Onawa, Iowa

 I left Chicago with so much food packed in my panniers, I have been spared the ordeal of grocery shopping yet.  I’ve been gorging on hard-boiled eggs, hummus, bean salads, cheese, cranberry bread, Ramon, canned ravioli, nuts and assorted sweets.  Somehow I’ve managed without chocolate milk, which will be among my first purchases when my stores are exhausted. 

My only expense these first four days has been the five dollar admission fee to the Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn, money well spent.  As the only Danish museum in the US, it pays tribute to all things Danish and has Danish-related artifacts from all over, including Victor Borges first piano that he bought in Denmark as a young man in the late ‘20s.  

Along with the piano were an assortment of videos of his performances on the Ed Sullivan show and before eleven presidents and sessions accompanied by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and other luminaries.  He is a Danish icon and was a great favorite of my father.  He was among a dozen Great Danes listed at the entry of the introductory exhibit of the museum along with Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Scarlett Johansson and Viggo Mortensen.

I arrived at the museum in the early evening after it closed, so was the first customer the next morning.  It resides on the outskirts of Elk Horn surrounded by cornfields.  With no nearby residences I pitched my tent on the grounds behind an old cabin that had been the home and school house of a Danish immigrant in North Dakota that had been transferred to the museum.  

With the museum not opening until ten it allowed me time to do some early morning meandering about town hoping some house would trigger a memory of it having been where my grandparents had lived and I slept once or twice on family trips to Yellowstone and Colorado many decades ago.  There were quite a few likely candidates, but nothing clicked.  

I stopped by the cemetery to see if my grandparents might have been buried there.  There were two Andrew Christensen’s among the many Christensen’s, but the dates didn’t correspond to my grandfather and neither were accompanied by his wife Mildred.

The town’s early library with a cornerstone of 1950 fitted into a narrow slot between larger buildings on its Main Street and was now a tattoo parlor.  It was mere wisp, especially compared to the Carnegies in Atlantic and Audubon twenty miles to the south and north. The contrast was a strong testimonial to what the generosity of Carnegie could have provided if only Elk Horn had had a citizen or two or women’s group, as was the case with many towns, to rally the town to meet the prerequisites that Carnegie set for a library—providing a centrally located piece of land and passing a bond issue of ten per cent of his grant to maintain it.   The present library is attached to the city hall and has very limited hours, but a most fetching mini-mural.

The attendant at the museum wasn’t a Christensen, rather a Peterson, ending with an “son” rather than the Danish “sen.” She said her mother was Swedish and had married a Dane, who like her had the Petersen surname.  She assumed his version of Petersen, but when they divorced she wanted that “o” back and changed her name to the Swedish version, which her daughter also adopted.

When the museum was initiated in 1983 it was known as the Danish Immigrant Musuem, but in 2013 changed its name to the more inclusive Museum of Danish America. In the latest census one-and-a-half million Americans claimed Danish ancestry, which I was among.  A good many of them, 300,000, immigrated between 1850 and 1920, including my grandparents.  Twenty thousand of them were Mormon converts, as the religion had taken hold in Denmark.  The first language the Book of Mormon was translated into was Danish.

The Danish immigrants had to be overwhelmed by the size of America, as Denmark is the smallest of the Scandinavian countries and is just one-third the size of Iowa. Its present population is five-and-a-half million.  The museum pointed out they are the happiest people among the world’s nations according to many surveys.  Universal health care is one of the reasons and also undoubtedly their close relationship to the bicycle with fifty-five per cent of the population commuting to work and school by bicycle.  The exhibit included a Danish made bicycle, a Principia, that a Danish journalist pedaled across the US in 2012.  But it made no mention of the EPO-tainted Bjarne Riis, the only Dane to win the Tour de France, breaking the five-year run of Indurain in 1996.

 

A second floor exhibit was devoted to the “Danish Pioneer,” a newspaper established in Omaha in 1872 and continues to be published, though just twenty-six issues a year.  It relocated to Chicago in 1958.  It was originally published in Danish, but English has been its language for quite some time.

I lingered in the museum almost long enough to be able to drop in on the library, which didn’t open until 12:30.  But with the possibility of rain I made the Audubon Carnegie, twenty miles northeast, my library for the day.  It resided in a park facing a statue of its namesake.  

The walkway to its original entrance, now closed, was lined with tile mosaics of Audubon’s bird etchings.  There were several dozen throughout the park.  There was a mural of Audubon at the new entrance to the library in its addition to the rear of the building.  Another mural devoted to Audubon graced the interior of the post office thanks to the WPA in 1942. 

The librarian was one of several people who informed me there was a high wind warning for that afternoon and tomorrow.  It blasted up from the south shortly before I turned west to Onanwa, seventy miles away near the Missouri River.  It was so strong I had to bike in the middle of the lane to prevent myself from being blown off the road.  I was leaning into it so severely I feared scraping my left pedal on the pavement.  Fortunately I was on a county road with little traffic.  When I stopped at a gas station for water a woman apologized for not stopping to offer me a lift, as she saw me swerving all over trying to stay upright.  She said she had a dog in the cabin of her pickup and he wouldn’t take kindly to me.

I passed up an abandoned house that would have provided  refuge from the wind, either inside or as a blockade, as I wanted to get further down the road fearing the conditions could be even worse the next day.  I came upon a cluster of trees and a recessed river bank out of the wind that was just fine.  Still my rain fly flapped against the tent all night regularly waking me.

The wind had calmed a bit in the morning and I didn’t have to battle for each mile.  The wind did pick up after I’d take a break after thirty-two miles, forcing me to lean into its force from the south.  Thirteen miles later after I’d stopped for more food just seven miles from Onawa the wind had become a gale force.  It was impossible to remain upright.  Even walking was a challenge with one gust blowing the bike out of my hands on to its side as I walked along pushing it. 

I kept waiting for a pickup truck to stop and rescue me.  Half a dozen or more passed until one pulled over after I’d been at it for nearly half an hour.  It was a guy from Kansas City pulling a rusty old Volkswagen bus he’d just purchased for $1800 to restore and sell.  When I saw him stopped ahead, I figured the wind was playing havoc with his load, but he was a cyclist himself and knew what impossible conditions I was up against.  We hardly got to talk as it was just six miles to the Carnegie.

My rescuer didn’t know anything of Carnegie libraries, just asking if it was the same Carnegie as Carnegie Hall.  I was hoping Onawa’s Carnegie would have a strong “wow-factor” to impress him, but it was of the restrained dignity faction.  As with Audubon’s, its original dignified entrance had been closed and replaced by a lackluster entrance through the addition, denying one the pleasure of being immediately immersed in the high-ceilinged Carnegie aura.  The Carnegie-experience is always blunted when one has to pass through an ordinary contemporary setting.

But Onawa’s addition had some pleasing features.  One was a pyramid of books.

Another was an Einstein benediction akin to his more famous “I thought of it while I was on my bike.”  This one was, “The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.”  I was shocked that I had never come across it before.  It should be inscribed in every library.

By five o’clock when the library closed the gale force winds had somewhat abated and best of all had switched to a southwesterly.  And since I was turning back east and heading a bit north I was in business.  At times I was flying along at twenty miles an hour without pedaling and at other times had to lean into the wind when the road did some winding.  A large bush behind an electrical plant provided a wind block for my tent.