Exploring Iowa

We headed from Dey House into the hinterlands for a couple of days exploring northeastern Iowa, sticking almost entirely to back roads.

About 25 miles west of Iowa City are the Amana colonies, a cluster of villages established in 1856 by a group of German pietists, a Lutheran sect. The villages have become popular tourist destinations. The main village of Amana was attractive but a bit too touristy for our tastes, so we quickly moved on.

Highlight, for us, of peaceful West Amana was a large flock of  barn  and  cliff swallows , many of whom were no doubt juveniles not long off the nest.

South Amana, adjacent to U.S. Highway 6, was home to a quilt and gift shop.

This 19th-century "postage stamp" quilt was reasonably priced and in beautiful condition. It now graces our guest bedroom—Tess's former domain.

A few miles west on U.S. Route 6, Sudbury Court sported its vintage sign just south of the town of Marengo. Highway 6 stretches from California to Massachusetts; like many federal highways eclipsed by the Interstate system, its roadsides are dotted with remnants of an earlier era.

Many Iowa towns are made visible from a distance by their tallest structures: water towers. Here is Marengo's version.

High-rise grain elevators used to provide serious competition to water towers as town markers. But many of the older concrete silos have been replaced with clusters of squat, corrugated metal cylinders, like these structures near Garwin. The older elevators were invariably along rail lines and in or adjacent to towns; this facility, served by trucks, is near neither.

Click the button to view...

Two crops rule the roost in Iowa: corn and soybeans. In 2019, 13.1 million acres of corn were harvested; soybeans totaled 9.2 million acres. As one drives, hour after hour, among sprawling fields with endless rows of utterly uniform plants, The mind boggles at what mechanized farming has wrought.

The majority of Iowa's harvests feed cattle and hogs, which in turn feed people—a less-than-sustainable practice, as I documented in  The Cost of Beef  back in 2017.

A third category of high-rise structure now vies for attention with water towers and grain elevators: wind turbines. More than 3,000 of them spin majestically above the state's corn and soybean fields, most in northern and western Iowa where average wind speeds are higher. Zoom into the map to see individual windmills (blue dots); zoom out to see their statewide distribution.

On the outskirts of many of the towns we passed through were small cemeteries, often situated on peaceful hilltops with views of the countryside. Most of them welcomed visitors with ornate iron gateways, like this one outside the tiny village of Luzerne. The cemetery's name reflects the Scandinavian heritage of many Iowans.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at a diminutive roadside graveyard that offered a 360-degree panorama of Iowa farms and fields.

Click the button to explore cemeteries throughout Iowa.

Most towns, if not thriving, were apparently holding their own against economic hardship and migration to cities. The courthouse at Grundy Center, a county seat, has a handsome clock tower.

Grundy Center's main drag, G Avenue, was graced with 19th-century storefronts.

Grundy is one of 99 counties in Iowa.

We made an overnight stop at Cedar Falls, and took an evening walk down its welcoming Main Street.

Cup of Joe, the coffee shop at the north end of Main Street, welcomed us for a take-out breakfast before we hit the road.

Our prime destination for day two was a patch of virgin tallgrass prairie. This tract is named in honor of Dr. Ada Hayden, a conservationist and botanist at Iowa State University who died in 1950. She was a passionate advocate for preserving the rare remnants of unplowed prairie.

The once-immense sweep of the North American prairie has been almost entirely plowed under. Click the button to see the original extent of the continent's grasslands: tallgrass (blue); mixed grass (orange), and shortgrass (yellow).

Naturally, we expected to find grass. But we were surprised by the diversity of the flora. Multiple species of wildflowers and shrubs were buzzing with insects and birds. Prominent among the latter were  dickcissels  and  sedge wrens —two species I hadn't seen since my teenage days as a budding birder in Indianapolis.

I failed to photograph the dickcissels and wrens, but this  Northern harrier  posed obligingly for us a few miles east of the preserve.

Our last stop in Iowa was Decorah. Starting in the mid 19th century, Norwegians arrived in considerable numbers; their cultural influence remains. We had hoped to visit the  Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum , but it was closed due to the pandemic.