American Sabbatical 017: 9/18/96

9/18... Iowa continued.

I proposed we make some big jumps before Iowa got us, like Illinois did. So we closed our eyes to all temptations and booked it from the Amanas to Ames. College town. Ought to have a veggy restaurant, right? Not on your beefeating life. We scoffed up some strange vegetable pastries in a “Brazilian” bistro, under posters of Rio, with guitars strumming in the background, and the waiter (who had mastered his manana) looked amused that all we wanted was appetizers. We backpedaled quietly past the huge sports stadia and Colosseum, lest we get captured and fed to the lions..or bears..or whatever the STATE animal is there.

I’d found a campground mentioned in a mag in the bistro, and after some redirected calls we were pointed toward an Episcopal Conference Center and Campground in Boone, Iowa...home of Mamie Dowd Eisenhower... in the dark, down dirt roads, out beyond the city lights. Was it possible? A campsite with no trains or highways. What about ambiance? Would the RVs get restless? We groped in at last, were greeted warmly by the garrulous older (us over-50s choose adjectives more carefully) volunteer, who warned us that the most annoying amenity of the place was the noisy wild turkeys, and scootched into our wickiup. Nary a train toot. But the anomaly was explained in the AM. We woke up to find ourselves camped in a field of big yellow cabooses, which doubled as special accommodations. Imagine our relief.

9/19.. To South Dakota.

Starting out next morning we made up for our trainless night by encountering a mile-log, four-engined, double-piggybacked container train running west through Boone, and we Festivaed alongside it for the next hour. Those babies run at 65mph blowing A to the bar. The productive power, the agricultural wealth, the thundering wheels, the great get up and go of America, stands naked out here like the muscles on a dancer. Small wonder Kennedy brought Khrushchev to Iowa to show him our invincibility. Blowing along in the semis’ wake with the long freights keeping time, even the Red Festiva feels like bragging a little.

Iowa is a state worth bragging in. Its crisscrossed quilted croplands, the rolling swells and bending rivers, brown and green corn, yellow beans, brilliant white grasses (Miscanthus robustus), the modest, tidy farms, the unassuming cozy towns.. this is the Heart of America (and it’s almost as lily-white as Maine). Where Illinois looked dead or overworked, Iowa seems healthy and alive. We didn’t see a single dead town here, and the pattern of agricultural management (from the road, at least) seemed less absentee than elsewhere. The farmsteads were frequent and frequented. The towns bustling. And the big rigs of midnight roll on.

Yes, indeed HE (they never did give me a name) had started Midwest Industries, and His boat trailers were so successful that He’d made a fortune. And built a fantasy town to suit His imagination. Now retired and living in Minnesota and Florida, He still visited occasionally to see that Ida Grove keep up its reputation. He also was fascinated by model airplanes, which explained the other local business, the model plane fuel manufactory. Clear prop. We swung our propeller and taxied out of Ida Grove.

We rolled off the highroad into Sioux City in a raging downpour. Even the rainmakers were smiling on us. We wanted to make some miles, and they were hiding the distractions from us, cooling our eyes. All that water made us think about laundry, and we ended up in the Vietnamese section of Sioux City. Ain’t America Grand? We watched, what else, soap operas.. with subtitles(in English).. and did our book-keeping while our unmentionables got mentionable.

Finally the munchies and the translucent air drove us into Elk Point, South Dakota, and we sprinted into Cody’s steak house. We didn’t ask for the quiche menu. Bunch of the boys were lined up along the counter jawing about it being too deep to plow but not deep enough to fish in. We asked about rain in South Dakota, and they told us that it only rained two ways here: too soon and too late...and too much, one added. We agreed, and came to a soggy stop in Yankton at the Super8. Modem jack and all.

9/20... True West.

Architectural notes: I haven’t reported the succession of barn shapes and styles for a while, but I’ll try and recapitulate. Moving south in Illinois the eve slopes came farther down to the ground into the familiar hill-billy image of drooping house and barn roof. The unbroken roof line from peak to eave shifted from a higher angle to more gradual slope, as we drove from north to south, as you’d expect where snowloads lessen. From east to west the percentage of “Dutch” barns increased, until an unbroken-sloped roof was a rarity. Barn cupolas had been either circular tin vent structures (especially in NY State), or relatively modest square, peaked cupolas, east of the Mississippi. Across that water, cupolas expanded until they overshadowed their barns. Dutch-roofed barns with huge peak-roofed houses on top looked very strange to this cupola connoisseur. Meanwhile the silos were changing. The sky-stabbing silo of New England persists everywhere, and there are some glazed block-and-mortar silos in the Midwest to die for. But the towering silo of old has been totally outnumbered by the squat cylindrical metal storage structures (also called “silos”) clustered together in little villages of grain, with an elevated superstructure of conveyor pipes connecting them to a central tower. These mark the change from storage of cut corn-and-shock in a fermentorium (silage) for feed, to storage of dried kernels for market. In addition there was an occasional oval shaped (in cross-section) silo, walled up in blocks with holes in the middle..like swisscheeze buildings.. which I was told are for silage also. They are boarded up when filled, but the boards removed for ventilation as the silage goes down. Are you nodding off yet.

The barns of America are defining elements in our landscape, our Jeffersonian high churches, and their regional variety may tell us something about our agricultural faith. Or at least our heritage. Are the “Deutsch” barns of Iowa a trace of her Germanic settlers? Somewhere in Iowa there seems to be a differentiation of barn function. One barn becomes two barns. One, often with “eastern” roof, and then a “dutch” barn with megacupola. Is this grain storage and animal housing? And the grain elevators at the rail crossings get bigger and more prevalent. Crossing into South Dakota the old tower silos acquire a checkerboard band (mostly black and white) around the top of the cylinder, just below the cap. Then, across the Missouri, a second band appears about halfway up the silo. Is this a sacred Grange symbolism? A corporate commitment? The Purina effect? I simply report.

Grant Wood had great fun with such stuff. One of his lithographs, called “Fertility” has a bold phallic silo (he modified the cap, just so) standing next to a wide-hipped barn. He used the shadow from the gable-end projection (which becomes frequent in Iowa) to suggest..well, suggest. Have I been looking at too many barns, too?

Bryce's Palace

Peggy managed to discover a gem of an archeological museum in Mitchell, goddess knows how...

When the white men started up the rivers of the Plains, especially the Missouri, they found two types of Native American tribes. One type of tribe was the nomadic hunter-gatherers who were so focused on the buffalo (Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapahoe and many others). These were the tribes that became the focus of Hollywood westerns, the tribes that attacked wagon trains and engaged in constant ritualized warfare. Our media image of Native Americans is very much that of the Plains nomads roaming the grasslands. This is strange for two reasons, first , there were so many other interesting and more numerous tribes, from whale hunters of the northwest to acorn grinders of California to the city living farmers who inhabited Cahokia(Memo #13). The other reason is that the Plains buffalo-hunters had a very new way of life ; these tribes used the grasslands in new ways as nomads thanks to the horse which the Spanish introduced to the New World. Before 1520, when Cortes led an expedition to Mexico City, horses were unknown in North America. After that, horses spread very fast and tribes quickly became horse oriented.

The Mitchell site is the remains of a farm village of about 1000 a.d. on a bluff by a river. Archaeologists are still digging the site. A superb small museum displays artifacts and explains the way of life. There is also a reconstructed earth lodge that you tour. The way of life becomes incredibly alive. They also keep a garden of plants true to the time.The museum is planning to construct a permanent building over part of the site (an archaeodome) so that visitors can see archaeologists at work and archaeologists can work year round. This will be the only museum of its kind in the world.

When I visited, site archaeologists had just found artifacts that proved contact with the groups in the Cahokia region.

9/20.. continued.

...THEN we pointed her WEST for the big muddy.

Eastern Iowa had a cozy half-sectional beauty to it, but South Dakota has a wilder grandeur, especially in the river volleys. It’s Iowa writ grand. The greens and yellows of cropland yield to all the siennas, beiges, and russets of autumn rangeland. Vast acreages of grains and sunflowers (now nodding brown at maturity) vary the scene, and the scattered black cattle, and solemn rolls of hay populate the nakedness. Different counties seem to stack their hay rolls differently, like regional emblems: long rows, high piles, curious architectures, or just as they lay.

We were bucking a Festiva-shoving headwind due west when we came up on the Missouri at Chamberlain (right next to “Kennebec”), obviously the right place for Mainers to cross.. hard by the 100th meridian. A spectacular crossing, wild folded hills falling to rocky bluffs, and a hard wind chopping up the sour gray-green waters.

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