Border Town Search Part 1: State Line Road

I’ve mentioned before that Cresco is located quite near the border of Iowa and Minnesota. In fact, if you travel on Highway 63, there’s only one town, Chester, that comes before the border. However, and here’s the weird thing that I noticed while driving back from Rochester last week—the state boundary markers don’t match up. When you drive out of Chester, maybe a hundred yards out of town there’s a sign on the side of the southbound lane that proudly welcomes you to Iowa. Further down the road, in the northbound lane, a smaller sign welcomes you to the State of Minnesota. It’s a bit hard to judge the distances, but it feels like there’s at least a quarter mile of space between the two signs. The space in between is like a kind of no-man’s land, where no one lives except perhaps some cows, who are notorious for ignoring state boundary lines.

This was kind of curious, so I sat down after I got home and fired up Google maps. After all, the border between the two states had to exist somewhere, didn’t it? The map informed me that, yes, yes the border did exist. What’s more, in the area surrounding Highway 63, there was a road perched right on the border between the states, appropriately called State Line Road. I scrolled along State Line Road, and then came to another surprise. About 15 or 20 miles to the north of Cresco was a town called Florenceville, that put the town of Chester to shame when it came to being a border town. Florenceville was so close to Minnesota that it had apparently grown into a Minnesota town by the name of Granger, and the two were, for all intents and purposes, one town. The thought of seeing Florenceville and Granger drove me to get in my car and, paying no heed to the current price of gasoline, driving off to locate the border towns.

The first step in this trip was locating State Line Road, which was harder than I thought it was going to be. This is because State Line Road isn’t what you would call marked well, or even at all. It’s just a narrowish dirt road that is barely wide enough to hold two standard cars whose drivers are on very good terms with one another, and the turnoff is almost hidden by a copse of trees that are part of a smallish park that seems to exist for no other reason than because it is on the border of Iowa and Minnesota. To be honest, it’s a lot like the Four Corners Monument, the area where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, only much less impressive. For some reason, I could see my Mom and Dad stopping here on one of the vacations they would take my brothers and me on when we were growing up. We, meaning mostly my Dad until my brothers and I got old enough to drive, would go on vacations through the continental United States, and along the way we’d hit every attraction that a state could offer. There were lots of spectacular locations, but there were also a lot of small, little locations that my Mom would see, have my Dad stop the car, and we would get out and look at a plaque that commemorated a spot that seemed to meet the bare minimum standards for historical significance. I could see my family stopping by the State Line Wayside Park, with my Mom and Dad understanding the subtle wonder of seeing the border between two states, while my brothers and I wondered what was so great about standing among six trees and some shrubs that commemorated the state border.

Then there was the road itself. It was defined in a Zen-like way by its complete lack of significance. For all intents and purposes, it was just another dirt road in another rural area, with the occasional house cropping up on one side or the other. Sometimes I would see a farmhouse on one side, with a pasture where cows were grazing on the other, and I would realize that if that farmer owned the cows in that field, he’s traversing state boundaries every day of his life. Then I realized that, for said farmer, when he crossed from Minnesota to Iowa, it was probably morning, and when he crossed from Iowa back to Minnesota it was time for lunch or dinner.

Here’s the thing—I think I’ve been conditioned to think of crossing borders as a big thing. After all, borders can be pretty significant. Crossing borders from countries to countries means flashing your passport and having a customs inspector make sure you don’t break any of the byzantine rules that all countries seem to have on what can be taken where, and that’s just going from the United States to a friendly country. Then you have borders, say, between North and South Korea, or the border of the old Berlin Wall that are so foreboding they’re almost impassable. This isn’t even counting those invisible borders, like the one between childhood and adulthood, or the one between high school and college, or the border between an amateur and a professional. Crossing a border is supposed to mean something, and yet here I was, driving on the border itself and watching people treat it with all the meaning of crossing a road. I was so caught up in this that I didn’t notice when the road ended and I ended up in the middle of a large family farm. I smiled, tried to ignore the stares from the two or three adults who were wondering what this idiot was doing driving into their farm in a subcompact car, and turned around to try to discover what had become of State Line Road.

To Be Continued…

Fitness, Brew and Stew

One of the problems I’m starting to run into with this blog is that the more I get out and see all the neat and cool things around northeast Iowa, the less there is to actually write about. Perhaps more accurately, the harder I have to look to see what else is worth writing about out here.

Then there are the times when something practically bites you. This happened to me back in January, when a pleasant young woman at the Cresco Fitness Center told me about the “Take Your Time” Triathalon. This is a competition where you have to essentially run a cross between a marathon and a triathalon over a period of four months. By the time April 28 hits, the contestants have to run 100 miles, swim 10 miles and do 200 miles on a bicycle, stationary bike or elliptical If you manage to do this, at the end you get a t-shirt saying you completed the triathalon. It’s a good way to get yourself to push your limits, and I think the DSM IV also has it listed as a symptom under several different types of insanity. Nevertheless, I decided to sign up. I’d like to say it was because I wanted to push myself, but it was mostly because I can already swim a mile at a time in the Fitness Center’s pool, and I assumed that since I had no trouble swimming, how hard could running be? After all, if you go by the distances swimming is 10 times as hard as running. So how hard can it possibly be?

Right now it’s close to the end of March, and I really want to go back in time, grab my three-month-younger self’s head and bang it against the wall a couple times until he comes to see the idiocy in that statement. Actually, since I was sick at that time, probably not. Maybe just a long, stern talk instead. Regardless, for the past week or so I’ve been running three miles a day and biking six miles, breaking the monotony by lifting some weights. Up until this point, the aerobic exercise was a bookend, and the weight lifting was what I focused on. Still, I can say without reservation that running is just as tiring as swimming. It’s also a lot harder on the knees and the shins. At this point in the triathalon my shins feel as though they’re made of thin glass, and if I put too much pressure on my shins my tibia and fibula will snap in two like dry twigs. I don’t know how people who run regularly put up with this. They must have shins reinforced with titanium.

In the middle of this triathalon is St. Patrick’s Day, and with it comes what has come to be a Cresco tradition—the Brew and Stew. For the uninitiated, the Brew and Stew is a 5K fun run/walk, or a 15K bike ride. It goes around the south side of Cresco, and cones back to the center of town, where willing participants can then hit one of the five or six bars within walking distance until walking is no longer an option. The American Legion, also within walking distance, has some Mulligan Stew, for the people who want a bit more of an Irish experience that doesn’t have to do with drinking, scandalous as that may sound.

Much as I would like to say I participated in it this year, I have to admit I didn’t. Mostly, this was because I didn’t want to end up running in the cold, as I thought March 17 would be just starting to warm up when I first got the chance to sign up back in February. I could have signed up the day of the Brew and Stew, but as that would have been twice as much as the original, I decided against it. Besides, after running, I have come to realize there are two kinds of people—those who like to run, and those who don’t. If you like to run, you can enjoy being out in the county, feeling the breath in your lungs, the progress your body makes with each step, and the thrill of getting out and moving under your own power. If you don’t like running, you’re too busy gasping for air and forcing yourself to put that next foot forward, feeling each shockwave as your foot lands further destroy your shins, and you have to wonder if getting this far away from a comfy place to sit is a good thing or not. Ultimately, I went home and had a lovely dinner of Mulligan Stew, which was extremely filling, and some good old Irish soda bread. As I had corned beef last year and Mulligan Stew this year, I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing next time. Maybe seeing what I can do with potatoes. Or maybe I’ll forego the triathalon next year, and just let the American Legion take care of it.

Going Zen in the Middle of Nowhere

As penance for my anemic performance the last couple weeks, I decided to scour the list of things to do this weekend in Decorah. Admittedly, I was kind of hoping to counter the hectic pace of the past couple weeks by doing absolutely nothing. Maybe I’d play some video games or marathon a DVD set. If I was feeling really optimistic, I’d head to Decorah and catch “The Lorax” to indulge in the irony of a New Jersey resident playing the voice of the Lorax, who speaks for the trees. Still, I found something that promised to be interesting—a Winter Gala at the—get this—Ryomonji Zen Buddhist temple. I think only in Decorah would you see an Iowa Zen Buddhist temple. Maybe Des Moines, but saying  “The Zen Buddhist Temple in Des Moines,” feels like I’m disturbing the order of the universe on some fundamental level. Regardless, a Zen Buddhist temple would definitely be worth checking out. Thus it was that I got in my Aveo and putted off down the road in search of the Buddhist Temple.

The first thing to understand about the Ryumonji Zen Monastery is that it is an honest-to-goodness monastery, and it is registered in Japan at the Zen Headquarters as a formal temple. The second thing to understand about the Ryumonji Monastery is that it is not in Decorah, and I want to be very emphatic on this point. Dear Lord it is not in Decorah. Instead, it is located out in the wilderness, about as far away from everything as it could possibly be. There is a farm next to it, but other than that there is nothing but trees and fields. I drove down back roads I didn’t know existed, which isn’t that hard, and then the pavement ended and I was rattling down dirt roads, surrounded by hills, trees and the occasional cliff until I came to the road leading to the Monastery. Actually, “road” is somewhat misleading. It’s actually more of a narrow dirt driveway that gradually circles around the hill at an angle that is alarmingly close to forty-five degrees. As I drove up, I could hear my Aveo’s little engine struggling to get the rest of the car to the parking lot at the top. I downshifted until I was in first gear, and that was how I climbed the hill leading to the Ryumonji Monastery, at about five miles an hour my fingers gripping the steering wheel so hard they left indentations. I suppose the attendees of the Buddhist temple could use this time for contemplating mysteries of life and applying the Zen Buddhist teachings to this particular task. I, on the other hand, had a more rudimentary mantra that went something like, “Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap.” There was probably also a prayer in there to the Judeo-Christian God that if he would get me up this hill I would handle the getting down part myself. Finally, though, I arrived at the monastery.

When I got up there, I realized that every other car up there had a more powerful engine than mine. I also realized that I had been subconsciously underestimating the monastery. I was expecting something small. A pre-fab steel building, maybe, or a repurposed farm house. Instead, I was treated to a monastery that would look more at home in Tibet, which is not in Japan, but I have never seen a Japanese Zen monastery sitting on the mountains. The Ryumonji Zen Monastery was pretty immense, and I have no idea how they managed it. The building still looks new, except for the large metal bell in front, which has the greenish cast reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty. You could see this bell being rung constantly for decades, if not centuries. I felt like I should be wearing monk robes and sandals as I approached, not boots and a leather jacket. Then I opened the door, and found myself in a very Japanese-looking foyer. To my left were people browsing through a silent auction that included local craftsmen’s fares, some Buddhist items including a granite head of Buddha from China, and to my left…a duet playing what sounded like very slow polka music. Actually, I should say I don’t know for sure that it was polka music. The two musicians played the violin and the accordion, though, which is a surefire way to polkify any song. Still, if there was one type of music I wasn’t expecting to hear at a Buddhist temple, polka would be it.

Nevertheless, I took off my shoes and allowed a woman named Becky to lead me to a library that currently served as a small tea house, where I partook in a tea ceremony with a very nice woman who showed me how it was supposed to go. I ate a red bean paste bun to counter the bitterness of the macha tea, and I have to say that the sweetness and the texture take some getting used to. The best comparison I can draw is eating a raw pie crust sweetened with sugar. Then I drank the tea, which was delicious. If you’ve never had macha tea before, I would heartily recommend searching for it at your nearest Asian food store. All the while I tried to figure out how it was that the woman across from me, who looked as though she should be pulling bran muffins from an oven in a farm house came to be here, dressed in a kimono, giving me an abbreviated history of macha tea.

It’s not a question I felt comfortable asking, though. Actually, it’s not a question you can ask anyone—“Why aren’t you the stereotype I expected?” is rude at best. When a stereotype gets blown out of the water, the best thing to do is sit back and revel in the world’s ability not to conform to your view of reality. So I wandered through the monastery, taking it all in. Along the way I had a vegetarian dinner that, while delicious, left me somewhat unfulfilled, as though a cheeseburger could have tied the whole meal together.

Other points of note include what one might call the training center, a series of twelve wide cots that also serve as meditation chambers, all centered around a tall altar. Its purpose is to house Buddhist monks as they train for however long they need to train. That’s right, the Ryumonji Monastery is set up to be a pilgrimage destination. I almost had to laugh when I heard this, because for the life of me I couldn’t imagine Buddhists in, say, Osaka talking amongst themselves and saying, “You know where we really need to go to further our spiritual awakening? Iowa!” On reflection, though, given the unlikelihood of the monastery existing at all and the number of people who attended the ceremony, perhaps it wasn’t that unlikely. Also, given the nature of Zen, where better for a Zen Buddhist temple to exist than the middle of nowhere?

If nothing else, the meeting at the Buddhist temple filled me with optimism and a renewed sense of wonder for the Driftless region. I admired these Buddhists for their tenacity and perseverance, although I still indulged in a long, meaningful conversation with God about the existence of miracles and whether I might be entitled to a handful as I drove my car down their deathtrap of a driveway.