Nothing Like Las Vegas

Abstract

Nothing Like Las Vegas Kate Flaherty At the corner of MiU Road and North 14th Street outside Lincoln, Nebraska, there's a line of trucks parked a quarter mile long. They're parked along the dirt road because there's no more room in the rutted makeshift parking lot that used to be a soybean field, before it was a cornfield , and before it wiU be a soybean or cornfield again come spring. Trucks outnumber cars at least twenty to one, and in the crowd mflling around the farm equipment set in six neat rows next to the field of trucks, the ratio of men to women is about the same. Mark and I left Lincoln around nine and drove through the downtown to get out on North 14th and find the auction we'd read about in the paper that morning. We were listening to Blue Mountain on the tape player, an upstart band we saw a few weeks before at Knickerbockers Bar on "O" Street—three kids in plaid flannel and tornjeans, not sure ifthey were playing country or punk or both, just singing their hearts out and having a good time along with the twenty or so of us drinking our beers and going deaf from the sound system in the closet-sized bar. Saturday mornings in downtown Lincoln are desolate when football season is over, and "O" Street was empty—just the echo ofBlue Mountain and the ghosts ofthe Friday night college bar crawlers crossing 14th and "O" to get to O'Rourke's from Duffy's or Duffy's to O'Rourke's, a route so weU traveled there should be ruts in the crosswalks. "O" is the busiest street in Lincoln, but if you go far enough east or west you end up in a country of prairie grass and cornfields, and the only sign you're stfll near the city is the state capítol building in your rearview mirror. Blue Mountain ends mid-song when Mark shuts off the engine, and we make our way through the field oftrucks to walk down the first row offarm equipment. Mark is always on a casual hunt for equipment we can use on the little farm we run to supplement our income. For a few years now we've 183 184Fourth Genre sold tomatoes and corn grown in our acre-sized backyard, and we've earned enough to take some pretty sweet vacations. Last year it was San Francisco and Big Sur in the faU, the year before was Jackson Hole at NewYear's. This year we spent two weeks in New England, bed and breakfasts aU the way, a true blowout because the vacation was doubling as a honeymoon. But there might not be a vacation next year because we've just expanded the business and funds are a little low. We bought twelve acres on the outskirts of town on which to grow sweet corn, our most popular crop, and we also splurged on a Massey Ferguson tractor to work it with. The Massey is a 1957 Model 50 with about 38 horsepower, twice the size of the little orange Kubota we use for tflUng and mowing at the house garden . Mark's friendTodd, who works in the sod business and is a self-educated expert on good used tractors, said it was a find. It belonged to the farmer's wife and was low on hours, in reaUy great shape. With used tractors, unlike used cars, the hours it's been worked are more important than the miles it's traveled, and tractors can last considerably longer than cars ifthey're cared for properly Uke this one has been. It's a beautiful thing, big and red, the way tractors look in storybooks, and together the tractor and land make me feel Uke Mark and I have stepped over some boundary from just playing in the dirt and making fun money to running a business and joining the difficult and unpredictable world of the farmer. I'm excited about the change but nervous too. We could use a four-row cultivator for the Massey but we're not itching to find anything...