Walt Lockley - Travel Pieces

Bentonsport & the sexy part of southeastern
Iowa (really)

written December 2000

Pros: serenity now
Cons: no chianti

The second-best Grant Wood painting is called Death on Ridge
Road. It's a cartoonish sort of painting, and nightmarish. Wood
has a bright red cube of a panel truck levitating over a hill, about
to collide with a fishtailing black limo. With impending loss of life.
With this painting, and five or six others, Grant Wood was working
toward an expressionist pastoral pornscape (if there is such a
thing, and there's clearly not). Mr. Wood painted sexy Iowa hills,
rumps and bumps and furrows that are unmistakable stand-ins for
breasts & haunches.

Take a look at Fall Plowing. Take a look at Young Corn, and tell
me if you see the same panty lines and swelling globes I do.
(Back to Ridge Road for minute, though, because it's my favorite,
please go look at it, and tell me if you get a faint Ballard-like
psychosexual charge from a fatal car crash in that landscape...)

And you can point your own panel truck down almost any real
country road in southeastern Iowa and travel over the same
sensual, feminine muscles in the landscape. Grant Wood knew
what he was painting about. It's really sexy around here.

And more than that, except for maybe Keokuk and Ottumwa,
southeastern Iowa smells good too. It smells fertile -- alfalfa, all
that. The soil is still pretty much as rich and dark as chocolate
cake. Although this is a working landscape, gridded, seeded,
reaped, it's still comfortably maternal, as if you could pull over
and curl up anywhere and go to sleep, if you really needed to. At
45 MPH, bottoming out, topping off, bottoming out, topping off,
you experience the pull of something that loves you and doesn't
want to let you go.

Someday somebody's going to define this territory, and label it
something like 'the American Cotswolds' and start a big marketing
campaign that'll ruin the whole territory. So far, though, there
aren't many tourists around these sexy hills.

And a river runs through it. The Des Moines River angles off from
the Missouri at Keokuk then north (going upstream). About 30
miles upstream you find Bentonsport. In Van Buren County. Back
when the rivers were roads -- say, 1840, Bentonsport was a hot
spot, with a mill and a dam and a (duh) port, a riverboat port.
This was the northern stopping point since the boats couldn't get
over the dam... except for the occasional riverboat captain,
crazed with greed, who would fire up the boiler and try to ramp
up and over the dam, freight and passengers and all, sometimes
getting to the virgin transport market upstream and a quick
fortune, sometimes just smashing his boat into kindling and
splinters. With loss of life.

Right now, though, Bentonsport has shrunk down like a
Shrinky-Dink in a cyclotron. Down to a village of about 200
people. What remains is orderly and upright, it's just so much less
than it was in 1830.

I say, "It's a great place, you should go."

You say, "It's two hundred miles from anywhere, dodo. What is
there to do?"

Right by the bank of this manageable little Des Moines River,
narrow but deep and fast, you can play on the extensive black
stone ruins of the old old mill, where some local has put in a
gorgeous red rose garden. Or you can look across the narrow iron
bridge, long closed even to pedestrian traffic, rust and planks. Or
you can balance-beam-walk on the yards and yards and yards of
rectangular stone foundations of the houses and stores that
disappeared 100 years ago.

Or you can go find an Iowan to talk to. Mostly true to
stereotype, I've found Iowans corn-fed, sturdy, spectacled,
pleased to see you, willing to work three hours before sunrise,
and happily tuned to the reproductive cycles of their crops, their
stock, and each other. Iowa has the highest literacy rate in the
country. All cynicism and silly sexy-hill-talk aside for a moment,
Iowans, as a group, are the best.

.....Or you could take an entire day and recuperate, if you have
something to recuperate from.

Or you can lay around in the broad empty lawns on the riverside,
mowed, I'm guessing, by a private citizen as a civic gesture.
That's why I love Bentonsport. And you can watch the river scroll
by under its own power, from right to left, obeying its own logic,
a friendly little river as rivers go, that somehow reminds me of a
young, strong dog.

Or you could sit here at this picnic bench, and have a cigarette
with me. Okay, okay, I know, I know. At least don't yell at me for
having one. Just imagine how this place would look with five
inches of snow. No, I'd never blow smoke in your face on
purpose.

Let's move here. Let's live here. You want to?