For Michaela

I write this for myself and Michaela, a native of Omaha. I lived in Omaha for four years while studying at Creighton University. These were some of my most depressing years and eye-opening years. Nebraska was the home of my catharsis--Nebraska is where I reconciled the child in me with the adult.


You start in a covered wagon.

You start with the trail-blazing pioneers, etching a path to California, only to be stopped in the dead center of the Earth, too tired to move forward, too tired to forge back. You quit in the brown spot, and that brown spot is named Nebraska.

You build a shack of dirt and line the floor with dirt. You sweep dirt out, only to find it caked in the porcelain dishes you brought from back East. You wash clothes, only to dry them in dirt. You find dirt in your food, bland and white.

You build a real home out of expensive wood, because there is hardly a tree in sight. You put in glass windows so that you can gaze out onto the brown fields of prarie. You wish there was something else to look at, but there is nothing.

You get some livestock, and you plant some wheat. You have some babies and farm the land. Your blood is thinned, your skin is thick, your hands are tired. You nurse sick calves and sick babies. Many of them die in the winter. You bury them in a grave, and make a cross for the children, and stick the cross amongst the brown, brown wheat.

And then the trains come through, and the town becomes a city. The city builds itself out of the pioneers who have come, but the city never loses the dirty sheen from the dusty land. And in the winter, when the sun is dimmed and the cold snow has belched upon the tundra, there is only brown surrounding the city. But now, you are in a home, with alleyways and separate garages and stocks in the beef trade.

And then, the beef trade goes on to better places, where the ranching is more prosperous, and it leaves the dirty city in Nebraska. The trains still run through, but not as often. The trains are bound for more fantastic places--Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles. You are left behind in a trail of dirt.

You go along the North Platte river, out to the wilds of Northern Nebraska. You stand amidst the brown wheat and smell the air. It is ripe with pollen. It is bleak and soul-crushing. Later, the land goes fallow, but a quarry opens, and so you go to work at the quarry. You see girls, young girls, with shoulders like men. These girls drive trucks and Hi-Lo's and go home to cook bland meals of meat and potatoes for their husbands, who still read The Farmer's Almanac with the poise of the religious.

You are Catholic, Protestant, German, Irish, Scottish. Your hands are still tired, your skin is still tough, your blood does not always warm you in the middle of the gray, gray winter. You wonder why you stay in such a bleak, brown place.

And then, in the middle of summer, you stand at a fountain in the middle of this dusty, windy, gray city. And the sky is dark, but off in the distance, far to the West, a lightening storm begins, thrashing purple violet against the ground, soundless and beautiful and awe-inspiring. The air is thick with electricity, and it is as though Thor himself is standing atop the Mutual of Omaha building and tossing down these forks of power.

You awake the next morning, and the sky is so huge above you, and so blue, the expanse leaves you breathless. While the city remains gray and lifeless, and the Earth remains brown and dusty, you know why you stay. You stay for those skies. Those incredible Nebraska skies.