When Looking Back Soothes The Soul

Nebraska Grasslands, image courtesy of the USDA

The mounting tremors emanating from the circus of the absurd that is Washington give me a wonderful opportunity to pause and reflect on a place in my early life. A true halcyon locale and time that was, in part, so far removed from today's Babelian incoherence the epicenter of which is triangulated by social media, cable news, and dysfunctional government.   

There is a much longer narrative preceding and following this excerpted post, but let me just lay a little groundwork for what follows: I was a military brat, the son of an Air Force officer who, after serving in combat in World War II, rose appropriately in rank, title, and command responsibilities. By the late 1950s, he was assigned to command Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases in the Midwest and South. Three of those bases were Clinton County Air Force Base in Ohio, Lincoln Air Force Base in Nebraska, and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The dates of his  SAC commands encompass my preteen and mid-teen years--roughly 11 to 16. 

Prior to those duty assignments, our family had spent almost five years in Germany (Wiesbaden), and five years in the Washington, D.C./Pentagon area, where I was born in 1949. This post picks up just after my father had received orders to leave Ohio, and take over new duties as the base commander of Lincoln Air Force Base, a B-47 bomber base on the edge of the Great Plains. 

The move from Clinton County Air Force Base, near Wilmington, Ohio, to Lincoln Air Force Base, just west of Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1961, was like going back in a time machine to the prairie life of the 19th century, at least as far as the landscape and populations were concerned. 

Lincoln, a pretty town in my opinion, was not a major metropolitan center in the early 60s. Although it is the state capital, and home to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln's population of 128,000 in 1960 was less than half that of Omaha, about 50 miles north. But Lincoln had such a broad sweep to it, and the tall and stately Capitol building, with its golden dome topped by the statue of The Sower, spreading seeds across the farmland, pinned the city firmly to the rich earth.

 

The Sower, by Lee Lawrie, atop the Capitol dome, Lincoln, Nebraska

I’m of two minds when it comes to writing about Lincoln. I fell in love with the prairie right away; the sky is huge, the stars almost reachable; the air is sweet and clean, and you can see thunderstorms coming from a hundred miles away. In the summer, I would ride my bike out from the base and pedal down farm roads, leave the bike at the edge of an ocean of shoulder-high grass and, wading into it, listen to the wind and the songs of the meadowlarks, bobolinks, and other plains birds. 

I could almost see and hear Conestoga wagons filled with pioneer families headed west, lurching and bumping across the rolling grasslands, tin pans and iron pots clanking, the bellow of oxen straining as they pulled the load, the tinkling of a cow bell on the milk cow following behind. In some places, the ruts formed by thousands of wagon wheels are still visible more than a century later. Pretty heady stuff for a preteen.

The other view I have of Lincoln…during our first tour of duty there…was the brutality of junior high school applied to the vulnerable psyche of a rootless 12-year-old. I’ve written often enough about my experience with bullying at Whittier Jr. High School, so I don’t need to go into it here, but beyond the bullying there were the mean-kid cliques, closed-groups, animosities, whispered threats toward military kids, and teachers and administrators whose willful ignorance of the mental and physical violence going on in their classrooms, halls, and grounds endorsed the "us vs. them" attitudes of the town kids. 

These observations could have been isolated incidents in my life, perhaps unique to the relationship between the base kids and the townies of Lincoln. But, of course, such perceptions of hate, rumor-mongering, peer-level gaslighting, and ruthlessly-applied taunts and physical assaults are common across life, whether the targets are barely-cognizant children, or senior citizens nearing their ends. That such willful and debilitating strikes still occur and make up an unbreakable thread in the fabric of American life continues to baffle me. Why aren't we past all of this? Why do we see it at the highest level of government and among what should be otherwise reasonable people. 

I didn’t realize it at the time—I simply did not have any prior comparative intellectual or social experiences—but what happened to me at Whittier was a level of white-on-white bigotry and us-vs.-them classism that I would soon see being waged against blacks when we moved to Louisiana. My sense of injustice and recognition of the reality of being a voiceless minority were profound, and shaped, I’m sure my anger, fear, and frustration at being so callously prejudged and summarily dismissed as a person, laid the groundwork for my intolerance of social, racial, religious, fiscal, and political inequalities. 

As an aside: The bus route took the base kids over a bridge above the Lincoln cattle stockyards and slaughter house. There is no adequate way to describe the sound and smell of a slaughter house from a bus traveling overhead on a hot morning—but to this day I can hear and smell it, and it is never lost on me that those sounds and smells, filling the bus as it carried me to Whittier every weekday morning, made my anxieties about what was ahead for me in that school day all the more worrisome.

Is it any wonder then that I sought out the solace of the tall grasses, the textures and rich smells of newly-plowed fields, the shadowed hideaways among small stands of trees where the bitter voices of angry children were replaced by the calming whispers of a non-judgmental natural world?

It was during the quiet times like these—left alone to my own devices out in the middle of the prairie—that I think my first coherent thoughts formed about the span of American history. I can’t put much of a philosophical point on it because I was still being formed myself, and all I can recollect is that such quiet times were very comforting and became big-thinking opportunities. 

If that alone time out in the tall Nebraska grasses had any significant impact on me, it is that when I feel most stressed and conflicted—personally or politically—I can go back there in my mind and very quickly settle the internal storms or anxieties just by recalling the trill of the meadowlark’s song and the gentle push and rustle of the ceaseless wind.