Paul and Arlene Fell lived in a new ‘open house’ duplex (semi-detached) off Old Cheney Road to the south of Lincoln. They remembered Old Cheney when it was a dirt road ten years ago and everything south of it was squares of agriculture. What I rode down that afternoon was a four, sometimes six lane highway serving as an inner beltway. Hanging off it was now a vast complex of new sub-divisions sprinkled with malls, plazas, gas stations and low rise office blocks. The new development alone was larger than any town I had passed through since leaving Kansas City.
Ranked across the hills were homes clustered by styles which ran the gamut from modest to The Ridge, a pretentious enclave where orthodontists, doctors and bank managers lived in ugly architect designed properties costing anything up to four million dollars. The whole area was landscaped with attractive parks and ponds, and was expanding south at a rate of knots. From Old Cheney, the southern panorama was solid with roof tops. Beyond it, sidewalks, lighting and a sprinkler system were already in place beside strips of lonely tarmac which charged off across a countryside braced for further invasion. In the last fifteen years, Lincoln’s population had nearly doubled. Unless they were mopped up by the insurance corporations which had recently relocated to the city, the question was, where did all these people work? According to Paul Fell, there had been no commensurate growth in any other sector of Lincoln’s blue-collar employment base.
Paul and Arlene were the first couple I stayed with who hadn’t spawned children, and their attitude to work was a million miles from that of recumbent fanatics, John and Betty Fearday of Effingham, Illinois. Arlene was frantically trying to do as little work as possible. Having been the Alterations Manager at a prestigious department store in town, she now ran her own business from a premises in the historic quarter of Lincoln. Turning away tailoring and dress-making commissions, she preferred the flexibility inherent in the quick turnover of alterations and repairs. I think she secretly wanted more time to shop. Paul meanwhile was as neurotic as most cartoonists are about their work — wishing to slack off but convinced everything would dry up if he did. Until 1992, he was the staff cartoonist on the Lincoln Journal, the city’s biggest paper. After eight years service and with no warning, he felt the cold steel of the axe which had lopped off so many editorial cartoonists in Europe and America of late.
“Newspapers aren’t run by newspaper men any more,” Paul observed with an anger I shared. “They’re run by bean counters who haven’t a fucking clue what the function of an editorial cartoon is.”
Now back with the Lincoln Journal Star, his old newspaper renamed after a take-over in 1995, Paul had survived the lean times by freelancing, lecturing at the university and, most imaginatively, by airing his cartoons on a radio show. Fax Fix on Radio KFOR Lincoln provided listeners with a number they could dial for a free fax of a weekly editorial cartoon Paul later discussed on a phone-in programme. It was an innovative idea destined to go national until another bean counter moved in on KFOR.
Breakfast at a cartoonist’s table is typified by hunting for the peanut butter under a truck load of newspapers and hurling abuse at the radio or TV news. On the first morning of my stay, the headline story came from Conyers, Georgia, where a teenager had walked into Heritage High School with two guns and fired discriminately below the waist. He shot six youths, none fatally, and as the heavy brigade arrived, he dropped to his knees, stuck the barrel of a .22 in his mouth, and didn’t pull the trigger. Apparently his girlfriend had jilted him.
It was exactly a month since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold became infamous. Regardless of what was happening with the American economy, Columbine was still the most discussed story on the street, receiving commensurate column inches and regular revisits from the cartoonists. While producing his fair share, most of Paul’s work was concerned with events in Nebraska more than with national and world news. With the State Legislature just down the road, he was ideally placed to receive the nod on how senators were manoeuvring around particular issues. The couple took me for a look round the State Capitol building. From the snatches of conversations he had with a few of the staff, it was clear Paul was a recognised face and his cartoons impacted on those who walked the corridors of power. I was given the grand tour, which mostly consisted of checking out the iridescent murals of Nebraska’s history and the busts of famous notables, work which was of the highest order.
Considering the state was the butt of so many urban American jokes, Nebraska was a backwater of outstanding talent and innovative ideas. The very building we were in was mold-breaking. It was not a poor copy of the federal Capitol building in Washington, like so many other state capitols and town halls. Instead of the obligatory golden dome, a 122 metre tower topped with a little crown and a six metre statue of a sower lunged out of the ground rectangle of the main block. It deserved its honorary as ‘the penis of the prairies’. From a hole in the helmet I looked west towards California hoping to see a ripple of the Rockies on the horizon. The line between heaven and earth couldn’t have been smoother if Jesus the Carpenter had planed it himself. At the foot of the big dick sat the unique single chamber where state senators did the business, as against the two house system of senators and representatives which operates in every other state. Walking the main corridor, inspecting the photographs of senators through recent ages, just one black face appeared again and again, getting older by the administration. This, I was told, was the legendary Ernie Chamber, who probably knew more about the workings of Nebraska politics than any other public servant.
Before leaving the building, we called in at the office of Senator Vrtiska, Arlene’s cousin, whose politics she was less than enamoured with. Vrtiska was a short, ruddy man with a demeanour that oozed power. He was the owner of a large ranch somewhere in Nebraska which featured in an aerial photograph prominently displayed over his desk. It was the last-but-one day of business before the summer recess and Vrtiska had just come from the chamber having voted in favour of a two year moratorium on the death penalty. Senator Vrtiska voted against his usual party line.
“You know where I stand on the death penalty, Paul.” He was a law and order merchant. “But Kermit put up such a darn convincing argument. Okay, so I don’t agree with Ernie, but I think Kermit has something worth exploring.”
Nebraska was the first state to have second thoughts about legalised murder since 1973, when the U.S. government reinstated it as a state option. Ernie Chamber, the living legend, had always been opposed to the death penalty on the grounds it inevitably disposed of a disproportionate number of African-Americans because they were poor, vulnerable to involvement in crime, and couldn’t afford a smart defence team. At the other end of the political spectrum, white conservative Kermit Bashear argued that the death sentence was being applied ‘unjustly’, citing examples where expensive briefs had helped guilty whites side-step their just deserves (according to the yardstick set by sentences handed down to poorer sections of the community). While their arguments might have been subtly different, for once right and left were united in calling for a suspension of executions while a study of all homicides and capital sentences since 1973 was conducted. The day’s vote fell in favour of the moratorium, 27-21.
“This means it’ll go to the governor for his vote,” Vrtiska explained. “If he vetoes it, it’ll come back to the chamber and Kermit will have to find three more supporters. And Johanns probably will veto it, eh, Paul?”
Governor Johanns was a conservative, new to the office and (according to Paul) proving to be even more of a plonker than his political track record suggested. Over the weekend he threw the moratorium back to the chamber. With just one more day of legislative business before the summer recess on Monday evening, the moratorium was going down to the wire, and Paul was in the thick of it. It was a joy to witness him pumping Vrtiska and taking the piss out of the senator’s knee-jerk liberalism.
I was also having problems with a jerking knee and had started to limp. On an unaccompanied visit to the University of Nebraska State Museum it suddenly collapsed and sent me crashing into a display case, but I tried to disguise my infirmity in front of Paul and Arlene. I didn’t want to become any more of a burden than I already was. The Fells were spending money on me like it was ink and, by day two, I was becoming embarrassed by the number of times we ate out. Paul dismissed my concern, maintaining that, “We don’t normally do this. It’s kind of a nice break for us, not cooking. If you feel so bad about it, you can pay for the Runzas when we’re next in town.”
“You simply can’t leave Lincoln without tasting a Runza,” Arlene added, vamping it up.
“Most Americans eat out most of the time,” Paul went on. “We all have hi-tech kitchens with the latest gizmos and watch TV cookery shows until they come out of our ears. But there isn’t the time in most people’s lives to cook, even if they knew how, or at least that’s what they believe. Nobody bottles or bakes any more. Look in anybody’s fridge and all you’ll find is beer, soda pop and doggy bags from the meal they ate out the night before. The kitchen is as modern and over-equipped as it is purely for it’s realty value.”
In the Lincoln Journal Star that morning, U.S. Agricultural Secretary Dan Glickman was bemoaning America’s lack of support for their farmers. ‘For every dollar spent on comestibles,’ Dan maintained ‘only 8¢ is spent on purchasing food for home consumption’. 92¢ went on eating out and the preferred breakfast, lunch and dinner was taken at one of the big throw-ups, which did its grocery shopping overseas.
The opportunity to sample a Runza, Nebraska’s native fast food, came on the day when Arlene would reveal all about her roots. After trucking round the Museum of Nebraska History listening to her repeat, “Oh, I remember those,” as if half the exhibits were Steinauer heirlooms, we tumbled into the Runza Rock ‘n’ Roll Café. If the restaurant didn’t exactly rock, the waitress at least rolled to our table on skates. Considering the chain had been operating since 1949, they were seriously underachieving in their pretensions to becoming another Wendys or Taco Bell. Everything about the packaging of Runzas suggested they weren’t quite cutting it, but the food was excellent. Modelled on a German-Russian recipe brought over by the Everett family when they emigrated to Lincoln, the Runza was a meat or vegetarian concoction, heavily laced with sauerkraut and wrapped in something like unleavened bread. It looked like a jumbo spring roll before frying, but was substantial and didn’t taste of MSG. I was further impressed that the current owner of the Nebraska chain and a man of millions, Donald R. Everett, was the guy wiping tables across the aisle from us.
Somebody amongst the Steinauers had done a heap of research. On our return to the house, a loose leaf folder containing 500 pages of family history, genealogies, obituaries, photos and memories of the old country landed on the table like a stamp hammer. The story it revealed was not very different from that of hundreds of thousands of other European families who settled west of the Missouri in the middle of the nineteenth century.
“The Steinauers were economic refugees,” Arlene explained, “funded by the Swiss government to relocate across the Atlantic. In 1856, Antony, Nicholas and Joseph Steinauer paid a dollar twenty-five an acre for 480 acres of land where Turkey Creek runs through. At the end of a journey halfway round the globe, they found nothing but wind and grass and spent the first year living in a cave dug into the mud banks of the creek.”
The Steinauer brothers were amongst the first wave of sod busters who struggled to create a home and livelihood in the Great American Desert. They broke land to grow corn, potatoes and wheat, and later raised cattle, pigs and oxen. Their first buildings were log cabins and sod houses — amazing organic constructions made from slabs of turf, sometimes as many as four storeys high, with shingle or sod roofs on which the grass continued to grew. They survived droughts, washouts, bitter cold, torrid heat, sandstorms, blizzards, fires and plagues of grasshoppers. Hailstorms frequently decimated their crops and their finances fluctuated from neck deep in debt to barely floating.
As the existence of Steinauer town suggests, the brothers worked hard and came good. They married girls from back home and the family tree blossomed. More land was incorporated in 1904 when the Kincaid Act permitted farms to expand to 640 acres — the one square mile that the prairies are still divided into by the dirt roads I travelled. The Great War brought prosperity but during the Great Depression of the 1930s chronic droughts brought on the dust storms. For the first time and after a number of violent demonstrations, farmers received government subsidies to stave off mortgage foreclosures.
“At the turn of the (twentieth) century, thirty-eight per cent of Americans were farmers,” Paul said. “Today it is less than two per cent and the Agricultural Department expects 40,000 farms a year will disappear for the foreseeable future, mostly absorbed into big corporate operations.”
Since the Forties, one innovation after another has seen farm acreage increase as the number of farmers decreased, “but there is still a Steinauer working land around Steinauer,” Arlene proclaimed.
I saw him in a documentary about the family recently made for European TV, a copy of which Arlene and every other American Steinauer had on video. Those interviewed spoke in a mishmash of American, English and High German, even the youngest generation, much like the Asians I live amongst in Nottingham speak Urdu, Gujerati or Punjabi with a streak of English woven through. Although Arlene was only distantly related to the three brothers, I couldn’t help noticing her facial characteristics were pure Steinauer.
“Yeh, she’s got the big nose and sticking out chin,” Paul said, milliseconds before a flying cushion attacked him.
I rode away from Paul and Arlene’s wishing I didn’t have to, fearing I was headed wide-eyed and limping into some kind of a mauling. If the Panther was going to run wild anywhere it would be across the prairies, but concern for my mental and physical well-being didn’t top my list of worries. In a link up at the Fell’s place, Sandy had told me she was faxing through a letter which tried to express all the things she was having trouble saying over the phone. The fax never appeared, I presumed because she had second thoughts. It would have only taken a phone call to check but, I didn’t want to make it. I had become too wrapped up in my Boy’s Own adventure, and would pay the price.
Ten miles south of Lincoln, I hung a right and set course for the town of Hastings, a hundred straight miles due west on Route 6. Beyond it I would cross the diagonal of the Oregon Trail, pause to say, “Hi! Remember me?” then work my way south-west on another diversion to the Pioneer Village at Minden. I had no idea why I was going there, except people at Jessica Nowak’s graduation bash said it would be a mistake not to call in if I was interested in pioneer history. My eventual goal was Fort Kearny, an important staging post for the overlanders on the banks of the River Platte, a dozen miles north of Minden.
West of Crete on Route 6, the undulating terrain of eastern Nebraska softened into a ripple which lapped so gently it is understandable that drivers consider the state to be flat. I was also gently but consistently climbing. At a rate of two to three metres a mile, I was ascending the foothills of the Rockies, hidden beyond the flat horizon over 700 miles away. According to the map, the average height of the eastern plains was around 700 metres above sea level while, in the west, they reached 1,500 metres. More accurately, I was creeping up a ramp of debris — a vast alluvial fan of sand and gravel washed away from the Western Cordillera over the millennia, spreading out across the whole mid-west of America. Remarkably, the bedrock deep beneath my wheels sloped in the opposite direction, from east to west.
Yellow irises nodded in a wind heavily laced with the stench of cattle pens and mulched sorghum. In fields which appeared to know no bounds, small herds of Simmentals counted their lucky stars they weren’t packed in corrals with the hundreds waiting to take the final truck ride. To my right, the sky was so deep and blue I wanted to jump in and swim around. Far off to the south, white puffs suggested surf breaking over a coral reef. Between the two, on a line running straight down the highway, an isthmus of clouds tapered down to sand dunes on a beach which looked distinctly like a storm front. It was going to be a short day.
Since leaving Indiana, everybody who talked about the weather confirmed this was the worst spring they could remember. The blame was squarely laid on the shoulders of Il Ninã but I was assured things would change for the better by next weekend, the Memorial Day holiday weekend, marking the start of summer in the minds of Americans if not that of the seasons. Since Missouri, the weather had fallen into a pattern of days which started with blue skies, high cirrus clouds and tolerable humidity.
Day two started dull and became dark as night. Churning grey clouds, dense humidity and an atmosphere I had to machete my way through set the scene for the morning. Around mid afternoon, the plot was thickened by a crescendo of rolling thunder, sheet lightning, fork lightning, then a short sharp monsoon. The dramatics were followed by a day of clear skies, searing heat, lethal sun and low humidity. Everybody rushed into the fields that day, mending and tinkering, if not actually ploughing. Then, like somebody cleaning off a brush of white emulsion on blue canvas, tell-tale cirrus wisps reappeared, and the cycle began over.
As I pedalled into Friend, an old boy on a tricycle swung out from the main drag, rode like the clappers down the wrong side of the street and shouted, “Better put up for the night, son. It’s a-coming.” Judging from the main street set at right angles to Route 6, Friend was going to be a cool place to knock off early. On both sides of the broadway, buildings had recently received a lick of paint, but what the local art teacher and his team had done amounted to more than a little redecorating. The fine detail of every decorative pediment and window head was picked out in brilliant white with highlights of mushroom grey. The frontage of each bar, store and office had a separate colour scheme, co-ordinated to complement the colours either side. Signboards were smartly and simply lettered in classic serif faces. On side walls reaching above younger buildings in the block, small murals remembered past glories such as pony trotting at the Friend Races of 1911. Tubs of variegated blooms mellowed the harsh line between office and sidewalk and, every thirty paces, new olde worlde lamp standards added a finishing touch of class. There wasn’t a blemish of litter anywhere.
I downed a couple of Busch Lites in the Broken Spoke Saloon, and chatted to three bikers on their way to a Harley Davison gathering in Hastings. One had once shipped his machine to Europe to cruise the continent. He’d been away for ten days and figured he’d seen it all.
“Didn’t like Europe,” he told me with a grimace. “Too old.”
At the back of the bar in the car park, an obscure Country & Western radio station was setting up a live transmission for a hootenanny that evening. Nobody was too concerned about the impending downpour and the joint was a-rocking. It seemed the whole town had knocked off early.
Five blocks south of the bar, the town park had a swimming pool, baseball diamond, swings, pavilion and the Friend Community Center. Under the trees outside the centre, a young man was grilling burgers and wieners on a park barbie surrounded by a gaggle of kids. We exchanged greetings. I told him I was camping overnight and he said, “You betcha. C’mon over for a burger when y’ready.” The only other people around were an elderly couple sweeping the grass with metal detectors. They were out for the summer in their RV, metal detecting their way towards Colorado. I asked if they had found much.
“Oh, nickels an’ dime stuff. Hair clips, brooches, sometimes an arrow head, Roman coins. Once I found me a watch…”
“Hang about,” I interrupted. “You’ve found Roman coins?”
“Yar.”
“In Nebraska?”
“Nar. Oklahoma.”
In the community centre, eight adults and ten kids ranging from toddlers to eight year olds were celebrating the first birthday of Jessie Stutzman. Jessie hadn’t a clue what was going on, but there were lots of plastic cups to throw around and the wrapping from his presents tasted scrumptious. While he gurgled cheerfully in his dad’s arms, we all played musical chairs to Bruce Springsteen. In the middle of the first manic round, lightning flashed, thunder crashed, windows rattled and the kids screamed louder as the speed of the chase accelerated. Within minutes of the monsoon falling, a boy came charging into the centre shouting, “Ma! Ma! The pool’s overflowing! We’re gonna be flooded.” The chances of the centre being overwhelmed were slim, but the prospects for my sorry little tent didn’t look good. Floodwater from the swimming pool was pushing towards it in a series of mini tidal bores.
A police car cut a wake along the perimeter road, slowing to a crawl to rise over a traffic calmer. I dashed out, splashed across the lake that used to be a lawn, and stopped him. The window rolled down on an unshaven dude in a Levi jacket, checked shirt and hair which hadn’t seen a comb in a month.
“Sure y’all can camp here, but I ain’t no real po-lice off’cer. He’s away on vacation. I’m just a-fillin’ in, but I’ll be sure ‘n’ let him know when he gets back,” the guy said, being helpful. “When y’leavin’? There’s a party on in town t’night, but y’should be okay out here.”
The park was bordered by three tarmac roads. The two along its length changed to grit as they stretched away from the village into the back of beyond. The one close to my tent linked the two others and was rippled with traffic calmers. As the shindig at the Broken Spoke wound down, revellers drove home. Dozing in my tent, I could hear that the road in front of me was the main drag out of town. Some vehicles turned left along the link road running by my head, then right onto the grit before fading into the distance.
Around midnight, a different pattern emerged, with occasional vehicles driving up the road behind me, turning right past my head, clunking over the calmers, then back into town in front of me. People were still cruising as I drifted into sleep. An hour later I was sharply awakened by two objects hitting the side of the tent and a vehicle roaring away past my head. A couple of minutes passed before a third missile landed, a vehicle revved, tyres plopped, and a voice shouted, “Go home!” Then a third vehicle and a fourth projectile. I was under attack.
Since the incident at Greens Bottom, Missouri, and the graduation kids partying in the car park, I had learned to accept that the growl of a souped-up engine was not synonymous with prowling rednecks whacked out on moonshine and armed with sawn-offs looking to exact evil against some ‘nehgra’ — or a Scotsman if an African-American wasn’t to hand. At Friend, however, the old Hollywood stereotype came rushing back to mind. I lay rigid in the tent, acutely aware that two layers of ripstop nylon offered no kind of protection.
During a lull, I slipped out of the tent and crouched in the doorway of the toilet block, maintaining a watch over the roads. Two more vehicles crawled round the three sides of the park. Then a pick-up slipped onto the link road, bridged a traffic calmer and paused. Somebody stepped out, hurled something at my tent and jumped back into the cab. With a blood curdling screech and in a cloud of burning rubber, rear wheels spun and the chassis bucked before the driver slipped the clutch and shot away. A fourth vehicle followed the same routine and roared off drowning calls for me to leave town pronto.
The streets fell silent and, after a judicious pause, I crept back to bed. Splayed around the tent were quarter full bottles of soda. My assailants were chicken-shit teenagers! Checking they didn’t contain urine, I sat in the tent and chain smoked, sipping Coke, 7-Up, Mountain Dew and Kool Aid. It was ironic that I had cycled safely through two of America’s worst ghettos only to be attacked by pop bottles in a country village called Friend.