Mason City, Iowa

I was stacking a load of change I had gathered along the road into two piles of one dollar each to pay for a couple of one-dollar burritos at Taco Bell, when a young man behind me reached around and handed the cashier a five dollar bill and said, “I’ve got it.”  He had earbuds and a distant look, so I couldn’t engage him in conversation other than a “Thanks a lot.”  

And then another “Thank you” when he gestured to the cashier to give me the change when she started to hand it to him.  My mission of lightening the load of coins in my pocket thumping against my thigh had been thwarted, and had, in fact, been exacerbated by another eighty-eight cents worth of coins.  It was the first such monetary offering of these travels, coming on Day Twenty-Nine, much later than usual.

It was my second stroke of good fortune for the day.  I had gotten on the road by seven to beat the rush-hour traffic on a five-mile stretch of four-lane divided highway.  I was forced onto the highway the evening before when the county road paralleling it turned to dirt.  With the threat of rain I wanted no part of that road and subjected myself to the steady roar of traffic whizzing by at over sixty miles per hour.

I camped just before the road narrowed for road construction.  I knew there was a threat of the shoulder disappearing.  When I returned to the road the next morning it was already backed up with traffic that had come to a halt.  A police car with siren blaring followed by an ambulance came up from behind me and had to go on to the grass to get around all the backed-up vehicles.  I was able to slowly bike past the line of traffic.  

Half a mile ahead a car that had crashed into a barrier was the cause for the blockade.   I got around it and had the single lane without a shoulder all to myself for the five miles to the intersection where I could leave the highway and get on a paved county road.  If not for that blockade I would have had a harrowing five miles.  I was most certainly thanking the cycling gods for providing me free passage on that perilous stretch.

If this set of good fortune had come in threes I might have topped it off with the acquisition of a Carnegie portrait, which would have been an unimaginable stroke of good fortune.  The official portrait in the Spring Valley Carnegie, now a town hall, was sitting in a corner with a pile of rubble, looking as if it were destined for the scrap heap.  I tried not to sound too eager when I commented to the town clerk, “If you’re discarding the portrait, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.”  I’d already told her I was visiting Carnegie Libraries, so would be a worthy recipient.  

Unfortunately, it wasn’t for the taking, as she said it had been taken down from the wall in front of us, as the wall had suffered water damage and was being repaired.  It was good to know it at least had a place of honor as the first thing people saw when they entered the noble building.  She said it wasn’t at the new library as they said they didn’t have a place for it.  It was more that they did not have an appreciation for it, as there was loads of empty wall space.  

It wasn’t the first time I’d made a stab at acquiring the portrait.  When I don’t see it hanging in a library I ask if it is hanging somewhere.  Usually the librarian will gladly point out where it is.  Sometimes the librarian will confess the library doesn’t have a portrait and was unaware of it.  In the small town of Boswell, Indiana the librarian said it was sitting in a closet, as they hadn’t decided where to hang it.  When I happened to visit the library again two years later and the portrait was still sitting in the closet, I asked if I could acquire it for a donation to the library.  The librarian said she’d have to check with her board of directors.  A couple weeks later she emailed and said they wanted to keep it. The next time Janina and I drive to Bloomington, we’ll stop at Boswell again to see if the portrait has been freed of its confinement.  If not, I’ll pull out five twenties and see if that will win his freedom.

I wouldn’t call it good fortune, but I at least had a quiet twenty-miles well off-the- beaten track when I was forced onto an unpaved road paralleling Interstate 90.  The road alternated between hard-packed dirt with just a few stray bits of gravel, that was almost like riding on pavement, to light gravel, that slowed me to eight miles per hour, to thick freshly laid gravel that reduced me to five or six miles per hour, and sometimes four, as a slogged through it.  It was most tiresome and required my full attention.  It came at the end of the day reducing my hopes for a ninety-mile day to just seventy.  At least I had a premium campsite in a small wilderness area with signs posted permitting hunting, though not this time of the year.

My last Carnegie in Minnesota came in Albert Lea, named for an early surveyor in this region in the 1830s.  As with the first in Luverne nine days ago it was diamond-shaped with a corner entrance, the third in Minnesota and fifth in all, the two others just over the border in South Dakota.  Those with a fascination for such architecture could pay them all a visit in a day if they don’t mind traveling by automobile  The former library was now the law offices of SMRLS—Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services.  It was the eleventh Carnegie I had visited in Minnesota during these travels.  With fifteen on previous trips, I have gotten to twenty-six of the forty-eight remaining Carnegies in the state.  Getting to the rest could be my fall project. 

It was just ten miles south to Iowa from Albert Lea where a bounty of eight Statues of Liberty will be on my route to the Carnegie in Fayette and then on to Rock Island.  The first of the Statues came in the small town of Manly in a tiny park.  It was the first I’ve come upon adorned with a globe.  It wasn’t in the best of shape and didn’t have the plaque crediting the Boy Scouts for providing it. 

The Statue in the much larger Mason City ten miles south came with the plaque and was well-tended standing in the corner of a large Central Park.