Leaving Okoboji

Tripping through rural Iowa in the Fall

I published an earlier version of this piece at lastdraft.com but wanted to offer subscribers something to mark the launch of this Substack, so thank you again!

The instructor in my last workshop at the Okoboji Writers Retreat said “think small,” but I’m living large as I drive out of town in a bright yellow Mustang convertible with the top down and Pink Floyd’s The Machine blasting out of 8 speakers because this is the first and last time this kind of luck will ever come my way.

She said think small but I really can’t as I settle my big butt into a soft black leather bucket seat for the first time in my life and take off on a sunny Fall drive home nearly all the way across Iowa. I revel at how the wind pulls my hair away from my scalp in every direction, just short enough to keep from getting in my eyes, like I’m some model in a car commercial.

Photo courtesy of https://fordauthority.com

Carrie Underwood sings to me about two women in black Cadillacs meeting for the first time and I’m feeling their power like a low surge through my body. Maybe it’s just the ventilation in my seat keeping my thighs from sweating through my jeans.

At the conference, frumpy, middle-aged women like me shared my joy when I told them about winning the “rental car lottery” as I called it, reserving a tin can Kia online and getting a ‘Stang for the same price. They laughed with me about the astonished look on the young man’s face was when I said I’d take it. I’m on the tail end of 600 miles in round trip sunshine and 70s and I’m sucking up every minute.

OK, not sucking too hard because once I’m out of Dickinson County the smell of money starts wafting across the road, making my eyes tear and my lungs rebel. I’m supposed to think small driving past miles of hog buildings the length of football fields with enough pigs to produce the manure equivalent of Mexico City. I hold my breath when I see them coming until I can’t anymore. It’s not a long-term solution but then I’m outta there, so it don’t matter to me, as the song goes.

I’m about 80 miles out of Okoboji when I slow down into a small town I don’t check the name of because I’m having too much fun celebrating Sweet Home Alabama with Lynyrd Skynyrd. I bring it down a few notches in speed and sound as I come to a flagger in downtown wherever-I-am. Big white men in safety vests and hard hats moving heavy equipment shaped a lot like them have torn up my side of the road. Probably federal money, though they don’t care, so long as the jobs are there and they still have the right to hang a F— Biden flag in their front yard. The only woman is the flagger of course, tattoos down the inside of her arm holding the STOP sign with SLOW on the other side.

Suddenly, I’m thinking small and a little less ostentatious might be a good thing right now. These are not necessarily people who would share my joy or celebrate my good luck. They don’t know this is supposed to be a sensible car with good mileage. Hell, they wouldn’t even get why a person would rent or even drive a car. Pickups and SUVs have a use, and if you owned one then why rent a car? I can almost hear the guy glancing over from the skid loader – a bright yellow sports car is kind of pretty but only with a pretty girl in it, pretty useless for most anything else, and totally wasted on that old lady driving it.

They probably think I’m a lawyer or worse, a lawyer’s wife. I want to stand up in my top-down yellow sports car and shout, “It was luck! I got it cheap! This isn’t normal for me! I live in the country! I grew up in the country!” but who would that serve? Not them. Not me, really. Yeah, for sure not me. I slow down as the flagger blessedly flips her sign to let me pass, lower the music more and give the Iowa two-finger wave from the top of my steering wheel, glad my shades are hiding my eyes.

As I pull past the second flagger the Eagles are trying to escape from the Hotel California and I realize I haven’t seen a public park for 100 miles. I’m starting to need a bathroom break. Every driveway leads to a home or a farm field. The only available toilets are at Casey’s in a town large enough to support one. Iowa, the nation’s 4^th most privately-owned state.

Next stop, I better put the top up. My forearms are burning. I’ll regret waiting this long. And I’ll regret putting the top up. Those are my choices and they end up at the same place. Like a lot of things these days. Like choosing to move back here and ending up living with what it’s become. Like fighting to make Iowa a better place to live while being dismissed as the outsider I am. Like falling in love 30 years ago with a state that has gone from nice to mean in a decade flat and just wishing I could slam it into reverse.

Well, better make the most of it. I floor it and feel the engine push me back into my seat as it roars to 100 on the flat empty county road. I give out a Woohoot! in my outside voice. There are no cops after all. They’ve been defunded by state tax cuts or sent to Texas to guard Iowa’s border. Yep. Not a typo. We count on personal responsibility now. It’s not a sense of personal responsibility but the fear some big mammal will dart out of a cornfield and make me swerve off the road that gets me to slow down to 65. Still, I feel myself pouting about it.

I’m supposed to think small, but Iowa does nothing small anymore. I’m driving past hundreds of wind turbines tossing their arms at the corn horizon on both sides of the road. I want a picture. I see a sign for a county park and turn onto gravel. Maybe it’s that stand of trees about a mile up. Wait! Skid to a stop. The gravel dust catches up with me, engulfing the car. Back up. The “county park” is this gravel parking lot with a farm gate into a little patch of prairie. “No toxic shot allowed,” the sign at the entrance says, but my first read is “no toxic shock allowed” and I wonder why anyone out here would care about keeping tampons in too long or even consider policing such a thing in a state with no conceal carry gun permit requirements.

I pull in and get out, white dust swirling around me. It hasn’t rained in a month of Sundays. I walk a few steps to the marker in the corner of the parking lot. Mr. Ferris must’ve owned this land, then some county conservationist identified it as a “slough” and now it’s preserved. It’s not big enough to shoot anything without crossing over someone else’s land or hitting one of those turbines, so toxic shot or not really wouldn’t matter, but here it is. Someone’s dying wish fulfilled. I’m thinking gravel and weeds, as far as the farming neighbors are concerned. This is what passes for legacy around here, and not a Port-o-John in sight.

The corn, bean and hog report on the car radio tells me everything’s better than expected this Fall, even with the drought. That means another year of no change, justified by the Farm Bureau and common sense. For all our worrying, it’s ain’t broke. It’s just the weather. This has happened before, historically speaking. It’ll rain next year, you’ll see. Let’s get tillin’!

The radio dies a few minutes after I turn off the engine. Now I hear the rhythmic whooshing of the turbines demanding order out of the unruly wind. I consider climbing over the gate and trudging through the slough to stand at the base of one like a tourist in New York City looking up the side of the Empire State Building. Then I imagine security cameras and fences and other devices to keep this tourist from getting any closer.

So I stay on this little gravel parking lot, leaning back against my little yellow car, and watch long wide rows of 30-story sentinels flailing at the sky, beyond where blue meets green and brown, where all the lines merge into one. I stand very still, feeling the sun prick the back of my neck where my hair doesn’t cover it. I taste the gravel dust on my tongue as I moisten my lips. A familiar twinge in my right hip reminds me I’ve traveled rough backroads like this before and carry the damage in my bones.

Standing there in the silence and light, no place to be or go in a rush, nothing to say to nobody there, I feel my whole body take a long, deep sigh, as if breathing itself into the hard, dry ground. Everything settles, and in that quiet moment, in that comfortable solitude, I find a place I know is home.