Reading · Spiral Notebook

Part 1: Leaving Home

“Halfway between Denver and Omaha, horizontally and vertically.”

The “welcome arch” on Highway 30, as I remember it. The portrait in the center is Buffalo Bill Cody, our most famous resident.

That’s how I usually describe North Platte, Nebraska. Sitting on the Great Plains about half a mile above sea level on what was once the undulating floor of an ancient ocean, bisected by the Union Pacific mainline, it’s home to about 25,000 people today. It was also my home from my first birthday until one day in late September, 1957, when our family moved east.

It had sounded like a big adventure when our parents announced it. “Daddy has a new job in New York.” New York! To a little girl from the high plains of Nebraska, New York was as magical as Oz. The Empire State Building! The Statue of Liberty! A Christmas tree as tall as the Pawnee Hotel! I was the envy of my third grade class.

As our ‘49 Chevy pulled away from the white stucco bungalow on Willow Street, I waved excitedly at my best friend Jane, who smiled wanly at me from her own front yard across the street. “We’re off!” Mommy said, with theatrical enthusiasm. In the back seat, Bobby and I leaned against the sloping rear window of the Chevy for a last look at North Platte.

310 South Willow Street, from its current Zillow profile. My bedroom is to the right of the front door. Once, when Dad forgot his house keys, I climbed in the window to let the family in.

The culture shock was awful. North Platte was so far away, and Bergen County, New Jersey was so different. Bobby was sent home from school for wearing jeans. My new classmates asked if we’d lived in a log cabin, had electricity, used an outhouse. (No, yes, no.) They made fun of my speech, so I learned to to say “soda” instead of “pop”. They mimicked the flat a’s that came out of my mouth when I said “North Platte” or “Nebraska”, so I erased those words from my vocabulary. Moving in the middle of the school year made it even worse. (We’d spent nearly three months living with our grandparents in South Jersey while Daddy looked for a place closer to the city.) The family finally moved to our new home the week before Christmas, rendering out of sync with the rest of my class. They had just spent weeks learning to play the recorder and speak French, but the teacher hadn’t planned on having a new student arrive midyear. So three times a week, I was sent to the library to read while everyone else sang “Sur le Pont d’Avignon” or played their instruments. I was behind in arithmetic. We’d been just about to start column addition in North Platte; in New Jersey they were already finished it. It still baffles me.

In short, life in New Jersey was miserable. For months, I would lie awake each night and try to picture the Willow Street house, from my bedroom to the yard with its lilacs and rhubarb. I would mentally trace the route from Willow Street to downtown North Platte, never wanting to forget the way to the library, the movie theater, or the newspaper office where my dad had worked. I thought of Jane and cry, berating myself bitterly. “I smiled! I smiled!” How could I have been so stupid?

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I even added a line to my bedtime prayer.
"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
And please let me wake up in North Platte."

But I wasn’t Dorothy Gale, it wasn’t a dream, and I never went back to North Platte. (Unless you the two days we spent there on a road trip when my kids were little and bored. I don’t.) Instead, I moved again and again, from New Jersey to Connecticut to upstate New York to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to Rhode Island and finally to Maryland. Maryland has been my home for fifty years, yet when people ask, I still say I am from Nebraska. Am I lying to them, or just kidding myself? What part of me really comes from there? What would have it been like to stay in North Platte?

On the eve of retirement, I applied for a one-semester sabbatical leave. I had unused research funds. With time and money to travel, I knew it was time to answer those questions. In October 2016, I flew halfway across the country, picked up a rental car in Denver, and drove “home” to North Platte. I knew that I was no longer the little girl who had moved away. But who would I be if we’d stayed?

Preparing for the journey

Nebraska Homecoming

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