Having spent a lovely two nights on Rathbun Lake, we’re on the road again. Today we traveled across Iowa. As usual, we stayed off interstate and four-lane highways. Pamela’s a great navigator. She’s gone back to using paper maps and is finding the task much more enjoyable. We actually spent the first couple of hours on county roads which were about the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen county roads from southern California to New England. These county roads were better than Texas’ “Farm to Market” network and put some state highways to shame. In any case, it was enjoyable.
We spent almost the entire 323 mile trip on US-169, an old two-laner from the US highway system’s history, but still quite good. Well, you’re not going to travel seventy miles-per-hour or faster, but for those of us who are happy just to amble along and enjoy the scenery, it was just fine.
Driving through the heartland of Iowa we saw the damage from last weeks derecho storm. Entire fields of corn were flattened. We saw giant trees that had been uprooted and what looked like great brush piles until you looked closely and realized that it was where the storm had dropped trees, plants and parts of buildings. In a few places we saw trees that had fallen on houses, and houses or other buildings with the siding ripped off, exposing the studs. We had heard it described as an “inland hurricane” but it seemed to have acted more like a tornado. There would be places where the cornfield on one side would be untouched and across the road it would be totally destroyed. We have read that as much as 45% of their crop was destroyed or damaged. The damaged area was a tremendously wide bands.
The landscape is beautiful, especially if you like farms. For a long time I had to keep telling myself that the destruction of the Great Plains to create farms happened a long time ago. Most of the towns were still small, neat and obviously geared to serving the needs of the farmers. I was pleased to see that they weren’t all ringed by subdivisions that, in their turn, destroy the farmland along with further destruction to the land and pressure on natural resources. I must admit that seeing subdivisions springing up in what had been forest or farmland is a pet peeve of mine. We’ve destroyed so much of our precious Earth with farming, mining, lumbering and other such enterprises, now we’re pushing out with unrestricted growth; houses, commercial developments and giant corporate campuses, just to name a few; without any concern for the destruction to our planet or the future of our species as well as those around us.
I’ll have to admit that I was quite disappointed to learn that Iowa has no Covid-19 precautions in place. I didn’t think about it at the Rathbun campground. There everyone stayed in their own family groups, outside, with plenty of social distancing. It was when I stopped for gas and realized that there were no precautions at the gas station. None of the businesses in the town had any Covid-19 warnings or guidelines. The danger in this was striking when we stopped for a snack and who should pull in next to us but a couple on a motorcycle wearing Sturgis shirts. There have already been Covid cases reported that were traced back to the Sturgis rally; 250,000 unmasked people who took no precautions. All it would take would be for the couple from Sturgis to be infected and pass it along to a clerk in Iowa who was not taking any precautions who would then pass it along to unsuspecting customers like us. After realizing Iowa was taking no precautions, I could not wait to get away.
We are spending the night at the Wokiksuye Makoca (Dakota language for Land of Memories) Campground in Manakato, MN. It is a city campground and park on the Minnesota River pictured above. Standing on the bank of the river you can pretend that the human infestation isn’t all around you, at least until a train goes by or a camper goes speeding down a hiking trail on his mini-motorcycle. The woods are Box Elder, Ash, Slippery Elm, Hackberry, Hickory and Oak. The Cutleaf Coneflower is magnificent. The campground is very nice, with lots of room between sites and, a boon to nomads, showers. We are still in the severely over-populated east, so we haven’t tried boon-docking. All of the places we’ve stayed so far have been extremely nice; one state park, one Corp of Engineers and one city park.
Tomorrow we’re venturing near Minneapolis so that we can visit friends with whom we worked at Glacier National Park near our adopted home of Columbia Falls, Montana. They’re going to visit us at a campground where we will have a social distanced reunion and a bring your own dinner; all for the sake of Covid safety. We like each other too much to take any less precautions. We had to get reservations because campgrounds near a city on a weekend are all full. $60 for dry camping with no amenities. No wonder city people think camping is expensive. Don’t know if I should tell them that in 2019, on the road all year except for our bi-annual visit to the east to visit family, we didn’t pay $400 for camping. But that’s part of the nomad life-style. Maybe I’ll share the secret some day, but for now, I must say good night.
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