by Bill Bryson
I, on the other hand, was steadily prospering, particularly when my bonus fines were factored in. Shortly before my twelfth birthday I was able to pay $102.12 in cash—a literally enormous sum; it took whole minutes to count it out at the cash register, as it was mostly in small change—for a portable black-and-white RCA television with foldaway antenna. It was a new slimline model in whitish gray plastic, with the control knobs on top—an exciting innovation—and so extremely stylish. I carried it up to my room, plugged it in, switched it on, and was seldom seen again around the house.
I took my dinner on a tray in my room each evening and scarcely ever saw my parents after that except on special occasions like birthdays and Thanksgiving. We bumped into one another in the hallway from time to time, of course, and occasionally on hot summer evenings I joined them on the screened porch for a glass of iced tea, but mostly we went our separate ways. So from that point our house was much more like a boardinghouse—a nice boardinghouse where the people got along well but respected and valued one another’s privacy—than a family home.
All this seemed perfectly normal to me. We were never a terribly close family when I think back on it. At least we weren’t terribly close in the conventional sense. My parents were always friendly, even affectionate, but in a slightly vague and distracted way. My mother was forever busy attacking collar stains or scraping potatoes off the oven walls—she was always attacking something—and my father was either away covering a sporting event for the paper or in his room reading. Very occasionally they went to a movie at the Varsity Theatre—it showed Peter Sellers comedies from time to time, on which they quietly doted—or to the library, but mostly they stayed at home happily occupying different rooms.
Every night about eleven o’clock or a little after I would hear my father going downstairs to the kitchen to make a snack. My father’s snacks were legendary. They took at least thirty minutes to prepare and required the most particular and methodical laying out of components—Ritz crackers, a large jar of mustard, wheat germ, radishes, ten Hydrox cookies, an enormous bowl of chocolate ice cream, several slices of luncheon meat, freshly washed lettuce, Cheez Whiz, peanut butter, peanut brittle, a hard-boiled egg or two, a small bowl of nuts, watermelon in season, possibly a banana—all neatly peeled, trimmed, sliced, cubed, stacked, or layered as appropriate, and attractively arrayed on a large brown tray and taken away to be consumed over a period of hours. None of these snacks could have contained less than twelve thousand calories, at least 80 percent of it in the form of cholesterol and saturated fats, and yet my father never gained an ounce of weight.
There was one other notable thing about my father’s making of snacks that must be mentioned. He was bare-assed when he made them. It wasn’t, let me quickly add, that he thought being bare-assed somehow made for a better snack; it was just that he was bare-assed already. One of his small quirks was sleeping naked from the waist down. He believed that it was more comfortable, and healthful, to leave the bottom half of the body unencumbered at night, and so when in bed wore only a sleeveless T-shirt. And when he went downstairs late at night to concoct a snack he always went so attired (or unattired). Goodness knows what Mr. and Mrs. Bukowski next door must have thought as they drew their drapes and saw across the way (as surely they must) my father, bare-assed, padding about his kitchen, reaching into high cupboards and assembling the raw materials for his nightly feast.
Whatever dismay it may have caused next door, none of this was of any consequence in our house as everyone was in bed fast asleep (or in my case lying in the dark watching TV very quietly). But it happened that one night in about 1963, my father descended on a Friday night when my sister, unbeknownst to him, was entertaining. Specifically, she and her good friends Nancy Ricotta and Wendy Spurgin were encamped in the living room with their boyfriends, watching television in the dark and swabbing each other’s airways with their tongues (or so I have always imagined), when they were startled by a light coming on in the hallway above and the sound of my father descending the stairs.
As in most American homes, the living room in our house communicated with the rooms beyond by way of a doorless opening, in this case an arch about six feet wide, which meant that it offered virtually no privacy, so the sound of an approaching adult footfall was taken seriously. Instantly assuming positions of propriety, the six young people looked toward the entranceway just in time to see my father’s lightly wobbling cheeks, faintly illumined by the ghostly flicker of television, passing the open doorway and proceeding onward to the kitchen.
For twenty-five minutes they sat in silence, too mortified to speak, knowing that my father must return by the same route and that this time the encounter would be frontal.
Fortunately (insofar as such a word can apply here) my father must have peripherally noted them as he passed or heard voices or gasps or something, for when he returned with his tray he was snugly attired in my mother’s beige raincoat, creating the impression that he was not only oddly depraved but a nocturnal cross-dresser as well. As he passed he mouthed a shy but pleasant good evening to the assembled party and disappeared back up the stairs.
It was about six months, I believe, before my sister spoke to him again.
INTERESTINGLY, at just about the time I acquired my television I realized that I didn’t really like TV very much—or, to put it more accurately, didn’t much like what was on TV, though I did like having the TV on. I liked the chatter and mindless laugh tracks. So mostly I left it babbling in the corner like a demented relative and read. I was at an age now where I read a lot, all the time. Once or twice a week I would descend to the living room, where there were two enormous (or so it seemed to me) built-in bookcases flanking the back window. These were filled with my parents’ books, mostly hardback, mostly from the Book-of-the-Month Club, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, and I would select three or four and take them up to my room.
I was happily indiscriminate in my selections because I had little idea which of the books were critically esteemed and which were popular tosh. I read, among much else, Trader Horn, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Manhattan Transfer, You Know Me, Al, The Constant Nymph, Lost Horizon, the short stories of Saki, several jokey anthologies from Bennett Cerf, a thrilling account of life on Devil’s Island called Dry Guillotine, and more or less the complete oeuvres of P. G. Wodehouse, S. S. Van Dine, and Philo Vance. I had a particular soft spot for—and I believe may have been the last human being to read—The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, with its wonderfully peerless names: Lady Pynte, Venice Pollen, Hugh Cypress, Colonel Victor Duck, and the unsurpassable Trehawke Tush.
On one of these collecting trips, I came across, on a lower shelf, a Drake University Yearbook for 1936. Flipping through it, I discovered to my astonishment—complete and utter—that my mother had been homecoming queen that year. There was a picture of her on a float, radiant, beaming, slender, youthful, wearing a glittery tiara. I went with the book to the kitchen, where I found my father making coffee. “Did you know Mom was homecoming queen at Drake?” I said.
“Of course.”
“How did that happen?”
“She was elected by her peers, of course. Your mom was quite a looker, you know.”
“Really?” It had never occurred to me that my mother looked anything except motherly.
“Still is, of course,” he added chivalrously.
I found it astounding, perhaps even a little out of order, that other people might find my mother attractive or desirable. Then I quite warmed to the idea. My mother had been a beauty. Imagine.
I put the book back. On the same section of shelf were eight or nine books entitled Best Sports Stories of 1950 and so on for nearly every year of the decade, each consisting of thirty or forty of the best sports articles of that year as chosen by somebody well-known like Red Barber. Each of these volumes contained a piece of work—in some cases two pieces—by my dad. Often he was the only provincial journalist included. I sat down on the wi
ndow seat between the bookcases and read several of them right there. They were wonderful. They really were. It was just one bright line after another. One I recall recorded how University of Iowa football coach Jerry Burns ranged up and down the sidelines in dismay as his defensive team haplessly allowed Ohio State to score touchdowns at will. “It was a case of the defense fiddling while Burns roamed,” he wrote, and I was amazed to realize that the bare-assed old fool was capable of such flights of verbal scintillation.
In light of these heartening discoveries, I amended the Thunderbolt Kid story at once. I was their biological offspring after all—and pleased to be so. Their genetic material was my genetic material and no mistake. I decided, on further consideration, that it must have been my father, not I, who had been dispatched to Earth from Planet Electro to preserve and propagate the interests of King Volton and his doomed race. That made vastly more sense when I thought about it. What better-sounding place, after all, for a superhero to grow up in than Winfield, Iowa? That, surely, was where the Thunderbolt Kid was intended to come from.
Unfortunately, I realized now, my father’s space capsule had suffered a hard landing, and my father had received a concussive bump, which had wiped his memory clean and left him with one or two slightly strange habits—a crippling cheapness and a disinclination to wear underpants after dark being the principal ones—and spent his whole life tragically unaware that he had the innate capacity to summon up superpowers. Instead, it was left to his youngest son to make that discovery. That was why I needed special clothes to assume my Electron powers. I was an Earthling by birth, so I didn’t come by these super-gifts naturally. I required the Sacred Jersey of Zap for that.
Of course. It all made sense now. This story just got better and better, in my view.
Chapter 10
DOWN ON THE FARM
MASON CITY, IOWA—A pretty blonde bride’s playful tickling of her husband to get him out of bed to milk the cows led swiftly to tragedy early Tuesday. Mrs. Jennie Becker Brunner, 22, said through her tears in a Cerro Gordo County jail cell here late in the day that she shot and killed her husband, Sam Brunner, 26, with his .45 caliber U.S. Army Colt pistol. Mrs. Brunner said she and her husband quarreled after she tickled him under the arm to get him out of bed.
—The Des Moines Register, November 19, 1953
GIVE OR TAKE the occasional ticklish murder, Iowa has always been a peaceful and refreshingly unassertive place. In the 160 years or so that it has been a state, only one shot has been officially fired in anger on Iowa soil, and even that wasn’t very angry. During the Civil War, a group of Union soldiers, for reasons that I believe are now pretty well forgotten, discharged a cannonball across the state line into Missouri. It landed in a field on the other side and dribbled harmlessly to a halt. I shouldn’t be surprised if the Missourians put it on a wagon and brought it back. In any case, nobody was hurt. This was not simply the high point in Iowa’s military history, it was the only point in it.
Iowa has always been proudly middling in all its affairs. It stands in the middle of the continent, between the two mighty central rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi, and throughout my childhood always ranked bang in the middle of everything—size, population, voting preferences, order of entry into the Union. We were slightly wealthier, a whole lot more law-abiding, and more literate and better educated than the national average, and ate more Jell-O (a lot more—in fact, to be completely honest, we ate all of it), but otherwise have never been too showy at all. While other states of the Midwest churned out a more or less continuous stream of world-class worthies—Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh—Iowa gave the world Donna Reed, Wyatt Earp, Herbert Hoover, and the guy who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.
Iowa’s main preoccupations have always been farming and being friendly, both of which we do better than almost anyone else, if I say so myself. It is the quintessential farm state. Everything about it is perfect for growing things. It occupies just 1.6 percent of the country’s land area, but contains 25 percent of its Grade A topsoil. That topsoil is three feet deep in most places, which is apparently pretty deep. Stride across an Iowa farm field and you feel as if you could sink in up to your waist. You will certainly sink in up to your ankles. It is like walking around on a very large pan of brownies. The climate is ideal, too, if you don’t mind shoveling tons of snow in the winter and dodging tornadoes all summer. By the standards of the rest of the world, droughts are essentially unknown and rainfall is distributed with an almost uncanny beneficence—heavy enough to give a healthful soaking when needed but not so much as to pummel seedlings or wash away nutrients. Summers are long and agreeably sunny, but seldom scorching. Plants love to grow in Iowa.
It is in consequence one of the most maximally farmed landscapes on earth. Someone once calculated that if Iowa contained nothing but farms, each of 160 acres (presumably the optimal size for a farm), there would be room for 225,000 of them. In 1930, the peak year for farm numbers, there were 215,361 farms in the state—not far off the absolute maximum. The number is very much smaller these days because of the relentless push of amalgamation, but 95 percent of Iowa’s landscape is still farmed. The remaining small fraction is taken up by highways, woods, a scattering of lakes and rivers, loads of little towns and a few smallish cities, and about twelve million Wal-Mart parking lots.
I remember reading once at the state fair that Iowa’s farms produced more in value each year than all the diamond mines in the world put together—a fact that fills me with pride still. It remains number one in the nation for the production of corn, eggs, hogs, and soybeans, and is second in the nation in total agricultural wealth, exceeded only by California, which is three times the size. Iowa produces one-tenth of all America’s food and one-tenth of all the world’s corn. Hooray.
And when I was growing up all this was as good as it has ever been. The 1950s has often been called the last golden age of the family farm in America, and no place was more golden than Iowa, and no spot had a lovelier glint than Winfield, the trim and cheerful little town in the southeast corner of the state, not far from the Mississippi River, where my father had grown up and my grandparents lived.
I loved everything about Winfield—its handsome Main Street, its imperturbable tranquillity, its lapping cornfields, the healthful smell of farming all around. Even the name was solid and right. Lots of towns in Iowa have names that sound slightly remote and lonesome and perhaps just a little in-bred—Mingo, Pisgah, Tingley, Diagonal, Elwood, Coon Rapids, Ricketts—but in this green and golden corner of the state the town names were dependably worthy and good: Winfield, Mount Union, Columbus Junction, Olds, Mount Pleasant, the unbeatably radiant Morning Sun.
My grandfather was a rural route mailman by trade, but he owned a small farm on the edge of town. He rented out the land to other farmers, except for three or four acres that he kept for orchards and vegetables. The property included a big red barn and what seemed to me like huge lawns on all sides. The back of the house was dominated by an immense oak tree with a white bench encircling it. It seemed always to have a private breeze running through its upper branches. It was the coolest spot in a hundred miles. This was where you sat to shuck peas or trim green beans or turn a handle to make ice cream at the tranquil, suppertime end of the day.
My grandparents’ house was very neat and small—it had just two bedrooms, one upstairs and one down—but was exceedingly comfortable and always seemed spacious to me. Years later I went back to Winfield and was astounded at how tiny it actually was.
From a safe distance, the barn looked like the most fun place in the world to play. It hadn’t been used for years except to store old furniture and odds and ends that would never be used again. It was full of doors you could swing on and secret storerooms and ladders leading up to dark haymows. But it was actually awful because it was filthy and dark and lethal and every inch of it smelled. You couldn’t spend five minutes in my gr
andfather’s barn without banging your shins on some piece of unyielding machinery, cutting your arm on an old blade, coming into contact with at least three different types of ancient animal shit (all years old but still soft in the middle), banging your head on a nail-studded beam and recoiling into a mass of sticky cobwebs, getting snagged from the nape of your neck to the top of your buttocks on a strand of barbed wire, quilling yourself all over with splinters the size of toothpicks. The barn was like a whole-body workout for your immune system.
The worst fear of all was that one of the heavy doors would swing shut behind you and you would be trapped forever in a foul smelly darkness, too far from the house for your plaintive cries to be heard. I used to imagine my family sitting around the dinner table saying, “Well, I wonder whatever became of old Billy. How long has it been now? Five weeks? Six? He’d sure love this pie, wouldn’t he? I’ll certainly have another piece if I may.”
Even scarier were the fields of corn that pressed in on all sides. Corn doesn’t grow as tall as it used to because it’s been hybridized into a more compact perfection, but it shot up like bamboo when I was young, reaching heights of eight feet or more and filling 56,290 square miles of Iowa countryside with a spooky, threatening rustle by the dryish late end of summer. There is no more anonymous, mazelike, unsettling environment, especially to a dim, smallish human, than a field of infinitely identical rows of tall corn, each—including the diagonals—presenting a prospect of endless vegetative hostility. Just standing on the edge and peering in, you knew that if you ventured more than a few feet into a cornfield you would never come out. If a ball you were playing with dropped into a cornfield, you just left it, wrote it off, and went inside to watch TV.