The telephone went to speaker at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday in August, and the voice that came out of it belonged to family, calling from a small town in Nebraska where it had been raining for days. The call carried two things at once, the way a plains telephone always has. A death in the family. And a storm inventory, item by item, in the flat voice the plains keep for damage. Trees down across the county. The grain silo wrecked. More than a hundred utility poles broken, thirty-four of them in a row on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. And the town held its festival anyway, in the middle of the ruins, because the festival had been running since 1901 and a storm was not going to be the thing that stopped it.
