Bad Wrecks on the I-80

These days the part of Iowa I know best is I-80 between Davenport and Iowa City, where I go for cochlear implant surgery like I did yesterday. I was a little nervous, because it has been cold and icy here, but the roads were fine and we made it to the surgery on time, at about 9 30 am. I got through it successfully but it took me a while to get out and my wife was driving us back east to Illinois, and we stopped for gas in West Branch.

I used to live in West Branch! I lived at Scattergood Friends School, about three miles east of West Branch, for a couple of years in the eighties. Very nice and interesting years. But I didn't know anyone at the Casey's; it's possible it wasn't even there in the eighties.

What I haven't told you is that there was a huge accident on I-80, right there east of West Branch, on Saturday. More than sixty accidents were involved. People were delayed for as much as seven hours. Traffic backed up all the way back into Coralville and the hospital had to decide who to treat first, with so many people coming in. One person had to be extracted from a car but miraculously nobody was killed.

By Monday evening at 5 o'clock a lot of the trucks still hadn't been removed from the roadside; there were also various cars in the ditches going both ways, with a kind of green ribbon/tape on them, presumably signifying that they could be left there until removed, and were not an emergency. Some of the trucks were right on the shoulder, and two of them actually had their blinkers on. This alone was enough to slow people down and so, though I blamed rubbernecking, it was small wonder that the heavy traffic going east a few miles beyond West Branch slowed down considerably and backed up almost to West Branch. We were aggrieved at the ten minute (or so) delay but were lucky it wasn't more and could hardly imagine a seven-hour delay on a much colder night on Saturday. Also, the roads, for us on Monday, were clear, whereas on Saturday I imagine there was a terrible combination of clear and icy, just bad enough for sixty cars and trucks to go slamming into sixty more on some stretch of that road.

So as we inched along we became rubberneckers by necessity, and saw the innards of smashed up trucks right up against the roadside, and the ones with the blinkers on, which had back wheels hanging over the ditch and couldn't be moved so easily, or so quickly. Now this was scary to me, because I have a son who is a regional trucker in Arizona/California, but is becoming a 50-state trucker soon enough. And what is it with the trucks? Some people blamed young truckers carrying "dry loads" and driving too fast. Presumably all sixty were driving too fast, if they were crashing into sixty others. And sometimes you can drive smart and careful and the people in front of you or behind you make you into a statistic (or hospital admission) anyway.

This I think is not unknown to Iowa. Several people commented on how common it was on I-80 and that is in fact my experience, one of the scariest things about living in the state. It's partly because you get up on 80 to make good time and you go as fast as you can and are allowed to, and the weather can change or become deadly somewhat abruptly; things just freeze. Water, cold, snow, frozen, bingo, cars and trucks off the road. Some of them flip. Some bash into each other. It's not pretty.

That's all. I go back Jan. 9 and again Jan. 25. Pray for me; January is not generally any better than December.

Parkinson's Disease and the Midwest

I've felt strongly enough about this that when I went to write a novel about Iowa, it ended up being partly about this, if not the main takeaway. I cannot die silent about an issue that affects the region I love.

I read a very good article recently, but then unfortunately lost it and can't pass it along. It was entitled something like "Parkinson's Disease is not an Accident," and it was about increasing evidence that pesticide use is correlated with neurological disorders. Yes! Some scientist had gathered all the data and said that, basically, we can see the correlation, we know what the problem is, but the system is not geared to responding quickly to obvious problems. It's kind of like smoking: they had to have nasty lawsuits for years before the system was able to admit that an obvious killer had been wreaking havoc on American health.

In this case, briefly, pesticides are nerve gas. If we were to outlaw them, or limit them severely, people would accept that, because the proof is there that they are dangerous, and are disrupting our nerves and those of our children. It is the one thing that is doing probably the most damage to American children today - those same children are popping up with increasing autism, adhd, and various other problems too. The article dealt only with Parkinson's, but it was thorough, and the scientist who was interviewed really knew his stuff.

I find that, here in Illinois, I am one of few who get bottled water for home consumption. Presumably a lot of people, including children, are simply living off the tap. And I would guess there is some cleansing of the water that is in the tap. But I would also guess that so much pesticide is seeping down into the water table that we are beginning to see some pretty steep effects. Sometimes it's not just the pesticide itself but some of the metals that are used in their construction, and the chemicals used to bind things together to make them what they are. They are powerful, and they are dangerous, and we need to control them better. We have a lot of land under production.

I'll keep looking for the article. I read it and said, I wish I could show this to everyone. But a few days later it was still an open window on my computer, and life somehow moved on without me writing this. Things are busy here. They're busy everywhere - who has time to save America's children?

recent trip

UI Hosps

I maintain that the University of Iowa hospitals is one of the best art museums in the state, if not the best. It's full of wonderful art. This time, while walking through it, I stopped and grabbed a few pictures. I don't think it's representative, though; I'd like to take a complete tour and get everything that's good, and in fact, get better pictures of everything.

The problem is that, when you're in the hospital, you're distressed. In my case, because it was a lower-stress day, when my cochlear implants would be activated, I was in a fairly good mood and I could stop at things that struck me, and actually look at them. But that's rare. Most days I'm like the other people in there: worried; facing the fact that I'm declining fast; thinking about death around the horizon, etc. Not a good frame of mind for perusing art.

From Galesburg however I have learned two things. I learned them mostly by being stopped by trains, which interrupt us regularly. First, there is some fanatastic art out there in the world, which can really add to your life. Second, you may not always understand it, but you can usually identify how it makes you feel or what about it contrasts with its environment to give you a certain boost. All art happens in an environment, and UI Hosps' art is in some of these pictures very much in the Iowa place we all well know: Kinnick Stadium, the Children's Hospital, etc.

I am getting to know the place better. It is very intimidating to one or even three-or-four time visitors; it takes a while. Now that I'm a little more comfortable I can actually look at the art. I don't always understand it (what is going on behind the Old Cap, below?) but I can tell you what I like.

My apologies to the artists, whose names I tried to remember, but failed. These are poor pictures/representations anyway, and if you want the real thing just go to UI Hosps and you'll find them pretty quickly. I'm still looking to see if they have any Mario Lasansky (I'm sure they do somewhere) and ultimately I'd like to make a full tour and give you a much wider, more complete report. I like art now, and I at least want to identify the things that make me an impressionism fan.

The art was so fine, it popped my out of my gloom. And now, with my new cochlear implant, I hear tinny sounds and have lots of noise to make my life a little more full.

Review page

A wonderful review page for Tall Corn State...

https://www.bestbookeditors.com/uncategorized/tall-corn-state-by-thomas-leverett

Caitlin Clark

I would be remiss not to put some kind of tribute to Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes here. They gave us a wonderful season and changed women's basketball forever.

As a Hawkeye fan, I got drawn in early and got special notice that Hannah Stuelke is a relative of mine (second step-cousins, twice removed, to be exact). I wasn't able to actually watch any games so didn't get drawn in so much by the live-action angle of it; I just read about them afterward and occasionally posted using home-made pop art.

There are many reasons Caitlin got a wide range of fans, intense national interest, and status as a huge star. Yes, this was in spite of the fact that the South Carolina team was actually way better than the Hawkeyes. Caitlin kind of just drew in her audience with her way of being. She's a kind of combination of very competitive and super-polite, self-effacing Iowa farm girl, and people just responded to that, or maybe they were just ready for that new kind of hero. Girls especially, and I mean young white ones mostly here, especially respondsed to it, in Iowa in particular.

Some say that Iowa's theocratic backward state politics have led Iowans into despair and self-loathing, which made the state itself ripe for a hero who is strong, competent, and still clearly Iowan to the core. The fact that Caitlin is from West Des Moines and Hannah is from Cedar Rapids made me at least feel that the team was home-state Iowan, unlike many basketball teams today that are a product of super-effective national recruiting machines. Iowa had to pay a premium probably to ensure they stuck with the team and didn't wander off to some lucrative transfer option. But they wanted to play for Iowa. And they made the season for everyone.

She said all the right things when she was interviewed and she gave proper credit to her teammates who have indeed carried a lot of the weight. I like how she's humble when she needs to be, and she's pretty in a natural, confident, strong kind of way. It's hard to define exactly what about her attracted fans' adulation. On the court, it appeared that it was that she could always make threes, and often did, and this made her a threat every minute that she had the ball. That also put her in the class of male athletes like Stephen Curry who can make baskets from anywhere on the court.

I still have an old feud with the ugly Hawkeye logo, of course, but I'm finding it a lot more fun to be a loyal fan of my alma mater (one of them anyway - I went to Iowa twice) - and proud to be associated with this team. I'm a huge Caitlin fan.