This is Iowa

I’m writing this introduction on the way to the airport to come home, working on coming up with stories and analogies that might adequately explain Iowa, and in particular, Ottumwa, Iowa, to someone who has never been there. Let’s start with the state….small, low population, incredibly rural, and home to one “city,” the capital and airport hub, Des Moines.

What used to be a 2 hour drive from the airport to Ottumwa has been shortened by a few major freeway construction projects over the past several years. And that two hour drive is a flat shot through farmland that never seems to end. Once you reach Ottumwa, you’re in a town that is small and remote like Half Moon Bay, but it’s in Iowa, which means that the migration to and from the city is a slow drip at best, and the majority of the residents were born and raised there.

Main Street and the downtown center have changed a lot since our trips here in the summers. At that point, one out of maybe every 4 or 5 stores on Main was shuttered or closed. It still had numerous restaurants, a great bookstore, a movie theatre and other shops. Over the years, the building of a Wal-Mart and other major chains has slowly strangled the downtown area. As you drive down it now, only a handful of shops remain, most of which are closed everyday. The movie theatre is boarded up, replaced by a brand new cinema on the other side of the freeway, and the only real time we saw any sort of traffic on Main was in the evenings as it plays host to the Salty Frog (a bar featuring live bands and flip cup tables), Scooter’s (the night club of the town), Elbow Room (the after hours spot, but I’ll get to that later), and Chills ‘n Thrills (the local strip club which the townies refer to as “Hogs ‘n Dogs). Truthfully, the residential neighborhoods, in places, feel a bit like Xenia, Ohio in Gummo.

What you notice walking around are the extreme similarities that the majority of the Ottumwa population has to stereotypes of the Midwest. The people are, for the most part, obese, poorly maintained on a basic hygienic level and uneducated on a higher level. Of course, the white trash meth crowd is also big out here. Most have never left the town, or are in some state of transit between here and another small Midwest town. Fittingly, the lawyers, doctors and others here were, for the most part, born and raised before returning after their formal training. The idea and feeling of simplicity in living is striking, and the pace of life can only be described as “watching the corn grow.” And while I don’t think of myself as sticking out in a crowd, or wearing a t-shirt and jeans as anything unusual, for some reason we are easily branded as “not from around here,” before we even open our mouths. Over the past 10 years, there has also been a major influx of migrant workers attracted to the cheap cost of living and abundance of agricultural work.

What never fails about the trips to Ottumwa is that they are always dotted with the same predictable moments, and at the same time consistently full of absolute randomness that couldn’t happen anywhere else. For the parts that stand out as outlandish and ridiculous, I can only tell you that they’re all true, and relate here the one sentence that our family has used for 16 years of traveling here to explain even the inexplicable…”This is Iowa.” The picture above is Main Street Ottumwa on a Saturday night. You can't see the bar revelers, but you get an idea of the traffic. Welcome to our trip.