Western Nebraska is the home to many monuments our state treasures, such as Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff. Rivers such as the North Platte cut through the prairie and provide life-sustaining water to all the life that calls this beautiful land home. An agrarian area blanketed with ranches, wheat fields, country music, and kids wearing *checks notes* Abercrombie and Fitch? What gives?!
When I was coming of age, Sidney, Nebraska was an unusual place in this sparsely populated area of the country. While many towns in the Panhandle still relied on agriculture as the base of their economies, Sidney was different in that we had Cabela’s. While Alliance had the railroad, Scottsbluff had Regional West Hospital, and Chadron had Chadron State College, I feel like Sidney had way more kids that would be just at home in the Denver suburbs.
Sidney didn’t have many places to shop for clothes outside of Cabela’s and Walmart. Fortunately for those who had some money, it was easy to make a day trip to the malls in Cheyenne, Fort Collins, or even Denver if you stretched the day a bit. We often didn’t have money to shop at the mall, so we didn’t make that trip often. For the fourth through sixth grade, I went to the elementary school in town with kids who did.
Our strangeness also wasn’t helped by the music that tended to be listened to in Sidney. I remember Avril, All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, and anything rap being popular from fourth grade all the way through high school. One of those rap fans used to sit behind me in chemistry class and was the clown of the class, much to the chagrin of our chemistry teacher. He would talk about things like so rich he could buy his brother a Mercedes-Benz for his 16th birthday.
I didn’t see how it was possible really. The guy went through cars like I go through tennis shoes, so he was hemorrhaging money even in high school. We’d all laugh at the stories, mostly because we weren’t the ones being idiots, but our chemistry teacher was never amused. Not because our chemistry teacher wasn’t humorless, but more our chemistry teacher just didn’t care for general idiocy. A temperament I find myself embracing more these days in corporate America.
There was a time I was back home (somewhat against my will), and I went out after a day of work at Cabela’s. The DJ at the bar everyone ended up at played his music that night I remember his music being played, and I wasn’t impressed. I hear he’s trying to make it happen again! I guess I just don’t associate great rap artists with the same place where I associate the start and end of the school year with the smell of the feedlot west of town. There have been stranger things to happen though!
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