I grinned gleefully at an episode of That 70s Show tonight, with its flashback Casablanca sequences, Eric as Bogie, Donna as Bergman. Except that Donna swiped Eric's/Bogart's repeated line, giving me my title. So we travel westward, not as Horace Greeley said, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country," but as he merely repeated that sentiment of an Indiana Terre Haute Express editor, John Babsone Lane Soule, in 1851. Mom spoke of all-day trips Up West to see Grandpa and Grandma Peters. It didn't take us all day but merely seemed so traveling U.S. 20 to little Newport, the same size as Center, and turning north out somewhere southwest of the White Horse Ranch, famous enough for its albino horses that it had touring groups and made Life magazine and a Warners Brothers short, which gave the folks from Naper southward bragging rights. I've mentioned Peggy Ann's kicking me at the Bloomfield farm. Though I fantasize now about being a superb horseman, contrary to the adults, then I was more interested in the Peacocks' St. Bernard, a pony-sized dog much larger than my cousins and I, the only one I saw for decades. (This Alpine hero with his collar brandy cask figured in many cartoons I did see.)
Oddly, years later while on one of my western forays, I found my way back out to the Peters homestead. The road had been widened, places had changed, but I somehow spotted enough landmarks to home in. I could not do that today. Anyway, here I'm headed out to the eastern edge of our Sandhills, the largest expanse of dunes in the Western Hemisphere, from sand blown along Pleistocene glacier edges, 95% grassland with surprisingly huge hills as tall as Star Wars' Gorax [30 meters=100 feet] on State 2 Charles Kuralt made one of the nation's most scenic drives. This sea of grass is parked over the [Sioux-named] Oglala Aquifer, an unbelievably huge underground lake from Nebraska to Texas, much of its million-year-old reservoir being depleted by irrigation in the U.S. Granary's Great Plains of low rainfall, caught between mountain range wringers, most wetness sweeping up this central corridor from the Gulf of Mexico, as do tornados. Geography is history. Cherry County, the second one over from Rock County, my destination, is larger than Connecticut. Near its county seat, Valentine, is the state's most popular tubing site down the Niobrara River to an area now being readied for national-park status, thanks to the Nature Conservancy, because it's the junction of three major ecological/forest zones, as I was thrilled to read about in my Backpacker and Outside magazines several years ago. Ted Turner of TBS, the Atlanta Braves, the Weather Channel, and Jane Fonda's ex-, seems intent on buying it up for his bison, 320,000 acres to this point. I mentioned Jane Fonda because, of course, Henry, her father, comes from Omaha and was persuaded to act by Mrs. Brando; his green-painted family home is restored at Stuhr Museum grounds in Grand Island (been in it). And the local Community Playhouse, the nation's largest in subscription memberships, staff, budget, has a Fonda-McGuire (as in Dorothy) theater series; Dodie Brando starred in its first play a year after Marlon was born.
Before I finish this detour, I must add that the most stunning bare sand dunes lie snugly in a mountain pocket made national park northeast of Alamosa, Colorado, definitely worth an exhilarating side trip. Further, most travelers yawn their way across Nebraska on mostly flat Interstate 80, part of the Great Platte River Road of our pioneers, who took it precisely because it was flat and had water; but the state is mostly hilly, like Omaha, and one of the best surprises lies near I-80 at North Platte where a glance north sees huge oceanic waves cresting and crashing southward, the Sandhills menacing. From the air this north-central part of Nebraska looks like a stormy seascape except where wind has pitted it with blow-outs, grassless eroded sand hollows.
The Peters homestead is in sandy soil, which meant that Grandpa's corn was often dwarfy next to the Bloomfield farm's. It also meant that on the back way to Bassett, cutting across farms and their roads rather than following the county roads, I learned you should deflate your tires halfway so they can balloon over the sandy trails rather than spin helplessly. Mom told me and demonstrated more than once. West of the farmstead down the hill on a flat was a fine spring creek, as cold and as glass-clear as they come, where we loved to sit on the sandy bottom in the hot summers, grass roots wavering like hairy clumps of "seaweed" along the low banks. Farther west slanted a long hill, the Sugar Loaf of crumbly white rockiness, rising to a little point in a neighbor's pasture. I tried to find the Indian pipe Mom had recalled but found instead native grass, cactus, and yucca or Spanish bayonet, which Grandma called soapweed, claiming women had used its roots for laundering. It is also where Mom found those arrowheads I missed. I didn't go hiking up it very often, unlike my cousins, because I had a rattlesnake wariness. The rocky hill was ideal snakeland, as was a prairie dog town a mile south, just beyond the nearest neighbors, Andersons, on the east side of the county road. In their teen years my cousins hayforked rattlers rather regularly when shocking grain, but I never saw one, so my wariness worked. High on the rattlers' menu, the prairie dogs were funny--that word always means "comic" to me--little creatures, standing as nosy sentries, barking at us, racing between burrows, worth the walk under the cottonwoods (our state tree) and trying to stay silent so they didn't disappear on us. They were/are considered pests, though they have a well-tunneled section at our nationally acclaimed Henry Doorly Zoo, always in the U.S. Top Ten Zoos.
. . . . . . .
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
--Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness," Sailing Alone Around theRoom: New and Selected Poems
So I have to cheat a little and look at the aerial photo of the farmstead many of us have. In Grandma's photos I also have one of the stark "E.L. Peters homestead 1911," as I have a picture of Grandma in the yard at 19 of whom my cousin Penny seemed a clone, as well as a crowd photo of "Wolf hunt in Rock Co. near Mariaville 1908." We visited it often, for my aunt and uncle and cousins lived on it at one time, my grandparents later; but it hadn't the frequency of the Bloomfield farm, and I liked it even less. It was, however, too distantly isolated to start walking home. Down the lane westward, the house was a T, the letter's top the two-story section with living room and bedrooms, the stem the dining room and kitchen. Later, needed additions were another bedroom and an indoor bathroom on the north of the dining room, a separate garage. The porch was along the base behind the front two stories, the door opening into the kitchen. The unporched, seldom-used "front" door facing east was next to a large living room window, like ours in Center (forerunners of picture windows), but with a rectangular stained-glass panel at the top which cousin D.J. bought and treasures. (Consequently, his sister makes her own stained-glass creations.) The kitchen and dining room were larger Up West but the living room and bedrooms smaller. In fact up the narrow, steep stairway to the walk-in freezer--which reminds me now of the cramped stairwell in little Mark Twain's Hannibal boyhood home--at the top of the stairs to the north was simply a bed in the open under the slanting roof. No privacy. I remember being the furnace sandwiched between always-cold cousins M.L. and D.J. in either that bed or the preferred one in the southern room. And the chamber pot contents were always frozen in winter.
I'm not going to catalog the furniture because I can't remember my aunt's and I threw in even the kitchen sink, as you surely noticed, at the Bloomfield farm entry, same furniture Up West. Well, I never did mention the living room carpet or The Last Supper print over the sofa or Edgar Guest's framed "A House by the Side of the Road." I've been trying to recall the pumps, stymied because my paternal Aunt L. had a memorable one at her sink that I can't erase. I think Grandma had such a little pump at her sinks in both places, but by the time they moved Up West, they installed several modern conveniences, though the outhouse north of the kitchen and clothesline is in the photo. It seems there was a dug-out storm/canning cellar in there too. I think there were larger pumps at the Bloomfield farm by the windmill and in the garden. These were the kind, all metal, still in use then, on which we Center boys dared each other to put his tongue in winter, a painful moronic feat also performed on the pipe ditch guards.
Northwest of the house and yard was the henhouse with small attached equipment shed. One of the ways Mom and my grandparents kept me occupied in Rock County Siberia was to keep me busy. When my aunt and uncle moved Up West, we required the whole family to renovate the house's disrepair, new wallpaper, paint, linoleum. One of my jobs was to catch the numerous mice and drown them in the slop bucket. "See, Grandma, I caught another one," holding the squirming vermin by its tail. Likewise, Grandma delegated me to crawl under the henhouse and remove the baby skunks, a truly odorous task, albeit I found them cute, as most baby animals are--fully equipped, though, as baby rattlers are. I had dish towels wrapped around my head except for my eyes, like a Tuareg, as a homemade gas mask. (Skunks love eating chickens and eggs as we do. And my dogs had already proved the effectiveness of their squirt-gun stench in Center.)
In the middle of the bare yard was a big corn crib-shed combination again with a central passage, where in opposites-attract repulsion-fascination I watched them butcher terrified squealing hogs hanging in the empty corn crib. The white hoghouse--all the buildings were white but the little barn--was at the yard's southwest corner, where I watched baby pigs being born, as I had on the other farm. I really thought the little barn repugnant, a worn-out red and about a fourth the size of the Bloomfield one, the floor and the cow stalls a 6"-8" quaqmire of dung and urine we sank into, Grandpa altogether too matter-of-factly blithe about it. South of the hog yard was a ravine with sheep sorrel, a weedy shrub that Mom cautioned us was poisonous, a favorite place to play, climbing up and down its eroded sides and terraces. Naturally, we could also easily walk up to the Mariaville school with its playground, the store gone in the photo I'm looking at. And there was the separator on the porch to crank, homemade ice cream more frequent up there than at Bloomfield, which meant hard cranking of the ice cream churn with its salt and ice around the paddle and cream concoction that beats any store-bought, even the expensive brands. In those days the cream was so thick it hardly poured. Mom got it and eggs and chickens from Grandma and later farm women close to Center. I can remember the latter using quart jars and our having to spoon the cream out. (All these good farm products bought or bartered for directly disappeared with increasing government interference--uh, health regulation.)
Grandpa did extensive shelterbelt tree planting north of the house and buildings and along the lane, this being largely haying country, mostly with cottonwoods along the roads and outlining wetness.
The family's having been in the area for a long time, my grandparents knew virtually everyone for miles, and communal picnics were held regularly at the dam a couple miles south, with its pond, treated as a park area. Some of the neighbors were lifelong friends, like Cloydie Turpin and her two bachelor sons with their high squeaky voices sputtering so fast I couldn't understand them very well. James/Jim/Buzz and Lena Brown--Lena Bishop was from the Bloomfield area--had a large family of big-brown-eyed children, the only ones I remember playing with, and Buzz and Lena continued to visit Mom at Center until they all died. When I went to Norfolk J.C., a grade behind me was totally friendly and musical Dick Turpin, whose parents, part of my grandparents' world but Mom's age, lived in Bassett, at whose house I naturally stayed during our college spring music tour; in a small-world incident when I took the folks to Florida to visit Uncle L. and Aunt B. decades later, Dick was taking the plane as far as St. Louis. He went on to become a kind of legend in the Nebraska State Game Commission to his retirement, cropping up yet in newspaper articles sporadically, as with a cougar photo recently from that Niobrara "national park" area. While going to one of my nephews' football games three years ago, besides visiting the graves of Great Aunt Nellie and Uncle John F. in the main Bassett cemetery, I recognized many of the family names while wandering around looking for Grandpa's sister's grave. I do the cemetery thing well. Great Aunt Bess K. C. and her 5-year-old daughter died in a rooming house fire in 1927, in O'Neill, I think, though they lived at Bassett, when she mistakenly threw kerosene on a stove fire she thought had gone out. Nebraskans being who they are, when I stopped at a convenience mart-gas station and asked about cemeteries and explained why, I had all kinds of helpful friendly directions, and they thought Aunt Bess was more likely in a country cemetery south of that corner, which I didn't have time to explore. I heard from her Missourian great granddaughter a few years ago, asking if I knew anything about her, who disappeared back into shocked genealogical space when I e-mailed her what I knew when apparently she hadn't known about the fire.
Up West did have some redemption in its outlaw history. In Mari Sandoz's Love Song to the Plains, she mentions, "Jesse James was all through the region, and apparently hid out with the Santee Sioux near the mouth of the Niobrara for a while, using the name of Jesse Chase, although the Indians all knew who he was. The mixed-blood Chase family there are said to be the descendants." (P. 212, Bison Book edition, 1966.) She's referring to the area in my home Knox County known as the Devil's Nest, rugged Missouri River hills that people once toured. Sandoz also described Doc Middleton's gang and Kid Wade's supposedly taking it over when Middleton went to prison. Those were stories of Grandma's. Another great raconteur like Dad, she thrilled cowboys-and-Indians children with stories of vigilantes in the area. One account involved burying a rustler alive, tied to a chair, in the farmyard (the home place?). Another involved the lynching of Kid Wade, another of those 16-year-old outlaws graduating upward to crime, though he was mostly a horse thief until a Knox County deputy got perturbed and a posse dragged him back from Iowa, after which a midnight mob of masked vigilantes took him from jail and lynched him at the age of 21 from a railroad hitching post in February, 1884, his body laid, as it were, in wintry cold storage on a stack of cordwood in front of a general store, the rope cut up and sold for souvenirs. That was her story, and the lynching site was just east of Newport, where we drove past the store awed. However, a local historian with solid research, from one of the area families my cousins know better than I, Harold Hutton, says in his 1978 Vigilante Days: Frontier Justice Along the Niobrara that the town was Bassett. A photo of Kid Wade is his frontpiece. I lucked out on the book, an autographed copy, in the O'Neill Drug Store when I took Mom to the chiropractor there not too many years before her death and also bought his 1974 Doc Middleton: Life and Legends of the Notorious Plains Outlaw, both with much about my home county area, from where the Niobrara River dumps into the Missouri at a camping site of Lewis and Clark, westward into Rock County. Obviously, western history has deep resonance for us.
I merely wish I could remember better amid my little attic rooms full of such reverberant tales. "So time, that makes us objects, multiplies our natural loneliness," Derek Walcott, "Crusoe's Journal," Collected Poems 1948-1984.
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