11 Things Nebraskans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Nebraska is the state the rest of America drives through on I-80 and considers, from that single data point, fully understood. The Cornhusker State stretches 430 miles from the Missouri River to the Wyoming border across terrain that reveals itself slowly, reluctantly, and only to people patient enough to stop looking at their phone and start looking out the window — sandhills that roll like a frozen ocean, the Platte River valley where half a billion birds stop every spring on their way somewhere else, and small towns that contain more genuine community per square foot than most American cities contain per zip code. Nebraska doesn’t care that you drove through it without stopping. Nebraska was busy. Nebraska had things to do. Nebraska always has things to do.

1. Treat Husker football as the state’s de facto religion, complete with saints, scripture, and excommunication

Nebraska has no professional sports teams, which means the full, unmediated, unshared weight of an entire state’s athletic passion lands on the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers football program with a focus and an intensity that produces the largest home crowd in the country relative to the state’s population. Memorial Stadium in Lincoln on game day is the third largest city in Nebraska. Husker fans have sold out every home game since 1962 — the longest active sellout streak in college football. A consecutive sellout streak that has survived losing seasons, coaching changes, and decades of hope and heartbreak. This is not fandom. This is devotion of a genuinely theological character.

2. Wave at strangers on gravel roads with the automatic reflex of people raised on mutual acknowledgment

Nebraska’s gravel road wave — the lifted index finger, the brief nod, the acknowledgment of shared presence on a road that not many people travel — is so deeply conditioned in rural Nebraskans that it happens before the conscious mind has processed the decision. You see a vehicle. You wave. They wave back. This is not friendliness as a performance. It is the residue of a culture where everyone on the road was probably someone you knew, and even if they weren’t, they were a neighbor in the broader sense — someone sharing the same particular stretch of ground — and that was enough.

3. Navigate entirely by compass directions and section lines with no landmarks required

Nebraska’s landscape was surveyed using the township and range system — a grid of section lines laid across the land in one-mile squares — and rural Nebraskans navigate this grid with the natural ease of people who grew up in a world organized by cardinal directions and measured in miles. “Go two miles north, one mile east, and it’s the second place on the south side of the road.” No landmarks. No turns at specific buildings. Just the grid, which is reliable, which has always been there, which makes complete sense once you understand that the roads are the map.

4. Discuss the Platte River bird migration with the reverence others reserve for natural wonders

Every spring, between mid-February and mid-April, approximately 500,000 to 800,000 sandhill cranes — along with millions of ducks, geese, and shorebirds — converge on the Platte River valley in central Nebraska in the greatest bird migration spectacle in North America. The sound alone — hundreds of thousands of cranes calling at once at dusk as they settle into the river — is something that stops people in their tracks and produces involuntary emotion in wildlife biologists who have seen it a hundred times. Nebraskans who live along the Platte treat this annual miracle with the warm familiarity of neighbors welcoming back old friends.

5. Eat a Runza and regard it as a food group rather than a regional curiosity

The Runza — a yeasted dough pocket filled with seasoned ground beef, cabbage, and onion, baked until golden — is a Nebraska institution with German-Russian immigrant roots, sold by the Runza restaurant chain across the state and consumed by Nebraskans with the comfortable familiarity of a food so thoroughly integrated into the regional diet that its immigrant origins feel less like history and more like simply the way things are. Non-Nebraskans who encounter a Runza for the first time invariably ask why this isn’t everywhere. Nebraskans nod with the patient satisfaction of people who have been asked this question many times.

6. Take the Nebraska Sandhills personally, as if the rest of America’s failure to know about them is an injustice

The Nebraska Sandhills — 19,300 square miles of grass-stabilized sand dunes in north-central Nebraska, the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere, sitting on top of the Ogallala Aquifer and supporting one of the finest remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystems in North America — are almost entirely unknown outside the state and regarded by Nebraskans who love them with the particular frustration of people who know something extraordinary and can’t get anyone to pay attention. The Sandhills are genuinely extraordinary. The frustration is genuinely justified. The rest of America is genuinely missing out.

7. Produce an Olympic Trials qualifier in wrestling from a town of 800 people and find this unremarkable

Nebraska’s wrestling tradition runs deep through the state’s rural culture — wrestling is the sport of farm kids, of people who understand physical work and leverage and the particular discipline of one person against another with nowhere to hide. Small Nebraska towns produce state champions, college All-Americans, and occasionally Olympic-caliber wrestlers with a consistency that suggests the sport is being handed down with the same intentionality as farming knowledge. The wrestler from the town of 800 is not a surprise in Nebraska. He was expected. His father wrestled. His grandfather wrestled. The gym in the school basement has been running for fifty years.

8. Attend a one-room schoolhouse reunion and mean it as a sincere celebration

Nebraska has more one-room schoolhouses still standing than any other state — remnants of the rural education system that served the state’s scattered farming communities through most of the twentieth century — and reunions of former students at these buildings happen with a genuine warmth and a genuine turnout that reflects what these small schools meant to the communities they served. People who attended the same one-room school three decades apart share something specific — a place, a tradition, a particular relationship between education and community — that produces real connection at these gatherings.

9. Keep a tornado shelter stocked and ready like a second household

Nebraska sits in the heart of tornado country, and the tornado shelter — basement, storm cellar, purpose-built underground room — is maintained by Nebraska families with the practical seriousness of people who have used it and know they’ll use it again. Stocked with water, food, a weather radio, blankets, and the family documents, the shelter is checked seasonally, maintained annually, and accessed without drama when the sky turns the particular green that Nebraska residents have learned to respect. The rest of America watches tornado coverage on the news. Nebraska watches the sky.

10. Drive two hours to see the state capitol building and consider it worth the trip

The Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln — a 400-foot tower rising from the plains, Art Deco and Byzantine in style, topped with a bronze sculpture called The Sower, visible from miles away — is genuinely one of the most architecturally extraordinary state capitols in the country, designed by Bertram Goodhue and completed in 1932 with an ambition and a beauty that rewards careful attention. Nebraskans make the trip from across the state with the quiet pride of people who know they have something remarkable and don’t need to oversell it. The building does the selling. It is very good at this.

11. Stay in Nebraska when they could leave, and feel genuinely good about the choice

Nebraska has the infrastructure, the university system, the agricultural economy, and the community life to keep people who want to stay — and it loses people anyway, the young especially, drawn to coasts and cities and places with more obvious energy. But the people who stay, or who leave and come back, often describe the choice in terms that have nothing to do with what Nebraska lacks and everything to do with what it provides: space, community, the satisfying work of agriculture, the particular social trust of small towns, the sky that goes on and on in all directions. Nebraska doesn’t make staying easy. It makes it meaningful.

Nebraska will not be running a major tourism campaign to convince you it’s worth your time, and it will not be simplifying itself for an elevator pitch. It will simply continue doing what it does — feeding a significant portion of the country, maintaining communities that function with a decency and a mutual investment that more celebrated places have lost, watching half a billion birds move through the Platte valley every spring, and producing from its flat and open and deeply underestimated landscape a people who know exactly where they are, exactly what that means, and exactly why they chose to stay. I-80 goes straight through it. Stop sometime. The Runza is better than you’re expecting, and the sandhills will do something to you that the interstate won’t.