Nebraska: Part 1

KS-Nebraska border to Beatrice: 57 miles
The first town past my entry into Nebraska was Pawnee City, population 1033. A Sousa march (couldn’t remember its name) played on a loudspeaker from a bank on the edge of the town square. Offices and small stores lined both sides of the roads forming the square. As I slowly biked around the west side of the square, looking for the “Tourist Info” place referred to by an earlier sign, I was greeted by a man who asked where I was heading. After talking a bit, Vic treated me to a cup of coffee at the VFW hall on the square’s north side. The manager, who added “Of course, of course” when Vic introduced him as Mr. Ed (get the allusion, kids?), brought us complimentary pan cake.

Vic was brought up in Ogallala, which, he informed me, was featured in Lonesome Dove, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and would merit time spent when I pass through. Vic moved to Pawnee City after getting his law degree and has practiced law there for about forty years. Vic enjoys biking and participated in most of the Tour de Nebraska rides of about 500 miles since its inception in the 1986. He noted that my gear was quite “compact” compared to what he would use on the Tour rides—the organizers providing transport of the overnight gear.

After coffee, I cycled around the fourth side of the square back to the first side to get to his office where we exchanged contact info and I got the road map from the info center, just across the street. Vic's friendliness was a great way to start through this state which I knew hardly anything about.

Since it would be more than 40 miles to Beatrice, with no commercial centers in between—apart from two gambling casinos, I stopped at a service center on the outside of town to get pizza and donuts and to have two water bottles topped off. While eating at the store’s shaded side, I looked over the ’65 Thunderbird at the pump. When the driver was about to take off, I called out something original like “Nice car!” “Thanks,” he replied, “Do you want the tour?” Sure. He parked it away from the pumps. “Before the tour, you’ve got to see this,” he said pulling out a scrap-book. It had pictures documenting its restoration, from the junkyard to now.

For eight years, whenever they would pass the junkyard, his wife would asked him to take on this project. Her brother had had a black one of the same model and year before he went to Viet Nam, from where “he never came back.” A metaphor of regeneration befitting this Lutheran pastor; perhaps also a not-so-Lutheran prayer for the dead.

After the tour of the car—its low-slung wide-swinging door on “the lady’s side”, the massive engine which can consume a gallon in eleven miles, the line-spreading rather than needle-pointing speedometer, the bucket seats, the spacious trunk—our talk turned to his passion for studying the Greek New Testament. I checked my impulse to question his claim that one can’t truly understand the Scriptures unless they can read them in the original; I’ve known too many whose claims to understand the original are to support their particular understanding of religion—quite different from the next to make the same claim. But I agreed that working with the biblical languages was a wonder-full experience that can point to dimensions of a text that we might not have explored or appreciated if we just read translations. (Of course, our reading of “the original” is a reading of copies of hypothetical originals and interpreted via two thousand years worth of analytical tools, commentaries, histories, and theological and cultural traditions.)

Speaking of exegesis. Before this trip, I could define and grammatically analyze “wind swept plains,” and explain the variants “wind-swept…” and “windswept”, using the expression in appropriate contexts. But I’m thinking that only in the last couple days have I started to understand what this expression refers to—especially when a headwind is involved.

Beatrice (“Be-at-triss”, stress on the second syllable): Rest Day
Before the trip, mom gave me her copy of “Mennonite Your Way”, a directory of Mennonites and others willing to host travelers. The directory suggests a donation of $10 a night, plus a little extra if you use the laundry and have breakfast. Ms. Letha accepted to have me stay in her house for two nights.

Letha’s and her husband’s parents were immigrants from Germany and she has lived here her whole life. “The world doesn’t end in Indiana,” she says. She lives in a big white house on the town’s main street, the furniture, carpeting, and homey feel reminding me of our Houghton home. Her husband’s parents lived here along with his aunt. After they passed, the aunt kept boarders upstairs. Then the house became Letha’s husbands. He renovated it—making a full cellar, taking out the false wall in the entrance way, painting, etc. in 1986, the family moved in. He died three years later. Since then she has been practicing hospitality, especially for international students, most recently one woman from Zimbabwe and another from Nigeria finishing up nursing programs in the local community college.

My first night here, she invited me to accompany here to a picnic for families of those in a “Mother to Mother” program that provides mentoring for mothers with various challenges. I sat with a state senator who told of a biker coming to their front door and asking if he could stay on their porch. “We decided he might as well stay inside.” Hmm. He said he almost lost the last election due to his stand against capital punishment especially since “it discriminates against the poor “.

For breakfast, Letha served semmels, a little heavier than dinner rolls and slightly crisped, with various toppings including her own mix of Velveeta cheese, Limburger cheese, and carroway seed. For supper, we went to a benefit supper for Habitat for Humanity.

In between, I wrote, read, talked with family, and repacked my bags with laundered clothes and a replenished supply of granola bars, oranges, and Gatorade powder.

I leave all the more grateful for people like Letha, hoping to grow in their spirit of kindness and courage.