Jack & Me In Stuart IA: Dirt Track Date
Sun Aug 19
# days otr 12
miles 1701
route Cedar Rapids to Anita IA via
Lake MacBride, Prairie Lights Bk Store IA City & Stuart IA
Playlist Mark Schatz and Friends, Steppin’ in the Boiler House,
Steve Earle, Transcendental Blues
& great broadcast from Prairie Lights Java House Coffeeshop
Satuday big day in Cedar Rapids. Visited the house where I lived from age two to ten. Boy was that family surprised to see me! House adorable as ever. Yard not as vast as it seemed at 5. Went to All Saints my Catholic School and peeked in window of church there I went to mass six days a week. After hands down one of the most beautiful drives of my life on Friday - astonishing – I really mean it! Northeast Iowa – WHO KNEW! – I had to go see some Grant Woods at the Cedar Rapids Art Museum. Woods grew up on a farm in Anamosa and when his dad died while he was still a kid he moved to CR. Anamosa is in NE Iowa. If you think Grant Wood buffed out that countryside to make it more tidy for his paintings and imbued it with this pulsing, swirly topography as an artistic device you are so wrong. It is de facto modernist agricultural vistas out there. Everybody should go. Have fried catfish at Stormin Norman’s!
Today headed to the Czech and Slovak Museum in CR for what promised to be an amazing show of their country’s puppets. But no open even though they said they would be. And I had what has become a typical Iowan George Orwell moment – or is it Night of the Living Dead? Not sure but here I am in a moderate sized city on a gorgeous day in front of a huge new museum and there is NOBODY there. I don’t mean just like nobody in the Museum – I mean NOBODY ANYWHERE VISIBLE ON THE STREETS. I caught the back of one biker. Geez. I guess they got lots more room here and folks spread out.
Wasn’t anybody on the beach at Lake MacBride when I got there either. My Mom used to take us there with Mrs. Harger and her kids. We got to drink as much soda – pop they call it here - as we wanted and for kicks we – I am not making this up – smoked driftwood. Eiiieee.
But here is this pretty little lake and I swam for thirty minutes on a Sunday morning before a soul showed up. A lot of my childhood memories come back as sense things. The water tasted familiar. And when I opened up my eyes under water I had this slammin’ recollection. THIS is what my underwater kid-hood looked like – this grassy green luminescence.
In Iowa City caught up with Jack. Went to Prairie Lights Books and bought the Scroll edition – the book of his typed scroll – the original draft of On The Road. The lady pulled out the NYTimes Book Review and there is Jack on the cover. Kinda feels like me and Jack are in the car and all this other hoo-hah about OTR’s anniversary is far away over there. I didn’t know this anniversary was coming when I first planned the trip and now that I am on the road I barely have time to keep up with it all. The road creates its own space responding to its own dictates. Me and Jack are just movin.
Iowa City looks healthy and smart and growing. I had a nice Indian lunch and listened to some smart ladies talk about the risks of hormone treatments and plastic water bottles.
Then….I went to Stuartt!! The Stuart Iowa where Jack ended up while hitchin’ with an Irish guy from Brooklyn he met on the road. “…Stuart Iowa, a town in which we were really stranded.” Wrote Jack in OTR. Jack and his friend tried to hitch 6 westbound for five hours with no luck. Then they tried to sleep in the train station on a bench but the teletype machine kept them up. Jack didn’t forget it and when things got bad down the road he compared ‘em to Stuart.
So…Stuart is still there. “ A lot of good eggs – a few stinkers” is what the sign on the way into town says. Bonnie and Clyde robbed the bank here once. And the wide empty streets still have a few working businesses on ‘em.
The Rock Island train station quit operating in the sixties but is still there. Boarded up with pigeons flapping away from under the eaves as I head up. Red brick, arched windows with white keystones. The tracks west look on huge silver silos. It really looks like Jack coulda just left. Feels like it too. I do some recording and take pictures.
Nate, proud new owner of Ruby’s Bar on the main drag thinks he might have heard of Kerouac being here. Not too sure. He’s had his business “one month and 19 days” he says with honest enthusiasm. Business is good he says. I look at the two other customers and kinda try to politely find out when the busy times are. “After the dirt track races let out. They’re on now.”
Yeah!! I am so there. Never been to a dirt track race before. What is not to love!!
Mud flying into the aluminum bleachers where me and all the blond tan Iowans sit. They smoking like crazy. Me trying futilely to record the cataclysm. Halogen lights blazing over cars so beat and munched it’s like a dinosaur spit ‘em out. Screaming deafeningly fast side-ways round turns. One guy flies off the track all together punching out the side and down the hill. Bunches of other guys kinda smash into each other and either drive or are pushed away. It all throws a huge cloud of dust into the night air that I see floating up against the heat lighting as I leave.
On the ride down the road I hear my first ever Emergency Broadcast. Again, I am not making this up. In the middle of this cool alt country show that really LOUD harsh WANK noise cuts into Tift Merritt’s song. Boom! Flash flood watch in some Iowa counties. “Do not try to swim across fast moving waters.” Got ya there brother. I’m splurging on a Quality Inn with wi-fi!
# days otr 12
miles 1701
route Cedar Rapids to Anita IA via
Lake MacBride, Prairie Lights Bk Store IA City & Stuart IA
Playlist Mark Schatz and Friends, Steppin’ in the Boiler House,
Steve Earle, Transcendental Blues
& great broadcast from Prairie Lights Java House Coffeeshop
Satuday big day in Cedar Rapids. Visited the house where I lived from age two to ten. Boy was that family surprised to see me! House adorable as ever. Yard not as vast as it seemed at 5. Went to All Saints my Catholic School and peeked in window of church there I went to mass six days a week. After hands down one of the most beautiful drives of my life on Friday - astonishing – I really mean it! Northeast Iowa – WHO KNEW! – I had to go see some Grant Woods at the Cedar Rapids Art Museum. Woods grew up on a farm in Anamosa and when his dad died while he was still a kid he moved to CR. Anamosa is in NE Iowa. If you think Grant Wood buffed out that countryside to make it more tidy for his paintings and imbued it with this pulsing, swirly topography as an artistic device you are so wrong. It is de facto modernist agricultural vistas out there. Everybody should go. Have fried catfish at Stormin Norman’s!
Today headed to the Czech and Slovak Museum in CR for what promised to be an amazing show of their country’s puppets. But no open even though they said they would be. And I had what has become a typical Iowan George Orwell moment – or is it Night of the Living Dead? Not sure but here I am in a moderate sized city on a gorgeous day in front of a huge new museum and there is NOBODY there. I don’t mean just like nobody in the Museum – I mean NOBODY ANYWHERE VISIBLE ON THE STREETS. I caught the back of one biker. Geez. I guess they got lots more room here and folks spread out.
Wasn’t anybody on the beach at Lake MacBride when I got there either. My Mom used to take us there with Mrs. Harger and her kids. We got to drink as much soda – pop they call it here - as we wanted and for kicks we – I am not making this up – smoked driftwood. Eiiieee.
But here is this pretty little lake and I swam for thirty minutes on a Sunday morning before a soul showed up. A lot of my childhood memories come back as sense things. The water tasted familiar. And when I opened up my eyes under water I had this slammin’ recollection. THIS is what my underwater kid-hood looked like – this grassy green luminescence.
In Iowa City caught up with Jack. Went to Prairie Lights Books and bought the Scroll edition – the book of his typed scroll – the original draft of On The Road. The lady pulled out the NYTimes Book Review and there is Jack on the cover. Kinda feels like me and Jack are in the car and all this other hoo-hah about OTR’s anniversary is far away over there. I didn’t know this anniversary was coming when I first planned the trip and now that I am on the road I barely have time to keep up with it all. The road creates its own space responding to its own dictates. Me and Jack are just movin.
Iowa City looks healthy and smart and growing. I had a nice Indian lunch and listened to some smart ladies talk about the risks of hormone treatments and plastic water bottles.
Then….I went to Stuartt!! The Stuart Iowa where Jack ended up while hitchin’ with an Irish guy from Brooklyn he met on the road. “…Stuart Iowa, a town in which we were really stranded.” Wrote Jack in OTR. Jack and his friend tried to hitch 6 westbound for five hours with no luck. Then they tried to sleep in the train station on a bench but the teletype machine kept them up. Jack didn’t forget it and when things got bad down the road he compared ‘em to Stuart.
So…Stuart is still there. “ A lot of good eggs – a few stinkers” is what the sign on the way into town says. Bonnie and Clyde robbed the bank here once. And the wide empty streets still have a few working businesses on ‘em.
The Rock Island train station quit operating in the sixties but is still there. Boarded up with pigeons flapping away from under the eaves as I head up. Red brick, arched windows with white keystones. The tracks west look on huge silver silos. It really looks like Jack coulda just left. Feels like it too. I do some recording and take pictures.
Nate, proud new owner of Ruby’s Bar on the main drag thinks he might have heard of Kerouac being here. Not too sure. He’s had his business “one month and 19 days” he says with honest enthusiasm. Business is good he says. I look at the two other customers and kinda try to politely find out when the busy times are. “After the dirt track races let out. They’re on now.”
Yeah!! I am so there. Never been to a dirt track race before. What is not to love!!
Mud flying into the aluminum bleachers where me and all the blond tan Iowans sit. They smoking like crazy. Me trying futilely to record the cataclysm. Halogen lights blazing over cars so beat and munched it’s like a dinosaur spit ‘em out. Screaming deafeningly fast side-ways round turns. One guy flies off the track all together punching out the side and down the hill. Bunches of other guys kinda smash into each other and either drive or are pushed away. It all throws a huge cloud of dust into the night air that I see floating up against the heat lighting as I leave.
On the ride down the road I hear my first ever Emergency Broadcast. Again, I am not making this up. In the middle of this cool alt country show that really LOUD harsh WANK noise cuts into Tift Merritt’s song. Boom! Flash flood watch in some Iowa counties. “Do not try to swim across fast moving waters.” Got ya there brother. I’m splurging on a Quality Inn with wi-fi!
posted by Megan at
8:59 AM
4 Comments:
Speaking of dirt tracks, I saw a T-shirt today that said something like this:
"Life is not a safe, sedate journey whose purpose is to deliver your well-maintained body to the undertaker in perfect condition. It's a screaming, banging, full-throttle bone-rattling chassis-denting race that finishes in a wheel-spinning skid, brakes locked, dust flying, and the driver yelling WOW! What a ride!"
No argument from Kerouac or Cassidy on that one.
along those lines (bone rattling & chassis denting) in the great Malick film "the thin red line" an omniscient narrator (God perhaps) says to an american soldier in the WWII pacific jungle: did you think you're life would be easier because you loved goodness . . .?"
i often wished so, but what do i know?
hey it's been a week since the last 'back with jack' installment. did you get locked up in a one horse town?
Hey Megan, thanks for stopping by! Good luck with your travels.
Nate Westre
www.goodegggazette.com
www.rubyspubonline.com
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