LIGHT SIDE: Abandoned mattress near Walker draws attention, jokester

The mattress showed up in February. No one knows exactly when.

Suddenly it was there on a bed of snow, a pale green queen-sized beside the road north of Walker.

"I don't know if it blew out of someone's truck," said Dan Klendsworth, who lives on a farm nearby.

Removing the mattress seemed like a job for spring, and then snow fell and the mattress became part of the landscape. But when the snow melted, the mattress unfortunately did not, and its presence became a mild embarrassment on Quasqueton Avenue in southern Buchanan County.

On a warm, breezy March day, a sign appeared behind the mattress. It said, in red letters on a white background, "VACANCY," and under that, "cheap." It was an invitation to a night on a discarded mattress aside a rural Iowa highway.

"They did nice work, painted it and everything," said Daniel Miller, who lives less than a mile away. "I figured somebody was going to throw something up there. A blanket, maybe?"

Quasqueton Avenue, or Betty's Grove Road, is a good concrete highway, and it runs on a straight line north from Walker to Quasqueton. To the east, the land slopes to the woods of the Wapsipinicon River valley. To the west, the giant radio towers stare back from the highest point between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids. And there on the muddy grass of the ditch lay a mattress.

Semi-trailer drivers trekking from Highway 20 to Interstate 380 saw it. So did commuters heading in either direction. Some neighbors wondered if they should pick it up, and how much it would cost to take someone else's mattress to the dump. Some hoped the county would take care of it.

No one knows who posted the sign, but Klendsworth said he suspects someone from Quasqueton. He thought their energy could have been spent better elsewhere.

"If someone's got that much time on their hands," he said, "why didn't they just move the mattress?"

The sign stood less than 48 hours. By Tuesday night, it and the mattress were gone.