You're taunting us aren't you?
The piece is snide in a salable coastal way, and one of its tricks is to take basically good things, like the educational system or the legalization of gay marriage, and make them seem vaguely ridiculous. The guy is an academic and one suspects that for him Iowa represents his failure to get a job in a place where he wants to live.
Oh boy was that writer annoying. Thanks for clarifying what a "brat" was for people who don't have Iowa's love for sausages. Maybe he should explain the "corn" is actually "maize." I couldn't finish. It was like reading Charles Kuralt except he's probably not smart enough to keep a mistress somewhere in the back country.
I'm only Iowan by ancestry and even I found it offensive. Also, this: "Rural America has always been homogenous, as white as the milk the millions of Holstein cows here produce." is one of the stupidest sentences I've read recently (the white part, maybe, if you don't consider Mexican farmworkers as part of "rural America" but the "homogenous" and "always" are as wrong as you can get.)
The biggest secret often is -- if you still own farmland -- exactly how many acres.
For fuck's sake. Do the death-threat people have a Facebook page?
the white part, maybe, if you don't consider Mexican farmworkers
Or the entire southeast quarter of the country.
3: If you keep reading, and I don't recommend it, he goes on to discuss meatpacking plants hiring undocumented workers for low paying jobs.
as white as the milk the millions of Holstein cows here produce [but not black and white mixed, like the hides of these same cows].....
The guy is a journalism professor, FFS.
5 -- right, they don't count either.
To 4, everyone knows it's not acreage but Corn Suitability Rating (/secretly wishing for rural credibilty from MH).
I think it is a big deal in Iowa though?
Ah, here. Apparently, CSR is Iowa-specific. Take that, coastal elites!
(/secretly wishing for rural credibilty from MH)
I don't have anything to say about this, but even as a joke it's sort of hilariously pathetic so I wanted to see it repeated.
(/secretly wishing for rural credibilty from MH)
One more time!
Tweety, for real, are you pissed off at me for some reason? It's not like I really care, but if you want to get into some personal beef, let's take it offline. Or maybe you're joking, I can't really tell.
Someone should write a movie script about the search for the mythical CSR-100 field.
17: I'm just making fun of you. Do you want me to check with Blume and see if she's interested in offering you rural credibility?
There are few billboards along the washboard-bumpy, blacktop roads that slice through the countryside, only hand-drawn signs advertising sweet corn, cattle, lemonade, or boar semen.
!!!
OK, I guess, but I can't really tell if it's coming from a place of actually being pissed off or not. Again, I don't really care (and don't mind at all being made fun of, certainly recognize that I deserve it) but there seems to be some kind of underlying desire to start a fight. I guess I should just drop it. /earnestness.
The article is teal deer, but I want to read the version of it that David Foster Wallace would have written.
24.
DFW's version would be six times as long, with no paragraph breaks and 200 footnotes.
25: Yes. And I would probably want to read the whole thing, unlike this.
But, skimming:
Indoor parking lots are ramps, soda is pop, lollipops are suckers, grocery bags are sacks, weeds are volunteers, miniature golf is putt-putt, supper is never to be confused with dinner, cellars and basements are totally different places
This is interesting. A few of these are part of my native idiolect and a couple of them sound totally impossible to me.
27: M/tch was in China farms, I believe.
weeds are volunteers
It's not a general term for a weed, but for a plant that grew in the wrong place. If you were growing beans, the corn that grew in the field would be called "volunteer corn."
Current farmers? Knecht pretty much grew up on a farm, I think, but obvs he has retreated to the loathsome coastal enclave we got up here.
Doesn't clew do something-or-other to do with a farm sometimes?
Anyway, if somebody asks you to go pull the volunteers in the flower bed, it is a sexual proposition.
"putt-putt golf" is a regionalism? I didn't grow up with it, but I've certainly heard it plenty.
27: I don't mean to brag, but I've successfully kept a couple of slide plants alive for months now.
26: Some are for-real true, many are only sort of true. Like weeds/volunteers. As a kid, we called weeds "weeds." But imagine a field of soybeans, which the previous year had been planted in corn. A few corn plants would grow, and would, in context, be weeds. That's known as "volunteer corn."
Also, strongly agree with Emerson on the tone of this.
29: Does this mean I've been pwned? I'm kind of new at this.
This reads like it's by someone who lived in one place for the first 21 years of his life, and then in another place for the other 1 year. Really unbearable.
HEY GUYS DO YOU KNOW THEY CALL SPRINKLES JIMMIES HERE! AND SOMETIMES THERE'S THESE ROUNDABOUTS INSTEAD OF STOP SIGNS
36: Yes, but it happens to everybody.
Also, NISFKC is a too hard for a pseud.
37.2 sounds like it was written by T-Rex, and I don't mean Marc Bolan.
41 suggests that T-Rex and Utahraptor have distinct personalities, which I'd never considered. Have I just read the wrong 100 strips?
Really? I feel like T-Rex is always the "HEY GUYS HAVE YOU NOTICED..." dude and Utahraptor is kind of gently taking the wind out of his sails.
Do we have any farmer-commenters?
I grew up in that kinda country, back when the Maytag factory was still open and the town had three hotels. Thirty years ago I would have said "farms and factories" (+ schools of all sizes) was America and didn't understand what a big city was for.
Yeah, elevators tractors pickups hunting and fishing all that stuff an arm's throw away from my life.
Maybe all dinosaurs just look alike to you, ned. Racist.
Back when I was a little kid, the 50s, so little I barely remember, my grandparents, on the edge of town but close enough for a 12-yr-old to walk to from home...has chickens corn string beans tomatoes strawberries and bought a young hog to fatten up on garbage butcher and freeze. Maybe ten acres.
Their parents were farmers for ten generations. Instead of moving to Dallas non-inheriting kids moved to the "city" in same state and got a factory or teaching job. The story of the early 20th.
Everything was just spread out and you drove more but we had everything. Hippies, bikers even eggheads. See every factory had a research dept with college grads or postgrads. We had an architect and a lawyer or two.
The guy who sold me sense lived on an old farm designed electronic equipment for a Fortune 500 and had a hobby of translating Urdu.
It's odd. He doesn't actually say anything that's not true.
The lengthy list of corrections at the end suggests otherwise. And doesn't the Atlantic employ copy editors these days, the piece is full of stuff like this:
... those too timid (or lacking in educated) ...
The phrase "lacking in educated" caught my eye too.
Regarding "volunteer" I have heard it used for anything not deliberately planted. One's attitude toward it can be positive, negative or indifferent.
I live a hop, skip and a half hour drive from Iowa and in one of those towns with the immigrants working in the meat processesing plant. However, the folks living here are Mexican and West African families and they live in houses, not deplorable make-shift shanty towns. This would seem to be a minor point, but the thing is new immigrants have helped keep rural towns alive precisely because they have replaced the older residents who have left. Not that there's nothing to Bloom's narrative of exploitation, and there's plenty of racist push back to the changing face of rural America, but there's also a whole bunch of intermarriage and folks just living together in a community. Of course, that wouldn't help him teach coastal America about the real Iowa and its mysterious hickish ways.
I looked at Ames and because Ames might be an exception, I also looked at Bettendorf. Both are growing, both have factories.
One thing that has always amazed me in America is the small factories. You get off the main drags anywhere in this country you find small manufacturing shops with less than fifty employees. Or used to.
Sivyer Steel in Bettendorf isn't that small. At least by my hick standards.
My uncle got an engineering degree and an MBA, could been a VP at a Fortune 500 but didn't like the rat-race. At 35, he bought two patents and started two small shops servicing the auto industry around three steps removed from Detroit. Total ten employees, he made over 6 figures, lived on a lake, went fishing and hunting whenever he wanted. Went to church every Sunday but didn't believe. Gave me his Portable Nietzsche when I was 13. Passed his business to his sons.
Iowa is majority urban now. "Urban" seems to cut off at 20,000.
I just read the article, after reading the thread. It's pretty much as dumb and superficial as people were saying.
I think what would have been more interesting would have been an account of Iowa from someone who has lived both there and in other parts of the Midwest for substantial amounts of time. Teasing out the specific characteristics of Iowa as a state is potentially an interesting project, given its political importance, but Bloom's piece is mostly just lazy "flyover country" stereotypes ornamented with some Iowa-specific data and anecdotes.
The place that comes off he worst in that article is San Francisco.
The article is also surprisingly replete with spelling and grammatical errors for something written by a journalism professor.
59: fucking A right. I'm apo-pwned, but the idea that rural america is not merely now, but has always been, 100% white is just...I don't mean to be a pain about the south existing and stuff but, doesn't he remember that the civil war occurred this one time? I often notice an (understandable) tendency in people who grew up outside the south to think of black americans as a naturally inner-city dwelling people but um...no.
Indoor parking lots are ramps, soda is pop, lollipops are suckers, grocery bags are sacks, weeds are volunteers, miniature golf is putt-putt, supper is never to be confused with dinner
This sort of thing drives me crazy. I definitely used the words suckers and grocery sacks and supper as a kid in Iowa-adjacent Missouri, but it's not like you wouldn't know the other words, or even much notice if someone used them.
It's also both weirdly personal and depersonalized. The whole "happy hollidays" bit could have been interesting if he had framed it for his students in terms of his own sensibilities ("I'm Jewish*/I don't like it when people assume that I'm Christian"), rather than as an etiquette lesson that somehow their families had been too ignorant to teach them. As it is, he makes it seem like his students are proud of their ignorance, rather than responding in an understandably defensive way to him being a prick about the issue.
* I don't know that he's Jewish, though from subtext/surname/bio, it seems likely.
lacking in educated
I doubt this is a genuine example* (as opposed to a typo) but there's that thing you sometimes see (mostly deployed for comic effect) where you use an adjective ("educated") in place of the corresponding abstract noun ("education").
E.g. "the stupid, it burns!", or, from 18 upthread "the smug is strong with this one."
See also, Ray Romano in this episode of Sesame Street where he talks about "frustrated".** Which makes me wonder whether I've just noted a well-known regionalism, as opposed to a newish and obligatorily comic-in-a-Yodaesque-manner construction.
* haven't read the article.
**No endorsement of Romano intended. Grover, on the other hand, wins many points.
In Iowa, names like Yoder, Snitker, Schroeder, and Slabach are as common as Garcia, Lee, Romero, Johnson, and Chen are in big cities.
Those wacky Germans!
Johnson? Is that a recognizably ethnic name? Because I would bet there are as many Johnsons in Iowa (including some cousins of mine) as there are Yoders.
Maybe he thinks Johnson is an Irish name.
I suspect he just thinks of it as a common name, like the others, as opposed to those wacky German names they have in Iowa.
I can't even tell if he's trying to make Iowans look bad, or if he's trying to defend them from Obama's remark about economic malaise turning people into bigots. What the hell is his point?
Also, corn syrup manufacture wins over pig shit in the Iowa Stench Sweepstakes any day. The corn syrup smell is truly nasty.
What the hell is his point?
He appears to be arguing that Iowa is a weird place that shouldn't have so much power in presidential primaries, but if so he's doing a terrible job of it.
Some men just want to light a fire and watch the world burn.
73: nastier than pigshit? dag, that's pretty bad.
72: He is trying to assemble facts and anecdotes in a way that will keep people reading without offending advertisers and in a way that roughly reflects the worldview of the publisher.
Exactly as he teaches his students to do in journalism school.
OT: I've decided that the general situation in which, if you are arguing about going to the hospital you should go is true across the board, so, I should have gone to the psych ward, amy winehouse should have gone in the song "rehab," and so forth.
You know how to make vegan pigshit? Put about 20 lbs. of sunflower seeds in a garbage can with a lid and leave it out in the weather for about 18 months. Natural fermentation processes will produce something you can't tell from the real thing.
CT: scan was normal showing only creamy, delicious braaiiiins. I am being discharged today. the only problem is they will send me home with inadequate pain meds because they ate aintry narnians. oh well, blood work looks good, no fever; hopefully the pain will not recur with the same intensity.
You know how to make vegan pigshit?
Feed pig prunes.
Eating alameida's brains is still not recommended, kids, because you can never tell, maybe prions.
Southern black people: they exist.
One day agriculture, too, will get its Tiger Woods.
83: George Washington Carver would like to let you know you can go fuck off and eat peanut butter.
White people from Nebraska are extremely rude but correct.
87: George Washington Carver asked me to post that.
Stanley, did you have something to say about M/tch?
89: Never mind, preview mishap.
28: 27: M/tch was in China farms, I believe.
Like apo was in labs?
Prior art from Stephen G. Bloom. (Which I think I had read and maybe even cited on here). "Dr. Fart speaks: Everything you want to know about flatulence, and some things you don't."
apo in labs, that wasn't bad at all, that was great.
Weird article...my vague sense is that Iowa's economy is actually doing pretty well. There's a price bubble in agricultural land right now. He makes the place sound like a gloomy Russian novel with a sinister Norman Rockwell facade.
Holy shit, that was a cliched mess of nonsense!
A. More than 80% of his Iowa-esque traits are pretty universal in rural areas from Alaska to Florida.
B. His whole thesis seems to be "Listen, coastal elites from whom I spring, when you talk about Flyover Country, what you don't realize is that it actually is Flyover Country."
C. No Hindus in Iowa?!? I guess he ain't heard of Maharishi Vedic University, not to mention all of the non-cult Hindu Temples.
What a jackass. It's like he went to see Fargo under hypnosis and never woke up. If that's all it takes to be a j-school professor in Ames, I really should have gone to grad school.
Why am I still awake reading about someone being WRONG ON THE INTERNET? Sigh.
If he really wanted to write about Iowa as a bizarre and unsettling place, he should have investigated why so many mass murders occur in rural Iowa farmhouses.
he should have investigated why so many mass murders occur in rural Iowa farmhouses.
Just really well made. Lot of wood in those places. Good beams.
Weird article...my vague sense is that Iowa's economy is actually doing pretty well. There's a price bubble in agricultural land right now. He makes the place sound like a gloomy Russian novel with a sinister Norman Rockwell facade.
You can see glimpses of an alternative picture in the way he talks about the slaughterhouses. Changes in the technology and economics of agriculture may well be leading to greater centralization and mechanization, with fewer opportunities for independent farmers and the majority of the jobs available being really awful and low-paying (hence disproportionately attracting immigrants), but that's still economic activity and if crop prices are high enough it could easily mean economic prosperity in a broad sense for the whole state. There's a weird mixture of disdain and romanticism in the way he talks about the farmers.
His whole thesis seems to be "Listen, coastal elites from whom I spring, when you talk about Flyover Country, what you don't realize is that it actually is Flyover Country."
Yes, exactly.
If that's all it takes to be a j-school professor in Ames,
That's probably where most of Iowa City wishes he was located.
99: yes, there's a thesis buried in there, but he never bothers to really defend it beyond these impressionistic claims. Don't you have to at least mention that Iowa and surrounding states have the lowest unemployment rates in the country right now? (Iowa's unemployment rate is half of California's). Seems like a big issue in thinking about Iowa's role in the Presidential race is that the state was basically unaffected by the recession and the financial crisis and were helped by the drop in the dollar/rise in commodity prices. He makes some gestures toward explaining it by outmigration and low job quality but he shouldn't wave aside big facts by doing that.
"I want to read the version of it that David Foster Wallace would have written."
You mean the version he actually wrote, which is here:
http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1994-07-0001729.pdf
It's every bit as smug, but much more fun to read and about a thousand times funnier.
yes, there's a thesis buried in there, but he never bothers to really defend it beyond these impressionistic claims.
Indeed, I kind of doubt the thesis I see there occurred to him.
Reading some of the very mixed comments Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (about a successful Lubavitcher kosher slaughterhouse outside of a small Iowa town) gives ample foreshadowing of this article and its response.
There was another Postville book written 9 years later (not by him) after the big immigration raid shut down the whole operation.
Bloom's book apparently started with him telling of his odyssey to the land of fat, white people in Iowa City. Also his hosts did not know how to use chopsticks on his interview trip. And so on.
His was definitely the one I had heard of.
Agree with all of the points made above about lazy boilerplate 'flyover country' stereotypes, but did the author really receive death threats for his annoying little article? Because if so, that's truly crazy, and I can't help thinking the response is somewhat disproportionate to the offence.
Maybe they were threatening to bore him to death.
Death threats would be wildly disproportionate, of course, but it's not clear what they evidence is that he's actually received any (beyond "Stanley has heard rumors").
the lurkers threatened him with death in email.
Best Iowa song. (By a Viginian).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdU8It806Xw
Christ, do I have to spell everything out to you people? Stanley knows this because Stanley threatened him with death.
Bill Bryson was a lot ruder about Iowa, IIRC, but presumably got away with it by doing it in a book, thus successfully concealing his criticism from Iowans.
Given the relative prominence of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Iowa (and Iowa City in particular) has received more than its "fair share" of literary treatment.
116: bill Bryson is actually funny, though, and he's from Iowa.
118 is right. Also, 113, probably.
101: Ames, Iowa City -- who can tell the difference?
I was going to write a comment about how even a cursory reading of Bryson would undermine many of his contentions, but going to sleep made more sense.
Also, who spells "scuzziest" with a "k"? "Scum", "scut" -- it's obviously supposed to have a "c".
Finally, perhaps Shearer could find some statistics about barge traffic on the Mississippi that would prove he was wrong about that, too. There's still plenty of traffic at the Port of St. Paul, it's just that barges don't get into the news much. Sure, the Mississippi is not the main economic driver of the region as it was in the 1850s, but it's hardly irrelevant.
Barges get into the news when they get crashed into a bridge support or when one of their crew reports seeing a body floating in the river.
I also have a dog
What does he want, a medal? I gave up not far after that.
well, when you hide the body in the farmhouse for too long it gets smelly; it's only natural to dump it into the mighty mississippi.
118: Exactly. Extra comedy value from Bloom now comes from his claims that the piece was meant to be satirical, and why can't you all take a joke, jeez; overlooking the minor fact that his article was a) not funny, b) lacking any indicators of satire and c) a steaming pile of stereotypes that were hackneyed thirty years ago. But apparently, we Iowans lack a sense of humor when someone tells us we all suck.
Calling Iowa "landlocked" and then mentioning the two rivers - one of which is the MISSISSIPPI, was just wrong.
Landlocked in the winter - okay, I'll buy that.
In general, though, he seems to exaggerate things, which I figured one must do if one is from Iowa and wants to be published in The Atlantic. Bad dum dum.
Hey - what do you call a bunch of John Deers parked around a McDonalds in Iowa? Prom night. Heheh.
I think he is right about not keeping their youth in Iowa, though. We allow the best (or prettiest) to come to Minnesota. Laydeez.
You know why the stadium at IA state has astroturf? To keep the cheerleaders from grazing.
And he failed to mention my brilliant son spending 4 years at IA State studying math. Yes, he will leave right after graduation. And yes, almost all the classes seem to discuss corn or soybeans in some way.
Landlocked: the riverboats up the Mississippi brought jazz to Iowa and Minnesota. That's how Bix Beiderbecke (Davenport, Iowa) got to be the way he was. Lester Young was from Minnesota, though I don't think that he actually had anything to do with boats. Charlie Christian was from Oklahoma, but he was discovered in Bismarck ND, which is where Peggy Lee grew up.
German towns in Iowa like Davenport did their best to ignore prohibition.
Bix's real name was "Bismark", after his dad. They presumably took the "Bix" nickname around 1917, when Bix was 14. I don't know what Bismarck ND did.
Once I was taking a long road trip and became too ill to drive. I had to stop for a good vomit and some sleep. That was Davenport and I've never like the place after that.
What does he want, a medal? I gave up not far after that.
Yeah, the dog thing was really incomprehensible. His neighbors try to engage him, and he takes this as a sign that they could never ever understand him. Dude, just tell them that you got the dog for your son! Iowan boys also have pets, you know, and not just ones that are used for killing or that they later eat.
Yes. I'm pretty sure his neighbors think of him as someone who won't be drawn into friendly conversation.
129: Really? It sounds like Davenport gave you just what you needed. "Come for the purging, stay for the nap."
Tripp Davenport (yes, really)
Once I was taking a long road trip and became too ill to drive. I had to stop for a good vomit and some sleep. That was Davenport
Hell of a creation myth you've got there, Davenporters.
115 is funny, but this radio show is where I heard about the death threats. Which is typo'd as "death rates" in that link. And the commenters don't buy it.
133: Better than the uncensored version of the "what dripped from Izanagi's spear" story.
I don't know what Bismarck ND did.
Just stayed Bismark, as far as I can see. It could have become Windsor, which would have put it in the fashion at that date, but it chose not to, probably wisely.
I don't think Bix was worried about being known as a German American; I think he just thought it sounded cooler, probably wisely.
I found a Google Books page (hard to link to, half covered-up anyway) seeming to say that the name "Bismarck" at the railway station was painted over, but that's all. Don't know why - to keep soldiers passing through from mobbing up?
136: Around that same time, Berlin, ON became Kitchener, ON, which was a nice variation, I think.
"...legend has it that at some earlier point in time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and taking two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the accumulated manure was starting to weigh the boat down in the water, so they tipped it over the side and called it Ankh-Morpork."
132: I suppose it did give me what I needed, but my plan was to drive to Nebraska that day.
126: Landlocked in the winter - okay, I'll buy that.
Does the Mississippi actually freeze over that far south? I had always assumed that it was unfrozen past Lake Pepin or so. Computer says no.
140: I suppose it did give me what I needed, but my plan was to drive to Nebraska that day
Fixed!
After 7 hours on I-80, nothing is more welcome than the bridge to Omaha.
I don't think I've been west of Iowa City on 80, but I can name all the Taco Bells on 80 between Chicago and NYC.
Taco Bell, Taco Bell, Taco Bell, Taco Bell, ...
They're all just called "Taco Bell" aren't they?
Not having been to any of those Mississippi port towns, I can't honestly claim that they are not "skuzzy". But I've never heard anyone else make the claim that they are particularly worse than any other small city in the Midwest, and Iowa does come in for a bit of ribbing up here, as Tripp's comments suggest. (Although recently the focus of our disdain seems to have shifted to the 'Sconnies. Because we are the Brainpower State!)
Council Bluffs, on the other hand, really is a den of repropbates. Bluffians founded Omaha as a way to cash in on railroad expansion, but now CB pretty much owes its existence to its relaxed blue laws in comparison with its Nebraska neighbor -- gambling, pornography and off-sale liquor would seem to be its primary industries.
144: After 7 hours on I-80, nothing is more welcome than the bridge to Omaha.
I don't know; it's not all that high over the river.
This to 146, 147. Although maybe it's the New York School for the Unsubtle.
146, 147: Every Taco Bell is like a snowflake, you ignoramuses. A snowflake with a meat hose.
152: Don't joke! I once had opinions about all of them! (Clarion is much to be preferred to Dubois, for example.)
Well of course, Clarion is a college town.
Of course what you want to do now in that area is stop off at the Sheetz in Brookville.
153.last: Cute boy at the counter.
Speaking of bridges, one of my friends apparently just witnessed a suicide from the Washington Ave. bridge that connects the two halves of the U of M campus. Drag.
David Foster Wallace's Midwest State Fair report is much more interesting. A big part of it describes the carnival rides as if they didn't have them out east. But they do, right? It's just that the ones he saw were in Iowa. He thinks they are weird and apparently never had noticed them before.
I think his schtick is that everything's weird -- I love his essays, but they do tend toward that "Have you ever really looked at your hands?" tone.
Yeah, but have you ever really looked at your hands...on weed?
142: From a report about the Davenport and Quad Cities barge traffic on 12/8 - "It could end Dec. 5, and some years, you don't have ice or lock closures," Daily said. "You're always taking a chance of it getting cold on you. Never underestimate Mother Nature."
I can personally attest to enough ice at La Crosse to closes those locks this past weekend, despite the warmish winter so far. The ice was patchy though, and I wouldn't risk ice fishing on it.
Huh, that's interesting. I guess we just hear so much more about ice-up in the Twin Ports here, and of course the river always freezes this far north.
Fishhouses and cars are going through the ice up here. No fatalities so far to my knowledge. On Mille Lacs lake a sheet of ice with 50 people on it separated from shore.
Where was Eliza crossing the ice? That was the Ohio, not the Mississippi, of course.
158: It was the IL state fair, right? DFW grew up in downstate IL (Urbana, but still).
Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, one of them.
164: Right about here, I reckon, given the Beecher connections on the Ohio side of the Ohio. I'm actually probably wrong about that, though. Our house is not old enough for Underground Railroad trappings, but a few older ones especially down here by the river do have them.
Further to 164, I want to say the last time the Ohio was easily crossable was 1979 or so, recently enough that a lot of my classmates' parents had stories about it when I was growing up, but I've lived through an era of floods instead.
165: Right, Native Informant was a high school friend, wasn't she?
164: Where was Eliza crossing the ice?
Ripley, Ohio--about 50 miles SE of Cincinnati. Apparently based on an account of an escape related by John Rankin who was a very prominent abolitionist and whose house sat on a bluff high above Ripley. An ancestor of ours was pastor at Red Oak Presbyterian which was generally the next stop north on that part of the Underground Railroad (and also early Temperance zealots).
170: NO IT WASN'T, IT WAS BASED ON THAT CHARMING FILLY CASSIE AND ME WITH A BULLET IN MY ARSE.
In the early-mid 1800s there was so much less warm industrial waste water coming into most big rivers that aside from any climate warming they froze much further south. The rivers here in P'burgh will freeze during a cold snap--but historically they would freeze much more solidly.
121
Finally, perhaps Shearer could find some statistics about barge traffic on the Mississippi that would prove he was wrong about that, too. ...
Well I did just read a long article in Fortune claiming barge transportation is becoming relatively less important so maybe he isn't wrong. According to the article the barge companies would like the government to raise their taxes so it could maintain the system better. Apparently the governement has been spending most of the available money on some black hole of a project near Paducah.
172: George Washington walked across on the ice once.