When Nathan first asked me to write about my home town, my thoughts went immediately to the framed photos hanging in the hallway that is my back porch. If you visit my little home across from the Morse Bluff Post Office, you will see that I have some old, sepia-stained photos of the Morse Bluff District #14 School, the Post Office, and the Morse bluff sign with the population of 128 proudly displayed. I took these pictures when I was back on leave from the Air Force after I returned from my first tour of duty in Italy. The photos are black and white and cheaply framed but they have hung on every wall of every dorm room, tent, apartment, rental house, and base housing unit I have ever lived in. I wanted so badly to get out of here…from the age of twelve, all I wanted was to put distance between myself and this little town. I thought it’s influence would keep me close-minded and simple, my adolescent head so set on making a life that was so much more worldly and so much better than the lives of the family and friends I had grown up with.
I had temporarily forgotten how, as children, we came home from school and within seconds changed into our “play clothes” so we could run out to Sand creek, feel the cool mud between our toes and check on the daily transformation of the tadpoles in the Spring. Summers meant riding our bikes to the Racek’s house where we would be off to our many adventures on Killian’s Hill, or Dodge’s Hill, and every time we found an arrowhead atop Indian’s Hill, our imaginations went wild creating our piece of folklor to go with it. We would spend hours, high in the limbs of the grand maple in our back yard, reading, thinking, or just dozing. Everything I know about boys, sex, and life, I learned looking down at the earth from the limbs of that tree, in retrospect, that might explain a few things.
It didn’t hit me until I was a world away how much I could miss that smell of the freshly turned Nebraska earth during planting season, (I even put some in a jar once and took it back with me to Texas.) No metaphysical, philosophical discussion will ever replace the constant back and forth between farmers about rainfall. I missed driving along the highway during harvest, watching the behemoth machines change the landscape in one afternoon, that smell of burnt husks in the air, and the anxious discussions centered around yields in every grocery store and gas station. For me it was always easier to follow a combine for a few miles than it was to sit for one minute in rush hour traffic in Dallas.
When I finally came home, it seemed as though the town’s heart was aching because of the closing of the school; the grass growing around the playground equipment, a subtle symbol of what we all felt was an unnecessary end. In spite of the inevitable, we Morse Bluffians rallied with the stunningly refurbished Legion Hall bringing in folks from all around and the Morse Bluff citizens coming together financially and physically to build our beautiful Centennial Park. We have a new heart and it beats strongly through the mature and young families with a fresh generation of children to enjoy and ensure the prolonged existence of our lifestyle, our neighborliness, our buffer zone from the problems of the big city….our home town.
We are just South of North Bend, “over the Platte River and to the woods”….we are Morse Bluff, and we welcome everyone to come on over, have a cool drink and a meal at the Bottom Road Bar, sit in the gazebo while your kids play in the park, or plan to have your next family reunion with us at the American Legion Hall.
When I started my own family, I could have moved anywhere in this world, but to me there isn’t a more perfect place and those photos still hang on the walls of my house, but now they simply reminds me of my long journey back home to Morse Bluff.
—Norrth Bend Eagle: 9 Aug 2006