this manifesto comes with 

catbirds

six dead 

may apples

drying on the 

windowsill

my mother burying her

pig behind the 

irises 



it starts with the threat of storm 

sits below another war our familiar 

mirage

spring spent in cruel 

middle america



my heart runs heavy on rural ennui 

and anhydrous gas

tries to turn up the 

twang when it 

has to



at the post office i broke off my lock box key in the 

wall of locks

irony is the mailman once warned me that tree limbs 

can be trouble 

shit-talked the cop before offering us a survey about

his service



i am back in bad luck again 

in dreams blue jays carry wet matches 

toward the american gothic house



i want to know glee as my neighbor ronnie does 

after all day rain 

throwing bean bags at a board with a hole 

in the middle 



his whole life is histrionics

clearing the board at night 

cleaning the hospital in the 

morning



would you believe the body 

of christ could be held inside 

a saltine cracker 

that’s how he first found me 

june like this 

town like this



town where i was taught to back them

the troops

told to do it now and to know that 

when the world finally burned i would be 

in some small way 

to blame



now picture a clavinova rattling around 

the back of a pickup truck 

wrapped up in winter blankets

collecting rain beneath 

the keys



let me live long enough to hear that music 

just once



i have eaten my anger here with too much quiet

smoke in the gravy

that’s the midwest to me

cheap cigars

that four seasons porch with the 

windows painted shut



i opened up my chest once to find 

a starving clown 

twisted guitar strings

enough bloody mary 

mix to last the 

afterlife



a peacock feather fades in the window

one story above the milkweed



something in her hands and words 

make resurrection



sometimes we are allowed to lose 

our minds trying to make 

memory



in my dreams i get caught behind

combines



i am living in the country of my country 

i do not know what it means to dream

any place else

I’m sure that I’ll keep writing this thing in spits and starts for the rest of my life.

Ever grateful for my friend ’s call to begin one of these for their printing project, MANIFESTOS FROM THE MIDWEST.

I’ve always wanted to be Elvis.

For years, growing up, when people asked, I told them that I wanted to be an Elvis impersonator. I remember researching the job and presenting its salary and estimated work schedule in front of the class. We were sitting in the computer lab where I later watched pornography for the first time.

Everyone else chose to become a star on network TV or to play quarterback in the NFL. Not one yet has, to my knowledge, achieved those professional goals. There were 17 kids in my graduating class. I think I would have heard by now.

For Christmas early on, I got ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits on CD. I practiced “Heartbreak Hotel” inside my mother’s Windstar van in the christian church parking lot after service. We had just invaded Iraq.

For the fall school music special, I put on a greasy wig, worn by a different kid with Elvis dreams the year before. This tasteless gimmick, despite the fact my mom had greased my own hair and combed it right. “Remember to shake your hips,” my mother said when she dropped me off.

I remember waiting for my cue beneath a double pompadour and fake leather jacket, thinking how strange it was to be standing alone in the high school lunchroom kitchen.

When it came, I ran out on the basketball court in the dark.

I really tried to be Elvis. To sell it. The smolder. The mic stand bends. The tiptoe lean backward. The works. There were fresh, shiny coins in my penny loafers. I was 10. Maybe 11.

They didn’t let me do the whole song, but I remember everyone laughing at me, which I still cannot accept, or understand.

I want to write a play called Three Elvis Impersonators Share a Hotel Room Near Lincoln, Nebraska. That’s the tentative title. The problem with the play is that the title’s the best part about it.

It’s set at a cut-rate casino hotel during the Christmas rush. The type to book the country’s preeminent Elvises into the same hotel room. The play picks up just after check-in.

The three different eras of Elvis are here: 1956 phoenix ascending Elvis, the black leather 1968 “Comeback Special” Elvis, and the heaving, near death, white jumpsuit-era Elvis.

In the first two acts, they come and go between sets. The lineup goes in reverse chronology, so as to de-age Elvis and leave the crowd feeling young. In their comings and goings, they argue about the best way to make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. About which hair cream would be authentic to Elvis. What his order at Waffle House was. His favorite gun.

In the third act, Fat Elvis fails to make it back out for the encore, which is a problem because Nebraska loves her heavy Elvis, her wavering, gospel-spewing, pistol-waving, Nixon hand-shaking Elvis.

The guy behind Fat Elvis has meticulously pursued his craft. The last time we see him, he wound up bloated, paranoid with pill fever, karate chopping down the hotel hallway after his set in the lounge, retreating to watch professional wrestling on local access TV.

The other two Elvises return to the hotel room after their own sets to find Fat Elvis in the bardo, his jumpsuit unzipped to the tile, his body slumped back and his head resting against the wall above the toilet.

I still don’t know yet if he’s alive or dead.

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I fell in love with a bartender who once tried to work at Graceland.

She applied to be a janitor there. She ran the TV remote at a cash-only bar a few blocks from my apartment. On winter nights I stayed long enough to jump start her car at close. She let me listen once while she sang in the shower. She had a green stick-and-poke dancing bear on the pit of her thigh, and she had a Velvet Elvis hanging on a wall in her apartment. It was in the kitchen above a playing card table always covered with a crowded ashtray and red Budweiser cans. The King of Beers. Diesel is what we called it. A cat named Spooky was said to live there. She even showed up in the pictures, but I never saw her.

I was always there at odd times, among other things, looking up at Elvis. She lived alone, but there were always other people around. It was Skinner and this guy called Sci-Fi. He made cartoons and smoked cigarettes beautifully. Sometimes, this noise musician showed up. He dyed his clothes with tea bags, and washed his hands and neck in gasoline before his shows. He assaulted the piano and howled.

Everyone worked at bars or in kitchens or stocked shelves and showed up at the bar or her apartment after. Except for the noise musician. I don’t know what he did besides rot on the couch. I found him once with all the shades drawn, already days down into an acid hole, and all he wanted was mango juice.

“Fresh mango juice!” he cried out.

It wasn’t even his apartment.

She never got the gig at Graceland, and I never got the gig with her.

“Uh-oh,” my father says, relaying another one of his myriad days in retirement. “Elvis is walking across the TV with a cowboy hat on. I’d better change the channel.”

Elvis movies have always had an unshakeable rap, all of them universally panned, both then and now. Westerns, musicals, some weird slapsticky things.

They all genuinely suck.

Especially the ones when he’s supposed to be singing. For whatever reason, it seems as if it were neigh on impossible for Elvis to accurately lip-sync along with his own recorded voice.

I think the films all failed because basically Elvis loses all of his magic, his weird primordial American charm, at the exact moment that you ask him to become anybody else.

We’ve got one Elvis movie here, a VHS tape here called Elvis: The Great Performances.

On the tape, Priscilla Presley wanders around Graceland, pointing at Elvis memorabilia while supplying the old familiar myth. (He’s driving a truck, when he decides to stop at Sun Records to record a 45 as a gift for his mother…) They pair the story with the best footage ever captured of her dead husband, a man still known a half century after his death simply as “The King.”

We simply cannot comprehend what a shock to the global culture that Elvis was. The raw controversy of Elvis, the popular hero worship and subsequent moral panic that he set loose upon a nation enjoying the first commercial televisions ever made.

During live performances, on talk shows and variety programs, every time the camera inevitably cuts back to the audience, they capture a sea of teenagers absolutely losing their ever-loving minds in the mere presence of Elvis. I think it’s as close to a pure, unredeemed spiritual awakening as we’ve ever been able to capture on film.

Remember also that Elvis was a particular kind of country cut-up, making faces and crossing his eyes for the camera. They dressed him up in golden jackets to sell records, and hired Ed Sullivan to play the pitch man. He lauded Elvis’ moral character to the world, and more importantly, America.

He even called him a “decent and kind” boy.

Writing about Elvis in any serious way is pure fallacy. The man’s been splayed and splintered down into antimatter. The collected Elvis bibliography on Goodreads defies mere exploitation. (THERE ARE SO MANY MEMOIRS BY LOST LOVES AND LIFELONG FRIENDS AND EVEN HIS KARATE INSTRUCTOR!)

Look at some of these.

Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley

I Just Can’t Help Believin’...: Conspiracy Theory Book One - Elvis Presley

I Called Him Babe: Elvis Presley’s Nurse Remembers

All the King’s Horses: The Equestrian Life of Elvis Presley

Schmelvis: In Search of Elvis Presley’s Jewish Roots or The Elvis-Jesus Mystery: The Shocking Scriptural and Scientific Evidence That Elvis Presley Could Be The Messiah Anticipated Throughout History

I only stopped looking through the list because I could feel it starting to pull me into its panoptic mystery, its endless sprawl.

Elvis was the first thing I remember really wanting to know more about, to study on my own.

I knew back then and still know that he shared the same birthday as my grandmother. I knew that he died on August 16 in the same year that my mother graduated from high school. I knew his band was The Blue Moon Boys and I knew the members of that band: Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D. J. Fontana.

These were just things that I knew, the first things that I ever learned.

Now I am forced to face down the fact that when I was first asked to think for myself, I immediately started thinking about Elvis.

And I haven't stopped.

During a shift at the start of the pandemic, a coworker with my mother’s name showed me this video which claimed that Elvis was alive and well and preaching somewhere in Arkansas. We were sitting in the breakroom, hiding out from the horde. At the time, we’d resorted to Elvis conspiracies to keep us talking during those bleak shifts at the grocery store. Now, in the breakroom, everyone just stares at their phones in silence.

“It could be him,” she said, doing some wild kind of arithmetic to get their ages to match up. She wrote out numbers with a black marker on a piece of cardboard.

Based on her evidence, I had to agree with her. It could have been him.

The King. Alive and well in Arkansas.

Soon after that, she got married and transferred to one of the stores in Las Vegas.

I wonder if she ever found him out there.

Impersonating Elvis has remained a lucrative, if difficult, career.

Those who pursue it are known now as ETA’s.

Elvis Tribute Acts.

Just think of it: a whole legion of people, walking right now amongst us, able to always surmise the right time for Elvis to finally arrive.

The car crash starts just after four in the morning and the county road is all covered in snow so I am driving towards the lights of the tractor factory and the interstate beyond and it’s silent in the car and I am thinking about the road and I am thinking about the car and about how it’s due for an oil change because the display screen keeps saying it, REPLACE ENGINE OIL, over and over and then I think that this car has driven all the way to the moon and that it’s on the way back, and I wonder why I always think this, that whenever somebody asks about the car, I say it, that the car “has driven all the way to the moon and it is on its way back.”

I said this once to . We were sitting at the Deadwood Tavern and watching the Cyclone game when he told me that his brother once watched Denis Johnson shoot heroin right down there by the river. Said that he’d driven down from Storm Lake today in an electric car. “What kind of wheels you got now?” he asked, as if he’d been keeping track.

We’d met about nine minutes prior.

I told him I drove an 08 Toyota Highlander with 327 thousand miles behind it. The one with cursive “Live Love Laugh” (sic) bumper stickers stuck above the taillights.

Then I said the thing about the moon.

I forgot to tell him that the car had spent a good part of its former life in the service of a retirement home, shuttling packs of seniors still in independent living back and forth to the drug store/shopping mall/doctor’s office/Red Lobster and I am thinking about how strange it is that I am driving it now towards the grocery store, to the interstate because I never take this way, especially not when it is snowing, and for some reason I did, and I am thinking about Jon Fosse’s Septology because I have been reading it in shifts all winter, always in the morning, or at least never in the daylight, which is probably the best way to read it.

The book is about a painter named Asle who is driving his car through the snow in Norway, forever back and forth to Bjørgvin and Asle is thinking about his life and the life of another man, a person known as The Namesake who’s also named Asle, who’s also a painter and he lives in town, in Bjørgvin, and the novel recounts their individual and shared lives, the lives of the two Asles who both paint and drink and love and die in Norway.

I need to finish it because the library wants it back soon and at times it has felt like a chore to read but also wildly hypnotic and moving and the sentences pile up across pages and reading it somehow feels so much like your mind while you’re driving through the snow, and that’s why I’m thinking about Septology as I merge onto the interstate and then I remember when yesterday, not a half hour into first shift at the grocery store, Bryce lays the latest research on me regarding the nature of linear time. I mean he really let me have it. He was unloading packages of salmon out of cardboard boxes when all of the sudden he walks over to me and tries to explain quantum entanglement, how we are at once moving forward through linear time while also still actively affecting the events of the past. He’s fallen hard into yoga and on the mornings after his classes he shows up and talks me through his spiritual journey with the cadence of a professional wrestler, circa 1998. He tried several times to lead me through it but I guess I wasn’t ready yet for that kind of talk and after a while he gave up and went back to the waiting salmon and left me in what I call “the dungeon” because I can’t hear the radio back in the corner of the produce cooler where I am most mornings, kneeling on the ground, surrounded by carrots.

It’s usually just semis and service vans on the interstate at this time in the day but with the snow and cold it is especially light and from what I can tell the road is clear and I can see the lane lines fine and I test the wheels against the merge and it feels alright, and now I’m driving east on the interstate and the wind is behind us blowing big sweeping waves of snowdust across the surface of the road beneath the headlights and right then I start seeing myself driving to work at the grocery store on all the other days and nights before this, in the snow and on just regular days too and I’m marking the year by the windshield that I am looking out of and I am thinking that in a way it’s all kind of the same drive, the same snow even, and right now I’m climbing up the hill where the highway cuts straight through a clump of windmills with their eyes all blinking red and now I’m cresting the hill and I see taillights ahead and they aren’t blinking at all like the windmills, no they are a solid red and then I see the semi jack-knifed through the cables up beyond the tail lights and I have to make a decision quickly now, like right now, either ditch or median, so I try hit the brake lightly and aim it towards the median and I understand right away that it is over, that I am going to wreck the car, that in many ways I already have and I know it because a warning goes off, a dire bell ringing soft, ding-ding-ding through the silence in the car and I actually say as we start to slide “HERE WE GO” softly but still out loud to myself and to the car and all the other versions of myself in those other cars on other days because yes, I suppose they are also in here with me, and who’s to say when the crash actually started, you know, it could have been years ago that I first started drifting gently, but now the car is swerving hard towards the ditch and I make it around the semi while the rear end of car drifts up until we’re almost parallel and pointed straight north and then I hit the ditch and the tires catch the frozen ground and I try to straighten out the car before I hit the cables hard and keep moving forward as the two bottom cables catch the front and run along the side while the top cable jumps across my hood, hits my windshield hard, scrapes across the top of the car and shaves off the racks up there, but the car is still running when it comes to a stop so I take it up out of the ditch and park it along the side of the interstate and turn on my hazard lights and I can hear them blinking and all of this still feels very normal to me, I have no great feelings of shock or surprise I think, because I didn’t have the time to be afraid, it all just sort of happened at one time, and that now, it was all over.

For some reason I get out of the car and walk around to the front and look back up the road to where I had lost control and I realized slowly that I shouldn’t be standing out there, that I shouldn’t have gotten out of the car at all, and so I get back in the car and nudge it forward and it goes, so I limp it to the next exit, boxed in all the while by nervous semis, blinking lights. From the exit ramp, I called Bryce at the store, who’d just tried to tell me about time and space and how we were constantly moving back and forth through it, through all of it, and I told him on the phone that I wasn’t going to make it in.

He didn’t seem surprised.

I made it back to work the rest of the week in Sara’s car and on my last day in, Bryce tried again with the quantum entanglement material. He says, “Dude, last night at yoga I reached a point where I was breathing in and out at the exact same time, and brother let me tell you I understood it…You know, that time thing I was telling you about,” and I could actually see it in his eyes, the understanding, real bona fide physical and spiritual comprehension, and he was experiencing it right there, standing by the citrus table.

And now it’s been weeks since I crashed the car and I am looking out the window and I see the moon is hanging low and it’s shining on the crumpled heap that was the car that had once made it up there, had made it all the way to the moon and had turned back around again and wound up here, busted apart in Iowa County, the exact place, according to Bryce, it was destined to be, the place where it has been all along.

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Post time at the horse track is six p.m. sharp, and I’m sitting in the Finish Line Show Lounge, wishing that I still drank.

Instead I’m drinking my casino drink. My new casino drink. I used to have a different one. Now it’s fountain Coke mixed with unsweetened tea.

I need to kill a few hours, and I’m here at the horse track this afternoon because it has turned out to be one of the cheapest places left to exist for a few hours in these United States.

I’ve got the book spread open in front of me, and I’m staring at the pages, desperately trying to remember how to bet on horses. I’ve got $63 cash, which I can make last a few hours at a casino. Particularly out here at the race track. Adjusted for inflation, there is no better return for your entertainment dollar than the horse track.

That is if you aren’t interested in really winning anything, or, at the very least, you are not hell bent on losing. Some folks do come here for the drastic and intoxicating threat of complete personal ruin, sure. But they’re not doing it during the early races. Nobody is losing their mortgage on these old horses, with the heat on and the sun still up and the buffet just reopening for dinner service.

About five cocktail tables from me, Megaballad is soundchecking “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and playing it loud, all the way straight through at a crowd of annoyed retirees and several members of the Prairie Meadows sanitation team. After, the lead singer apologizes for the volume, tells us that we just heard a sneak peak of their encore, and reminds us that their set doesn’t start until after the horse racing is over.

I scan the room to find the Finish Line Lounge mostly empty. No one here now will be willingly catching Megaballad’s set tonight, a show scheduled to last past midnight. So far, it’s just me in here, the aforementioned Megaballad, and some folks that Prairie Meadows buses in from their nursing homes.

My algorithm has spent all summer feeding me videos showing a virtually empty Las Vegas, and so far, this heartland horse track checks out. Four months after our “Liberation Day” and I wonder what it means for our beloved country when her casinos can’t even draw a crowd on Saturday night.

When it comes down to it, horse racing feels earnest and pure and very romantic because it still relies on dumb, blunt luck and circumstance. All those vague hunches and old family superstitions can be explained away at the horse track. The one I learned was to always bet the grey horse. And only ever on the grey horse to win.

Grey horses never show. They either win it all or fluke out immediately. Last time I was here, the one grey horse we saw that night ran about a hundred yards, turned right around, and high-tailed it back to the gate. The rider bailed and they chased that horse all around the track, trying to take it back to the stables and do God knows what with it.

Sara’s at home, watching the races online and calling in her bets to me over the phone. Intimidated by the mere idea of relaying aloud my bets and wagers to another human being, I put our bets into a self-betting kiosk in the corner by The Paddock Grill. I propped up the book on the counter and tried to remember the names of the horses and the exact order of Sara’s trifecta bets.

Two races passed with this routine. We found no winners for either of us, and not even a grey horse to bet on. All of the sudden, we were horse racing experts, comparing our notes after they’d crossed the line.

I stayed for one more race, and bet the exact line the book suggested. The bugler played and the horses were led down the track gently toward the gate.

When they opened up, the #7 horse fell almost immediately. Face towards the sky, its legs locked straight in the air. The race went on and the announcer didn’t mention the fallen horse, just called the race straight through. Then he announced the winner and the official results, and faded into silence.

I suppose this has become standard practice in live and televised events, the same kind of courtesy by omission extended toward starving children in Gaza and streakers during the Super Bowl.

Everyone could see the horse was clearly dead. Or at least close. The grounds crew brought a horse trailer and a tractor out to try and block the view from the grandstands. The youngest two unrolled a black tarp as nearly as tall as them, hoping to break the sight line from the infield.

Only a few people were crowded against the fence in the corner closest to where the horse fell, trying to see it. Something.

I joined them.

The loudest was a man in a turquoise pearl snap and rich Republican jeans. He was talking on the phone with an anxious voice. He seemed to care deeply about the horse.

He didn’t say shit about the crumpled rider, who was pressed flat in the dirt, slowly trying to turn from side to side. Two young girls were crying closer by, and their dad was trying to shepherd them towards the concession stand. Nothing a little funnel cake and casino cotton candy couldn’t fix, though it would be several days before his wife talked to him again.

Even I would have bet on that.

They got the horse loaded into the trailer, and they put the rider into an ambulance. (Even then, at the time, I kept forgetting about the rider.) Sara asked me “Is it dead? Is it dead?” again and again, even though she could see that it was, in fact, dead. Very, very dead. She could probably see it even better than I could, watching at home on her iPad.

The worst part about it was I still had to stop by the cashier to turn in my slip because the horse I'd bet to win actually won this cursed race.

Against a five dollar bet, the cashier handed back to me six dollars and fifty cents. I noticed the quarters were warm. She grimaced and inhaled hard against her teeth. She said, “Damn. Must have been a lot of money on this one.”

Of course there was: It was the horse that the book picked to win.

Every sanctioned horse race has a detailed chart that gathers all the available information about the race. At the bottom of the page, footnotes attempt to explain with a strict glossary of racing words what the chase actually looked like.

Here’s the footnote for that race:

“REBELUTIONARY clear, best. MINDSETTE bobbled start. RIO WINNA steady effort. B AN ILLUSION evened out. APOLLITICAL LOVE failed to threaten. POPPYS CARTEL lacked a rally. APOLLITICAL HOT no response. FABULOUS DASHA FIRE fell, lost rider, vanned off.

Now there is a beautiful sentence, a genuine syntactical marvel that successfully avoids revealing any outcome for the fallen horse or its rider, and yet it conveys fully the events as they occurred. The footnote seems even to deny that a world exists beyond the confines of the race track.

“FABULOUS DASHA FIRE fell, lost rider, vanned off.”

I hear a eulogy hiding in that last sentence, some kind of psalm for a horse that never officially died.

It merely fell.

See what I mean about your entertainment dollar stretching far at the horse track? It’s been weeks now, waiting on a sentence to wind all this down and make it mean more than it ever could.

Which I think leaves us with just one question: At what point exactly does the dead horse stop beating you?

Asking for a friend.

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By Julie Gammack

I am not feeling much like an outlaw at the Outlaw Music Festival.

Maybe it’s the $21 beers, or the Mosh Burger™ with its meat patties that are “built to thrash,” or the even the omni-present ad for the latest Citibank credit card. (Scan the QR code to apply!) I noticed they aren’t showing it to the people who have paid for seats under the awning. This one’s just for us out here in general admission, huddled up in folding chairs, or otherwise prone on the lawn.

The weed gummies we bought at the Christian dispensary out on the outer edge of town are a total bust. I should have clocked it sooner: All of the pre-rolls in there had little white crosses stamped on them.

Oh, Missouri. Pure anathema. Place of muddy dreams.

The old-timers in front of us are the only ones doing this festival right, sprawled out on the grass and chain-smoking little Cheyenne cigars. He looks like Willie Nelson’s slightly younger cousin. She’s wearing bedazzled jeans and drinks slowly from a giant can of “Smirnoff Smash: Red White & Berry.”

They just spent most of Bob Dylan’s set throwing popcorn at people walking toward the bathroom. Earlier today, they sparked a joint and tried passing it to some kids sitting next to them.

The kids shook it off meanly, staunchly, so much so that Willie Nelson’s slightly younger cousin actually said, “Gee-whiz.”

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As we wait for the stage to be change over from Dylan to Willie, I look over at Sara, who’s wearing my father’s crop top from the original Farm Aid in 1985. The lineup on the back serves mostly as obituary now, but both Dylan and Willie are on there.

I realize that we’re participating in one of our last great shared American traditions: the Willie Nelson concert. Culturally ubiquitous, now this thing is multi-generational, venturing out to some state fairgrounds or football field or speedway infield across this American empire to see Willie Nelson.

Not only because you were told that you just had to go do it, but because you knew it was an important thing for you to do. A certain American rite-of-passage. An alternate kind of patriotism itself.

You went out and you got drunk. You got sunburned. You got lost, or you got stoned if you were lucky, and stood in a patch of grass and squinted to see Willie Nelson. He was singing somewhere off in the distance, and Trigger was hanging loose around his middle.

We all share some version of this story, from our eldest all the way down. I bet you took a picture with your friends like this:

We wound up at Waffle House.

How about you?

When the house lights dimmed, the music video for “Living in the Promiseland” played on the screens.

He played the whole video and then he let us sit with it for a moment. No speech. Nothing.

Willie Nelson wanted us to think about it.

About all of this. This promiseland. Our country. Its inherent greed and emptiness. How all of this madness and suffering is actually just more business as usual around here. Just another cruel chapter in our long legacy of anger.

In that quiet, the curtain finally dropped, and Willie Nelson fell back in to “Whiskey River.” Can you name me a more American sound than the first twenty seconds of this?

Halfway through his set, Sara comes up to me with crying fresh in her voice and asks the question that I assume everyone has been asking for the last twenty five years. At least.

“He’s going to die soon. Isn’t he?”

It doesn’t look good. He keeps blowing his nose and coughing into a white towel during songs. He’s sweating a lot. His voice cracks when he sings the first verse of “Funny How Time Slips Away”, right as he asks himself “How am I doing?” You can sort of see it in his eyes if you look hard enough at the screen.

The end of the road.

Willie Nelson is 92 years old. He had his 70th birthday blowout special on live TV, Live and Kicking, back in 2003. He’s been on this perpetual last chance tour for so long now I think we all kind of forgot that one day Willie Nelson was going to have to die.

Tonight feels less like a concert and more like we're paying our respects to Willie Nelson and that pure, ineffable thing he’s come to represent. In lieu of prayer, we all sing “Night Life" and “Crazy" and “Georgia On My Mind.” Just like our parents did before us and some of their parents did before them. I imagine my dad, forty years ago, doing the very same thing in the shirt that Sara is wearing right now.

As the set finishes, I start actively thinking about his death. About how when we do finally lose him, we will be losing along with him the America that Willie Nelson always believed in.

I am now openly grieving at the Willie Nelson concert.

How’s your summer been?

Thanks as always for being a part of this.

The Five and Dime is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Each week, the Collaborative features new work from writers like Art Cullen, Mary Swander, Peter Hedges, and dozens of others across Iowa.

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

If you want to read the story, you can find it over at Bruiser. (The story continues from here just beneath the cover image.)

Thanks for being a part of this.

The Five and Dime is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Each week, the Collaborative features new writing from writers like Art Cullen, Mary Swander, , and dozens of others writing across Iowa and publishing on Substack.

You can find out more here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

I’ve been looking for Atlas, Illinois, my entire life.

For years, my daily commute involved turning east at the four-way stoplight in the center of this unincorporated town in the western part of Pike County, about 100 miles from St. Louis. After Atlas came a series of rural hamlets without zip codes that held nothing but a rock shop, a trading post that sold beer and arrowheads, one of the last drive-in theaters in America, and finally my employer: a fruit stand with three shopping carts in New Hartford, right off of Highway 54.

Despite its name, Atlas was always tough to locate. Back when road maps were still handed out free in gas stations, Atlas was always my navigational landmark. I grew up in Pleasant Hill, seven miles south along the Great River Road; as a child, I learned how to find my hometown on a map by tracing a finger along the Mississippi River, the edge of the state, looking for Atlas.

Now, of course, you can just type in “Atlas, Illinois” and Google Maps will take you there. If, however, in a fit of anachronistic self-flagellation, you type only “Atlas,” you’ll get a list of GIS companies nearest your location, suggesting more maps for you to consider.

But even if its existence on the world’s largest digital atlas goes only half-heartedly acknowledged, Atlas’ position at the intersection of State Highway 96 and U.S. Highway 54 has ensured the town a consistent imagistic cataloguing. Since 2007, all of Atlas has been thoroughly captured and documented by Google Maps’ all-seeing cartographic eye. And though I left the area in 2012, I have been watching minute but transformative alterations to Atlas through Google’s portal ever since.

I justify these digital sojourns by telling myself that it gives me a visual companion to the stories I hear from my parents who still live nearby—the new bridge to Missouri has finally opened, and the Atlas Cafe, under new ownership, has great fried fish. But the truth that Google Maps confirms, through more than a decade of images, is that most things eventually seem to leave.

Moving through the years across the slider on Google Maps will show you this: The trading post has closed, the rock shop burned down, and the drive-in theater up the road weeded over, waiting for a digital projector. Even some of the trees have left from the nursery, which holds up one quarter of Atlas’ four-way intersection. The hot rods up in “Hot Rod Heaven Too” will also one day roll away, housed in a building that was once an antique mall. The oldest building in the county—now a private residence—still stands here in Atlas, though, regal and severely out-of-place in a town that never grew up around it.

There are other Atlases in the United States, in Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Texas. Somehow, they all seem to look just like my Atlas: rural, unincorporated communities with a smattering of houses, and sometimes a church and a cemetery, as if to fully incorporate and grow an atlas has always been impossible.

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The images that capture the town’s decline come with ever-important digital watermarks, which imply that Google itself is claiming the imagistic history of Atlas. The company has preserved a part of my own history, too, caught as I have been by its lens the summer before I left Atlas for good, loading trucks and delivering produce up the road at Ackles Farm Market. That’s my Ford Ranger in the picture, the one with the decals off my high school football helmet.

I admit this is at the root of my fascination with this atlas of Atlas: I was there once, and here is the proof.

And yet, because Atlas doesn’t possess its own zip code, Google continuously insists on saying that my virtual visits to Atlas are to the town with the nearest post office. By refusing to name the place, the most comprehensive mapping system ever invented denies me fully what I know to be true: that I am categorically in Atlas when I find it on a map. Google Maps does this across the world, of course, but it is especially poignant in a town of this name. If Google Maps displays that nothing in Atlas stays, perhaps it means that it is a real town that has grown fake, captured and preserved best by the technology that has replaced its namesake.

On the other hand, perhaps Atlas’ physical fade from the ledgers of cartographic relevance is fitting. Atlas has always set the precedent for navigability, as it should: one intersection, two highways, straight lines all forming a nearly perfect “X” here near the navel of the United States. Like a train porter, it wills everyone away in all four cardinal directions. West out of Atlas holds the promise of the Mississippi River, north out of Atlas will get you to an interstate, south takes you to my hometown, and east takes you up out of what used to be the river’s basin and into endless flat plains. Like an atlas you can hold, it presents itself as mere possibility, all the way up to the margins.

Sitting with my mouse hovering over this intersection on Google Maps, I realize that the one thing that seems to hold Atlas in place is the blinking red stoplight, which perpetually watches over the town much the same way that the Google Maps car does. The light gives people a reason to pause, if only briefly, before speeding off on their way to somewhere else.

Atlas has always been a passing-through place, and never the destination. Yet with every blink of the stop light, it still asserts itself as part of everyone’s journey through it. In that sense, maybe it has done its namesake some kind of justice, in a way that Google Maps’ still images can’t ever fully capture.

Right now, that stoplight in Atlas is blinking.

There it was.

There it is, again.

Originally published as “On Google Maps, a Town Called Atlas Keeps Disappearing” in CityLab.

The Five and Dime is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Each week, the Collaborative features new work from writers like Art Cullen, Mary Swander, Peter Hedges, and dozens of others writing across Iowa publishing on Substack.

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By Julie Gammack

Thanks for being a part of this.

It’s been difficult to get a decent workout in at the nursing home.

Something’s been off in there.

Let me explain.

Through my insurance, I am entitled to a free membership at a participating gym location in my area. On the map, the only one within 30 miles of our house is at this nursing home. I don’t question why it is listed. It is free, and I try to go twice a week.

I showed one of the staff members an insurance card once long ago, and that person just sort of shrugged. I took that to mean that I had been entered into the system, a proud member of the nursing home gym.

The room is filled with a handful of elliptical machines and treadmills, a punching bag and a communal pair of boxing gloves, and several of those All-In-One weight and pulley lifting systems. There’s a rowing machine that, true to form, rocks and rattles as you pantomime the act. It’s being braced against the ground with two 60-lb weights. The Total Gym has been out of commission since Christmas. They haven’t taken it out or gotten it fixed. Its cords are just wrapped around it and tied off.

Somewhere, Chuck Norris is pissed.

Honestly, nothing in here feels safe or necessary to have at a gym in a nursing home, but I’m not complaining because I do not pay for that privilege. My presence here is as pure addendum, a piece of bunk data for some actuarial at the insurance company one day to find and say, “What the hell are we covering this for?”

Technically, the place is a wellness and therapy center.

From their website:

“Reach your fitness goals with our full-service athletic facilities which includes cardiovascular as well as weight-training equipment.”

(For some reason, those words are in bold and italicized on their site.)

As always, I’m biding my time here, in a bizarre room that doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be, aesthetically or otherwise. It’s a doctor’s office, a rehab facility, and a break room for the attending staff.

There’s waiting room artworks on the wall, and those weird framed posters that are meant to elicit inspiration by defining a desirable characteristic, like courage. This one features a golf hole out in the middle of a body of water. It implies that it is a challenge to make it out there.

“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it,” we are reminded.

There’s a full kitchen in the corner of the room. It’s got a sink, an oven, and a refrigerator. A potholder is wrapped around the door handle of the fridge. A sign on the cabinet reads: “In a true emergency, contact the staff at the nursing home.”

I pray never to be here during whatever constitutes a true emergency.

The adjoining nursing home is attached through a hallway just behind the refrigerator. Throughout the time that I am in here exercising, people come and go through the hallway: residents, nurses, physical therapists. One time, a very old man in a tweed cap and suit wandered into the gym, tip-toeing around the equipment.

“Can I help you with anything?” I asked, having no qualifications to do absolutely anything for him.

He didn’t respond, just turned away and walked on, back down the hallway where presumably he lived.

He seemed to be looking for something.

Most of the outsiders and non-residents are here because they hurt somewhere.

Knees. Backs. Shoulders. They have been ordered here to wait out their sentences, that tenuous and uniquely American time until they can finally crawl into an MRI machine over at the university hospital.

“It hurts,” they say after decades of farm work, of factory work, of household work, entire lives spent seeking overtime wages and raising kids and being pummeled by life so often and for so long that they never considered that it could be any different. They point to where the pain is strongest.

“Go move that part that hurts for six more weeks,” the insurance company responds on official insurance company letterhead.

“See if it gets any better.”

Today, as I pulled up, a woman walked out of the gym, hopped in and peeled out of the parking lot in a side-by-side, which are street legal around here.

There were two older women, non-residents, on the treadmills when I got inside. One of them was watching a Netflix period drama on her iPad. The other one was deep in the comment section of a YouTube video that was just a static image of an Israeli flag. She was typing up her position while ambling on the treadmill, her two pointer fingers stabbing at the touchscreen.

I was just working on an elliptical, choking for air, with my headphones in, playing nothing. I try to hear the gossip from the resident staff and the physical therapists, the conversations among neighbors and people who once shared the same shift at the Whirlpool plant down the street. You can call me a shameless snoop, a chismoso. I’ve heard it before. But I consider it putting my journalism degree to good use, eavesdropping on people at the nursing home gym.

One of the regulars lives in the building next door. She always wears this knit wool sweater with a ruby red cardinal on it, dress pants, and brown leather slippers. These must be her workout clothes. I’d have confused them for church wear if we weren’t surrounded by dumb bells and second-hand lifting equipment.

She stretches her arms out and gets a few reps in on the leg press machine, a truly harrowing sight, me being the only other attending person in this room. Remember: “true emergency.”

But she’s always fine, and after, she goes to line up in front of the mini-basketball hoop in the corner.

I don’t know why this is considered proper gym equipment, but I’m glad it’s here. Her shooting form is ugly, the ball spins somehow in the opposite direction that it’s supposed to, but I’ll be damned if she doesn’t start draining shots with those miniature basketballs. She has to be approaching 90, and she’s in here absolutely raining jumpers on a mini-hoop.

“Nice shooting,” I say on my way out.

She just looks at me as if she hadn’t realized that I was even there at all.

What I appreciate most about the nursing home gym is that there aren’t many mirrors in it. I don’t much care for seeing myself in the act of exercise. My dad reminds me that I was an athlete once. I burned out my body for so many losing records on various teams in different sports that I find it now to have been insane.

For one thing, it prepared me for this particular timeline.

My guiding health question for the last few years has been this: Exactly how much you are you willing to pedal around on a bicycle?

Last weekend, I hung out with writers and musicians and artists, all so hauntingly talented and intelligent that it was sort of exhausting, its own kind of calisthenics.

In these situations, I still find that I’ve never read enough, listened to enough music, or watched the right movies, despite the fact I’ve spent most of my life doing exactly these things and nothing more. I defaulted to talking about staking out the Bingo hall in town and the spiritual power of gas station donuts.

In my conversational deficiency, I resorted to being the customer service representative that I’ve been training all my life to be. I think it freaked them out, my Midwestern way of saying so very much about so very little.

They appreciated concision. Two of them worked in marketing.

One of the writers, a Navy veteran with the knee to prove it, had traveled across the country, reading from his new book of short stories. He’d brought a kettle bell along with him, hundreds of miles in a cramped car.

It looked like it weighed 700 lbs. He said he got his reps in before his readings, where he performed in a loud, frenetic voice. He’d memorized several of his stories, and he threw his book down towards the end of them, staring straight at the audience for the final lines. It was, in a word, intense.

“He definitely doesn’t work out at a nursing home,” I thought. “And look where it’s gotten him.”

He has a work-from-home job and a dog named Snacks and a book of short stories with his name on the cover.

The name of his book is Hey You Assholes.

Meanwhile, I had to print out the story that I read from a computer at the library.

I had to have the librarian walk me through the multi-step process. A thumb drive was involved. In the end, it cost me 50 cents.

Which, it turns out, is exactly 50 cents more than my gym membership costs.

So, I guess I’m still ahead on that one.

Whoopee.

Thanks as always for being a part of this.

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By Julie Gammack

Psalm #3

Even in death, the Babe could draw, so
they planted his coffin at the main gate,
opened up the lid, and sold concessions.
For two days they let them all see the
savior, precious oil poured over his head,
formaldehyde thick in his veins. Someone was
hired to swat the flies. Thousands came to lift
up kids to the rim, holding baseballs each that
later were put into attic boxes. On the third
day, he did not rise, but his body was gone,
taken away from the house he’d built by
men in the night. Nevermind that some of
these mourners would decades later mail
threats to Hank Aaron, saying they’d kidnap
his daughter, use a hunting rifle on him
from the nosebleeds if he kept on swinging. No,
no, no. It’s best to ruminate on the King. See
him smoking in that pointed crown, pledging a
finger toward heaven where the next pitch was
headed. Later he appeared to Benny in a VHS
dream saying “Legends never die.” And so it has
always been. I’m straight wrong: America’s pastime
is not all chalkdust real estate, carpet-bombing
neighborhoods to erect monolithic cathedrals
where men attempt to get other men out, forever.
Instead, I like to recite Psalms 133. It starts “How
good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together
in unity!” I read the rest aloud from a page I found
blowing at the edge of a cornfield after harvest. It was
torn, naturally, and it brushed me back a little, holding
names like Aaron and Herman right there together, as if
God always thought home runs were a thing worth
dying over.

-

This poem was originally published in Words & Sports.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I’ll be part of the reading this weekend in Iowa City as part of Mission Creek Festival.

Truly gobsmacked to be a part of this thing. I’ll be reading something brand new with some of my favorite writers.

Come watch me blow it. It’s free, and I’m bringing several boxes of Casey’s donuts.

I spent the last few months of 2024 immersed in a fifty-year old bluegrass record. I spent hours on the phone with legends like Jerry Douglas and Ricky Skaggs, and talked to the founders of Rounder Records about how this album changed the face of bluegrass and independent American music.

The result is a kind of oral history of the album from the people who made it, and the folks that it is still influencing today.

You can find it in the latest issue of No Depression.

An abridged version of an essay that I first sent out here, “Rummage Sutra”, will be included in the next issue of The New Territory.

It’s a brilliant magazine, one of the few headquartered in and exclusively covering the Midwest. I’m honored to be a part of it.

Thanks as always for being a part of this.

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

There are only a few constants that hold up my life week to week in these divided states of America. Apart from calling my mom and making sure my work shirts don’t reek overtly, the only thing I make a priority is reading .

Every week. Immediately. As soon as his column appears on Wednesday, I read it sitting in my car on my lunch break. It hurts, how good he is.

I think he’s the last honest newspaper man in America who happens to operate right here in that weird alcove known as Storm Lake, Iowa. I’ve never been able to find that place. It’s always reminded me of that line from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

He’s been writing the book on how to both live and continue to think in Iowa for the last few decades. He’s done it so well that he even won a goddamn Pulitzer Prize for it. And if I ever get to see him in person, I’m going to bum a cigarette off him, just to see if any of that divination is transferable.

He’s that good.

In his latest column, a real hot number about his impending heart surgery and running into former Hawkeye coach Lisa Bluder at a diner, he gutted me with this line:

Here’s what he was referring to:

There was a guy standing on the shoulder of the road at Marengo with a cardboard sign that read: “Go home, illegals.” Where does that come from? How did a Mexican ever put that guy down? What is so wrong with Iowa that would make him stand out there in the wind?

What is right with Iowa is that we can be so unassuming. It lifts you up as you leave the hospital parking ramp for home, and there the protester invades the windshield view. It’s such a pretty place, even on a brown winter day, the surgeon has a sure hand, and Lisa Bluder is cheering us on.

It makes you love Iowa even when you might want to hate it. It’s not the heat, it’s the humility. Marengo still could use some help. The folks at the Chelsea bar, with the only public restroom around, were priceless. As long as we can somehow stay grounded, we will survive.

I know the guy he’s talking about, of course. He’s out most weekends, usually with even more ignorant and heinous waste that he’s written on poster board which he got at the Dollar General. Maybe nothing else better sums up what passes for articulate conservative talking points these days than this cartoon yokel standing out in front of the Carquest, scribbling hate speech with dollar store materials.

I wrote about him once myself. He was in that same spot that Art saw him, wearing a confederate cutoff t-shirt, and propping a sign against his leg. He was blowing a duck call, and waving a jolly roger flag through Iowa County air. It worked: I looked.

We’ll ring in 6 years here in Marengo come May, but that man with his flags and signs has been here long before we arrived. I dragged my partner, the incredible human and artist , along with me to this faded town lost in a sunset that forgot it was supposed to end. We got in right under the wire, holing up here the summer before the pandemic descended and the empire began falling right behind it.

Now, Sara and I and the five cats look out the windows at a town where we exist, but don’t really live. We’re stuck here for the foreseeable come-what-may mostly out of sheer stubbornness. And because we stashed a printing press in our garage last year, and it’ll take a real act of God to get me to move that thing again this decade.

There’s a hardware store and a farm store and a grocery store that’s better than we deserve here. We’ve also got two dollar stores, the county courthouse, and apparently, a fish store? The progress of man and all that.

Our house was built before the big war. The first one. The abstract here says 1911 and shows a lengthy list of residents who climbed these narrow stairs and fell into beds day after day until eventually, they didn’t anymore and the next names on the list did. I’m not sure what was ever in these walls for insulation, but on bitter winter days, it doesn’t feel like much remains. If you are standing in the right spot, you can watch a draft run straight through the house and blow ripples in our miniature rainbow flag, tucked beneath an inherited monstera plant. A few houses down, a homemade yard sign reads “MAGA EXTREMIST HEADQUARTERS.”

I think that’s mostly why we stay. As our dear friend and mentor Tim Fay often tells us “Johnson County doesn’t need any more bleeding hearts.” And he’s right, plus we can’t afford it, so we wage our little battles out here. With words and art and songs, but also in actions. We volunteer with an area food pantry. Sara’s trying to amend city ordinance to implement a “No Mow May” program for native pollinators. I’ve even got notions of starting up a community garden in the park.

That ought to go over like a lead balloon at the city council meeting here where even recycling feels like a five-star act of courage.

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Yesterday, I sat on a bench in the laundromat and tried to figure out what I wanted to tell Art Cullen about Marengo. Slack-jawed, I watched our blankets twist around and wrote very little in a notebook that often feels more like a burden to carry than a welcome place to turn. Still, I lug it around. I’d like to ask him if his weighs on him still, after all these years.

People at the bar who were preparing to watch the Super Bowl dashed across the square, moving clothes between machines, feeding everything quarters until motion resumed. Then they rushed back to the bar before their Busch Lights warmed past peak temperature. I’d have joined them if we knew anybody here. Besides, I’ve sworn to a very particular type of Iowa sobriety: no booze outside of RAGBRAI.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t want some version of that for myself, for all of us: a place to go without the obligation of spending money, that elusive “third place” we all desperately crave outside of our homes and our jobs. It used to be churches or whatever social clubs or community groups could survive the disparate politics of its members. My vote is to make that third place the library. I’ll keep you posted.

I was really down bad for a third place earlier in the week. I was walking a lap around town along the levee when I went by an equipment shed with some trucks parked outside. Through the window, I could see three bald heads in upright recliners, watching Gunsmoke.

It was four o’clock, and Sheriff Dillon was still bringing the town together.

When I got home from the laundromat, I found Sara set up in the living room with a carousel slide projector. She arranged it on a bench on top of a box of Trivial Pursuit and a cat scratcher haggard with abuse. She’d found a free square of white space on the wall.

I sat down and we flipped through pictures that her great grandfather had taken seventy years ago of his cows in the pasture, his work horses in the field. We even saw the day they sold everything at auction. Sara kept pointing at the men’s jackets, their hats, wishing that we had them. I was pretty stoked at just having pictures of them.

I ran upstairs to grab this notebook, wanting to get some of this down enough to tell Art Cullen about what Marengo can be sometimes.

When I came back down, she said, “You’ll never believe it.”

“What?”

“The freaking bulb just burned out.”

So, Art, I think you’re right: We do need some more help here.

But don’t count us out yet.

We’ll get another bulb.

I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative:

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By Julie Gammack

Another Young Bull

after Andrew Wyeth

They were all standing around the hole, warning up a secret: one of their own had slipped or pirouetted down into the well, dark as ice or something colder, and when my brother and father showed up for morning chores, just carrying coffee and arguing surely, all they could see was a yellow ear tag floating down in there.

In the time it took for the vet to appear from Pawnee, a plan had frozen together and they broke the tractor from its silence, coughing rich winter smoke because the bull had to come out, live or dead. My brother told the vet to tranq him, which she’d never done, but she still shot him and my brother got a chain around its hips while my father coached them all, the tractor dragging it up while she took out her phone and recorded it.

It wasn’t dead somehow, and after a few hours in the November sun, started to move again.

Come dusk, they returned to find a trail of snapped electric fences headed north towards the highway. My brother followed on horseback first with lasso in hand. Then, this not being another modern western opera, he dropped the rope, got it tangled in the horse’s feet, then lost it wholly.

The steer, feeling some new strength, ran on in the night through Sangamon County, all the way up through this telephone, around this quiet room and down the stairs before stopping, pausing before the open garden gate, its one eye still wet and watering some from the wind.

I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative:

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By Julie Gammack

Robert, A Neighbor

A rusty handsaw in an antique shop near Missouri says more to Robert than any old newspaper ever could. He’s a rustic man, craves sweat in his eyes and blisters in between his toes. He doesn’t double knot his Red Wing boots in the morning just for grins. He was born with a pair of Jersey gloves on and didn’t take them off until he was home safe in his crib. The man don’t look at sunsets unless he’s driving towards them and antique tools, handles worn smooth and splinters all forgotten, are his interpretation of high class art.

Robert has bought enough corroded blades to know which ones had actually been used to hack and those who were used to hang. Being a connoisseur, a real hand tool enthusiast with magazines and all keeping him up to snuff, he don’t mess around with anything that didn’t pull its own weight for at least awhile. And those that have been repaired, either shoddily or supremely, don’t even get a second glance or a handling from his big palmed, work hewed hands. He was fooled once or twice in the beginning, some of those old repairmen put soul and pride in masking their life-giving revivals, but now going on a lifetime of looking at them, Robert knows firsts from frauds and takes great chest-welling pride in knowing so.

He’s not much on fish not out of rivers, channel cat and buffalo being the cruxes of his finned food, tuna making him feel too much like a feline, and therefore too close to a female. Tomcats aren’t made for sipping tea, so Robert says, and he keeps to hitting the red can Folgers both before his bacon/eggs/toast breakfast and after his supper with dessert. His wife Louise isn’t a housewife of forgettable features, broad shouldered and big hipped, her hair a ruby red from chemicals. She brews that Folgers both times for him and her cooking makes the coffee all the harder to quit drinking, what from the grease from those slices of pig and those pies with real butter melted across the strips of her lattice crusts. When Robert thinks that he has had his fill, Louise is there saying “there’s just one bite left honey, and I don’t want to have to feed it to the dog,” making sure that Robert stays at a consistent range of between 265 to 275 pounds, despite the doctor’s warnings of diabetes and high cholesterol and high blood pressure and death.

But what does he know? Robert goes once a year for a little check-up because his insurance gives him one, but that’s the full extent of Robert’s involvement with the medical profession. Yes sir, he’s not convinced that those that make the medicine and those that prescribe it don’t have a quota to fill each month and Robert’s not much on having steel wool pulled over his eyes. He’s an honest man on top of everything else and doesn’t like smirks or practical jokes from strangers, and particularly from friends.

When Robert’s mowing his yard, a big sprawling piece of Missouri dirt covered with genuine Kentucky Bluegrass which he paid top dollar for and sowed the spring after they moved in some 19 years ago, he’s wearing a baseball cap and plenty of sunscreen on his nose. His t-shirt is a plain color with nothing written on it and denim does the job of covering the rest of him up. Not surprisingly, he takes great pride in his lawn care and Louise does her due diligence to match him, sweating clean through her blouse under that heavy Missouri heat keeping crabgrass out of her cosmos and dandelions out of her daffodils. Every fall when everyone else leaves their patches and plots to themselves before winter comes on like a wine drunk and knocks them over, Robert and Louise are still at it, though in flannel and shivering when the wind picks up near dusk.

And when winter comes Robert takes to his shed where all those pristine timeworn instruments are that he picks up in antique malls, flea markets, and estate sales. He picks out a project every winter and uses those old blades and mallets and presses to put something together his ancestors would be proud of. Last winter there was enough snow to keep him holed up in the shed for whole days and he came out in the spring with a bow that’d make a true outdoorsman shiver from its purity. Red Cedar, Locust, and Witch Hazel wrapped around one another, sanded down until it was smoother than the underside of a peach, and coated with a heavy dose of liquid shine. On the grip just below the arrow rest in the heart of a limb of Locust, Robert carved his initials with a hand chisel twice as old as he was. He doesn’t shoot it at all, just has it hanging across the antlers of a 10 point buck deer he has mounted on the wall of his bedroom, looking at it first thing in the morning and last thing before he goes to sleep.

The moon is big over Missouri, seems to be full more often than not, and sometimes keeps Robert from getting a working man’s rest. And when it does, he takes to repeating the prayer his mother taught him some years ago now, her eternal voice speaking right along with him, his eyes closed:

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”

And when he finally sleeps he dreams of earthworms on hooks attached to fishing poles, May rain hitting a tin roof, and the smell of alfalfa drying yellow in streaks as long as highways.

This story was originally published in Synaesthesia Magazine back in 2014. The magazine was based in the U.K., and the theme of this issue was “Americana.”

I remember reading this story at one of the few readings that I’ve ever done. I had to go first because my shift was about to start. I think I was already wearing my company t-shirt.

I hadn’t read it again until this morning when I got the notification that the magazine’s archive finally went dark. As other magazine websites close up and publications shut down in the future, I’ll probably post more of these short pieces here.

All photos are from The Face of Rural America, published 1976 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Thanks as always for being a part of this.

I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

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By Julie Gammack

To hear the album Good Old Boys exactly right for the first time, you’d have to be about 20, driving straight south through eastern Missouri, possibly for Easter, and Randy Newman’s voice, who up till now you’d only heard sing about the intense toy friendship between a jealous cowboy and an emotionally unavailable spaceman, starts snarling through the speakers:

I didn’t know anything about Lester Maddox, or who had laughed at him or why. But I learned, and I learned it from Randy Newman, who with the next three verses of “Rednecks” takes aim at the systemic racism of the South, right alongside the blatant hypocrisies of the moral North. Up until that point in my life, I didn’t know that one could do both things at once. And in a song? Forget about it.

Then, on the chorus, he sings:

We’re Rednecks, Rednecks

We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.

And then he says the N-word.

He says it a couple of times.

It’s shocking still today. But it’s how Randy Newman chose to begin Good Old Boys, an undeniably “capital A” American album, and an album that turned 50 this year. I have been listening to it for the last few months, mostly in the car on YouTube. I used to have a CD of it. In fact, I am not sure my copy of Good Old Boys ever came out of the 5-CD changer of my first car. (An ‘05 Ford Focus with what the guy at the garage diagnosed as a “serious” brake problem.)

Of the five albums pictured here, only the Good Old Boys CD is missing.

It may very well still be sitting in that car right now, wherever it wound up. Here’s an image: a Randy Newman CD, Good Old Boys, still intact, beyond the twisted metal of my compacted car in a junkyard not far from Des Moines.

What is Good Old Boys exactly? Think of it first as the complete antithesis of Waylon Jennings song of the same name, that early cell phone ringtone and theme song for The Dukes of Hazzard. On this Good Old Boys, Newman serves as anthropologist, spouting his findings from atop a piano bench. He uses the voices of bigots and drunks, folks in rotten marriages, full of grievances and rage, about being from the South, or poor, or white, or a combination of all of these, to try and tell us something about ourselves. Who we were. Where we’d come from. How we’d arrived at 1974.

Where we were heading.

I suppose the scene wasn’t all that different then today. Some of the words are even the same: Genocide. Watergate. Impeachment. But still, fifty years ago our parents got “The Rumble in the Jungle”, that great Foreman/Ali bout, broadcast live on pay-per-view on movie theater screens around the world. Now, we are offered Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul streaming on Netflix, and sponsored by Celsius.

Heinous, really. Just heinous stuff.

Probably the most important things to know about Good Old Boys is that Randy Newman didn’t need to make this album.

By the mid-70s, he was already one of the most prolific and recorded songwriters working. One of his first songs,“They Tell Me It's Summer”, was recorded by The Fleetwoods when Newman was 19 years old. By 1974, his songs had been recorded across genres by Barbra Streisand, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, Glen Campbell, the Everly Brothers, Nina Simone, and Wilson Pickett. Harry Nilsson had recorded an entire album of Newman’s songs, a gesture usually made towards the twilight of a songwriter’s career. Newman was 27 years old.

He’d had his first #1 hit in 1970 when Three Dog Night recorded “Mama Told Me (Not to Come).” (He’d even wrote a Dr. Pepper jingle.) Imagine Randy Newman walking into a Warner Bros. recording studio in Hollywood with the kind of sway then only given to financially successful songwriters, and choosing to make Good Old Boys.

He got studio legends Willie Weeks, Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner all to play on it, and even an assortment of Eagles to sing. Eventually, he premiered the album at the Symphony Hall in Atlanta. Randy Newman conducted the goddamn Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Come on: he sang the album straight at them.

I believe that powerful forces at Pixar have long used their nefarious conglomerate means to stilt the popular recognition of Randy Newman’s long and storied solo career. As film composer, he’s scored nearly the entirety of Pixar’s animated fare, embedding himself deeply into millennial nostalgia in a way completely unique to him. Indeed if you look at the Spotify page for Good Old Boys, I can’t tell you how perplexing and unnerving it is to have a little green Mike Wazowski staring right out at you while you are listening to Randy Newman Sing, let’s say, “Every Man A King,” a song written by Louisiana governor, Huey "The Kingfish" Long.

Randy Newman has created a life in art that has allowed him to score the everyday soundtracks of several generations of the American family, while also allowing him to become one of the most caustic and accurate satirists of that very same America. Truly there has been no other artistic life quite like him in the modern era, to be both this well-known and at the same time, to also be this unheard.

Unpaired with a cartoon, the only songs that have carried over into the mainstream, or whatever access I seem to have to, are “Short People” and “I Love LA.” And perhaps maybe "It's a Jungle Out There," the theme song to the TV show Monk. (Sure, there were all those other hits he had for others, but I’m talking about Randy as both the songwriter and the performer here.)

“Early on, I decided I wasn’t a good subject for my songs, and I’d rather write about those types of people instead. Maybe that’s why my records weren’t more successful. People generally want songs about ‘I’ and ‘Me’ and ‘You’ and ‘We.’ They want things that are immediate, and my songs aren’t that — my stuff is slippery.”-Randy Newman interviewed in the New York Times

His songs are composed of scenes and characters fused from the surreal parts of Norman Rockwell paintings, and the sober parts of Gary Larson’s illustrations. I’ve come to see Good Old Boys as sort of a musical version of Winesburg, Ohio, written and sung by some drunken jester wedged beneath a piano and watching a television that has bunny ear antennae coming out of it.

Since the election, I can’t help but think about how the characters that Newman explored on this record now have descendants in contemporary American culture. Let’s face it: a pair of “good old boys” have secured the popular vote. And they did it to the tune of millions.

But other good old boys have been popping up for years. I recognized them at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. They showed up next to their pontoon boat in that Montgomery Riverfront brawl footage. Now, some of them even listen to that episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with Elon Musk without headphones on while they shop, slowly, through the grocery store.

Oh. And they hated the new Buzz Lightyear movie.

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Good Old Boys began as a concept album centering around one Southern every man: Johnny Cutler. The album was to be called Johnny Cutler’s Birthday, and this recording features Newman narrating the scenes between the songs. Here’s Johnny Cutler at the city park. Here’s his wife. Here he is at the tavern. That sort of thing. (At one point he says, “Who the fuck am I talking to anyway? Who’s going to hear this?) It’s informal, feels private, and Newman rambles throughout. The tape catches him questioning himself, still trying to fit all the pieces together. The whole thing is absolutely exquisite.

I prefer this raw, early version of Good Old Boys, a thing much closer to Newman’s brutal and real intent than the actual one that was eventually released. The more I listen to Johnny Cutler’s Birthday, the more I’ve finally realized that it isn’t an album at all. It’s actually been another one of Newman’s film scores all along. His dark and angry vision of America wasn’t a prophetic one: he was simply making music about a part of America that has never gone away, a part that he knew would always exist.

I’m not sure if listening to Good Old Boys or Johnny Cutler’s Birthday is cathartic, exactly. At this point, I’m far beyond offering prescriptions of any kind. But this is the kind of gallows music that feels hopelessly appropriate now, in these short, anxious days, so quick to darken.

I’m sending this one out tonight from behind a desk in the dark somewhere out in an America that I can’t bring myself to recognize anymore, singing along with Randy Newman’s “Rollin’” towards a closed door with a mirror hanging on the back of it.

That’s my new address.

Here comes that last verse now:

Additional Good Old Boys links:

• There’s an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History where he uses the album, and “Rednecks,” in particular as a gateway into the history of Lester Maddox and the American South.

• “Randy Newman Is at His Best When America Is at Its Worst”-New York Times

• ’s review from his ‘70s Consumer Guide.

I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

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By Julie Gammack

I’m telling you that for just a moment, everything was right.

Shift over, sitting in the sun with my Pocket Book copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I need to be reminded often of the syntactical greatness of Joan Didion. Just earlier that hour I’d gotten a reasonably large spider out through the backdoor, carrying it out on a blank piece of paper. The spider looked like a pile of letters that were trying desperately to fall off the page.

Then, a text message, one from a friend who, (among a long list of other important things in my life), properly introduced me to the Grateful Dead.

The text simply said: “Just a box of rain.”

And I knew. Right away, I knew.

Phil Lesh was gone.

I had just cruised by this section of Didion’s titular essay, the one in which, as you can see, she writes about hanging around at a Grateful Dead rehearsal. I no longer believe in serendipity, or even cosmic intervention. Just confirmation bias, the transitive property of Culver’s cheeseburgers, and the Grateful Dead.

In short order, I texted that exact phrase to another friend, “Just a box of rain,” someone who’s foray into the Grateful Dead just started a few months ago. I imagine it was like that for a lot of people, the air thick with phone calls and text messages and emails amongst concert friends and parking lot neighbors and tapers and Deadheads of all stripes and creeds, all beginning to mourn the loss of Phil. I could practically hear them running to the comment sections on YouTube.

I knew set lists this weekend would change in places that still book live bands, and I imagined I would see some extra color in the aisles at the store. And sure enough, on Saturday, I stopped a woman wearing a jacket featuring a psychedelic mosaic of terrapins and bears and rainbows. Jerry was smiling across the back.

I waited to tell Sara in person and wondered if she’d already found out. I had doubts: she’d been driving interstate all afternoon with a rear differential going bad. Both of our first cars held dancing bear bumper stickers. We both were started on Skeletons from the Closet CDs.

You see, we’ve determined she’s a first set person, and that I’m a second set person. Somehow we make it work.

The next day when I got to work, we had lots of talk about Phil. We compared the shows or songs that we’d listened to the night before. It should not shock you, this overlap of Deadheads and grocery store employees. We walk among you, stumbling stereotypes.

My friend, the one I’d texted, had listened to Fallout From The Phil Zone, a hand-picked collection by Lesh himself.

I needed to find a different day, another October 25th where Phil Lesh was still playing. So, Sara and I listened to the Dead’s 10-25-1973 show, which is one of only two shows the Grateful Dead ever played on October 25th.

It’s not really important that you know that, but rather that the fact is known at all. Herein lies a large part of the power and influence that the Grateful Dead continues to maintain in contemporary life. Nearly every note the band ever played in front of an audience was recorded, disseminated widely by fans for decades, archived and preserved, and, eventually, uploaded to the internet.

That despite whatever Deadhead tropes you’ve heard, some of which I can report are true. Somehow they’ve still been able to compile and maintain the largest complete library of recorded music by a single group.

And remember: they did it stoned.

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Try this exercise: Type a random date into your chosen search engine. Do it that way, with the numbers and keep the date before August 9, 1995. (The day Jerry Garcia died.) I’d bet both my right arm and my last dollar that a Grateful Dead concert corresponding to that date appears on the first page of results, if not in the top three.

Such is the technological prevalence of the Grateful Dead in 2024, that they’ve commandeered the very digital record of our days for the better part of forty calendar years. Even the side projects of the band’s individual members have been captured and cataloged.

I can even show you what I heard the only time I saw Phil Lesh play live. It was 11-20-2011. I can see the date listed here on the back of my tie-dye tour shirt. I was far better back then, I think. Wistful.

Somehow I convinced my boss to park the produce truck outside the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis for three hours and join me inside for two sets of Furthur, one of the numerous “after-Jerry” bands that have continued touring for the last 30 years in the wake of his departure. This was a place used to staging James Taylor and elaborate productions of The Nutcracker. It didn’t stand a chance.

After the show, we went down to Produce Row, loaded all the requisite produce for another unavoidable and fast approaching Turkey Day, and drove home along the river straight on into the next day.

Phil Lesh had been playing close to his home up until last month, still searching for the sound, even at the very end. It seems important to note also that the word “jam band” was added to the dictionary earlier this month, a feat not possible without Phil Lesh and the rest of the Grateful Dead because the word lacked a meaning before they came along.

The fact that I’ve spent more of my life listening to the Grateful Dead than any other music isn’t a unique character trait. Many people have lived this very kind of way over the last few decades in America. It’s nearly traditional at this point, and in my view, it is an admirable, if naive endeavor to fill the space of the many small rooms of our lives. It can provide a way of remembering, providing an adaptive structure to otherwise forgotten days.

Days between. That’s what they are. The days between. And I’ve spent the last two deep in the Phil Zone. While there have been countless Jerry Garcia disciples, and even some Bob Weir acolytes, I’ve heard very few people who could play bass like Phil Lesh did.

The only one I’ve seen in person was a guy who stood on a farm trailer and played in white New Balance sneakers. He came into the store not that long ago. I told him that he “nailed Phil.”

He shook my hand, and said, “That really means a lot. Call me Uncle Ed.”

Phil’s playing only ever pointed forward, and started around the fifth fret. Listen for just a little while to any stretch of a Dead show and you will find that Phil Lesh was always the wild, beating heart of a band that never stopped playing.

I’m particularly keen on Grateful Dead shows that were taped closest to the Phil Zone, which officially means “an area directly in front of the bass amps onstage where some fans would stand, feeling the full-impact of the vibrations of Lesh's bass-playing.”

If there is a spiritual core of the Grateful Dead, it is “Dark Star.” There is a really magnificent and far out theory in Deadhead culture that insists that the song “Dark Star” is always playing somewhere out there in the universe, and that the Grateful Dead just chose times to tune in to it. To pull it out of the ether. To channel it.

Sometimes the band took years between performances, especially towards the end. Phil always kicked it off.

If you really want to understand the genius of Phil Lesh, start with this suite from that other October 25. The one in 1973. This “Dark Star” isn’t on this list of the eighteen greatest versions of “Dark Star,” but it should be.

Throughout, Lesh guides the group from section to section of sometimes formless music, but it is a music that is never lost. Even at its strangest points, still Lesh is charting the course.

You don’t have to give in to it, but I do believe that “Dark Star” is playing right now. I mean I know it is playing here, through my laptop speakers as I write this. But it’s also playing back there in 1973, and it’s being played tonight by some band in some bar on the coast.

To me, that’s the real Phil Zone, some place between then and now, definitely a Sunday show with a spot by the stage, drifting right along the weird edge of America, falling and rising with the sound of the Grateful Dead.

Fare thee well, Phil.

Thanks for always steering the ship.

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The Five and Dime is member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where each week a slew of new writing appears from around the state. It is gracefully collected by Julie Gammack, and published here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

In lieu of our regularly scheduled programming, I thought I would try ripping off one of ’s voice memos. They’ve become one of my favorite things on Substack. Adam is a writer and editor of the literary magazine .

The music throughout this voicemail comes from Side A of Cattle Call by Eddy Arnold. (RCA Victor, 1963)

Below, I have compiled some things that were published elsewhere in August and September.

If I haven’t said it enough yet, thanks so much for being here.

There’s more coming soon.

Take care.

-Avery

POEMS

mine’s eight minutes ahead and

sara’s is three minutes further on

eleven years between us and

i’m the one stuck changing the

clocks in both of the cars

- from “Changing the Clocks in the Cars” at Belt Magazine

FICTION

“The Name Of The Buyer Was Not Disclosed” over at JAKE

“For the record, the Pentagon had been the one footing the bill for the development of the hot dog cannon all along. Originally, they were desperately trying to get people to forget about some tragic toy known as The Lawn Dart. It took the top brass and millions of dollars, but by God, they did it.”

-from “Hot Dog Exclusivity” over at Heavy Feather Review

ALBUM REVIEWS

No Depression:

AMOS LEE

THE CACTUS BLOSSOMS

WILLIE WATSON

My partner Sara Williams has been putting heaters like this one up over at Public Nuisance all summer long.

The Five and Dime is member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where each week a slew of new writing appears from around the state.

It is gracefully collected by Julie Gammack and , and published here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

One night last fall I was tired and smelling of retail death, a thing reeking and always trapped in the armpits of our t-shirt uniforms. The dead tree next door was in the process of being felled by a guy with out-of-state plates who was already hanging a fatal distance in the air, tied off to the thing that he was actively cutting down.

Wanting to look tough and play the part honestly, I ran inside and grabbed the closest Bukowski, Women, which is a sad and flagrant book. I went about reading some of the Tammie parts. I mouthed those ugly words and breathed in the chainsaw fumes slowly, trying to move the words out and down among the grass where mason bees hummed around my Crocs. I wanted to save some watching for later, so I faced away from the tree and kept my face towards the pages. 

He was just doing the preliminary cuts, but I admit the Paula Abdul and Tears For Fears songs coming out of his jobsite radio sorely ruined the mood: distinctly not chainsaw music. With the sound and setting sun in my eyes, everything took on that patina of real cheap tequila. But back in the kitchen, I had found only a down-on-its-luck lime which I cut too big a wedge from and shoved into a non-alcoholic beer. Lime juice was stinging my thumb that I’d just caught with my boxcutter earlier that morning, opening the box that the lime had arrived in. 

All summer long, the logger has worked his way around our near-levee neighborhood. We all take turns, watching him work. Hanging up there. Some of the boldest among us set out lawn chairs, koozies in hand.

When he finally got to our corner, I stood in the backyard and pointed up to some honey locust limbs just then being cradled by our roof. The pods slapped the shingles at the mere suggestion of a breeze. “That’s the priority,” I said and continued pointing, as if he could miss them. He said that was bad for the roof, which I could tell just by standing there. 

I’d discovered early on that having something drag all night across the roof above your head can lead to great psychological distress, not unlike reading too much Bukowski. In our last house, we had multiple raccoons living and thriving directly above our pillows. The guy in the apartment across the street got drunk enough to come over and tell us that he’d watched one of the raccoons carry an entire plastic shopping bag up our downspout and into the attic. He drunkenly emphasized that the raccoon up there was “huge.”

Believe me when I say that we tried to take care of these limbs ourselves. At various points, both Sara and I had scaled the roof or hung out of the attic window, both of us doing it while the other was gone, and each of us with the same extendable chainsaw.

It stretches about 8 feet. On a single charge, it runs for about seventy five seconds.

We hacked away at what we could, but the worst of it was just out of reach.

-

He said he’d be over early, and when I came home from work, I found a heap of limbs and branches already laying in the yard. He’d gotten it all down by noon. My shift had started at 3 a.m., but “Seven Spanish Angels” was coming out of his truck. It’s quintessential American pop music, and in this instance, I took it as an omen.

Look to the chorus:

There were seven Spanish angels

At the altar of the sun

They were prayin' for the lovers

In the valley of the gun

When the battle stopped and the smoke cleared

There was thunder from the throne

And seven Spanish angels

Took another angel home

As we don’t get visitors often, I decided to help him load his trailer, and worked with him all afternoon, picking up. Here was a guy who's used to being stuck up in a tree, being talked at, so mostly I listened. I’m afraid this is how I’ve chosen to spend my life: studying the pure art of Midwest conversation, mostly in silence, and usually from a few houses over.

Strangely, I never found a good time to tell him that I’d spent most of the previous night collaging baseball cards. He was carrying on his person a variety of saws and sharp implements made exclusively for separation, and there I was, having trouble getting through some 1989 Upper Decks with a rusty X-ACTO knife. 

I tried when I could to keep the conversation local. We talked about the levee and the explosion and what the town square used to look like on a Friday night. He told me about his deployments, his back surgeries, the highways in Alaska. He even told me that he and his buddies used to shock blue catfish by sticking a hand crank phone out of a boat and turning it in the water of the quarry lake. 

When things drifted towards anything past the interstate, I’d try to steer it back, ask some more about Alaska or how the next town over got all that money to build a new football field. At one point he decried the current state of Facebook Marketplace. We got a good fifteen minutes out of that.  

I survived mainly by non-committed affirmations, complaining about the town lawn mowing ordinances, and asking questions about that conversational mine best known as the “Great Big Local Past.” For some reason, it’s safer. Something about distance, and it all being settled back there.

-

At one point my neighbor ambled over, looked at him up in the tree and declared that he looked like that guy straddling an atomic bomb in that one movie.

He said he was waving a cowboy hat and riding it down to the ground. They couldn’t think of the actor’s name. 

I waited for as long as I could, then said it.

“Slim Pickens. Dr. Strangelove.” 

“That's it…Surprised you know that one,” my neighbor said.

“Is that the one where the general goes crazy or something?” the logger asked. “Because that’s a good one.”

-

Later the two of us were running rakes, almost done picking everything up, and I finally said what I’d been working towards all afternoon.

“I bet all this is kind of boring,” I said, and gestured with my hand past the pile of limbs on the trailer. I tried to convey scale. I meant all of it. Post-military life. Iowa.

I meant the 21st century world in an honest and genuine sense. 

He waited a beat, then said “I’m embarrassed to say this, but you know, there’s just no thrill like hunting a human.” 

I didn’t want to lose him now, so close to the end, so I nodded along.

We were nearly through with the work. 

Eventually, I said “Sure. I bet.”

It was quiet after that. We just pulled the rakes.  

-

I’ve tried desperately to shake this conversation going on a week now.

I used all the usual suspects, too. I spent the holiday weekend wholly absorbed in the grocery store. Pumpkin season looms. Fucking pumpkins.

I chased that with a Grateful Dead cover band playing a street dance in Anamosa. Hell I even tried seven innings of a semi-professional baseball game. (It was the Kernels versus the Timber Rattlers. We rooted for the corn.)

None of it’s worked. Right now, I’m sitting in the yard and still thinking about the logger. About his war. About ours. How we couldn’t make it a full week into school without a mass shooting. That’s our new American calendar: drifting between mass shootings in malls and churches during the summer, and in schools for the fall and spring.

I’m sure glad they banned all those books, though. Especially this one by Jodi Picoult, which, (checks notes), “follows the unfolding of a school shooting, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of the incident.”

-

There’s a new light coming through the trees and I can feel my face burning in it. I’m listening to Tony Rice records on YouTube. I’m sitting on an inherited beach chair and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Charles Bukowski on it.

I watch as a hummingbird skips the trumpet blossom, heads straight for the bargain-brand grape jelly. I don’t blame it. America will eat you too, little bird.

Greg Brown taught me that.

Across the fence, a potty-training neighbor dog is finally getting it right. A kid just rode by on a bicycle, clutching a TV to his chest. Soon, I’ll go inside to cut up a can of chicken for a cat with no teeth, and a separate can for a cat with three legs. 

Everything is going according to plan.  

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I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

Each week, a roundup of our work is gracefully collected by Julie Gammack, and published here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

We’ve reached the route now and it feels like I’m being dropped off at a raucous, two-wheeled summer camp. 

Sara helps me unload my bike, takes my picture, and says “It’s going to be a lot like Willy Wonka, Big Fish, Field of Dreams, and a little Dazed and Confused all combined.”

After providing me the necessary equipment, she has brought me, fittingly, to Orient, Iowa. In my fanny pack, I have $71 in cash, a driver’s license, and an insurance card just so they know who to charge in case they have to scrape parts of me off the highway. I have also brought a disposable camera and a spiral notebook with Garfield on it. 

By the end of the week, the cash will be gone several times over and the disposable camera will be filled, its scroll wheel grinding like a crankset with idle pedals. I’m positive that most of the pictures are of county courthouses I could not in good faith identify now, several different slices of Casey’s breakfast pizza, and at least one of a guy who’s riding a penny-farthing across America. 

This dispatch, will rely on what Garfield was holding before he and the cover ripped off one afternoon in Albia. He took his own invitation, it seems. Maybe he didn’t like the direction this thing was taking. 

Within the first fifteen miles of the ride:

I spot a cartoon cop complete with the requisite mustache walk out from the first rows of a corn field, zipping up his fly. 

I hear what feels like a direct omen straight from our patron saint: “Life Is Just A Tire Swing” by Jimmy Buffett.

I eat a porkchop served on a napkin, sans sauce, fished out of a plastic Coleman cooler with a bare hand.

I send out and receive a significant number of rich, backwoods country waves from folks in lawn chairs, sipping from koozies like the folks do back home.  

I see a group of young Amish kids, standing really close to an enormous Bose speaker that’s mounted on a bike that’s blasting out Biggie Smalls’ “Juicy.”

For those tuning in outside of Iowa, I’m riding the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. RAGBRAI. 

Local legend is that Des Moines Register columnists John Karras and Donald Kaul dared each other to ride their bikes across Iowa and write columns about it. On the day the ride started, Kaul wrote this invitation in the Register: “Today is the day the Great Bike Trip begins. From the Missouri to the Mississippi in six days, or any part thereof. Get your bike out and ride with us for a spell.” There are several photos of him riding with a Snoopy helmet on. 

At most, a few hundred joined them at various points on the journey. 

51 years later, as many as 25,000 bicyclists will ride this week. 

Safe to say the secret’s out, and to hear “Iowa” is to think of American Gothic, Caitlin Clark, and bicycles swerving between cornfields every July. Riders come from all over the world to this, a race without prize, payout, and, some might argue, purpose. I rode for some time with a guy from British Columbia who loved “the premier arena rock tribute band” Hairball back in Knoxville. He says he once rode all the way across Canada, and that he still likes this ride better. 

What is RAGBRAI now?

Like all good things, it’s become, at its very worst, an ugly capitalist boondoggle. At face value, RAGBRAI now resembles a brutal mix of traveling frat party, county fair, and rowdy class reunion. To hear it from other Iowans and a few long-time riders that I know, it’s lost its heart, become uber-commercialized, sponsored by Scheels and Celsius, and officially partnered with HotelPlanner.com. 

RAGBRAI is probably the last economic asset that the Register owns. Out on the route itself, Burma Shave-style signs litter the countryside, promising everything from pickle juice shots to something called Mango Madness, always just up ahead. I have to tell you that there is no bigger mark alive than some middle-aged dude on a bike out on RAGBRAI. He’s never, in his whole life, been this tired. He’s in Eddyville, Iowa, covered in a thick sap of beer sweat and sunscreen. And tap to pay is enabled on his phone. (Apparently there’s a term for them: MAMIL, or "middle-aged man in Lycra.")

For the record, I’m not immune to the marketing either: I’ve eaten Casey’s pizza twice since the ride concluded Saturday. It’s Monday night, marking five straight days of the greasy, glorious stuff.

Two kids at different houses in Eldon held up poster boards, trying to flag down riders. One said FREE KITTENS. The other said ROCK SALE.

American Gothic indeed.

Still, there remains glimpses, lingering mirages, of Kaul and Karras’ original romantic and surely barroom-fueled scheme. Along the route this week, riders funded coffers for several church bells, little league bases, and wrestling uniforms. On Tuesday alone, riders donated over $50,000 to Greenfield’s relief fund.

RAGBRAI can still feel like that sometimes, a spiritual deep kind of Midwestern pilgrimage: purposeful, meditative, beer-stained. But those moments arrive well outside of each day’s official programming, and on such an individual basis as to sometimes be untranslatable.

I could try to tell you about the hay rake tine I saw sticking up out of the garden, painted like the zinnias that surrounded it. Or what it was like to listen to a dad explain to his young daughter the order and “reason” for each American military action since the second-half of the 20th century. But I’m not able do it. To adequately write whatever that emotion is.

Even when I get those photos back from Walgreens in three weeks, I’m sure they won’t be able to show it either. Not to sound like I’m wearing a “It’s a RAGBRAI thing. You wouldn’t understand” t-shirt or something. I just think I’m beginning to understand why people come out here, year after year, and ride across this silly state in their silly Lycra uniforms.

Riding bikes is by nature a repetitive act. RAGBRAI is repetition made manifest. Total. After a few days it becomes difficult to maintain the proper day’s route on your phone when and if you can get cell service. Checking always late in the day when the wonder has all worn off and the notebook hasn’t appeared for awhile. When it’s quiet on the route and the Bluetooth speakers have all died. When it starts to feel like work and you remember that you’ve taken your vacation time to be right here, doing it. 

If you start at the same time every day, you ride with many of the same riders. Most towns have the same food vendors. All day and at night the bands play cover songs, often with comparative setlists. They played what I’d describe as hyper-pop, which is mostly the music found at wedding receptions. What differentiates any of it from day to to day often depends on how much of you is sunburned, and if you had either two or three Busch Lights at the last town. 

At some point, it becomes your main objective to create change amongst the static of pedaling and shifting in order to remember something. Some kind of spikes on the graph. At one point, I ride up behind a biker with Sara and announce to her, “Here’s my main man Steve.”

I hadn’t seen him for two days. I’ve never had a main man before. 

That’s a little more unrivaled RAGBRAI essence: finishing conversations you started three days and hundreds of miles ago. All because you were next to them outside of Indianola, jamming out to certain Eagles songs together. We definitely had different opinions on “Backing The Blue,” but for a stretch of time, we were moving and communicating as a pair inside a larger collective. We all shared a loosely defined direction, at least for a little while. For stretches, it was intoxicating.

I think I’m imparting a real sense of Blanche DuBois about the whole thing. Something about always depending on the kindness of strangers. But, like all American traditions, there’s a level of pretend that occurs during RAGBRAI. It’s still just Iowa masquerading as a welcoming, supportive place that’s got its shit figured out. For a week, RAGBRAI showcases Iowa, but it is an Iowa in makeup, made up for shadows.  

I was reminded of this most when I saw a local at a beer tent in the hills wearing a t-shirt that read “I LIKE DEMOCRATS LIKE THEY LIKE THEIR VOTERS: DEAD. A woman was taking a picture with him. They both were smiling.

They probably consider themselves moderates.

I ride by myself and with Sara and then with a group of her friends who’ve all been doing this for decades, Iowans all. This thing is already on its third or fourth generation of native riders. 

The best riding was always with her. On our shared RAGBRAI, Sara serves as historian and regional RAGBRAI celebrity. A lot of the old heads out here know her, even if she hasn’t ridden in a few years. She’s got inside jokes with all the bike mechanics, and they’re a weird lot. At each town, they are approached solemnly, humbly and with reverence, keepers of destiny as they are.

At one point we pass a man taking photos on the side of the road a few miles outside of town. “Hi Sara” he says, after seeing thousands of cyclists already that day. When I catch up enough to ask her who it was, she says “You know, I really don’t know.”

Later, she tells me about Terry before we pass him, who’s got one arm and has been riding this thing since the 80s. When we do, she asks him about his kids, knows their names, where they’re living. It feels very magical in a minor and pure way.

When I rode with her and her friends, I largely just listened. And when I was by myself, I wrote notes with a handwriting I can’t really now read. One is to remind to me to make sure to reference Roland Barthes’ “The Tour de France As Epic” in this essay. How he described the race as a “total, ambiguous myth…at once a myth of expression and a myth of projection, realistic and utopian at the same time.” 

I also wrote a note that just says “Croce: Yes.” I think meaning that I approve all Jim Croce songs, (but mainly his character songs,) to listen to while riding a bike.

Here’s a working list of Songs Never Ride Bikes To

• Counting Crows- “Round Here”

• Billy Joel- “Uptown Girl”

• Queen- All of Greatest Hits

• Limp Bizkit- “Rollin’” (This culprit had a red Kennedy ‘24 hat strapped beneath his seat.)

I also wrote big egghead things in my notebook like “The bicycle marks one of our last great Kantian inventions, arguably our finest human-powered machine. Aesthetically, it’s one of purer creations, a real populist contraption if there’s ever been one. Even today, nearly everything on it can be altered with an Allen wrench.” 

Like I said. It was a lot more fun when I was riding with Sara, in awe, through the hills of southern Iowa.

There were probably benefits of really getting to know your bike before riding RAGBRAI, which featured every conceivable version of pedaled-machine from the last century. Along with the usuals, I also saw a penny-farthing, an elliptical bike, and the cutting edge in e-bike technology. 

My bike? Late last year, Sara had found my bike on Facebook Marketplace. The lady said she’d never ridden it. I test rode it in the Coralville Mall parking lot, and paid $250 for it. It’s got a single sticker of sasquatches dancing in a circle, painted like Grateful Dead bears. That’s about all I know about it.

I rode a few relatively harmless loops in the months since, never more than thirty miles and never really getting the shifting right, or the correct placement of my tailbone on the seat. (One of my favorite notes reads: “Leaving Fairfield, two older riders trying to pronounce “perineum.”)

Of course there are folks out here with bikes that cost more than any car I’ve ever owned. They’ve got tracking computers attached to them and are made of exotic alloys. Their owners want you to ask about them. Sometimes when they passed, I stifled the urge to yell, “Nice bike. Is that a Huffy?”

Lord, please save me from the world of expensive bikes.

Time: 4 total days riding.

Distance traveled: just over 300 miles.

Diet: Mostly Casey’s breakfast pizza and tater tots.

Drink: township water from makeshift PVC fountains hooked up to fire hydrants, and Busch Light with Bloody Mary Mix in it.

Towards the end, RAGBRAI gets shifty. Just when you think it's all over, you’re in a genuine pink tile shower from the 50s. Sink’s pink too. Then a stranger is offering you a fresh towel, a word you haven't heard since Tuesday, and making you a spot on the couch. Sportscenter is on. Your parents are in the room next to you. They drove three hours to check this whole RAGBRAI thing out, see how you looked by the fourth day.

The next morning, you are among the last riders out of town with your friends, out on a RAGBRAI of your own making. The six of you wind up drinking clear liquor at a bar in Yarmouth and dissecting the lyrics to Reba McEntire’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Then you’re stopping in several ditches with locals and drinking some pineapple juice and Corona concoction made up by a woman with the nickname “Gremlin.” By midnight, you’re wearing borrowed clothes and shoe-less, wandering around eating a cup full of Fritos and brownies on a farmstead out in Des Moines County.

I think that’s the RAGBRAI Donald Kaul would have wanted for me. For all of us.

Sara and I performed an Irish goodbye and disappeared from that party early. We climbed narrow farmhouse stairs and collapsed on a mattress in the attic. 

I looked over at Sara, giggling, and said, “I rode my bike here.”

She giggled too.

“Yeah. You sure did.”

We listened all night as the box fans churned hot air back and forth up there, and when we woke, we talked about our dreams of bicycles. 

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I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

Each week, a roundup of our work is gracefully collected by , and published here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

Spend enough time in the bleachers this summer and you will hear a story about someone getting hit by a baseball. Either them getting hit at the plate or in the stands, or a tale about watching it happen to someone else.

Last weekend a guy at the bar in Dyersville was talking about getting hit, hard, and in the head. I heard him say he woke up at home plate, missed most of the fall semester. Later that night, standing in front of the Field of Dreams house, a friend told me about her son, a left-handed batter who as a teenager sent one over the short fence along the third base line, and just missing a wandering toddler’s temple.

“It would have killed him,” she said, making sure that I realized how close it was. “It was my most scared mom moment.”

Her son told her recently that he still thinks about it, twenty years on.

I guess this is mine:

It’s a little league night near the Illinois River. Mid-July. Truck beds and grandparents are bunched up against the outfield fence. A piece of gum and a quarter are given for every foul ball returned to the concession stand. The county courthouse glows beyond the third base line. The grain elevator provides the soundtrack, humming a couple of blocks away. 

I am keeping vigil as second basemen, my daily bread being Baseball Tonight and All-Star Baseball 2001 for the Nintendo 64. 

After every batter, I hold my hand up to let everyone know how many outs there are, and where the next play should be. I know where I am supposed to align myself, my reactions well-rehearsed for whatever is going to happen next. 

This turns out to be a short-lived time in my life.

The pitcher will later become an all-state quarterback, and now he’s built like the concrete foundations he helps his dad pour every summer when the weather is good. 

He’s usually behind the plate, but against the tough teams, he pitches. 

He has the capacity to buy beer now at age 10, and throws a stone of a baseball.

The batter’s a kid scraping the bottom of the age requirement, he’s hugging the outside of the batter’s box.

Later, it’s rumored that he’s been begged by his father to go out for baseball this summer. 

For this at-bat, he’s pinch-hitting.

HBP

High and tight, and fast too. Defying all logic, baseball or otherwise, the kid turns into that goddamn missile. Had he turned away, the pitch still would have shattered his plastic helmet. 

On paper, it looks like this: 

Hit-By-Pitch: HP, or HBP.

Out on the diamond, it looks like this: the ball breaks the kid’s cheekbone, splinters his nose, and threatens to take his eye. 

Our catcher tears his helmet off, looks down at what the pitch has done, and pukes behind the plate.

The batter’s mother comes screaming out of the stands and through the dugout. She threatens to sue the pitcher and his family, and curses at the umpire, our coach, and God above I think. 

No one is safe. 

The kid wails and moans like a thing much older and suffering. We all stand and seem to understand that we are all in some way to blame for this, the delicate beauty of baseball splintered much like my grandparents’ picture window by just one wild throw.

His mother gathers him up and runs with him in her arms through the outfield and into somebody’s waiting minivan, where we watch her tear down the road to the county hospital.

After, everyone just looks around. I think the coaches talk it over. I’m not sure what to do. At this time, I was doing my best to always look stoic and sure. 

This too turned out to be short-lived.

Our pitcher is devastated, squatting down and picking at the grass behind the mound. We probably pray together, him and I, as that is something we were doing then. 

The coach’s son who chalked the lines tonight comes out to rake dirt onto the blood left behind in the batter’s box. It clots into something amorphous which he does his best to drag to the edge of the fence and push into the gravel. 

Somebody makes a decision to play on. Someone is always making decisions for us. This goes on to remain a constant, decades beyond baseball.

It’s tough for the opposing coach to convince the on-deck batter to step up to the plate. They send someone else out to take the batter’s place on first base: a pinch runner for a pinch hitter, a subtle reminder that baseball is a timeless game constructed entirely on replacement, abbreviations, and error. 

I knew, even then somehow, that the kid in the minivan will never step into a batter’s box again. 

His replacement, with one cleat planted hard on first-base, is scared shrunken by the kid who has just become a man on the mound.

Play resumes, and somebody manages to win, but I can’t remember or even imagine who. 

Turns out I have written too many poems about baseball in the last few years.

Here are a few:

“Dear Major League Blackout”- The Twin Bill

“2”- The Under Review

“Mercy Rule”- Words & Sports

I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Each week, a roundup of our work is gracefully collected by , and compiled here:

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

Look. They even have my name on them.

For the last four years, my brother has been building a regional beef empire on top of the bones of an abandoned Peabody mine shaft. If you ask, he can tell you how many tons of cement they dumped down there to seal it off. Now, around a hundred cattle are corralled above it, a perfect capitalistic ouroboros a little too convenient, even hacky, to linger on.

Once I sent my brother a website that had reports on each of the deaths that had occurred there during the mine’s operation.

"That's, ah, kind of creepy, Ave." he said, standing alone out there in the dark, pumping water for the cows. When my grandfather bought the place, there were still some clothes hanging in the lockers.  

Suffice to say there is beef aplenty at family gatherings. I come from a generational dynamic of New York strip steaks and packages of beef bacon given out as tokens of reconciliation for some familial dust-up or misunderstanding. (That should explain some of this.)

Problem is the meat sits like birthday cards in a drawer for long stretches, as this too-small freezer serves our mostly vegetarian household. It was the last residents’ garage fridge, so I think it’s already lived a life largely comprised of grilling meats and beer. (For the record, I don’t count pepperoni as “meat” really. Pepperoni has its own part of the Gregurich/Williams food pyramid, which is more like a self-intersecting polygon drawn with refried bean quesadillas and lazy salad kits. It’s an imperfect system I’m sure we will spend the rest of our lives amending.)

The cats usually eat all the “real” protein around here. We’re kind of like living, breathing characters from a recent Scott Adams cartoon. Even as a child, I knew Dilbert wasn’t meant for me when I found out his dog was named Dogbert. 

Really dodged a bullet there.

I’m writing this now because it’s been a mixed few weeks for meat.

First, Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy. They are billing it as the fault of that All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp fiasco, but really it’s the work of yet another shady corporation doing incredibly shady, yet legal, acts of business. (Cory Doctorow has a great explainer here.)  

In better news for capital “M” meat, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed exactly the kind of grievance lawmaking I’ve come to expect from ours and other GOP-dominated statehouses. Just your normal small government at work. Nothing’s sexier here in Iowa than right-wing grievance, self-perceived of course, and usually self-inflicted. This law’s just a step before the total bans on cultivated meat like the ones that known fellow future-forward states Alabama and Florida just enacted.

From Iowa Public Radio’s Katarina Sostaric:

“Starting July 1, lab-grown and plant-based imitation meat and egg products sold in Iowa stores will have to be labeled with words like “fake,” “lab-grown,” “meatless,” “imitation,” or “vegan.”

The labeling requirements also apply to meat alternatives made with insect protein.

Reynolds signed the law at a farm in Ladora.”

…

“This is but one thing we can do to help protect Iowa’s ag industry from the climate crazies that want to destroy everything we do right in the name of climate change”- Rep. Heather Hora, R-Washington.

Yikes.

Had I known Reynolds was just down the road in Ladora, signing this thing, I would have showed up with a container of deep-fried tofu shaped like chicken fingers, dipping them in a tub of Casey’s ranch. They really hate that shit.

I’d also have gotten a copy of Sara’s cartoon autographed.

Working at a grocery store whose sole ability to grow and expand can been directly explained by courting and maintaining millennial shopers, I’ve eaten a lot of plant-based meat. Nothing lab-cultivated yet, but I’ll give it a go once it shows up. If you are skeptical about these things, seek out unsanctioned video from inside our current large-scale commercial chicken farms, or watch scenes from our cattle slaughter lines. It’s hard to classify some of our current crop of large-scale animal protein as being “real.” There’s a reason states like Iowa have gone to great lengths to institute “Ag gag laws” to prevent outside filming or photographing of industrial farms. It’s always been easier to pay the butcher than to do the work yourself.

One recent Christmas, we helped my brother vaccinate and band some of his cattle. We drove back home and didn’t eat meat for a month.

And, for the record, my brother’s doing everything the right way.

I’m thinking about diets a lot recently because men of a certain age really want me to know about their diets. Specifically about all of the meat that they are eating. These men, who grew up on second-wave frozen meals and spent some Saturday nights of their youth in pursuit of the very first McRibs, regale me with the benefits of a high protein, (and in one case exclusively carnivore), diet.

That guy worked at a plant nursery near here. He even followed us out to my car to continue telling me and Sara more about it. We were carrying trays of perennials, trying to continue convincing butterflies and bees to live here, with us. Even they are shipping out, and I don’t blame them. The nursery guy was passionate and naive enough to out himself as a Ron Swanson-brand libertarian, post-irony. He’s been doing it for six months. The carnivore diet, that is. That libertarian thing was well-aged, of an early Tea Party vintage.

My perception of Midwest masculinity was shaped by people like him: middle-aged and older guys in pickup trucks with diabetes, driving around old dogs with the same. Universally, they hated the government, seat belts, and ironically, the proverbial “man”.  Now, they’re wearing Fitbit watches and obsessed with bio-metrics and sleep patterns. They practically moan about the idea of eating insects and wear t-shirts that define “Carnivore” or “Apex Predator” or contain some linguistic combination of sheep and people.

All of these meant-to-be displays of toughness have always rung hollow for me. If the masculine ideal is t-shirts like these, carrying a gun in public, and seeing how much black smoke you can get out of you diesel truck exhaust at one time, I think I’m all set.

The bravest people I know personally are either vegan, trans, or sober. Sometimes even a beautiful combination of all three. Those are the ones I keep closest company with, and how fortunate I am to have them in my life.

When finding a lane in the current cultural landscape, especially for capital “M” men, diet and exercise is the usual place to start. I propose that the last four decades of “masculine conversation” can be stereotyped as follows:

80s- Stock Market, ala Wall Street. (Later, many of their sons would miss the moral point of The Wolf of Wall Street and start doing the McConaughey breathing exercise at frat parties the country over.)

90s- Sports, Thanks Exclusively to One Michael Jeffrey Jordan

2000s- What Patriotism Is and Should Be

2010s- Let Me Tell You What Current Technology Defines Me

2020s- Diet/Doom: Pick Your Poison

I’m also of the mind that food diet and cultural diet are deeply interwoven. If I’m eating more cleanly, I read more, watch better movies and TV shows, sleep adequately. Whatever contentment means in 2024 is attainable, if only briefly.

But if I’m back on the micro-meals and whatever brown item I can pull out of the air fryer, I’m probably watching too many YouTube shorts on my phone. Which has shown me its own depravity of our current obsession with diet. So, so many “Everything I Eat In A Day” videos and videos of the “only” way to cook a steak, etc.

As the pandemic started, my friend sent me a list of some of the media he was taking in at the time. He called it a Consumption List. It included Dylan’s Desire, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Sex and the City. I’m trying to eat better lately. My consumption list has been rich in early 70s Grateful Dead tapes, Ollie’s bargain emails and flyers, and the comedy programming of Sam Tallent.

I’ve paired that with a light physical exercise regiment that includes many whimsical five-pound dumbbell workouts and a strictly followed route around Marengo by bicycle. 

If I’m feeling conciliatory with my place here in Iowa County, I stuff a speaker in my water bottle holder and play this YouTube video Sara found called “Old School BBQ Cookout Funky Mix (70s/80s/90s) (5 Hour Mix).” 

It is, in all ways, perfect. And ad-free.

I’m not feeling that way often, though, so it’s usually the Dead, preferably pre-Reagan, and loud. Arguably my finest form is coasting by the police station on a bicycle, wearing knee-length pink baseball socks and blaring a ragged ‘68 “Dark Star.” It’s a life lived in direct opposition to Harrison Butker and a whole lot closer to Bill Walton. (Fare thee well, Grateful Red.)

Last week, I ran into a ground hog on the gravel path that runs on top of the levy. I’ve been watching as the Iowa River keeps rising, creeping closer, and I’ve been thinking about our state’s abysmal water, how the recent rains have forced massive amounts of nitrogen into our waterways. (If you are reading this in Iowa, you ought to be reading Chris Jones.)

Anyway, dogwood gossamer was raining down, and the bike and I were deep into an airy ‘81 “Birdsong” when I swerved to just miss the rascal. I stopped and tried to herd it away off the trail, but the groundhog stood its ground, perhaps never hearing that presentation of the song before. We stood at duel position for a full minute, until I conceded, and then rode off.

I made it back home, did my push-ups against the raised bed and waved those silly dumbbells around. Then I went inside and started cooking the steaks I started all of this off with. I should have filmed it.

It was a disgrace before God, modern masculinity, the cow itself, and most of all my brother’s family business.

I put it in the cast iron with oil like all the videos do, but I didn’t have the heat or timing right, so I kept pulling the steaks off, eating a bite, and then putting them back into the pan until twenty minutes had passed and what were once surely great steaks were now imitation penny loafer leather, covered in burnt black pepper. Truly, they wound up tasting distinctly like most tofu: gummy, weird.

This is all is to say I don’t think I’m meant for meat, at least not in great quantities and on a consistent basis. I don’t particularly care if other folks are, I’m just tired of them telling me about it and how it transforms them into something better equipped for our current times: more virile, angry, or American.

Make what you want about what that means for my identity, masculine or otherwise. I guess I want to live standing patiently in the corner and watching the squirrel figure its way out of the rafters in the garage on its own. Or giving a friend some books and a pot of scarlet begonias, you know, like the Grateful Dead song. Or eating over the course of a week a pound of pinto beans that I cooked in the pressure cooker, because it’s funny. And cheap.

Maybe that’s me, an “imitation” Iowan.

I can get used to that.

IOWA WRITERS’ COLLABORATIVE

Nicole Baart: This Stays Here, Sioux Center

Ray Young Bear: From Red Earth Drive, Meskwaki Settlement

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights

Tory Brecht: Brecht’s Beat, Quad Cities

Dartanyan L. Brown: My Integrated Live, Des Moines

Jane Burns: The Crossover, Des Moines

Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines

Rachelle Chase : Reading with Rachelle, Ottumwa

Iowa Writers Collaborative: Roundup

Steph C: It Was Never a Dress, Johnston

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

Suzanna de Baca: Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley

Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

Randy Evans: Stray Thoughts, Des Moines via Bloomfield

Daniel P. Finney: Paragraph Stacker, Des Moines

Marianne Fons: Reporting From Quiltropolis, Winterset

Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, Okoboji and Sioux Falls

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji

Avery Gregurich: The Five and Dime, Marengo

Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames

Rob Gray's Area: Rob Gray’s Area, Ankeny

Nik Heftman: The Seven Times, Iowa

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla

Iowa Capital Dispatch, an alliance with IWC

Iowa Podcasters' Collaborative

Black Iowa News: Dana James, Iowa

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Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Letters From Iowans

Darcy Maulsby: Keepin’ It Rural, Calhoun County

Hola Iowa: Iowa

Alison McGaughey: The Inquisitive Quad Citizen, Quad Cities

Kurtis Meyer: Showing Up, St. Ansgar

Vicki Minor: Relatively Minor, Winterset

Wini Moranville: Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines

Jeff Morrison: Between Two Rivers, Cedar Rapids

Kyle Munson: Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines

Jane Nguyen: The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines

John Naughton: My Life in Color, Des Moines

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines

Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.

Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Des Moines

Steve Semken: Ice Cube Press, LLC, North Liberty

Macey Shofroth: The Midwest Creative, Norwalk

Larry Stone: Listening to the Land, Elkader

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona

Mary Swander's Emerging Voices: Emerging Voices, Kalona

Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County

Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport

Jason Walsmith: The Racontourist, Earlham

Kali White VanBaale: 988: Mental Healthcare in Iowa, Bondurant

Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines

Perhaps more than anything else, I’m proudest to have fallen into a life with a person who, every springtime, becomes tragically serious about looking for morel mushrooms. (Also serious about tracking tornadoes on her phone, TV shows about a place called Skinwalker Ranch, and a little roulette about once a year.)

This life together might not exist without morels.

Sara and I first started spending time together after shifts in search of them, sometimes by flashlight late at night and always in places that we were not supposed to be. The first morel we ever found together, in the last stand of trees a Wells Fargo campus hadn’t yet claimed, rests on a bookshelf that holds some sentimental CDs and an inherited mini-bottle liquor collection. 

They shrink down to next to nothing, and are hard as rocks.

Over the years, we’ve started to bring our friends along with us, trying to show them the joy and absurdity of parking on the shoulder of the highway and heading out with the rest of the walking-stick-and-Walmart-bag crowd. So far it’s been a success: Sara's best friend now carries a meat thermometer out with her while she’s walking, stabbing the ground and checking the soil temperatures wherever she happens to find them. 

Irony is that Sara and I don’t eat them. Not anymore. She got sick on them once, all mixed up with lots of keg beer. I never did like the taste. So many hours spent each spring, and we wind up giving them to friends or folks who can no longer get out and find the things themselves. You’d be surprised how many older Iowans over the years have wandered into the suburban grocery stores where we’ve worked and asked to buy morel mushrooms. We’d always take their number, say we’d try to help them out if we could, much to the worry of our bosses, who probably have great paranoid dreams of liability lawsuits.  

Once we met up with a woman in a mall parking lot and gave her morels. She nearly cried, promised us that they would make her Easter dinner, and her mother’s year. She said that her mother was in her nineties. 

Those particular morels marked time well spent. Most do.

Superstition and outright lies abound in searching for morels. Lucky talismans and t-shirts are both encouraged. The deer and lone star ticks don’t mind, either way. Sara always sings a song or repeats a secret morel mantra. It’s tradition now that once I find my first mushroom, I pantomime a laugh like Nelson from The Simpsons.

“HA-ha!”

If you come across someone else out hunting on public land, it’s a requisite to lie and say you haven’t found any, especially if you have. Know that they are doing the same. The one family rule we have was taught to me by my grandfather, and that’s to wear a hat. 

First one found always goes into the hat as a sort of offering. Carry that around until you find another. It’s then, and only then, that you can bring out a bag. Mesh is best, for the belief is that as you continue to walk, you will spread the spores of the morels wherever you go. Like most everything about morels, the line between ritual and fact blurs, becomes unimportant. And yet, we follow.

I can’t be alone in acknowledging that it’s getting harder for me to keep track of seasons, to keep track of time at all. The new climate binary seems to be: drought, then cold. Sometimes it’s 70 in March. The next week it snows. Even the weather here is burned out. Polarized.

But I can always tell when it is morel season. It rains and sometimes hails. There’s mayapples growing on the forest floor and the wild Virginia bluebells are approached by a loud and lumbering bumble bee. Then a hummingbird shows up from a winter spent somewhere south, probably beach side, now half-starved for Iowa County sugar water.  

We’ve seen more cars parked with ours out at county parks this year than any year before. A retail work schedule allows for time off during the week, and still, they’re out there in the early afternoon, hiking the trails and “swinging stick.”

Earlier this week, a man sauntered up to us in the woods, intent on learning us about morels. There must be something about the two of us, some part of our appearance or walk or demeanor that encourages strangers to try to teach us about things that we already know. As if two bleeding hearts in bicycle caps couldn’t possibly also be interested and quite capable of finding and identifying morel mushrooms. We drive our hand-me-down pickup around this county for just this reason, trying to pass as locals in town most known for one of Iowa’s worst chemical spills in recent decades. 

“Any luck?” he says.

Sara: “Not really. How about you?”

“A little…What you’re looking for are these,” he says. 

He comes up to me and holds out a gray morel that could have fit on the end of a pencil. 

“This is a gray one,” he says, pinching the stem.

“And this is a yellow one,” he says, raising up his other hand.  

It’s a verpa, or false morel, which as the name implies, isn’t considered a morel at all, at least not in our house and most of the various morel hunting websites Sara traffics, like the Iowa Morel Report and The Great Morel. 

I just don’t have it in my Midwestern heart to tell him he’s wrong, that without correct preparation, it’s mildly poisonous to even the most hardened wild mushroom eater.

“Looks like a lot of work,” I say instead, keeping a gray morel tucked inside my palm, pushed into my back pocket. 

I thanked him for showing me his haul and he headed down off the hill and to his van, sure he’d been a help to some wayward strays out for the first time, spurred on by social media or something. We stayed out a while longer, finding a few along the path he’d left by. I worried about not telling him about the verpa. 

But he didn’t ask, and as he could rightly tell, we’re not from here and therefore not to be trusted.

Clearly.

We arrived into this morel season with a tornado, and I’m writing this tonight beneath the threat of another. We’ve raced home to shut the windows and get the clothes down off the line. This evening’s total: twelve gray and sort-of-sunburnt morel mushrooms, five still-traveling ticks, and a dead robin.

Thanks to the rain, the season will last a few more days, maybe another week or so.

Who knows? Everybody claims to be an expert on the whole thing. I know for certain that none of them will get it exactly right, but we’re sure to be out there, until the warm, bitter end.

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You can find the work of the rest of the Collaborative below:

Nicole Baart: This Stays Here, Sioux Center

Ray Young Bear: From Red Earth Drive, Meskwaki Settlement

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights

Tory Brecht: Brecht’s Beat, Quad Cities

Dartanyan L. Brown: My Integrated Live, Des Moines

Jane Burns: The Crossover, Des Moines

Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines

Iowa Writers Collaborative: Roundup 

Steph C: It Was Never a Dress, Johnston

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

Suzanna de Baca: Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley

Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

Randy Evans: Stray Thoughts, Des Moines via Bloomfield

Daniel P. Finney: Paragraph Stacker, Des Moines

Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, Okoboji and Sioux Falls

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji

Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames

Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines

Rob Gray's Area: Rob Gray’s Area, Ankeny

Avery Gregurich: The Five and Dime, Marengo

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla

Iowa Capital Dispatch, an alliance with IWC

Iowa Podcasters' Collaborative

Black Iowa News: Dana James, Iowa

Chris Jones: Chris’s Substack, Iowa City

Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Letters From Iowans: Iowa

Darcy Maulsby: Keepin’ It Rural, Calhoun County

Hola Iowa: Iowa

Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Alison McGaughey: The Inquisitive Quad Citizen, Quad Cities

Kurtis Meyer: Showing Up, St. Ansgar

Vicki Minor: Relatively Minor, Winterset

Wini Moranville: Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines

Jeff Morrison: Between Two Rivers, Cedar Rapids

Kyle Munson: Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines

Jane Nguyen: The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines

John Naughton: My Life in Color, Des Moines

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines

Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.

Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Des Moines

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