Long Way from Iowa (eBook)

The Journey Begins: Back to Bonair

If we were approaching Bonair from the east and we were about a mile away the first thing we should see would be the top of the elevator and the church steeple. As we come nearer we should see the houses and the white schoolhouse standing apart from the rest of the town...

So began the description my grandmother had written about her hometown in 1907. Fifteen years old at the time, she had gone on to describe the main street of her little town in careful and loving detail, building by building, ending her first entry with a description of the depot of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway.

A low and rather small building…painted yellow, with brown trimmings…in one corner of the room there is usually a bright fire...Four maps are on the walls and a candy and gum slot machine is in one corner…Throughout the whole building everything will be found neat and in order.

I first read these words—in old-fashioned handwriting, in fading ink—eighty-five years after they were written, sitting in the unfinished attic of the brownstone in Brooklyn where I lived: a long way from small-town Iowa. As I read I felt a sudden rush of connection across the miles and the years—and a growing, and painful, sense of closeness I had never before felt with my grandmother.

As I turned the fragile pages slowly and carefully, I discovered a side of her I had never known. To my surprise, I also found evidence that the mischievous streak I had always felt she had disapproved of in me was not entirely foreign to her own character, as revealed in one of the letters she had written, apparently as an assigned exercise for school:

Dear papa,

Now you know very well, my dear, that I am a very economical girl, but it would certainly cost at the very least one dollar (small sum, indeed) to attend a county fair, and I beg of you to allow me to call your attention to the fact that it would injure my health to remain at home on that notable day when the fair is to be held, so you may observe what an economical turn of mind I have, for doctor bills would certainly amount to more than the named sum. Please forward the required amount at once.

From your dutiful daughter, Effie

As I read on, I began to develop a desire—amorphous, inchoate, but also very strong—to follow the backward trail of my grandmother’s life. It was clear from the descriptions in her notebook that Bonair had been a very small town. I didn’t know if it even existed anymore, but if it did I wanted to find it, and see what it was like now. Most of all I wanted to learn more about the girl who had become my grandmother.

That summer I had the opportunity to visit Bonair. At first it had seemed that it probably did not even exist any longer: this was pre-Google, and Bonair was not on most maps. But I went to the library, I kept looking, and finally I found it: it was near Cresco, in the northeastern corner of the state. Not too great a detour on the road from Minneapolis, where we would be visiting my dad, to Chicago, where we would be going to see my husband’s parents on our way back east. So when we left my dad’s house in early August that year, instead of heading southeast from Minneapolis and driving across Wisconsin on the interstate, we dropped straight south and drove on smaller highways, into Iowa.

The Mississippi River valley in northeastern Iowa is hilly, with forested riverbanks and high bluffs. The highway, US 52, curves and dips along through these hills, and it is quiet, peaceful, and beautiful. As we neared Decorah and began to move in a more westerly direction, the land flattened out and we were driving past fields of corn and soybeans. We found our way to Cresco, and from there got directions to Bonair.

Finally the magic moment arrived, when we were able to slowly drive down the main street of what was left of Bonair in 1992, a hundred years after my grandmother was born there.

That evening we approached Bonair from the west, the opposite direction from the one my grandmother had described in her notebook. But no matter which way you came from, there was no church steeple, and no grain elevator. There was no train depot. There was a building on the north side of the street that looked as if it might have been a general store at one time. There were a few houses, some old, some new, and a couple of mobile homes. At the east end of town, where the Methodist church had once stood, in a vacant lot overgrown with weeds there was a church bell mounted on a brick foundation, and a brass plaque that read: “On this site stood the Bonair United Methodist Church. After fulfilling its purpose since 1890, closed with a farewell sermon, June 14, 1987.”

The church, too, had been lovingly and painstakingly described in detail by my grandmother in her composition book. Now it was gone, and there was nothing to see there but an empty churchyard returned to prairie, a weathered outhouse, the brick front steps of the church, a silent bell mounted on them, and the brass plaque. Not far from the site where the church had been was a boarded-up, square wooden building that looked like it might have been a one-room schoolhouse. We looked around, then we turned back toward the center of town.

If I had been alone, that probably would have been the end of the day’s exploration: I would have been inclined to savor the experience privately, to mull and read, and think and wonder, before returning to Bonair. But my husband is a more outgoing person than I am, and also had the good sense to see that it was silly to have come this far and not take it one step farther. So he knocked on the door of the house that looked like it might have been a general store at one time, and we introduced ourselves to the woman who answered. What felt like a close and personal secret to me at the time, something I felt irrationally should not be spoken of in anything louder than a whisper was, to my husband, exciting news to share: I was in possession of my grandmother’s journals! She had written all about this town! She may have lived in this very building!

His enthusiasm was irresistible: the woman invited us inside, and took us into the part of her home that had indeed once been a general store. She showed us the wooden sign she had saved from the train station when the depot was taken down, and my husband took a picture of me holding it.

I told her I was interested in finding out more about the history of the town, and wondered if she knew anything about what Bonair was like long ago. “Oh,” she said with a sigh, “No, I don’t know much. I come here when everything was gone.” She directed us to a neighbor’s house, and told us that the man who lived there had been here all his life. Perhaps he could tell us something more about the town.

We followed her directions, and a few minutes later were met at the door by the man’s wife, who looked at us warily. She warmed up a little when I explained my mission, but told me that her husband was very sick and couldn’t see anyone. I apologized for disturbing them, thanked her, and was turning to leave when she said, “You know, if you want to know about the history of this area, you really ought to go on over to Lime Springs, and talk to Anna May Davis. She’s in her eighties, but she’s as peppy as anything, and she knows absolutely everything.” The woman added that she herself had grown up in Lime Springs, where her father owned a mill, and had moved to Bonair in the 1930s when she married. “I can remember driving through Bonair when I was a girl, and getting quite a thrill,” she said. “But by the time I got here most everything was gone.”

That was the second time in less than an hour that I had heard almost the exact same words: a refrain of loss.

We drove the seven miles to Lime Springs and found Ms. Davis listed in the local telephone directory. I called her and explained my interest: she invited us to come to her house immediately. As we sat in her living room and I explained what I was interested in learning about, I mentioned that my cousins were all busy creating and raising the next generation of our family, and that it seemed to have fallen to me to research the past. A vibrant woman, indeed “peppy as anything,” she went straight to the point. “You have a lot of work to do,” she told me, “And there’s no time to waste. There are people here you should talk to, but they’ll soon be dying!”

A few months later, a major event occurred in our lives: the baby we had been wanting for some years was conceived. I continued to work on uncovering the story of my grandmother and her early life for as long as I could, at long distance, until shortly before his birth: I wrote letters to my mother’s cousins, telling them what I was trying to do. I received pictures and letters from them, and from Anna May Davis, pictures that would help me in my search. I carefully filed it all, I kept notes, and I began to write.

Then for a long time, other things took precedence. The first baby was followed by a second. Caring for them filled my days and much of the nights too, and when I wasn’t caring for them, I was struggling to contribute to our household income with freelance editorial assignments—or I was asleep, exhausted.

But finally, fourteen years after my first visit there, and with the blessing of my husband and our two boys, now thirteen and ten, I returned to Bonair.

***

I arrived there in 2006 without a...