Iowa.
Almost all of my associations with it have been pleasant, yay even wholesome. All the folk I’ve known who hail from it are rather proud of it, from their promotion of Maid Rite as the name for Sloppy Joes to tales of the hard job of detasseling the corn in the summertime. It is the setting of the fictional, eponymous town from the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, a moving favorite. It is host to to the largest bicycle tour in the world in the Ragbrai, which I have always had ambitions to attempt. And whatever you might make of their recent choices, it has the quaint custom of people caucusing to determine their political candidates. Whatever its drawbacks, and I am sure there are some, what a concept it is these days to even try talk to one another to come to a shared decision.
And to the point of this little piece, I have always found Iowa beautiful. Beautiful whenever I have driven across it and beautiful one July 4th when I spent several nights there. It is true that it puts on full-display the corn monoculture, which along with soybeans and wheat, undergird our food system in unhealthy ways. But I still find it beautiful, as I do my home state of Illinois. Compared to the corn growing regions of Illinois, I find it more beautiful with its more undulating landscape, with farm houses and barns (often decorated with a quilt pattern) surrounded by the the contours of the corn.
And today with that vast landscaped stripped of the corn and a covered by recent snowfall, the contours of the fields and hills were especially visible. Lovely. Even the the abandoned barns with their collapsing roofs, looked picturesque in the snow, if only sadly so. And the drifts, though not massive, overflowed snow fences and hedgerows of the northern and western sides of the roads.
Absorbed in an audiobook (why have I not read the amazingly written and thought-proving Brideshead Revisited before?), my minds eye ranged across England and Italy and ocean liners on the Atlantic and wrestled with the questions of human loves (and hating) and the pursuing love of God. And yet still, if only from the corners of my attention, I noticed the beauty.
Finally, traveling into the sunset on a small westerly road–my same direction in the essay of which this is a pair–I was closer to the drifts. I paused my book and began to look for a sufficient shoulder where I might stop to take some pictures.
And just as last summer in Michigan, I pulled off near a ditch, selected the lens I wanted, and walked toward the field. It was 8 degrees so I planned to make it a very short shoot. But just as before, lost in my work I did not notice the pickup truck as it pulled up, this time veering over from the oncoming lane to stop in the middle of the road.
In the miles before stopping, I considered the question of whether stopping might not provoke a similar reaction to the steely, cold, and menacing reception I had received at the end of summer in Michigan. And, yet, when a suitable opportunity presented itself I stopped.
This time the truck was newer and shinier and larger. This time there was a woman and over in the passenger seat a child. And again through the opened window there was a question. And again from me there was what probably seemed like an odd explanation.
“Can I help you.”
“Ah, I just stopped to take pictures of the drifts.”
“Oh, OK I was just making sure that you had not broken down and needed help.”
“Thank you!”
And then they drove past me and in a driveway behind me turned around and passed me again continuing west. They had turned around to help me.
Beauty and blessing.
Iowa.
