Iowa, Ticky Tacky, and Reactionary Livestock Al

I have left the brown pasturelands and green fields of Nebraska for the corn kingdom that is Iowa. We crossed the Missouri River at Decatur, Nebraska, over an old steel truss bridge and I moved quickly over the flatlands to Onawa, Iowa. Onawa bills itself as a “progressive rural community.”  Still, I was a bit surprised when I pulled up to meet Joanie for a second breakfast that loudspeakers had been set up along the city’s main street and were playing a succession of 1980s rock hits. Farm trucks rolled by to the tune of AC/DC’s “TNT.” Stranger than Penny Lane.

I ordered a gigantic stack of blueberry pancakes, but I think the maple syrup they served in a small, pourable, glass dispenser (and to which I heartily served myself) was really corn syrup disguised as the real thing because right after I left the café I felt toxic. So toxic, that after only 8 miles I had a repeat of the Clearwater, Nebraska experience where I found a bench in front of a small farming community named Turin and tried to sleep off the syrup. As with Clearwater, I didn’t feel much better after some light snoozing, but, once again, I felt better as soon as I got on the bike and I started climbing the beautiful Loess Hills of Iowa.

I was riding on Iowa state route 37 which climbed up and down those lush, beautiful hills. I didn’t mind the short, steep climbs; they seemed to help purge the toxic faux maple syrup. The hills were carpeted with fields of corn and soybean bordered by thick strands of trees. I climbed and descended for 11 miles and by the time I got to the small town of Soldier, I felt better. The winds continued their relentless gusts of 15 mph from the southeast, making the going slow, but by now I was used to it and did not try to fight. Yes, I have learned how to eat these hills for breakfast.

I have been riding for over 2,000 miles now, and I have moved from the dry highlands of the west to the more temperate, humid lands in the east. The evening I entered Nebraska from Wyoming was the first time I heard crickets. In the middle of Nebraska I noticed for the first time the whine and bite of a mosquito. And, somewhat surprisingly, it was only on Tuesday the 17th that I experienced my first humid day. Make no mistake… it was miserable.

Yesterday, as I rode towards Des Moines, the corn fields suddenly gave way to a new suburban development. After seeing only old, rural communities for weeks, laying eyes on these newly constructed boxes on treeless plots reminded me of the subversive Melvina Reynolds “Little Boxes” song, except in Iowa these boxes were not on a hillside:

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same  

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

Look up the song and find out who lives in these little boxes and what happens to them.

The same day of fake maple syrup fame, I was taking a break in the small town of Dow City, Iowa sitting outside of a gas station cum convenience store cum general meeting place, after wolfing down a slice of cheese pizza I had purchased inside. Retired farmers and other passersby posed rhetorical questions disguised as friendly comments (such as, “Hot enough for ya?”) or made recommendations (“you should get one of these ice cream cones.”). I was gearing up for the ride to Manning, my destination for the night, which involved a fair amount of climbing.

I had put on my helmet and turned on my blinking lights when a stocky man, maybe ten years younger than me, had just got out of his pickup truck, which was pulling a long, flatbed trailer. He approached me and asked, “Where are you going?”

When I replied that I was heading for Manning, but eventually going to Virginia on a coast-to-coast ride, he smiled and exclaimed, “No shit!” He asked what my job was and a few other questions about the trip (“how many miles do you a ride a day?”). When I asked him what he did, he replied that he was a livestock consultant, working in a few states, and that he also did some work “for himself” on the side. He was full of stories about Manning (during the Prohibition, guys from Chicago would come to Iowa and “hide” around these parts, and that the Templeton Rye Whiskey distillery near Manning was a way for local farmers to supplement their income during those restrictive times). He also told me that he had lived and worked in Costa Rica, helping set up beef farms. I had visited Costa Rica in 1985, so we exchanged stories. He had lively blue eyes and seemed to relish having an audience. He also told me he helped set up farms in Venezuela, hoping to set up a “grass fed” operation, but that didn’t pan out. We both decried what a shame it was what had happened in Venezuela. I didn’t make any statement about the politics in Venezuela, or in this country, for that matter. It was just a general, nice, surface-level conversation with a stranger at a gas station in a small town in Iowa.

And then, after making some unspoken mental jump, he blurted out, “You know, we’re going to have to fight these guys. There’s going to be a war.”

This comment was so out of place that it was as if a second person was now inhabiting this man’s body. To me, it made about as much sense as if he had just blurted out, with deep conviction, “Rook to Queen 3.”

 “War with whom?” I asked.

 “You know,” he replied, “those guys in the Middle East… the Emirates and the Gulf countries.”

I looked at him quizzically. He continued, “Yeah, you know, Obama gave them billions of dollars in aid, and you can bet they didn’t spend it on food. They bought weapons.” 

Very quickly I got a sense where this was going. This friendly, jovial, story-telling stranger was now going full reactionary on me. This country has always had people with a strong streak of such political knee-jerk antipathy towards people and ideas who don’t fit their peculiar worldview.

He started to roll.

“Yeah, they bring in 10,000 people a day illegally and give them the right to vote. If I were to move to Mexico, they wouldn’t allow me to vote.”

Mayday! Mayday! If our conversation were a jet plane, it would be spiraling down towards the ocean, black smoke pouring from the engines.

“I know what these countries are like. If all these people like communism or socialism so much, hell, I will buy them a ticket! They can leave if they don’t like it here.”

I knew there was no way to return to a dialogue. So, I quickly blurted out, “What’s your name?”

 “Al V……” (in hindsight, I cannot remember his last name.)

“My name is Doug.” I put out my hand to shake his, as a means a reaching cloture. This seemed to distract him enough that he shook my hand and walked away, saying, “I have to get back to work.”

“And I’ve got to ride to Manning.”

If you had inspected the asphalt outside the gas station’s convenience store, you would have seen the ashes of what once had been a nice conversation.