Governed by the Mortar Board?

Jan. 10 – Mason City, IA

With our visit to Mason City, we completed another circle: the life of Buddy Holly. In Lubbock, where he was born, we'd seen his statue and visited the museum where, on display next to his iconic glasses, are the much lesser-known Buddy Holly's Contact Lenses (it sounds like a Far Side cartoon, but it's true). On the way from Lubbock to Farmington, we had passed through Clovis, New Mexico, where he did much of his recording. And now we were taking the Interstate 35 exit for Clear Lake, Iowa, where he played his final concert, and passing the Mason City airport, from which his chartered plane took off that winter night bound for Fargo. We had already driven by the cornfield in which he died.

Mason City, for its name, displays a surprising paucity of stone buildings, although it does have a modest, old-timey downtown featuring a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style hotel and numerous references to River City, its alter ego from The Music Man. And as you walk down Federal Avenue past turn-of-the-century storefronts, you abruptly come upon Southbridge Mall, whose north entrance sits athwart the street, oozing out like the Blob between the old façades as they march forward inaccessibly into its maw. The south entrance stockades the business district behind a portcullis, shining like a citadel across the wide asphalt moat that guards it.

As we made the trip home from our venue, located miles outside of town across the vastest field I think I have ever seen, scarcely a light was burning in any house window. Ice was the rule on every paved surface, and dinner was hours beyond obtainable. To me that night, north-central Iowa was something that not even Wyoming had matched: remote.

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In which we administer a colonoscopy to an Upper Midwestern state

Jan. 9 – Wausau, WI

Wausau seems to be doing all right for itself, although I can't say what it is that drives the place. As it's a relatively far northern outpost in Wisconsin, my first guesses would have been lumbering or the manufacture of cheese, or perhaps skiing, since we lodged under the snowmaking floodlights of the Rib Mountain ski area. Wikipedia, the uncredited co-author of this blog, says it's paper-making, home building and insurance; from a peremptory survey of the various business fronts, I might add real estate, light manufacturing and banking to the list, and at the moment, capriciously re-arranging the highway grid seems to be another prevalent livelihood. Or hell, maybe it's just an outdoorsy Northwoods river town where thirty-eight thousand people just happen to want to live and work.

The Grand Theater (one of the few venues we've visited to use that spelling) is unremarkable but drew a healthy crowd, and we had a hoppin' time in the hotel bar that evening, playing darts and enduring the wiles of a rather inebriated Dairyland gal who seemed to be paying excessive attention to anybody other than her husband. The next morning I made the mistake of guessing when the Free Continental Breakfast would end and was off by an hour, leaving me with no other option than a Burger King several hundred sub-freezing yards farther away than it appeared. I passed a lone surveyor, no doubt plotting the further confounding of GPS street databases, and had the urge to ask him why they'd not built sidewalks to go along with the new double-barreled county trunk roads that stymied my efforts at a geometrically logical path toward my breakfast.

It was time to go back whence we'd come, to Iowa. Our travels, like an embarrassing doctor's visit, had caused us to invade Wisconsin from both its ends without piercing its middle, and Minnesota was showing a habit of following us about like a toilet paper streamer. Lunch on the way to Wausau had been at the Mall of America, in a suburb (what else?) of Minneapolis. If you count the amusement park in the middle (known as "The Park at MOA" for crying out loud), it is the nation's largest mall, and also the one most undistinguished from any of the others, making its name quite fitting. Hours prior, in Windom near daybreak, I'd bought coffee from a woman who was the Minnesota archetype; with her sensible, muted sweater and short, motherly, Nordic blond coif, she asked where we were go-een and showed us where the gar-beej was. A group of paunchy men, who looked like they knew something about ice fishing, looked on, apparently still rather awestruck by the arrival of our busload. They witnessed in five minutes more business transactions than they probably expected for the entire day, and I'm not at all sure that they didn't speculate afterward what the experience portended for the rest of their day.

End 'a story.

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Out with the old, in with the ugly

Jan. 8 – Sioux City, IA

Sioux City is a worn-out, dog-eared old cardboard box of a town, done up at regular angles with some of the corners missing, in shades of brown, buff and ecru. As in many cities of the northern Plains, enclosed second-story walkways, as lightly-used as the streets they pass over, connect various downtown buildings. One of these buildings houses the Orpheum Theatre; though not nearly as lavish as the Rialto Square, it is another example of a relative gem in the midst of a used-up town. I think the presence of these beautiful old music halls in the smaller cities is not a complete accident. Mid-sized municipalities, larger than Sioux, tend to have remained economically viable into the postwar period of Utilitarianism, of the new and modern replacing the stodgy and old, and so in the fifties and sixties these cities purged almost all of their turn-of-century infrastructure to make way for what have subsequently become the eyesores of today. Meanwhile, less populous industrial centers often never recovered from the Depression and had consequently given up all hope of renewal by the time it was fashionable to raze these historic structures.

We'd had lunch that day in West Des Moines, at something called Jordan Creek Town Center. Despite its name, Jordan Creek is not in the center of anything and it most decidedly is not a town. It is a brand-new upscale shopping mall with a self-admitted (from its web site) "streetscape design"; across the man-made lake another part of the complex, called The Village, is a cluster of outbuildings having an "open-air lifestyle design." Of course, in real towns and villages, streetscapes come about organically as a continual result of commercial and human processes, and lifestyles develop naturally from the influence of the communal experience. The idea that a streetscape or a lifestyle can be artificially "designed" in the cornfields of Iowa is nothing but pompous corporate branding.

To me, the most grating application of this marketing technique shows in the outbuildings' full moniker, "The Village at Jordan Creek." The increasingly prevalent naming pattern "The Such-and-such at So-and-so" is meant to suggest that "So-and-so" is unto itself such a world-renowned destination as to require no particularization of the "such-and-such" located there. You're supposed to equate places like "The Village at Jordan Creek" or "The Links at Westwood Green" with "The Palace at Versailles," "The Shops at Rodeo Drive" or "The Projects at Bedford-Stuyvesant."

Give me a friggin' break.

If Jordan Creek is the shiny new toy city of the future, then I'll take the discarded box it came in. A man who called himself "just a dumb ol' farmer" told us how much he and his wife enjoyed our show, which they had attended as her birthday present. At Jordan Creek we saw everyone but met no one. The farmer we met in The Clarion at Sioux City.

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A diamond in the roughage

Jan. 7 – Joliet, IL

The odd January warmth continued into Monday and brought with it freakish summer-like storms; that afternoon, a tornado touched down in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, which we had traversed just hours before. We arrived without incident, but the eerie winter lightning and the freshening gale, while blessedly mild, made us wonder what kind of evening lay ahead of us in Joliet, Illinois.

You wouldn't expect Joliet to be a very nice place, perhaps because on the map its name looks suspiciously close to "toilet", and maybe rightly so, since the map also shows it to be located at the business end of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, whose original function was to divert the big city's sewage away from Lake Michigan so it wouldn't show up in their drinking water. But before it became part of Chicago's municipal plumbing system, Joliet was a legitimate port on a real canal, the Illinois and Michigan (which is to New Orleans as the Erie Canal is to New York City), and its name was spelled Juliet.

While it is indeed a recently down-and-out burg, from what I could see in the early winter night the town seems to be fighting its way back to life. There were some pretty little rhinestone buildings and the gaudy zirconium of Harrah's Casino, but by far the crown jewel of Joliet is the Rialto Square Theatre. Its auditorium is decorated as opulently as any of the great European concert halls and has acoustics you could swim in, and the almost sepulchral outer lobby approaches both the elegance of the Library of Congress and the grandeur of Grand Central Station. It is unquestionably one of the most beautiful performance venues in America, and it sits just blocks away from the mouth (?) of Chi-town's sewage discharge channel. Ain't that always the way.

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Ever so humble

Jan. 6 – Milwaukee, WI

While hardly bustling on a foggy, wet, unseasonably warm Sunday in January, Milwaukee lacks the air of dejection that permeates so many cities of its rank. Currently at #22 in the nation, Milwaukee's population of about six hundred thousand puts it just ahead of Boston and Seattle, although its metropolitan area is much smaller than both. As a result, the city occupies an uncoveted niche between mid-sized manufacturing center and bona fide megalopolis, an ignominy exacerbated by its location in the penumbra of Chicago.

What's more, Milwaukee seems to boast more theaters and performance venues per capita than any city I know, along with an inordinate number of aesthetically imposing churches and a veritable plethora of bridges spanning the Milwaukee and Menomonee Rivers. Architecturally, Milwaukee shows a penchant for stripes, a perception reinforced by the proliferation of parking garages downtown, but the motif is repeated with remarkable harmony in some of the surrounding edifices (such as our hotel, the Hyatt International Space Station). Still, other styles prevail, from utilitarian office towers and the colossal neoclassical county corthouse (far surpassing the US Supreme Court in mass) to the German vernacular façades of Old World Third Street and the ornately detailed German Renaissance City Hall, currently encased in an even more ornately detailed matrix of scaffolding.

Against all odds, and in a fit of Midwestern self-reliance, Milwaukee carries with it neither the misconceived perception of world-class status (an ill-founded conceit that Boston wears like a Red Sox cap on its head), nor the disconsolate ball-and-chain of post-industrial urban defeatism (Detroit may be troubled, but it's not exactly Mogadishu). Instead, the city abides with neither smugness nor despondence, achieving a balance enviable in the sprawl-scape of twenty-first century America. That's quite an accomplishment for a town whose chief rallying point is bratwurst and beer.

(The above paragraph has been brought to you today by the hyphen.)

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