hunters occupy franksolich’s place; describe fate of primitives. Saturday morning when I got up, there were four motor vehicles parked out in the front yard. It’s been hunting season for quite a while now in Nebraska, but the real hunting season doesn’t start until the last Saturday of October (pheasants) and mid-November (deer).
Probably out for small game—grouse, geese, duck, whatnot, I thought.
So I got dressed, and brewed coffee and started the hot chocolate.
About mid-morning, they showed up at the house. There were six of them, one of them just a kid, and I knew one of them. The others were strangers to me, but from this county (a fact one discerns from the license plates of motor vehicles).
I do not own this property, which is way out in the boondocks, the nearest neighbor being six miles away. The owners, who are very ancient, dating from Calvin Coolidge, live in town and of course are known by nearly everybody in northeastern Nebraska; they are the ones who give permission for others to hunt here.
franksolich simply plays host, giving them a place to get dry and warm, and to have a hot drink or two, after the exertions of the hunt. It’s not anything I particularly mind, and in fact I encourage it, as having company—especially armed company—around here is a good deterrent to stalking primitives.
The hunter whom I knew (it turned out the others knew me, but I didn’t know them) noticed a telephone recently installed in the dining room, commenting “It’s about time, it’s for your own safety.†I wearily pointed out the telephone had been installed under duress, required by the owner, and I didn’t see what good it would do me.
“All I can do with it is pick it up, punch ‘911,’ saying something a couple or three times, and that’s it. I have no idea if the party at the other end gets the message, or knows who I am.
“And besides, I’ve been out here for six years now, and nothing’s ever happened.â€
The hunter whom I knew snorted in derision. “There’s always strange people hanging around here, but you don’t see them because you don’t hear them.â€
After which he related to the others the old hippie who’d spent a few days in the front yard repairing his hippiemobile, and the convey of hippies who’d camped down by the river over the Labor Day holiday.
“The neighbor meets Mrs. Alfred Packer’s Wild Bill†and “Mrs. Alfred Packer does Labor Day†were not spun out of thin air, but rather based, loosely, upon real-life events around here.
“And we’ve all heard of some other, uh, rude awakenings you’ve had,†he added without details.
I pointed out these had been drunks and methamphetamine addicts, not primitives, and hence easier to handle, to get rid of.
Then I thought of a question that had been in the back of mind for some years now. “You know, primitives are found just about anywhere, including in the reddest of red areas. They’re rare, but one sees one once in a great while. But after one sees one just one time, suddenly they’re no longer around.
“One doesn’t see them any more. What happens to them?â€
Now, I have lived in this area, on the eastern slope of the Sandhills of Nebraska, for only ten years now, while everybody else sitting at the dining room table were life-long residents around here, and so had seen more, knew more, than I do.
Reminiscences of primitives past bounced back-and-forth across the table; the sporadic wild-eyed Trotskyite, the long-haired flat-earther, the frothing Nixon-and-Agnew-hater, the unkempt pacifist, the promiscuous love-child, the wire-rimmed eyeglassesed revolutionary, the ranting conspiracy theorist, the sign-waving Fidelista, the sour dour Maoist, the raving cop-hater, the dopeheads, &c., &c., &c.
But each of them had been around for only a short time, and then evaporated as quickly as they’d come.
“Does one suppose they don’t like our weather?â€
One of the other hunters reminded me that one of Nebraska’s three insane asylums is located in the big city forty miles away. It’s been around for a very long time, and in fact at times its inmates have exceeded 10% of the population of the big city. It used to be bigger than it is now, but it’s still pretty big.
For the outsider, it seems a rather pleasant place, dozens of brick buildings scattered over more than a square mile, with trees and lawns and gardens and low hills (but oddly, no fences).
I questioned that. “It used to be that they took the generally insane, of any nature, but some years ago it was changed into a high-security place exclusively for sexual offenders,†I said.
Well, that’s where the primitives end up, I was told.
Oh.
