Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but not in that order

I’m sitting in a train station in La Crosse, Iowa, waiting for an Amtrak train to take me to Chicago, off to the side, typing on my computer. I’ve got time to kill—the man in the ticket booth told me when I got here the train had been delayed by two and a half hours, and the first thing I thought was, “this would never happen at an airport,” even though it does all the time. Still, airplanes wouldn’t be delayed in weather like this, the sunny spring weather that is starting to get just a bit uncomfortable for long sleeved shirts. There are clouds in the sky, but the sun is so brilliant that they all get faded out somehow, so that the sky is a washed-out cerulean, which transitions to green tree-tops, rather than the sharp contrast that is so eye-striking on a clear day.

In fact, the train station couldn’t be a more stark comparison to the airport if it tried. While my apartment says 1920s, this train station seems like it was constructed in the 1950s. I’m not quite sure what strikes me as being 1950s about this place. It has a high ceiling with support beams dividing each section into squares, and in each square a brass light fixture juts down. The benches around the edge of the station and bisecting it remind me of pews. Old, dark pews. You might expect people to be praying rather than waiting for the train.

What really drives home the oldness, though, is the semi-circle ticket office, with its yellow-brown stone base, mini counter and stained wood divider. Two ticket windows are in the center, with a brass cage protecting the Amtrak employee from his clientele. It’s rather ornate, actually, and “TICKETS” is etched into the brass. It’s actually rather calming to be here.

Airports, though, are ultra-modern. They feature the latest in design and architecture, and just walking through an airport makes me feel like I’m a man who is going places, an up-and-comer. Partially, this is due to the fact that everyone is going places in an airport, and everything in an airport is geared toward helping you get where you are going and helping you pass the time while you’re waiting to get where you’re going. When you look at the prices you also get the sense that the stores are there to soak as much money from you as humanly possible while still leaving you with enough cash to get home, but they’re at least trying to make your stay more pleasant.

In the La Crosse train station…I don’t feel like I’m going anyplace for the next two and a half hours. You don’t get a sense of how thoroughly air travel has won over train travel than when you sit in a train station.  Instead of bookstores there is a library of sorts where you can take a book at one location and leave it in another location. There is a restaurant here, but it won’t open until 11 am. And there are people here who look as though they just got done working on the farm or on the assembly line. This you would never see in airports. If the prices wouldn’t keep them out, the TSA definitely would. I suspect part of their mandate is to deny anyone with stained jeans access to the airport itself.

That’s what is nice about taking the train, though—you can travel long distances and just be a passenger, and it isn’t prohibitively expensive to do so. While I mostly travel by car, along with 99 percent of everyone else in America, I think the train gets neglected. Granted, this whole two-and-a-half hour delay is pretty irritating, especially when I think that I could be on the road and almost to the Iowa border right now. Not to mention that this is the earliest train available. Seriously, the first train on the schedule is over two hours late. If Congress could fix that little detail I think they’d make train travel much more attractive.

Okay, back to the advantages of traveling by—seriously, two and a half hours! Can you believe that? What could possibly delay the first train on the schedule by two and a half hours? How can I get a job where I can be two and a half hours late and it’s no big deal? Okay, obviously be an Amtrak engineer but still…

Okay, still, if you’re going on vacation in the United States and you are traveling across state lines, a train might be the best way to go, especially if gas prices keep going up. When I actually get on the train, I’ll write more.

The Old Apartment

In all the entries I’ve made, I have somehow failed to talk about my apartment. This is a crime, because my apartment is really kind of a hidden treasure.

My apartment is located on the second floor of a store that is a combination pharmacy and gift shop. It’s kind of impressive—walk in the front, and you have an old-fashioned gift shop, with painted wood signs, antique-ish knick-knacks, cookbooks featuring old-fashioned recipes, and a very large greeting card section that somehow serves as a transition to the pharmacy area. Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been in a pharmacy, and I can honestly say I have yet to see a combination pharmacy and gift store. Pharmacy and general store, yes. Pharmacy and medical supply store, yes. But a pharmacy and gift shop makes me think about what other combinations you could see. A pharmacy/deli would be a fun combination. So would a pharmacy/bookstore. For that matter, a combination pharmacy/fast food restaurant would be particularly appropriate—you could raise your cholesterol and lower it at the same time.

Fortunately, I don’t have to go through the pharmacy when I enter and leave. There’s a small door to the side, and in the front there is an old wooden staircase that has pretty much been sanded smooth from the time it was constructed. There’s antique wood paneling on the lower half of the wall, and a single light bulb provides illumination at the top of the landing. It should by all rights look cheap, but it doesn’t. Instead, it just gives off a sense of history. I get a very 1920s vibe from the place, although I’m not sure when it was built. But I say it was made in the 1920s, so there. If the House of Representatives can vote to not accept scientific findings on global warming, I’m well within my rights to say a building was constructed in the 1920s.

From the landing, there’s a door that leads to a hallway with a bank of four doors. Each apartment gets two, which is kind of extravagant. It helps that these doors also have an antique feeling, like they’ve stood the test of time. They’re darkly stained, have old-fashioned doorknobs with deadbolt locks, and glass windows that have been opaqued for privacy, which I don’t mind. Authenticity only goes so far. 

What is truly neat, though, is that on the apartment door nearest to the landing chipped and fading painted letters read “Doctor Field Waiting Room.” Apparently, both apartments were once a doctor’s office. I can tell this because in my bedroom there is a space that pretty obviously used to house a door. The fact that my apartment was once a doctor’s office charms me to no end. To me, things that have a history to them gives them character. I have a very nice leather jacket, for instance, I got at a goodwill store, and it is slightly scuffed. This pleases me to no end, because it obviously has some character to it, and it’s pretty sturdy. Also because the scuffing is pretty minor and the jacket is far from worn out. The apartment is the same way—it has character, but it is still useable. I should take a moment here to note that my mom also loves antiques, that she has a passion for it that has manifested in her having her own antique shop which is more or less an excuse to buy more antiques. It strikes me that I have started to become my mother, and if not for one key difference this would either send me screaming for the nearest therapist or convince me once and for all to take up something my mother never would, like skydiving or rap battles. That key difference is usability. That, and I’ve never made my family drive a thousand miles wedged in between an antique piece of furniture and the sides of a conversion van like human play-doh. (Yes mom, I still remember that trip.)

As for the apartment itself, it’s pretty simple—one bedroom, one bathroom, and one living room/kitchen. There are only two things really unusual about it. First, the ceilings are pretty high. At a guess I’d say at least twelve feet—maybe more. Then there’s the fact that the rooms are laid out in a line—living room, bathroom and bedroom. It’s an interesting setup. It also has five large windows in the living room, so a lot of natural light comes through. It’s a nice feature, the only problem is that the windows let me look out across the huge public parking lot instead of down main street. It’s not the most interesting view in the world. Granted, I can tell when the church across the street is having an event on Saturdays, or if one of the bars is more packed than usual during the weekend, but that’s about it. Still, they are windows and at least they let in the light.

The only real problem I have with my apartment was during the move-in phase. The best way to move furniture into my apartment is through the back, from the public parking lot, and up a set of steep steel stairs. It says something that I can feel a knot in my stomach just thinking about it. See, my parents performed an act of kindness akin to sainthood when they drove down to Iowa with all my stuff packed in a moving van since I had only a motel room and no leads for apartments when I got here. If that weren’t enough, they helped me to move my stuff into this apartment. If for no reason other than that, they should be canonized. My dad and I made at least thirty trips up those steep steel steps, and at the end of it all each step was an accomplishment in and of itself, and literally every muscle of our legs was screaming in agony. I hate moving for several reasons, but moving into this apartment was its own special kind of hell. When we went back to the motel room to rest, all of us were asleep, on the same bed, within five minutes and slept until roughly noon the next day. If I decide to spend the rest of my life here, rest assured it is not because I have fallen in love with the land or that I think I have the best job ever. It is because I am terrified of having to move out of this apartment. My parents are way too smart and have way too much survival instinct to help me move from here, and I can’t think of what I would have to bribe my brothers to get them to help. I could ask the people I know around here to help, but I am reasonably sure I would not remain friends with them afterward. Actually, I’m not sure I would remain friends with them through the entire moving project.

Still, I’m here for now, and I feel pretty good when I get to come home and feel like it is actually a home, not just some place I’m staying.

Wal-Mart and Alco

So, I mentioned that Decorah has a Wal-Mart. It’s on the outskirts of town, almost delineating the eastern border. There are a few shops past the intersection that leads to Wal-Mart, but they’re isolated outbreaks at best. When you hit Wal-Mart, you know you’re in the town proper.

While this may sound sad, Wal-Mart is my one real tether to the larger world in northeast Iowa. Okay, sounds sad nothing—that is sad. On the other hand, you can’t get new releases of DVDs anywhere else, and the magazine racks at Wal-Mart blow away the magazine racks at any other place in Decorah or Cresco. They also occasionally have a decent selection of Transformers (shut up).

I should admit up front that I’m not the biggest fan of Wal-Mart stores. My sense of fair play is offended when I hear the reports that they keep their workers at a part-time status to avoid paying benefits, that they snatch up illegal immigrants to pay them below minimum wage and that they occasionally try to build on sacred burial grounds, which I swear I am not making up. It doesn’t help their reputation that their prices attract the type of customer who would previously be found skulking between the aisles at a dollar store. If you go to a Wal-Mart, you’re not going to see the most affluent members of society. There’s already a website or two devoted to the “People of Wal-Mart” that showcases the Freaks and Geeks (mostly Freaks) you’re likely to find. If you want to see the real people of Wal-Mart, though, go to the cash registers. That’s where everyone has to count the cost of what they want, and you can see it actually hurts some people. I’ve seen women trying to control two children using an EBT welfare card to pay for some off-brand groceries that consist mostly of frozen food and entrees in bags, and the tired, defeated looks on their faces always gets to me.

However, recently another store in the Wal-Mart vein was built in Decorah. I can’t really call this store “big-box,” although it is boxy and it is the biggest store in Cresco. I think “medium-box” is a better adjective. Its  name is Alco, and if you haven’t heard of it, you’re probably not from around here. I have seen exactly one other Alco store since I’ve been living in northeast Iowa, and that was in a town just across the border in Minnesota, one that has the same design ethic as a 1980s K-Mart.

Alco is supposed to bring in people who want to shop at Wal-Mart, but don’t want to make the half-hour drive. It’s definitely an appealing concept. The problem is that, having been in Alco a few times, I don’t think people are going to be leaving Wal-Mart in droves.

The main problem is that the store seems more like a larger Dollar General or Family Dollar store than a Wal-Mart. Off-brand groceries, knock-off electronics, DVDs that you could get at other big box stores a few weeks before, and discount books that are usually featured in high-end bookstores “Last Chance to Buy” bin by the entrance, filled with the kinds of books you really don’t want to buy—cookbooks by now-dead celebrities, kids books and a disturbing number of self-help books covering fad diets whose time has passed, the best investment system in a pre-recession market and how to have a healthy and fulfilling life in a pre-recession market. Going through the Alco discount book bin is a uniquely depressing experience.

All this combines to create a sense that perhaps you are wasting your time shopping here, when you can drive half an hour to shop at Wal-Mart. It doesn’t help that, on the whole, Alco charges more per item than Wal-Mart.

That said, however, I have shopped at Alco before, in fact bought a couple discount DVDs there, and for a small town store it isn’t that bad. The big problem is that it is trying to be a small-town “big-box” store. They could have done much better for themselves if they had simply said they wanted to be the next step up from a dollar store, like the nearby Dollar General.

Going into the Dollar General is like going into a dollar store that has decided to pull itself up by the bootstraps. They’ve got a ton of discounted DVDs of blockbusters that were popular last year that nobody wanted, but they’ve also got a pretty decent selection of more critically acclaimed movies. I mean, where else will you find Slumdog Millionaire on the same rack as Transformers 2? And yes, Dollar General carries off-brand food and cheap clothes, the same way that Alco does. And Alco does carry things Dollar General can’t, like do-it-yourself furniture and outdoor furniture. Still, I think I’d rather go to the little store trying to be something more, rather than frequent the store trying to be the small-town version of an urban store.

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.

The post that's not about the Rubaiyat

This blog post was going to be about the Rubaiyat—one of Decorah, IA’s finest restaurants. To some extent, it still is. However, I went there with my brother Andy, and afterwards I realized the restaurant itself was actually kind of boring compared to how incredibly smooth my brother is.

Let me start—we went to the Rubaiyat on Easter morning for a nice brunch. The restaurant serves brunch from 10am—1pm, and they offer dining that either is gourmet, or it’s too close to tell. They’re located on Decorah’s main drag, Water Street, and they have a pretty classy façade. If it’s possible to judge a book by its cover, then you can definitely tell the Rubaiyat has class. I’m not entirely sure what makes it classy, though. It could be the sign above the restaurant that is elegantly understated. They have nice, large windows through which you can see the dining area and the bar, which is fairly impressive as bars go. More on that in a bit.

When you enter the restaurant, two things strike you. First, the bar. I’m not much of a drinker, but when you see thirty some-odd taps mounted on the wall next to the bar I think you have the right to be impressed. They had some of the established brands, like Miller and Busch, but they also had some with odder names, like Blue Moon, Fat Tire, Open Book, Stubbed Toe, Betty Ford, Dirty Sock and Erotic Magazine. This time around, at 11 am on a Sunday, they also had a Bloody Mary bar, where you can mix tomato juice, hot sauce and vodka with a celery stick. Normally, I think if you start drinking before noon you might want to admit you have a problem, but there were people up at the bar, pouring vodka into their tomato juice, giggling as they applied a dash or two of hot sauce, and then going on their way. It seemed only slightly less sophisticated than having a brandy after dinner, and I was thinking maybe I had stumbled onto something, some etiquette of the upper crust. I was tempted to have a Bloody Mary until I remembered that I hadn’t really liked vodka when I tried it, and I’ve hated tomato juice as far back as the first grade. I almost went for a glass of hot sauce and a celery stick, though, which should be a good indicator of how curious I was to try it.

The second thing that strikes you is the definition of “Rubaiyat.” Just hearing the word puts you in the mindset of rubies somehow, but instead it’s a poetry collection written by a Persian named Omar Khayyam, and it celebrates living life to the fullest, with a healthy dose of food and wine. Actually, it’s more about how good food and wine can help you live your life to the fullest. Most people just write about how good wine can help you find the joy in life, but Khayyam went further and included food in the mix. In fact, Khayyam penned the immortal couplet:

                                That is not dead which can eternal lie.

                                And with strange eons even death may die.

No, sorry, that’s the couplet from Abdul Alhazred and the Necronomicon. The actual couplet is:

                                A book of verses underneath the bough,

                                A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Granted, when Khayyam wrote these lines, over a millennia ago, he probably didn’t use words like “thou.” The poems were translated from Persian (Persish?) into English in the 1850s by a gentleman named Edward Fitzgerald. I don’t know about you, but dining at a restaurant named for an ancient book of literature is somewhat comforting. It speaks of class and a certain artistic approach to food you won’t find at, say, Big Bob’s Eat ‘n’ Leave.

So Andy and I settled into a booth and were presented with a nice menu with several decent choices. I had hollandaise sauce for the first time in years, and I enjoyed it immensely. Good hollandaise sauce is an art in and of itself. Yes, you can feel your arteries hardening as you eat, but the taste is worth it.

We had a great meal, and when the waitress delivered our bill, Andy said, “Hey, my brother and I were talking and maybe you can help us out—do cute waitresses get tipped more than other waitresses? I’m asking because you’re pretty cute, so do you get more tips than the rest of the waitresses?”

I  should point out that before the waitress came up we were actually talking about Swamp Thing.

The waitress, however, did not know this crucial bit of information, and was definitely caught off guard. She mentioned she hoped personality played a part in the tips she got, too, but was very nice toward my brother. Very nice. If he had written his phone number down on the check, this waitress would have called him wanting to know if he was free at any point during the rest of the year. She smiled at him as we walked out. Not one of those polite, friendly smiles, but a warm, caring, “you made my day” smile.

When we were in the car I tried to imitate Andy’s delivery of the line and came off sounding more like a Brooklyn pimp. “So, my brudder an’ I, we were talkin’ an’ maybe yous can help us out, eh?” (Yes ladies—I am single.)

It was shortly after that my brother had to leave for Pennsylvania. I watched him drive off, and I felt kind of lonely without him. I had a great time while he was here, and I loved getting out and exploring northeast Iowa with him, and just talking about random things, like whether or not Swamp Thing would earn more tips than the other waitresses.

The Magpie—it’s open

Over the course of the weekend, Andy and I ate at two nice restaurants. The first one we encountered was the Magpie.

The Magpie is a coffeehouse/deli that caters to students from the nearby Luther College. It goes out of its way to have an informal atmosphere, from the chalk-drawn menus to the social area in back where you can sit on couches, play board games and read magazines. It takes me back to my college days, when coffee houses were really starting to come into their own, and the stores were trying to figure out the right combination of intellectual appeal and informality to hit the current college demographic.

The menu, though, reads less like a coffeehouse menu and more like the menu you’d see at an upscale deli. They offer mostly sandwiches, but sandwiches with seven or eight ingredients, the type of ingredients that are so good they have to tell you about how they are cooked on the menu. You know, things like slow-roasted chicken, carmelized onions, chipotle mayonnaise, jalapeno butter, ciabatta roll, Panini bread, that sort of thing. If your mouth hasn’t watered at least a little bit on hearing those ingredients, you might want to call a doctor or a psychologist. Just sayin’.  They also offer some really unique side dishes, like potato salad or macaroni salad. Personally, I loved the iced tea, which was clearly brewed from some good tea leaves. Keep your Lipton’s Iced Tea that gets dispensed at the local soda machine. The iced tea at the Magpie has that very slight bite of bitterness that separates the merely okay teas from the very good teas.

Personally, though, I think the best feature about the Magpie is that it’s open after regular lunch hours. Andy and I had finished touring the Bily Clock Museum and driving around Spillville. I wanted to take Andy to a nice restaurant for a late lunch, since I’d told him about the plethora of nice restaurants in Decorah. We parked the car around 3 pm, then walked down a block or two until we got to the Rubaiyat, which closed down at 1:30, to open again around 5:00. Fine, I thought. They’re a fancy restaurant, they can do this. So we went across the street to another nice restaurant, which was similarly closed. Also fine, I thought. They’re also a nice restaurant, they probably only serve important people who know when to eat lunch and dinner, not two anarchists who think they can dine out at any point in the day it suits them.

I was not beat yet. I would take Andy to the backup plan of my backup plan, the La Rana bistro. We would go there, Andy would be suitably impressed by the menu, and we’d both marvel at how the restaurant was laid out, how it was built, and why the proprietor seemed so much like a Tom.

As we walked toward the La Rana, I could see the restaurant’ s door open. This was a good sign. I’m not ashamed to admit I smiled in triumph as I went in, following Andy, and saw a woman with short red hair and glasses, wiping down the bar. She looked up, and Andy asked, rather sarcastically, if they were open for business. At which point the waitress, either naturally or intentionally missing the sarcasm, apologized to us and said the La Rana was not in fact serving lunch or dinner, but it was offering drinks. Not wanting to drink our lunch, we decided to head to someplace that was actually serving food. One block over, we found the Magpie.

I am very happy to say Andy and I enjoyed the sandwiches we ordered, and the drinks were very good as well (coffee and iced tea, respectively). There wasn’t much in the way of waitresses, but we did have a very nice barista who refilled our drinks whenever we took them up. Seeing as how the distance from our table to the counter could be reached in about three paces, it wasn’t much of a hassle.  I have talked previously about having a cute woman to bring me lunch. A cute girl who will refill your iced tea? You know, I can live with that.