Rain Gauge Nerd

(c) 2013 Trina Lambert
Wrong gauge–no hundredths!

Nothing says Nebraskan like a rain gauge and last year I was an ex-pat Nebraskan (in Colorado) without a rain gauge. My old gauge had broken and no store seemed to have any in stock—didn’t matter much because last year the rain hardly fell. Knowing that was pretty much all we needed to know.

Early last month, I found several gauges at the store, but didn’t put out the one I brought home. Rain gauges aren’t usually that fond of April snows (well, neither am I but at least the snows don’t break me!) With the most recent snowfall just a week ago, (yeah, I know—that was a May snow), I’d forgotten that now might really be the time to break out the rain gauge.

Never mind that some people around here have taken to putting out fake flowers—as if they’ve given up hope on spring. The grocery stores, usually loaded with plants, have no more than some bags of soil stacked outside and the occasional hanging pot—which can be whisked back inside. No doubt, there is no point in rushing to plant annual beds yet, but this morning the skies cracked open and the rains dropped hard and furious, along with pea-sized pellets of hail.

I remembered the rain gauge and—sometime after the hail stopped—ran out into the wet where I plunged it in the first open soil I found: in a pot filled with hen & chicks that had safely overwintered outdoors. Bring it, I thought!

You see, I am neither farmer nor a daughter of a farmer, but am the granddaughter of farmers. The towns in Nebraska are populated by many people who like my parents, left the farm, or like me, had parents who had left the farm. In a place where rain falls in “hundredths” of an inch and where dust once covered the lands, rain is most often a blessing. Yes, people stand around and compare how many hundredths of an inch they got, even if all they are doing is cultivating a bluegrass lawn.

I’ve lived in Colorado for over 28 years and not found many people here worried about hundredths of an inch, even though we have way more reasons (or is that fewer?) to count those hundredths since average rainfall here is much less than further east on the prairies. For many city and suburban dwellers without farming in their family backgrounds, they don’t seem to realize water comes not from faucets and spigots but from aquifers and rivers and streams—until drought restrictions are put in place as they are now, despite the seemingly endless but still too-little, too-late moisture we’ve had this spring, or until a developer is denied a permit.

Yes, it’s time Coloradans take a little more interest in knowing how much is falling from the sky, even if doing so doesn’t sound very sophisticated. With watering limited to twice a week, a little data might be helpful for planning. I got my rain gauge at the local Ace Hardware: the venerable A&A Trading Post.

And please, spare me the tales of how the water is all going downstream to Nebraska where they might need it to grow food. All of us from cities, suburbs, and towns—whether in Colorado or Nebraska or wherever—ought to be thinking more about how water affects the food supply and less about maintaining perfect lawns.

I’m not giving up turf, trees, or flowers—what we grow in our communities aids in producing cleaner air, keeping temperatures lower, and providing bees with pollen—but doing so with an eye on the numbers helps us to work with what we do have.

However, what I don’t have after all is the right rain gauge for the region. While checking my gauge’s numbers after this morning’s precipitation, I discovered the numbers do not break down into hundredths! Why bother? Good thing Ace is the place . . . for nerds of all kinds.

There is No Place . . .

Sunset in North Platte, Nebraska (c) 1982 Trina Lambert

I’ve lived out over half my life here in Colorado since I left my hometown of North Platte, Nebraska more than 27 years ago. True, there are times when I return—to anywhere in my state—that I feel like a stranger to the world that was once all I knew. And, oh, doesn’t it sound a lot more “sophisticated” to be from Colorado than to be from Nebraska?

But I’m not from Colorado, even if it’s been my home since back when Madonna was just beginning her career as the latest shock pop star.

Sherman and my kids, of course, are Colorado natives who could all qualify for the Colorado pioneer license plates. Still, they’ll all tell you there are times when my inner Nebraskan comes out, especially when people who know nothing about Nebraska like to reduce it to a stereotype. Which they—whoever they are—do all the time.

First of all my family settled on the Nebraska prairie long (OK—on the prairie a few decades matter!) before Sherman’s family made it to Colorado—to live in the even more sparsely-populated and more arid prairie lands of Colorado. However, Sherman’s father is no city kid who believes his homelands are superior to mine.

But for all many know who have never left the suburbs of the Colorado Front Range or for those who hail from more sophisticated regions all over the United States of places such as eastern Colorado and the whole of Nebraska, those locales could be stuck in some permanent replay of episodes from the TV show Hee Haw—which, by the way, I only watched when forced.

I’ll be the first to admit that when I was in high school I was yearning to break across the boundary of the Missouri River to see more of our country, but I didn’t really care if where I went was that high on the sophistication meter. It wasn’t so much that I had to leave Nebraska as I had to go somewhere where people didn’t assume they knew who I was—based on my family, my past, or what they thought they knew about me.

So then I discovered that when some people found out where I was raised, then they made new assumptions. Honestly, I was amazed by how ignorant people around this country were of life in Nebraska. Sure, growing up in a town of 24,000 was nothing like living in California or New York City, but it didn’t seem that different from coming of age in so many of the suburbs portrayed in television, movies, or books.

I didn’t think too much of a certain Ivy League-educated New Yorker’s intellectual skills when she seemed genuinely shocked that my father was a professional and not a farmer. “But why would you live in Nebraska if you aren’t a farmer?” she asked. The best I could get her to understand was that my pharmacist father and those in other professions were needed to serve those in agriculture who came to the towns for goods and services.

Try explaining to someone like that that many farmers have agriculture degrees and those who don’t still pass the fallow seasons doing research, managing their businesses, and strategizing for future seasons. Hey, farmers are the original day traders—only they spend most of the year prepping for those few days that will either turn the profit or turn their business itself under the soil.

And, what about the girl from the fancy suburbs of Cleveland who could not believe she had not guessed I was from some place in Nebraska? Why, I dressed and talked no differently from others at college. I gathered she expected me to stand out by wearing overalls, sporting a hayseed from my mouth, and walking bare-footed across campus.

The people I met in Nebraska weren’t so different from people I’ve met everywhere else, except for the most part they don’t seem to be so big on assuming how people are based just on where they come from—although I won’t speak to assumptions some Nebraskans might make based on what football team someone else roots for—guess we better keep sports politics out of this discussion!

Over the years of living here in Colorado I’ve heard a lot of the jokes, you know about the “N” on the Cornhusker helmet standing for knowledge and about the winds being associated with crude terms such as sucking and blowing, especially when the Colorado Buffaloes were competitive with the Cornhuskers. (Whoops, back to that sports politics theme!) For the most part, I just roll my eyes.

But when nationally-based journalists try to paint a picture of my hometown that is just a little too folksy, I think that’s just prejudice combined with lazy journalism even when I believe their prejudice may be unintentional and that they think they are being complimentary versus patronizing.

Someday I’ll get around to reading Bob Greene’s tale about the legendary North Platte Canteen, but I have a hard time with how he paints a picture of the place with his statement that “North Platte, Nebraska is about as isolated as a small town can be.” (See pg. 6, Once Upon a Town, William Morrow Paperbacks, 2003.) Oh, it may be far from Denver and Lincoln and Omaha, but it’s right off I-80—I worked college summers at Fort Cody Trading Post and have met people from all over the country who remember North Platte because of their Fort Cody stop on the way to somewhere else.

Before moving to the boomtown of North Platte when I was ten, I did live in an isolated Nebraska Sandhills small town. North Platte is only isolated to people who come from bigger places—usually further east whether that’s Omaha or the east coast. Ask my father-in-law if he thinks North Platte is more isolated than Cheyenne Wells, Colorado.

And today’s diatribe is brought to you courtesy of my re-reading ESPN’s 2011 tribute to Danny Woodhead’s hometown—which is also my hometown. Full disclosure: I don’t know Danny Woodhead, but I did know his mother when I was in high school.

I’m glad that kids still get to be three-sport athletes there, but I don’t believe it’s because the school can barely fill its teams—these kids have always hungered for competition despite the often harsh weather conditions. Don’t forget that many of the athletes raised in that demanding four-season weather are the descendants of those pioneers who were tough enough to prove out their homestead claims.

The author also writes as if it’s a given that Woodhead would be raised by a Christian dad who works a couple jobs and a Christian mother who bakes cookies. The North Platte I knew had many churches as well as many kids who were not that interested in following those dictates as well as many types of parents—Woodhead is blessed that his mom Annette was one of those who always lived out her beliefs and witnessed to the rest of us.

All I’m saying—at least some of what I’m saying!—is that Nebraskans are not some archaic stereotype. Though they may share some common characteristics, they are not all the same. They can be intelligent—or not, moral—or not, tough—or not—just like people from anywhere else. They are both more and less than the national perception of them.

While you can take the Nebraskan out of Nebraska, you can’t take Nebraska out of the Nebraskan. Watch what you say about us . . .