Meeting Iowa
In which my wish of shadowing a farmer for a day is granted
LYON COUNTY, Iowa — It’s the tail end of northwest Iowa’s harvest season, the culmination of a long summer’s worth of work, and I’ve scored a ride-along with a 70-year-old farmer as he harvests his last 10 acres of corn.
There’s just one problem: I can’t find this guy’s driveway.
Jerry, who I met the previous night at a bar in Rock Valley, instructed me to drive to his house, then head three-quarters of a mile east before turning onto a gravel road, where I’d spot a driveway after a quarter-mile. From there, I’d walk over to his combine and climb on in.
I found the gravel road easily enough. But the first driveway I saw felt a little bit further than a quarter-mile. I pulled in anyway and began walking; then, my phone rang.
“You went too far. That’s someone else’s place.”
Praying they didn’t have an active Ring camera, I bolted back to the car and drove slowly, deliberately, back toward Jerry. Inching along, I saw him wave to me through the window, but still no driveway. Thoroughly vexed, I stopped at the next intersection and got another call.
“You went past it! Turn around and park right in front of me.”
In farm country, most two-lane rural roads are lined with medium-steep ditches. What Jerry referred to as a “driveway” was a miniature section of infill in the ditch, completely unmarked and unpaved, no stone or gravel in sight; in other words, a car-sized plot of dirt. More than a little embarrassed, I pulled in and greeted him. I know he’ll get a kick out of that story for a long time.
It was a drastic change of scenery from earlier in the week, where I’d explored Dubuque and the Quad Cities, which felt like the re-emergence of the Rust Belt.
These eastern Iowan cities have downtown districts with abundant brick; buildings with faded advertisements on their facades; abandoned gas stations with paint tearing off the signage. Empty parking lots languish in the afternoon sun, and occasionally you stumble upon a mural depicting a place brighter and livelier than the sidewalk it overhangs. It’s a slightly less harsh version of the urban environments I explored in Northeast Ohio.
A similar dynamic is present: signs of community persisting amid the visual reminders of decline. Moline, across the border in Illinois, featured a set of railroad tracks that I assume go unused 23 hours of the day; nearby, I found an airy coffee shop there full of cozy chairs. Rock Island’s entire main street was torn up, dust and equipment laid to rest for the weekend strewn everywhere; at the same time, a wedding photoshoot was going on along the riverbank.
But I was about to get a taste of a very different archetype: the rural Midwestern farming community.
Encouraged by the reception I got in the Driftless Area’s hamlets and determined to one-up myself by going even smaller, I trek 45 minutes from Dubuque to Monmouth (popluation 129), where my fingers and toes outnumber the streets in town; it’s the smallest place I found with a bar active enough on Facebook to assure me it was a going concern. A solitary truck is parked in the dirt lot. Absurd as it sounds, I tell myself to act like I’ve been here before. I’ll at least be able to talk sports with the ALDS on, I tell myself. I barge inside.
Immediately I’m thrown for a loop. The space is mostly dark and vacant, an L-shaped bar adjacent to the door occupying less than half of the interior. Along with two of her patrons, the sole bartender is engrossed in an on-demand drama playing on the TV; they don’t turn their heads an inch. It feels like a sedate, vaguely forlorn living room. Ninety excruciating seconds elapse, and then…
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Back into customer-service mode she went.
Across the rural Midwest, even in the most far-flung places, even as the most flagrant outsider, everyone is entirely unfazed when I walk into a bar. I detect no suspicious glares or nervous murmurs; I’m not greeted with added gusto or shaken down with extra attitude. In other words, they behave just as they do when a regular arrives, save them not knowing my name. I’ve grown to appreciate this, seeing it as yet another manifestation of their extreme earnestness; they simply don’t know how to treat anyone differently from how they treat lifelong neighbors. All that said, they do usually perk up once I start talking, especially since my questions (“were you born and raised here?”) are a dead giveaway I’m a visitor. From there, the curiosity flows from both of us: they unpack family lore likely to be referenced later and I teach them about faraway Massachusetts.
The Hound Dog, though, was a different beast. Two middle-aged men whose sagging postures made clear they’d just gotten off tiresome shifts were volleying gossip across the table. I sat smack-dab between them, so they had to stare right through me to keep talking. Yet even when I injected a few wows and that’s-crazies into their banter, they barely flinched. For over an hour, I was literally a fly on the wall.
The vacant space behind the bar has your standard pool tables and gaming machines. But the lights are half off back there, the TV screens dark like they’ve been unused for years, an observation corroborated by Patty, who arrives and sits next to me while I’m still in fly mode. Decades ago, she confides in me, the place was buzzing every weekend. Eventually, though, both Hound Dog bartenders were busted for serving minors; the owner promptly got caught, too. Deriding the current proprietor as negligent and lazy, she asserts she could return the bar to its former glory if given the power, then makes a rapid exit after a couple quick drinks. It’s all rather haunting.
Luckily, the gossip is interesting. Marty, a voluble mower wearing a fluorescent green tank top stained with the day’s labor, goes back and forth with Josh, a visibly inebriated concrete pourer whose liberal usage of fuckin’ makes it seem like he has a perpetual grudge to bear. They rapid-fire debate the merits of different guns for deer hunting, using shorthand to refer to caliber and brand. Grievances include the inflexible PTO policies Marty’s wife endures and the high cost of a closed trailer.
As each local packs it in for the night, I get a bit of one-on-one time with them. They’re all perfectly friendly — again, just totally unfazed. It’s an early evening; Josh’s “final final” drink arrives at only 8:45. Anna, the somewhat emotionless bartender, makes the executive decision to trudge over and flip off the neon window signs.
Sitting in my car after closing the place down, I hear her pull up beside me. She had sensed my curiosity. She invites me to another bar where she’s meeting a friend, one she promises is livelier. The Hound Dog crowd, she explains, is stale; if you see it on one night, you’ve seen it on every night. 15 minutes of very dark roads later and a detour to photograph the northern lights, we arrive at The Grove, where the barstools are comfy leather chairs and a large family gathering provides most of the energy. The night’s slice-of-life theme continues when Anna opens up to me about her predicament: after 11 years working in eye clinics, she’s decided to try out driving cement trucks this fall because it pays much better, but recently tore her ACL. She sees her kids four days a week and needs to figure out childcare while she recovers and prepares for the new gig.
The next evening I’m in McCausland (population 313), just 20 minutes from Davenport. Its only watering hole, the Lucky Frog, sits across from a ballfield where a rec league has ran for decades. The bar has less space than the Hound Dog, but more people inside: a steady post-softball crowd grabbing food to go, poker leagues at low round tables in the back, early-20s guys circling around the pool table and chatting up the similarly-aged bartenders. Quickly I meet Mark, a jolly FedEx driver with salt-and-pepper facial hair who gushes over my project.1 After polishing off a plate of unexpectedly tasty ribs, I take in a rant from Keith, an auto technician still wearing his work apron, about Iowa football’s unimaginative play calling.2 A flamboyant millennial man with a construction vest keeps challenging people to pool; by the obtrusively loud chirps of frustration coming from the table, he appears to be losing. Christine, a semi-truck driver, cringes when I mention my dad’s love for old BMWs — “I’ve gotta have American-made!” she proclaims. The night takes a weighty turn when I meet James, a former Marine and Boy Scout leader in North Carolina. During a smoke break on the quiet patio, he speaks solemnly about the losses he’s faced: his son 12 years ago, his mom and marriage last year. Back in his tiny hometown, he’s looking for work. To pass the time he enjoys philosophical YouTube channels (he was psyched to get a response from Neil DeGrasse Tyson on a livestream). James speaks with assertiveness — I suspect that aspect of military life rarely leaves you — and there’s a vigor to his gravelly voice that belies the losses he’s endured.
I finish my weekend back in the Quad Cities. Back in Davenport I sense strong community at the local farmers’ market, which runs year round and proves the perfect way to spend an unseasonably warm October afternoon. After buying a berry crisp, two-pack of cinnamon rolls, and container of chocolate chip cookies, I have a leisurely chat with a couple who teach middle school music.
Later, I stop by the John Deere Pavilion in Moline, which is a funny place. Its brief exhibits, a tad boastful, are the kind of thing many people might deride as propaganda if a company like Amazon or Google were writing it. But having seen farmers satisfied with their Deere equipment, and knowing the earnestness of the Midwest, it manages to feel pretty genuine. A bunch of young parents shepherd their little ones around the huge combine they can climb into; the kids seem genuinely pumped to be around them. It’s an unexpectedly wholesome scene.
At this point, the cumulative sleep deprivation I’ve endured on the trip gets to me and I nearly nap in the hotel room as the sun sets. The day before I’d heard an ad for a local Oktoberfest, and after a longer time waffling than I’d like to admit, I push myself to go. I mostly stand around and take in the atmosphere, but toward the end of the night I make conversation with a happy couple and enjoy a beer holding contest. It’s the kind of low-stakes community event that’s big fun for everyone who goes. I’m less amused by the weird-tasting Quad Cities-style pizza3 I’m blindsided by afterwards and the ear-assaulting karaoke at the dive bar serving it.
After a brief interlude in Iowa City, where I don’t find anything that deviates much from “prototypical American college town,” I spend a night in Fort Dodge, a former meatpacking hub. At Sneakers, a bar and grill (a regular, Tom, insists that I not call it a dive bar because it serves food), I scarf down an unusually thick pork tenderloin. When I ask Tom if any businesses he grew up going to still remain, he tells me about the Ja-Mar Drive-In. I resolve to head there the next morning.
After touring a near-silent downtown, I was surprised to walk into a place that was downright hopping. Two lines fed into the cashiers, both steadily replenishing their ranks. With its rounded E’s, the menu board wouldn’t be out of place in a ‘70s sci-fi movie. Elderly couples milled about, taking advantage of the day’s special: a $9 two-piece fried chicken meal. As I finished my very good breast and wing, the multi-family gathering across from me coaxes the waitress they know on a first-name basis to commemorate their meal with a photo. It’s a super wholesome scene that makes me feel like I’m back in this place’s heyday.
Here’s a day in Jerry’s life during harvest season: combine six rows of corn the length of the field, then do the same coming back. Repeat until the combine is full. Drive the combine to the grain cart, where its contents are ejected. Repeat until the grain cart is full. Retrieve another grain cart and hitch it to the first one; harvest and dump until that one is full. Load the two grain carts onto the tractor and drive to the grain elevator in town. Get the corn weighed and inspected for foreign substances; once cleared, dump it into an underground pit under the supervision of an employee. Obtain a receipt that records the precise number of bushels you harvested and its moisture content.4 Then do it all over again.
I didn’t appreciate just how monotonous this work is, and it makes me far less guilty for barging into Jerry’s world — I’m keeping him company amid the repetition. After a few hours, his wife Cindy drops off some homemade chocolate chip cookies for him to munch on5. That said, there are nuances he takes for granted that intrigue me. Corn looks uniform from the roadside, but he shows me how different varieties have been planted for varying lengths of time, how some rows have oddly green stalks and some of the fields have visible cracks from the deluge of rain earlier this summer.
I realize how little intuition people in big cities have for this; it would be like asking a billionaire who never buys groceries what the price of milk is. I grow excited to quiz my friends back home about what unit yield is measured in and what 4-H and FFA stand for. In Northwest Iowa, these are taken for granted. Listening to top 40 radio stations, the standard weather update is presented alongside a commodity market update — you’re never an hour away from hearing the latest on live cattle and Minneapolis wheat.
After Jerry calls it a day, we drive over to his house, where he proudly shows me his dad’s old tractor6 and old Corvettes. He showers and we head to a spacious bar across the South Dakota line where two other older couples they’re friends with are waiting. Their banter is more easygoing than the grievances of the Hound Dog; it’s a pleasant patter, pierced with on-the-spot jokes and easy laughter. It is not nearly as emotional a scene as the Hammer Down slow dance, but I again sense the peaceful satisfaction with life that struck me then. Why would you change anything?
Indeed, this obvious contentment sticks with me, and it extends to even the smallest, most nondescript towns. I ask young and old residents alike whether they think today’s teenagers want to stick around; I gather the vast majority do, and not out of social coercion. They might taste small-scale urban life while studying or working, but they’ll come back and raise kids. Yes, these places are declining in population — but far from exuding a sense of impending doom, they’re in a peaceful stasis.7
Surveying Jerry’s now-fully-harvested fields, dusk encroaching on the vast horizon, the seeming enormity of his work hit me, the panoramic view making his trucks look like little toys. Though his operation is small, unremarkable by Iowan standards, I found it undeniably impressive that he’d cleared those acres and I’d watched it all happen. By touching their work, I suspect most farmers have a fundamentally more intimate relationship to labor than I’ve ever had. “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work” finally hit home.
Best thing I ate: The cherry berry crisp from Out on a Limb Pie Co. in Davenport. It was a really smooth dessert with plentiful, fresh fruit; simple, well executed, and addictive.
When I asked if they were serving food at the Hound Dog, Anna walked outside to corral a rather unkempt man to get him to fire up the fryer. They flipped the fryer off minutes after Anna slid my chicken strip basket into my waiting hands.
I had some gas station fried chicken from Kwik Star (aka Kwik Trip to Wisconsinites). Very, very salty, but it was fine in a pinch.
Jerry isn’t even a career farmer: he built houses for several decades until switching to farming 10 years ago. His feels his needs are pushed aside in favor of industrial farms, which have much greater buying power.
Davenport bears an uncanny resemblance to Youngstown in one respect: I find the one “alternative” cafe that seemingly attracts the area’s quirky personalities; the first person I meet is a yoga and meditation instructor.
If I had a nickel for every 1970s-ish font I saw in Iowa, I’d have two nickels — which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Despite northwest Iowa’s homogeneity in most respects, I learn from Jerry that Hispanics have lived in the county for a solid decade-plus, doing menial farm and factory labor. Mexican restaurants in the area do well, and at the Blue Bunny visitor center in Le Mars plenty of Mexican surnames adorn the anniversary wall.
Radio promos (“whether you’re at home, at work, or in the car, we play Boston’s best variety!”) include a fourth location in Iowa: “in the fields.” The combines can be fitted with some seriously good sound systems!
Many people tell me the farm dust has never been worse than this year; after a drenching rainfall at summer’s start, northwest Iowa has been parched since. Every vehicle driving by leaves a wall, not a cloud, of dust in its wake; when we step outside, my glasses fog up immediately.
It’s a gorgeous day on the Mississippi River when I go to Dubuque’s Eagle Point Park, yet very few boats are visible, seemingly none for pleasure. I wonder if traffic is heavily regulated or prevented by locks.
In Iowa City I meet a woman who, with five friends, has a movie club: they’ve watched upwards of 600 films over 12 years.
High school football is very strong in Northwest Iowa. A recent Rock Valley graduate plays in the NFL; his jerseys hang on the wall at Koldy’s. Jerry tells me with displeasure about a 12-year-old grandson who got hit hard in last weeks’s game.
I drove past an ominous sign that reads WARNING: ENTERING POULTRY BIO-RESTRICTED AREA. USE ALTERNATE ROUTE WHEN POSSIBLE and promptly smelled, through my car, a very repulsive scent I don’t even know how to describe.
The world’s largest truck stop is indeed very large.
Mark knew Boston well. More people from rural Iowa know about Boston than you might assume, because of how many of them work as truck drivers.
If we take Keith at face value, they only ever run it up the middle; a star receiver transferred out because he was so fed up with not seeing action; and yet some of the team they’ve faced are so bad that the strategy works enough for the coach to keep trotting it out there.
The pizza is uncomfortably doughy, with zero crisp, and each ingredient has a weird flavor that just tastes off.
If the moisture is above 15%, the farmer must pay the facility to dry it down to 15%.
She gifts me the remainder of the cookies for the road.
He restored it and now takes it on tractor rides, which are like recreational motorcycle rides for farmers.
I suspect much of the decline is just math: you don’t need as many kids to run a business as you did 50 years ago.