A Small Cheap Box

Hoover Dam - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

It is a small cheap box sent by my brother and sister- the final remnants of my mother’s keepsakes. The word eclectic is inadequate. They can be inscrutable. I first looked at photos of long-dead great uncles, all showing their blond Swedish hair. I remember them as I look now-bald as billiards.

Both my parents were only children. Their family was great aunts and uncles and cousins. They lived a hard life under the unforgiving blue sky of the high plains.

I was born in California in 1943. My father found work in defense industries and escaped the draft for a couple of years. Mother had the box then and in the summer added a racing program from August 27, at the Sioux County, Nebraska, fair. Her mother knew she was homesick and thought it might help.

There was a war raging. The program was printed on stiff recycled paper and half the third page described the yearling steer to be given the highest bidder in the war bonds drive. The prize for the boys’ pony race was nine dollars.

I attended that fair on August 26, 1950, when I was seven years old. The program was larger and the purse for the pony race was up to ten dollars. The soldiers had come home and spent their savings. The town bloomed briefly, but most left to follow their money to the big cities.

We watched the races sitting in our 1946 Ford Coupe because mother had a bad case of poison ivy picked up while fishing in a creek north of town. She was more angry with my father than she was hurt by the poison ivy. Every year he bought their fishing licenses in late March after her birthday and before his in June. She was two and a half months older than he, but he said he could prove it was a year as their ages were listed at thirty two and thirty one.

Looking at that program and its successors in 1945, 1948 and 1950 caused me to remember, and that is the greatest gift of all. The late August sky in Harrison, Nebraska, is warm and dry but cruelly honest. You look at that endless sky and listen to the emptiness and feel life running through your fingers like sand And how it has run! All those young cowboys are dead now, and the wizened little town of five hundred has three hundred -mostly pensioners. All across north and central Nebraska there is less than one person per square mile. The working ranches are becoming hunting and fishing camps.

Just across the border in South Dakota the Sioux must watch with a certain amusement. Only a hundred thirty years after the battle of Wounded Knee, the thousands of sod-busters and cowboys are buried under fading tombstones. The deer and antelope are plentiful. When the buffalo and wolf return, the Sioux will be restored as a people.