Once Upon a Town
Chapter One
On Interstate 80, three or four hours into the long westward drive across Nebraska, with the sun hovering mercilessly in the midsummer sky on a cloudless and broiling July afternoon, there were moments when I thought there was no way I'd ever find what I had come here to seek:
The best America there ever was. Or at least whatever might be left of it.
It wasn't some vague and gauzy concept I was searching for; not some version of hit-the-highway-and-aimlessly-look-for-the-heart-of-the-nation. This was specific: a real town.
But the news, as I was hearing it from the rental-car radio on this particular summer's day, made Nebraska in the early years of the twenty-first century sound deflatingly like the rest of the continental United States.
In Sutherland -- not far from where I was heading -- a man had come home from work to the rural farmhouse he and his sixty-six-year-old wife shared. The house, located on a dirt road about a mile from the closest neighbor, was in an area so quiet and sedate that there was seldom a r ... read full excerpt from: Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen ebook
