A short drive and a view of progress

Last week, I had an experience worth noting. A random drive through town rendered an idyllic, if not exaggerated, snapshot of our recent progress in McCook.

I had driven from the Gazette office to the North Pointe subdivision to grab a photo for our reporting on the Coffee Talk discussion with MEDC housing director Amanda Engell.

I drove past the recently occupied homes with cars lining the street to what is, for now, the back of the development, where several new homes were still sporting green sheathing. I grabbed a few photos there, but eventually made my way back to the front of the development.

As I took a photo of the signage facing Q street, I glanced to the left and noticed the ball field lights at the sports complex in the distance. The once-bare poles are now wearing their full set of light banks, arms splayed outward and seemingly ready for action.

The topography is such that, even though the fields are off in the distance, those lights will have direct line-of-sight visibility from that side of town rather than the secondary glow we get from the football stadium. It won’t be good for stargazers, but it’s going to be quite a sight on warm summer nights.

From there, I needed to swing down to B Street just to see who was open for business on a holiday. That took me down West 10th Street past a wide expanse of new pavement on the west side of the YMCA. It’s part of the cooperative project between McCook Schools and the YMCA that’s coming together nicely, but presents a dramatic change in appearance.

I know the engineers have this worked out, but that sure looks like a lot of water that used to be absorbed by grass. I’m sure they know what they’re doing, yet it’s still a lot of paved surface. I’ll be interested to see how it behaves during a heavy rain.

Once I had properly patrolled B street, I turned up West First Street toward the Gazette Building and, of course, drove past Community Hospital’s “Roots” residential construction project, looking good and nearly complete.

I saw four construction sites on a three-minute drive around McCook. Granted, one was viewed from a considerable distance–and it was an odd combination of circumstances to caused me to take that exact route–but it caught my attention.

The bottom line is that we are seeing more construction. We are seeing more visible evidence of development, renovation and, dare I say, progress?

And here’s the closer: all of this unfolded on Thanksgiving Day. The holiday has now passed, so we’re no longer obliged to make lists of things to be grateful for, but the simple fact that so much evidence of growth can be seen in such a short drive didn’t strike me as a bad place to start.

In a town that has seen its population fall from 8,404 in 1980—its highest official decennial census count (not including the wartime surge when the air base was active)—to just 7,446 in 2020, and in a region where rural communities across the Midwest have contracted by roughly 10 to 15 percent over the same span, the odds have not been in McCook’s favor. Neighboring towns have dwindled to the point of losing their main streets, their restaurants, and—too often the final marker of decline—their grocery stores. Against that backdrop, the development we see today is not merely welcome; it is something to be genuinely grateful for.