Day Seven: Iowa City, Iowa, to Murdo, South Dakota

Sunday 29 September -- L.T., after her one full night of sleep for the week, decided to try a new restaurant for Sunday’s breakfast.  We had fantastic waffles at the Fair Grounds Coffeehouse (get it?  Fair Grounds/fairgrounds?).  Mine had corn and apple in it, and it was as light and crispy as the raised waffles Magdalen Braden makes.  Yes, that’s right – romance author, publisher and Golden Hearts® finalist Magdalen Braden has made me waffles.

And then it’s back on the road again, with a plan to make it to Cactus Flat, South Dakota, by bedtime.  Since I didn’t leave Iowa City until 11:30 (this lingering with hostesses!), and I like to meander on my routes, 600 miles was probably an unreasonable goal.  But that’s okay on this leg, as I don’t have a kind host waiting for me out on the prairie, and there will be a motel somewhere that takes in travelers at whatever hour they arrive.

Cornfields at mid-day.

So I can take time to stop and smell the cornfields if I want, which reminds me that in Kalona, I saw a postcard referring to Iowa as “the tall-corn state,” and wondered briefly which is the short-corn state.  I could look it up, but won’t.  But I shall pay attention to the way the earth’s rotation (because it’s the earth that’s moving, not the sun) changes the colors of the fields.  At mid-day, I see tan-brown stalks, the color of almond butter, with still-green leaves.  The green is the shade of canned peas or unpolished peridots.  The soybean fields are much brighter: emerald green or green-lawn-grass green with buttercup yellow flowers.

Near Grinnell, Iowa, I see my first dead deer since Pennsylvania, and near Des Moines I see a small herd of very lively goats in a back yard by the highway.  Passing me somewhere in Dallas County were seven people on four motorcycles wearing a total of zero helmets.  And, much as I love and appreciate my ex’s many great qualities, I must admit that passing by a billboard for the Iowa Aviation Museum and knowing that I would not be shuffling through that thing looking at airplanes, and airplane engines, and airplane propellers, and airplane pilots’ badges, was a wonderfully liberating feeling.  The ex certainly does love aviation museums.

And I’m thinking, as I drive along through this wide and wonderful landscape, that it’s decidedly sparse on people.  I can go for miles without seeing a house or strip mall or store or barn, even a freeway exit, almost without seeing another car; ah, the wide open spaces, the romance of the road, the heart of the heartland.  And it is certainly a long darn way from the roads I usually travel in and around Washington, DC, or traveled in and around Boston, Massachusetts in the 90s.  But I went to college in western Massachusetts, in the beautiful Berkshires (shout out to Puje and the crew at Manna), and there are long stretches of the western end of the Mass Turnpike where you get very few indications of human habitation, either.  And I believe no one has ever accused my home state of being the heart of the heartland, though it is world-renowned for its romantic qualities.  Even traveling superhighway 95 up and down the east coast megalopolis, you can find pockets of low-density.  I’m just unconvinced that we’re as different as politicians and comedians and the occasional newspaper columnist sometimes like to pretend.

For instance, we number our streets the same way, although we don't always make it to 500th.

There is, however, nothing like Elk Horn, Iowa, in New England.  The billboards start about twenty miles out, demanding I stop to visit the “Danish Wind Mill.”  There’s a rest stop decorated with bits of windmills; many of the picnic tables are covered with canopies decorated with an old-fashioned windmill blade – latticed wood jutting up from this little wooden tent top.  In front of the building that houses the bathrooms and brochures, there’s what seems to be the main stanchion of a modern windmill, the gracefully shaped, bright white, metal support for the blades.  It makes a decent sculpture.  And the billboards keep coming, and I am convinced – this Danish Wind Mill must be something special.

Having grown up within easy driving distance of Plymouth, Massachusetts, landing place of my pilgrim ancestors and home to such sites as Plimoth Plantation, a reproduction of the Mayflower, and Plymouth Rock, I cannot credibly claim that the Danish Wind Mill in Elk Horn, Iowa, is the world’s most boring tourist attraction.  Plymouth Rock, after all, is a rock.  In any reasonable boulder field, it would be insignificant; in Plymouth Harbor, it’s just a large-ish grey rock with “1620” carved on it.  I wonder how many times I looked down at that thing (it was protected from souvenir-seekers by a fence and a drop of about twenty feet, contained under a kind of mock-Grecian temple) in the company of out-of-town guests and thought, “Why do we keep coming back here?”  It was probably because the rock was fairly near the Mayflower, which is somewhat worth seeing, and we were already there for Plimoth Plantation, which I can recommend enthusiastically.

The DWM has a car-charging station though; the only one I've seen to date -- which is quite interesting

Leaving Elk Horn

The Danish Wind Mill is painted in many bright colors, at least.  And it does have a lot of Scandinavian tlotchkes for sale for astonishingly high prices in its gift shop.  Yay!  And the views along the secondary route from the freeway were gorgeous; I went downhill and immediately back up until I started to feel like I might be on the Mayflower, riding the waves.  I stopped to take a few photos, and as I walked along by the cornfields, I flushed about a half-dozen large, acrobatic grasshoppers with each step.

There's even corn on the sides of the roads!

By late afternoon, the cornfields have become brighter; shinier.  The browned stalks are a paler tan, the color of the sand on the north Atlantic beaches of my childhood.  Someone has tossed a handful of silica into the sand to make it glitter with silver-gold-white sparks, the color I associate with moonlight.  The still-green parts are glittering, too, like the peridots have now been cut with facets and polished bright.  And the wind keeps everything moving, so the fields send the lowering light bouncing all around.  The soyfields are now less bright, like the oil colors of midday have been replaced with watercolors, and someone’s added a light wash of purple sage to the emerald and buttercup.

I turn north just before Nebraska, and the world almost immediately goes flat.  I suppose that’s because I’m now in the Missouri River plain or valley or whatever, but it’s kind of startling.  My route officially keeps me in Iowa, but I selected a handy side road and shot along west for about ten miles until I reached the Mighty Mo.  I crossed well over the state line, and felt ridiculously elated that my practical brain hadn’t talked me out of the detour that took me to the land that nurtured one of my favorite people.  It also offered a quiet turn-off down a graveled road, where I could sit on a fence eating a picnic lunch.  And an aroma like waffles – probably just animal feed or something being processed, and I’m hungry enough to hallucinate the maple syrup.

The Mighty Mo

By 5:30 the shadows are really long, and the colors in the fields are all bleached paler, and muddied a bit with gray – and ten minutes later everything is shimmering bronze-gold.

I am actually getting mildly sick of Jason Aldean’s “NightTrain.”

Le Mars, Iowa, calls itself the “Ice Cream Capital of the World,” but I don’t believe it and keep driving.  Later I read in a month-old newspaper I brought with me for the travel article on the middle of America that it’s the headquarters for Blue Bunny ice cream.  So I’m not fussed to have skipped.

Sioux City is ferociously ugly seen from the freeway, but so is Albuquerque and that’s worth a visit.  But I’m still not to South Dakota, so I don’t stop to investigate.  But I don’t hurry, either, as a highway patrol car u-turns onto the northbound lane just behind me, just as the speed limit leaps up to 75.

By 6:30, with the sun just above the horizon and clouds forming, the corn is pale mauve, a kind of greyish purpled tan, oddly washed in glimmers of bronze.  There’s a stubble field that looks so beautiful in the light of that very low sun – puce and copper and bronze, perfectly-level cut down stalks in a near-perfect square – that I gasped.  I immediately wished I hadn’t as a chemical fertilizer stench and a burnt flavor combined to create a disgusting taste on my tongue I couldn’t spit out.  But it passed soon enough, and fifteen minutes later the fields are rose-gold with a darker mauve foundation, and I’m willing to gasp again.  The sun is half set by 7:00pm, and all the colors blurring.

South Dakota!  The land begins to undulate a bit.

Road signs inform me that there is a town called Tea in South Dakota.  It has a fireworks mega-mart and I think an adult super-store.  Before this trip, if anyone had ever told me, “I’m from Tea, South Dakota,” I would not have believed him.  Or her.

I drive another two or three hours in real darkness – most of the billboards don’t bother with lights; no lights on the freeway; the clouds are pretty thick – and pull off after about 500 miles on this leg.  I chose a Best Western from a selection of six to eight motels, because too many of the independent brands have signs out front boasting that they’re “clean,” and their need to mention that makes me uncomfortable.  Unfortunately, the Best Western charges $95 per night – which is at least a useful lesson.  It also offers a small cardboard stand for its TV remote; the stand is printed with the explanation that that scrap of heavy paper ensures the remote is ‘clean.’  I start to wonder how dirty a remote could get, and then have to stop as my imagination heads in ghastly directions.  Fortunately, I am way too tired to want to watch TV.