Getting out

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By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star

Sure, Rylee Buettner said it, and she’d hear others say the same thing.

I’m getting out. I’m getting out. I’m getting out.

It was as if repeating it might make it so. Suddenly you’d look around and find that you had gotten out, that Nebraska was just some gas stop before life became truly remarkable.

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Rylee Buettner

Rylee Buettner

Well, Rylee got out. She left a day after graduating from Wood River High School.

Now, life happens in a town called Oak Grove, Ky. It hugs the Tennessee border. Nashville sits just 40 miles away.

She’s 20 and married to a military man from Grand Island. They have 18-month-old twin daughters, three dogs and a vegetable garden in the backyard.

It was a simple life back in Nebraska, one she misses, but only occasionally.

“I am glad I got out,” she says. “I’m probably not ever going to move back.”

What Nebraska offered in simplicity, it lacked in diversity.

“Nobody really accepted anybody that was really different,” Rylee says.

In her Nebraska world, everyone was a farmer who lived in the state because their daddy lived in the state.

Now, she has one neighbor from Florida, another from New Jersey.

“Everybody is just thrown in together,” she says. “I’m not saying Nebraska has a bad way of life, but …”

Everyone acted the same and looked the same, she says. It bored her.

She rarely saw a black person growing up. Now many of her friends are black. When she tells people in Nebraska about the diversity of her new world, sometimes they almost seem scared, “not because they’re racist, but they’re ignorant.”

She’ll always appreciate the strong work ethic and family values of Nebraska but says she figures she can take those traits with her to other places.

As for her high school friends, some stayed in small towns, some went to Lincoln, most stayed in Nebraska.

“We’re one of the only ones that really got out.”