Lincoln, Nebraska: Home on the Prairie

The college city's big sky and endless farmland gave this New Yorker some fresh perspective

  • By Meghan Daum
  • Smithsonian magazine, November 2011, Subscribe
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Lincoln Nebraska
In Nebraska, storms are a violence from which no amount of caution or privilege can protect you. Their warnings crawl across television screens in every season. (Ryan McGinnis / Getty Images)

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Meghan Daum

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The thing you have to understand about Lincoln is that it falls under the radar. Unless you’re from Nebraska—or possibly South Dakota or Iowa—it’s probably not a place you’d think of visiting, much less moving to. No matter how unaffordable life becomes in Brooklyn or Portland or Austin, Lincoln is unlikely to turn up on a list of “unexpected hipster destinations.” But, being extremely unhip, I moved there anyway. In 1999, when I was 29, I traded New York City for it and stayed nearly four years. This was a strange thing to do, and it perplexed a lot of people, particularly because I did not, contrary to some assumptions, go there for school or a guy or because I was in the witness protection program. As a result, there’s a part of me that feels like an impostor whenever I write or even talk about Lincoln. I’m not from there, I don’t live there now, and when I did live there, I occupied an often awkward middle ground between guest and resident. By this I mean that even though I lived in a house and had friends and a relationship and a book club and a dog, I was always regarded as “the person who moved here from New York for no particular reason.” In Nebraska that translates loosely into “deeply weird person.”

I could tell you the basics. That Lincoln is the state capital and the county seat and the site of the main campus of the University of Nebraska, and that the capitol building has a 15-story tower commonly referred to as “the penis of the plains.” I could tell you that recent figures put the population at nearly 260,000 and the median household income at just under $45,000. I’d be obliged to mention, of course, that the biggest deal in town is, and always has been, Cornhusker football. The stadium has a capacity of more than 80,000, and on game days the normally wide-open 60 miles of interstate between Lincoln and Omaha goes bumper to bumper.

I could tell you the stuff that’s slightly beyond the basics. That despite Husker pride—there’s a disproportionate number of red cars and trucks on Lincoln’s streets—and the beer-chugging, chest-painting, corn hat-wearing (yes, as in a corncob on your head) all-American gestalt that comes with it, Lincoln’s not as Wonder Bread as you might think. Since the 1980s, it’s been a locus for refugee resettlement, and there are thriving communities of Iraqis and Vietnamese and Sudanese, to name a few. It’s also got a visible LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) population, a lot of aging hippies and the kind of warmed-over, slightly self-congratulatory political correctness common to left-leaning university towns in red states. Unlike Omaha, which wants the rest of the country to know that it has tall buildings and Fortune 500 companies, Lincoln wants you to know that it’s culturally sophisticated, that it’s got a vegetarian sandwich shop and a public radio station and a wine bar. Like a restless kid from a small town, Lincoln wants to prove to you that it’s not a hick. All the same, the country comforts of its steakhouses and honky-tonks make you want to put your arms around it as though it were a big, shaggy sheepdog.

But all that stuff always seems slightly beside the point. The Lincoln I love—the reason I stayed as long as I did and have returned nearly every year since—actually starts where the city limits end. Drive five minutes out of town and farmland unspools before you, replacing the car dealerships and big-box stores with oceans of prairie grass and corn growing in lock step rows all the way to the horizon. This is where I spent the bulk of my Lincoln years; in a tiny farmhouse on the northwestern outskirts of town with an eccentric boyfriend and lots of animals (dogs, horses, a pig—the whole tableau). It would be a lie to say I didn’t have some dark hours. My total income in 2001 was just over $12,000. My debit card was declined at the Hy-Vee supermarket more than once. I seriously wondered about whether I had it in me to seek work at the Goodyear plant. (I didn’t.) As quiet as the days and nights were, there was chaos all around—animals that got sick, propane tanks that ran out of gas on frigid weekends. This wouldn’t surprise a Nebraskan. It is not possible, after all, to live on a farm with a boyfriend, eccentric or otherwise, and animals five times your size without wondering if your life is piling up in snowdrifts around you. You can’t live through a rural Nebraska winter without succumbing to at least a little of the “prairie madness” the early homesteaders battled when the wind blew mercilessly for weeks and months at a time.

Still, that landscape is the place my mind summons when I’m asked (usually in some yogic or meditative context, now that I live in Los Angeles) to close my eyes and “imagine a scene of total peace and serenity.” In those moments, I picture the Rothko-like blocks of earth and sky, the psychedelic sunsets, the sublime loneliness of a single cottonwood punctuating acres of flat prairie. I remember the sound of golf ball-size hail hitting the roof and denting the car. I remember sitting on the front porch and watching a lightning storm that was miles away but cracked the whole night open nonetheless. It was there, under that sky and at the mercy of all that weather, that I began to understand the concept of a wrathful God. In Nebraska, storms are a violence from which no amount of caution or privilege can protect you. Their warnings crawl across television screens in every season. They’ll blow you or freeze you or blind you into submission. They’ll force you into some kind of faith.

Lincoln gave me a faith in second chances. In third and fourth chances, too. I’d had a nervous upbringing in the tense, high-stakes suburbs of New York City, after which I lived hungrily and ecstatically, but no less nervously, in the clutches of the city itself. This was a life that appeared to have no margin for error. One mistake—the wrong college, the wrong job, embarking on marriage and family too soon or too late—seemed to bear the seeds of total ruination. Terrified of making a wrong move, of tying myself down or cutting off my options, I found myself paralyzed in the classic New York City way. I paid my rent, pursued my career, worked at temp jobs and went on second (but not third) dates. I was waiting for the big score, of course (what is New York City if not a holding pen for people awaiting recognition of their greatness?), but in the meantime I was holding still, making no commitments or sudden moves, never venturing past the point of no return, honoring the nervous energy that paid my bills (barely) and delayed most of my gratification indefinitely.

Until one day I got on a plane and moved to Lincoln. Like I said, I don’t expect people to get it. I didn’t get it myself. Instead, I can offer this controlling metaphor. It concerns the final approach into the Lincoln airfield. It’s a long runway surrounded by fields, with no built-up adjacent areas or bodies of water to negotiate. The runway is so long, in fact, that it was designated an emergency landing site for the space shuttle and, to this day, every time I fly in, even when the wind is tossing the little plane around like a rag doll, I always have the feeling that nothing can possibly go wrong. The space is so vast, the margin for error so wide, that getting thrown off course is just a minor hiccup, an eminently correctable misfire. Lincoln’s air space, like its ground space, is inherently forgiving.

After those acid trip sunsets, that’s the thing about Lincoln that rocked my world. That you can’t really mess up too badly. You can marry too young, get a terrible tattoo or earn $12,000 a year, and the sky will not necessarily fall. The housing is too cheap and the folks are too kind for it to be otherwise. Moreover, when you live underneath a sky that big, it’s hard to take yourself too seriously. Its storms have a way of sweeping into town and jolting your life into perspective. That jolt was Lincoln’s gift to me. It comes in handy every day.

Meghan Daum’s most recent book is Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.


The thing you have to understand about Lincoln is that it falls under the radar. Unless you’re from Nebraska—or possibly South Dakota or Iowa—it’s probably not a place you’d think of visiting, much less moving to. No matter how unaffordable life becomes in Brooklyn or Portland or Austin, Lincoln is unlikely to turn up on a list of “unexpected hipster destinations.” But, being extremely unhip, I moved there anyway. In 1999, when I was 29, I traded New York City for it and stayed nearly four years. This was a strange thing to do, and it perplexed a lot of people, particularly because I did not, contrary to some assumptions, go there for school or a guy or because I was in the witness protection program. As a result, there’s a part of me that feels like an impostor whenever I write or even talk about Lincoln. I’m not from there, I don’t live there now, and when I did live there, I occupied an often awkward middle ground between guest and resident. By this I mean that even though I lived in a house and had friends and a relationship and a book club and a dog, I was always regarded as “the person who moved here from New York for no particular reason.” In Nebraska that translates loosely into “deeply weird person.”

I could tell you the basics. That Lincoln is the state capital and the county seat and the site of the main campus of the University of Nebraska, and that the capitol building has a 15-story tower commonly referred to as “the penis of the plains.” I could tell you that recent figures put the population at nearly 260,000 and the median household income at just under $45,000. I’d be obliged to mention, of course, that the biggest deal in town is, and always has been, Cornhusker football. The stadium has a capacity of more than 80,000, and on game days the normally wide-open 60 miles of interstate between Lincoln and Omaha goes bumper to bumper.

I could tell you the stuff that’s slightly beyond the basics. That despite Husker pride—there’s a disproportionate number of red cars and trucks on Lincoln’s streets—and the beer-chugging, chest-painting, corn hat-wearing (yes, as in a corncob on your head) all-American gestalt that comes with it, Lincoln’s not as Wonder Bread as you might think. Since the 1980s, it’s been a locus for refugee resettlement, and there are thriving communities of Iraqis and Vietnamese and Sudanese, to name a few. It’s also got a visible LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) population, a lot of aging hippies and the kind of warmed-over, slightly self-congratulatory political correctness common to left-leaning university towns in red states. Unlike Omaha, which wants the rest of the country to know that it has tall buildings and Fortune 500 companies, Lincoln wants you to know that it’s culturally sophisticated, that it’s got a vegetarian sandwich shop and a public radio station and a wine bar. Like a restless kid from a small town, Lincoln wants to prove to you that it’s not a hick. All the same, the country comforts of its steakhouses and honky-tonks make you want to put your arms around it as though it were a big, shaggy sheepdog.

But all that stuff always seems slightly beside the point. The Lincoln I love—the reason I stayed as long as I did and have returned nearly every year since—actually starts where the city limits end. Drive five minutes out of town and farmland unspools before you, replacing the car dealerships and big-box stores with oceans of prairie grass and corn growing in lock step rows all the way to the horizon. This is where I spent the bulk of my Lincoln years; in a tiny farmhouse on the northwestern outskirts of town with an eccentric boyfriend and lots of animals (dogs, horses, a pig—the whole tableau). It would be a lie to say I didn’t have some dark hours. My total income in 2001 was just over $12,000. My debit card was declined at the Hy-Vee supermarket more than once. I seriously wondered about whether I had it in me to seek work at the Goodyear plant. (I didn’t.) As quiet as the days and nights were, there was chaos all around—animals that got sick, propane tanks that ran out of gas on frigid weekends. This wouldn’t surprise a Nebraskan. It is not possible, after all, to live on a farm with a boyfriend, eccentric or otherwise, and animals five times your size without wondering if your life is piling up in snowdrifts around you. You can’t live through a rural Nebraska winter without succumbing to at least a little of the “prairie madness” the early homesteaders battled when the wind blew mercilessly for weeks and months at a time.

Still, that landscape is the place my mind summons when I’m asked (usually in some yogic or meditative context, now that I live in Los Angeles) to close my eyes and “imagine a scene of total peace and serenity.” In those moments, I picture the Rothko-like blocks of earth and sky, the psychedelic sunsets, the sublime loneliness of a single cottonwood punctuating acres of flat prairie. I remember the sound of golf ball-size hail hitting the roof and denting the car. I remember sitting on the front porch and watching a lightning storm that was miles away but cracked the whole night open nonetheless. It was there, under that sky and at the mercy of all that weather, that I began to understand the concept of a wrathful God. In Nebraska, storms are a violence from which no amount of caution or privilege can protect you. Their warnings crawl across television screens in every season. They’ll blow you or freeze you or blind you into submission. They’ll force you into some kind of faith.

Lincoln gave me a faith in second chances. In third and fourth chances, too. I’d had a nervous upbringing in the tense, high-stakes suburbs of New York City, after which I lived hungrily and ecstatically, but no less nervously, in the clutches of the city itself. This was a life that appeared to have no margin for error. One mistake—the wrong college, the wrong job, embarking on marriage and family too soon or too late—seemed to bear the seeds of total ruination. Terrified of making a wrong move, of tying myself down or cutting off my options, I found myself paralyzed in the classic New York City way. I paid my rent, pursued my career, worked at temp jobs and went on second (but not third) dates. I was waiting for the big score, of course (what is New York City if not a holding pen for people awaiting recognition of their greatness?), but in the meantime I was holding still, making no commitments or sudden moves, never venturing past the point of no return, honoring the nervous energy that paid my bills (barely) and delayed most of my gratification indefinitely.

Until one day I got on a plane and moved to Lincoln. Like I said, I don’t expect people to get it. I didn’t get it myself. Instead, I can offer this controlling metaphor. It concerns the final approach into the Lincoln airfield. It’s a long runway surrounded by fields, with no built-up adjacent areas or bodies of water to negotiate. The runway is so long, in fact, that it was designated an emergency landing site for the space shuttle and, to this day, every time I fly in, even when the wind is tossing the little plane around like a rag doll, I always have the feeling that nothing can possibly go wrong. The space is so vast, the margin for error so wide, that getting thrown off course is just a minor hiccup, an eminently correctable misfire. Lincoln’s air space, like its ground space, is inherently forgiving.

After those acid trip sunsets, that’s the thing about Lincoln that rocked my world. That you can’t really mess up too badly. You can marry too young, get a terrible tattoo or earn $12,000 a year, and the sky will not necessarily fall. The housing is too cheap and the folks are too kind for it to be otherwise. Moreover, when you live underneath a sky that big, it’s hard to take yourself too seriously. Its storms have a way of sweeping into town and jolting your life into perspective. That jolt was Lincoln’s gift to me. It comes in handy every day.

Meghan Daum’s most recent book is Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.

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Comments (100)

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I grew up in southwest Nebraska, and went to school in Lincoln. Whenever someone in Los Angeles talks about a beautiful California sunset, I just shake my head because they don't know. Ever step out on your LA patio at night, and feel like you can see EVERY star in the Universe? Nope.

Posted by Michael on February 6,2013 | 02:01 AM

Meghan Daum, thank for capturing the heart of Lincoln and Nebraska. You came as a stranger to Nebraska, but you left as a Nebraskan. Oh pioneer, your home is always here. Blessings on your journey in LA and beyond.

Posted by C. Curtis on February 6,2013 | 10:22 PM

Meghan, Thank you for this beautiful testament to my beloved little city.

Posted by Ben K. on February 6,2013 | 07:21 PM

I've been searching for words to describe Lincoln for nearly five years, since I moved away to New England. This nails it and provided me a little afternoon nostalgia and, admittedly, a misty eye.

Posted by Amanda Smidt on February 6,2013 | 12:59 PM

You are a gifted writer and have keen insight (yes I know, sounds like a fortune cookie, but it is true). I enjoyed this piece. I will look forward to reading books you write in the future.

Posted by liz whitton on January 19,2013 | 11:10 PM

Love your article! As a Lincolnite, I understand what you're describing. It's hilarious to hear out of towners talk about the madness of football saturdays! The storms can be dangerous but fascinating too. There's been many a time I had to pull over to the side of the road until a torrent of rain stopped and I can drive on. The scary times are when you don't know if you're in a typical storm or in a path of a tornado and the radio is out of range of a radio tower. Around Lincoln it's very pretty but if you want to see Nebraska, get off I-80 and drive on the highways. What you see will amaze you.

Posted by Nancy Arensdorf on December 23,2012 | 09:11 PM

You've done a great job of describing life in Lincoln....and making me just a bit homesick. You seem to have had a great lifetime worth of experiences in those 4 years. I hope that LA is as generous to you....or that you move back to Nebraska. Thanks - A Lincoln-ite who migrated to Ontario

Posted by Liwana Bringelson on October 10,2012 | 11:52 AM

Loved the photo and loved your story of your years in Lincoln. I was born and raised there, and of course have a slightly different perspective, but you have it down! The sky over Lincoln is something I miss, and has affected every home I've chosen since (need lots of windows). I've also lived in Los Angeles, love the weather and people there as well. But Lincoln is my home, always will be, and when I need that reality check, I head back home to the place where you can see for miles, where people are especially fair and kind, and a place where you are what you are and there's no need to impress. It's reality.

Posted by Susan Curelop on October 5,2012 | 04:22 PM

I submitted a comment directly to my friend who forwarded it to me.

Posted by Lois Cox on August 26,2012 | 07:46 PM

Amazing read. As a Lincolnite who moved to New York a few years ago, this article did a perfect job of iterating why I love Lincoln, why I had to leave, and why I'll never fully understand the rat race of New York.

Posted by Eli on June 26,2012 | 05:10 PM

As a Lincolnite and a Nebraskan for over two decades my memories are solid, positive and everlasting. We share many of the same feelings for a place mysteriously etched into our minds. No one can be brought to fully comprehend or understand all things Go Big Red, even after living it as a University of Nebraska student. While I have lived in California (where most people can't spell winter and San Diego bills itself as “America’s Finest City” in most part do to the near perfect weather) for the last three decades, with an in between decade in Vail, Colorado, I miss, fondly remember and long for the chance to return to what I have all my life considered my roots. Some say you can't go back or go home, but for me life has a cycle and I can't think of any other place on earth, and I have been lucky enough to have traveled the globe, that I would rather live the last years of my life and die and be buried. I can’t help but feel sorry and even have some pity for all those people who just don’t know or have not experienced what you and I have been so blessed to have as part of our short lives here on this earth to be able to fully understand and embrace the song “There Is No Place Like Nebraska”!

Posted by Dean-Ross Schessler on February 11,2012 | 12:08 PM

Meghan's writing has a way of grabbing your attention and spirit, taking both on the journey with her. I too have a "Lincoln" like place in Alabama which has a way of removing the foder of life and makes room for nourishing the soul. Meghan has a true storytelling gift! Reply to Joel above: You missed the point.

Posted by janice on February 5,2012 | 12:12 PM

Many people view everything west of Lincoln as western nebraska. Omaha is a town of people that want to be a big town and just asoon consider "nebraska" as their step sibling state and all agriculture a downfall to their image even though they were built around the stockyards. Lincoln contains a little of the big city arrogance. If you truely want sincerity and a place where it's considered discourteous if you dont wave going down the highway, then travel outside of these two places. As far as the people who have moved here or moved back and dont feel welcomed, then I appologize for the people you have dealt with. As a poster said above, in all places you will meet all types.

And if you want to see the true beauty of the state then dont sit at the edge of town and do it at sunset, do it with a hard working rancher or farmer who has been putting in long days on that land and gets the opportunity to stop and acknowledge what he sees around him then keeps on working to feed the world

Posted by "oscar" on January 10,2012 | 06:49 PM

I enjoyed the article and could identify with many of the comments. It has been over 40 years since we moved to Colorado, but I still consider Lincoln "home." I've lost track of how many trips we made on I-80 as we come back for every Husker football game. Each time I drive into Lincoln I still get excited. One of my son's fond memories from when he was young, was driving across Nebraska at night and seeing lightning dance across the sky. Even though my children were young when we moved from Lincoln, they feel a strong attachment and love coming back. Now a couple of my grand children are Big Red fans and say the atmosphere at the stadium can't be beat.

Posted by Janet Winslow on January 10,2012 | 04:34 PM



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