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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