Day Four: Chicago, Illinois, to Iowa City, Iowa

Thursday 26 September -- Amongst its luxuries, M.J.’s apartment features a gym with indoor swimming pool, which is where I started my day.  Half an hour of breaststroke may not be the world’s best exercise, but it’s certainly better than looking out the window at all the activity in the gigantic construction site (lots of cool machines operating in their separate spaces).  And it is magnificent for my mood – I love to swim.

With only 300 miles to travel today, I lingered a bit in the big city, though I didn’t make it the few blocks to either the lakeshore or the art institute.  I had lunch at Local Root, with a Michigan-produced beer ‘cause they need the money more than Illinois does, and it had one of the lower alcohol percentages on the menu (not that I can finish an entire beer by myself).  And I did get to enjoy one of the special joys of Chicago once I was back in the car:  a traffic jam!  At about 1:00 on a Thursday afternoon!  This was the first one of the trip, so it was meaningful.

But I left urban life behind within about an hour, and was instead surrounded by massive, flat fields of corn edged with scrub grass.  So many miles and miles of cornfields that the brief interruption of an uncultivated field, blooming thick with wildflowers, was a real relief.  The cornfields strike me as unnatural nature, too even, too consistent, too much the same to be healthy or real.  I started thinking I would never eat corn syrup again, but that would mean no pecan pie, so pfui.

Only the world's widest-angle lens would do this justice.

And oh, my goodness, are there more cornfields in my future...

And I haven't gotten to Kansas yet.

Sometime after passing a rest stop or service plaza called an ‘oasis,’ I saw a sign just off the highway advertising tomatoes.  So I took the next exit and followed a few small roads, winding through cornfields, until I found the tomato seller.  She was missing a tooth – that seemed too clichéd to be possible, but it’s true, it’s true – but had a plethora of tomatoes.  I picked three red ones, and asked about the other varieties.  She led me around to the side of the house and started pulling beautiful zebra tomatoes off the vine (the green stripey ones), saying I shouldn’t pay her for those since it was the end of the season and they’d just go bad.  I gave her $1.25 for about two pounds of just-picked tomatoes.

She has a niece in the Navy, on a ship somewhere in the Middle East, her husband’s a trucker who drives a semi the three hours to Illinois every day.  She breeds dogs and is getting a metal roof and an attached greenhouse put on her house.  And her tomatoes are delicious.

Lyndon Bridge in the sunshine

After I left her, I saw an old ironwork bridge off to the south, and decided to look it over.  It is the Lyndon Bridge, and it is old and undergoing preservation efforts.  It crosses the Rock River in Lyndon, Illinois, and under the metal canopy, it is composed of wooden planks that leapt and bounced with great chuckling clunks as I stepped across them.  Many of the planks carry metal plates with tributes to donors who helped preserve the bridge when it was threatened with demolition.  On the other side of the bridge were cornfields.

"Teacher/Bridge to the Future for Many"

"Still Crazy About You Pubala"

Why was she behind him?  Why not beside?

These two, I believe unrelated, are my favorites.

Back on the road, the cornfields soon changed to soybean fields, which were greener and yellower and less uniform somehow.  And shortly after that, I crossed the Iowa border – and almost immediately, the flat fields changed to plump and tidy hills planted in something (corn, I think) that was turning yellow-brown.  Yellow-brown is pretty much amber, right?  So that would be amber waves of grain, I believe, especially when slicked by the late afternoon sunlight.

SOY!

TWLTS is near some cornfields (switched back from soy)

Somewhere after Davenport I saw... the suspense builds... The World’s Largest Truck Stop!  “WOW!” as the billboard puts it.  The exit ramp for TWLTS was backed up to the highway, and it’s a long exit ramp.  Nonetheless, I passed it by, traveling 70 miles per hour (or maybe a skosh faster) thanks to the Iowa speed-limit-uptick.

I arrived in Iowa City shortly after L.T. started her twelve-hour night shift, and met her at the hospital to receive her keys.  She also fed me – residents eat free on night shift – and showed me around a bit.  I saw blood, and a radiologist shut into a tiny dark room by himself.  All night?  Poor radiologist...

L.T. essentially turned her house over to me, and it is a beautiful and comfortable house, with lots of dark wood paneling on the lower half of the walls, and light, very slightly colored paint above.  She also has a memory foam bed, which is weird but very comfortable...  shhh...