It's always good to go back to Iowa, even if my reason to go basically is to fine-tune my cochlear implants in the UI Hospitals. They want to do research on people like me so they buy me a hotel room and I stay an extra day.

I arrived in my hotel room, seven floors above Coralville, just as a storm was rolling in. I opened the curtains wide and watched the lightning cross the sky; it was very dramatic. The television had little ticker-tape warnings below the picture that mentioned all the counties that had tornado watches; in the eastern part of the state, most of them.

The dark Back to the Future (second one) was on, but it just wasn't holding my attention. Instead I looked at the storm and down at the hugely busy First Street Coralville. I'd worked here almost fifty years ago delivering newspapers up and down road. In those days people still read newspapers and they even paid money for. them; I would put a slug quarter in the machine, pull out old one, and put in new ones. I did all starting at abouut three-thirty a m. I would also wrap papers in bundles, tie them in twine, and drop the bundles on street corners.

One night a policeman pulled me over out in the neighborhoods. We were in the habit of driving all over the road out there because it was four the morning. But that morning maybe I'd jumped a curb or done something stupid, not intentional. As usual he suspected alcohol even if he'd seen that same old Suburban out there for many years, and after all he'd never met me, though he'd seen me enough times. So he met me, decided I wasn't drunk, and sent me on my way. Just checking, he said.

Last night, after about five minutes I got tired even froom watching the storm - I was very tired - and just fell asleep on their wonderful bed, no shower no nothing. That was tired! Partly it was just from reliving my Iowa City/Coralville. days.

But at three thirty a m I woke suddenly, wide awake. I don't know why - it. wasn't a bad dream - but now I realized again, that I was back in Coralville where I dropped all those bundles so many years back. At three-thirty I would just be taking a shower or going to work. So I took a shower.

Now I looked out on First Avenue again; just a single truck rolled down the street. Some things don't change, or change slowly. It was my street again, empty, and now I went back to sleep, no problem.

three weeks after the event

I went up to Iowa on Friday for medical reasons. At the UI Hospitals, they gave me the hardware for my second cochlear implant, and turned it on. I can now hear with both ears. Electronically, yes, but at least I can hear.

In the free time I had, I visited Scattergood School, where I used to work. It was still there, still beautiful. The meetinghouse, though it no longer had a wood stove, was still its usual meetinghouse, austere, beautiful. I met some of the faculty who were preparing for students to come back over the weekend.

I told them of the days of 84-86 when I worked there. At the cemetery, someone told me that they had to move the interstate so it wouldn't go over that cemetery; because they moved it, it had to make a curve over a nearby hill. This is why we could hear the trucks changing their gears out on the interstate right below the meetinghouse. I told them how loud it was when I was there; how I said someone should build a wall; how they said it had been thought of, and a wall appeared sometime in that era after I'd left.

I asked them about the "multiple casualty event" that had happened a little more than three weeks from that day. I had been coming back from my surgery, and had seen many trucks on the side of the road, some in the shoulder or the median, some with their blinkers on. That was two days after the event, and they were still clearing trucks from the side of the road. In the event, there were maybe thirty or more accidents, forty injuries, twenty hospitalizations, nobody dead. The best they could figure ice descended on the road and caused all the accidents, going both ways, in a six-mile stretch east of West Branch.

I had been stunned to figure, based on the reports, that it happened more or less right at Scattergood, perhaps even on the hill that the interstate had to climb, the curve it went around. I asked the people at Scattergood if they had any memory of that night, but they didn't, and even the director had no idea what I was talking about.

Same at the hospital. The "mass casualty event" had faded into a distant memory, something that happened on the slippery interstate during an ice storm, one of many events if you look at the whole state and the whole winter.

No question, I-80 is busy these days between Davenport and Iowa City. People go about 70 and go bumper to bumper, and may not be prepared for an icy patch on a cold winter night. It wasn't unusual for the state or maybe even for that stretch of road. It stuck in my memory mostly because of the location and because of what I'd heard at the cemetery. It was an old Quaker community: ancestors of both Nixon and Hemingway were supposedly buried there. The cemetery looked to be in good condition; so were the grounds of Scattergood.

But Iowa was carrying on as if nothing had happened.

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