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.