IC1

Have arrived in IC and managed to set up just about everything I need to: student ID, savings/checking account, cable television, health care, payroll/tax forms, direct deposit application, purchase of required texts, prescription transfer, wireless internet (though I can only access it in the doorway of my apartment for the moment; long story), student parking sticker, retrieval of items from English Department/UI e-mail mailboxes, necessary additional purchases of furniture/household items (including second utility bench, after the first one failed to launch due to, ahem, "human error"), and about a dozen other things. It's amazing what moving your entire life 1,200 miles west requires.

A couple nights ago I was at a karaoke bar, and an inebriated local octogenarian named Cecil was singing his fourth (at a minimum) song of the night, to wit, the longest and most tortuous version of the Eagles' "Lyin' Eyes" you could imagine--it's already a painful set of lyrics, to my ear--and a classmate turned to me and said, "Welcome to Iowa." Indeed. Welcome to Iowa. In case this comes as a surprise to anyone, Iowa is absolutely nothing like Massachusetts.

Those who know me exceedingly well know that one of my most notable "primal fears" is a holdover from childhood; as in, this is not an intellectual sort of apprehension, but the kind of memento mori/mortal terror we usually associate with a child's fear of, say, witches, or the Big Bad Wolf. Anyway, the fear I'm talking about is the following: extremely large objects, in vast open spaces, in the dark. I'm serious.

Last night, after spending the entire day working on academic-related affairs, I decided on a whim to take a drive outside IC to see the countryside at night. My first plan was to cross I-80 and go northward a few miles to reach North Liberty, IA; I turned around half a mile past I-80, and it wasn't because of the enormous silo which said "Coralville" on it (though it could easily have been that; when the only thing in the darkness is you and a twenty-story-or-whatever monolith, and you've got the fears I've got, it'd be enough), it was because in the distance I saw lightning so furious it might as well have been the jowls of an angry god shivering in those clouds, and not mere electricity. You have to understand that the sky in Iowa is so vast lightning does not "roll in," as in New England. It apparates. It simply is. Everywhere. Suddenly. That's what I saw, at least. I don't understand how children don't grow up positively pissing themselves over the lightning in Iowa. That is not how lightning looks in New England. I'm serious.

All of which causes me to realize that if I'd grown up in Iowa, I'd be religious. I don't know that the sense I get is that the folks here are closer to the land, though that may well be true, too; instead, it strikes me that they are closer to the sky. If you believe God sends lightning, then, my friends, when the lightning strikes in North Liberty or Cedar Rapids or the Amana Colonies you are very close indeed to the Hand of God. The lightning I saw last night from my bedroom window (after my second adventure, which I'll mention below; the storm had crossed into eastern Johnson County by midnight) was the most savage assault of electrical energy I've ever witnessed; the lightning breathed, it had emotion and motive and a character arc and everything of that sort. It was alive. And within minutes--minutes!--there was what seemed to me to be near-flash flooding, with the street by my apartment turning into a veritable river in no time at all. Again, water is not so aggressively invasive in New England; I went to sleep last night and had nightmares about floods (floods!) for the first time in my entire life.

After the North Liberty fiasco I turned the Civvy westward, hoping to hit Marengo, IA (twenty-six miles away) by way of Tiffin, along Route 6. At the end of the Coralville strip the World ends, however: the Civvy was encased in darkness, because when you drive in rural Iowa after dark there are no streetlights, just the road in front of you (however strong your headlights are). And of course just past the Tiffin town line I passed an enormous grain silo (Hawkeye Food Distribution) which loomed over the Civvy like Old Scratch on a bender. Terrifying, to someone with my hang-ups. But I kept going, gripping the wheel like a total sad-sac. Until the sky ahead of me imploded. Into lightning which made the lightning over North Liberty look like a night-light. Keep in mind, in Iowa, when you're out in the cornfields in your car around midnight, you're the tallest thing going--and whether the lightning hits your car or doesn't, if that lightning makes contact with the ground you will see it happen.

I'm from New England, I don't want to see that happen. I want lightning to be just a flutter of light behind a dense canopy of conifers, per usual; I want to believe God's just flicking a light-switch up and down as a sort of prank, not planning an Event the likes of which mankind will not soon forget. So, screw Marengo.

The weather here is absolutely insane.

More later.