In Nebraska, Talking Up Stoicism

FRIEND, Neb. -- A fly landed on Glen Steffensen's hand, and suddenly a table that was alive with the gravelly laughter of four elderly men fell quiet. No one moved. All eyes turned to Marvin Kraus. Slowly, he lifted the fly swatter he'd been holding, placed it in prime position and with one flick of the wrist, thwack!

He hit Steffensen's hand but missed the fly.

"You didn't hit hard enough," said Steffensen, 84.

"He didn't want to bruise you," said Gerald McCullough, 64. "Then you'd be screaming for health care -- 'Obama, Obama, send me a check.' That's what everyone thinks, that he's going to send them a check."

"There ain't no Santa Claus, is there?" said Kraus, 69. This is how talk of politics and the economy spills out at a popular gathering spot in Friend: the Speedee Mart. The convenience store has six window tables, and McCullough, Kraus, Steffensen and Gene Roll, 65, can be found sitting at one of them at least once a day, and often twice.

"We have to get the news in the morning and we have to get the news in the afternoon," McCullough said.

That day the "news" ranged from how Kraus had gotten the best seat in the place (it was the easiest from which to watch women walk by) to how the cost of living was rising (McCullough had just paid more for his pickup truck's shocks than he'd paid for the tires).

Meanwhile, the price of crops is falling, he said.

"I don't think they realize," McCullough said of city dwellers, "that we got to keep the food chain going or there's going to be a problem."

"As long as there's food in the grocery store, they don't think about it," Kraus said.

"I really think, though, in the city it's a lot tougher than here," Steffensen said.

"Because we live within our means," McCullough said.

"When our parents lived through the '30s, we had to live through it, too, because they never got over it," Kraus said. "So who we are today is because of who they were."

"That's right," McCullough said. "We're in the shadow of it."

Roll didn't say much, just sat drinking a 63-cent cup of soda (which, along with coffee, "just went up from 42 cents," Steffensen said). Suddenly, talk turned to how the country could use the money that's being funneled into the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Keep the money here!" Roll said.

Steffensen nodded in agreement.

"Still," he said, even with the country's problems, "it's the best place to live."

"It is," Kraus said, adding a few minutes later, "And there's better days ahead."

"I hope," McCullough said.

Half a Tank is part of a summer-long quest to find the stories of lives altered by a flattened economy. Reporter Theresa Vargas and photographer Michael Williamson left Washington on June 1 to cross the country and post an online journal of the characters and scenes they encounter. Here's a recent blog post and image. You can find others at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/recession-road.