12 Days

Not long after we arrived in Iowa City, a friend of mine sent me a Slate article  about a new book that collected the letters Kurt Vonnegut wrote during his life. The article featured one letter in particular written to Richard Gehman, who at the time was a graduate student in need of advice. The acerbic missive explained what to expect in Iowa City and the university.

 

This email came at the perfect time for us. Bo and I had arrived in the dead of Iowa’s winter and the view out every window was a bleak snow scape so different from what we could see in the Pacific Northwest. The shift in location and the low moral left me questioning my decision to leave a lucrative job and go back to school. Vonnegut’s advice about the city itself was the leverage we needed, a treasure map, that took us out of the house and into Donnelly’s Pub; which was just the start. Not long after classmates shared tips about Hamburg Inn and Blue Bird Cafe. Bo found a community-rowing club who pointed us toward the Amana Colonies. Later, I shambled into Zombie Burger in Des Moines with my robot theatre class.

 

It wasn’t just food either: we took part in a number of activities that we missed in Portland. I found some great game stores like Hobby Corner and Critical Hit. Riverside, Iowa, the future birthplace of Captain Kirk and home of Trek Fest, is just down the Highway. Bo and I both reconnected with outdoor activities like biking and rowing which brought great friends like Casey Westlake and Karen Clark into our lives. Through my classwork I met great people, who I hope to work with in the future like Denise Szecsei, Lisa Schlesinger, Peter Balestrieri, and Joshua Wheeler.

 

Our adventures also took us outside of Iowa City. We have traveled extensively in the past two and half years with trips to Cedar Rapids, Chicago, Cincinnati, Des Moines, Kansas City, Sioux City, and San Francisco, Seattle, Wahoo, and oh so briefly back to Portland. Some of these trips were get-aways designed to restore sanity, as Vonnegut suggested. Others were flights of fancy or research expeditions. Some of these trips were places, that due to proximity, expense, or size, we wouldn’t have traveled to otherwise. All of them were worthwhile.

 

We have spent the last two and half years living as local tourists, trying to absorb as much of the Iowa-ness as we could. Yet, each sentence in this post only skips along the surface of our memories here, a link in a larger, deeper web of associations and memories. There is just so much experience that sits in the white space between these words. It may be easier to say, we both fell in love with this place and now that we only have another twelve days left we find ourselves a little sad to be leaving.

We didn’t do everything Vonnegut suggested. I didn’t “run with the painters,” although I wish I had. There is some amazing work to be found in Art Building West that I didn’t encounter until my last couple of weeks here. We also avoided the football games like the plague, instead we became fans of the Cedar Rapids Kernals, a Class A feeder team for the Minnesota Twins . We also didn’t visit the Lark, a Tiffin steak house that Vonnegut recommended, but had burned down by the time we arrived.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Leave some of the mystery. Something to see when we come back.