Storm Lake, Iowa

 With no forests of corn stalks to disappear into this time of year and clusters of trees not so common in Iowa, I’ve had to be more inventive than usual in scrounging a place for my tent come dark.  One night I burrowed into a handful of fir trees with branches bending to the ground in the corner of a churchyard.  

Two nights ago I set up in a not-so-dense thicket of leafless tress in the corner of a cornfield.  It was near dusk and along a lightly traveled county road, but some eagle-eyed motorist spotted my tent and roused me with a “Hey you” shortly after I’d settled in.  When I emerged from my tent a burly, surly forty-year old with a pickup truck standing safely fifty feet from me growled, “This is private property.  Do you have permission to camp here?”

“I thought it was a patch of wilderness,” I said.  “I’m just passing through stopping at Carnegie Libraries.  I just visited the one in Rockwell City (seven miles back) and am  headed to Sac City (thirteen miles up the road).  I’ll be on my way first thing in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you stay in Rockwell,” he replied in no less of a gruff tone, clearly antagonistic to vagabonds, whether they be an Audubon or Muir or Johnny Appleseed or Daniel Boone.

“I wanted to push on into this headwind so I wouldn’t have so far to Sac City tomorrow morning.”

“Well you can tell that to the sheriff,” he snapped and retreated into his truck.

Evidently he wasn’t the owner of the property, just a busybody.  If he had said he wanted me off his property I would have offered him twenty bucks to stay.  I wasn’t entirely sure if he would call the sheriff, hoping he would be content with just throwing his weight around and trying to intimidate me and asserting his masculinity to his wife sitting in the passenger seat. 

I knew there was a creek two miles up the road with the possibility of trees along it to camp amongst, as I had one night already, but that was no certainty.  If I took down my tent and hit the road there was a chance the sheriff would pass me on the road and give me trouble with my flight providing an assumption of some sort of guilt.  I preferred to wait and reason with him if he showed up.  On a couple of other occasions when that happened the officers either let me stay or gave me an escort to some place else to camp.  They recognized I was no ne’er do well, nor threat to the community and were always most amiable.  With the wind still blowing hard and the temperature just forty, I had no desire to resume pedaling, especially with dark imminent.  

All was resolved when no one showed up, maybe thanks to his wife urging him to let me be.  After half an hour I breathed a sigh of relief and after an hour I filed the incident into a distant corner of my mind, only wondering if the cops didn’t wish to bother or if the guy hadn’t bothered them.

It had otherwise been a fine day, as I was able to capitalize on a tailwind that made for a three-Carnegie day.  I wished that the first in Odebolt had been the one that my rescuer the day before had taken me to, as it would have given him a jolt of awe that such a majestic building could reside in such a small town and make him want to search for more.  He would have fully understood why I was biking hundreds and thousands of miles to search them out. 

The next in Lake City, named for Lake Creek rather than a lake, was more quaint than spectacular, but it too was an eye-catcher that would have affirmed to my rescuer that my quest was fully justified.  It had been converted into a bistro and ale house and faced on to the town’s central park that filled an entire block.

I had to give up my high octane tail wind and battle a side wind after Lake City when I turned north to Rockwell City.  Its distinguished Carnegie was vacant and in disrepair, but a sign out front told of the ongoing effort to save it, soliciting funds for the cause.

From Rockwell City I turned west and had to push into the strong wind that had been at my back for seventy miles the majority of the day.  My average speed had begun plummeting from well over fifteen when I turned north, and now threatened to fall below twelve.  It had been my second day of ferocious winds with more forecast for one more day.

I arose before seven before the winds truly picked up and also to be gone lest the guy from the evening before came to check on me.  The wind was already strong and only grew stronger.  I spent the day pushing into a twenty-five mile per hour wind, the toughest day yet, just forty-five miles in just under seven hours on the bike, barely seven miles per hour.  

And it was cold.  There was some northerly in the wind dropping the temperature considerably.  It was twenty-nine when I broke camp.  After half an hour I could feel my nose going numb with the fierce headwind creating an arctic windchill.  I pulled out a neckerchief to wrap around my neck and pull up over my face.  I put my new down puff jacket to use for the first time.   I had hoped I wouldn’t need it, just bringing it along for an emergency such as this.  I wore it all day as the temperature stayed below  forty.

I have never experienced such prolonged strong winds, day after day, raging at over twenty-five miles per hour, not even in Iceland, notorious for its howling winds that broke the resolve of just about every cyclist I met there.  Usually such spells of nasty, gusting winds are short-lived, like torrential rains. The planet is certainly rebelling against what the human beast has inflicted upon it.  

When the wind was head-on I could just drop into a low climbing gear and grimly push into it, but when from the side it was a painful ordeal trying to stay on the road or out of traffic.  The rumple strips made it all the more treacherous, as I couldn’t help but be blown into them every so often, especially when an eighteen-wheeler passed from either direction and played havoc with the wind.  I had to hang onto my handlebars for dear life. 

I contemplated spending the day at the Sac City library reading  the e-book “Nature’s Metroplis,” a history of Chicago which I was greatly enjoying, but there was another Carnegie just twenty-six miles away in Storm Lake.  Ordinarily that would be a pleasant two hour ride.  But in these conditions it would be a hard-fought four hours of biking.

Sac City’s Carnegie sat on a hill and was now the town’s Chamber of Commerce.  The town had long outgrown its modest size when it was replaced in 1989.  The several blocks along the town’s main street to its new library was lined with large, statuesque homes, more striking than I had seen in other small towns on this trip. I figured the town must have had some industry other than farming, but it was all farm money other than a small factory.

Halfway to Storm Lake I stopped at a closed weigh station to sit against a wall of the building to rest and escape the wind for a spell.  Before I’d dug out my food a state trooper stepped out and invited me in.  I didn’t realize how cold I was, as I didn’t remove my down jacket or wool cap for the fifteen minutes I spent inside eating a sandwich.  I resisted asking the very kindly trooper if he could check the records to see if anyone had reported a trespassing cyclist at about 7:45 the night before.

Storm Lake had resort revenue along with farming to make it a more substantial town than Sac City or most I had passed through these past five days, the first with a Walmart since Council Bluffs, and a rare for the region McDonald’s as well.  Its Carnegie had a turret, leading to its new incarnation as Santa’s Castle, a museum celebrating Christmas and jolly Saint Nick, which it had been for more than fifty years, since 1971 when a new library was built. The museum had limited hours so I could only peer in at its jumble of ho-ho-ho offerings.  It looked like a genuine hoot of a place.