About
River City Obscura is a little creative project of Eric Christopher Westra, who lives and sometimes works in Omaha, Nebraska… near the confluence of the Missouri and Platte Rivers.
YOUR HOST: A Brief, mildly embellished biography
Part ONE: Origination
At some preordained time in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, a boy was born in a sleepy little town on the banks of the Mississippi River. Angels sang, light streamed down through the clouds, planets aligned, and birds in the forest briefly went silent to mark the occasion. The boy’s mother, having already birthed six other children, merely zipped up the incision in her abdomen and went back to work in the corn fields. The event was noted in passing in Grandma Ethel’s diary… alongside her trip to the drugstore to pick up medications for her gout.
The boy learned to walk, and among his earliest memories is marching confidently into the backyard one Spring day wearing nothing but red rubber galoshes and a smile — remniscent, perhaps, of the Buddha’s Great Going Forth. Or not… but it definitely happened. The other poignant recollection from childhood involves the first awareness of having committed a moral transgression: our subject pilfered a gun from a neighbor’s house (albeit a toy… the gun, not the house). His conscience having been activated already before the age of three, he instantly knew he had tasted of the Forbidden Fruit — but murky memories do not provide evidence of even a Fig Leaf of remorse. Perhaps the purloined pistol was surreptitiously dumped into the nearby river. We just don’t know.
Thirteen years of Catholic School indoctrination would subsequently shape the boy’s inherently misshapen character. This took place in Lincoln, Nebraska, to which the family had relocated when our subject was barely three. Situated across the Plains and across two other great rivers — the Missouri and the Platte — this bustling capital city on the prairie was the backdrop for his coming to manhood.
part TWO: Destination
The boy born in one river city eventually assumed the responsibilities of manhood in another river city. Educated in the arts and sciences at the University of Nebraska (the non-universally acknowledged “Harvard of the Plains”) — and later, at Creighton University — he took his backpack full of book-learnin’ to the bustling metropolis of Omaha at the dawn of the Twenty-First century to embark on what would become a twenty-year career as a school teacher.
Omaha, of course, is named for the Native American people who first called this land of “flat water” their home. The city sits — no, it squirms and wiggles — on the shifting banks of the meandering Missouri River, not far from its confluence with the mouth of Nebraska’s great eponymous Platte River. It’s a pleasant place in which to raise a family (by many accounts), and as cities go there are certainly worse ones in which you could find yourself. Its identity is wrapped up inextricably in the sensible, guarded values of the people who call Nebraska their home.
By most accounts, our subject enjoyed two decades of relative success (professional more than pecuniary) as an educator. Along the way, when he wasn’t earning wheelbarrows full of money, he earned: experience as an activity sponsor and youth minister/mentor; a piece of paper certifying him as a K-12 school principal; accolades as the director of statewide youth leadership organizations; fifteen minutes of fame as a TV gameshow contestant; the respect of students, friends, and colleagues; and — most significantly — the self-awareness to realize that life is a chaotic mixture of earned success, unearned privilege, and… let’s be frank… just plain, damn luck of the draw.
Fearful of becoming one of those crusty old teachers who never had the good sense to get out while they could — and hopeful that other challenges and opportunities are always just around the corner — Mister Westra recently eschewed the rights and privileges and honorifics appertaining to his credentialed and storied professional life in order to pursue independent creative pursuits.
He is currently occupying his prime years as a self-employed creator, observer, writer, investor, humanitarian, and problem-solver. He plans to continue living prodigiously and eventually to die peacefully on his 100th birthday.
What FOLKS are Saying…
“The writing is punchy and alive, with just the right mix of nouns, verbs, and interjections. Holy moly, my brain feels like it’s getting tickled mercilessly with the feather of an endangered species of bird when I read this shit. In school, I was never what you’d call a ‘good student,’ or a ‘thoughtful human being.’ But if you were to chain me to a desk and shove a slimy ball gag in my mouth and force me to do nothing but eat and excrete and read this blog all day long… although I’m not sure how I’d really eat with a slimy ball gag in my mouth… I’d be one happy gimp.”
— CHILDHOOD FRIEND
“Complete psychopath. Like, I’m not saying that everything in the restraining order is entirely true, but much of it is reasonably accurate enough to justify the court’s injunctions. That being said, it’s kind of touching and even inspiring that someone so utterly devoid of a conscience can express complex ideas so delicately and engagingly. In retrospect, had our relationship entailed more of this witty verbal banter and much, much less of the soul-crushing tedium and utterly intransigent frippery… things might have been different. Oh well… whatev.”
— EX-Paramour
“The lawn is always mowed and the sidewalks are always promptly shoveled in Winter. And despite the near-constant stream of visitors and reporters, things are generally pretty calm and orderly after suppertime. The trash and recycling bins get put out and put away every Tuesday. We’ve seen Jehovah’s Witnesses get invited in for what we assume are cordial but spirited theological confabulations. We love that the mid-century raised-ranch house has been spiffed up and modernized, and that the yard has been augmented with all of the Big Four native prairie grasses.”