People of a certain age know Omaha for Mutual of Omaha’s sponsorship of Marlon Perkins' Wild Kingdom. People of another know Omaha for Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, and Alexander Payne's use of the city as a canvas for several cult filma (Election, About Schmidt).
That’s an exaggeration, but in all my travels, few destinations drew less of a response than Omaha. Even Boise caught a little fire, if only for its distance from the Midwest. Omaha drew blank stares.
By all rights, it shouldn’t. A city of 400,000 a few hours from Kansas City, Omaha has a strange character, a hybrid of Midwest friendliness and frontier roughness. Arriving from St. Louis, our jet skimmed the flooded farm fields of Iowa. For all Nashville endured in 2010, the Missouri River states continue to face much worse. Road vanished into muddy pools, telephone wires barely stayed about water and farmhouses once on hills now had lakefront property they would gladly exchange for dry fields.
The skies opened up as the plane unloaded, and the temperature fell at least 25 degrees below the steam of Nashville earlier that week. Little did I know, but the cab ride into Omaha already passed through Iowa. Only on Tuesday morning, when going back to the airport, did I learn that a change in the Missouri’s course created an oxbow lake, leaving Carter Lake, Iowa, the state’s only settlement on the west side of the river.
Originally I planned a bicycle trek downtown, but I couldn’t find a key to its lock and didn’t feel like spending vacation riding a bike in the rain. With a quick Google Map search, I discovered 3.4 miles of walking would get me to the Old Market.
So I set out to see Omaha on foot. Jon lived at the foot of the brownstone buildings that formed the Dundee, a neighborhood the pretty brick homes which included those of Warren Buffett and Payne’s fictional Warren Schmidt. All the way I followed the Woodmen of the World building, the landmark I learned from About Schmidt. Most of Farnam, the street I followed, was in relatively good shape. I passed the Beer Corner, which would quickly become the epicenter of the weekend’s drinking.
Although the bank thermometers never rose above 74, humidity crept back in as the fog lifted over the Woodman and the cities few other skyscrapers. While Omaha lacked an impressive skyline, its mid-rise and high-rise buildings were often masked by its unexpected rolling hills. Most impressive was Midtown Crossing, a new mixed-use urban development that breathed new life into the area, with shopping, restaurants and a crescent-shaped condo building overlooking a tree-lined park. An older corporate resident made a bigger impression; the massive Mutual of Omaha complex framed the Midtown area. Little did I know, but its best-known anonymously occupied the same street - Berkshire Hathaway was already several blocks back.
I expected the plains of Kansas to continue in Omaha, but the city didn’t own a lot of flat spots. The journey to the Missouri had plenty of elevation changes, almost on par with those in Nashville. Water had claimed much of the flatland along the river.
Soon Farnam descended toward the waterfront and I quickly finding the Old Market, a marvel that spoke to Omaha’s heritage. The market’s brick buildings had been refurbished in recent decades, and its brick streets were easy to imagine with horse-drawn carriages and muddy lanes in their place. Trendy restaurants and boutiques had overtaken the market’s old produce vendors. In its former firehouse, The Upstream Brewing Company occupied me for the next two hours.
I returned to Jon’s brownstone just before the next wave of rain. On the way back I crossed paths with Beertopia, the retail store anchoring a block of interconnected taverns and taprooms. Sixty dollars later, I was back on the sidewalk, ready to walk the last 12 blocks with a wine case of beer.
Along the way some people in a car made monkey noises at me. In fact, they had been making their grunts and hoots before I entered the beer store. They gave the impression they wanted me to call them out on it and force a confrontation. Playing games with mental midgets only cuts one off at the knees, so I said, “Have a nice day.” Despite their sad reinforcement of a stereotype I never subscribed to , they couldn’t ruin the one I already had.
I would get my shot at the Beer Corner following a home-cooked dinner. The staff was versed in Belgian beer, and able to talk the lingo. For a $2 corking fee, they would go next door to Beertopia to acquire a bottle missing from the bar. For my 34th birthday – which began with Order No. 34 at the Nashville Airport Burger King, a private irony I thoroughly enjoyed – I went with the safe hand. Most of their Belgians were familiar, so I went with St. Bernardus Abt 12 on tap, a Geuze Fond Tradition and an Orval, three high achievers and symbols of Belgium’s big beer spectrum.
Every town should have what Omaha entrepreneurs located in the same block – a beer store (Beertopia), a Belgian alehouse (Max and Joe’s ), an American pub with 40-plus handles (Crescent Moon), and a German-style beer hall (Huber-Haus).
Saturday morning I returned to the Old Market with Jon and wandered a little deeper into its corners. The Old Market Passageway, a glass-topped arcade lush with greenery, held some of the market’s most intriguing businesses and bistros. Jackson Street Booksellers had an intimidating collection, including 12-foot-high rows of historic books I dared not touch. But I dug out a paperback history of phylloxera and a pristine Marvel Masterworks edition of Jack Kirby-drawn early 1960s Captain American tales.
Anyone writing off Omaha as a boring flyover spot without much history should dig into the Durham Museum, housed in the former Union Pacific train station. A wonderful restoration preserved the Art Deco building’s main atrium. Flourishes included metal statues of everyday people from the 40s and 50s. Below, a full passenger train, a street car and other means of transportation. A George Washington Carver traveling exhibit led into a streetscape of a vanished Omaha.
The museum fleshed out Omaha, giving it a rich, vibrant history from Indian times to the stockyard heydays and the development of Mutual of Omaha and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. As the hub of the transcontinental travel, it had central role in westward settlement and more than earned its nickname.
Sunday I had a single task: walk into Iowa, made possible by the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge. Kerrey was a senator - with a borderline liberal streak for a Nebraskan - who won a Congressional Medal of Honor and lost a foot during Vietnam. He's been seen in other ventures since - chairing the New School in New York City, for one.
As I drove down to Omaha's riverbank, I struggled to find the entrance due to all the flood-closed streets near the waterfront. The bridge was open, but only to the other bank. Midway across the bridge, text noted the change of states. I had hoped to ride a bicycle into Iowa, but the Council Bluffs end of the bridge was barricaded. Local flooding had closed the gate, and police patrolled it and promised $150 fines for trespassers. So I drifted back to Omaha, pausing only to feel the crazy trembling of the bridge cables, unable to shake images of the swollen river.
Much of Lewis & Clark Landing, as well as Omaha’s other river attractions, were muddy or submerged. Islands in the Missouri only showed their treetop branches. Flood damage meant that when the river levels came down, so would the trees. This damage was nothing compared with what the farming communities faces, but a sobering reminder that dams only stop so much when floodwaters reach this magnitude.
I would cross by car on Monday, intent on a quiet excursion to Council Bluffs. I wandered around the town center and settled on a small lunch spot for an ice cream cone. Near my car, someone assembled a tent, and soon I noticed the name atop it: Michelle Bauchmann. Why would she be coming … to Iowa … in the August before a presidential year. I picked the wrong time to get acquainted with Council Bluffs. In an hour, there would have been nothing quiet about the picturesque downtown.
The moral of the story: If going from Omaha across to Iowa, don’t go the week before the straw poll or the month before the caucuses. Some candidate will always block your path or shout their way into your thoughts.
Across the river, Omaha’s biggest attraction still awaited. Every city claims a great zoo, but the Henry Doorly Zoo always lands in America’s top 10. I expected a statue of Marlon Perkins somewhere. Only later I discovered that Perkins was director of the St. Louis Zoo, and only his corporate sponsorship came from Omaha. The Doorly Zoo had a pedigree all its own, and a dozen exhibits unlike any other in North America.
Beneath a glass dome, the zoo housed one of the world's largest indoor rain forests. Who can take their eyes off of sleeping Malaysian tapirs? Not I. The bodies were so clearly divided between black and white skin, and they looked too comfortably on the rocky banks. The amorous monkeys might have swooped among the vines, but I enjoyed watching the lumbering black and white mammals sleep among the rocks. The sheer volume of animals and exotic flora made it difficult to keep a running total of the zoo's collection.
After a brief spell in the day's pounding heat, I entered the Desert Dome .... for more heat. This exquisite display showcase creatures from most of the world's deserts. Most slept, but the burrowing owls and the Cape thick-knees provided ample intrigue.
Beneath the desert environs lied the Kingdom of the Night, replete with bats and dozens of other creatures native to other continents. After watching through the swamp exhibit, which featured about a dozen alligators, I had enough. My clumsiness worked fine when dealing with bats clutching the ceiling, but I couldn’t account for the black waters below me and the leathery reptiles within. A pass at the tank of juvenile alligators, where they swam alongside spectators in hungry anticipation, letting visitors know what they wanted on the menu.
My trips in the dark eventually led outside to the cat complex. I expected a handful of enclosures with sleeping cats wedged awkwardly into outcroppings. I got more than a dozen tigers, many half asleep, others panting frantically, some lying in misting pools to ease the summer brutality.White tigers, Malaysian, Bengal and Siberian tigers were all represented. They were part of a successful breeding program, including a three-legged Malaysian female who produced eight cubs. Few were more active than the Siberian below.
A few more laps didn't come close to passing all the zoo's enticements. The crowds were thick, but I almost had the bongos and the aviary to myself. For all its exotic animals - I could have traded their kookaburra for my own orange-and-white American Talking Cat - they had no elephants. The diversity of animals and the size of the exhibits made them a bearable omission.
The long weekend wrapped with an encore at the Beer Corner, this time downstairs in the beer hall over burgers, Bavarian pretzels and a smattering of German lagers.
A 5:45 a.m. flight rushed me into morning. Jon's girlfriend Lanie volunteered to take me to Eppley Airfield. The city was peaceful at that hour, and lights glimmered off Carter Lake near the airport. To the south, "Woodmen" still shone above Omaha. Only at 4 a.m. was Omaha the sleepy Midwest town envisioned by those unfamiliar with its quirks and characters.
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