Soaking up Iowa

(Today's Insight section featured several essays on what being an Iowan means. Here's my contribution)

On the muggy May night after my high school graduation, I was cruising gravel roads with a couple of guys in a beat up Caprice Classic, doing what small town kids in the late 80s did on gravel roads at night. Periodically, aluminum evidence of our transgressions was tossed ditchward. The quiet of rural Iowa, subjected to the blare of AC/DC.

At some point very late in the night we parked out on a dark road in the middle of nowhere. The western sky exploded with lightning flashes. A strong, warm wind swept in from those 30,000-foot-tall strobe lights, across the corn and soybean fields. I remember closing my eyes, feeling that wind, with the thunder booming in the distance. It's remarkable how vividly you can remember some moments. I can see it like an HD photo.

I'd like to say that was the moment I decided to stay in Iowa, but that would be overly dramatic and sappy. But, for some reason, whenever I think about what it means to be an Iowan, or why we live here, or why we stick around year after year despite wind chill, mosquitoes and March, I think about that night, when everything was still possibility.

I chose a career that involves writing about stuff. So knowing about stuff is helpful. I spent years, decades, learning stuff about Iowa. I spent, for instance, a whole 5th grade semester in Mrs. Cook's Iowa history class, hearing about glaciers and the Spirit Lake massacre and Kate Shelley's bridge.

It took me a very long time to soak up Iowa, to be able to tell a Hickenlooper from a Kraschel, or a Dolliver from a Kenyon, or a barrow from a gilt. I was a legislative page who wore out three pairs of shoes hiking around the Statehouse. After years of detasseling, I could lecture on corn sex. In college, I worked in the sports department at the Des Moines Register. So I knew that Kingsley goes with Pierson and Sibley goes with Ocheyedan, and what SCMT and LDF-SEMCO and AGWSR really meant.

That's just the tip of the grain bin. And the thought of tossing all that and moving to some other state, where I'd have to master foreign Hickenloopers, seemed like an enormous waste. I was raised to not be wasteful. My mom saved cupboards full of empty margarine containers. So I put myself in Iowa's cupboard, just in case it ever needed me. You never know.

Call me loyal. Call me lazy.

No regrets, beyond a few dark days in mid February. Still, it's not all wild roses and goldfinches. It takes an even temperament.

You're going to find yourself at a party or function in some far off metropolis, patiently explaining that your state is not home to Columbus, or Boise or the Indianapolis 500. And, no, I don't think the caucuses are at the root of everything that's wrong with American democracy.

At some point, you'll have to counter a flip comment about Herbert Hoover with a tedious, but very necessary, explanation of how he saved millions from starvation. See their Tom Arnold and raise them a Norman Borlaug. John Wayne has your back if things get ugly.

Iowa is boring, nothing ever happens there, they'll say. You say, not true. In fact, 74 million years ago a 10 billion ton meteorite traveling 45,000 mph landed just north of present day Manson with the destructive power of 1 million Hiroshima bombs. Boring? I don't think so.

But be nice. Always be nice. When life gives you Stephen Bloom, make him a JELL-O salad. You won't convince or convert everyone. But that's OK. We kind of like the extra space.

So, no, a magic spell did not wash over me on that gravel road. Iowa doesn't hit you like a gust or a flash. It sinks in like a soaking rain. Before you know it, you've put down roots. Which brings us back to corn sex.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com