On a Tour of Chadron, Nebraska

 

On a Tour of Chadron, Nebraska

With my wife and a traveling companion, I was on a bus-tour of the garden spots in the Nebraska panhandle.  The bus was not particularly luxurious, more like an old school bus with hard bench seats held in place by metal pipes riveted to the vehicle’s floor.  I was born in Chadron, Nebraska and had not visited the town for many years and, so, I was excited to see that we had come to the city’s outskirts.  

We passed a small teacher’s college.  I mentioned to our traveling companion that my father had attended school at that college.  (I don’t know what moved me to say this: my father went to school at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa.)  I also said that the governor of the State of Minnesota had gone to that college – this was true, I think.  Next to the road, a big brick structure rose like a ziggurat, stepped back terraces ascending to a grim-looking tower.  The windows piercing the brick facade were all broken.  Fires had burned within the tower and soot stained the sills and window-frames.  A few hundred yards down the road, the new college stood on a steep hillside.  The buildings were made of dark cinder-colored brick, windowless with aerial patios jutting out of the structure beside long, sloping ramps.  The structures looked less like a college than an industrial facility, perhaps, a foundry.

Chadron itself occupied a crater, city streets forming a grid at the bottom of the pit where the town was built.  As tall as the Eiffel Tower, two buttes rose from the crater floor, steep pyramidal peaks.  Evidently, the city was much altered from when I had last seen it.  Of course, I remember nothing at all about my first couple months in Chadron – I was a new-born infant then.  When I was ten, my family stopped in Chadron before driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota – the Nebraska town is about 100 miles south of Rapid City.  Then, it was a sleepy village, an oasis of old elms and oaks gathered around an intersection downtown.  We visited the Lutheran Church where I had been baptized and my father took a picture of me standing next to a golden baptismal font, a streamlined vessel like one of Brancusi’s “Birds in Flight.”  Twenty-five years earlier, I drove through the town again, this time en route to Yellowstone.  The city had lost some of its old trees but was still a bucolic green place with flowering hedges and well-watered lawns.  The pine ridges with their evergreen seams and green-edged blufftops, loomed over the town, bare hay-colored slopes dissected by waterless and gravelly ravines.   

Things had changed.  Coal had been found in the hills and Chadron now had a bleak industrial aspect.  The town was full of smoke and the downtown, now a vast labyrinth of dirty warehouses and mining logistics (lots full of dirty excavators, piping, and huge trucks) lapped up against the two cone-shaped peaks.  Railroad tracks converged and diverged, crossing at the enter of big iron-laced yards full of boxcars.  Several elevated tracks ran along the length of the commercial streets and the houses looked small and besieged by the heavy industry dominating the town.  The only color that I saw in the cityscape was on a half-dozen red sedans, cars that seemed modeled on the vehicles in which gangsters made their escapes from crime-scenes.  The red sedans were taxis, apparently intended to be whimsical and I saw them lined up on there main thoroughfare under the iron stanchions holding up the elevated trains.  Some kind of monument had been raised atop one of the pyramidal peaks.  The summit of the other butte was concealed in a low-hanging fog of mist and fumes.

We lost the tour-guide on the ascent of the steep hill.  A trail, or, perhaps, road had brought us up the slope to within thirty or forty feet of the hilltop.  I scrambled up the side of the peak, climbing on all fours toward to the summit.  All went well until I turned around and looked down.  The side of the butte was sheer, a six-hundred foot drop to the base of the butte.  Suddenly, this seemed like a very dangerous place to be.  There was no way down except up – at least, this is what I perceived, so, turning away from the frightening declivity, I continued my climb and, at last, came to the summit.  A hedge of evergreens surrounded a cyclone fence that enclosed some kind of transmitter apparatus.  There was a tiny, closet-shaped hut next to the fence and the lattice of fins and antennae pointed up at the sky.  My wife had reached the top by some other, less arduous route.   She told me that she would meet me at the café at the foot of the peak, turned on her heel, and vanished.

I made my way down the hillside, skidding and sliding through the scree, then, at last, plunging down a sooty bank of coal, a vein of anthracite wrapped like a belt around the butte.  Coal dust rose under my heels jammed into the sheer hillside and I was covered in the stuff.

On the city street, traffic lurched around me.  It was so dark under the lowering storm clouds that the street lamps were illumined.  People were hurrying along the sidewalks, hustling here and there among the dismal, barren walls and lots full of pits and excavators.  The coal was close to the surface and, it seemed, that the people in Chadron were eradicating their own town to mine the stuff.  The darkness was spreading.  It occurred to me that I didn’t know the name of the café where I was supposed to meet my wife.  And it wasn’t obvious to me where the tour bus had gone.

I found a 24-hour around-the-clock breakfast place and had three eggs, bacon and sausage.

Elevator

 

Elevator

We were fighting a war in a distant part of the world.  So far as I could see, the war didn’t affect most people.  Planes landed and departed, more or less, on time.  Grocery stores were well-stocked and their shelves were full.  Sometimes, when I traveled, I encountered soldiers.  When the soldiers were in groups, they seemed jovial and cocky, talking loudly and pretending to bully when another.  But, when you saw them alone, dragging big khaki-colored canvas bags through the jetways, the young men and women looked distraught – they sat by themselves in the waiting areas, staring off into the distance or nervously fingering their cell-phones.

This happened a number of years ago, but I remember things vividly. 

The concourse leading to my flight ended in large waiting area with seats bolted to the floors in front of the gates.  TV screens were mounted over the passengers gathered there.  A food court with a Chinese restaurant, a taco place, and some convenience counters peddling bottled drinks and potato chips as well as paperbacks and magazines made a half-circle around where people were waiting for their flights.  I was traveling on a small regional jet – I can’t remember my destination.  A passenger van was pulled up to a gate on the tarmac where the larger planes were being loaded with luggage and trays of frozen food.  To reach the van, passengers had to take an elevator down one floor to the level of the runway where the conveyance to our plane, apparently on a remote runway, was waiting.

When our flight was called, about 25 passengers gathered near the two elevators under the digital sign identifying the gate on the level below.  I was traveling light (it was a short trip) with just a cloth duffle bag and a back pack.  After the announcement, I made my way to the elevators.  Both elevator doors opened at the same time, but, for some reason, all of the passengers crowded together to get into the left one.  People were pressed tightly around the right door, but, when it opened, they recoiled and didn’t enter, stepping to the side to queue for the left-hand lift.  

I was in no hurry.  Seats are assigned.  It doesn’t make any practical difference whether you are the first on the plane or the last.  But, of course, most passengers don’t seem to understand this fact and, so, they shove and push to reach the discomfort of the crowded regional jet. This has never made sense to me but I am, by nature, patient, even phlegmatic. 

The elevator door closed and the lift dropped and, then, after a minute, ascended again.  More people jostled one another, carry-on luggage bulked-up against hip and thigh.  The door slid open and, again, the passengers gasped and stepped to the side and, so, the way was clear for me to enter the elevator on the right side.  I stepped forward.  A figure was sprawled on the floor to the right of the doors under the bank of buttons.  The man was covered in rags and both of his feet and right arm were missing, raw bulbs of red flesh exposed where his extremities had been amputated.  On his chest and thighs, I could see burns, shiny and pink continents mapped on his skin. The air smelled of some sort of ointment.  I was startled and instinctively backed-up, off the elevator, and, then, the door soundlessly slid shut.

I wasn’t going to ride that elevator.  The man’s eyes were large and bright and, with the persistence of vision, I imagined them still staring at me through the elevator’s door.  

Moving to my right, to the other elevator leading to the tarmac, I took that lift down to the lower concourse.   The people standing around the gate were silent and appalled.  It was best not to speak of what we had seen.