Tale of Two Rest Stops

 ...between the East of my youth and the West of my

future  -  Jack Kerouac

Iowa is at the center of writing in America and home of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the first creative writing degree program in the United States, and served as the model for writing programs across he country. Over 40 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to writers with Iowa connections.

A towering pen’s nib stabs the ground and greets visitors at the entrance to this Johnson County, Iowa, rest stop. Its scale would do Klaas Oldenburg proud. A river of ink flows from the foyer floor into the interior part of the building. The above quote from “On the Road”, Kerouac’s 1958 beat novel, floats on its surface. So begins an impressively-curated, integrated art installation acknowledging the seminal influence of Iowa and the importance of the written word.

Jack Kerouac, like a specially-trained Torah scribe, wrote the entire manuscript on one continuous scroll measuring 120 feet. The novel chronicles Kerouac’s romantic passion and celebrates mid-century American culture by way of the highway.

100 years earlier, Americans moved to the beat of a different drum. A strain of rugged individualism was being bred into the American genome, epitomized by the pioneers who sought and found a better life in Oregon and California.

At another rest stop, this one in Lincoln County, Nebraska, there is a tribute to this chapter of the American experience. Groupings of steel hoops, evocative of wagon's wheels, punctuate the fields behind the rest stop’s facility. The location of this sculptural installation in this verdant field is no accident. The Overland Trail once passed through.

The common expression stuck in a rut, dates back to this era of territorial expansion and referred to a tendency of conveyances to get stuck in the well-defined grooves carved deep into the roadbed by the teaming river of hooves and wagon wheels flowing westward. In order for a individual to turnaround or go his own way, he would literally have to lift a wagon’s wheels out of the ruts.

So it was with this writer.

In order to turn my life around, I had to lift myself out of the ruts carved deep from years of alcoholism. Thus, I found it somehow reassuring that Nebraska’s Tourism Bureau has embraced for its slogan the juxtaposition of just two words…

“possibilities…endless”.