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…

A Post About Sundays

  For the first time in a while, I don’t have anything to write about. Not that this is a bad thing, and not that I’ve finally run out of topics, but it’s Monday evening and I’ve finished exercising and at this point nothing interests me quite as much as lying on the futon or my bed and going to sleep.  Still, the blog must have its entry. So what I’ve decided to write about is a uniquely Midwestern topic—Sunday.

For me, Sundays are not bad. I wake up fairly early, drive an hour to Rochester, Minnesota to practice Kendo for an hour and a half at the YMCA, stagger out at the end, and either have lunch or take in a movie at Rochester’s southernmost mega cinema, then drive back to Cresco and enjoy a Sunday afternoon. It’s rather peaceful, with the exception of the hour and a half of martial arts practice.

The Midwest seems to feel the same way about Sundays, northeast Iowa in particular. Very few shops are open in Cresco and Decorah on Sunday. The chain stores are open, yes, and they close up respectably early on Sunday, but the town grocery store is closed on Sunday. It’s a little jarring if you discover you’re out of, say, chicken for your chicken salad sandwich and decide to make a quick grocery run. The nearest place that resembles a grocery store would be the Wal-Mart in Decorah, about a half-hour away. I don’t mind this, per se—going into a Wal-Mart is the easiest way to feel like you’re in a bigger town than you actually are, and I highly recommend walking through one if you get homesick for your city. Still, the difference between a two-block walk and a half-hour drive is about an hour’s difference. Besides, once I go into a Wal-Mart after driving a half-hour to get there, I feel the need to actually buy some things to justify driving half an hour to get there. I say this to offer a partial explanation for why, in one trip, I bought Romeo Must Die from the five dollar movie bin.

I can’t complain too much about the towns closing on Sundays, though, even though it can be aggravating to have the newest Decorah bookstore always be closed on Sundays, when you most feel like taking the time to walk into a bookstore and browse. Having the town close down, though, gives a sense of peace that urban areas have to work harder to obtain. When you walk the streets of Rochester on a Sunday, for instance, you see people walking with purpose, from one place to another. If you go into Rochester’s mall, you’ll see thousands of people all hurrying to get their shopping in, their meals eaten and the mall’s selected entertainment of the month experienced before the weekend ends. It’s entertaining to see how orderly hectic a mall is on the weekend, but only if you are not a part of it.

Walking down Decorah’s main street, though, is much more relaxing. You have some people parked on the street and you do meet a few people, but they aren’t hurrying anywhere. They’re strolling, which is becoming a lost art not even practiced by parents pushing strollers. These people are going somewhere, and they do feel the need to get to their destination. It doesn’t control them, however. They don’t have a reservation they need to guard like lions guard their kill on the veldt. They don’t place more value on the destination than the journey. Instead, they’re enjoying the walk, looking at other people and smiling at some of the more standalone shops on the main street. You can enjoy yourself walking in Decorah. When you get to Rochester, you just need to be at your destination. Which is a shame, as I think Rochester could do with more people who strolled through it.

Actually, the Mayo Clinic is a fine place for strolling. If you happen to walk through it during the day, you’ll see several people who are patients there, or they have people they know who are patients, and when you are in either group, you have to wait. Wait for tests, wait for the diagnosis, wait for the cure to work or wait to die. The waiting can drive you insane if you aren’t careful, and the people at the Mayo Clinic seem to have recognized this. This is why the hallways are lined with art and sculpture, from abstract streaks of paint on twenty-foot tall canvases to intricately-carved sculptures of children on dolphins. The lobbies even have grand pianos that invite anyone to play, and several classically-trained pianists come along in a week, playing a concerto. Occasionally, they bring friends with other instruments, and the melody lingers in the hallways, encouraging people to continue strolling, until the waiting is done. As a visitor it can be quite pleasant.

I’m not sure which state I prefer.  I love strolling, and I think it’s a shame that people don’t stroll more often.  I do, however, love sitting in a public square and watching people hurry to and fro, leaving somewhere on their way to somewhere else. For me, it’s a calming, comforting feeling, that there are thousands of happy people in this area, busy living their lives and going to someplace that, hopefully, will fulfill them somehow, even if it’s just to the drugstore to buy a soda.