Back From Beyond The Edge Of Existence (Now Featuring Words!)

If you drive east from Chicago on I-88 for what seems like 400 miles, you will find yourself just outside of Iowa City, Iowa (and why you name a town for a state like Iowa is beyond me.) So you then take I-80 north to I-380 north for another thousand miles or so through endless cornfields and soybean fields and wheat fields, past the edge of known existence where the water and land falls off of the end of the Earth, past the demons that guard this place, then make a left somewhere, and you will find yourself in Mason City, Iowa.

Not that Mason City is a bad place. It has a supermarket or to, a good Mexican restaurant, and 22,000 people that probably wake up every day wondering why the hell Frank Lloyd Wright bothered to design a house here. But design it he did.

I wasn't here to take in the (lack of) tourist sites, however - I was here to walk. My archaeology surveying job had taken me to the edge of the world so I could walk ten miles from Iowa to the Minnesota border, some twenty-five miles north of Mason City, and make sure that there were no early American or perhistoric (Native American) artifacts or sites. My first instict was that if nobody bothers to live here now, why would anybody have bothered to live here then? And as it turns out, I was right. For two days full work days I walked, staring at the ground the entire time. For ten miles. You usually have things to think about while you are walking. Normal walking time only lasts a few hours, but after two full days, you start to go insane. You start thinking about things you would never normally think about, thoughts you can't even put into words later. Your mind goes completely numb. And what is worse is that after work you have to go back to your hotel room (which has no internet) in Mason City (which has nothing to do). The only interesting piece of scenery was the large windpower field just south of our survey area. The field was home to some eighty or ninety generator windmills, each about seventy feet high, maybe more, which created quite an awesome site at sunset.

It would be an understatement to say I was excited when we finally left Mason City on Wednesday morning. I was actually looking forward to making a few stops in Iowa at random historic or culturally significant locales I had seen during the drive up. First stop was the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, home of the largest library and museum collections dedicated to Czech and Slovak culture in the United States. They had clearly gotten money from somewhere for the very nice building and well-presented exhibits they had. What was most interesting to me was that, unlike most ethnically-themed museums, the NCSML did not make any effort to present the Czechs and Slovaks as having a largely disproportional contirubtion to human culture. Rather, the museum chose to define the people in opposition to their thousands of years of oppression at the hands of foreign and tyrannical governments. My only objection was their presentation of the modern Czechs and Slovaks as having friendly relations - most people will tell you that Czechoslovakia split into two countries for one very good reason. They didn't like each other.

After the museum (as well as a tasty lunch at a local Czech restaurant) I found myself in Brandon, Iowa: home of Iowa's largest "Fryin' Pan." The pan was built to raise money for a local community center in the sleepy town of 245 inhabitants. I decided it was a worthy cause and donated a dollar in addition to the two postcards I bought. I saved one for myself and sent the other to Shewara from the Brandon post office, which was little more than a converted trailer. The nice old lady who worked there even went out of her way to find me a 24-cent postage stamp for my postcard. After leaving Brandon, I thankfully headed home to civilization in Illinois, where I could prepare for a fun weekend of cultural activities.