"The Loess Hills"

"The Loess Hills"

By James Robert Smith

My son and I were driving back east after two weeks in South Dakota and Montana. We had already ferried my wife to the airport in Sioux Falls so that she could fly back home ahead of us while we pulled the travel trailer across most of the country.

That same day my son and I were on the Interstate cruising along, not necessarily enjoying the scenery in Iowa, but finding it interesting all the same. We were driving through a section called the Loess Hills. As I drove and as my son sat I did what I always do because I have read too much and have a big mouth. I explained to him about the geological origins of those damned hills, so he had to sit there and listen to me explain about continental glaciers and rock flour and vast deserts of soil being tossed aloft and carried hundreds, even thousands of miles by westerly prevailing winds to be deposited in layers two hundred feet thick and now revealed as plateaus and hills made of fertile dirt without a rock in sight.

To our left as we drove relentlessly east was a big verdant green wall, the tremendously rich soil delivered in the wake of the glaciers, fertilized by millennia of colonizing grasslands and enriched by the dung of hundreds of millions of roving bison and extinct giants like mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, and countless other creatures long since exterminated by the indigenous peoples of North America.

Blah blah blah.

It was getting late and we really needed to find a state or county park where we could pull in, hook up the trailer, and get a good, quiet night’s sleep. The sun was still in the sky, but it never helps to linger over such concerns. We did not want to have to pull into an Interstate rest area for a noisy night adjacent to some rattling semi with its generator running to feed the demands of a freezer. Nor were we attracted to the idea of an evening parked in a shopping center or hospital trying to get a few hours of rest.

The GPS device I was using could detect no county parks. We couldn’t even find a private campground that was not cheek by jowl with the howling Interstate. “Screw it,” said I, and took the next exit, aiming our truck/travel trailer rig for the looming wall of those loess hills of which I had read so much but never seen. We were going to climb to the top of that giant mound of fertility and find a campsite in a nice park and be done with it.

The truck pulled us up--200 vertical feet to the top. It almost felt like we were climbing the foothills of the Appalachians, but not quite. In short order the engine stopped laboring and we were on the summit of this vast, undulating, emerald barrier that stood above the plains below, the big Interstate highway appearing as a beige ribbon on the flatlands. We couldn’t even hear the whine of those tens of thousands of tires.

After climbing those slopes we expected to see it dropping off on the other side. Not so. The loess had been deposited not like a tall set of hills, but rather like a fantastic plateau of richness that stretched on to the horizon. We had merely been introduced to it by way of its leading edge. There we were, atop the sweetest stack of grass-friendly soil on the continent. Wonderful dirt that had birthed vast, almost unending vistas of wheat and alfalfa and maize that had fed and fueled the invading swarms of Europeans since this frontier had been wrested from the native peoples through murder and deprivation.

These were thoughts that tickled along the corridors of my brain but which I decided not to inflict upon my son. Instead, I asked him to see if he had cell phone service and could locate us a park while I drove. He tried, but had no luck.

At the next intersection I hung a hard right, taking us further east, paralleling the big federal highway hidden to us by trees and giant fields of green corn growing as high as that elephant’s eye, as promised to us by Oscar Hammerstein. (Or was he talking about wheat?)

“What are we going to do now?” Andy asked.

“I’m just going to drive until we see a sign for a state park or a county park with camping. Then we’ll pull in and rent a space.” It was a sure thing, a piece of cake, a walk in the park.

We drove on. No parks. We passed by lots of farms. Almost everyone seemed to be growing corn, but we saw other crops, too; all of it ridiculously green in the August sun, those fields bursting with vitality.

“Try your phone again, or ask the GPS if it can locate a park.” Andy did that, but no luck.

We pushed on. Not through the big muddy, but along an idyllic two-lane state road, emerald to our left, gorgeous green to our right.

Soon, it was crowding six o’clock, about the time when most state and county parks were closing their offices and sending everyone home for the night. Occasionally we passed a pickup truck or a big sedan, or they passed us. People, but no parks.

“It might be the rest area for us tonight,” my son finally said, foreseeing defeat.

“Maybe not,” I told him. We had just passed a city limits sign. Another small burg on this interminable hilltop of farms and fields, trees and cornstalks. Maybe they had a park or a private campground.

I slowed down. The town came out of the green to meet us. We saw houses off to the right and left. They were like something out of Ozzie and Harriet. We saw a mom and pop grocery. And a malt shop as we slowed to meet the speed limit of 25 miles per hour. A malt shop. Such as you'd see in an Archie comic book.

“Look at this place,” Andy said.

“Uh huh,” I nodded. The town was small. What we sometimes call a postage stamp town. One street light where we caught the red and had to stop. It was quiet. We saw a group of kids, their blonde hair shaved in similar crew cuts. I swear to Almighty God, they were wearing crew cuts. Flat tops. Three of the kids were riding Stingray bikes. I shit you not. One of them waved to us as they passed. Yeah. Blue eyes and perfect teeth.

The light changed and I pulled forward. There were five teenage girls walking past the local grocery store. They were wearing sun dresses. Fine hair, all of them in pony tails. One of the girls was wearing a ribbon in her hair about the same color as the blue sky in spring after the rains have fallen for the season and the soil is just beginning to give up some of its hoarded wealth to those endless rows of corn.

“Fuck," I said.

“Place looks like it stopped aging in 1958,” Andy told me, enough of those old TV shows under his belt to know what he was talking about.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

So I hung a right at the very next state highway intersection and we were once more moving at 65 miles per hour, the tires on the truck singing that drone as we headed to dark where I knew I would pull into a rest area and snag four hours of sleep, my travel trailer vibrating from the powerful rumble of some generator growling away to power a refrigerator truck.

It seemed better than risking our fading luck in that little bit of blonde, blue-eyed weirdness up on the hill. Because something told us it was not a dream, but the alternative.