Notes from Elkhorn, Nebraska

Out the window, morning. There were thunderstorms last night and now the sky is gray and dense, monochrome against the rolling ridges of tree. I imagine it will be another thick day. Someone must have turned the air conditioner down because the pug is stretched out in the center of the bed instead of pressed up against me as usual. I can actually stretch out a little instead of being pinned at the edge of the bed by 25 pounds of dog. Pinned by pug.

I’ll miss this house. I’m here to help a family member move out. I’ve been coming here for 18 years, to this big house on a hill overlooking the little old town of Elkhorn. The town is adjacent to the original trans-American highway, a bumpy brick deal of which about a mile is still intact. It runs along the train tracks and the sound of the train is a frequent gorgeous and wistful reminder of long-lost days. There are wooden buildings along the tracks that I love, whitewashed, leaning, and oddly shaped from when there were horses, not cars.

“In horses, cars were stirring.”
Andrei Codrescu, “Beach in Sebastopol, Calif.”

One of my favorite lines of poetry.

When I first arrived 18 years ago I saw pretty clearly that one day the little town would become a quaint art community in the middle of suburban sprawl, and that’s what is happening, as Omaha has annexed its Western edge and development is razing the 20 miles of cornfield that used to separate the city from country. I could predict the future because this has happened in my life before, in my childhood Orange County, as orange groves made way for sprawling housing developments. It’s a dim glory, being proven right this way.

It used to torment me, the way ‘progress’ happens. In my hometown, the gorgeous country road on which we would rattle along back to Trabuco Canyon is now a two-lane bike path next to a six-lane highway. In Omaha, cornfields fall to yet another mini mall, or box store, yet more blandly unappealing industry.

“In cornfields, Costco is stirring.” That one is mine. Ugh.

I’ll always love Chrissie Hynde for this song:

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga falls
Said, a, o, oh way to go Ohio

It’s an anthem I’ve sung many times. Really, I’ve let go of most the torment I used to feel about these things. It occurs to me that nature has the last laugh, always. Reality is a long game. I read that those big shopping malls are becoming obsolete, repurposed as offices, and apartments. Then, one day, even those will be obsolete, torn down, or crumbled. Nature will take it back over, whether we’re there to see it or not.

Driving through Europe, often the highways are far from the towns. You see the pretty little clusters of life off in the distance, surrounded by rolling green hills and staked to the sky by church steeples. I guess this is what happens when towns come first, before highway systems. Planners can be thoughtful about the way the culture wants life to look. Here, the highway comes first, and then everything gets slapped up alongside. Drive from Dallas to Austin, Texas and you’ll see it, three hours of ugly sprawling industry with absolutely no sense of style. We’re in a hurry over here, it all seems to say. Nature? Just a place to slap up a metal building and park cars in front of.

I said I let go of the torment, well you see there’s still a little there. I imagine that I’ve insulted Texans and their aesthetics, and I take responsibility for recognizing my own silly judgments. Why does Clem think she has the ultimate say on beauty? I walk through the streets of San Francisco and look into apartment windows, baffled that anyone would have glaring fluorescent light in the kitchen. Baffled at those salmon-colored cars that young women choose to drive. Baffled at the agonizingly bright ROSS sign destroying the view of Fisherman’s Wharf at night. Why does Clem think she knows better?

I read a book once in which a space alien was gifting the human who rescued him with a great deal of information about his perfected society back home. People lived in cities that functioned comfortably, everyone with enough space to live and be happy, no one owning huge places with many empty rooms and huge utility bills. Close enough to be in community, to let go of loneliness. Enough space for your cocoon, too. The less footprint for the beings, the happier they were, and they were free to explore the vast natural landscape of their planet that remained intact.

Being a fan of cities, it made sense to me. My little San Francisco flat is small but functional. I’d be happy with it twice the size, so I would be able to have my studio here, but even then it would be small by Omaha standards. The house I am in now has a room we sit in for Christmas. There is another room that we walk through to get from the kitchen to the bedrooms that is never used for anything other than a passageway. There is a downstairs of about 10 rooms that used to be an office, but for the past four years has stood empty. Five acres of land, very pretty, but the house now sits next to a highway and the sound of traffic has obliterated the peacefulness of the last 18 years. Time to go.

If I lived here, I would welcome the change. There are gorgeous old buildings in the Old Market section of Omaha and big brick lofts for rent. That’s where I’d live. After all of the years of housing all of this furniture and artwork and chotchkees, I would want to let go of it all and just be free. That feels like living to me.

I pack box after box of things not looked at for years. Everyone has their possessions they keep for sentimental reasons and it’s not for me to say what has value for someone else. But as I work, I keep thinking of all those things I’m holding on to at home and it makes me want to just purge it all when I return.

Long ago, I said I wanted to be light as a feather always, to be able to run out the door with a bag of my true possessions and not care about the rest. I think I still think that way, although some part of me seems to need to keep a bunch of stuff around: clothes I’ll never wear again or books I’ve read and won’t reread, old letters and photos that I would never miss. I think, well photographs, I should keep, but so many I may never look at again, or look at once and then once again set aside and spend money to store. In the drum world I am pretty bare bones with only three kits, but I have a studio crammed with pieces and attachments and broken cymbals and stands and all kinds of items I tried and don’t use. I just pay to store it all.

I don’t really have anything of value now that I take stock of it, with the exception of my wedding ring and my small stack of childhood books.

Here I am, wishing away all my stuff, while a few hours away as California burns, families are suffering shocking loss.

A friend just lost his house in fire, and I have been thinking of him quite a bit. He seems so peaceful about it, and I know he must have lost a lot: musical instruments and photos of children and his long marriage. A life of accumulation, a beautiful home, gone up in flame. His spirit is always so generous and peaceful, and his whole family admires him in a pure way and through this catastrophe, you can see why. I don’t have to ask him if he lost anything of value in the fire, of course he did. And yet, with his every post and message it seems that he knows that this is not the measure of a man, these things. His character is a revelation.

Often these days, I dream of a small shack in a forest, preferably overlooking the ocean, with a wood fireplace, wooden walls and a picture window on which my imagination can play out. Time, work, quiet, the smell of redwood and sea salt, sound of jay and owl. One room, perfect. Carpets and a low couch and bed and blankets. The pug. Books. My family, in walking distance.

So all of that stuff about traveling light that I wrote above goes out the window when I dream of this place in the woods. A house in a forest, not a city. A house filled with items I love dearly. Away from distraction and other people.

Maybe I will title this blog How To Be A Hypocrite In Three Pages.

I guess that’s just the deal. We aim to move from pure knowing, pure truth, and instead we battle judgment and thinking we know it all. We desire beauty and attach to a judgment that is anything but. We prescribe community and conservation for everyone else, longing for an extravagant solitude all to ourselves.

These dichotomies, they rise, and then I let them go. I watch out this big window as a storm moves through and lightening strikes and I see it hang for a moment on some earthly attraction. Beautiful? So beautiful. Unless, I guess, you’re the one below.

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