pink = where we went
My time in Iowa was part 3 of our big family road trip.
We parked our RV at Shady Brook campground. Staying at these campgrounds in the midwest in cold muddy early Spring felt like we were catching them off guard. They are designed to be in their glory in the summer, with swimming pools, picnic tables, fire pits. We saw the opposite of what most people see, which felt both like an embarrassment and a privilege. I felt like I should apologize to the vulnerable off-season actors at rest. I’m sorry, empty pools and ruts of mud; I’m sorry neglected cabins and leafless trees.
I wanted to say sorry to the man we met who owns the campground, who emerged from his dark home office, also sleepily caught off-guard, a bear hibernating with cigarette smoke blanket. I asked him where he thought we should go and he recommended the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, where he, and John Wayne, are both from. I asked him if he was a big John Wayne fan.
“Oh yeah.”
“What was it like growing up where he was from?”
“Pretty neat. It was also pretty neat when Clint Eastwood came to town.” (For the filming of The Bridges of Madison County.)
He said that lots of town people met Eastwood. Friends said he was a real nice guy. He played golf in town one day, walking around and meeting people.
In Winterset, the woman at the Chamber of Commerce said we should go by the old jailhouse, which is now an artists & makers collective. We went there and a woman gave us a tour of the small old jail, which was connected to a house. She told us how a woman in town in her 80’s grew up in the house. She said one prisoner made her a dollhouse, which she still has. Her mother would make Sunday dinner for their family and the prisoners. One man would get himself arrested every Sunday for public drunkenness so that he could have her mother’s Sunday dinner.
We had lunch at Montross, a soda fountain in the back of a pharmacy on the town square.
We sat at the counter and had different lunches that all came with fries. A 79 year old man named Bobby sat next to me. He told me how he comes there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner nearly every day. His mom used to work there.
Bobby drove a semi for 59 years and shared memories of driving through Seattle. He told me to look at the last stool at the end of the bar. “See that stool? I have a long back. That stool is two inches shorter. It’s my stool.” He wasn’t sitting there for lunch that day because when he got there a woman was sitting there. He ordered a piece of the pecan pie and the waitress motioned like she was going to plant it in his face, which thrilled Asher. He said, “DO IT! It’ll be a funny scene!” Everyone laughed.
As we left, Bobby said he had been feeling low when he came in for lunch but that he felt better now.
We went to the Iowa Quilt Museum, where a woman named Sally gave me white cloth gloves so I could turn quilts with her on a queen sized bed like pages in a book.
On our way out of Madison county we thought we’d see one or two of the picturesque bridges. This part of Iowa (along with the parts of Nebraska and Kansas we traveled through) had recently flooded, and so we held our breath as we rolled gingerly through the mud and slid down gently rolling hills in the RV which felt like an elephant on roller skates. This made our experience of the bridges of Madison county more suspenseful than expected.
We spent the night in Pella in the beautiful 1875 Victorian home of friends of a friend. Shelley and Derek were so warm and welcoming, and staying in their home was luxurious after many nights in the RV. Asher was hatching schemes for how we might all stay there the rest of the trip. “Maybe I’ll meet some people that speak a foreign language that you two don’t speak and I’ll tell them in this language that they should take us back to Pella.”
We all walked downtown for pizza for dinner and on the way home Derek got a rental bike and rode it with Asher in front.
Pella was settled by Dutch immigrants; it is a charming town with Dutch architecture, a tulip festival in May (complete with 300,000 tourists per weekend) and a fully functioning windmill that grinds the wheat used in the local Dutch bakery!
Derek works at the mill. In the morning he gave us a special insider tour of the mill before it opened for visitors. Built in 2002, it is a replica of a mill in the Netherlands. We got to go all the way to the top! It was like being inside a giant old clock.
Back on ground level there is a gloriously intricate miniature Dutch village that was started by “a couple of old guys in the 30’s who didn’t have anything else to do.”
On our last day in Iowa we drove north along the Mississippi River before crossing it into Wisconsin.
We stopped at the National Mississippi River Museum, which felt like a love song to the nostalgic American story of the river as the keeper of the landscape. On display are relics of things the river has kept: furs of skunks, skins of otters, arrowheads, egg shells of the Red-bellied Woodpecker and Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Mannequin white settlers and Native Americans barter their wares (guns, beads, respectively) in a grotto of pretend rocks. I wonder if they will barter there forever.
