August 11th, Day One

Twelve hours of driving on our first day. Five states, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and finally into Nebraska.

Into Iowa, the land rolls, rises, though never too steep that the crops can't hold, into ridges and crests, and falls into gullies and stream beds. The features are all soft, like cake mix that hasn't quite settled yet.

This is corn country for the most part, with soybeans to break the monotony every once in a while. The other constant is the audio book. Outside the country passes, inside Japan races towards modernity, guided by the words of Ian Buruma. Twelve hours of driving, 100 years of history, from Perry to the 1964 Olympics. Outside, corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans. Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and finally Nebraska. We start on a history of Tudor and Stuart England.

The countryside rolls by. Corn and soybeans, row after row, neat and orderly and so neat and straight that they ripple to the eye. Little, muddy creeks flash by. Inside, we hear about Tudors and Stuarts, the Great Chain of Being, peasants in their mud huts. What would a feudal Iowa look like? I just can't imagine this land carved up into fiefdoms and tiny plots for individual families of serfs. The country is so big. Each patch, hundreds of acres, no sort of definition or delineation.

Every once in a while, I can see cows grazing the side of the road. So even if most of our cattle is factory farmed, fed on grains and antibiotics and growth hormones in quarters too close to turn around, some are still free. I only see a few at a time, never more than five or six here in the corn country of Iowa, lazily browsing, living the way a cow should, here among the rolling fields of corn and soybeans.