The last stretch of road into my wife’s hometown of
Beatrice, Nebraska is the eventful little two-lane State Highway 136 that leads
from I-29 north of St. Joseph, Missouri into Beatrice. Beatrice, by the way, was
the birthplace of the actor Robert Taylor (though the locals knew him as
Spangler Arlington Brugh) and the poet Weldon Kees (whom the locals called
Weldie). When I say the locals I mean my mother-in-law, who has lived in
Beatrice all her life.
Turning
west from I-29 onto 136, you come almost immediately to a bridge that will take
you into Brownville. (If you are coming from St. Louis, this will be the third
time you cross the Missouri River.) Often the center of these little towns is
worth the out-of-the-way few blocks you must go to reach it, and Brownville is
no exception. Technically a village of fewer than 150 souls, Brownville boasts
some fine historic buildings on Main Street, and on the river, a floating bed
and breakfast. A few miles farther west is Auburn, which always calls to my mind
the opening couplet of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”:
Sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of
the plain,
Where
health and plenty cheer’d the laboring swain….
Unlike Brownville, Auburn is not a village but a city of
3500. Its first sign is an airport where are there are two intersecting turf
runways, the only one of its kind I’ve seen. Auburn’s graveyard is on the
highway and called Sheridan Cemetery, but as we leave the city we find its
annex: on rolling turf easy to mistake for a golf course a very few headstones are
visible, and gates that proclaim this as “Sheridan West.”
Not much
farther, at Spring Creek, you’ll see a working bison farm, with its feed lot
and pasture wrapped around a house on the south side of the road. The last time
I passed there were dozens of buffalo within a few yards of the highway, a
startling sight more common on these plains two hundred years ago. The next
creeks form an interesting contrast of names. The first is Brewer’s Branch,
calling up for me southern associations of “branch water” that always seems to
be linked to alcohol—paired with bourbon or used for brewing. But the next
crossing is Yankee Creek.
Almost
immediately we are in Tecumseh, where we do one of those mysterious
ninety-degree turns followed by another ninety-degree turn back to course a few
blocks later; this is a fairly common occurrence in Midwest driving where roads
avoid a parcel of land some farmer resisted giving up to the right of way. And
the next town is Beatrice.
What
strikes an observer about the streets of this town is the number of trees
throughout the city. They are more numerous than in any other of the towns
spread across southeastern Nebraska. Yet the locals will tell you (my
mother-in-law again) that before the advent of Dutch Elm Disease that killed
almost all of the fine American Elms in Beatrice, there were twice as many
trees here. Beatrice boasts the very first homestead, applied for shortly after
midnight on the day Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act went into effect. The Homestead
National Monument is on the other side of town. To the north is Beatrice’s
airport, where you can depart on its runway 36 and fly straight without a
course change the thirty-three nautical miles onto runway 36 at Lincoln. I know; I’ve done it.
