With reference to the last sentence in the last posting, I should warn you that my 3:00 a.m. epiphanies are nudging me ever closer toward a goal, for me at least, to put Agincourt into print a.s.a.p.

So, stay tuned for further developments. If this works out, you won’t be able to shut me up.

The Youth Music Scene

Out on Hiway #7, there’s a turnoff just east of the Muskrat bridge. Behind a thick hedgerow you can just see the bowed roof of a former municipal maintenance garage. Welcome to the Yellow Brick Roadhouse, site of Agincourt’s youth music scene. My last visit was a few years ago to experience He-She and the Screamers, passing through on their way to Council Bluffs. Bet I was the eldest person in the room.

And what a room it is. Bowstring trusses span the whole of it, open above their bottom chord and showing the wood rafters and plank above. That probably helps the acoustics — not that He-She needed the resonance of a Stradivarius to be heard in the nether reaches.

The city “abandoned” the building in the ’70s for a site near the new high school. It sat vacant a few years until the Youth Council formed (a bit late) after the turmoil of the Sixties. Hereabouts, we say, “In Agincourt, the Sixties didn’t happen until the Seventies.” There’s a time warp that still holds true, though the gap lessens each year. As municipal property with a new purpose which was a municipal agency, title transfer required nothing more than a city council vote: 4-to-1, and I’ll bet you can name the “No” voter. He resigned a couple years later and moved out to Nimby, to be in “better company”. Since then, with a now-peeling coat of paint and leaking crank-case stains showing where the snowplow used to park, it’s housed any number of needs, now for the Under Eighteens — well out of acoustic range from the nearest residential neighborhood.

You might know this would turn into a lesson in structure, though, the bowstring truss being one of the more graceful ways to span a wide berth. It consists basically of a bottom chord, parallel with the floor below, and a quintessentially arched chord (and a bunch of connecting pieces between) which, when you rotate it 90-degrees looks remarkably like the longbows that won the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. [Not incidentally, it can be installed upside down, which tends to create an uncomfortable compression on the human psyche.] There’s another equally graceful example not a thousand yard east of the Roadhouse: the old Hiway #7 bridge, now serving as part of the hike-bike trail system between Forth Dodge and Omaha. So that neighborhood has a respectable population nearly 24/7.

Sorry to have been away from the keyboard for so long. The rhythms of retirement haven’t quite settled yet but i feel the urge to write my way to the “dirt nap”.