Crossing Iowa

Iowa is flat, mostly, and covered with corn. It is not, like some folks have been telling us, boring. The towns are small and far apart and yes, it kind of repeats on you — small town, corn field, feed lot, stand of trees, small town, corn field, feed lot, stand of trees. Every now and then there’s a grain elevator or a slightly bigger town, we saw six stories buildings today and they looked huge from the horizon. A few chain stores sit on the edge of the towns, Subway sandwiches, the same line of gas station slash convenience stores, a pizza joint, and then the towns dissolve in to corn again. But it’s pretty, the green green fields in strips, the blue sky, the big fluffy clouds, the wind turning the crop leaves into an weaving ocean. I like it.

We left South Dakota via Mitchell, home of the famous Corn Palace. The crew that runs the Corn Palace changes the exterior every year, the side yard of the building was full of strapping lads chopping bundles of straw to be stapled to the outside of the towers. The theme this year is America’s Destinations, fitting for road trippers, that’s for sure, and Seattle’s Space Needle is just to the right of center. The Lincoln Memorial looks a bit awkward made from corn, but Mount Rushmore shows a fair likeness, even to someone who’d seen it 24 hours earlier. We had breakfast in Mitchell at Betty’s Cafe, a cavern of a place with a hammered tin ceiling two stories above us. Betty’s has what must be the cheapest breakfast in the US, I don’t think there was anything on the menu over five dollars and they had chocolate cake for 85 cents. When is the last time you’ve seen something on a menu for 85 cents?!?!

We stopped for lunch in Sioux City where we met Thomas Ritchie, a journalist with the Sioux City newspaper. We learned that there’s a bit of a controversy about using indoor furniture outdoors, that the no tolerance law around dog bite incidents is problematic, that the mayor isn’t crazy about the Girls Gone Wild party bus, that the only man to die in the Lewis and Clark expedition died in Sioux City, that Ann Landers and her sister came from Sioux City, and a bunch of other stuff. Thomas found us via Twitter. “You’re the first people I’ve met from the Internet!” he told us, which is great, because the road trip crew met on the Internet too. Thomas helped us set our route for the final leg of our trip, our arrival to Chicago. We looked at maps while having lunch in a Sioux City strip mall and decided to camp here, at Brushy Creek.

It’s dead quiet here, mostly, save the noise of the crickets and the occasional howling of coyotes. It’s so quiet, in fact, that you can almost here the flapping of cricket wings. There are fireflies sparking off along the horizon and there’s a clear sky that’s full of stars. There are big orange flashes of sheet lightning on the horizon but there’s no sign or smell of rain. The air smells like wood smoke and dry grass. We have one more night to go, then it’s Chicago.