Otter Meat

Bertram Goodhue designed the perfect building for men who wore wool suits and hats, carried briefcases, and believed in their own history. Made it from Indiana limestone. The same stone that surfaces the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and Yankee Stadium. 

The day before, Denver’s shiny, modern skyline shrank in my rear view mirror. The rest of the day was interminable prairie. I might have slept in Cozad. I might have slept in Kearny. Who can tell the difference twenty years later?

Goodhue quarried the bottom of an ancient sea, shipped it seven hundred miles west, and cobbled it four hundred feet into the Nebraska sky. In doing so, he said something about Nebraska and its interminable prairie. It’s written down somewhere but unknowable anymore.

The Christian Scientist lived next door with his Quaker wife in a house he built himself.  As a young man, he had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright so the roof leaked. He cloaked his wood beams and glass in sheets of black plastic. He designed and built his own radiant heating system beneath a floor of gneiss slabs he had collected from the creek and woods out back. During the first winter, the heating broke but the floor was too perfect to destroy so he warmed the house from the kitchen stove forever after.  

Once, I saw him use a bow and arrow to hang a swing on a beech bough. When I was small, he wore small bandages beneath his eyes to cover his untreated skin cancer. As I grew, so did the bandages.

We went to the meetinghouse to observe his unnecessary death. The dull, white light of November lit the room. A strange boy, younger than me, stood and spoke of the bow and arrow. Not long after, his widow married a man she had fallen in love with at summer camp fifity-five years earlier. We returned to the meetinghouse in spring and everyone was happy.