Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest
thing is the flies. I remember one long, shimmering stretch where I could see a couple of
miles down the highway and there was a brown dot beside the road. As I got closer I saw
it was a man sitting on a box by his front yard, in some six-house town with a name like
Spigot or Urinal watching my approach with inordinate interest. He watched me zip past
and in the rearview mirror I could see him still watching me going on down the road until
at last I disappeared into a heat haze. The whole thing must have taken about five minutes.
I wouldn't be surprised if even now he thinks of me from time to time.
He was wearing a baseball cap. You can always spot an Iowa man because he is wearing a
baseball cap advertising John Deere or a feed company, and because the back of his neck
has been lasered into deep crevices by years of driving a John Deere tractor back and forth
in a blazing sun. (This does not do his mind a whole lot of good either.) His other distin-
guishing feature is that helooks ridiculous when hetakes offhis shirt because his neck and
arms are chocolate brown and his torso is as white as a sow's belly. In Iowa it is called a
farmers tan and it is, I believe, a badge of distinction.
Iowa women are almost always sensationally overweight you see them at Merle Hay Mall
in Des Moines on Saturdays, clammy and meaty in their shorts and halter tops, looking a
little like elephants dressed in children's clothes, yelling at their kids, calling out names
like Dwayne and Shauna. Jack Kerouac, of all people, thought that Iowa women were the
prettiest in the country, but I don't think he ever went to Merle Hay Mall on a Saturday. I
will say this, however-and it's a strange, strange thing-the teenaged daughters of these fat
women are always utterly delectable, as soft and gloriously rounded and naturally fresh-
smelling as a basket of fruit. I don't know what it is that happens to them, but it must be
awfultomarryoneofthosenubilecutiesknowingthatthereisatimebombtickingawayin
her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque,
presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which
the pin has been yanked.
Even without this inducement, I don't think I would have stayed in Iowa. I never felt al-
together at home there, even when I was small. In about 1957, my grandparents gave me
a View Master for my birthday and a packet of disks with the title “Iowa-Our Glorious
State.” I can remember thinking even then that the selection of glories was a trifle on the
thin side. With no natural features of note, no national parks, no battlefields or famous
birthplaces,theView-Masterpeoplehadtostretchtheircreative3-Dtalentstothefull.Put-
tingtheView-Mastertoyoureyesandclickingthewhitehandlegaveyou,asIrecall,ashot
of Herbert Hoovers birthplace, impressively three-dimensional, followed by Iowa's other
great treasure, the Little Brown Church in the Vale (which inspired the song whose tune
