Midwest Tour

(Apologies for the ridiculously long entry. It will be moved to the Travel Logs section of "The Buddha Diaires" in due course.)

Thursday, June 23

I think the hardest part of leaving on a trip is not the packing or the logistics, but saying goodbye to George! We left him in the house early in the morning, having arranged for Lisa, his dog-sitter, to pick him up a little later. He had been watching us pack with suspicious eyes, and was looking thoroughly mournful when we closed the door behind us.

The Jet Blue flight from Long Beach to Chicago was a relative breeze. The small airport at Long Beach was jam-packed with travelers, but security was less of a nightmare than at bigger airports like LAX. The hard part of the first day out was the drive from O’Hare to our first overnight stop in Galena—much further than I had anticipated, and endless road construction slowed the heavy traffic out of town and well into the country. After the four-hour flight, it felt interminable.

Still, we did arrive intact in Galena, where we were booked into a comfortable room at the Farmer’s Guest House. Arriving late, however, we found almost every restaurant closed—except for one, a pleasant stroll across the river near the old railroad station, where our nice waitress came back with the news that the kitchen was fresh out of all the main course choices. All that was left was eggs, so we ordered a 10:30PM breakfast.

Friday, June 24

Breakfast, too, the next morning at our B&B. I must report at some point on B&B breakfasts. These good people were kind enough to scramble up a simple egg for us, but I think there must somewhere be a school for B&B breakfast makers, where they are trained to do dreadful things with eggs to make them a) unrecognizable and b) inedible. They bake them or concoct them with various foreign ingredients into something that looks more like a cake or dessert dish than an honest egg. Call me conventional, I like my eggs to look and taste like eggs, preferably alongside a couple of strips of bacon or a tasty sausage. Is that too much to ask?

We had chosen Galena as a stop-over because my son, Jason, with whom we were to spend our weekend in Iowa City, had recommended it as a wonderful mecca for antiques and collectables. There were, indeed, some beautiful old houses...

... but we were surprised—as Jason was, later, when we told him—that the main street...

... was a solid row of gift shoppes and boutiques, with nary an antique in sight. (We have actually not “collected” anything for years now: it has been a while since everybody and his sister discovered that their mother’s old kitchen junk was “worth something,” and stuck a big price on it for the garage sale or swap meet. No bargains any more, and it was the treasure hunt that made it such fun.)

The one remaining antique shop in Galena recommended a detour to Cuba City, where we did find a genuine junk shop or two, plus a sandwich for lunch, on our way into Iowa, via Dubuque and, further south, Mount Vernon. The latter is a pleasant little town that was, in my Iowa days, a favored place for Writers’ Workshop faculty to live—close enough for a reasonable commute to Iowa City, and far enough to find some peace and quiet. I do remember driving out to parties there, with such luminaries as Kurt Vonnegut in attendance.

It was nostalgia time in Iowa City. I went there in the early sixties to attend the Writers’ Workshop as a poet, and was inveigled into doing a PhD in Comparative Literature along the way. I was promised two years; it took me four, plus an extra year as an ABD (“all but dissertation”) when I moved on to Southern California for a teaching job. The best part was being in a place with more poets per square block than anywhere else in the world. The bad part was still being young enough to believe that I was the center of the universe, and behave accordingly. I’ll spare you the details.

It was, though, a great joy to be reunited with my son—now… um, growing into middle age—who was born and has spent the better part of his life in Iowa; and his Mom, Elizabeth, who moved back here from Southern California in the early 1970s. It has been a couple of years since we last saw them, here on the West Coast. We got together, first, at Jason’s house in adjacent Coralville, and were delighted to find so many pieces from Ellie’s parents’ art collection—some of them rescued from neglect in the basement—nicely framed and hung, and obviously loved in their new home. Jason has also recently added a new garage behind the house, and a fine new deck in front, where were greeted with great enthusiasm by Jason’s rescue dog, Louis, a sweet creature...

... but young enough not to be much aware of his own size and strength!

We gathered again for dinner at a fine downtown Italian restaurant, and returned in decent time to our B&B.


Saturday, June 25

First thing was a room change, graciously agreed to by our hosts. Our original room was quite tiny, with no space to unpack or put the contents of our bags. At breakfast (don’t get me started!) we requested “boiled eggs” over the proprietor’s concoction, and were surprised when they arrive hard-boiled and cold. Clearly, we had miscommunicated out intention. After breakfast, Elizabeth drove around to guide us down to the local farmer’s market...

...sheltered, thankfully, from a steady downpour of Midwestern rain. It rained on and off for most of our time in Iowa, in fact, though this did little to spoil our long weekend.

We met up with Jason again at the farmer’s market, and spent the rest of the day in town with him. Here are Ellie and Jason near the Old Capitol, at the center of the campus...

We had heard of the devastating effects of the floods, two years ago, on what had been a fine art museum building down by the Iowa River, and were interested to see the museum’s temporary location in a top-floor wing of the student union. First, though, a nostalgic walk through the natural history displays in McBride Hall, where we used to take the boys to marvel at the stuffed animals in their dioramas. It is more elaborate now than I remember it, with an upper level devoted to the early Iowan cultures, as well as the native flora and fauna. All nicely displayed. We could have spent more time there…

There is only a small part of the museum’s impressive collection on exhibition in the single gallery they now occupy. Much of it—including an important pre-drip Jackson Pollock painting—is on loan to the Figge Muesum in Davenport, Iowa, while decisions are made as to how and where the university museum will find a new home. A great deal of the collection, we hear, is in storage. A shame, because I do remember the great gallery in the old building, severely flooded and now apparently just empty and decaying, a home to birds and rodents. Sounds like a great movie set! Still, the curators have made the most of their small space, particularly for the collections of African art and modern and contemporary ceramics.

Time out for a break back in our (mow more spacious!) B&B room, and off to Elizabeth’s house for the best dinner of our tour. Jason and Louis in attendance...

(Jason here seen with Elizabeth's dog, Rosalind Russell) ... along with an old friend of Jason’s, Melissa...

... who has spent time with us in California and who has for some years now worked for Planned Parenthood. Much talk about the disastrous budget cuts and hostility from those many aggressively misinformed Americans who seek to put an end to its much-needed services. We have good reason to be thankful for people like Melissa, who are determined to stick it out.


Sunday, June 26

Oatmeal for breakfast! Excellent!

We drove out to Jason’s, where Louis jumped on me while I was juggling a cup of hot coffee on the front deck, requiring a quick rinse of clothes and the loan of a pair of shorts. No rain this morning...

Elizabeth arrived for a light breakfast outside...

... but chose not to join us for a late-morning walk. Jason had planned to take us out across the Coralville strip to a hike he had recently discovered out into the country and through the woods, but unhappily we found the access closed for construction of some kind. Instead, we took a walk through the civic center and around the duck pond, then along the tree-shaded residential streets before leaving Jason to prepare for an evening gig with his band at a bar in neighboring Cedar Rapids.

Time enough for a taco lunch in Iowa City and a nap at our B&B before heading out, ourselves, to Cedar Rapids. Jason, though now gainfully employed in a day job with an educational testing company, started out his adult life as a serious, well-educated and dedicated musician. After a few years’ absence, it was good to see him back playing music: he is a fine R&B singer and guitarist, and it was a special pleasure to see him now in great form, very much at ease to be performing with skilled fellow-musicians, and for people who obviously appreciated their songs. It’s so important for creative people of all kinds to keep the flame alive, and I’m happy to know that Jason is doing just that.

The biker bar, though, was not exactly the best environment to hear the music. Nor, obviously, great light for a picture. Jason is in the background.) There were continual conversations going on, and the usual bar activity, so we drank our beer contentedly for an hour or so, then said our goodbyes to Jason before heading out through the country-side...

... to the Amana Colonies for dinner. At seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, the tidy little village of Amana...

... seemed pretty much deserted—until we walked into the restaurant and found almost every table busy with mostly rather large people enjoying the traditional German fare.

We knew what we were in for and chose, with circumspection, “small” dishes—Sauerbraten for me, pork sausages for Ellie, both with generous heapings of mashed potatoes. Not for every day.

Back to our B&B for a last night there. We were watching an episode of Poirot on PBS when the first warning came—a beep beep beep on the televison, followed by a weather map showing severe weather with tornado warnings at the far west end of the state. Outside the window, there were already occasional flashes of lightning and bursts of thunder, with heavy rain showers passing through. At intervals throughout the evening, the weather warnings appeared on the TV screen, edging eastward, each time a little closer to Iowa City. Really quite exciting—and unnerving. At about ten o’clock—drama outpacing Poirot by far!—our room exploded with a sudden, intense burst of light, as though the lightning had struck directly outside our window, followed instantaneously by the most deafening thunderclap I have ever heard. We trembled, awaiting worse…

But after that, the storm abated. The weather maps showed the severe weather moving to the north and east of Iowa City, leaving us much relieved and able to get comfortably to sleep.


Monday, June 27

We left Iowa City in good time in the morning, driving north again through Mount Vernon and Dubuque, this time into Wisconsin, where we were booked for the night in Spring Green at the Usonian Inn—a motel designed either by an associate or by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, whose Taliesin East community was our objective. We were intrigued, close to our destination, to pass signs to “The House on the Rock,” and detoured off the highway to find it to be the delightful pinnacle of kitsch...

... designed and built as the extravagant fantasy of one Alex Jordan. The place is a veritable rabbit warren of crazy corridors, dark rooms and projections over the void...

...all perched on a rocky hilltop overlooking the glorious countryside of the Driftless area (more of this in a moment). Aside from the obsession with this architectural oddity, Jordan was the fanatical collector of obscure, mostly mechanical musical devices, circus and fairground memorabilia, and other grand guignol kitsch. Since his death, the place has been turned into a tourist mecca, attracting great crowds despite the outrageous cost of the various tours. We did the basic, and were more than satisfied.

I wondered what Frank Lloyd Wright might have thought of all this, so close—geographically, I mean—to his own architectural monument. Would he have been intrigued by the monomania (not, incidentally, much unlike his own!) or appalled by its undisciplined expression?

We found the village of Spring Green clearly suffering from the bad economy, with several restaurants and B&Bs closed down, and a rather desultory air about the place. Since we were by this time hungry, however, we were grateful to find a delightful bookshop which also served sandwiches for lunch, and enjoyed a good chat with the owner—who promised to order a few copies of “Persist,” which he said sounded just right for the creative community thereabouts. We asked about “Driftless,” by David Rhodes—one of our all-time favorite books—and were pleased to find that our enthusiasm was shared. The “driftless” area, mentioned above, is a slice of landscape that was somehow missed by the last great glacial shift and retained its millennia-old geological characteristics—not to mention the quiet beauty of its verdant, rolling hills...

... and wandering waterways. No wonder Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Welsh immigrant family had moved to this valley before his birth, considered it his Eden.

A few more stops in Spring Green, notably at the friendly local department store and the Catholic church, designed in the Wright tradition by his son-in-law—a fine-looking piece of architecture from the outside...

... but unfortunately closed that particular day for “carpet cleaning.” Then on to the Usonian to find our room and rest up a while before heading out for a walk in the park—the Tower Hill State Park, which we found totally deserted but for one unoccupied campsite.

No visitors, not a single car parked in the huge parking lot, and a kind of spooky feeling to the place. Perhaps the gnats and mosquitoes were to blame… One remarkable sighting, however: I spotted a large furry creature snuffling around near a picnic table and thought, at first, it had to be a raccoon. No. A little closer, we recognized it as a beaver. When we got too close, he trotted off back down toward the river, but I was surprised to find one of these creatures so far from its natural habitat. As usual, at such moments, I forgot all about the camera…

For dinner, we headed down the road to a town with the improbably name of Mazomanie, where enterprising folk had turned an old flour mill into a spacious restaurant. The food was pretty good and the place was pleasantly quiet, perfect for the evening. After dinner, we took a constitutional across the railroad tracks and into town, where we found the great, wide streets as vacant as the park had been. It had the feel, at eight o’clock at night, of an exceptionally well-tended ghost town. We walked along between the houses, expecting curtains to part and eyes to be peering out at us. But no. Silence, emptiness. Very strange.


Tuesday, June 28

Breakfast—you guessed it—in an empty restaurant. Well, virtually empty. The place was a huge converted barn, with windows affording views through the ceiling, up to the old raftered roof. There were, we noticed, a couple of other customers at a distant bar, clearly locals. Otherwise we were the only two breakfasters in this vast, echoing space. (It’s the economy, stupid!)

Booked into the four-hour tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright estates at 9:30, we arrived promptly, as instructed, and signed in at the visitor center...

The Lloyd-Wright family immigrated from Wales in the 19th century, and soon took over the valley with their progeny. The family chapel...

... and graveyard...

... proved to be the first stop for our bus, and we wandered between grave markers for the various wives, mistresses, parents and siblings of the great man. Initially buried here himself...

...he was secretly abducted long after his death by the last of his wives, who stole his body away in the dark of night to be cremated and inurned along with her. Our guide made nice work of the story—as she did, indeed, with the entire tour.

Next stop was the school Wright designed...

... originally, for his sister, and redesigned at intervals thereafter, following fires and whatever personal whims caught his fancy. The school eventually became the working center for his “fellowship” of apprentices, who were expected to till the soil and perform a variety of other tasks at the behest of the master. It remains an educational center to this day, as witnessed by the impressive studio we visited along the way. Wright’s love of music was such that he regarded it as adequate qualification for admission to the fellowship of architectural students and, in addition to the studio, we visited the theater he designed for performances and concerts—and the dining and other community areas set aside for their use.

The rest of the tour was on foot. (Our camera’s battery gave up on us at this point, and we had forgotten to bring along a spare. Curses!) We climbed a hill through a meadow of tall, silvery grasses and wildflowers to the “Romeo and Juliet Wind Tower”—an elegant, embracing twin set of tall, narrow buildings designed as a windmill to pump water for the facility. The concept—though not the architecture, of course—made me think of that other Frank (Gehry’s) Fred and Ginger building in Prague. I wonder if he gave a thought to the master as he designed it?

A long walk, next, through more meadows and neat fields of crops...

... past the house designed for Wright’s sister, and past the Wright farm with its long, low red barn ...

... to the house he built, modified, and rebuilt for himself, Taliesin...

... Welsh for the “shining brow” of the hillside he had loved since childhood. Along with Falling Water, which we saw last year in Pennsylvania, it has to count amongst Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, where everything, from the nestled position in the landscape to interior detail, was a matter of his aesthetic choice. He was, by all accounts, not the nicest of men, but you can’t walk through a place like this without acknowledging his genius. Our guide was full of information about both his personal life and his architectural philosophy and practice. We visited, of course, the infamous spot where one of the house servants went amok with an axe, attacking Wright’s long-time mistress and her company before nailing the doors shut and setting fire to the house.

We were glad to have chosen the long tour, arriving back at the visitor center for a pleasant lunch in the dining room there...

... overlooking the lovely Wisconsin River...

... before returning to the car for the penultimate leg of our journey, this time to Madison. Ellie started her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s and had not returned since, so it was another nostalgic visit, this time for her. Warmly greeted at the B&B we had reserved for our two nights here, we unpacked with plenty of the day left to drive downtown for a stroll around the campus.

Well, I had imagined a stroll. It turned out to be a good, long hike, starting with the rooming house...

... near the student Union, where Ellie had spent her first year; then through the union and out along the lakeshore path...

... in search of the dormitory where she had spent the next, and last of her two years at UW. The lake shore was busy with summer activities...

...sailboats and canoes, wind-surfing craft, speedboats and sleek competitive rowing shells. Thousands of students everywhere, whose youth and energy left me feeling somewhat creaky at the joints. Doubling back a couple of times in the course of our search—and enjoying a detour through a beautifully tended botanical garden...

... we finally found the Place Itself...

... Cole Hall, triggering many memories for Ellie of long time gone…

Back at the Union, somewhat fatigued by a long day on our feet, we found a place amongst the crowded tables to sit down for a shared glass of beer...

A multitude of young people clearly enjoying their relaxation at the end of a day of warm sunshine, anticipating the arrival of a band for an evening of music. We, though, chose to go looking for a restaurant on State Street and, finding nothing to our taste, headed back toward our B&B to seek out a restaurant that had been recommended. Jac’s provided us with excellent (Tuesday night) two-for-one hamburgers and more fries than we could possibly eat.


Wednesday, June 29

The last full day of our Midwestern tour. Breakfast—I hesitate to mention—was another strange experience. You would think that toast—no?—would be a not outrageous thing to ask for. It did seem so, however. I was asked if the donuts provided were not satisfactory, and was met with something approaching disbelief when I said that, no, I did actually prefer toast. I’m not hot on sweet buns for breakfast. A good deal of searching in the kitchen, it seemed, resulted in the eventual discovery of an English muffin.

We soon found congenial company with our fellow-breakfasters—Maryanne turned out to be one of the many dedicated teachers subjected to the state’s massive budget cuts—and sat for a long while in sympathetic talk. We set out late-ish, enjoying a cup of coffee with the brother of one of Ellie's old college friends, who directed us to the house where the family had lived...

... and where Ellie had been made to feel at home at a lonely time. The area is filled with architectural gems, like this Prairie style house by Frank Lloyd Wright himself...

Here's a detail from a neighboring architect-designed house of the same period...

We enjoyed our walk in the neighborhood before moving on, with no particular goal in mind, heading downtown to the Capitol area...

... where we found a place to leave the car for the day. After our breakfast discussion—and having watched the demonstrations against the Governor’s austerity plans from afar, on television, for the past few weeks—we were not surprised to find a handful of hardy protestors still making their presence known, with signs demanding his resignation or recall. Our sympathies, of course, lie with them; we are appalled by what is happening in the states, as well as on the national political scene, and Wisconsin has seemed like weather vane for the rest of the country.

After a quick lunch at a local hangout, we decided on a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art and spent a while in the several exhibitions there. I wish I could report on some excitement there, but truthfully I found the shows kind of pedestrian. I suspect that they, too, reflected a paucity of discretionary funds. A nice gift shop, though...

... where Ellie found some small gifts to take along with us when we cross the pond to visit the grandchildren, this September.

Rather uninspired and—I speak for myself—rather travel fatigued, we wandered down to the Convention Center, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol, which we had seen in model form on our Frank Lloyd Wright tour. He had designed it years before, but died before seeing his plan approved and brought to fruition.

It’s an impressive building which plays delightfully between interior and exterior and welcomes the visitor with its spaciousness and repeated circular patterns—echoes, as the architect saw it, of the Capitol a short way up the hill. While substantially modified from his original plans, it has all the appeal of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, nestling comfortably between the man-made city and the natural lake and incorporating the energy of both. Up on the open air top level, overlooking the wide stretch of water, we were chuffed to find a memorial to Otis Redding, who died in a foul weather plane crash in the lake nearby, having insisted on the attempt to make a landing in time to get to a concert for his fans. We have always loved his mournfully sensual “Dock of the Bay”—one of “our songs.”

In the growing, increasingly muggy heat, we headed back toward the university campus on a final search for another of Ellie’s undergraduate haunts, a complex of lecture halls, to satisfy the last of her nostalgic wishes; and stopped to enjoy an ice blended mocha before heading back to the Capitol for a Wednesday evening “Concert on the Square.” We were surprised by the great throngs of people gathered for the event, with blankets spread out under the trees, beach chairs and elaborate picnics. Each one of the quadrants surrounding the building was crowded...

... even those well out of sight of the stage where the orchestra was playing, but where the music was piped in through loudspeaker systems. After listening to the music for a while (pop selections from Mendelssohn, Elgar, Aaron Copeland) we were lucky to find a nice corner table at an outdoor café...

... where we enjoyed a glass of wine and a decent, final dinner for our tour.

Thursday, June 30

Breakfast. Don’t ask. Soft-boiled eggs, okay, nice. But still no toast. Good conversation. We packed and checked out of our B&B in good time for a visit to the UW Arboretum on our way out of town. A lovely walk through the prairie meadows…

... and then on down the Interstates to O’Hare, car rental return, a long wait at the airport, and Jet Blue back to Long Beach. And, of course, George, returned to the cottage by his dog-sitter in anticipation of our arrival, not knowing that we’d soon be home… but delighted when we were.