by David Boles
July 1, 1998
During Christmas of 1984, I visited North Loup, Nebraska to spend the holiday with my mother and Great Aunt Ellamae along with her son Russ, her daughter Martha and the their families. Christmastime in North Loup was always a postcard: Tables overflowed with smoked turkey and candied ham and chokecherry jam smiled from hot slices of homemade bread. Santa Claus with his dancing reindeer kicked along rooftops while flickering colored lights reflected from rain gutters and downspouts.
North Loup is my mother's home village (it isn't big enough to qualify as a "town" in Census records). She and I would visit my Grandpa there often as I grew up. My Grandpa, Bill Vodehnal, was the village pharmacist and he and I would explore the village together in his old, slate-grey, Plymouth Fury II at a blazing two miles per hour. Every street, except for "Main Street" (which was really Highway 11) was paved with gravel. My Grandpa was long dead when I visited North Loup in 1984, but I always felt his spirit rumbling deep within me every time we pulled into town.
In 1984, I wanted to take down a visual diary of the village for a novel I was writing based upon the atmosphere and earthiness I knew only to exist in North Loup, Nebraska. The images you'll tour in this article are the touchstones I committed to film that day. Even now, these images speak to me without having to listen or comprehend. These thoughts touch me on the dirt level of the soul where things silently grow and blossom into magical, emotional, things one could never comprehend in any intellectual moment.
While these photographs were shuttered during the dead of Winter, the atmosphere preserved looks rather hot and barren and, after 14 years, my first instinct was that these shots were taken in August. My mother reminded me they were taken in December. You can see in some instances, small pockets of dying, white, snow. These photos prove Nebraska isn't always blanketed by blizzards for a white Christmas: Sometimes the weather can be clear and the land unburdened by the whims of a life on the winter prairie.
Village Limits
Behold the North Loup village limits! As you curve around Highway 11 to
enter the village, North Loup comes slowly into view. The green sign counts the
number of people who live in North Loup since the last Census. I understand that in
the 14 years since this photo was taken, the village population has dropped to below 300.
Notice the silvery water tower in the background? Growing up, I always
thought it looked like a coffee pot and that the local Cafe would tap into that giant pot
to get my Grandpa's morning cup of java! You can see the North Loup water tower from
miles around.
