Ode To Grandpa Huck

My grandfather was a natural born storyteller. When he came to visit, we kids would gather around him and beg him to tell stories like Gefilte Fish over and over and over. He hated farming, though that was how he made his living. Legend has it he had wanted to be either a lawyer or a preacher but, for some reason, he was too afraid to go to high school; he never got past an eighth grade education.

My grandfather was one of the many German-Russian refugees that came to the Mid-West and parts of Canada in the first part of the twenty-first century (his mother may also have been Jewish, though there is no way to know; he certainly was fascinated with Jewish culture). He was born out in a tent where the migrant workers lived, his mother back in the fields shortly after his birth. When he was a child, he often told us, the only toys he had ever had to play with were bones. Although I doubt this was actually true (he told it to us, of course, to try and teach us a lesson since he found us so wasteful), we believed him; when my younger brother was in the fifth grade he had to interview someone about the best Christmas present they had ever received. My brother knew immediately he wanted to choose my mother. She told him the story of a ballerina doll she had gotten one year but soon saw that he was disappointed. When she asked him why he said: "I figured you might have gotten a human skull." After all, grandpa had played with bones so why not mom too, and the human skull is the ultimate of all bones....

A few years before he passed away I asked my grandmother to record him telling his stories. She did, and I still had the cassette in my old wardrobe at my parent's house. When my mother recently moved I forgot to mention it and all the old cassettes were thrown out....

Still, he was present when I went the harvest festival in Nebraska. All of the old farmers there looked more or less exactly like he had. Did they also hate farming? Do any of them also have a poetic, story-telling soul? Who knows, but it's nice to think he might not have been the only one.

Newsflash: Walmart Has Ruined Small Town America...

That's how I felt on my recent journey through Cheyenne, Wyoming and various small towns in Western Nebraska. Here were all these places with quaint, old brick buildings lining main street that had a sort of Western charm and yet most (if not all) of the shops were deserted. The only other people I saw during the day (though downtown Cheyenne does seem to have a nighttime cowboy drinking crowd...) were in the occasional car driving by. Where was everyone? I wouldn't have been surprised if I had seen a tumble weed, a la Hollywood, rolling down the street.

Some of what I saw bordered on the surreal, like this shop window of the same chair over and over in a now-defunct furniture store in Cheyenne:


Or this remains of an ancient piece of apple pie on a bench in Minatare, Nebraska where someone had propped a plastic fork:


Many of the empty businesses had signs in their windows like the photograph at the beginning of this post. Still, that one at least has a sort of irony to it. Some of the other signs were really sad, like the ones that thanked all their loyal customers for helping to keep them open in these hard times only now the shop is gone, a rolled-up American flag propped up against an empty display case.

Am I just an arrogant city slicker? Have I just become too European? After all, my grandma, a native of Western Nebraska, told me how excited everyone was when Walmart came to town. But these lonely, small town streets had such a charm; they still do, though now they are all the more desolate and melancholy.

But I did get some great shots, especially of this abandoned motel about 5 miles up the road from the farm in Bayard where my mother grew up:


Next to the motel was also The Chef restaurant.


Although the restaurant was closed too (it said in the window, Due To Uncontrollable Circumstances) and there was a for lease sign out front, all of the tables were still set, as though in eternal waiting for hungry diners.


Some of the motel doors were open but, though we were somewhat tempted, Jasper and I didn't go inside. We weren't sure who (or what) might be living there and besides, we were starting to both feel spooked. We had landed in a ghost town reserved as of now only for the dead or maybe just those merely forgotten.