The Crater in the Center of Town

A vintage postcard featuring the Palmer House Motel

I stand before the putty-colored monstrosity and wonder: how did the place I love become this? I already knew they’d flattened the Palmer House Motel in Auburn, Nebraska. But I hadn’t known that the new owners intended to replace it with another chain store, another monument to the ways commerce makes every place the same. There’s no sign on it yet, but I recognize the architecture as belonging to Dollar General.

When my truck collapsed beside Highway 75 in February 2020, the Palmer House Motel had provided me an inexpensive room in a strange town when I had nowhere else to crash. That’s not a major personal investment, of course. Anybody hypothetically could’ve done that. The motel’s owners also provided me transportation, recommended food at affordable rates, and took time to make me feel welcome. They didn’t have to do any of that.

Palmer House mattered to me when I had nobody else to rely on. When all the possessions I’d accumulated were somewhere else, and I lacked food or a pillow, they offered a place to sleep, a connection to the world, a way that I could, for one scared and desperate weekend, still be part of the world. Palmer House was part of my life for three days, but those three days were embossed on my brain as a frightening encounter that, with their help, I successfully avoided.

And now they’re gone. No longer physically there, no longer part of the larger community fabric. Instead, there’s another standardized retailer, a place without any sense of local identity. They literally flattened the rolling landscape and made the community conform itself to the chan store’s demands, unlike the motel, which used the texture of the land. Palmer House was part of the community, and the people who worked there also lived there.

Before the Interstate channeled most Nebraska traffic into one centralized corridor, Palmer House offered travelers a connection to the community. Even after most traffic moved thirty miles north of Auburn, Palmer House attracted migrant workers and short-term residents, offering them a local address within walking distance of downtown. It offered people a base they could leave every morning and return to every night, right in the middle of town.

Now, it’s been replaced by commercial anonymity, a building useful but without character. A building people can visit without having any connection, where they transit across the space with ghost-like ephemerality. They aren’t part of the community, and the community doesn’t change them. Dollar General offers no opportunity for introspection or identity, like I received when I was stuck in Auburn. There’s just a vacancy at the heart of town.

The criminally underutilized downtown of Auburn, Nebraska

Auburn generally, and Palmer House specifically, offered a chance to look inside myself. A chance to evaluate my principles, and decide whether I approved or disapproved of my life’s choices. Three days wasn’t time enough to truly understand the community, but the community offered me an opportunity to understand myself a little better. An opportunity that, in my mind, is inextricably connected to a specific place.

Auburn has other motels. A trucker’s motel on the far north side of town, for instance. But, like the dollar store, it’s built on flattened land that ignores the natural terrain. Like the dollar store, it’s an imposition, a place people can duck into and then leave without having to see anything that changes their viewpoint. Palmer House was part of the community; the trucker’s motel is a crater, a concerted absence of local experience.

My experience in Auburn was colored by everything that came before, but also everything that came after. During my “lost weekend” at Palmer House, COVID-19 was making its first appearance in America. I had no idea that this introspective weekend would be my last opportunity to travel more than eight miles from my house for the next fourteen months. That weekend with no car, no phone, limited social contact, was a prelude for everything impending.

I learned important lessons that weekend, but sometimes I wonder whether I learned enough. I find myself drifting back into comfy but meaningless patterns of work, screen staring, and sleep. Before Palmer House was demolished, I’d considered going back, not as a scared and desperate wanderer, but as a seeker, to recapture the moments spent wondering. But, like so many, I waited too long. The place I needed is gone.

How many of us, I wonder, can look to the spiritual refuge we need, and find just another Dollar General in its place?