Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mental activity, it's only that there's not much call for it. Their wits are dulled by simple,
wholesome faith in God and the soil and their fellow man.
Aboveall,Iowansarefriendly.YougointoastrangedinerintheSouthandeverythinggoes
quiet, and you realize all the other customers are looking at you as if they are sizing up the
risk involved in murdering you for your wallet and leaving your body in a shallow grave
somewhere out in the swamps. In Iowa you are the center of attention, the most interesting
thing to hit town since a tornado carried off old Frank Sprinkel and his tractor last May.
Everybody you meet acts like he would gladly give you his last beer and let you sleep with
his sister. Everyone is happy and friendly and strangely serene.
The last time I was home, I went to Kresge's downtown and bought a bunch of postcards
to send back to England. I bought the most ridiculous ones I could find-a sunset over a
feedlot, a picture of farmers bravely grasping a moving staircase beside the caption “We
rode the escalator at Merle Hay Mall!” that sort of thing. They were so uniformly absurd
that when I took them up to the checkout, I felt embarrassed by them, as if I were buying
dirty magazines and hoped somehow to convey the impression that they weren't really for
me. But the checkout lady regarded each ofthem with interest anddeliberation-just asthey
always do with dirty magazines, come to that.
When she looked up at me she was almost misty-eyed. She wore butterfly eyeglasses and
a beehive hairdo. “Those are real nice,” she said. “You know, honey, I've bin in a lot of
states and seen a lot of places, but I can tell you that this is just about the purtiest one I
ever saw.” She really said “purtiest.” She really meant it. The poor woman was in a state
of terminal hypnosis. 1 glanced at the cards and to my surprise I suddenly saw what she
meant. I couldn't help but agree with her. They were purty. Together, we made a little pool
of silent admiration. For one giddy, careless moment, I was almost serene myself. It was a
strange sensation, and it soon passed.
MyfatherlikedIowa.Helivedhiswholelifeinthestate,andisevennowworkinghisway
through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines. But every year he became
seized with a quietly maniacal urge to get out of the state and go on vacation. Every sum-
mer, without a whole lot of notice, he would load the car to groaning, hurry us into it, take
off for some distant point, return to get his wallet after having driven almost to the next
state, and take off again for some distant point. Every year it was the same. Every year it
was awful.
The bigkiller was the tedium. Iowa is inthe middle ofthe biggest plain this side ofJupiter.
Climb onto a rooftop almost anywhere in the state and you are confronted with a feature-
