Belle Plaine and What Cheer, Iowa: The First Ice Storm of Winter

In Eastern Colorado, the steer and the antelope and Mexican immigrants play. These high rolling plains were the nexus of the Texas-Montana Cattle (bison bye-bye; longhorns, ho!), the Overland, and Trappers’ Trails—until the Union Pacific Railroad snorted its way into town, changing everything, just after the Civil War.

It’s almost still a prairie here: surge after surge of yellowed tumbleweed becoming, as we continue east, golden grasses. Cross the border into Nebraska and the land compliantly flattens; the earth turns black and bristles with harvested corn husks. Corn, corn, and too much corn to do any of our autoimmune systems—whether human or grass-eating cattle imprisoned in a stinking stock yard—any good. For those who still eat commercial beef, who still drink commercial milk, denial (and the pleasure of your pocketbook, I suppose) is your best and most necessary friend if you travel through these environs.

Though no longer plentiful, the state flower of Nebraska is still the prairie rose, which once grew thickly as part of the eight foot tall sea of swaying grasses memorialized by the woman I consider to be the U.S.’s best novelist, Willa Cather. I am reading Prairie Visions, an autobiography by the innovative folklorist, community worker, and theater professor Robert Gard (father to Judith’s good friend and community arts worker Maryo Gard Ewell). In it, Gard relates the story of how his father urged him to leave home. The luxurious and seemingly endless sea of grasses that had lured his father to Kansas had been, by the early 20th century, chewed up and spit out by the sodbusters, those horse-driven plows piloted by visionaries such as Gard’s father himself. The prairie in Kansas gone, Gard’s father urges him out “to discover The Stranger,” to find the next untouched prairie. A parable of the paradox of American mobility and development . . .

When we reach Iowa and its swelling hills, water is pouring from the sky and freezing before it hits our windshield: the roadside ditches and medians are littered with cars and trucks. Rolled over on their backs and crushed like beetles; jackknifed like alligators trying to bite their own tales. We counted six tractor trailers off the road in less than a mile, many more before and after that. It’s a war zone and the traffic is losing.

Judith is scared and wants to stop for the night.

I can’t bear another night in a disinfected hotel along an anonymous expressway, while our debt accumulates and my goddaughter Jordan awaits in Chicago.

We’re arguing the pro’s and con’s when we pass through What Cheer, Iowa.

We arrive, bruised and fatigued, in Chicago around 10:30 that night. Whole bodies, icy souls.

(That black spot in the photo below is Jack, peering down from a loft on the stairs over the Christmas tree we helped decorate, with friends, in Chicago).