Omaha, Nebraska: Locomotive Omaha

The British are peripatetic.  As former colonisers and empire builders we are used to travelling, to pitching up in unforeseen and inhospitable places the world over.  America is no different: by far the most popular non-European destination for British tourists.  However, when the average Englishman talks about Stateside visits they normally refer to the big cities, to New York and Los Angeles, the beaches of Florida and the attractions of San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.  Rare are excursions to Middle America, to this country’s rustic, rural heartlands.  Certainly there are some states where the British have no real need or appetite to visit, venues without international airports and global business connections, far-flung outposts of splendid seclusion, separated by extended and rolling farmland and rivers, intersected by long, straight highways and punctuated by small hamlets and communities withdrawn from the urban sprawls and twinkling neon of larger, brighter conurbations.  Usually British visits to such isles of isolation are not deliberate, arising out of travelling necessity, using Midwest midtowns as linking posts to broader, wider crossings. 

Not so for this pair of intrepid explorers, for whom a sojourn in Omaha, Nebraska, was both welcome and intentional.

Batten down the hatches; here comes the cold

Nebraska in February is cold.  Snow, fog and a bitter chill drifts southwards from the Dakotas and Canada, mixing against the low pressure feeding the region from the Great Lakes, and resulting in systematic downpours of sleet, ice and snow.  These are not conditions for the feint hearted.  The weather touches everything and everyone, affecting agriculture and industry, transport and tourism.  Dean and I witnessed hundreds of miles of white blankets over frosted fields, drifts of dusty snow cascading across from previously collected piles of powder, buffeting and whipping around our vehicle like successive blows to head and torso.  These were swirling winds of warning, ricocheting in all directions from heavy, darkening, portentous skies.

Driving conditions, as we made our way in to Nebraska from Iowa, deteriorated rapidly and our average speed dropped accordingly.  On either side of the interstate were abandoned lorries and container trucks, with the occasional flashing blue of emergency patrols: sirens of seriousness, piercing out of the grey mass that extended left and right across the mantled fields of the republic.  Looming out of the fog and gloom, upturned articulated lorries fought for our concerned attention against spinning suburbans, while pick-ups parted through the carrousel of carnage.  This was a valley of ashes, of soot-coloured grey and black iced bedlam.

In the darkness it was hard to make out much by way of landmarks and Nebraska bore much the same look of western Iowa.  What was clear was its disparate desolation.  Staging posts became increasingly separated by long stretches of highway, pulsing through the ranches and farms.  The gloom made it difficult to appreciate any natural beauty and we focussed on arriving in Omaha, Nebraska, safely, if not some way behind schedule.

Passport to Omaha

It was past 10.00pm by the time Dean and I checked in to our hotel in Omaha and already there was a sense of quiet, of the sleepy satisfaction that attaches itself to indoor warmth while the outside world battles against falling mercury.  Not to be put off by the rest of Omaha’s inclination to bury its collective head under a warm duvet, Dean and I took a cab to the Old Market area of the city, in search of some food and well-earned beer.

Omaha’s Old Town is a pleasant quarter of ‘Main Street USA’ styled shops and restaurants, with balconied terraces creeping over the ground-floor outlets and leaning in to cobbled market streets.  Dean and I would learn the next day of Omaha’s pioneering pre-eminence, its frontier founding, but on that cold Tuesday night the city bore little of its supposed grandeur.  It had instead retreated, leaving two British travellers to brave the elements. 

After a considerable walk we eventually found what looked like the only bar that was still open, and stepped inside to the warmth.  Alas, we were only able to order half of our planned burgers and beers double act.  Despite being armed with our United Kingdom drivers’ licenses, the United States’ propensity to require ocular proof of legal drinking age resulted in a possibly sensible night of alcoholic abstinence.  Nebraska, it transpires, does not accept foreign drivers’ licenses as valid identification documents.  The state expects foreigners to use their passports when ordering drinks.  While some may consider this to be right and proper, an appropriate response to tackling underage drinking, the practicalities of walking around Omaha, Nebraska with a passport had clearly not been properly assessed by the state legislature.  Our passports were locked away safely back in the hotel.  Dean and I had ordered our drinks based on the dual notion that our usually universally accepted ID would work in Omaha just as well as it had done in every previous city, and that we both resembled adults of more than twenty-one years of life experience. 

Nebraskan negativity towards non-passport based credentials acts well as a microcosm of an occasionally limiting aspect of the United States of America.  The overwhelming sensation of this great country is that it is as welcoming as it is courteous, as proud as it is eager to learn about others.  Occasionally, its own sense of both self-importance and isolation can result in its better angels being drowned out by its own cruel and unusual peculiarities.  Not to be perturbed, however, Dean and I finished our meal, waited in the sub-zero sub-climate for a cab back to the hotel, and looked forward to viewing the city afresh in the morning winter sun.

The hands that built America

We emerged the following morning blinking in to dazzling sunshine, reflecting off of the snow in a cacophony of colour and brightness.  In an instant the city was transformed from a macabre municipal menace to an atmospheric Alpine Atlantis.  With our hoodies, jackets and, refreshingly, sunglasses at the ready, Dean and I enjoyed the sensation of cold air and blue skies, admiring the crisp white snow on shivering pines, and the crystallised icicles dangling precariously from rooftops and fly-overs.

In this light, Omaha took on an entirely different meaning and perspective.  We admired downtown’s glass towers and wide boulevards, itself rising out of the snowy fields, reminding travellers and locals alike that this city, this metropolis, has clout and meaning amidst the badlands beyond.

Before arriving in Omaha, I was aware of its significance as a Normandy codeword, a critical landing point in 1944’s D-Day, as thousands of British and American troops stormed Omaha beach in northern France from the sea and the air.  In this context, with its historical association with power and glory, military might and bravery, Omaha becomes more than another Midwestern urban zone: its very name conjures an image of courage and conviction, force and freedom.  Dean and I learnt, however, that Omaha had itself represented the hopes and dreams of a people yearning to breathe free almost a century before it lent its name to the Anglo-American onslaught on the final remnants of Hitler’s Germany.

In the decades after independence from Britain, the newly formed United States began to outgrow itself.  Hemmed in by its easterly colonies and a fear of the vast unknown that stretched beyond the contemplation and mindset of early settlers, America struggled to grow, to reach its potential, to access and acknowledge the beauty and utility of the surrounding land.  Yet this is a nation borne out of an ideal of progress, out of a dogma of discovery.  The unfinished pyramid that sits on every $1 bill epitomises the fact that America’s work is unfinished, that the American dream requires relentless labour, betterment, determination.  A country of explorers, of pioneers, the United States needed to look west not just to enjoy the vast resources and beauty that lay before it, but to survive, to thrive, to shake off its previous shackles of Royal control and internal division.

The hands that built America were not necessarily connected to the famous politicians of American legend.  They did not always rest in Washington DC.  The true story of America’s pioneering spirit is told by the countless crusaders of the frontier, the westward-facing engineers of endurance, the cultivators of a culture that still rings true today: that America’s destiny remains in its own calloused hands, its own determination to work harder and provide more for its children than the previous generation, to strive continually to give to the country and its citizens what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the last full measure of devotion’.

To bring the fruits of the west to the homes of the east, to create and settle new communities, America needed transport: to move people, goods and ideas from sea to shining sea.  The later prosperity of the United States, then, is as much about the foundations laid by its pioneers as it is about the laws passed by its politicians.  To comprehend the country’s rise to first international prominence, and subsequently superpower status, is to understand how the states became united, how it was possible to make this vast land smaller then it had ever been while it simultaneously grew beyond recognition. 

The railroads were the answer; an interconnected system of engineering brilliance, carving up the country from east to west, dissecting the nation with each new outpost towards the pacific.  Without America’s commitment to a unified train system it would not have emerged blinking in to the dawn of the twentieth century as a nation of opportunity and plenty.  The laying of these tracks was often dangerous, and involved feats of technical aptitude and resilience with every move west, across the plains of the Midwest to the rugged desert of the Dust Bowl.  In Omaha, Nebraska, the railroads met at a critical staging point.  Here, the lines from the Great Lakes and Chicago, and the eastern territories of New England, met at a grand junction of possibility.  Omaha grew as it enjoyed a crucial position in the story of America’s advance, a city that no longer simply enjoyed the fruits of others’ labours, but instead facilitated that collective effort.

Omaha’s Durham Railway Museum, housed inside its old union station, itself a grand and imposing building of marble and golden domes, wide ticket halls and echoing, high ceilings, helps inform its guests of the city’s rise to railway recognition.  With exciting exhibits, and the opportunity to walk through both steam and electric locomotives relevant to the varying stages of America’s infrastructural development, Dean and I enjoyed learning more about the city and its role in the development of the modern nation.  This is no simple exhibition for train boffins; rather it is of interest to anyone fascinated by the romance of America, and helped Dean and I reach a new understanding and appreciation not only of the city we were visiting but why it matters to the nation at large.

Sullivan’s

Omaha is also famous for its meat.  With its expanses of farmland surrounding the urban core of the city and its flat pastures perfect for grazing cattle, it is of little surprise to discover that the region specialises in prime cuts of beef.  Having built up an appetite at the Durham Railway museum, we headed off to Sullivan’s, a well known and well reviewed steak house, to enjoy our very own carnivorous carcass carnival.

The beef did not disappoint, and we felt armed and ready to face the next stage in our trip south towards Kansas City. 

Before leaving the city we travelled around some of its suburban districts in order to get a better feel for the real Omaha behind its central zones.  With snow touching everything other than the road surfaces, this winter wonderland reminded me of the descriptions of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as set out by the author Jonathan Franzen in his acclaimed novel Freedom.  The book charts the life of one family across four decades, and exists as a compelling treatise on modern, at times fragmented, America.  It rightfully sits in the compendium of the great American novel, and sets out beautiful narratives of the land surrounding the protagonists’ homes. 

In the same way I was taken by Omaha’s links to its own land, both its dependence on, and difficulties with, the same terrain that both provides and punishes.  As Dean and I sped down the interstates of rural Nebraska on our journey towards Missouri, the sheer immensity of the land and, crucially, what it means to its people, became clear.  In the midst of a harsh winter and treacherous conditions arose great beauty and wonder.  Lines of ploughed snow stretched in to the distance as the golden rays of a setting sun conjured a magic hour potion of white light.  The gothic sublime of America: tripping the light fantastic through history, splendour and power.

~~~

‎"D Day"

Smoke stacks rising into another frosty sun,
The signal to a workforce that a new day has begun,
Blue collar scholars with bags weighing a tonne,
While politicians limber for another pointless run.

This isn't meant to say that Nebraska has no clout,
That its snow-filled roads lead to avenues of doubt,
But if the capital wants to renegotiate its standing,
It would do well to recall the glory of Omaha and its landing.

Robert 'Sammy' Samuelson 

Omaha, Nebraska - 8 February 2012