There's no place like home

Speckled with streetlights, lined by pleasant homes and hidden in a few hills, Falls City teems with activity. But you won’t see it. Grandma Keithley follows the grocery boy out to her car, making sure the eggs go in the front seat. Mr. Oliver stands on his front porch, obsessively watching his grass grow. Those might be the only sights gracing the eyes of a person merely passing through town; but don’t be deceived. Just past the main road, the fuel of Falls City’s existence, its youth, spins the cogs of this small town. But where Falls City nurtures its youth, it neglects them; where it teaches them, it leads them astray; and where it empowers them, it leaves them helpless.

Proud people live in Falls City. They breed proud babies, who grow into proud teenagers. Stones etched with family names litter yards to advertise who owns which house. The O’Gradys power washed their house last week, planted flowers and forgot to put their basketball away. They’re athletes. The Hullmans added another room to their house over the summer, pay to have their lawn mowed and built a house to hold their hot tub. They’re rich. The Thompsons left their bicycles in the yard all week, let their dog loose during the day and decorate their driveway with side-walk chalk daily. They’re creative. Parents teach children confidence through knowing where and what they come from, who they are. And these names that label houses start to label people. And they’re right. The confidence spurred and kindled by the adult population, without careful regulation, evolves into arrogance and haughtiness. Children are taught to grow into their name; and those who strive for something more, something different, are made to feel as if they are wrong.

Churches line streets like fried-Twinkie-toting vendors at the state fair, and everybody wants to buy something. Students feel the two block gap between the Catholic school and the public school. It seems like miles, because they’re so “different.” But neither will ever hear much about evolution or civil rights or safe sex. Those topics are too explosive. It leads to heated debates in tiny classrooms about the death penalty. The word democrat becomes an insult. Ideals instilled and fostered by the people in a good, Christian community turn into discrimination. And young people are never asked to question their morals, their beliefs or their opinions, even if only to grow stronger in them. In the mix of soup suppers, bible school and craft fairs, things get pretty homogeneous, like the thick layer of elm trees that blanket the town in leaves each fall. Instead of horizons being broadened, they are hindered, by close mindedness, by ignorance, by misplaced values.

Before any of this fails to sink in, Falls City’s youth have freedom, the type of freedom only allowed to those younger than 12 and loathed by those too old to remember. They ramble through the woods on the edge of town for hours, days without a single brow raised. Bicycle gangs roam roads finding adventures the other side of town has to offer. And parents find comfort as their children meander home through the dimly lit streets of dusk, awe-struck and enchanted by the shimmer of fire flies.

That type of freedom, it’s intoxicating. But age dilutes the high that childhood fancy once provided. A search for excitement takes advantage of freedom, and the intoxication of hide-n-go-seek changes into the intoxication from drugs and alcohol. And there are a lot drugs and alcohol. Rambles through the woods become drunken wanderings through cornfields and over levies to late night drinking fests for the underage and undereducated. With prairie grass blowing gently against the sides of dusty Chevrolets and half-crushed beer cans shining in the moonlight, adolescents in small-town Nebraska drink their “troubles” away: a lack of perspective in the world, a lack of intelligence and a lack of reserve. And the only one not invited to the party is Consequence. It’s just like him to miss a party. Without him, Falls City’s teenagers get their first tastes of the future: failed attempts at community college, a discharge from the Air Force, alcoholism at age 20. Parents blind themselves in a thick haze of delusion that comes from years of fooling their children into thinking that the two mile radius of this town could somehow offer them everything.

These young people, they’re not hopeless; they’re helpless. They live in a town with no questions and, therefore, are given no answers nor are expected to give any. Things just are. If you’re just passing through, roll down your window. You can smell the stagnation that hangs in the air like the smell of wet grass. Leaving yields the only escape for the youth of this town. It’s the only way to see Falls City as it really is, and to come to appreciate it for what it was, when you were young and disillusioned. It’s the only way I can call it home without getting squeamish. Because, the nurturing is real; the teaching is real; the empowerment is real. But without other options, those things start to corrode, and when it’s over, they end up where everything else ends up, the rummage yard just north of town.