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.
