Everyone Knows This is Nowhere

1.

It works like a bathtub drain on the edge of town. Commerce swirls around it during working hours. RVs sit in the parking lot — debris stuck to the porcelain. The pickups and cars float down the rows into the stalls. People do the dead man’s float through the automated doors.

Inside, Wal-Mart is the most culturally interesting place around. It’s the only place within 100 miles where you can find people of five different races in the same building at the same time. Shopping carts litter the frequently full parking lot — chaotic detritus of consumers too caught up in getting their products home to care about returning carts to the corral. Cars float away with trunks full of nutritionally suspect food.

Like the deals at Food Desert Hell, houses here are cheap. Dangerously so. You buy one and your mortgage is less than any big city apartment rent and it ends up holding onto you. After investing so much time and effort into getting it how you want it, you can’t imagine selling it. Even if the place is wrong for you somehow the house anchors everything.

But it’s not the house that’s most important; it’s the car. The town has an unreliable airport and no public transportation. Scottsbluff, Nebraska, population 15,039, operates wholly dependent on the automobile. The county is 37,000 people and few survive without access to a vehicle in some form. Hitchhikers are never seen. It’s rare to see people walking. And it’s common to go for days without seeing a cyclist.

On the weekends there isn’t reliable cab service so it’s difficult to get drunk outside your home, unless someone with you doesn’t drink. It’s generally understood that if you’re going to drink past the legal limit at a bar, you should do it early enough in the night that the police won’t suspect you of drinking if you get pulled over. The drunk tank has a drain that’s harder to escape. No country for pedestrians.

2.

The people of the town have lost their sense of opportunity. We missed it by a generation. My parents grew up here and were young when all the small towns were thriving. When on Friday and Saturday nights the cars lined Main Street. It was the Golden Age of American Small Towns. A Ron Howard film. Maybe American Graffiti. Rural life before meth use became the most distinguishable symptom of abject poverty. When the roads and highways were new. People went out to the movies and dinner and everything felt hopeful. Those people stuck around.

My generation continues to look for community — everyone does — but coming back to a place like small-town Nebraska, so many people have left, and of course you can make your own community, but in little places it’s hard to find people living on the same level, to find your people. So you spend more time on the internet because there are people like you there. But those people aren’t really there. My friends from high school went to college and most stayed gone. Those who came back took opportunities too good to pass up. Family businesses. Jobs in fathers’ law firms. Winning lottery tickets. They’re doing well, but they miss the city.

Transplants from cities too competitive or expensive start businesses, work low-paying jobs and live in houses of a size they could never afford where they came from. They’re disappointed by the lack of cultural options, the lack of possibilities, how they’ll never really know the people who are from here. They hope one day to get somewhere better, somewhere warmer, more culturally relevant, or just to get back home.

The only young people who want to stay are farm or ranch children. The newspaper runs editorial after editorial about ways to reverse the brain drain. People from here who live in other places swear Scottsbluff is the nicest small town in Nebraska. But oh how small town life in the center of America has changed.

America is a monster. It’s never easy. I came home to be close to friends and family, but my phone doesn’t ring much more here than it did in Korea. When I lived on the other side of the Pacific Ocean everyone said they couldn’t navigate the time change, but that hasn’t mattered. The truth is we got old. We scattered all over the world. Our lives got in the way.

People think they know me because I grew up here. It’s a small town. You never really escape your past if you live in a place where people remember you. Where you encounter your former teachers on the street or faces you can’t put a name to. I see the family doctor who delivered me at the table next to me during dinner.

You can’t go home again. You can go home again. You can’t go home again. You can go home again. Back and forth in my head all day.

3.

We all knew going in there wasn’t any money left in writing, but we hoped there might be glory. Now even that’s a mirage. Most of us will settle for survival and knowing that we can serve the common good of the society we’re covering. The glory of writing has grown so elusive it’s almost a unicorn. Yet despite all of that I’m still searching to understand exactly how people feel about their lives, to properly render the human condition.

At this time in my life I’m in the place where I can do the most good. Serve the realm, as it were. I can help my grandma if she needs her gutters cleaned or my dad if he bought something at a sale and needs to load it. When people talk to writers, they like to say things like, “You’re lucky. You can do your job from anywhere,” without a clear idea of the importance of location for a writer’s material. While that might matter to a lesser extent to a fiction writer — the long-standing truism that you can’t really write about a place until you leave it applies — it does matter for a newspaper journalist. Beats can be learned. Issues understood. But truly understanding the dynamics of a culture is best left to the men and women who are products of their environs. Here I know why the power shifts the way it does. I’m not distracted by the weather. I’m not required to study to understand this environment — it exists in a familiar way and always will. I know the names of the trees. I know what role agriculture plays in the local economy. And I know where the irrigation water comes from.

I write a column for the local newspaper and see people in the aisles of the supermarkets. They come up to me and say, “I enjoy your articles.” That’s the stock phrase. “I enjoy your articles.” And it’s good to hear. But I never know how to respond. I just say thank you and try to keep moving.

People like to ask me who my parents are. Writing for the paper, my family gets their share of attention. My mom and dad say they run into people at Kmart or Home Depot — wherever they go, church even — and people come up to them and ask “Is Bart your son?” Most of the time my parents even say yes.

I’m lucky. I am able to do what so many journalists, at their very core, wish they could do. To have a direct impact on my environment, my culture. It’s what people want as writers, as advocates, as activists. To be able to challenge the way people think. How they look at their community. You have that opportunity when you work in a small town. You know if people are reading you and what they think about your ideas. But if that’s what you want, be careful what you wish for. Because then you also get people calling you or coming into the office and telling you what you’ve done wrong. Or what they think you’re not seeing. And phone calls and face-to-face conversations are much more difficult to ignore than the comments at the end of an online essay.

For example, I wrote a column about how I had grown up showing 4-H animals. How the farm animals that we raised had personalities and emotions and intelligence. How my siblings and I would get attached to them, think of them as pets, then, after a year, we would sell them for slaughter. How at one point in my later life I realized that if I wouldn’t eat an animal like a dog because a dog is a pet with emotions and intelligence then by that same token I shouldn’t be eating cattle or any other domesticated farm animal. After it was published in the newspaper, one of the area ranchers called me to say he didn’t want to spend his money to support someone like me who didn’t in turn support his industry. I received an angry email from another man with a family connection articulating how disappointed he was in the newspaper.

It’s possible to have all the talent in the world but that doesn’t make up for the wisdom that comes from experience. I had no idea at the time that would be the fallout for writing something that I thought was just honest — a different take on rural life that might make someone think. The closest I had to foresight of the problem I had caused for myself was a sudden, unexpected sense of dread I felt before I walked into the building the day the piece ran. It takes experience, as a writer, to learn to gauge how things are going to impact people. Even after nearly a decade of writing I’m still learning how to anticipate reactions to my stories. And I don’t always know how things will land.

But I also received letters from people saying thank you. That they had grown up in this community, had spent their whole lives here and were made ashamed that they didn’t eat beef or any meat all. Just like with any creative endeavor, when it comes to reactions, what to focus on is a choice.

I write newspaper stories at work in the morning and edit in the afternoon. Come home. Eat dinner. Read. Try to write before bed. Wake up. Do it again. It’s not the kind of glamorous writing life I envisioned when I began, but in a lot of ways it’s a pure one.

4.

The plan is to take the extra money I make from freelance writing, put it into a separate account, and use that for traveling, to see the places in America we’ve never been. When we moved back here from Seoul, my wife and I each made a list of the five places we want to visit in the U.S. that we’ve never been.

Me:

1. New Orleans

2. Yellowstone

3. Savannah

4. Nashville

5. Yosemite

Her:

1. Las Vegas
2. Miami
3. New York City
4. Los Angeles
5. Hawaii

We’ve been back in America together for nearly a year and haven’t visited any of them. Instead it’s been San Francisco, a lot of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, the Black Hills. Mostly closer places. But we’ve done a lot of other things. I want to tell you about our garden, but I could never put into words how good our tomatoes taste.

I’m constantly at odds with the security of owning a home and my life lacking adventure. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Or unaware of my privilege. What I’ve always wanted was a life of independence and forward motion. Now I have security and dissatisfaction and a desire to just convince my wife to get in my truck and drive until we reach the ocean. A desire that I smother with work and responsibility to others but not to myself. Is that what it means to be an adult? To fight your instincts until you’re crazy with unhappiness, trying to ignore the impulse to burn everything you have and flee to the mountaintop?

When I first got here the only thing I was thinking was how to get to New York. I remember watching a CNN video of a foreign correspondent standing wide on the deck of a ship, reporting as Russia moved into Ukraine while I edited stories about the humane society and the United Way. I don’t think I can do this, I thought. Staying here for five years was the plan, but five years might be the test of my endurance. I got into journalism for the adventure, not the drudgery.

All I could do was daydream about what it was like to ride a bike through Brooklyn over the bridge and into Manhattan. To get on a plane in Seoul and fly to Hong Kong and Macau for the weekend. I needed a life that felt like I was living an adventure.

I’ve learned to remind myself to be good to people here. To try. To do my job. To work as hard as I possibly can. The work might give me the glory I’m seeking one day. Or the work might just be its own reward. I haven’t come to terms with that yet. Satisfaction in ambitious people is the rarest thing I know. I doubt I’ll ever find it. In the meantime, I’m going out back to weed the basil and watch the full moon rise.