Houses and Graveyards

I should preface this entry by saying there are things to do in northeast Iowa. Lots of things. On the other hand, when you are a comic book aficionado and the nearest comic book store is down in Cedar Falls, you take Highway 63 to the borderlands of northeast Iowa, which is how I spent my Saturday.

The last time, I talked a lot about Waterloo and Cedar Falls, but precious little about Highway 63, which is kind of a shame because you stumble on some interesting mysteries of rural life when you drive down it.

I’ve already mentioned Highway 63’s split personality, where sometimes it is a 55 mph highway and other times it is a four-lane 65 mph expressway. What I don’t recall writing about is the surprising number of houses that are right off the highway.  Most of the time you’ll be looking at the endless fields and buildings off in the distance, and then suddenly you see a house. With one exception, I’d estimate they are all around 30 yards back from the road, which seems like a lot until you see a house sitting there as you fly by.  It makes me feel like an intruder somehow—when you drive past houses in a city, the highway is usually separated from the houses somehow, even if it’s just a backyard. But these houses sit with their fronts to the road, beckoning to hundreds of faceless strangers going much too fast to really consider stopping.

These houses always make me curious. How long have they been here? Were they here first? Did they want to be located right next to the highway in the middle of nowhere? I could see a number of scenarios. It was likely the owners had been living here for some time. The highway is confused enough as it is, and that could be the result of the Department of Transportation figuring out just where it could be an expressway and where it couldn’t. It’s not like Highway 63 passes through towns, just by houses. Imagine waking up one morning to discover people can drive 65 mph by your house! So much for needing an alarm clock to wake you up. So much for going to sleep, for that matter.  The people who live there either have to be insomniacs or the soundest sleepers in Iowa.

I’m not sure why people would choose to keep living there, to be honest. I’d feel too exposed. But then, being exposed is part of prairie life. I suppose being able to see your neighbor’s house from five miles away isn’t so different from having cars zip by your house when I think about it.

Slightly harder to explain are the graveyards I see by Highway 63. There are two or three very old graveyards, which you can tell without having to examine them too closely. Some wonderful gothic headstones mark the graves, and a lot of them have been worn away by time and the elements. This I can understand. Like the houses, they were probably here before the highway grew into what it is now. However, then there are the two or three new graveyards. The property has been marked out, but the graveyards have yet to break the double-digit threshold. And like their older counterparts, they lie by the side of the highway. I don’t have it on good authority, but I can imagine that people follow the driving laws pretty closely when they drive by those patches of land. The state police should designate the property next to these graveyards as self-check points where you can go to make sure you’re following all the laws, down to testing the visibility of your headlights. For that matter, they should put neon lighting around the grave markers of everyone who died in a traffic accident.

The thing is, I’ve driven past graveyards before. The majority are not along a highway, not in the middle of nowhere  and if they fulfill any of the previous two conditions they have something more solid separating the graveyard from the road than a thin wrought iron fence. I don’t understand why whoever is in charge of placing graveyards chose to place the new ones next to the road. I also wonder how the people who live in houses next to the road feel about the placement of these graveyards, and what they think it says about their houses. Regardless, I will not pick up hitchhikers on Highway 63. I know that picking up hitchhikers is risky in general, but on a road where graveyards are just to the side there’s a whole new dimension of risk involved, not the least of which is falling for a beautiful woman to whom you give a ride and then discovering she died twenty years ago. Talk about falling in love with someone unobtainable…

I can’t let this entry end without mentioning the creepy phenomenon of people putting up crosses and makeshift memorials on the roadside where people have apparently died. I get that this marks the spot where the person was last alive, but if there is one thing I don’t want to do to a spot where someone I loved died it is to sanctify that land. Also, if you die in a traffic accident I can’t imagine that your last moments would be altogether pleasant. If I happen to die away from home and anyone wants to commemorate me, set up a shrine in the manga section of the nearest Barnes & Noble. I’ll feel a lot better about it.

Outside of the creepiness, some of the memorials can be a little frightening just by their location. There is a 20-foot cliff face as I take Highway 9 along the outskirts of Decorah that has 20 crosses at the top, gazing out over the motorists. For the life of me, I do not know how a person died up there, particularly if they were driving a car.

Then there are the roadside memorials that spring up in more common places, like in the depression next to a curb or on the side of a stretch of road that has clear visibility and no sign of a curve or intersection for miles. If you ever need your dose of paranoia fuel, that last one is particularly high-octane. I can think of a few ways someone would wreck their car on a straight patch of road, and a lot of them are out of my hands.

For all that, though, I did get to Cedar Falls and back with no accidents, no events, and enough reading material to keep me occupied for a week at least. Of course, I may not have a lot of time to get to them this week. There’s a fair in town, and wait until I tell you about that!