Fayette, Iowa

A gentle breeze from the north gave me an assist for another hundred mile day.  But the northerly also brought with it colder temperatures, much colder than I realized, as shortly after I commenced riding the next morning I realized I needed to put on my tights.  I could manage the forty-nine start-of-the-day temps of the day before, but this day’s forty-one under cloudy skies was too much.  And I needed my gloves and wool cap as well.

At least it meant I could buy a half-gallon of milk, my preferred volume, if I could find a grocery store, which haven’t been so common in this sparsely settled corner of Iowa.  I went sixty miles before I came upon a Dollar Store and could get that hall-gallon of chocolate milk and take advantage of the day’s refrigeration, as it never warmed up much above fifty.

Though there was only one remaining Carnegie in the Northeast sector of Iowa that I had yet to get to and was indeed the only Carnegie in the state that had eluded me, I had another in Waverly I needed to stop by as I hadn’t realized I’d seen it two-and-a-half years ago. It had been entombed by a red brick facade on all sides and since I was there on a Sunday I couldn’t find anyone to verify it had been the Carnegie.  

The expansion that swallowed up the library took place in 1968, before the time of the few people I asked if they knew where the Carnegie had been. An older couple out walking their dog told me the library had been across from the supermarket, but the plain brick building certainly wasn’t a Carnegie.   Wikipedia ordinarily gives the address of the Carnegie, but not this one.  It didn’t report that it had been razed, so I figured it was wrong again.  It wasn’t until the next day when I called the Waverly library did I learn the dog-walkers were right and that the red brick building contained the Carnegie within it.  

So I was happy to return this year and look at the red brick building with a different perspective.  First I stopped at the new library.  A librarian told me that a cornerstone had been placed in the wall surrounding the old building acknowledging its past.  Indeed it was there with the dates 1867, 1905 and 1968—of the town’s first library, its Carnegie and then its expansion.  It continued as a library until 1998 when the new one was built and the old one passed into the private sector, now serving as an investment firm. 

A few blocks down the street in front of the courthouse was another of the Statues of Liberty provided by the Boy Scouts, part of a cluster of me-too-ism along with those in Manly and Mason City to the north, that I mentioned in my last post, and a fourth fourteen miles south in Cedar Falls. 

As I pedaled on the shoulder of a four-lane divided highway to Cedar Falls a police car came up from behind me and sounded its siren.  The officer told me it was too dangerous for me to be riding on this road, calling it an interstate.  It had the features of an interstate with on and off ramps and a grassy median separating the two-lanes of speeding traffic going in both directions, but it was designated as state road 218 and had no signs forbidding cyclists.  But there was no debating the issue with the officer.  He said he would follow along behind me for the mile to the next exit to make sure I got off the road.

It made for a long, circuitous route to the statue in Veterans Park on the south side of the sprawling city and forced me to ride through the busy downtown of the city.  I was careful to obey the traffic signals lest I encounter the officer again and give him the excuse to issue me a ticket.   I’m always a little nervous when I approach the park where a Statue is supposed to be, never fully trusting Wikipedia, so when I spot the Statue it is a glorious, triumphant feeling.  

And even if I fully trusted Wikipedia it would still be a glorious feeling to lay eyes on this emblematic figure whose original in the harbor of Manhattan has welcomed millions.  I can well remember quite a few occasions spotting it from the water or land, and even walking up inside it.  My last encounter was with Janina returning to the US on the Queen Mary standing at the bow of the ship with a mob of passengers, mostly Brits, watching the distant iconic figure grow larger and larger.  It was an emotional experience for all. 

The surge of pleasure is not dissimilar to that of seeing a Carnegie, particularly when there is a lengthy period of expectation or if it completes the slate of another state, as was the case with the one on the campus of Upper Iowa University in the small town of Fayette, fifty-four miles northeast of Cedar Falls.  The enrollment of six hundred is half the size of the town.  

The university had already commenced summer vacation, so the library was closed.  The campus was deserted other than a couple of groups of prospective students being given a tour.  It was a personable, cosy campus, but utterly isolated, surrounded for miles by cornfields.  The Carnegie was its most noble building and had a large addition to its backside. The library was named for David B. Henderson, a ten-term Congressman and Speaker of the House from 1899-1903, the only Iowan to serve in that capacity.  He attended Upper Iowa University and was a personal friend of Carnegie.  A statue of him stands in front of its original entrance.