Hastings, Nebraska, is a long way from paradise: Libya in the summer, Siberia in the winter; too wet for the Bureau of Reclamation, too arid for trees. Hard up against the hundredth meridian, Hastings occupies America’s agricultural DMZ. Neither God nor government has taken it under its wing. Disaster is Hastings’s stock-in-trade—that and dullness. “The capriciousness of nature is the one thing that livens that place up,” says Dominy. “When they aren’t talking crop prices or tattling on their neighbors, all anyone talks about is the weather.” Hastings is tornado country (one of the few
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