Katie’s Musings: My Nebraska Story

In preparing for the recent retreat, I got to thinking about my Nebraska story….

It didn’t begin here, in this land declared by pioneers passing through to be a desert, an unappealing wasteland to be endured en route to the west.  Only the hardiest decided to stick around and make Nebraska home, the folks used to a climate of punishing variables, the daily hardships of farm life, folks longing to live on their own terms, without interference.

No, my Nebraska story didn’t begin here.

My Nebraska story began in the mountains of Switzerland.  It is a beautiful country, but it’s short on farmland, and Jacob and Fritz Ritter really wanted farm land.  Uncle Jacob came first, a confirmed bachelor who lived to be 101 and decided the farmland around Tilden was the perfect spot for the Ritter clan to take up residence.  He wrote to his brother, Fritz, to bring his wife Louise over.  They passed through Ellis Island in 1893 – their names are on the register – and then took trains and rode in wagons and arrived in Tilden to make their fortune.

Fritz’s wife, my great, great grandma Louise lived here for 30 years.  She never learned the language, sticking to the Sweitzer Deutze of her homeland.  She never saw her family again, and she really didn’t like Nebraska that much.  I can only imagine how foreign the flat prairie of Nebraska must have seemed to her.

My Nebraska story didn’t begin here.

It began in Germany, where my great grandma Siegenthaller was born.  Shortly before World War I, they fled so her brother could escape conscription into the German Army.  The Siegenthaller Nebraska stories are about how they, as newly arrived Germans during WWI, were persecuted for their heritage, even though they fled to avoid fighting for something they didn’t believe in.  They learned English very quickly, adopting patriotism to this country an their state to counteract the preconceived notions about them.

No, My Nebraska story didn’t begin here.

It began in… well somewhere… the Millers didn’t keep very good records. But they told VERY good stories, and only with the slightest of embellishment, of course.  My dad always joked that they crawled out of a swamp somewhere in Kentucky, and that has proven that to be not terribly far off.  But it was less swamp crawling and more being on the run from the law – in the late 1800s, great-great-(ish)-grandpa somehow ended up an indentured servant, and he decided he really didn’t want to be an indentured servant anymore, so he stole a horse and ran off with his girlfriend to Brownville, NE, they got married and he took her name, and they never looked back.  Begat, begot, begotten, and my Great Grandpa Miller, a burly man with an impressive mustache and 16 years older than his wife, drove her and and a team of oxen up to farmland in northeastern Nebraska, where Millers have resided ever since.  He MIGHT have been a bootlegger – during the depression years, he was said to always have had a wad of cash in his pocket, and that tended to mean one thing in them days… but so far, that’s just a story.  Some day we’ll all go up to the homestead with some metal detectors and see if the stories about the jars of money buried all over the land is actually true.  Or it might stay a Miller family legend.  We Millers do like our legends.

My Nebraska story didn’t start here.

… And yet it kind of did.  I grew up on the edge of the sandhills, a storied place where the desolate meets the green, where hilly cornfields run to the horizon and further, crisscrossed by barbed wire fences in varying states of disrepair and the odd crick, barely visible in the tall grass and pokey shrubs.  I suppose we were probably poor, though I’ve since come to understand that being rural poor has very little in common with being urban poor. I could tell you very little about world events that happened during my childhood because all that seemed very far away, but I would wager that I could sing you at least the choruses of every major country song put out between 1990 and 2000 and remember the ups and downs of crop prices, judging by whether or not we drove to violin every weekend or every other weekend.

In seminary I spent a lot of time trying to explain rural life to the more urban-rooted people I was surrounded by, like an accidental redneck translator.  And when I’d come home, I’d spend a lot of time trying to explain to the rural folk I was surrounded by that no, even though I was living in Chicago and going to School on the south side, I was certainly not residing in a cesspool of moral depravity, constantly in fear for my life.   If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that rural folk and urban folk have absolutely no concept of each other’s lives.

Our Nebraska stories don’t start here, nor do the end here.  I live in the state and, indeed, the world created for me by my great great grandparents and great grandparents and grandparents and parents, just as you do.  And our children and their children and their children will live in the world and the Nebraska that we create for them.  The stories that seem minor to us in the moment, the moves we’ve made for work or the friends we’ve taken into our lives along the way, the vacations and the hardships, the stories told to us that we pass down to the next generation with some minor embellishments, of course, the people we’ve rejected and welcomed into our circles, the adventures taken and the crazy paths we’ve taken and will take, one day will all be a part of someone else’s Nebraska story.  A Nebraska and a world that we may not be able to imagine accurately right now, but certainly one that is worth telling those stories for.

Because our Nebraska story doesn’t start here.  And it doesn’t end here either.