Oskaloosa, Iowa

For the second year in a row I broke my tradition of bicycling bike back to Chicago from Telluride after the film festival. Once again I drove back with Janina, complementing our drive out with visits to national parks and friends and art galleries. Our stop at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City on the way back might have been the highlight of our month-and-a-half away, as unbeknownst to us one of our favorite artists, Andy Goldsworthy, was on the premises constructing a wall, affording us the opportunity not only to see him in action, but also to exchange a few words.

Goldsworthy’s constructions of stones and twigs have been a dominant theme in our lives, drawing us to many of his sites and inspiring us to make imitations in Janina’s yard. Two summers ago we biked across France to visit a series of cairns he had constructed in the foothills of the Alps. On our drive up to the Traverse City Film Festival at the outset of these travels we stopped off in Grand Rapids to see an arch of his. A documentary on his work from 2001, “Rivers and Tides,” is among our favorites that we watch from time to time. He was as affable and friendly as his screen personae. So was one of his assistants we spoke with, a fellow Brit who has been working with him for 23 years and can be seen in “Rivers and Tides” hoisting a large rock into place.

If we hadn’t encountered Goldsworthy, meeting the 78-year old Brit Michael Apted, director of the seminal “Up” series, who was presenting the latest installment, “63 Up,” at Telluride might have stood out as the most memorable event of our time away. But Telluride is always chock full of brushes with towering figures of cinema. Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe were in attendance with “Motherless Brooklyn.” Werner Herzog and Ken Burns are always there whether they have a film to present or not. Pico Iyer was the guest director. We had the great film scholar Mark Cousins nearly to ourselves for twenty minutes before four hours of his 14-hour film on Women in Film.  

I could go on and on but I’ll refer you to Janina’s Telluride Journal at her website merelycirculating.com. She had so much to comment on this year she’s still polishing it off.

The past two years I’ve devoted my fall bicycle tours to completing the slate of Carnegie libraries in Illinois, then Indiana. This year it is Iowa, a much more ambitious undertaking, as there are sixty-one libraries on my itinerary, compared to less than thirty I had left to reach on the past two fall rides. Iowa is one of six states along with Illinois and Indiana that had over 100 Carnegies. I’ve gotten to 37 of the still standing Carnegies in Iowa on three previous rides across the state, mostly in the southern half of the state, leaving me with sixty-one as ten of the original 108 have been razed, compared to eighteen in both Illinois and Indiana.  It will be a huge haul, but not as many as the eighty this past March in California.

We passed through Iowa on our return.  We were in too much of a hurry to stop at any Carnegies, though we did visit two in Kansas along with twenty on our way out through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota when we weren’t so pressed for time.  It was tempting to have Janina drop me off in Iowa and let me commence my ride, but I had matters to tend to back home first.  I returned to Iowa via Amtrak after a week back home. I didn’t have a great choice of destinations, as Amtrak does not offer baggage service at many of its stops across Iowa.  

I had to get off at Mount Pleasant over eighty miles from the nearest Carnegie I had yet to visit in Marengo. Mount Pleasant had a Carnegie, but I checked it off four years ago on my ride back from Telluride. So few people get off at Mount Pleasant that the Chicago Amtrak station did not have pre-printed baggage tickets for it. I needed one for my bike and another for my duffle.  

This line had a bike car separate from the baggage car, so I didn’t need to box my bike and could hoist it on the train myself, sparing me the worry of it failing to be loaded on to the train, as has happened to me in the past. But I did have to worry that the handwritten tag on my duffle might get overlooked and miss getting off the train in Mount Pleasant. I knew it would be a short stop, and with the baggage car being all the way at the front behind the engine and me nearly at the back, I couldn’t get to it in time to make sure my duffle was removed.  

So it was a happy site to see an Amtrak employee at the end of the long platform approaching me in the distance carrying my duffle after I got my bike. My duffle was the lone article from the baggage car disembarking. I spared the station official lugging my bag any further, loading up my bike right there in the middle of the platform.  

I had ninety minutes before dark to get down the road and find a place to camp. I wasn’t concerned, knowing there were corn fields aplenty, though I have had the police called on me three times in Iowa for illicit camping, more than any other state. One just never knows when someone might catch a glimpse of me disappearing off the road and take it upon themselves to alert the authorities. I have been spared that so far this year, camping my first three nights in corn fields.

It wasn’t until late in the afternoon the next day that I reached my first Carnegie in Marengo. An unlocked bike sprawled on its side by the entry was an emblem of small-town America.  The original entry was blocked off as the building had been somewhat bastardized by an addition in 2007.  The new entry was in the middle between the new and old halves of the building. At least the new wing tried to replicate the original. After I staggered up the steps to the circulation desk, weary from the heat and seventy miles in the saddle, the elderly librarian asked if she could help me, more out of a concern of “what I was doing there“ than a welcome. She turned friendly though when I expressed my interest in the history of the library.

A little ways down the road I gained a semblance of understanding for her leeriness when I discovered a sheaf of diatribes in a Little Free Library directed at the owner of the local supermarket for his banning a customer wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat from his store. Evidently an employee took exception to the hat, which led to an altercation and the summoning of the police. The pile of letters in the Little Free Library to the owner were all written by right wing zealots bemoaning unrest in this small town where everybody knows everybody.

All the letters veered off into unrelated politicizing calling Hilary a felon and fearing the advent of SOCIALISM and accusing the owner of subscribing to “the planks of the Communist Manifesto” and castigating “leftists attempting to make criminals out of Catholic students from Covington Kentucky just because of the hats these students were wearing.” One letter concluded with “I suggest you get OFF UNITED STATES SOIL.” Another included a P. S.—“Jesus never lost an argument, but people like you crucified him anyway.”

This was a fine welcome to small-town America. It was quite a contrast to the book I had been reading on the train, 92-year old Jan Morris reminiscing about the “essential niceness” of such communities in his latest book “In My Mind’s Eye,” what she calls a “thought diary.” The book has 188 entries written over a year’s time, trying to avoid being upset about Trump and Brexit. She is constantly asking, “Why can’t people just be kind?”

After a rainy night in a cornfield it was on to the college town of Grinnell and it’s academic Carnegie Library, now used for classrooms and undergoing an extensive renovation. 

Grinnell was also home to one of the handful of banks Louis Sullivan designed between 1909 and 1919 that are scattered around the Midwest.  It resides in a prominent position in the town center.  Stained glass windows on its side let in light and a pair of lions guard its entry.

It was twenty-two miles south to the next Carnegie in Montezuma. This town of 1,700 wasn’t much larger than when it’s Carnegie was built, so it hadn’t necessitated an addition. It exuded the charm and warmth that characterize most Carnegies. It was now home to the local Historical and Genealogical Society. It was one of the last Carnegies built in Iowa with the year of its construction 19 and 18 flanking “Library” over the entry.

The Carnegie in Oskaloosa twenty-five miles away still served as a library, but had been doubled in size. It’s addition included pillars flanking it new entrance. A simple “Free” still resided over its original, now closed, entrance.