I was at loose ends on Sunday, which is not a fun place to be. If you’ve never been at loose ends, consider yourself lucky. If you have, then you know that you need to do something, want to do something, but also suffer from a distinct lack of energy that makes you not want to do anything. Finally, in the late afternoon, I finally hit on what I was going to do—drive to Decorah. Yeah, it’s not particularly exciting but there was more going on there than there would be in Cresco.
I got in my car, started driving down highway 9, and since I wanted to “do something,” I decided instead to take the back road to Decorah. This is not difficult to do, and in fact I have done it at least once without realizing it. This is because just outside of Cresco to the east is an intersection. To take Highway 9 to Decorah, you must turn right on the intersection. Despite this vitally important fact, the Iowa Department of Transportation has seen fit to put up a casual marker at best. First-timers can miss that Highway 9 takes a sudden shift right, and may make the more logical conclusion that there is another paved road that looks exactly the same as Highway 9 ON THE OTHER SIDE. This conclusion is totally wrong. I’m not sure of the reasoning behind this—maybe the Department of Transportation wants to discourage visitors. Or maybe they figured, “Eh, they’ll get it eventually.”
Another theory is that they wanted people to get a good look at the scenery northeastern Iowa has to offer. If you miss the turn to Decorah on Highway 9, you will go down a back road that takes a little longer to get you there, but the view is a lot prettier.
The area is called the “Driftless Area,” because when the Ice Age ended and the glaciers began melting, they did not leave behind “drift,” or in layman’s terms, “a whole mess of dirt and rocks.” Geologists still don’t completely understand what caused this lack of glacial deposit, but the important point to take away is that the Driftless region is essentially one big plateau, which the Mississippi river cuts through like…okay, like a river cuts through rock. The Driftless area features caves, streams that disappear into the earth, and springs (where the disappearing streams come out of the ground again, one supposes).
What really separates the Driftless region apart from other areas is the landscape. When you take the back roads, you drive away from the plains of Iowa and into a region with large forested hills, small rivers that snake through valleys and even cliff faces. As an added bonus, the curves in the road require the drivers to slow down to 25 or 35 miles per hour, allowing you some additional time to take in the beauty of the area.
One of the most notable sections of the back road is a curve that took me past two farms, with large fields in front of the farmhouse. As I passed, one of the farms was doing a burn, to get rid of the debris, dead grass and other detritus in the field. This occupied my attention a bit more than the road at first, because the fire was sending up smoke like a Chicago factory, and the flames were clearly visible. I thought about how all it would take for the fire to get out of control was a rogue spark, carried by a sudden gust of wind, and immediately felt a sense of fragility. I also wondered where the people were who had started this fire, and just how close of an eye they were keeping on it. As I rounded the curve in the road, though, the field began to rise until it was slightly higher than my car’s window, but of course the road was going down a hill, showcasing the bedrock on which the farm was built in the process. It was an extraordinary feeling, as though I were driving into the earth itself. It also explained why the farmers felt so safe. If a spark were to escape, it would have to travel pretty far in order to light something else on fire. The only thing that seemed remotely in danger of being set on fire was the farmhouse, and I suspected that the farmers would be very interested in preventing that outcome.
Perhaps the most interesting part of taking the back road is when the road, tired of meandering through the valley, decides to go back up the hill so it can finally start connecting one town to the other. It starts by going up a hill, then making a sharp 25 mile per hour curve that still seems too fast somehow, and then you’re driving up a hill, on the edge, with a vertical cliff face to the east. The speed limit is technically 55, but given that one side features solid rock and the other features a drop into space with very little in the way of a guard rail, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take that stretch of the road at the recommended speed.
In fact, the back road to Decorah needs to be handled with a certain amount of caution. Last year a teenager missed a curve, flew off the road and died. As I drove the road, I could see how it would happen. It doesn’t help that the road is fun to drive. Anyone who has this road as even a semi-regular part of his or her commute would have to possess the willpower of the Dalai Lama not to get a sports car or a motorcycle.
It also doesn’t help that Iowa highways are considered de facto expressways. When you go through an Iowa town, speed limits are strictly observed, as they should be. Outside of the city limits, though, the speed limit of 55 miles per hour seems like a polite suggestion at best. Please. If you don’t have anywhere you’d rather be instead of driving. Speeding on Iowa’s highways is easy—most of them are the opposite of the back road to Decorah. Iowa country highways are flat and straight, with gentle curves that don’t require slowing down. I’ve had people pass me when I drive at 60 miles per hour. I’ve had people pass me when I drove at 65 miles per hour. Some of them were semis, and I can tell you first-hand to be passed by a semi going over 65 miles per hour on a two-lane highway is quite the experience. One can fall into the habit of treating Iowa’s roads outside the towns like an expressway, and in the case of the back road to Decorah, that habit can get you into a lot of trouble. It’s excellent for police, though—the stretch of road that leads from my employer’s office to Cresco is an excellent spot for state police to set up speed traps. They have their choice of perpetrators, provided they can keep up with how fast the perpetrators are driving to get them to pull over.
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