So today was interesting. Make that HOT and interesting. I think it was about 95 in Fairfield Iowa today when I left there in the mid afternoon. Ugh lol. I mark today as the first official day of serious research for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project. I drove the one hour and change from my home in Iowa City to Fairfield and marveled at the endless rows of corn. I mean…I can’t say enough about how much land here is ruled by corn. It’s really bonkers to me to see all this land under the dominion of a single crop…a practice that any farmer knows breaks the land. I’m not a farmer and even I know it. You can simply look out at any non farmed piece of Earth and see that nature has a different set of rules, a different kind of design. Diversity is nature’s design because it’s what works. And here we are, trying to force dollars out of the ground against all logic, using more and more fertilizer like amphetamines to resurrect the tired and overworked soil.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is this: “A Fallow Field Is A Crime Against The Land” I thought it was a direct quote from Steinbeck’s book “Grapes of Wrath”, but it seems it is not. I can’t find where I discovered that exact quote, but what it meant to me was quite poignant. For me it meant (please note the past tense usage) that the land was the victim. The land was suffering, because it wasn’t under the command of what people wanted. It meant that not growing food is wrong. Not making the land productive is wrong. As a young person I strongly identified with this mandate…that it’s our right to put the land to our designs however we see fit. In my mind, we didn’t have to justify it. That began to drastically change when I became an outdoorsy hippie in my twenties.
Now, to me, a monoculture field is a type of crime against the land. And a fallow field is a chance at recovery. A fallow field never to be plowed again is a chance at redemption, to undo the harm that’s been done. Not in all cases mind you, but compared to King Corn, yes.
I am 53 years old ya’ll…and if you had told me even 2 years ago that I’d be writing this down this post in an Amish town’s (Kalona, IA) coffee house, after returning from Fairfield where I toured 2 different restored prairies…I would have quite simply said “but I will never live in the midwest, so that’s impossible”
Today was wild though. I learned so so much about what is happening with restored prairie. I met with folks, who between the 7 of them, possess over 100 years of combined prairie restoration know how. I got my first glimpse of actual restored prairie, got to walk barefoot along the firebreak pathways…oh…and now I know what a firebreak is. It would be too cumbersome to recount everything that I gleaned from these folks. And I won’t have to, because at least one of them is going to tell us in her own words…I am returning next weekend; one of them has agreed to commit to an interview for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project Podcast. And three of the others I met are pondering doing the same a little bit further down the road.
Stay tuned for that interview. And if you’d like to listen to Episode One, which is me talking about my motivations and influences that led to the beginning of this project, that was released yesterday. Currently I believe it’s only on the main Simplecast site…not quite filtered down to Spotify and the others yet. Click on the pic to listen.
And finally here’s two pics I took today…
King Corn on the left in a field outside of Fairfield, Iowa.chamaecrista fasciculata…the Partridge Pea that I spotted along the way.
Yep, I know I have a lot going on. My hands are full already with releasing weekly episodes of my podcast, lining up screenings for a movie about how Russia is ravaging Kherson, Ukraine with drone warfare…and just you know…working for a living and trying to keep my head above all the challenging things happening around the world right now.
But…ever since I arrived in Iowa, literally…I fell in love with the history of the prairie. I’ve also been learning a lot about the dismal water quality situation here. And more recently the cancer rates as it likely relates to agricultural practices. I And so…I am just starting the process of creating a documentary series (podcast and film formats) about the history of Iowa’s prairies. I plan on focussing on the changes primarily from just before pre settlement to current circumstances, how those changes have impacted water quality, species, etc. I mean…that’s a wildly brief summary but it gives you an idea of where I am coming from.
If you live in Iowa… I am hoping to connect with people who might fit into some of the following categories: 1- interested in being recorded while talking about their knowledge of prairie flora and fauna…with a perspective on how things have changed over the last 175 years. 2- don’t want to be recorded but are happy to talk about it off the record. 3- folks who can tell me where I should be filming to best capture existing prairie that never went under the plow 4-you know who I should talk to…if not you
5-you have drone footage or photos that you think would help tell the story.
If you are interested at all in helping, or asking me questions about the project, feel free to DM me. Forewarning: I am 53 years old and prone to actually talking on the phone as opposed to lots of messaging haha!
I am always a bit self conscious when walking into a diner. I shouldn’t be. I am always in good company. Today, strung along the street side window are three men over the age of sixty.
Two of them are wearing beanie hats. One of them has the classic baseball cap. All of them hiding their bald heads from the chill or hiding the fact that they lost that hair long ago. I rebel, and remove my gray wool beanie, setting it down pointedly on the table. I haven’t had hair on top of my head since I was 25. Unfairness in the handsome department struck me early in life.
It doesn’t work though. I still look just like them. For we are all the same. Alone, older and lonely looking. Oh…and all of us are wearing glasses in order to read the menu. Hello 53 years of age. I wasn’t planning on meeting you and being single still but here we are at the Bluebird Diner in Iowa City, Iowa. My theory is that you don’t really notice the older-lonely-beanie boys in diners early in the morning unless you are one of them. I think we are invisible to most. I don’t like belonging to anything by virtue of default. This is my least favorite label. The lonely older guy sitting in the diner at 8 AM. The romanticism of sitting alone in diners wore off for me about 13 years ago.
My favorite past is sitting across from me. They just walked in. My favorite of all time…the period of my life that brought out my best. It’s a 6-top. Four kids and all of them under the age of 5. Within minutes the three older ones have knives in their hands, they are shaking the salt shakers, there are napkins on the floor. There is squealing and laughing. The parents are calm but also taking a lot of deep breaths and looking at one another across the milieu-wan smiles. I only had two kids to their four, but it’s the best thing I ever did.
That’s why I am here in Iowa City. My two kids, now 22 years old and 26 years old somehow both decided to move to this town in the last year. Then the requests for me to follow began late last year. And after I was done saying “but why did you have to move to Iowa City of all places”, I visited them for Christmas and actually found that I liked the place. And then came the plans to move here on my part, driven by many external forces, but all of my own design.
First of all, any parent who has adult children asking them to live nearby to them, must say yes. It’s an unwritten rule of life. If you have kids that enjoy your company enough to make this request, despite your uncountable mistakes as a parent…count yourself exceedingly fortunate and make haste to their location.
Secondly, I have “lived” in 123 places in the last four years. No. That’s not an exaggeration. I made a spreadsheet. I counted them up. And for the last 11 months I have been doing nothing but volunteering for things I believed in. I have been creating more than I have at any point in my life. I created a 19 episode podcast and directed a feature length movie.To keep my costs low so that I could focus on this work I decided to do housesitting and petsitting up and down the east coast of the USA. It’s unpaid. But you get a dog or cat to watch after and a free place to stay. Usually it’s a very nice place to be and in a very choice location.
I have been, in a real sense, without a place to call home since August of 2019. I had some short stints in a rented place here or there…but for all the rest of that time I have either been taking care of my parents in their home, camping, staying with friends, at an Airbnb or doing the housesitting/petsitting thing.
I haven’t had a home to rest within, in any real sense. And by this January, during my last scheduled petsitting gig on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington Vermont, I realized I couldn’t do this any longer. The free wheeling sense of adventure had evaporated. I got to the point where I was daydreaming about living in one town, having one job, and just being as stable and boring as humanly possible.
And so, Iowa City made sense for a lot of reasons.
I now live in a house built in the 1850’s. The ceiling in my room appears to be 15’ tall. The windows are about 12 feet tall and they have two layers of heavy wood paneling that folds to act as a solid curtain against the light and cold if need be. You can feel the history in the exposed floorboards with every delightfully creaky weary wooded step. Steam coaxes deep grumbles from the heater in the corner. The massive front door of the house probably weighs over 100 pounds and was shipped by horse and buggy, overland from a train station in Chicago in 1853. The streets out front bear the weight of cars on red bricks and the tires make an odd but pleasing squishy grubbly sound upon them. I can walk to town within minutes. 1800’s architecture and early 1900’s edifice are everywhere. One thing I gleaned from staying in 123 different places was a made list of “things I want to have when I finally stop moving around”. Because I made a study of how people who live in one place…lived. The main thing I noted is that most places don’t really have a sense of community if they don’t have walkability. If you can’t walk to a friend’s home, to where things are happening, to where you might take a bite or get a cuppa or read a book…that community is always lacking something. So top of my list was to get a place in a town where I could walk to the town center and where the town would have something worth walking to. To my surprise, Iowa City=A+ on that grading chart.
I also made note of the absurd housing costs everywhere I went. There was not one place where the locals didn’t trot out the now tired tale “after the pandemic housing prices are through the roof! People can’t find anywhere to live here now and even if they can find it, it’s too expensive!” When I found out how little my kids were paying for rent in Iowa City I really thought it was a typo. Or if not, it meant that Iowa City must simply be a truly undesirable place to live. Nope. Turns out it’s just mysteriously affordable. And local wages somehow are not far behind the cost of living here.
To wit…my plan was to settle in a lovely small Vermont town called Warren. I was just there last week saying goodbye to that postcard village. And a friend there told me that just recently a 200 sq foot bedroom, in a home shared with others, was going for $2000 a month. As I said, a number of reasons drove me to Iowa City. At some points, while I was living rent and mortgage free for most of the last 4 years, I have felt like an economic refugee. Fleeing the high cost of housing as a single person and knowing that if I rejoined the housing fray that my earnings couldn’t possibly land me in a home that I would want to live in. When you are single, it’s just way different. Your options for comfort are exactly cut in half, unless you are wealthy…which I am most certainly not. I am not Ken Burns. I have found a place to rent that I enjoy, in a lovely historic part of town…and it’s not expensive. It’s easy.
So, here I am. Iowa City. Day 1. There aren’t words with enough letters or enough lines on a page to explain my relief at knowing that I am living here. No longer moving. No longer searching. Just finally living in one place.
Work? Honestly…who knows? Though I planned on doing a very normal, very plain kind of job…alas. I am who I am. I have applied for those jobs and been passed over or turned them down. Currently I am feeling like I’d love to do something historical about Iowa City. Maps. Visual retrospectives. Maybe see if the city wants to throw some money into something interesting that visitors might want to use or see. I want to dust off my old cameras and take some still images. Maybe get back into some architectural photography? In short…I am feeling like freelancing is what I will end up doing again. And that’s sounding okay.
What I am currently doing however is:
-ghostwriter and business contact for a book about Ukraine and the work of one frontline humanitarian aid worker from the USA. We are seeking a publisher for the book! (screenshot for the book website that is still in development phase below)
-copyediting my prescriptive self help memoir about my time as a caregiver for my mother as she died from cancer and dementia during the peak of the pandemic. Seeking the traditional publishing route for this one too.
-self publishing a poetry book drawing from my last 15 years of writing poetry.
-possibly developing a podcast based on my movie 400 Feet Down.
The Video Slab 