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© 2004 Josh Wolfe Introduction Essay for Nebraska 24/7 Along the Platte By Cindy Lange-Kubick Every August we hurtle west on Hwy. 2, an asphalt ribbon unspooling through Nebraska's heart. We race coal trains across rolling sand dunes, slowing down for one-blink towns, lost cattle in the road, thunderheads on the horizon. We are going away from the heat. Heading for someplace--any-place--we won't drip sweat going to the mailbox. But we always come back when it cools. Nebraska calls us back. Likewise, the cranes return every spring, appearing as the snow melts, hundreds of thousands of big-winged birds with Pippi Longstocking legs, roosting along the Platte River, dancing on its sandbars. But more and more farmers go away and stay away. Five thousand Nebraska farms disappeared in the past five years. But the corn still grows thick, and city kids come out to pluck its tassels each July. We grow beef here, too. Slaughter it. Pack it. Eat it. Small towns thrive on those packing plants, even as they adapt to las panaderias on Main Street. In the fall we harvest milo--and play football. There are no Husker linebackers on these pages. Nebraska 24/7's photos were shot in May, too late for spring drills, too early for the first kick-off. Still, we think Big Red is special, the Godiva chocolate of college football. It dazzles us, binds us together, for better or worse. When Tom Osborne retired as head coach we sent him to Congress--another Nebraska Republican in Washington. We're conservative here, on the whole. Sensible, too. Like the one-finger, steering-wheel wave: friendly without being reckless. Nebraska stretches 459 miles end to end, but all of us couldn't fill Manhattan's apartment buildings. We like it that way. Willa Cather called Red Cloud home; home for Johnny Carson was Norfolk. Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Dick Cheney in Lincoln Nebraska is a tall-grass prairie with trees planted by immigrants--the only place I know where state employees get Arbor Day off. Cather wrote about those trees in My Antonia: "I love them as if they were people." The same way we love our big sky and Big Red and all those checkerboard squares of earth passed down generation to generation, as if they were people. Nebraska is a dichotomy, divided by geography. Golden and green, flat and rolling, city and country. Seed caps and mortarboards, cowboy boots and business suits, rodeos and Rolexes. To the east is Omaha--billionaire Warren Buffet, food giant ConAgra, the College World Series. And Lincoln, the capitol, where the nation's only one-house legislative body--the Unicameral--is trying to figure out if we should be the last state to use electrocution as its sole means of execution. Out west is the breadbasket--cattle ranches, family farms and shrinking towns, all fighting to keep their hometown schools. The poorest counties in all of America are here. Meanwhile, Ted Turner buys up the Sandhills, dreaming of the buffalo's return. We dream too. It's easy: Take any highway out of town...sky unfolding all around...one-finger waves from red pick-up trucks...thunderheads on the horizon...and the welcome promise of rain. Browse    View All    Along the Platte    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Nebraska at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 180 Photographers: 30 Towns: 54

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