Summers at the Dolce Vita

The first time I saw Dolce Vita was a couple years ago, when we gathered for the annual employee dinner. It was a nice-ish restaurant that could only be reached by taking a side road across a one-lane bridge and following it as the pavement disappeared and it snaked up a hill. When I started keeping this blog I knew I’d have to write about it again, because there is absolutely no good explanation for why the owner decided to put it there.

Granted, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a restaurant in an odd place. If you take the right road from Rochester to Decorah, you’ll see a combination gas station/convenience store/restaurant that also happens to be part of a farming co-op, with a barn, silos and more tractors than you thought could exist in the same area. Not to mention in northeastern Michigan there was at least one restaurant located on a road that was definitely not well-traveled, and in an area where the nearest business was a gas station at least two miles away. However, both these restaurants were your typical “stop ‘n’ eat” places that didn’t really serve anything extravagant. Dolce Vita, on the other hand, is meant to be a fine dining destination, and most fine dining destinations are not quite so out-of-the-way.

Despite the restaurant’s location, it does serve really good food. Mostly it’s Italian, although the Dolce Vita has its share of sandwiches and the Kid’s Menu reportedly serves up a mean PB&J. However, during the summer, the big draw to the restaurant is its concert series. If you go to http://www.mcdolcevita.com/decorah-entertainment/decorah-entertainment.html, you can see all the bands that will be playing this summer. You may also see that, from the names of such bands as Buckhollow Band, Beet Root Stew and Big Daddy Cade, that the type of music tends toward blues, folk, and rock that is heavy on its blues and folk influences. Still, this was a wonderful opportunity. A fine dining restaurant in the middle of nowhere putting out a summer concert series? I’m in!

I ended up getting to the restaurant a bit late, owing to a visit to Cedar Falls to visit the comic book store in the early afternoon. I thought parking might be tight, but I was sure I could get a good parking place there, because how many people could this event draw, really? Longtime readers of my blog should already know the answer, and will not be surprised when I say that the parking lot was full, the sides of the road were filled up from sharp curve the sharp curve, and the owners of neighboring properties had posted barricades across their drive warning concert-goers not to park there.

I managed to find a tight spot next to a dumpster, and in no time whatsoever I was walking to the small concert stage, surrounded by all of Decorah’s Patrons Of The Arts. The band was playing some jazz-tinged blues song, and the crowd was busy sipping beer and socializing under the canvas tents. Some people were even inside eating!

To be honest, this felt less like a concert and more like a wedding reception. Sure, the band was the main focus, and while I’m not an expert on jazz and blues they definitely kept the crowd entertained. A good four or five people were in the courtesy space that usually separates a band from the audience, dancing as the spirit moved them. Off to the side, a spate of very cool twentysomethings sat, chatting and smoking, obviously digging the scene.

As far as the food, I settled for a Cajun dish, and despite the fact that I was in Iowa it was quite good. I wish I had more to report, but I have to be honest, it was a nice restaurant, nice food, decent music and a surprising turnout. You could definitely do worse on a Saturday night.

Graduations and Get-Togethers

Spring is turning into summer here in northeastern Iowa. It probably does this in other parts of the world as well, but for now we’re focused on Cresco, where school will be getting out for the summer, which can mean only one thing—open houses.

Open houses are wonderful things, for those unfamiliar with them. It’s a great excuse to get out and meet people, and also you’re getting a copious amount of free food. I can remember my high school graduation open house where, even after lots of family and friends visited we had enough food left over to feed our family of six for at least two or three dinners, since when you have four teenage boys food lasts about as long as a snowflake in Saudi Arabia.

When you go to an open house in a small town, there are two things that are unavoidable. First, you are going to know several people there. Second, you’re going to find out that some people know each other in oddly unexpected ways. This was how, for instance, I found out that two coworkers who had almost nothing to do with each other in the workplace knew each other because one coworker’s brother was the manager at the local bank where the other coworker did most of his banking. On any other day you would assume that the two coworkers had a passing familiarity with each other, but then you get the one coworker’s brother in the mix and the dynamic totally changes. It’s a type of alchemical reaction you rarely see anymore, since in larger towns and cities social groups are more separated.

An open house in a small town is also an interesting way to gauge closeness to someone you know. Let’s say, for instance, Coworker A puts out an open invitation to an open house in your town. Coworker B, who lives in the town 20 miles away, also puts out an open invitation. You can safely go to Coworker A’s open house as an invited guest—you live in the town, you’ll probably know some folks and you won’t feel completely weird about it. With Coworker B, though, you have to be a bit more thoughtful. The town 20 miles away has its own society, and the people there have their own relationships. If you go there, who exactly will you be talking to? Sure, it’s nice to chat with people about what their town is like, but you’re also an outsider at an event where family and friends want to get together to chat and reminisce a bit. If you’re like me and hate reminiscing, you’re going to think twice about showing up for anything other than the much-vaunted “token appearance,” where you stop by, say hi and have a plate of food before disappearing. In a lot of ways, having a plateful of food is actually doing the host of the open house a favor, although not technically approved by Miss Manners.

Perhaps it’s just the season, but I’ve also started seeing several notices for get-togethers and benefit dinners. One person was burned in a factory accident. Another person is suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s hard to come up with anything funny to say about that, and even if I could I’d have to accept the fact that I’d be a pretty terrible person to make a joke about people getting together to help a friend out. Also—it’s just admirable. Both in how the community comes together and the extent of these benefit dinners. For about five to ten dollars, you can not only get a large dinner, but there’s also a dance or a concert. On at least one occasion, the band performing was a quasi-professional country band! I feel secure in saying Cresco takes their benefit dinners seriously.

Travel, Travel and More Travel

First, let me apologize for missing last week’s post. I hadn’t encountered anything spectacular to write about, and I tried to come up with something while trying to balance a stiff work schedule, some other hobbies and getting over a trip to Chicago while at the same time preparing for another weekend trip. The result? Tuesday came and went, then Wednesday, then Thursday. By Thursday evening I was still telling myself that there had to be something interesting I’d seen, but I really didn’t believe it any more, similar to how some middle-aged men tell themselves that a sports agent will see them shooting hoops in front of their garage and sign them up to the Detroit Pistons.

Which leads us to this blog entry, where I again try to come up with something interesting about Iowa and proceed to fail yet again, because I haven’t spent any appreciable time searching for anything. Instead, I’d like to talk about travel. Specifically, car travel.

In the past four weeks, I have drive to Chicago three times. From Iowa. If you consider that each drive is about six hours, then I have driven a whopping thirty-six hours combined. I have to admit, I now have no idea how truckers do it. Yes, occasional trips to Chicago are quite nice, and the first trip was really pleasant since I avoided the tollway completely. The Illinois Tollway system doubled its prices at the start of the year, and while I’m not blind to the realities of inflation and increased costs, jacking the prices up by 100 percent is a jerk move of the highest order. I’m confident that the lion’s share of this toll increase won’t be going to maintain the roads. So I’m starting to consider it a point of honor to take a route that doesn’t leave you at the tender mercies of the Illinois Tollway, which is a lot like being at the tender mercies of a serial rapist. Actually, that’s not quite correct—at least a serial rapist understands he’s doing a bad thing.

So I drove the expressway in Wisconsin to a highway that led into Chicago where my brother lives, and while it probably did take longer, it was more direct and it was in fact interesting to witness how a few buildings started to become loosely-connected shopping centers, then finally main drags until the buildings and shopping centers and main drags coalesced into the outlying suburbs of Chicago. My brother tells me this is known as “Chicagoland” by the people who actually live in the Chicago area, but if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of the region you could be excused for calling it all “Chicago.” Let’s be honest, by now the cities and suburbs have been grafted together with housing developments and shopping centers. To call one suburb “Des Plaines” and another “Mount Prospect” has as much meaning as figuring out just where the dividing line is between indigo and purple.

The second trip to Chicago was tollway-free as well. On the other hand, it also took me through downtown Chicago and on the Dan Ryan expressway on a Friday night. I can confidently say I never would have made it through this if it weren’t for Lori, who knew her way around the city. We drove through a lot of areas in Chicago that I have strenuously tried to avoid, most notably the downtown area, and I can safely say that my little Aveo would have ended up being scraped off some SUV’s grill if it hadn’t been for her. It’s not that the entire drive was a hellish nightmare of roads designed by MC Escher, though. Lakeshore drive was fairly pleasant, and some of the residential areas were nice, if crowded on both sides due to parking. Downtown, though...I’m trying to think how I would get around there without a state-of-the-art GPS system and years of experience. It’s like trying to navigate through a labyrinth with one-way streets. And the Dan Ryan expressway was a seething mass of taillights marked by the occasional spurts of movement wherein drivers would aggressively nose their way in to different lanes. Combine that with one or two streets that require leaps of faith to make sure they are still there when you turn onto where they are supposed to be at an intersection, and you can understand my point of view that the Blues Brothers was less of a car chase movie than giving two guys who had never been to Chicago before the keys to an old police cruiser and seeing what happens.

The third trip was, quite frankly, excruciating. I brought some of it on myself by catching the midnight showing of the Avengers movie in Decorah, and completing a six-hour drive on three hours of sleep is an experience. At some point when you’re running on very little sleep, your mind starts to realize you’ve gone beyond drowsy and begins shutting down cognitive portions of your brain in order to keep your concentration on driving. This happened to my brother Andy and me a few years ago, and by the time we had gotten to my brother Jay’s Chicago condominium the portions of our brains that could think of the past and the future had been shut down, leaving us in a Zen state of existence where there was only the present moment. In each second I would tell myself what I was going to do, as in, “Now I am going to grab the toothbrush. Now I am going to open the medicine cabinet. Now I am going to grab the toothpaste. Now I will apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush. Now I will begin to brush my teeth.” It was an interesting state of mind to be in, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone make the effort to achieve it as it could cause an accident, traffic or otherwise.

This was how I entered into Chicago for the third time—faintly buzzing on caffeine, my body shaking from the vibration of driving on the road, and feeling strung out in general. By the time I had reached my brother Jay’s new apartment I was feeling like a rag that had been wrung out repeatedly. I desperately wanted to sleep, but since it was only two in the afternoon I would have to wait for a bit. Like eight hours or so. Maybe this is why I was so unwilling to make the drive back, which took a lot more out of me that it otherwise might. Perhaps part of it was that I realized I had spent a total of thirty hours in the car. Part of it might also be that I was tired of the constant drain on my mind from having to be alert all the time. Either way, I ended up getting up to stop and stretch a LOT. Perhaps not every town,  but most of them. My legs were screaming at me to move them. My body was hinting heavily that finding a motel would be an idea on the scale of discovering the theory of relativity in terms of recognizing genius. Still, I pressed on, and eventually ended up back in northeast Iowa.

This weekend, I don’t plan on travelling anywhere. No big trips, nothing involving crossing any state line. This weekend is all about resting, relaxing, and finally getting the chance to clean my bathroom, which is impossible to do if you’re in a different state than it. There’s definitely no place like home.

Unless you can rest there for a couple days, that is.

The Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame, Part 2

 In the last entry, I had made my way into the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and was mingling with a crowd of barrel-chested men, as well as their families. Not being a barrel-chested man myself, there was no doubt I wasn’t going to fit in here, and that was pretty much case. The people that I did talk with were pleasant enough, but they knew and I knew I wasn’t exactly an amateur wrestling fanatic. 

I did strike up a conversation with a man who had the image of two wrestlers, one behind the other, with the wrestler in front seemingly on his hands and knees, and suddenly I found myself understanding how the Iowa Supreme Court could allow gay marriage—if one of the big sports in a state is two men grappling with each other for several minutes, that state isn’t going to be too grossed out by the idea gay sex. Also, didn’t the Greeks used to wrestle each other in the nude?

After mingling a bit, I sat at a table populated mostly by ex-wrestlers, but also by a couple named Mike and Bev Chapman, who publish a magazine called the Iowa History Journal (http://www.iowahistoryjournal.com/). There’s no other way to describe Mike Chapman other than to say he loves Iowa more than anyone else I’ve talked with. It’s not an arrogant type of love, either, where he believes that Iowa is the greatest state in the union, bar none. It’s the type of love that would inspire a man to go out and track down Miss Iowa from 1954 and 1956, who also went on to become Miss USA and Miss Universe, to interview her about her reign and what she had been doing since (marrying a Texas oil baron). To even have the capacity for those kinds of facts reveals a lot about a person.

Somewhere during this time, the meal was served. A thick pork chop, corn, salad, rolls and some kind of tort. I could go on for a bit about how I’ve had more and better food for the price tag, but I overheard some of the other diners rave about the food, and two things struck me. First, this was a meal that probably many an Iowa farmboy has sat down to over the years. Second, I was definitely not the target audience for the dinner. It’s obvious in retrospect—you have Iowa wrestlers from the northeast corner of the state coming to be at this induction ceremony, an area that is chock full of farms. What better way to honor the wrestlers of the region than by serving up a meal that could just as easily have come from the kitchen of their home? It was kind of nice if you considered it that way.

And then, the ceremony. I listened to the first inductee, one Bob Buzzard, talk about his experience wrestling in Iowa, and how his father trained him over the years in a way that would either make a great movie training montage or an incident report to Child Services. As he talked, I thought about what this meant. The people that were here for the induction ceremony had a love for amateur wrestling that would put some of the most die-hard Trekkies to shame. They more or less dedicated their lives to the sport, dragging their wives around with them wherever they went as they wrestled, coached other wrestlers, and in some cases tried out for international teams. Then, long after those days, they came to Cresco to be remembered. On one hand, it seemed futile. How can you put in all that time, all that effort, year after year, only to eventually give it all up? On another level, I felt sad for these people. They had dedicated their lives to this sport. Not for fame, and definitely not for money. Most people don’t get that kind of clarity in their lives, and if they do they usually devote it toward something like becoming rich or famous or making some technological or scientific discovery. Then there were the men who had devoted their lives to wrestling. It seemed like the crowd should be bigger, somehow. That the kind of effort the hall of famers put forth should be acknowledged, if nothing else.

The Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Part 1

Sometimes, coming up with new entries for this blog can be a challenge. I’ve got one more Cresco store that I think would make a good blog entry, and to be honest I’m saving that for when I really need it. In the meantime, do I go with the tourist attraction up the road, or do I see if any events go above and beyond the generally accepted scope of small towns?

Then there are the times where a blog-worthy event jumps out at you. The induction ceremony for the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame, blared out on the electronic billboard at the junction of Main Street and Highway 9, was one of those events. It was going on Monday right after work, and the short message also implied there was going to be a cocktail/social hour and dinner before the ceremony took place. This is great, I thought. Now I get to see what the Iowa Wrestling scene is all about!

As I’ve mentioned before, my knowledge of wrestling begins and ends with Hulk Hogan. Okay, if pressed I will admit that I did sit around watching a few rounds of WWE and WCW television with my college roommate Donald, and that some of the background of pro wrestling lifts it from being the sport of trailer trash kings into a heady blend of circus sideshows and soap operas for men. Actual wrestling, though? As far as I knew, that was only a sport preppy high schools had, and that if you were very good at it you’d go on to compete in the Summer Olympics if the year were a multiple of four. So why not see what actual wrestling was all about?

The drive from my office to the Cresco Visitors’ Center, which also doubles as the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame, as long-time readers of my blog might know, takes about ten minutes. During that time, I reviewed what little I did know of wrestling in Iowa. At the Cresco Fitness Center, there is what you’d call “Pee-Wee” wrestling, which has nothing to do with Pee-Wee Herman and everything to do with kids around the ages of 8-11. I’ve seen a lot of high school students in the Cresco Fitness Center weight room, constantly working out and drinking water infused with protein powder afterwards, and there are few men in their 20s and 30s who drop their kids off at the swimming pool and hit the gym for an hour, keeping themselves impressively toned, as though they are just waiting for the Cresco High School to call them up and say, “Hey! There’s an emergency opening on our varsity wrestling team! Are you sure you graduated?” I mentioned before that there are precious few overweight people seen at the Cresco Fitness Center. Other than the obvious reasons why this might be, I want to point out that I think a lot of these people probably wrestled in high school, and now that they have gone and become adults, they still have the same habits and attitudes toward keeping themselves fit. It’s kind of admirable.

As I got to the Cresco Visitors’ Center, I noticed it was very, very quiet. Way too quiet, in fact. Weren’t they supposed to have an induction ceremony there or something? It was only when I talked with one of the people who runs the Visitors’ Center, a very nice woman by the name of Spiff Slifka, that the section of the induction ceremony that had taken place in the Hall of Fame itself was over. It lasted maybe about twenty minutes, and then people went to the Cresco Country Club to have a dinner and present the inductees. Okay, that was fair. The Cresco Visitors’ Center is nice, but it is a bit on the small side.

I was just turning to go when Spiff introduced me to two of the men on the Hall of Fame board. I smiled as I shook the hand of one massive mountain of a man, and another man in his sixties with a barrel chest and a grip that could turn an iron bar into a horseshoe. Holy crap, I thought. I kept on smiling politely, because pro wrestler or not, both of these guys looked like they could easily throw me through the front window if they got it in their minds to. Of course I’m kidding. They were both very civilized, and neither of them probably thought how easy it would be to bench press me more than once.

After some brief conversation, I drove down to the Cresco Country Club. This place really should get its own blog entry someday, as it is a beautiful golf course. The only setback is that I don’t play golf, and so don’t really have any great desire to play out there. Not that I’ve never played golf before, but it has been only of the putt-putt variety, and while I’ve gotten a hole in one a couple times, there have been a lot more times where I’ve gotten 15 on a 5-stroke hole. I’m pretty sure that actual golf requires more skill. However, the place definitely deserves a walkaround, and as the country club is gearing up for this year’s golf season, I may do that sometime.

The parking lot of the country club was packed to the point that I managed to cram my subcompact car into a tiny spot in front of the dumpster. For the first time I wondered about whether the Cresco Country Club could actually hold everyone, and I started to get a sense of the “Iowa” in “Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame.” They had invited everyone in Iowa who was passionate about wrestling to show up at the country club. That threw the entire trip into perspective for me. I found myself wondering about how Cresco of all places had come to be the home of the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. It’s not Des Moines, Davenport, Bettendorf or even Iowa City. To be honest, Cresco is out of the way, and probably a lot of what makes you want to come to the ceremony is whether you live in the northeast quadrant of Iowa as defined by the intersection of I-35 and I-80. I wondered at who would show up.

I got my answer about ten seconds after walking through the door. The crowd consisted mostly of men with barrel chests and short haircuts, and a disturbing number of them were over six feet tall. The ones that weren’t still had chests that jutted out a good six inches in front of them, even if a few of the men had also developed a gut that stuck out just as much. Still, these were guys who looked as though they were ready to get in the ring at any time. If someone had drawn a circle on the floor in chalk, I bet there would have been a few friendly matches starting, with the real possibility of the induction ceremony being canceled because teams would have formed. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed a lot of the men looked at me when I came through the door, size me up, and silently assessed that, yeah, they could take me in a fair fight. They were probably right, too.

A man with a dark green blazer walked up to me as I entered and asked if I was here for the ceremony. I told him yes I was, and I was directed to a woman seated at a desk in order to buy a ticket. I walked over, and got out my checkbook to buy a ticket for...TWENTY DOLLARS?   Seriously? Yes, I know that we’re in a country club, but…okay, sure. Maybe some of the money does go toward renting the place, but still…yes, I know everyone else has paid the fee to get in, but I’ve had gourmet dinners that cost less than this. Do you have a contestant from Top Chef back there cooking the food or what? I managed to convey absolutely none of these points as I wrote the check, got my ticket, and started mingling.

(To Be Continued)

Of Absolute Hoots, Haymarkets and the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

My friend and coworker, Mark, is not exactly what I would describe as a rock star. Low-key and laid-back, yes, and also a heck of a nice guy who’s fun to kill some time with chatting on a slow weekday afternoon when all there is to do are some blah projects that are as tedious as listening to a radio evangelist’s sermon while driving. However, if I were to tell you he’s a rock star, you probably wouldn’t believe me. I can understand this—I didn’t believe it at first. When I first heard Mark played guitar, I thought “Oh, that’s cool. He’s in a garage band. Wonder if they play music in Cresco and Decorah?” Then I learned that Mark was an inductee in the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (http://www.iowarocknroll.com/inductee-details.php?id=278 ) So yeah.

The Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a concept that is still hard for me to comprehend, mostly because it has the words “Iowa” and “Rock and Roll” in the same sentence. It’s like describing Dick Cheney as “whimsical.” On the other hand, it’s not like the genre has completely passed the state over. The heavy metal band Slipknot hails from Des Moines, as does the lead singer’s spinoff band Stone Sour. The legendary Surf Ballroom, the last concert of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper is located in Clear Lake, Iowa, and every year the Surf hosts a Winter Dance Party Tribute in honor of the musicians. So Iowa definitely has a place in rock and roll history. At least as much a place as Cleveland.

Despite the fact that Mark is part of the whole Iowa rock and roll scene, I have never gotten the chance to see him perform in concert. Then I heard that he would be playing at a Decorah bar that Saturday, and I knew what I would be doing that weekend.

The band Mark was playing with is called Absolute Hoot, and they were playing a venue called the Haymarket, a small bar in Decorah. Trying to describe the Haymarket is hard, because it’s a dive that somehow manages to transcend its being and become something else entirely. The bar itself occupies most of the ground floor of a two-story building two blocks away from downtown Decorah. The building is old. I’m not entirely sure how old, but it would be right at home in a black-and-white picture of Decorah circa 1913. The outside is unpretentious brick, with one side painted to reveal the establishment’s name. As I approached, the building, I was told by a bouncer who looked to be one part college student, one part farmer and one part skater punk that there was a four dollar cover charge. I paid the fee and stepped into the dive bar of dive bars.

Absolute Hoot sets up

I’m not exactly a connoisseur of bars, but you can tell roughly what kind of bar you’ve stepped into by the little cues. Things like patches of linoleum missing from the floor, or the bathroom having a thin sheet of metal nailed over the space where a glass window used to be, or just the fact that the floor linoleum may not have been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Some cheap wood paneling lining the walls and an oak bar that has probably seen a few decades of use are also good indicators. The Haymarket has all this and more. The front door leads to a sparse antechamber that leads in turn to the bar, a narrow area where the bar is on the right and about four feet over is an auxiliary bar of sorts, a free-standing wall where decorative wood columns create a cage-like separation between the main bar area and the rest of the establishment. On the other side of the wall there was a lot of open room, although a pool table in the upper left hand side took up part of it. The band setting up in the lower right hand side took up more space. Against the free-standing wall there was a large poker table and some chairs. The clientele wore mostly flannel, t-shirts and worn jeans with boots or tennis shoes. I got a distinctly blue-collar vibe from the place. Want to get dressed up and have a night on the town? There are plenty of fancy-pants places for that—here is where people come to drink and shoot pool.

Décor aside, the Haymarket may be one of the best music scenes in Decorah. They constantly bring in bands from Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, playing rock, country, blues, and folk, and they manage to consistently beat the pants off other local bars in terms of live bands. You can’t help but be impressed. In that sense, the Haymarket is a jewel in the rough.

Mark and his bandmates were getting set up when I arrived, waiting on one of their members who was having trouble getting her car started. It’s one of those hazards of playing you never think about when seeing a band perform. After all, there is a lot of background setup that needs to happen in order for a show to go on. Most big-name bands have roadies and sound technicians to take care of this, and their job is mostly to remain unseen. When you get to smaller venues like the Haymarket, though, you start to see what’s really involved. Mark was hunched over a soundboard, making small adjustments as the band waited for its final member, and the rest of them were doing individual soundchecks of their own. Music stands sat in front of each member, loaded with papers, and the setlist was taped to the floor. After a few minutes, the final member made it to the show, got her guitar hooked up, and Absolute Hoot started to play.

Absolute Hoot performs

All things considered, the band was pretty good, and they played a mix of music that I think worked well with the venue. There were some contemporary-ish country songs, older country songs, 50s and 60s rock and pop songs, and in one memorable instance an Aerosmith cover song. Slowly a crowd started to form in the Haymarket, which didn’t take much. After forty people had arrived, there was standing room only, and if you had to get up and go to the bathroom, you could reasonably expect the seat you had to be taken when you got back. However, it had to be good for the band. There’s nothing like playing and knowing that a lot of people are enjoying themselves while you play.

Mark rocks out

Another interesting thing was that the two women of Absolute Hoot wore dresses and generally looked made up. The men of the band, on the other hand, looked as though they had just come in off the street, seen some vacant instruments, and decided to start playing music. In a way, this made sense—the two women held most of the vocal duties, so it made sense for them to dress up a bit if they were going to be in the spotlight. Granted, the drummer did a lot of lyrics as well, but then again, he was behind the drum set, and getting dressed up to play the drums, which is the most physically demanding instrument to play, is a lot like putting on a button-up shirt to go jogging. Also, the drum set is between you and the audience, so honestly who cares what you wear? It struck me that you could get away with wearing a lot of stuff you ordinarily couldn’t. Which may be why you so rarely see shots of drummers in the music video.

Absolute Hoot was a lot of fun. If you happen to be in Decorah when they play, I highly recommend them. The cost is under $5, the musicians are all really good, and who knows—they might be inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame someday.

Border Town Search Part 2: Florenceville and Granger

When I last left everyone, I was busy trying to find the twin towns of Florenceville and Granger, only to find that State Line Road had somehow dead-ended into farm country. Later on, when I got home, I would fire up Google Maps and see that State Line Road is not, strictly speaking, a continuous road. If I had a four-wheel drive vehicle on the scale of a monster truck that could also get through thick swampland and a river, then I might have been able to find where the road picked up again. As it was, I backtracked and took the next available road South, headed toward the one paved highway I knew would take me to Florenceville and Granger.

If you really want to know what an area is like, the back roads are the way to do it. In northern Michigan, back roads wind through forests and hills which can sometimes seem like mountains, especially in the winter. Northern Michigan roads can be treacherous with ice and curves and hills that honestly didn’t seem that deep until you try to go up one or crest the hill and find that the slope on the other side seems much steeper than you originally thought. I have had the dubious distinction of driving in an SUV that could not make it up one particular ice-covered hill, and it sticks with you. Driving a sub-compact up an icy hill, you almost expect it to start sliding if you take your foot off the accelerator for so much as a half-second, but when over two tons of Detroit steel surrounding a V8 engine can’t traverse a hill, you get a sense of what the word “impassable” really means.

Iowa backroads are treacherous in their own way. I wouldn’t want to traverse them during the winter, but during the summer the loose gravel and dry dirt made my car fishtail at any speed over 30 mph. It’s only in situations where you have miles of dirt road that stretch out to the horizon that 30 mph starts to become intolerably slow. Especially when either side is populated only by miles and miles of farmland, sans farmhouses.

The farmhouses are worth mentioning, though. Life on the backroads doesn’t really concern itself with being pretty, and that’s very true for farms. It’s not that farmers are a slovenly bunch, it’s more along the lines that when your livelihood comes from working with your hands, you get used to being dirty and if you take a few minutes to stop working on your tractor or tending to livestock to go out and get the mail in a pair of muddy jeans and a flannel shirt that has obviously seen a few years of use, it’s hard to care what some random passerby thinks of you. The old woman in the fluorescent blue sweatpants and pink t-shirt was a bit harder to file in this category, but she was walking back to a farmhouse so she gets the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the back roads around northeast Iowa seem like the perfect location for a farm. It’s not a bad analogy, either. The farms just sit back, doing their jobs, and let all the big industries zip around over the world, creating hardware, software, trading stock back and forth. They’ve all got to eat sometime, and when they do they’ll buy food from a farmer. It’s a tortoise-and-hare type of scenario that seems not only possible, but likely in rural Iowa. Out here, the myth of the big family farm seems to have taken root.

Finally, after miles of back road, I finally caught some blacktop, and from there I headed to Florenceville and Granger. The direction sign on the paved county road that leads to the two towns only mentions Granger, and after coming upon the two towns, I can now say with some confidence that this is because Florenceville is the smaller of the two towns. Considering that the combined towns have a population of about 1,000, you can get a sense of how small Florenceville is. After I had passed by two or three streets, all dirt roads, I passed by two more and then I was at a T-Bone intersection that marked more or less the end of Granger.

The two towns are, for all intents and purposes one, and I suspect the only reason Florenceville is on the map at all is due to its geographic location. If it were even 200 meters to the north, the town would simply be part of Granger and that would be that. Instead, there is one pastoral little town disguised as two.

Oddly enough, I didn’t see anyone in the town, although the town’s only restaurant, a bar and grill, had a couple cars in front of it. To the northwest, there was a hill and three silos that marked yet another farm. All things considered, I’d driven through Florenceville and Granger in under a minute. That was when I decided I would at least drive along Main Street. I’d taken so much time getting here, it seemed a shame not to take in the sights. So I did, which took a