There's a feeling of floating as you soar over a big river on a bridge. It's like you've tricked the river and you're getting away with something. Suddenly your little car which has so laboriously hugged the road for hundreds of miles has taken wing and floats serenely over water, tug and barge. And as I floated back west into Iowa from Chicago, I thought, "I know what I'll do, I'll ask Renee to marry me!" Then, smiling, and armed with this new thought, my car and I landed back on earth and sped off to a new life.
Coming home starts for me the moment I get inside the Iowa border. I have been in Europe, Mexico, Canada, most of the fifty states, and have lived in California, Texas, New York City, Delaware and La Antilla, Spain, but I have always made it back to Iowa eventually.
You can drive in, fly in, and walk in. When you drive in from California, you arrive after days of rapidly changing scenery. You head east out of L.A. into desert and irrigated desert oases, zip through cacti in Arizona, through red rocks and painted deserts, and on east through the vast flatlands of West Texas, on up through those rolling flint hills in Kansas, and through the scruffy country in Missouri. Then, as you enter Iowa on Interstate 35 near Lamoni, the landscape starts to take on a particular flavor.
The road changes first, of course. As you go into any new state you are made aware that different states have different road contractors, since the roads immediately change from, say, a whitish concrete to asphalt. You always like to think that when you get into your home state the roads get better, but I suppose that's not always the case. In Iowa, the roads are known to be pretty good, though. But it wouldn't matter, anyway. If they were worse, I'd still like them more, because they are part of home.
But the land, the land! The land starts to shape itself just right. The color of the ground finally takes on the healthy black color that you have always thought land was supposed to have. The gentle roll of the hills happens with just the right frequency, and the barns start to look healthier, and wealthier.
There is a definite change as you move from one country into another. And there is a change, also, from state to state, or province to province, if you know what to look for. Each area has some aspect of life more lively than some other. In Iowa we like cowboy boots, but in Oklahoma and Texas, they live in them. In Iowa we play in the snow, while in Minnesota, they get out and race in the stuff. And there are subtler things. Slight changes in attitude and outlook. Little drifts in the direction of this language pattern, this word for the thing rather than that one, or this colloquialism rather than that one.
As I came into Iowa in the the Lamoni area, I felt like a tiny spermatazoa entering an enormous ovum. There was the feeling of being this little bit of consciousness entering a big, welcoming, motherly home. And big things can happen when the right bit of consciousness finds its way home.
In some ways you feel like you shouldn't come home to Iowa. That where it's really happening is somewhere else. But when you want success, you have to put down roots. You have to get in touch with the people in an area and build relationships. You have to make a long term commitment to an area, which I just wasn't willing to do in California. I wanted to make my way in an area where I knew how to act, where people know me and like me. I wanted to be closer to my family.
And I wanted to be in a state with actual seasons and weather. In California, if I wanted different weather, I had to drive somewhere else in California to find it. In Iowa, different weather comes right to you. Like it or not. You can't take the weather seriously in Iowa, because it's constantly in change. If you think women are hormonal and changeable, try Iowa weather. It creates a kind of excitement.
Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way, but I actually start to laugh when the weather in Iowa gets tough. When it snows and nothing can run and there's no school, I love it. I love the interruption of business as usual. I love thunder and hard rain and even ridiculously hot weather. I love it, and I know it will change. If you want really bad weather in Iowa, you only get two or three days of it, because it softens or changes that fast. So it's not unbearable. It's just that it keeps finding new ways to be bad. But, hey, try talking about the weather in Southern California. The only weather there is whether or not there's smog. So it's nice to get back to a state where there's some entertainment value in the air.
Flying in to Iowa you land in Des Moines. Or Cedar Rapids, sometimes. To really experience what it means to fly in to Iowa, you have to stay for three months in New York City first. You have to see dirt and trash on the street, note hard faces and face constant tension, some danger and plenty of noise. You have to avoid eye contact and act like you know where you are going at all times because you don't want to be obviously new to town. You have to fit in, as facelessly as possible, to the impatient crowds that swirl and charge through the city - hoping that no one will notice, isolate, and rob you.
You have to wait in the airport in New York City, keeping all of your bags in contact with your body so that if anybody tries to get one you will notice. You try not to jostle or even look at anyone who appears especially hostile. Then they let you get on the plane, and when you take off, you quietly celebrate inside because you have actually made it out of there.
And then you have to land for a plane change in Chicago. And you notice that the cultural diversity is toned down a bit. People aren't quite so hard or predatory looking. People all seem fairly well dressed, and there are groups of students here and there, flying home or off to some foreign adventure.
And then you fly into Iowa. And you are in shock. The people seem almost identical. The faces all have the same, mild expression. No one looks angry or dangerous. They are just quietly waiting for their plane to depart or their relative's plane to arrive. They very politely gather around the baggage claim, make a few jokes about the delays, sometimes with total strangers, and pick up their stuff and leave.
Then you go home to your parents house, and lie there in bed later, and cannot believe the silence outside. No fog horn sirens slashing through the streets at three a.m., no subways rumbling by and shaking everything, no one yelling at anyone. The only noise is the ringing in your ears because there's no noise. Which takes three days to go away. And then you're home.
I flew onto the Interstate 80 Bridge into Iowa in my yellow Volkswagen bug, still sifting thoughts of the relationship just ended in Chicago. I had gone to Chicago to either fix or end the thing, since it hadn't resembled the living for a long time. But by the time I got back on land in Iowa, I knew what to do, and who to do it with. That's right, I went home and married a girl from Marshalltown, Iowa.
Map of Iowa Index Page
Next Chapter, #9. Marshalltown