Valamity!

In case you didn’t glean it from Leila’s subtle nudging, I was born in the windswept grass-desert of Nebraska and raised, as we all are in this god-forsaken state, with corn between my teeth, hay tucked behind my ears and rivermuck between my toes.

I always reveal this with a measure of tribulation because for a long, long time I felt an innate shame for being born here. I can’t even make the halfhearted protest that I grew up in Lincoln or Omaha and therefore have some slim pickings of the metropolitan buried in my countenance. To be blunt, I grew up on a farm–a real, honest-to-god farm with sheep and cows and a thousand rows of green, green corn stalks within a hundred yards of my front door. You’d never guess it to look at me–thin, pale scholar that I am–but there it is. I am a Midwestern farmboy. Real salt of the earth, you know.

I don’t like telling people this because here in my anonymity I can project the image of a faceless, intelligent young fellow with no ties or history. People are forced to take whatever I give them because they have no other means to decide who I am. You are all grappling with my shadow, so to speak, but I have the means of providing as much or as little form and definition as I like. It’s a luxury that lasts for as long as I feel it should. However, whenever I decide I really like someone that I’ve met online, the subject always comes up. For the longest time I feared those effortless, witless jokes at my expense and the expense of my home state. Not that I harbor any feelings of deep pride about my heritage, but the obvious references to corn and hicks grate somewhat. It’s that old double-standard that an outsider cannot criticize what the insider will say himself, and, frankly, I’m not a yokel or a simpleton or nobody’s fool. My friends and family (well, most of them…) aren’t either. Of course, this is all probably moot because I don’t imagine anyone who reads this is coarse enough to suggest such foolishness. For those kind readers: imagine this whole spiel as a justification for why I remain Falkner instead of Faulkner, and perhaps you’ll understand my feelings on the subject. It is a complicated relationship that we prideful wordsmiths have with our humble beginnings.

Pushed and pulled by a bushel of impetuses, namely my mother’s 40 birthday, a potential uncomfortable and unwanted visitor to my shared dormitory room, and the joyous calling of Thanksgiving break, I have had the wearying experience of trekking back and forth across this state twice in the past five days¹. Having spent nearly 12 hours doing little besides looking at the flat brownness that pervades Interstate 80, I’ve managed to accumulate a few observations that appeal to my sensibilities. The first of these observations occurred to me as I navigated the intricate, exasperating streets of downtown Lincoln and finally found the Rosa Parks Parkway, a handy detour when West O Street is being mangled by men in orange vests. The Rosa Parks Parkway? I’m not sure whether to attribute this name to unthinking absurdity or demented logic, but I find it brilliant and irresistible in its insane mundaneness. This is a key sort of thing to know about Nebraska: well intentioned but very bad ideas abound. This impression is compounded by the view from the parkway as you rise up over the train tracks². There are a multitude of old, red-brick buildings that dot your vision, like droplets of dried blood, but one stands out in particular: a church. This church would be a beautiful, lovely old church, but for one glaring detail: at its creation (mostly likely for reasons of criminal frugality) the architect or congregation or board of trustees had decided to build it out of that same ugly red-brick, except for this very handsome, stone bell tower that juts out of the rest of the church in the manner of a butterfly perpetually stuck in the act of attempting to extricate itself from its coarse, unbecoming cocoon. And so there we are, stuck with this half-baked, monstrous amalgamation, with what might have been sitting in plain view. That, I think, is really the underlying feeling that binds the state together…that everything is marred by this halfbaked tackiness that is alternately, or perhaps simultaneously, lovable in a curmudgeonly, heart-tugging way and thoroughly offputting in an intellectual and aesthetic way.

Still, as much as I struggled and cursed and hated this place for so much of my youth, I can summon up a thousand little descriptions which appease some part of me…the Nebraskan part, I suppose. There problems living out here in this immense, flat wasteland…it takes an hour of driving to get to a bookstore that doesn’t cater to Christians, the people are often small-minded drunkards and nosy to boot, a respectable internet connection costs more than it should, and, yes, it’s altogether very boring. On the other hand…the sky is simply huge out here. Maybe other places have a sky that looks this large, but on a grey-blue day, driving down the interstate, listening to music that makes you slap your steering wheel and tap the foot that’s not on the gas…it is a great, almost mystical presence, that sky. It makes a fellow feel very free and very small all at once. The ever-present wind buffets you and compounds the knowledge that there is more air out there than you could breath if you had a thousand lifetimes. Autumn is beautiful everywhere there are trees. It is my favorite season today because everywhere there is a beautiful palette of orange and red and yellow that is all the more striking against the black trunks and blacker limbs and slate-gray sidewalk. Trees, even, are a rarity here. The beauty of scarcity instead of abundance makes it all that much more precious to enjoy.

Those are what I love today. When I was young I loved scampering across hay bales with my sister and walking the length of those deep-green corn rows under the pivot as the water drenched my brother and we laughed like two fellows on an adventure and exploring the musty confines of old haylofts and walking through the hills of our pasture hoping in my heart that I would find a cave or a deep valley which would lead somewhere magical. The trick to understanding this place is to know that despite all the years spent trying to tame it, we’ve made very little mark. It’s a blank slate, still, even if you think you know all there is to know. The trick to loving it is to fill that slate with whatever your head can conjure up. It takes effort, you know, but sometimes all you need to love it is to look beyond the mundane confines of rural, empty plains and see the heart again. Blink a little, you might find your eyes are fresher than you thought.

I don’t feel that I’ve communicated all I want or need to say about this place, but it is now a little past past very late for me and I have run out of steam and probably talked a lot past too much about this place.

Nebraska. Romantically unromantic, I suppose.

¹ It should be noted at this point that I attend the State University because of a fanciful cocktail of fear, convenience, cost and the deeply ingrained hero worship of my older brother.
²An abundance of train tracks is another charming characteristic of Nebraska. I moved 300 miles away for college, and my dorm window is about far from train tracks as my bedroom window back home. Leila will often gasp when we’re talking and a train passes. I’ll laugh bemusedly, and she will explain, defensively, that it sounds scary.

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