West Liberty, Iowa

 

The road construction season inflicted me with a couple more unwelcome doses of gravel with road closures forcing me on unpaved roads.  It is beyond my fathoming that riding gravel has become a fad.  There may be a minimum of traffic on such roads, but what little traffic there is speeds by spewing up a cloud of dust and is a threat to shoot out bullets of the loose gravel.  The gravel reduces one’s speed and increases one’s effort.  Descents are wasted, as one must brake, ever wary of hitting a thick patch of gravel which can catapult one over the handlebars, as happened to me a few years ago in Nebraska nearly breaking a collarbone.

But I can thank the road construction for sending me off on a detour that took me by the birthplace of Herbert Hoover in West Branch.  The two-room cottage where he was born in 1874 is part of a large park that includes a museum and his presidential library. The grounds administered by the Park Service is just a mile off Interstate 80.  I’ve passed it many a time in too much of a hurry to stop, always thinking, “maybe next time.”  At last, the bicycle gave me the opportunity to gain some intimacy with the first person born west of the Mississippi to become president.

I passed through West Branch on my way to Iowa City, where I had the unexpected bonus of two Statues of Liberty.  The Statue donated by the Boy Scouts placed in front of the high school had begun deteriorating and had been replaced in 2010 after sixty years of enduring the elements.  The original now resides in the foyer of the school. Only a discerning eye could tell the replacement hadn’t been cast from the same mold, as they were remarkably similar.  The major difference was that the new one had a more mature face.  The girlishness of the original was a point of contention with some. If the plaque on the replacement hadn’t revealed it was a replacement, I wouldn’t have looked closely enough at the face to notice the difference.

It was after five when I arrived.  The school was locked, so I feared I wouldn’t have the opportunity to see where the elder Lady Liberty had been placed.  One had to be buzzed in even during school hours.  I received no response to my several buzzes.  As I was about to leave several students came out the locked door, so I was able to slip in and go down a hall lined with lockers to the foyer and there she was with a coat of brown paint somewhat rejuvenating her.  It was the first of the couple dozen I have searched out that was confined to an indoor space.  It didn’t seem quite right, but it was nice she lived on. 

The day before I swung by Cedar Rapids for another Statue, this one in a position of honor at the tip of a small island in the Cedar River that runs through the city, the second largest in the state.  

Its Carnegie was just a few blocks away and was now an art museum with a large addition.  It no longer bore an identification on its exterior that it had been a library other than the faint engraving of four authors below its roofline—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Virgil.  The new library faced it separated by a large park that was populated by a dozen or so homeless.  

I was glad the first floor of the new library was largely constructed of glass so I could sit by a window and keep an eye on my bike remembering all too well that I’d had my tent swiped from my bike while in a library in San Francisco and my sleeping bag by a homeless guy I’d seen lingering outside a supermarket I went in outside of Washington D.C., the only two thefts I’ve suffered from my unattended bike, not counting a thwarted theft in South Africa. 

I included the small towns of Clarence and West Liberty on my perambulations as they too had Statues to offer.  The one in Clarence gazed upon its large park on the outskirts of the town.

The Statue in West Liberty stood in front of its City Hall.  As the one inside the Iowa City high school it had been slathered by some unsightly preservative.  

It brought me within twenty miles of the Mississippi, which I’ll ride along for thirty miles up to the Quad Cities scouting out potential campgrounds for my rendezvous with Janina.  There will be a bunch to choose from on both sides of the river. And there will be one more Statue on the way in the river town of Muscatine.  This region has provided a big bounty of the statues.  Iowa has twenty-five, more than ten per cent of those scattered around the US.  Only Kansas with twenty-six has more.  Illinois by contrast has a mere three.  If I’d been on to them sooner, I’d have been to most of them by now.