Uncle Koz, who is not really my uncle and not really named Koz, introduced me to Old Baldy when I was 12-years-old.

“That’s Old Baldy,” he said with no further explanation. We were out for a ride on his four-wheeler, stopped at an overlook. Protruding seventy feet above an already uncharacteristic area of highlands, the formation is enormous by Great Plains standards and topped off with a pale dome of chalk. Not a hill, but not yet a mountain, Old Baldy is the most consequential and mystifying landmark in northeastern Nebraska.

Koz was my (real) uncle Jim’s childhood best friend who hosted the men and boys of our family for a weekend at his cabin during a few summers of my pre-teen years. The resort area, Sleepy Hollow, was tucked away in a grove of cottonwood trees just a few miles south of Old Baldy. Trailers and doublewide mobile homes sat parked on Sleepy Hollow’s rented lots, most of which had whirligigs, plastic deer ornaments, and other antique mall acquisitions planted in the lawn. 

These trips followed a certain routine. Hopping out of our trucks and jeeps after the four-hour drive from Omaha, we changed into swim trunks and spent Friday afternoon at Sleepy Hollow’s sandbar. Between volleyball matches and Jet Ski rides on the Missouri River, we ate grilled hot dogs and deep-fried walleye that Koz had caught earlier that summer. I observed the shirtless bodies around me, noticing how these men in their forties and fifties had thick, toned arms, but stomachs that looked nine-months pregnant. At sunset we packed up the beach and headed back to the cabin, where those belly-bloating Bud Lights from daytime were swapped for Jägerbombs and bottles of the blackberry brandy they called “cough syrup.” My brother and I were supplied with unlimited Mountain Dew, but watched our older cousins try their shares of beer and Screwdrivers. 

The disease of alcoholism had long infected our family tree, starting at the roots and climbing its way through countless branches. No one in attendance had “a problem” on the surface, but a weekend at Koz’s called for more indulgence than usual. Here, men could get loud, raucous, and even blackout drunk without the consequence of shame. Belligerence was laughed off and otherwise unaddressed. I’m still not sure if this stemmed from a family value of non-judgment, a collective unwillingness to acknowledge hard truths, or something in between.

And Koz’s welcome proffered beyond family. One of his friends was heavily bearded, toothless, and introduced himself as “Spook.” He held a job as a school custodian and spoke lovingly of his daughter, but also had a criminal history and unstable housing situation. Spook stoked the biggest flames I’d ever seen while manning the bonfire and found a speaker to play “Baba O’Riley” by The Who on repeat.

“I used to listen to this song when I was a kid and get high as hell,” he recalled to no one in particular. My dad was an undercover narcotics officer and lifelong Democrat, my uncles worked in sales and listened to Rush Limbaugh every day, and then there was Spook, accepted as unconditionally as everyone else. This rural alcove off the Missouri River was, in its own right, a safe space.

Turnout for Saturday morning breakfast was contingent upon the number of Jägerbombs consumed the night before. We passed the state border to eat lumpy pancakes and scrambled eggs at a diner in Pickstown, South Dakota, and took another gaze at stoic Old Baldy on our way back. While its body and surrounding landscape consist of the same shale and flora found all across the Great Plains, the mound of chalk at the top is unable to sustain plant life, thus resembling an old, bald head. The sight never led to jabs at anyone’s expense, as I come from a lineage of men that maintain full heads of hair well into middle age. We all just stared on, enamored by its existence that seemed both random and purposeful. 

What I know now, which was never explained to me then, is Old Baldy’s historical significance. Just over three months into the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804, the captains saw the formation from their boats on the Missouri River and named it the Tower. Upon disembarking, they discovered a colony of “barking squirrels” in its midst—what previous French explorers had observed from afar and called prairie dogs. Having promised to collect specimens unknown to science, Lewis and Clark recruited their sergeants for a new mission. They heaved barrels of river water up to the Tower, flushed out and captured one prairie dog from its burrow, and shot and killed a second for captains’ dinner. The living prairie dog survived captivity for a year and a half, later getting inspected by Thomas Jefferson and rubbing elbows with a mastodon skeleton in Philadelphia’s first museum. 

There’s no documentation on how or when the Tower became known as Old Baldy, but it no doubt happened informally over time like any great colloquialism. It’s now sequestered on private land and still a pearl of Lynch, the town affiliated with the landmark and Sleepy Hollow. (Lynch was named in 1892 after its first settler, John Lynch, and is not a reference to the racist murders one may expect from 19th-century, small town Nebraska.)

Saturdays at the cabin were for recreation: rides on the ATVs, clay pigeon shooting, and games of Cornhole and Polish Horseshoes on the grassy area that centered Sleepy Hollow like a park. At dusk, we tried executing a prank. When Koz was lured away by a neighbor, we all snuck off to put on button-down dress shirts that would parody the sentiment Koz always believed: this was a place for gentlemen. 

“It’s about time you guys started dressing up around here,” Koz said nonchalantly upon his return, unaware of the planning that went into this bit and the anticipation we had for his reaction. 

Uncle Koz had two nicknames for me. The first was Grasshopper, insinuating that I was a young David Carradine learning the ropes from his Master Po. The second was bestowed after a particularly tense game of Texas Hold ‘Em, from which I walked away with a fat wad of ten-dollar bills after a come-from-behind victory.

“The Assassin,” Koz declared, acknowledging the quiet yet lethal nature of my gameplay. 

I was happy being the star of the show at the poker table, having spent most of the weekend discreetly observing the shenanigans. I sat back and watched Koz command circles with elaborate tales from his youth, holding a beer in one hand and animating the stories with the other. I saw my dad cooking pork tenderloin on a charcoal grill, while my uncles encircled him and explained how they prepared pork tenderloin. I belly-laughed with everyone else when my uncle Dave draped his shoulder-length hair over Spook’s head, resulting in an uncanny resemblance to Charles Manson.

I wanted to think like my masters, too, staring at the girl with pretty brown hair and a pink bikini at the mobile home across the way. I tried to make eye contact when she came to Koz’s cabin with her family on Saturday night, romanticizing the possibilities: an initial connection near the bonfire, followed by a long distance texting relationship throughout the school year, meeting once a summer in Sleepy Hollow. 

But telling myself this story could offer only so much escape from the truth, something I already knew at 12-years-old. I didn’t know then that my family’s practice of acceptance would also extend to people like me, so I erred on the side of caution, keeping up a poker face even when I wasn’t playing Texas Hold ‘Em. If questioned, I could openly pine after this brunette girl to deflect from the glances I stole at Koz’s sons.

Sunday morning was an early rise. We cleaned up stray beer cans and beef jerky wrappers around Koz’s lot and packed away our coolers, tents, and sleeping bags. I anticipated our exit route out of Sleepy Hollow: through the grove of cottonwood trees and pass the owners’ storage garages, we’d turn south onto dusty Utopia Road, in the opposite direction of one final look at Old Baldy.

“You want a Jägerbomb, man?” I heard my Uncle D.A. ask someone before our departure. D.A. wasn’t really my uncle. 

I haven’t been back to Sleepy Hollow in over fifteen years. Two separate floods ravaged Lynch—famously sandwiched between the Missouri and Niobrara rivers—in 2011 and 2019. The former left Sleepy Hollow cabins moldy and without electricity for the better part of a year, and the latter burst dams, washed away roads, and destroyed water pipes. Koz left sometime in between, opting instead for a lakefront property in Tightwad, Missouri. The floods had nothing to do with the move, according to my uncles, but rather a distance Koz was seeking from Sleepy Hollow’s shifting clientele. 

Years before the floods, Lynch made a concerted tourism effort to celebrate the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s bicentennial and the key discovery for which the town is famous. One local used a chainsaw to carve a prairie dog wood sculpture in front of his restaurant. A batch of volunteers sewed and stitched “Lynch Dawg” stuffed animals for sale, and those proceeds went to constructing the overlook at which I first saw Old Baldy. Now I wonder what a town like Lynch, with its dwindling population of less than 200 and vulnerability to destruction every eight years, can do to attract anyone at all. Even a nationally recognized landmark like Old Baldy may not be enough in a world that knows and cares increasingly less about its history. 

I’ve changed, too. Experiences with alcohol in my teens and early twenties taught me that the rest of the world wasn’t as safe as Koz’s cabin. I’m a teetotaler now, abstaining from Bud Light and blackberry brandy and everything in between. When I take road trips today through southern Illinois and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, passing through rural areas with friends I’ve chosen as family, we morbidly joke about who in these parts of the country may want us dead. Fleeing from our urban silo feels like an act of resistance. I drive past signs declaring the Second Amendment’s righteousness and feel a thousand years removed from shooting a 12-gauge at clay targets. And I sanitize my hands constantly, no longer the carefree boy sticking sandy fingers in his teeth to pick out walleye bones. 

I don’t mention that my happiest memories lie within landscapes like these. When I’m drinking iced coffee and practicing yoga in the queerest neighborhoods Chicago has to offer, I don’t talk about the days I spent four-wheeling gravel roads and cleaning up at the poker table. But I know that if I returned to the graveyard of Sleepy Hollow today, with Koz and my uncles and cousins, I’d be welcomed just the same, surrounded by the love, good men, and bald tower that raised me.