Main street in Grinnell, Iowa -- home of the oldest college west of the Mississippi
It’s a great time to be a sports fan in the middle of America. The St. Louis Cardinals (in Missouri) are favorites to win the World Series. The Green Bay Packers (in Wisconsin) seem destined for the Super Bowl.
Nestled in between the two — threaded together by Mark Twain’s river — lies Iowa, which doesn’t have a major sports team at all, but is arguably the heart of the heart of the country.
I’m biased, I’m sure — having grown up with so many positive associations with Iowa. (No, it’s not my birthplace — I was born along the ocean in Long Beach, Calif., and lived most of my adult years by the mountains in Anchorage, Alaska.)
But my grandmother was born in Cedar Rapids, and her grandfather (in the 1840s) was one of Iowa’s earliest white settlers. Later thousands of Iowans moved en masse to Long Beach, which once each year thereafter would celebrate the fact with an “Iowa Picnic” in the park a couple blocks from where I lived.
Then there’s the fact that one of my daughters’ favorite movies throughout their cuddle-with-their-dad years was Music Man, set in the fictional town of River City, Iowa, and one of my favorite movies at the same time was Field of Dreams (“Is this heaven?” … “No, it’s Iowa”) and you can see how easy it might be to romanticize the place.
But others have reached a similar conclusion.
Iowa, of course, is one of the real bellwethers every four years in the race for president. It’s not only the earliest state to hold its presidential primaries, it’s also a go-either-way swing state that might decide the general election (and three years ago President-elect Obama was quick to thank his Hawkeye supporters for putting him over the top).
This week, however, while Harley and I motored through the state’s rolling farm country along a highly improvisational route of back roads and minor highways, I learned something new — namely that Iowa, unlike its neighbors, is still a relative haven for small farmers.
There were more than 92,000 independent farms in Iowa in 2008, and I would wager that resulted in more individual farms per square mile there than in any of the six states that border it. This difference was especially noticeable in the side-by-side comparison between Iowa and Nebraska, where some of the biggest of America’s Big-Ag operations extended far across the horizon.
But I also learned that the small town of Grinnell, near the very middle of Iowa, is a great place to visit. A few days ago I got to spend a very pleasant Sunday morning walking across the empty campus of Grinnell College with former Alaskan journalist (now budding Iowan novelist) Mark Baechtel, who leads the college’s Debate Union.
Travels with Harley 
My wife Patty and I got a good vibes from a slow off-freeway drive through Iowa a few years ago. We were headed from Chicago to Seattle. One strange thing we kept seeing in restaurants and public places of Iowa — older farm couples who looked like the number 10. He was skinny as a rail; she was very round. We came to the conclusion this was the result of the husband out working on the farm all day for many years while she spent untold hours in the kitchen cooking and taste-testing.
Kent, great to have you along for the ride (though I am not going to comment on the shape of Iowa farm wives, since I don’t have that much first-hand experience). Doesn’t seem that long ago I was calling you up at Epicenter Press every few months to try to publish an excerpt of one of your latest books in We Alaskans. Was nice to hear that Epicenter is going to publish Howard Weaver’s new book on the great Alaska newspaper war. Really looking forward to reading it. Best / George
It was great to have you, George, and terrific to see you again. I miss drinking beer with you at The Moose’s Tooth. In the interests of accuracy, I don’t teach writing at Grinnell any more; I lead its Debate Union.
Mark, thanks for all the great hospitality — the steak especially — and the very pleasant Sunday morning literary bull session in Grinnell. And thanks for the fact check too. Nice thing about publishing on a blog is you can constantly correct your errors. Which I just did. Cheers!