Is this Heaven? No, it's Iowa

Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa. That great line from Field of Dreams popped in my head when I crossed over the Missouri River from Omaha, NE into Council Bluffs, IA. I fiddled with my phone (yes, a little bit while driving, but it’s pretty empty out there) to see if an audio book of Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella exists. Yes. $12.99. So I go to Apple Book, thumbprint my way to owning an audio version of Shoeless Joe and push play.

I am on IA-92 east, choosing state highways as often as I can because it is infinitely more pleasant - less traffic, two lanes (most of the time), smaller shoulders, and regularly passing through small towns. It almost feels like I am walking through a museum - seeing things that are foreign and new to me. These small towns Treynor, Carson, Griswold...where did they come from? Why did they spring up? A surprising number of roads and farms are called “Riverside,” but I don’t see many rivers.

In Iowa - as distinct from my memories on state highways going through Arkansas and Nebraska - I see a public library in almost every town, right on the main highway. Is this distinctly Iowa? I am biased, you see. I was born in Iowa. I went to kindergarten in Iowa, and it is where I learned to read. When we moved to Atlanta in the middle of my kindergarten year, I learned that they didn’t teach children to read in Georgia until first grade. It might have shaded me with a sense of superiority ever since.

The Iowa landscape is rollier than I imagined. In western Iowa, the cornfields are lightly terraced. I’m assuming it’s all corn. It’s all stalks cut to less than a foot above the ground. Seeing it like this makes me want to see all the seasons - the planting, the growing, the harvesting. What is it like to grow up in a place that revolves around this harvest?

There are lots of American flags flying. Are they all totems to MAGA? There are also Trump signs here and there, but not like in Tennessee. Or at least not now; maybe some came down after the election. But the MAGA hold on our country just perplexes the shit out of me. In this farmland, acre after acre, farms spread far apart from one another, small towns where I imagine everyone knows one another…how has meanness, anger, pettiness taken hold? In these places where I would imagine people would have to rely on each other, and have seen the best and the worst of one another, and there is little anonymity, why has meanness prevailed?

In education data, there is a durable finding that people rate public education broadly very poorly. But they rate their local schools very positively (even when those schools stink). I think it’s the same for government - people hate the big, amorphous “them” of big government, but think their local council is doing the best they can. I’m not sure. So could it be that the MAGA stance is just a big government thing, but not how people live their lives?

There is not doubt that Washington - and pretty much anything associated with big cities - feels a million miles away from here. It’s easy to imagine that folks on farms in Iowa would feel left behind or just ignored. I try to think of myself walking down the street in Boston, and then sitting in a coffee shop in Griswold, Iowa. These two places don’t meet very nicely. I am persuaded by David Brooks’s analysis that the Democrats did get too cozy in the highly educated, intellectual elite sphere. Too much “we know what’s best.”

What doesn’t square - at least for me - is why so many people would become not just supportive of, but fully dedicated to a complete charlatan. A liar. A bully. Someone who has never served, someone who grew up wealthy and used his wealth and power to hurt people over and over and over again. Why isn’t that rejected on its face? It’s not like there aren’t other Republicans out there. Mike Pence for goodness sake. Why this completely amoral, golf-cheating, non-family oriented schoolyard bully? What do people see in him??

I drove to the town where I was born, Muscatine, sitting right on the banks of the Mississippi, which is also the border between Iowa and Illinois. I drove by the first house I lived in at 603 Leroy Street and to Grant Elementary School, where I learned to read. When I drove downtown, I accidentally passed by the church where I was baptized and where I learned the Lord’s Prayer.

It was lovely visiting this town - and imagining what it was like for my parents to pack up two small girls and all their belongings and move to Atlanta where neither had family or experience. But my dad’s job moved us, and Atlanta is where I grew up.

I walked along the Mississippi for a bit, giant gusts of wind blowing me almost off my feet. I got two guacamole tacos at a place on E. 2nd street, hopped in my car, and kept on driving.