Their librarian is a weirdo. And that's part of the problem, it's hard to defend against random insanity like that. It always catches me off guard. What a bizarre thing for a librarian to be angry about.
The next morning, we cross the Mississippi over a highway bridge that has been carefully anchored in rock on the Illinois side and propped up on a sand berm on the Missouri side, possibly to make life easier for lazy writers searching for a metaphor.