#nebraskans

[vodkassassin]

Why am I internet friends with SO MANY Nebraskans?? Like, Nebraskans make up a good half of my online social circle. Why are there so many of you guys? and why are u all coming after me?! What is it about me that attracts Nebraskans like moths to a flame

[narcbrain]

Disaster response team from Austin uses Jeeps to help flooded Nebraskans ASHLAND, Neb. (KMTV) — This isn't the disaster response team you're used to seeing. "We actually drove up from Austin yesterday to come and help out."

[politicalert-blog]

133,000 Nebraskans Sign Petitions To Put Medicaid Expansion On The Ballot : Shots

133,000 Nebraskans Sign Petitions To Put Medicaid Expansion On The Ballot : Shots

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Nebraska resident Nick Carpenter listens as Becky Gould explains the Medicaid expansion petition in early July.

Fred Knapp/NET News

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Fred Knapp/NET News

Nebraska resident Nick Carpenter listens as Becky Gould explains the…

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[denisegilliland]

Governor Ricketts Veteran's Day Statement

Governor Ricketts Veteran’s Day Statement

Today, Governor Pete Ricketts issued the following statement in observance of Veterans Day: “Veterans Day provides an opportunity to celebrate the commitment and sacrifice of our state’s military heroes.  It is a day deeply steeped in patriotic symbolism commemorating and honoring generations of past and present military service members and their families. “On behalf of all Nebraskans, Susanne…

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[musterd]

okay so these British lads think they're all so high-and-mighty with their secret meanings behind "cheeky nandos", but we Nebraskans have our own inside joke: Runza. Good luck getting someone to explain that to you.

[johnzuger]

A Nebraska Sandhills Reminiscence

I recall a picture in the October, 1978, issue of the National Geographic magazine.  I had just moved the previous June from Bennet, Nebraska, (a few miles southeast of Lincoln on highway 2, the great soy bean oil route:Nebraska farmland-Lincoln-Nebraska City-Kansas City-St. Louis-New Orleans-the entire world) to Houston, Texas, to begin working on my PhD at Rice University, when this issue of the Geographic arrived.

One of the articles offered some of John Madson’s impressions of the sandhills of Nebraska.  I had lived in North Platte during the late 1960s;  I read and I cried and I died and I wondered why I had left.  One photograph pictured a woman in her 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s (who can tell with these weathered women of the Great Plains?) at the top of a windmill, the constant wind blowing her hair to the horizons of a dream, adjustable wrench in greasy hand, working alone atop the windmill while her husband, as the attending text made clear, toiled away at one of the other incessant projects that occupy the inhabitants of this severe country.  The Nebraska Sandhills: 20,000 square miles of sand dunes (the largest tract of sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere), stabilized by knots of tough Little Bluestem and other flora (85% of Nebraska sandhill vegetation is original stock - I suppose pristine beauty offers nothing to Goldman Sachs), punctuated with 1400 ponds (the Nebraska sandhills sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world).  Below the picture of this stalwart representative of what the inhabitants of both coasts call “flyover country” was a quote from this majestic matron: “Women’s liberation?  We’ve always been equal out here.”  The woman wasn’t posturing like a model on the cover of Vogue; she was too busy repairing the technology that watered her cattle, the cattle Vogue models shun in their bulimic-toothpick approach to life. She simply stated a truth forced on a people conditioned by hard weather, hard work, and hard times. Her words revealed the psychology and the philosophy of a people conditioned by blue sky and green grass pushed by invisible wind through a yellow, sun-infused landscape racing to a horizon formed by their arrival.

There are not many Nebraskans.  There is Omaha, Lincoln, Bellevue, and Grand Island, aggregates of people that together constitute forty-two percent of Nebraska’s entire population.   But I have told many Atlantans (I now live some thirty miles north of Atlanta) that the population of their metro area is thrice the population of the entire state of Nebraska and that Nebraska comprehends 18,000 square miles (the beautiful Sandhills?) more territory than Georgia, the largest state east of the Mississippi.  I performed a small exercise a few years back.  I calculated the square miles occupied by six counties north of Lincoln County, Nebraska (North Platte) and divided that number into the number of people that occupied those counties.  The result: less than one person per square mile.  I have been asked, on the occasions when I visit the sandhills country, why I go there because there is nothing there.  I reply that that is why I go to the sandhills; I go to fill up with nothing.  Nothing is some thing most folks lack.

But enough reminiscing and romancing.  My mom still lives in Omaha, some 200 miles from the Nebraska sandhills.  She once asked me if I would ever move back to God’s country.  I told her “No.  I would love to return, but a man is entitled to at least one illusion in life and for me that is the Nebraska sandhills.  I want to continue to believe there is still one perfect place that remains on this planet.”

[johnzuger]

Nebraska Sandhills: Home Sweet Home

The Nebraska Sandhills (in yellow): 20,000 square miles of grass-stabilized sand dunes and 1500 ponds (the Sandhills sit atop The Ogallala Aquifer).  85% of the ecoregion is intact natural habitat because most of this soil has never seen a plow – and maybe not even felt the sole of a moccasin or a boot.  

Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River

Vanishing point: infinity