Leaving Okoboji
The instructor in my last workshop at the Okoboji Writers Retreat said think small but I’m living large as I drive out of town in a bright yellow Mustang convertible with the top down and Pink Floyd’s The Machine blasting out of 8 speakers because this is the first and last time this kind of luck will ever come my way.
She said think small but I really couldn’t as I settled my big butt into a soft black leather ventilated bucket seat for the first time in my life and took off on a sunny Fall drive home nearly all the way across Iowa. The wind blows my hair into chaos and I revel at how it pulls away from my scalp in every direction, just short enough to keep from getting in my eyes, like I’m some model in a car commercial.
Carrie Underwood sings to me about two women in black Cadillacs meeting for the first time and I’m feeling their power like a low surge through my body. Maybe it’s just that fan under my seat keeping my thighs from sweating through my jeans. I’m starting to feel the sun burn my nose and neck but I don’t care. It’s all part of the ride after all and I’ve only got a few hours of this left.
At the conference, frumpy, middle-aged women like me shared my joy when I told them about this stroke of good fortune, winning the “rental car lottery” I called it, reserving a drab Ford Focus or tin can Kia online and getting this instead. They laughed with me when I told them how astonished the young man at the rental car agency was when I said I’d take it. I’m on the tail end of 600 miles in round trip sunshine and 70s and I’m sucking up every minute.
OK, not sucking too hard because once I’m out of Dickinson County the smell of money starts wafting across the road, making my eyes tear and my lungs rebel. I’m supposed to think small driving past miles of hog buildings the length of football fields with enough pigs to produce the manure equivalent of Mexico City. I hold my breath when I see them coming until I can’t anymore. It’s not a long-term solution but then I’m outta there so it don’t matter to me, as the song goes.
I’m about 80 miles out of Okoboji when I slow down into a small town I don’t check the name of because I’m having too much fun celebrating Sweet Home Alabama with Lynyrd Skynyrd. I bring it down a few notches in speed and sound as I come to a flagger in downtown wherever-I-am. Big white men in safety vests and hard hats moving heavy equipment shaped a lot like them have torn up my side of the road. Probably federal money, though they don’t care, so long as the jobs are there and they still have the right to hang a F— Biden flag in their front yard. The only woman is the flagger of course, tattoos down the inside of her arm holding the STOP sign with SLOW on the other side. Suddenly I’m thinking this is not a place that would share my joy or celebrate my good luck. They don’t know this is supposed to be a sensible Ford Focus with good mileage. Hell, they wouldn’t even understand why a person would rent or even drive a car. Pickups and SUVs have a use, and if you owned one then why rent a car? I can almost hear the guy glancing over from the skid loader – a bright yellow sports car is kind of pretty but only with a pretty girl in it and pretty useless for most anything else, and wasted on that lady driving it.
They probably think I’m a lawyer or worse, a lawyer’s wife. I want to stand up in my top-down yellow sports car and shout, “It was luck! I got it cheap! This isn’t normal for me! I live in the country! I grew up in the country!” but who would that serve? Not them. Not me, really. Yeah, for sure not me. I slow down as the flagger blessedly flips her sign to let me pass, lower the music more and give the Iowa two-finger wave from the top of my steering wheel, glad my shades are hiding my eyes.
As I pull past the second flagger the Eagles are trying to escape from the Hotel California and I realize I haven’t seen a public park for 100 miles. Every driveway leads to a home or a farm field. The only available toilets are at Casey’s in a town large enough to support one. Iowa, the nation’s 4th most privately-owned state.
Next stop I better put the top up. My forearms are burning. I’ll regret waiting this long. And I’ll regret putting the top up. Those are my choices and they end up at the same place. Better make the most of it. I floor it and feel the engine push me back into my seat as it roars to 100 on the flat and empty county road. I give out a Woohoot! in my outside voice. There are no cops after all. They’ve been defunded by state tax cuts. We count on personal responsibility now. It’s not a sense of personal responsibility but the fear some big mammal will dart out of a cornfield and make me swerve off the road that gets me to slow down to 65 with a little pout no one can see.
I’m supposed to think small, but Iowa does nothing small anymore. Now I’m driving past hundreds of wind turbines tossing their arms at the corn horizon on both sides of the road. I want a picture of the turbines up close. I see a sign for a county park and turn right onto gravel. Maybe it’s that stand of trees about a mile up. Wait! Skid to a stop. The gravel dust catches up with me, engulfing the car. Back up. The county park is this gravel parking lot with a farm gate into a little patch of prairie. No toxic shot allowed, the sign at the entrance says, but my first read is no toxic shock allowed and I wonder why anyone out here would care about keeping tampons in too long or even consider policing such a thing. I pull in and get out, white dust swirling around me. I walk a few steps to the marker in the corner of the parking lot. Mr. Ferris must’ve owned this land and some county conservationist identified it as a “slough” so now it’s preserved. It’s not big enough to shoot anything without crossing over someone else’s land or hitting one of those turbines, so toxic shot or not really wouldn’t matter, but here it is. Someone’s dying wish fulfilled. Gravel and weeds, as far as the farming neighbors are concerned, I’m thinking.
The corn, bean and hog report tell me everything’s better than expected this Fall, even with the drought. The radio dies a few minutes after I turn off the engine so now I hear the rhythmic whooshing of the turbines demanding order out of the unruly wind. I consider climbing over the gate and trudging through the slough to stand at the base of one like a tourist in New York City looking up the side of the Empire State Building. Then I imagine security cameras and fences and other devices to keep this tourist from getting any closer. So I stay on my gravel parking lot, leaning back against my little yellow car, and watch long wide rows of 30-story sentinels flailing at the sky for as far as I can see, out there to where blue meets green and all the lines merge into one.
Suzan Erem
October 2023