Laura Miller 2

Wading into the Fields


The notion of loosing brain cells due to the continuous knocking of my head against the window of my family’s mini van drives me crazy, so I take off my sweatshirt, roll it in a ball, and place it between my small head and the hard window. Our van continues to vibrate down a course Iowa interstate road. I gaze out the window at passing fields. Waves of harvested corn stalks ripple from one to the next, meshing into an ocean of dark and light green lines. Vast hills create the illusion of an ebb and flow within the waves of emerald, rolling one right after another within my view for just a second, then drifting away to be replaced by an identical sight. The sight hypnotizes me, and I remain still, letting it go right through me.
Into my thoughts wonders a tune that I learned long ago, in elementary school.

“I know a place where a gentle breeze/Becomes a mighty wind/Reaching far and wide over the country side/The place where I began.” The gentle tone of undeveloped voices straining to produce the melody that pleased my former music teacher rushes into me. My music teacher wrote the song herself, entitled “Heartland”, to be performed at the opening of the Cedar Rapids Historical Center. When I sang, I always focused on whether I was blending with the rest of the chorus, hitting the notes in a way that I considered to be acceptable. As a college student on my way home from school for the weekend, I finally note significance in the lyrics of my short ballad. I separated myself from my home several months ago to explore my potential, yet I did not dispose of Iowa, the place where I began.

The memory of my elementary school teacher sparks a world of bygone images to float simultaneously around my consciousness. My eyes focus on the cornfields, though I see the round, stone swimming pool that my Dad and I walked to on humid summer evenings, as the sun hung low on the horizon. Course pebbles embedded in the cement of the pool scratched my three-year-old knees as I scooted myself around the pool’s periphery, on my belly. Cold water caressed my skin and clung to my hair, which plastered itself to my tiny, round face. When I came to the spout that replenished water into the pool, I plugged it with my determined fist, trying not to let a drop sneak through my fingers. The water pressure overwhelmed me within a few seconds of my rebellious act, and I took pleasure in watching the stream of water heavily burst from the spout, and then shrink back down to its normal size. When the sun disappeared, Dad and I walked home, where Mom was waiting with a snack of fresh strawberries picked from our backyard garden.

I loved our garden, in that house from my childhood. When we moved into our next house, I found a pink rock on the doorstep, waiting for me to pick it up, clean it, and cherish it. My father and his friends spent that weekend moving all of our furniture themselves. Our new neighbors surprised us by bringing over a Jell-o mold and a plate of cookies. Mom let my siblings and I each eat one of the cookies for snack that night, as a special treat for helping pack up our toys. The next day, my sisters and I walked barefoot through the moist July grass in order to deliver “thank you” pictures we drew for our neighbors.

“Ew, somebody let a big one and it wasn’t me!” screeches my brother from the back seat. My reverie dissolves into reality. Instantaneously, my nostrils become aware of a slight sharpness in the air. Unpleasant smells seep through the cracks where the door meets the rest of our van and slithers through the air vents. The musty smell completely invades our van, though I try to plug my nose and only breath through my mouth. It is no use. I cannot escape the essence of smell around me.
“Mel, I think it was you!” cries my brother to my sister, who sits next to him. He bursts into a fit of laughter at his own fart joke.

“It’s the cows, stupid, look,” says Mel, un-phased by having been singled out as the butt of my brother’s joke. She points to the pasture of cows as we pass. My brother, fully aware of the source of this familiar smell, keeps on laughing.
The smell dissipates, leaving only remnants of its overpowering nature to linger about our enclosed environment. My siblings settle back into their I-Pods, and my mind lulls into a state of stagnation. I see a sign heralding the existence of the Wapsipinican River, which takes me back within myself. Between the ages of six and twelve, every year my father and I went to Camp Wapsi, on the Wapsipinican River, and spent the weekend as a part of a father/daughter group called “Indian Princesses”. We were taught about Native American culture through words, pictures, and experiences. For hours, my father stood beside me and twisted my body around so that I could accurately shoot the target with my bow and arrow. He patiently sat beside me in an old, rickety cabin as I created trinkets out of beads and feathers to be worn in my loose, curly hair or around my fragile neck. He put his arm around me, and hugged my little body close as the brisk night wind slapped me, when we sat around a looming camp fire. The mystical fire was taller than me, and always growing higher. Flames spun and spattered in every direction as we sung songs and told stories about a Great Spirit. Heat radiated from the red and orange flames as I inched closer to its mass, which exploded when my fist flung bits of corn into its soul.

During the day, my father took me out on the Wapsipinican River in a metallic canoe. Despite an itchy, oversized lifejacket, the world aligned into peaceful stillness as my father rowed far away from the beach, behind a large island. There we were surrounded by a chunk of nature. I breathed in and never wanted to let go. The canoe’s ores ascended without a sound from the water and were confined to the center of our canoe. Wind grazed over still water and vigilante Canadian geese sporadically spurted their harsh cry into the serenity. My dad told me stories about the Native American people. He told me about how they lived with the Earth and how the Earth lived with them. He said that Native Americans lived along and canoe in the same river that we were in. “But remember, Laura, this is not the same water,” my dad said. “Water keeps on flowing and changing. You will never step in the same water twice.” I smiled at my father and watched the water all around me, hoping to see a fish jump.

“How many more miles, I have to pee,” says my sister, yelling over the music that she blares from her I-Pod.

“Well, we just passed Walker, which is next to Vinton, so it is about the same amount of time that it takes to get home from Great-Grandma and Grandpa Kiler’s house,” answers my mother, without looking up from her Family Fun magazine. She continues to leaf through them, though the pages are filled with activities for children much younger than my siblings and I. Satisfied with an answer, my sister settles into her seat and withdraws back into her thumping hip-hop music.

Vinton used to be my second home when my Great-Grandparents were alive. They had been farmers by profession, and settled into Vinton during retirement. Upon entering Great-Grandma’s house, an array of delicious smells tickled my nostrils. She cooked all meals from scratch, and every dish found its way into my belly. During the summer, Great-grandmother made pop-sickles by freezing strawberry Jell-o mix. When she gave me a pop-sickle, I went out onto her porch because it melted without much stimulation. With each bite, the flavored ice collapsed into my mouth. Tangy-sweetness pierced my taste buds, and I could not consume fast enough. After devouring my pop-sickle, I was left with sticky fingers and lips, but very happy.

Underneath the porch, there was a swing that swayed back and forth in the wind, which also coaxed chimes hanging off the porch to ring in every octave. I could walk barefoot through moist grass to Great-grandma’s garden. Raspberry plants grew all around the edges. My little arms reached up into the bushes and pluck out a piece of lush fruit, which was instantly plunged into my mouth. On one side of the garden tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers grew. In the back there was rhubarb, with large leaves tossing in the wind. The front of the garden had strawberries that were sometimes bad because spiders made their webs in them. There was a stone path in the garden, but I preferred to feel the fertile soil between my tender toes.

My sisters and I cut out pictures of models in the JC Penney’s add and played with them as paper dolls while Great-grandma made our Barbie doll’s clothes on her sewing machine. This was the same machine that she made my grandmother’s childhood garments on. We had a home made doll house at Great-grandma’s that we crafted out of a cardboard box. The doll house was in Great-Grandma’s basement, where countless other treasures were found. We dressed up in her faux clip on jewelry and paraded around her house in gaudy black Sunday-church hats. Old Coke and perfume bottles were stored down in the basement that carried us children back to a time that wasn’t ours to remember.

A lone barn, an oasis in the middle of rolling fields, stands erect as we slowly pass by it. Though it is several yards away, I see the once proud, red paint chipped in strips from the wood. The roof is a skeleton, yet the barn stands as a relic of life before technology. The wind causes it to slightly sway back and forth, but never shakes the old building from its foundation. Tall prairie grass overtakes the land and the abandoned barn serves as a reminder to everyone who passes by of what life in Iowa was, dreaming of what could have been.

My eyes feel drowsy from watching the country side careen past me, so they droop down to the lines on the side of the road. I watch the line move back and forth as our mini van weaves its way down the road. The line grows and shrinks in girth. This makes my head spin in all directions, but my gaze remains transfixed on the road. “I will sing you a song of the Heartland/Of the valleys and the plains/I will sing you a song of the Heartland/Of a robin on the wing.” More words to my old song find their way into my head, and I am reminded again of where I originally came from. As much as my heart longs for the solitary prairie grass and stoic fields, I was reared in the city of Cedar Rapids.

A growing town of roughly 120,000 people, Cedar Rapids is in limbo between the city that industry wants it to be and the city that its residents maintain it to be. How Cedar Rapids got its name is unclear, though some speculate that when settlers founded my town, Native Americans refered to it by saying “See Der Rabbits?” Another explanation is that the Cedar River runs right through Cedar Rapids, though the river does not have any rapids. The name does not really matter though because to me it is home. Cedar Rapids is known as the city of five smells, all of which I learned to identify from a very young age. There is a General Mills plant by my first house, which smells like fermented garbage. The Quaker Oats plant downtown boasts the heavy aroma of grain and cereal, which can be pleasant in small doses. Our ADM corn syrup plant smells like a dead cow. The garbage dump, aptly named Mount Trashmore, over by the indoor pool where I took swimming lessons as a child, smells like rotting waste which still curdles my taste buds. The last smell is an accumulation of all the smells, which is attained by standing on Mays Island, where our town hall is located. It is in the middle of Cedar Rapids, and on a windy day, the perfect place for all of the smells to divulge. This experience is a unique cocktail that made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Despite the raunchy smells, the people in charge of Cedar Rapids have been for years trying to mold it into a place fit for tourism. City planners tried creating a boardwalk type atmosphere along the Cedar River with a gambling boat as the main attraction. This idea evoked outrage among the religious community because they did not want the evils of gambling to be promoted in their city. Progressive leaders of Cedar Rapids pushed for a grand attraction, but the long-term residence of my town clung to their values, and kept the gambling boat from being created. Then the city proposed building an indoor rainforest. The rainforest idea was nixed because Cedar Rapidians largely believed that constructing a rainforest would bankrupt the city and most likely not attract tourists at all. I like Cedar Rapids the way that it is anyway.

A sensation of excitement suddenly streaks throughout my body as I begin to recognize my surroundings. I cannot bear the notion that time is what is restraining me from doing all of the things that my friends and I used to do before I went to college. What I thought were the most mundane activities a year ago have risen to the position of exotic nostalgia within my senses. I wonder whether we still have the slip ‘n’ slides that kept my siblings and I content for hours on a humid summer day. When the sun beat down on our white skin, we could hardly wait for the five minutes it took to set up our sprinkler. Cold drops of water felt so good as they slid in between our sweaty pores. Then we put the sprinkler underneath our trampoline in the backyard. We jumped up and down, often wiping-out on the slippery surface of the screen. I taught my little brother how to do a flip on the trampoline last summer. His face glowed with excitement after he completed his first real flip.

My cell phone makes a buzzing noise and vibrates against my body. I jump slightly out of my concentration and flip open my phone. I stare at the name that comes up on the screen.

“Are you going to answer your phone?” asks my father, irritated that it continues to make a noise, intruding on the silence.

“No,” I say as my phone dings to tell me that I have missed a call.

“Who was it?” asks my mother.

“Matt,” I say.

“Are you going to talk to him?” asks my father.

“No,” I say. I listen to the message that he left me. He says that he is home this weekend and wants to see me. He says I can call him back on his cell before five, then he will be at home. It’s presumptuous of him to think I will call him at all.

We used to spend our summers together, on his boat at Coralville or playing croquet in his backyard. We took long walks on hot summer nights together around my neighborhood, anticipating the moment when our hands would brush together just enough to forget our inhibitions and grasp onto each other. We went out to eat every weekend, and often barbequed in my backyard. Then he went to college, and no longer needed me to keep him company. He didn’t even consider whether I still needed him. I don’t anymore.

When I wasn’t with Matt, I hung out with my girl friends. One night we went to the Olive Garden all dressed up, and told our waitress that we were celebrating the fact that one of us was pregnant. It was fun to see her reaction. Then we went to Wal-Mart and played with the tester toys in the aisles. Distraught workers called us by name in order to tell us that we needed to leave the building. We bought sidewalk chalk before leaving and then drove to a boy’s houses and drew on his driveway. I drew swirls and quoted Tommy Boy or Billy Madison while other girls professed the love of a secret admirer. Before the night was done, we all piled into my large green mini-van, rolled down the windows, and turned the music up as loud as it could go. We picked out cars and followed them around the asymmetrical streets of my housing development, just for fun. We laughed hard when the other driver realized that they were being followed, and then again when he realized it was just us.

The summer also means going to the beach. The closest beach to Cedar Rapids is a man made, yellow sand beach in Palo, Iowa, which is usually infested with dead Minos. I was deathly afraid of the Minos, staring at me with vacant eyes as they floated upside-down in the water when I was a young child. I once went out into the water without paying attention to what I was doing. Water-wings choked my arms and awkwardly positioned me to float, though my feet could still reach the muddy bottom of the beach. I suddenly realized that my feet were being engulfed by a slimy, cold substance, most likely goose poop, which caused me to further survey my surroundings. I saw several of the Minos on either side of me and I panicked. My arms flew uncontrollably up and down. The water-wings hindered my ability to quell the anxiety, so I released a high pitch whine. A lifeguard saw me, and came to the rescue. Waves of embarrassment surfed through my body because I had the water-wings and my feet could touch the ground. I stayed out of the water after that.

“So, my little college student, how does it feel to be returning home after a year of school?” my mother asks as she wraps her arms around my body from the seat in front of me.

“Fine,” I say, refusing to rip my gaze from the window even though my dream world has been shattered. My mother and I bounce in sync with the gravel road, her clinging on to me.

“She doesn’t want to be home, Renee. She wants to be with her friends. It was bound to happen. We let her go off to college and now we are just chopped liver,” says my dad. He turns his head for a quick smile and then focuses on the road again. My mother gives me one last squeeze of emotion before her hands release me from their grip. I sink down further in my seat.

My father is right. I spent the first half of my year at college wishing to go back to Iowa and the second dreading my return. I felt like I was intruding on someone else’s world when I stood in my suite during my first day at Knox. One of my suitemates said to me, “You know what Iowa stands for, right? Idiots Out Walking Around.” I stood there, feeling the room become hotter. Space between my suitemate and I increased as I grappled empty air for a concrete response. She looked at me, trying to decide to what degree she had offended me. I looked at the ground, and she chuckled. “Yeah, I guess,” I said a moment later. We parted ways, and never discussed it again. I heard that joke before, but it came from other people that lived in Iowa, as a mutual joke. I was hurt that she thought of my home in a negative way and confused about why she felt that I needed to know what she thought Iowa stood for.

I soon found another joke about Iowa that gave my home a context, which I never considered before. A friend from a big city asked me if I wanted to see the skyline of Des Moines, Iowa. Then she held up her middle finger and explained that there was only one tall building in Des Moines. Though true, once again I could not come up with an appropriate response to defend the state that meant so much to me. “Shut Up,” I answered, only half joking.

Smoke swirled around me as I half-sat, half-stood on a chair in McGillacuddys on a Thursday night. The smoke made me unable to concentrate on anything and loud jazz music pulsed in sync with the blood rushing through my veins. The waitress never brought out my soda. My friends sat around me, tapping our table to the beat of the music and spewing memories from their spring break at a decibel above the jazz. Tired of staring at drunk people I only partly knew, I decided to contribute to the discussion. I told my friends that I was excited because the Sweet Corn Festival is going to be the on the same weekend as my birthday. One of my friends said, “That is such a small-town, Iowa thing to say.” I tried to defend my territory by telling her about the festival. I spend a day at the festival sharing a bag of cotton candy with my little sister, watching my little brother squeal as crashes his bumper car, and resting my head on the shoulder of a good friend as the evening music dances in the air. My friends could not understand what I was trying to say because the sounds that they heard could not possibly recreate my experience growing up in Iowa. They laughed at my anguish, and I became more distraught. I emitted my frustration and stopped babbling.

I also had trouble fitting back into Iowa after only a couple of weeks away. Sitting on the sidelines of a high school football game, a friend in the band invited me to sit next to her. I was glad to have a place to sit. The weather was brisk and I wore my comfortable, old sweatshirt with our band emblem pasted on the back. “What, you’re not part of this band,” called a voice from behind me. “Are you back to relive the good old days or something?” I turned to see a girl two years younger than me staring into my face with a smirk. I turned red. I could tell that she thought I was lame. My friend then told me that she was going to get some water from the band cooler, and asked me if I wanted any. “No,” I said, “that water is for the band. You guys have been working hard. I was just sitting here, watching.” My friend shrugged, and got herself some water.

Later, I went back to my friend’s house to watch some television. Rather fatigued from the trip home and having socialized with people I hadn’t seen for weeks, I was ready to slip into the same routine that did in high school. My friend’s parents, glad to see me and question me about my experiences as a new college student, offered me something to drink. “What kind of soda do you have?” I asked. “It’s never soda, its pop,” my friend said to me. “Pop, whatever,” I said. Shocked at my mistake, I thought about the last time that I talked about pop, and wondered if I said “soda” or “pop”. I wondered when I switched from one to the other. My friend corrected me once more before the night was over. She also commented the accent that I developed while I was away. “I don’t know where you picked that up. They don’t have an accent in Illinois,” she told me. I didn’t know that I had an accent. I wanted to leave long before we parted ways. No matter what I described, my friend’s family could not comprehend what I had been through in college. We were more inhibited in the way that we talked to one another than we had been before I left. Both my friend and I evolved as a result of our months apart. We noticed that night the difference growing between us, a rapid river that I had somehow acquired a one way ticket across.

“We are almost home now. Can I go over to Justin’s house and have dinner? His grandparents are over,” says my sister from the back seat.

“Well, I thought we would have a family dinner tonight to celebrate Laura’s being home. You can go over there afterwards though. But be home at a reasonable time, you know that you have to work in the morning,” says my mom. She turns in her seat to make sure that my sister has heard and understand her. My sister does not look up from her Teen People.

“Did you hear me, Jennifer?” asks my mom in a direct voice.

“Yes, I heard you, jeez,” says my sister as she replaces her headphones, still without looking up at my mom. Satisfied, my mother turns back around in her seat and rolls her window down as my father turns onto a city road.

“What would you like for your special dinner?” asks my mother, knowing my answer before even asking the question.

“Spaghetti,” I say without hesitation.

“I’ve already got the angel-hair noodles,” says my mother with excitement.

Spaghetti has always been my favorite food, especially when my mom and dad cook it. Due to the picky tastes of my family, our spaghetti is simple and comforting. I began to help make the dish when I was seven. I watched my dad mix the hamburger in a pan on the stove, it turned from red to gray, then he gave me the spatula so that I could move it around until it turned brown. Then my mother started to boil water in another metal pan. First there were tiny bubbles at the bottom of the pan, which flew to the top and burst. When the small bubbles turned into raging foam at the top on the pan, my mother taught me to break stiff noodles over our sink and carefully place them into the water. I liked to empty the noodles into our strainer after the noodles cooked and let the steam raise up around my face, making my head tight and glasses blurry.

I sit up in my seat as I recognize the old farm house, which I have passed thousands of times, that marks the turn off into my home town. I sigh, with content. The farmhouse has been there as long as I can remember, and it comforts me to know that within ten minutes, I will be in my driveway. I can step outside on the tar that my Dad resurfaces every spring, which will be hot from the sun, collect my bags from the trunk, and enter my little house. The farmhouse is old and rustic. It was abandoned in 1993, after the floods.

I remember driving down streets laced with water that engulfed half of the tires on our car. One night we drove home from day care, where we all had to stay in a tiny room upstairs because water was coming in on the main floor, in a storm. When my mother finally got home, we had to park in the street. We opened up the door to our house, and the damp smell of outside was heightened. The soggy carpet squished in between our toes, and we rolled up our pants so that they wouldn’t get too wet. My mother, pregnant with my brother, spread out a blanket for her three small daughters to sit on, and we at Happy Meals for dinner. My dad was somewhere else, laying sandbags so that the water didn’t destroy something important.

The damage done to our house was mild compared to the way that other houses and fields were ravaged. The flooding completely devastated most of the cornfields in Iowa, while the innocent farmers watched. Every night on the news, a victim of the flooding told about how they had no money and no way to make money. Sometimes they cried, sometimes they looked like zombies. Bill Clinton visited Iowa that summer, twice. He said that he would not leave the victims of our flood alone. He said that the way that our community came together, helping each other out was inspiring. He told us not to lose hope, and that everything would be okay.

“I will sing of a land and its people/And a spirit that breathes free/Of peace and hope in the Heartland/That grows deep within you, and me.” The words circle in my head as the soft melody cascades back into me. As I think about my song, I see the pure truth of my world. I see where I am from and what that means. I see everyone else seeing me. From this point forward, no matter what happens, I honestly understand the place where I began.