A Few Words in Defense of Our Town
An Open Letter To Art Cullen
There are only a few constants that hold up my life week to week in these divided states of America. Apart from calling my mom and making sure my work shirts don’t reek overtly, the only thing I make a priority is reading
.Every week. Immediately. As soon as his column appears on Wednesday, I read it sitting in my car on my lunch break. It hurts, how good he is.
I think he’s the last honest newspaper man in America who happens to operate right here in that weird alcove known as Storm Lake, Iowa. I’ve never been able to find that place. It’s always reminded me of that line from O Brother, Where Art Thou?
He’s been writing the book on how to both live and continue to think in Iowa for the last few decades. He’s done it so well that he even won a goddamn Pulitzer Prize for it. And if I ever get to see him in person, I’m going to bum a cigarette off him, just to see if any of that divination is transferable.
He’s that good.
In his latest column, a real hot number about his impending heart surgery and running into former Hawkeye coach Lisa Bluder at a diner, he gutted me with this line:
“Marengo still could use some help.”
Here’s what he was referring to:
There was a guy standing on the shoulder of the road at Marengo with a cardboard sign that read: “Go home, illegals.” Where does that come from? How did a Mexican ever put that guy down? What is so wrong with Iowa that would make him stand out there in the wind?
What is right with Iowa is that we can be so unassuming. It lifts you up as you leave the hospital parking ramp for home, and there the protester invades the windshield view. It’s such a pretty place, even on a brown winter day, the surgeon has a sure hand, and Lisa Bluder is cheering us on.
It makes you love Iowa even when you might want to hate it. It’s not the heat, it’s the humility. Marengo still could use some help. The folks at the Chelsea bar, with the only public restroom around, were priceless. As long as we can somehow stay grounded, we will survive.
I know the guy he’s talking about, of course. He’s out most weekends, usually with even more ignorant and heinous waste that he’s written on poster board which he got at the Dollar General. Maybe nothing else better sums up what passes for articulate conservative talking points these days than this cartoon yokel standing out in front of the Carquest, scribbling hate speech with dollar store materials.
I wrote about him once myself. He was in that same spot that Art saw him, wearing a confederate cutoff t-shirt, and propping a sign against his leg. He was blowing a duck call, and waving a jolly roger flag through Iowa County air. It worked: I looked.
We’ll ring in 6 years here in Marengo come May, but that man with his flags and signs has been here long before we arrived. I dragged my partner, the incredible human and artist
, along with me to this faded town lost in a sunset that forgot it was supposed to end. We got in right under the wire, holing up here the summer before the pandemic descended and the empire began falling right behind it.
Now, Sara and I and the five cats look out the windows at a town where we exist, but don’t really live. We’re stuck here for the foreseeable come-what-may mostly out of sheer stubbornness. And because we stashed a printing press in our garage last year, and it’ll take a real act of God to get me to move that thing again this decade.
There’s a hardware store and a farm store and a grocery store that’s better than we deserve here. We’ve also got two dollar stores, the county courthouse, and apparently, a fish store? The progress of man and all that.
Our house was built before the big war. The first one. The abstract here says 1911 and shows a lengthy list of residents who climbed these narrow stairs and fell into beds day after day until eventually, they didn’t anymore and the next names on the list did. I’m not sure what was ever in these walls for insulation, but on bitter winter days, it doesn’t feel like much remains. If you are standing in the right spot, you can watch a draft run straight through the house and blow ripples in our miniature rainbow flag, tucked beneath an inherited monstera plant. A few houses down, a homemade yard sign reads “MAGA EXTREMIST HEADQUARTERS.”
I think that’s mostly why we stay. As our dear friend and mentor Tim Fay often tells us “Johnson County doesn’t need any more bleeding hearts.” And he’s right, plus we can’t afford it, so we wage our little battles out here. With words and art and songs, but also in actions. We volunteer with an area food pantry. Sara’s trying to amend city ordinance to implement a “No Mow May” program for native pollinators. I’ve even got notions of starting up a community garden in the park.
That ought to go over like a lead balloon at the city council meeting here where even recycling feels like a five-star act of courage.
Yesterday, I sat on a bench in the laundromat and tried to figure out what I wanted to tell Art Cullen about Marengo. Slack-jawed, I watched our blankets twist around and wrote very little in a notebook that often feels more like a burden to carry than a welcome place to turn. Still, I lug it around. I’d like to ask him if his weighs on him still, after all these years.
People at the bar who were preparing to watch the Super Bowl dashed across the square, moving clothes between machines, feeding everything quarters until motion resumed. Then they rushed back to the bar before their Busch Lights warmed past peak temperature. I’d have joined them if we knew anybody here. Besides, I’ve sworn to a very particular type of Iowa sobriety: no booze outside of RAGBRAI.
I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t want some version of that for myself, for all of us: a place to go without the obligation of spending money, that elusive “third place” we all desperately crave outside of our homes and our jobs. It used to be churches or whatever social clubs or community groups could survive the disparate politics of its members. My vote is to make that third place the library. I’ll keep you posted.
I was really down bad for a third place earlier in the week. I was walking a lap around town along the levee when I went by an equipment shed with some trucks parked outside. Through the window, I could see three bald heads in upright recliners, watching Gunsmoke.
It was four o’clock, and Sheriff Dillon was still bringing the town together.
When I got home from the laundromat, I found Sara set up in the living room with a carousel slide projector. She arranged it on a bench on top of a box of Trivial Pursuit and a cat scratcher haggard with abuse. She’d found a free square of white space on the wall.
I sat down and we flipped through pictures that her great grandfather had taken seventy years ago of his cows in the pasture, his work horses in the field. We even saw the day they sold everything at auction. Sara kept pointing at the men’s jackets, their hats, wishing that we had them. I was pretty stoked at just having pictures of them.
I ran upstairs to grab this notebook, wanting to get some of this down enough to tell Art Cullen about what Marengo can be sometimes.
When I came back down, she said, “You’ll never believe it.”
“What?”
“The freaking bulb just burned out.”
So, Art, I think you’re right: We do need some more help here.
But don’t count us out yet.
We’ll get another bulb.
I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative:
Even in Iowa City it's not always easy to find a third place where you don't have to buy anything. The last few months, I've been inviting women friends over on a Saturday afternoon to talk shit and eat the food I make. I call it a "ladies tea", but we're not all drinking just tea. I was overwhelmed by how many of the women wrote me after the first one to tell me how much they needed that. Community is everything, especially in small towns that need help.
As a library worker I second the idea of libraries as third places. Come on in, the reading is fine. Great little piece!