Iowa is gorgeous in July and August. When I’m there in the summer I tend to forget how horrible it can be in February. Everything is lush and soft. I can walk barefoot everywhere and few things try to bite me. It makes me want to stay and moisturize my brain with the sight of all the growing things.
I rented a car to go see my grandfather and had the familiar experience of driving north through some of the most fertile land in the world and listening to RAWK music on the radio. Corn fields and RAWK. They go together like Hawkeye vodka and strawberry Kool-aid. The fields are awesome; the rain has been good (where there haven’t been tornados), and the corn is very tall with mature golden tassels. The hills roll in that part of the state and the cliched patchwork-quilt effect is evident as I crest every hill. It’s breathtaking to top a hill and see five miles out over a river valley with the fields rolling along; beans, then corn, then hay, then a pasture with black cows. The farm houses are all white, usually with black shutters. The barns are red. The lawns and ditches are mowed. The rows of corn march perfectly where they were planted. It’s all incredibly tidy.
This is why there is RAWK. Everything is so excessively tidy. Growing up in Iowa, a kid is expected to be tidy, responsible, hard-working and somewhat (though not enough to be uppity) ambitious. While not cruel, Iowans don’t really know what to do with someone who veers of the path. Kids are not ‘tidy’, their feelings are not ‘tidy’ and their hormones are certainly not ‘tidy’. Therefore, there is RAWK. There is angst, there are tantrums, there are late-night drives through cornfields to see what patterns you can make with the broken stalks. RAWK scratches some awful unnamed bite on the ass.
Whenever I am home and driving around, I feel phantom angst. It’s not mine anymore, but it returns in the form of ‘Will I have to come back and be stuck here forever?’ At that point I turn on the radio, to the same station I listened to RAWK on when I was 14. They are playing bands I’ve never heard of, as well as Pearl Jam, Sound Garden, Rage Against the Machine and the obligatory “Mandatory Metallica” (playing at the Hilton Colliseum this week!). The lyrics are the same as always: no one understands me; I gave her my heart and she peed on it; my parents are evil and now I’m telling them. It’s weirdly comforting to drive through the fields and hear it.
I turn it up loud, and drive the speed limit.
db | 03-Sep-04 at 6:25 am | Permalink
I actually thought about this subject while I was driving home (and listening to the rawk) and it got me to wondering if I am in a constant state of phantom angst (I didn’t use that exact term but you pretty much hit it directly on the head), or at least a willful pull toward an illusory adolescence. There are a number of Iowa things beyond the rawk which I suspect play a role in this condition.
Curious.