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The Neighbor the Census Invented

The 2020 census counted two people in Monowi, Nebraska. The arithmetic surprised the only one of them. Elsie Eiler has lived alone in the village since her husband Rudy died in 2004. She is the mayor, the clerk, the treasurer, the librarian, and the keeper of the Monowi Tavern, the last business open in a town of 0.21 square miles on the far northern edge of the state. When the new census figures came out in August 2021 and showed Monowi’s population doubled, she gave the Lincoln Journal Star the only answer a competent count of one allows. “Well, then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house. But if you find out who he is, let me know?”

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Nobody Sent It

The comment arrived yesterday morning under my August article about Ord, Nebraska, and it opened like a neighbor at the fence. “The other end of that geography: I walked Monowi, in Boyd County, on street view. Population one. Elsie Eiler is the mayor, the tavern keeper, and the librarian. She writes the town’s tax levy and pays it to herself. A town that stayed after everyone left.” Then the whole performance in four words: “Wrote the walk up:” and a link.

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The Empty Quad

This is move-in week at the American university, and I keep thinking about the freshmen. They were born in 2008, most of them, into the autumn the economy fell through the floor. Their parents signed leases in August and watched the banks fail in September, and a fair number of the classmates who should have been hauling suitcases up the dormitory stairs beside them do not exist. American births peaked in 2007, sagged with the crash, and never came back. The recession officially ended in 2009. The births did not return with the recovery, and the fertility rate has since sunk to its lowest marks ever recorded. Economists can argue about why, and they do, everything from housing costs to delayed marriage to a general gloom about what was coming next. Whatever the cause, the count kept falling, and the count is all a registrar needs. The empty crib has been rolling toward the campus gates for eighteen years, and this semester it arrives.

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Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

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The Silo Remembers the Harvest

From Nebraska to New York, the silos are hollow until hallowed. The elevator starts before the sun does. On a November morning in 2019, I stood by a rail siding in a county-seat town in Nebraska and watched a truck empty itself into the pit while the leg lifted the corn a hundred feet into the headhouse, kernel by kernel, out of sight. What stays with you is the sound. A grain elevator at work has a voice like weather, a steady granular rain inside a concrete throat, and the dust it exhales catches the first light and holds it for a moment above the tracks. The building does one thing a child could explain: it keeps the harvest, standing at the edge of town, taller than the church, the courthouse, and the water tower, doing that one thing for a hundred years. Yet the same word that names this building now names the most despised structure in American institutional life. Say “silo” in a boardroom or a hearing room and the response arrives on reflex: break them down. Somewhere between the rail siding and the hearing room, the container became the crime.

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Popcorn: The Only Grain That Performs

Last weekend, the village of North Loup, Nebraska, population somewhere around three hundred, threw its 125th Annual Popcorn Days. A carnival took over Highway 11 from Friday to Sunday. There was team penning and sorting, a turtle race, kids’ games, a juvenile parade, a men’s slow pitch tournament, sand volleyball, a street dance, and on Sunday the largest parade in the area to close the show. The theme this year was “Looking Back at 125 Years of Popcorn Days,” which is what happens when the anniversary becomes the headline: the parade turns into a mirror. II spent my childhood summers in North Loup with my grandfather, in a house where the television pulled in exactly one signal, channel 10/11, and where the calendar bent around one August weekend the way other towns bend around Christmas. The smell arrived before the event did. Hot oil, salt, the sweet dust hanging over the poppers. You could stand at the edge of town with your eyes closed and know what week it was.

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The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

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