Presidential Candidates and House Fires

So. There wasn’t much to write about this week. In all honesty, this is in large part my fault for not getting out and doing some exploring. However, I journeyed down to Cedar Falls this Saturday, went to Rochester to practice kendo on Sunday, and the one interesting thing that happened, a visit from Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, happened while I was at work. Seriously, she scheduled her visit from 3:30 to 4:00 pm. Now, I know that Michele Bachmann is a very busy woman. However, I also know that she holds fast to the idea of people who like to work for a living and disdains those who are unemployed or, worse yet, on welfare. Even though I’m not a political consultant, I would like to offer this one piece of advice to Ms. Bachmann—if you schedule a campaign stop after noon and before five, you’re going to get a LOT of people who quite frankly don’t have anything better to do, because most of us are working. Granted, you may also get a few people who run their own business so they can afford to take the time off, but in Cresco? I think you can count those on one hand. Maybe two hands if the Decorah Tea Party regiment came, but I’m reasonably sure most of those people couldn’t get any time off.

Regardless, the event came and went with very little fanfare. I was actually impressed with how little fanfare there was. I had to find out about the visit through the little billboard on the corner of Highway 9 and Main Street, which struck me as a little undignified, since the item right after Michele Bachmann’s visit was a pancake breakfast on Wednesday at the VFW hall. Such is life in the small town.

This afternoon, though, there was a big event in Cresco, and I was an eyewitness to it. I was out taking some photographs, and as I was refilling my car, I saw plumes of smoke erupting from downtown Cresco. They were black, nasty plumes, and I’ve seen them in person before only once—it’s the smoke you see when a building is on fire. I jumped into my car and peeled off, trying to find out what was going on and maybe do something to help. When I parked my car, though, I realized two things—one, there was already a police officer and a lone firefighter on hand, and some good Samaritans were looking over a man who appeared to be in shock. Down a sidestreet that was more of an alley, the kind of street name that you’d think of as being “145 ½ Street.” The first building down, a professional garage, was on fire.

It’s possible you’ve never seen a building that’s on fire before. I have once, and maybe twice, but this time brought home just how hazardous a burning building can be. One of the garage doors was open, and fire encircled the top beam of the garage door. Inside, I could see the walls were on fire, and the borders of a far window I could see through the garage door were on fire. It seemed surreal, as though this were the set of a movie and it couldn’t really hurt anyone.

The sense of unreality was broken as I watched the fire truck pull up, loaded with firemen. They all dismounted with what seemed like no sense of urgency, and then went straight to their tasks, which was when I realized that they were urgent about what they were doing, they just weren’t hurrying the way you see firefighters on television or in the movies. Real life firefighters all have a job that needs doing before they can start extinguishing the fire, and they all mean to do their jobs right the first time. This means being thorough, and if you’re dashing around, letting your sense of urgency guide you, you might miss something that will make your teammate’s job very hard.

Even without the Hollywood hustle, the firefighters had their hoses blasting the garage with water in a touch less than a minute. I wasn’t exactly measuring their time with a stopwatch at this point, but I was impressed with how quickly the process seemed to flow.

Maybe thirty seconds after the firetruck had arrived an Ambulance did, complete with an EMT who, again, did not dash over to the man sitting down across the street, but walked fast and with great purpose. I don’t know who the man was, although I suspect he was the owner of the garage. I watched as the EMT gave the man some oxygen and tried to get a response from him, although he was having no luck at first. It seemed like the man was either in a state of shock or had simply shut down in a horrible organic version of Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death. I could sympathize.

The thing about accidents is that the bystanders and people who read about it in the news simply assume that, unless permanent bodily harm was suffered, the person will be able to get back on with his or her life, and that’s simply not the case. If the man was smart and had fire insurance, he’ll probably have to go through a labyrinth of paperwork and some investigation courtesy of the insurance company, who will want to make sure it is not being defrauded and doesn’t have to pay out the money unless it absolutely has to. While this is a good business practice, the wait can be excruciating. Not to mention his premiums are almost guaranteed to go up from now on, and if the man is a small business owner, his main source of revenue has just been obliterated. I hope that man has friends, I really do. I hope that the people who know him can see fit to all find a spare ten dollars or so and help him out. I have no idea who the man is, and I’m heading home in two days instead of tracking him down and trying to offer some assistance. I don’t know what that says about me as a human being.

I’ll end this entry by saying it’s been a pretty interesting ride. I’ve enjoyed myself immensely, and I hope my readers have too. I’ll be taking a week or so off while I go visit my family in northern Michigan, so don’t expect any entries until early January, 2012.

Happy Holidays!

Winter in Cresco

One of the big things about living in northeast Iowa, and I think I have mentioned this before, is that the winters can be brutally cold. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “brutally cold,” I am talking temperatures that regularly fall past ten below zero, measured in Fahrenheit. Add in some windchill unimpeded by trees, and you have temperatures comparable to what you might find in Antarctica.

At this point, some snow has fallen, but it’s not the kind of snowfall that really signifies winter is here. It’s more the accumulation of one or two light snowfalls, coupled with the kind of ice that a few alternating temperatures above and below the freezing point can produce. It’s unusual, because by the time the middle of December starts coming up, at least one blizzard, with white-out conditions and enough snow to literally shut down the town has arrived. It’s an adventure when this happens, but it’s not exactly something to look forward to. I’ve ventured out in two blizzards so far, once because I had to get to work and once because I severely underestimated the strength of the snowstorm, and both times have been two driving experiences I am not anxious to repeat. As much as I’d like to regale you with double-fisted stories of what driving in a blizzard is like, there’s not much to tell. Mostly you drive along at speeds under 25 mph, and sometimes even that can feel much too fast when the snow reduces visibility to maybe five feet in front of you. You grip the steering wheel until the blood drains from your fingers, and you feel your car slide along the highway as you fight to keep it in your lane.

On the other hand, if you are a farmer, this why you probably have at least two vehicles that are equally at home plowing through the snow or being used as a mobile base of operations in Afghanistan. It’s easy to tell who the farmers are in Iowa because of their utter nonchalance in winter weather. Worrying about the roads is for people who have vehicles that need to travel on them. I think the only kind of weather that might stop a farmer is a hurricane, and I have to be honest, I can’t really see a farmer worrying that a tornado will pick up one of those monster tractors and move it any appreciable distance. In fact, I can see farmers making safety plans if a tornado does approach. “Get into the tractor!” they’d say, and then practice drills for which child works the accelerator and the brake.

One of the nice parts about winter in Cresco is that the Catholic church has started playing Christmas Carols. It sounds like they are being played on a carillion, and while I suspect that’s probably not true, they’re definitely being played live. It’s one of the all-time greatest things about living where I live. There’s nothing like listening to Christmas carols echoing throughout the town at night. It makes everything seem very, very peaceful.

Now that the crops have been harvested, the deer are a lot more visible. For you hunters reading this, apparently the state of Iowa frowns on the use of high-powered rifles in northeastern Iowa. The firearm of choice is shotgun slugs, which seems to be missing the point to me. After all, you’re hunting for meat, and I would think a shotgun slug would damage quite a bit more of it. Then again, I can see why Iowa doesn’t approve of hunting with a high-powered rifle and scope when you can see a deer coming literally over the horizon. I’ve never hunted with shotgun slugs, but those who I’ve talked with say that it’s like throwing a baseball—you have to take into account the drop in height the further away your target is. Depth perception is a crucial skill when hunting in Iowa.

So that’s winter in Cresco, at least initially. I’ll be honest, I was hoping to have a nice blizzard to talk about, and perhaps get some shots of people wading through the sidewalks up to their knees. On the other hand, if you think for one second I’m going to bemoan the fact that six inches of snow hasn’t made moving outdoors all but impossible, you’re crazy.

Smoke Houses and Head Cheese

 

If you were to ask me what perks I get for working at my job, I would be able to answer that sentence in two words: free turkey. That’s right, every year around Thanksgiving, all the employees at my workplace get a free turkey. I have no idea how this tradition got started.

I usually take this turkey to my family for Thanksgiving, where we cook eat, eat it, and have turkey sandwiches for the next couple days afterward. This year, though, was a little different. For some reason and through no fault of my own, I had an unexpected attack of common sense where I realized I didn’t have to drive thirteen some-odd hours back to Michigan if I didn’t have to. This resulted in the purchase of one plane ticket, which meant that for the first time in a while, I had to pay attention to what I packed when I came home. I could have still probably gotten the turkey on board in my luggage, but this would have meant hauling with me around the airports, hoping that the ice wouldn’t get on my pajamas. There was also the very real possibility that it might attract the attention of the TSA, and then I would have to explain why I was trying to get a turkey on board a flight to Michigan, and in the process of doing so find myself shipped off to Guantanamo Bay for questioning and reeducation.

This is why I didn’t protest much when my Dad called the day before Thanksgiving and said he had already gotten a turkey that was thawing as we spoke. Still, it left me with a problem—what does one do with a frozen turkey? Cooking the bird was an option, but it would have required a lot of time and effort that would result in leftover turkey sandwiches for the next year. I could also have kept it frozen until Christmas, and simply tried to work around the turkey as it lay in my freezer, edging out the frozen veggies. That was just too inconvenient.

Then I heard about the smokehouse. Several co-workers go hunting, and quite a few took their deer to the smoke house, which is also a butcher and all-around meat processor. For about $30, these guys would turn your deer into steaks, hamburgers, jerky, smoked sausage and pretty much anything you can think of having to do with meat. That was when I started thinking of what smoked turkey would taste like, and about five seconds after that I was on the phone with the Poleshek Meat Locker.

Poleshek’s is located in Protivin, which is another very small town like Spillville. According to the Wikipedia article, 317 people live there. Judging from my drive through Protivin to get to the meat locker, this is about enough for one main street and about two side roads on each side. I have to be honest, I’m not sure what people in these towns do with themselves. I find Cresco a bit stifling on the weekends, and it has 5,000 people. So a town that has only 300 people kind of blows my mind. The only towns I’ve seen crazier than that was when my family vacationed out west. Sometimes, as we were driving through the desert, we would see a gas station and party store stuck out in the middle of nowhere, as though it had been dropped there by a child. Next to it there would be a small house. If the town was considered big, it might have a dirt side road that extended maybe 100 yards, with two sparse houses built on either side of the road. The population couldn’t have been double digits, and as we drove on I found myself wondering what these people DID out there. It didn’t seem like they were farmers, and even if they were I wondered how I would react to having to face the same two families every single day as long as I was in that town. I come from a small town myself, and one of the driving forces in me wanting to be in a city was so that there would be a lot more people to meet, and just as importantly I could get away from people when I didn’t get along with them. People in Protivin don’t seem to have that problem, though, which is probably just as well.

The main point here is that Poleshek’s is located on Main Street, and as soon as I walked in I could not for the life of me understand why the place is not packed each and every day. Admittedly, the décor isn’t great—think warehouse meets mobile home meets temporary office kind of atmosphere—but up front they do have at least six walk-in coolers and one butcher display counter, which contain all the items they have for sale. I can’t list everything, but what I can tell you is that their selection would make several upscale New York delis, not to mention countless supermarket chains, green with envy. I wish the store wasn’t a good twenty minutes away, because I think it would be an excellent place to pick up steaks. As it was, after I deposited my turkey with the owners, I bought some smoked cheddar and halapeno jack cheese, and sampled a couple of the meats they had out for tasting.

The first, some venison snack meat, was absolutely wonderful. The second meat was head cheese. For those of you unaware of what head cheese is, it is essentially a jelly-like substance that holds in place meat from the head of a cow or pig. This usually, and I stress usually, doesn’t include the brain, eyes or ears, although I’d heard that brains were common. Regardless, I’d heard things about head cheese, and that as a meat it was in the same category as beef tongue and tripe. Still, I was feeling adventurous, and when would I get another chance to try out some head cheese?

So I tried it. I would like to say that I am glad I tried it, but I sincerely think that anyone who eats head cheese any time more than once is clinically insane. This is NOT a good-tasting meat. If you take the worst tasting components of dill pickle juice, vinegar and onions, you have a pretty good idea of how head cheese tastes. I sincerely think this meat should be donated to the Catholic church and doled out as penance. I think if Bernie Madoff is truly sorry for his crimes, then he should eat a slice of head cheese for every meal, although I think that might be considered cruel and unusual punishment, if not a violation of the Geneva Convention. If you happen to like head cheese, I would urge you to get to the nearest psychiatrist as soon as possible. If you actually like the flavor of head cheese, there might be other delusions from which you are suffering.

Still, I was very impressed with Poleshek’s. I’ll be getting the turkey back this weekend, and I’ll let people know how it tastes. If you’re ever in Protivin, come on by. I’m sure they’d love to have you as a customer.

Airports

One of the sad parts of growing up is that you don’t get to see your family that often, especially if you move to a different state. This is one of the best parts of holidays. Right now, I get to see my family for Thanksgiving, Christmas and, oddly, Labor Day.

From where I live in Iowa, getting to my parents’ house takes at least 13 hours by car. I want to stress the “at least” modifier. What this means is that if I were to leave at 7 a.m., I would get to my parents’ house by 9 p.m. I’ve done this a few times, and more than any other factor this is why I bought a plane ticket for Thanksgiving.

Booking a plane ticket at any time of year is a tense experience. You know there are different ticket prices depending on where you leave, what time you leave, what day you leave, how old you are, the type of computer you’re using, the make and model of your car, your mother’s maiden name and your last two horoscope readings as printed in the National Enquirer. This is why discount flight websites exist and why there are so many of them now that websites exist that compile the prices of the other websites, and almost all of them are within twenty dollars of each other. But I played it smart—I bought my ticket near the beginning of October, where it cost me about half as much as what it would have cost had I tried buying that sucker in November, which is still more than I would have paid in gas prices, but got me there in about half the time, almost none of which required me to be awake.

I do have to say, the modern flight experience is somewhat curtailed from when I really started flying, which was only about two years ago. Right now, they serve you a drink in cups that are specially formulated not to hold all the contents of your standard pop can, and if you want a snack you can feel free to buy a pack of peanuts or pretzels. It’s sad that at least the airline I was flying had cut services, and I think it’s probably a matter of time before you see credit card readers on everything, including the bathroom and the oxygen mask dispenser.

On a more positive note, the one thing that really stuck with me on this trip was the O’Hare International airport. I know I’ve talked about this before, but airports are basically gigantic waiting rooms. Everyone there is trying to get to someplace else, and if you’re in an airport, you are playing the waiting game. In Rochester and Traverse City, there are two shops/restaurants. Rochester has the 331 Express, an extension of an Applebee’s-type restaurant that, while nice, is terrible as a hangout unless you’re going to buy a meal or an alcoholic drink. I suppose you could buy a coffee there, but it would be youre standard regular coffee, not one of the trendy neo-coffee house types. In fact, Rochester’s airport owes its very existence to the Mayo Clinic. It’s a hub of southern Minnesota/northern Iowa because people from around the world fly in to have Mayo cure them of their illnesses, and some of these people are kings, heads of state and CEOs, all of whom could build an airport like Rochester’s with a month’s salary. So Rochester is a hub of air traffic that is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Traverse City’s airport is similar to Rochester’s, but it’s more inviting. After all, Traverse City is an up-and-coming tourist city, and you can tell that a lot of effort went into having the airport be folksy and comfortable, yet still modern as possible. What’s really different, though, is the airport café, which is a combination of coffee shop, deli and gift shop. More than anything else, this is what separates Traverse City from Rochester. Rochester’s 331 Express is an awkward bridge between having a quick bite to eat and having a complete sit-down meal , which makes sense, since it’s trying to cater to your average middle (now lower) class Joe, and a bevy of medical residents, doctors, and the aforementioned power players of the world. Traverse City, on the other hand, kind of accepts that when you’re in an airport, you’re not too concerned with having a proper meal as opposed to just eating something to keep you from getting hungry, and that you really don’t want to be in the airport anyway. So you have a quick bite, you get a decent cup of coffee with some non-coffee flavors, and maybe buy a book about Michigan to read to help pass the time. Personally, I like the Traverse City airport better.

Then you have O’Hare, which I think may be the Walt Disney World of airports, although I haven’t been to JFK yet. As much as I never ever want to have to depart from O’Hare, being there as a hub between flights is kind of nice. Actually, it’s nicer than it has to be, because when you’re at an airport you are a captive audience, and as you walk along the shops you start to feel like a minnow surrounded by sharks, and you have to wonder whose mouth you are going to swim into voluntarily and ask to be eaten. You know you’re going to be charged more than usual, and you know that you’re going to be charged more than usual for everything, except perhaps at the newsstand. Yes, you don’t have to buy anything, but I always seem to be waiting in the airport at dinnertime, so I either get to have dinner in the airport or wait until I get to my destination and do the trifecta of awkwardness—have your ride drive through town looking for a restaurant that’s open, try to balance getting something good to eat with trying to arrive at your destination, and eating in front of your ride, who of course has already had something.

So O’Hare has kind of upped the ante on restaurants. You have your standard fast food fare, you have your standard coffee shops, Starbucks and Starbucks clones, but then you also have sit-down bars and restaurants. You have a restaurant that apparently serves dishes created by Wolfgang Puck, you have a miniature Chili’s restaurant in the airport, and for some reason this never fails to impress me. Perhaps it’s because these restaurants are better than they have to be. I don’t think anyone actually expects to eat well at an airport—it’s hard to enjoy a good sit-down meal with one eye on your luggage and another eye on the clock—but restaurants like these are all about convincing people to come in, take a load off, and behave as if their luggage wasn’t their dinner date.

In a way, all this is admirable. Yes, it’s just another opportunity for people to sell you something, but if you go with the theory that no one really thinks they’re doing something bad, then what you have are a bunch of people trying to make sure that your wait is as pleasant as possible. Don’t want a latte? Go for a hamburger and fries. Don’t want fast food? Go for a sit-down meal. In fact, why not browse for something that will make your flight easier, or buy a book? If you’re a soldier, there’s a special section for you, and if you want to feel elite there’s always the admiral’s club, where you can feel secure in the knowledge you’re getting charged more for services than the rest of the airport crowd. It’s a nice concept, at least in theory. Kind of an admission that waiting is rarely fun and they know you’d rather be at your destination already, but we’re at least going to try to make you feel good about the time you spend here. It’s nice to feel that way, even as you’re thanking all the currently-worshipped travel deities as you board your flight that you don’t have to stay at the airport any longer.

Miscellaneous Iowa Thoughts

This is one of those weeks where there wasn’t much to talk about. I mostly packed to go to Michigan for Thanksgiving, wrote a few blog entries, and thought about how in Michigan you can barely smell the farm animal crap if you don’t want to. So this entry will be a random collection of thoughts I had in the past week about northeast Iowa.

The corn fields and soybean fields have been harvested. Now there’s just large swaths of bare ground as far as the eye can see. I never considered this before, but farm kids must have some of the greatest hide and seek games of all time. I hope that snowmen and snow forts come to dominate the landscape in December.

It’s getting dark sooner, too. If you have an office job, it’s getting where you can go in at the crack of dawn and see one or two rays, then leave the office and be in utter darkness, with just a hint of sun slipping behind the horizon. You have to be fast if you want to get some daylight in the winter.

No one around here is looking forward to the winter. Absolutely no one. In Cresco, people speak of winter’s arrival like the Poles spoke of the arrival of the Third Reich. Sometimes I wonder why Cresco isn’t a ghost town.

The weather getting colder hasn’t done a thing to decrease the ever-present smell of crap in the air. It’s getting so I can tell where I am between the office and Cresco by the kind of crap I smell. By the office, you smell horse crap. A couple miles in, you smell pig crap. For about a mile, you have the relief of smelling cow crap, but then it’s back to pig crap until you reach the town limit and you smell cow crap again. This new ability bothers me to no end.

Deer are active during this season, too. From October to May, I drive a little more cautiously and I try not to speed. This means I get passed by horse and buggies, who are of course going ten over the speed limit.

There is an Iowa State Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in northeast Iowa. Also, Iowa has rock and roll bands.

Did I mention I can tell where I am on my commute home by the type of crap I smell? Also, I can now differentiate between different types of manure. I don’t know how I got this ability. I didn’t ask anyone. I just took a whiff of what I had formerly presumed to be fresh air, gagged a bit, and realized that only a pig could put out that kind of putrescent scent.

More and more people are showing up at the Cresco Fitness Center. During the summer, the place is almost deserted. When the winter comes, though, people flock to the place, even before the “January Joiners” club makes its appearance. I think that says something good about the entire town.

Seriously, I can tell where I am in my work commute by the smell of the manure. Other people get to tell where they are in their commute by how many Starbucks restaurants they’ve passed.

I have a lot of books. As in it’s a burgeoning library. I think this is one of the best parts of being me.

I also think I’m prone to clutter. I keep trying to sort it out, but the clutter keeps growing. I feel as though I’m waging a single-handed war against entropy.

Spiced cider is easily as good a winter drink as hot chocolate.

Seriously, my sense of smell is usually pretty bad because my nose is constantly stuffed up. So how the frick can I tell the difference between animal crap during my commute? For the love of God, why?