R and J in the USA

Perspective may not be everything, but it sure covers a lot. 

As we drove through the Sandhills, coasting on fumes with our fingers crossed and our eyes peeled for anything that could get gas in our car, we drove by the littlest of gas stations in the littlest of towns. In our travels, we’ve seen smaller than Tryon, Nebraska, but not by much. 

The gas pumps were clearly the same ones that had been here since the 1970s. They were low, rectangular, and boxy, with rotary dial gallon and cost trackers instead of a digital display and a lever that flips up over the nozzle slot to activate the pump. There were no credit card slots on these pumps. You pumped, noted how much gas you bought, then went inside and paid. Ryan hopped out to get to pumping. As the gas flowed into the van, a sigh of relief was exhaled out of him. That was a close one. No need to create unnecessary obstacles.

Ryan went inside to pay for this little salvation and got in a nice conversation with the woman working the checkout. She asked him what brought him to Tryon. He told her about the trip and she was excited by it and expressed her desire to do something similar someday, a sentiment we hear often and make sure to encourage every time we hear it.

Ryan commented on how beautiful the area was, and that the hills were unlike anything he’d ever seen.

“They call this area the sandhills,” she told him. “You should see it when they’re green. They just turned brown a few weeks ago.”

She continued, “If you walk through the grass on them, you get these little burrs with sharp points. They stick to everything. They stick to your pants. They get in your underwear. And they don’t come out in the wash.”

Ryan told her we had a version of those in some places back home.

“Really?” she said. There was almost a demeanor of camaraderie about her when she said that, learning that other people experienced those burrs as well.

[When he stepped in the sandhill grass the next night, Ryan found out the hard way that the burrs in the sandhills are beyond anything we have back home. When he said we had burrs back home, he was thinking of burdock, and those little green beady things that stick to your clothes. The sandhill burrs were nasty, sharp, and pervasive. We definitely don’t have burrs like that.]

Tryon was the kind of town that was just about over by the time you realized you were in it – with a gas station, a cafe and a high school building and a small group of neighborhoods crowded around it and not much else. Ryan was curious about life in this town. We hadn’t seen another town for miles before and as we looked out on the horizon, it didn’t look like much would be coming anytime soon.

”What’s life like in Tryon?” He inquired.

“You’re looking at it.” She said.

She continued, “We have to drive 30 minutes to get to the nearest Walmart.”

Ryan shared a bit about his own small town living experience, having grown up in the little town of Bergen, NY, which was starting to seem like the big city compared to this humble little enclave that wasn’t even, technically a town, but rather an unincorporated community of just north of 100 residents.

He shared, “I’m from a small town as well, but it’s different. There were things nearby. There was a town of about 7,000 people ten minutes up the road, a small city with 15,000 people about 15 minutes away, and a city of about 250,000 30 minutes away.”

He left out the detail that his small town of Bergen had 3,000 residents, making it 30 times the size of Tryon by population.

Ryan hadn’t quite finished his sentence detailing Bergen’s larger context when she jumped in and said, “So you were in the middle of it all.”

Yes, perspective impacts a lot.

We chatted about this little enclave as we headed out with our gas tank full. 

“Well, technically, it’s Tryon that is in the middle of it all,” Julie said. “Well, it’s in the middle of everywhere.”

”Yeah,” Ryan said. “But not a lot of people seem to go to the middle.”