Christmas in Cresco: A Pictorial

I haven't really had the chance to upload many pictures onto this blog, despite some urging from friends and family. This is partially because uploading photos onto this blog is a pain and causes the site to crash more often than not. It's also partially because I'm lousy at remembering to take photos.

So, this is a way to make things up a bit. Here are some pictures of Cresco decorated for Christmas. Happy Holidays!

A house on Highway 9. It's not a big house, but it's on a lot of property and the owner loves Christmas lights.

Beadle Park on the corner of Main Street. Note the decommissioned train in the background.

More of Beadle Park. This one shows the frontier cabin, preserved as it was in the 1800s.

The most festive funeral home ever.

The Howard County Courthouse, all lit up for the season.

Even the second-story apartments have lights put up!

Trees have been decorated on Main Street.

Another Main Street shop with a very festive light display!

Surviving Winter in the Midwest

This year has not been a typical winter in northeast Iowa. There has barely been any snow, and the temperatures, while cold, aren’t as bone-chilling as they have been in years past. In my first ever winter out in Iowa, I went to my car, started it up, and the external thermometer read -10. This was the first ever time I had seen the gauge dip below zero, and I thought for a few moments it was malfunctioning. This turned out to just be the product of wishful thinking and a very sheltered life.

Winter in Iowa is synonymous with extreme cold and nasty blizzards, even though right now there’s very little of either. For now, the only real threat the weather has thrown at northeast Iowa is a thick blanket of fog that comes down heavy on the weekends. Not so much like the little cat feet Carl Sandburg wrote about, but more like a giant hand while cars and people move about under its smothering embrace like ants. In this way and this way only is northeast Iowa like London.

So for now the residents of northeast Iowa are all breathing a sigh of relief. Farmers, landlords and construction workers are putting in extra time to get just a few more projects done before the inevitable winter storm hits and shuts things down until the temperature rises and the inevitable snow melts.

Until that happens, I’d like to list five ways that Midwesterners use to survive winter. While these are most useful in rural areas, cities will probably also get some use out of them, although cities in general can take the battering of a snowstorm better than smaller towns. Also, if you don’t live in the Midwest, I can’t guarantee that these will work.

Step One: Be Prepared – When November hits, good preparation is a requirement. I won’t go into the multiple and various steps farmers have to take because I know nothing about them, but I will say that farmers are up until late at night and begin early the next morning getting their fields ready for winter. According to one farmer, he spends twelve to fourteen hours a day working, except during the winter when he only works eight. I’ve said it before and I will say it again—farmers are some of the hardest working people on earth.

Even if you don’t have an outside project that needs to get done, you need to start preparing. Breaking out the winter clothes is a good first step. So is getting your car winterized. Make sure you’ve got a working shovel or a snowmobile handy, too, unless you happen to live in an apartment building. Then you just have to make sure your landlord has one. If you’re more than a few miles away from a town you might want to make sure that you get some grocery shopping done before the storm hits, and you will definitely want to make sure you have enough wood or gas to get you through the winter.

Step Two: Learn to Drive – Idiots are on the road almost immediately following a really bad snowstorm. You’ll be able to see them in ditches every so often on the road, giving the nearest garage a call to send out a tow truck, or if they’ve had particularly bad luck, they’ll be inspecting the vehicle in front of them to find out just how bad the damage really was.

No one will argue that these people are idiots, including the people themselves. “I was such an idiot!” they’ll say, and the people to whom they are talking will nod right along with them, only it will be an understanding, sympathetic nod because everyone driving in winter is a potential idiot. Let’s be clear, this is not the type of idiocy that compels someone to link the death toll in an earthquake with the number of abortions performed that year or something like that. This is the type of idiocy that no one can escape, and during the winter it starts with the first time you get in your car in the winter. You have to learn what the right speed is on each road every time you drive on it, not to mention how well your brakes will be working, whether or not you can expect black ice on the road and how bad the snowdrifts are going to be. It’s not easy, even with a vehicle that was built to handle tough weather.

Step Three: Enjoy it – Really, the big secret about winter that no one talks about is how much fun it can be. When I go home and spend Christmas in Michigan with my family, we will be all bundled up in my mom and dad’s house, and we will be having a blast playing board games and drinking some holiday tea that my mom has brewed. We’ll be opening presents, swapping stories and in general having a wonderful time. When we go outside, we’ll be going on hikes through the forest that surrounds my mom and dad’s house, and we might go on a sleigh ride, too.

Yes, winter has its difficulties, but the ice on the road also means that ice-skating is at hand, and a lot of snow also means that you can go out skiing, snowshoeing or snowmobiling. There are some great opportunities out there, and really all it takes is looking at the weather in the right way.

Then again, complaining about the weather can be fun, too.

Iowa After Dark

The trip, honestly, wasn’t that eventful—just another drive back to Iowa from Chicago, where I had spent Thanksgiving with my mom, dad, brother and brother’s wife, also known to friends as Jay and Natalie. While Thanksgiving is usually held at my parent’s place in northern Michigan, I think Chicago is a very close second place. It’s fantastic, at least in part because Jay is an avid boardgame collector. Our family definitely plays together, and thanks in part to Jay we were treated to a host of games. I brought some as well that I love and that went over semi-well with the family, but Jay clearly has the talent for seeking out general audience games that are easy to learn but still challenging, games like Thurn and Taxis, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic and Forbidden Island. There are a lot of other great things to do in Chicago, pretty much all of which I didn’t go to because of the cast on my foot, which is yet another incentive for me to heal quickly.

However, the fun eventually ended, and it was time for me to drive home. To those of you who haven’t driven from Chicago to Cresco, I want to give you a few facts that will put the journey in focus. First, the trip takes about six hours by car. It may take less time depending on your level of respect for the speed limits on the endless back roads between Cresco and Chicago. Second, there are three routes you can go, all of which take roughly the same amount of time. You can debate the efficiency of expressways versus the more direct backwoods route, but personally I prefer the route that takes me up to Madison, and then a more or less straight shot to Iowa, albeit the kind of straight shot that twists and turns along state highways and snakes through about five or six small towns that crop up randomly like whack-a-mole heads.

The third fact is that the drive to Chicago and the drive to Cresco are not the same trip. For me, the feeling I get when driving to Chicago is one of anticipation. Leaving Cresco behind and traveling down the back roads until I come across the expressway to Chicago is exciting. The small towns on the road fly by, with just a touch of activity to them. A couple friends stand around talking as their beat-up pickups guzzle gas at the Kwik Trip, and down the road a couple goes into the local Mom and Pop restaurant for some baseline American restaurant food with the occasional exotic menu item like the “Asian Chicken Wrap.” Then you get to Chicago itself. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Chicago is just as much of an insomniac. There are always other drivers on the roads in Chicago, and even after midnight there’s plenty to do. Sometimes I get the notion that living in Chicago would be great, if not for the fact that you have to accept that living in Chicago is worth paying a good 30-40% more for everything.

The towns have an entirely different feel to them when I drive back to Cresco from Chicago, though. The towns are more or less entirely closed for business, and if you need some gasoline or stop at a fast food restaurant, the odds are good that you’ll be one of two, maybe three customers while the staff, mostly teenagers,  at either place tries to keep busy while waiting for their shift to end. To go from the Other City That Never Sleeps to The Comatose Town With Occasional Signs of Life can be jarring, a kind of cognitive whiplash if you will and perhaps a sign that I may be in the wrong place.

Between the sleepy little towns, though, is darkness. Not the kind of darkness you get with a city, where it is held back by an army of streetlights and muted by the ever-present stream of honking horns, sirens and automobile engines that rise and fall in pitch as they drive past. This darkness is all-pervading, threatening to get into your car and suck out the light from your dashboard and radio. It reminds you how powerful it is when you turn off your headlights and drive for a hundred feet or so. In cities, you can drive for an hour and be entertained by a bevy of radio stations, several large-screen TV billboards and of course hundreds of other motorists. In the country, there’s very few discernable objects between one town and another. In cities and on expressways, distances at night can be interesting, or at least uneventful. In the country, though, distances are keenly felt. I can understand why some people would prefer to remain in a small town, really instead of having to drive for hours through nothingness.

This is not to say that there is absolutely nothing to see. A couple of times on the backroads I saw some farmers at work in their Green and Yellow tractors, halogen lights blazing as they hauled hay bales and wagons around the farm. It’s not a sight I get to see often, usually because I’m in bed well before that happens. In fact, most people who aren’t farmers are in bed during that time. When you’re up late, though, and wishing you were just at your apartment already, it’s eye-opening to see just what kind of effort these farmers are putting in. They don’t have regular hours, and they don’t exactly get breaks. Instead, they do whatever needs to be done, whenever it needs to be done. Farmers can’t really schedule tasks, either. They deal with whatever has to be done at the time, no matter how big it is. I could sympathize, as I raced home to be in my own bed in my apartment in Cresco.