By Chelsea Yates
I leave Eppley Airfield in a rented Nissan, briefly heading north from Omaha on I-29, then cutting west and picking up Highway 275 just south of Fremont. Blanketed in corn, soybeans, hay, and alfalfa, the land silently pulses as I drive, following a course set by the Elkhorn River. Along the way, I may find myself crawling behind a combine—or racing to pass a truck full of cattle. I try not to think about where they’re headed. I slow when passing through the small towns and villages that dot my route, checking them off as I drive: Scribner. West Point. Beemer. Wisner.
At dusk, I pull over to pay my respects to the setting sun. Streams of red light flood the flat land, coating fields and farmhouses. Before the cooling of darkness, everything connects in momentary tints of red, yellow, orange, and pink.
Outside the car, my skin absorbs the warmth of this light. Sometimes the wind—carrying the sweet smell of cows and crops—sounds bigger than it feels. In the winter, it bites and nips. In the spring, it whips. I wonder how many plough blades have cut into the earth around me, converting the prairie into farmland.
I was two, maybe three, when a wooden swing hit me in the face, and my little legs crumpled into the playground dirt. Blood seeped from my small cheek. My father picked me up, brushed me off, and carried me home. I cried all the way.
Or so I was told. I have no memory of this incident, but I can still see the tiny scar to the right of my nose.
Over the years, strawberries grew on my kneecaps from minor bicycle accidents and Slip ’N Slide mishaps. An infected bug bite on my right shoulder swelled into a permanent lump no cortisone shot can subdue. I still feel a slight kink in my left shoulder from when I was seven and slipped from jungle gym bars and broke my arm. I’ve had a writer’s callus on my left middle finger since I was nine. The three gashes near my right elbow are from cat claws though they look more like knife cuts. Faulty fireworks have made their mark on me, and adhesions from a long-ago surgery remind me of their existence every day. I carry all these markers with me.
I’m following my dad through rows of corn taller than he is. I am small and scared to lose sight of him. I keep my eyes fixed on his sweaty t-shirt, lawn-mowing cut-offs, and grubby sneakers. Though Dad has little farm experience, he moves through this Battle Creek cornfield as if channeling generations of farmers. I waiver between awe and fear. Suddenly, my right foot is stuck in a clump of mud. I freeze, dizzy, a knot in my stomach. I’m supposed to stay out of trouble, take care of myself.
“You’re welcome to as much corn as you can pick,” his friend had told him.
It was 1983. My parents’ second business, just a year old, was funneling us down the toilet. Dad had sold his hunting rifles and our two cars—an Oldsmobile Cruiser bought off the line earlier that year and my mom’s classy Ninety-Eight. In our driveway now were two beasts my grandfather had picked up for cheap: “Big Red,” a run-down old Mercury, and “Ol’ Yeller”—a real clunker, according to the kids across the street. Both cars smelled of cigarettes and age. They rumbled loudly when keys were turned in their ignitions, announcing to the neighborhood that my family was on the move. Even at five I was embarrassed.
The cars were the most public marker of my parents’ downturn, but they could have been shrugged off as temporary loaners until Dad’s next flashy purchase. My younger sister wore my hand-me-downs, and my baby brother wore clothes given to us by a neighbor that her son had worn a decade earlier. Even now, in old family photos, my brother looks out of place, dressed like a 1970s baby but in a 1980s world.
We ate fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. Braunschweiger sandwiches and tuna and noodles. I begged Mom to buy Pizza Rolls and Twinkies, but they cost too much. On Sundays when we clipped coupons, I’d sneak in a few for cereals advertised during Saturday-morning cartoons. Mom taught me the difference between good deals and gimmicks: forty cents could be worth it, but a ten-cent coupon “doesn’t amount to diddle.”
Dad enrolled in night classes at the community college to become an insurance agent. Months later, he divided his weekdays between preparing policies for clients and running the family business—a t-shirt and gift shop—with Mom. Evenings and weekends, he drove Big Red out to the country to sell life insurance to farmers and ranchers. Sometimes he took my sister and me with him. He’d let us jump on motel beds to wear ourselves out.
In many ways, my parents successfully hid our family’s financial woes from us kids, but the ways they couldn’t were difficult to ignore. I can still see the fear on my mom’s face if I answered the telephone before she did. Or how she’d shake her head and mouth “tell them I’m not here” if a stranger’s voice wanted to talk to her. I knew lying was wrong, but I was learning that sometimes it was right.
I wanted to do whatever I could to help. Mostly that meant not adding to the burden—so no crying in the cornfield.
“Keep up or go wait by the car!” Dad yelled. The air was hot and sticky, the bugs out in full force. I didn’t think I could find my way back to Big Red, so I mustered my strength and yanked out my socked foot, but my shoe was still stuck in the mud. I pulled and crammed and laced and ran to catch up before Dad disappeared.
We drove home, stinky and exhausted, with a trunk full of corn. We spent the evening shucking it on the back porch, husks pulled off cob after cob, kernels scrubbed of their silk tassels, unwanted bits thrown into grocery sacks. The porch smelled like corn, cows, and country. It made me a little sick.
Mom would stay up late dropping the shucked ears into big pots of boiling water on the kitchen stove. This process took hours and heated up the kitchen something awful, so it was best done at night. Once boiled and cooled, Dad helped her slice the kernels off the cobs into the giant pan she used for Thanksgiving turkeys. After mixing in a little salt and sugar, Mom spooned the kernels into freezer bags. They were squeezed to remove air, tightly sealed, and placed in the deep freeze of the basement. Over the following months, one by one, they went through the whole process backward: brought up, defrosted, unbagged, cooked, and served.
Hamburger Helper, goulash, fried chicken, meatloaf: with a freezer full of corn, we always had a side vegetable.
In the spring of 2019, as the Midwest was taken over by blizzards and floodwaters, I followed Nebraska news channels from my home in Washington. I pored over images of flooded kitchens and mangled farmland, bloated cattle with stiff legs upturned, farmers and ranchers dressed in camouflage and Carhartts assessing broken highways and stranded tractors. With most of Nebraska in states of emergency, my mind went back to the Battle Creek cornfield.
Weeks later, my mother commented on the disaster relief workers who’d arrived to assist with clean-up efforts, “It’s nice they want to help, but we’re strong. We don’t expect handouts. We take care of ourselves.”
After our phone call, I wondered why my mom felt she must take care in a silo, why accepting help was a sign of weakness, why individual strength and communal support were at odds.
We came through our financial problems of the 1980s. Dad traded the clunkers for the Cavalier station wagon we took to the Black Hills in South Dakota, our first family vacation. He slowly transitioned out of the insurance business and back into the family shop. My parents returned borrowed goods and repaid favors, and my sister and I started taking piano lessons. We eventually sold our house with the back porch and basement deep freeze and moved to a bigger house near a new golf course. We never husked corn there.
I was raised to be strong and responsible, make sure my siblings did their chores, walk the dog, believe in God, throw a football, mow the lawn, turn in my homework, get straight As, pay bills on time, arrive early for work, and be home by curfew. To keep quiet and take care of anything that others could see. As long as everything seemed all right then it was all right, no matter what.
But what is endurance without emotion, strength without support?
More than two thousand homes, twenty-seven bridges, and three people were lost in the March 2019 floods, which for a time closed off two thousand miles of Nebraska’s state roads. The U.S. Department of Agriculture removed more than twelve hundred carcasses from nearly one hundred and ten sites. The costs and the damages piled up as readily as corn in a crib.
And yet life moved on. This land has hosted calm and storm in turn long before people, where grasses and tornadoes dance and life fluctuates between beauty and brutality. Where death brings renewal and renewal brings death; light into darkness, darkness into light. Our challenge is to find balance, to navigate our pains from the past and fears for the future while somehow burning brightly in between.
When I was little, threatening storms sometimes forced us into the basement—under the pool table, away from windows. Some storms pummeled windshields with hail and converted green lawns into beds of ice pebbles. Power outages stripped us of television, nightlights, and Nintendo. By my teens, I yearned for internal blackouts I could lose myself in, heavy rains to wash away the ugliness circling inside that I dared not to speak of. Eventually, I learned that the ugliness had a name: depression.
It would be years before I’d hear myself say it out loud. We didn’t discuss feelings in my house, so I sought out other spaces to harbor them. These were usually to be found in warbled cassette tapes or in the faint airwaves of an Omaha FM station straining to reach my bedroom.
My dad called it noise. But to me, the distorted guitars buzzed and boomed low bellows of thunder. The synths and drums struck like skateboards smacking concrete, and buffeted voices seemed as if they could smash glass.
I also loved listening to the rumbling of my empty stomach. That place existed somewhere beyond responsibilities, schoolwork, chores, and other expectations, and it sounded like power. It was my secret. My body and my music. Destruction and protection.
For most of my adult years, I’ve felt embarrassed by the girl I had once been and the storms she set in motion. I tried to forget her into oblivion. But that’s not fair to her or to me, so today I imagine what I’d say to her if we crossed paths. I’d let her know that it will get better. Not right away, but it will. She will travel and meet friends, laugh and feel gratitude, grow tomatoes and enjoy food, find her own words, know love and peace, and—even in her forties—go to punk shows and wear Converse sneakers. She will decide to choose harmony over monophony. She will keep time and will improvise. She will learn how to tune her own strings, sing her own song. And she will hold that cherished keepsake close, passed down from those who came before.
My father’s ashes reside in a small wooden box on the piano where I spent hours practicing scales and songs for weekly lessons and annual recitals. Decades earlier, my mother practiced her scales upon the same ivory keys. They were chipped and discolored by the time my fingers slipped over them. Each time they did, I thought of the elephant who gave its life so that we could play upon its tusks—a beast of faraway grasslands as mysterious to me as my own. Despite the occasional drive to Grand Island or Kearney for a spelling bee or football game, Nebraska’s prairies existed in my mind more as myth than reality. The only grasslands I knew were well-manicured lawns.
My mother’s family is buried in a small cemetery just across the Missouri River in Magnolia, Iowa. My first time there was for my grandfather’s funeral when I was ten. I remember his scratchy cheeks and the way his shirt pocket crunched when I hugged him, the soft pack of Pall Malls smashing into his lungs. He smelled of stale tobacco and chalky peppermint candies. I can still see the snacks he kept out of reach so he didn’t have to share: chocolate-covered graham crackers on the highest kitchen shelf, a box of Karmelkorn in the magazine holder of his armchair.
As a boy, he’d lost half his vision in a fishing accident. It took a journey by train from the family farm in Iowa to a doctor in Denver to get the hook out. A few years later, his family faced another accident, as Grandpa’s brother Floyd, a burgeoning furniture maker, was thrown from a horse and wagon doing chores. That evening, the horse returned pulling an empty cart. After this, my grandfather couldn’t bear to stay. One day, he walked out of the house and didn’t return. From there he hitched trains across the plains—no one knows how many or for how long. He worked on a ranch for a time in Wyoming before journeying home to Iowa accepting he was a prodigal son of the prairie. By then his parents ran the local dance hall, and he joined the family business as a bouncer, there to keep youngsters in line. That’s where he met my grandmother, and they married not long after.
My mother has vivid memories of the Magnolia cemetery, of how scared she was of the cannons shot to honor the dead, and how my grandfather would take her hand in his and walk her away from the crowds, to the quiet edges of the cemetery that jutted against farmland and grasses. She still visits him every Memorial Day.
Some objects and practices bring us comfort like solitary melodies linking us to the past, familiar songs from the tongues of our elders, in the blood of our family. My father waits for my mother at the piano. I’m sitting at a wooden desk crafted by my great-uncle Floyd. I have moved it, along with a rocking chair he built, from my parents’ house in Nebraska to Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and Washington. Will they ever find their way back to the plains? Perhaps, like the ivory tusks, they can never go home.
As the sun dims and darkness moves over the land, I return to the rented Nissan. Nebraska sunsets still remind me that, no matter how much older I grow, I will always be small. They hint at powers I’ll never understand—the earth, moon, and sun continuing their intertwined dance long after I am gone.
As I open the car door, a dull penny gleams at me on the asphalt. My mother believes in “pennies from heaven”—coins our deceased loved ones tuck into odd places to show we’re still connected. I don’t share this belief, but whenever I find pennies on the ground, I dutifully pocket them to take home, where they’ll reside in a mason jar on my dresser, not to be spent.
I adjust the rearview mirror. In it, I see my grandmother’s straight mouthline alongside my playground scar, her wrinkles at the edges of my lips. I recognize my father, too, in the roundness of my chin and brown irises of my eyes. One day, I may pass them on to another. But for now, I keep them for me, tending to their scrapes and cuts, singing their songs along with mine. I hoist them above flood waters so they can continue to burn, bright stars in the darkness.
My headlights hide the stars as I pull onto the highway.
Chelsea Yates is originally from northeast Nebraska. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest and is a writer for the University of Washington. She’s been a finalist in nonfiction essay contests hosted by Midwest Review and The Iowa Review, and her work has appeared in HerStry, Kawsmouth and Hear Nebraska.