I'd been too busy back in my hometown to write much, but now I am back on the road and staying the night at a hotel in Iowa City and able to get my thoughts down. I spent almost a week in Hastings, Nebraska, seeing family and friends alike. It's always a joy to see my loved ones again, and sad that I only get to spend this much time with them once a year.
This time I also had the good fortune to be home during a spell of moderate weather. Three years ago we got to go tubing on the Niobrara River, but temperatures jumped up to one hundred degrees. This coincided with staying in a bargain-basement motel in Valentine, Nebraska, that never seemed to be comfortable. That year over Christmas we had to drive to the airport in Omaha in an ice storm. The next Christmas bad weather had us stuck at O'Hare. Last year it was brutally hot again in that blustery Great Plains way that make you feel like you are living inside of a hair dryer.
This year the moderate weather reminded me of just how beautiful Nebraska can be in the summertime. The corn rises tall and the grass waves green under impossibly vast blue skies. In the evening the sunsets dazzle on the flat horizon, while the coolness of the morning air makes perfect weather for thoughtful walks. The cottonwood trees, which look like weeds with trunks and branches in winter, abound with thick green leaves.
We had some escape from last year's hotter weather via a trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I luxuriated in the cool mountain evenings. This year we stayed in and around Hastings instead of taking a long trip with my parents, and I was glad for it. This year more than any other I have witnessed how my hometown has become a more livable place. In my earlier memories (which date to about 1978-1980), the downtown was bustling, the commercial center of an agricultural region. As the 80s progressed the mall near my house grew in popularity as the downtown stores started closing. At the end of the decade the arrival of Wal-Mart put this dynamic in overdrive. Out in the surrounding countryside, farmers were getting slammed and leaving the land during the Farm Crisis. By the end of the 90s, the once mighty Imperial Mall had become an empire in decline and downtown was almost completely dead. Come this century venerable local restaurants like Bernardo's and the OK Cafe closed for good, leading to a restaurant situation so dire that people welcomed Applebee's and Dunkin as saviors.
Miraculously, in the last few years things have completely shifted, thanks to people from the area who moved out than came back and to new arrivals from elsewhere. There is an abundance of tasty Mexican food, for example. Downtown there is a microbrewery, artisan bakery, new bookstore, multiple coffee houses, and a cheese shop and wine bar opened by a childhood friend who once plied his trade in Los Angeles. This morning at the Back Alley Bakery I had a delicious brunch I would put up against any place in Brooklyn. More importantly, these new, more interesting local businesses seem to be doing well. My friend told me to come to his place on Monday because that was his slow day, but it was still bustling.
The foodie revolution has even penetrated rural Nebraska. More than that, people there were yearning for alternatives to the dominant corporate chains and boring traditional local food culture. The whole thing is a great example of what a little new blood can do. I guess it was appropriate to witness that first hand the same week a generational shift happened in the presidential election.
While it might sound strange, the founding of better restaurants in my hometown gives me real hope. In so many ways we are oppressed by the dead hand of the past and by older people committed to keeping the status quo, no matter how shitty it is. A little bit of faith in the future, even in the form of a tasty breakfast, goes a long way.
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