The Post-Apocalyptic Roadmap/Iowa

Part of the Post-Apocalyptic Roadmap Project.

Central Iowa

It's funny. All my life people have given me a hard time for living in the middle of nowhere. I always ignored them, just like my mother told me to, and I was just getting to be comfortable in my skin here when all this went down. Now I really do live in a wasteland, and suddenly all those jibes to move someplace else seem like good advice.

Iowa has never been anything but a mother to her neighbors, supplying cattle and grain, shipping her sons off to foreign wars, but those neighbors have repaid her in the cruelest way possible. I've never seen the Great Lakes in my life, nor the big cities of the states like Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan that crowd around their skirts, but I have already had my fill.

Not a single nuke fell on Iowa soil. Nothing here merited one.

I hear tell that plenty fell on Chicago, Detroit, the Twin Cities, and that whole cluster of nuclear complexes between them. At least, that's what I can piece together from the way the Mississippi glows at night from the radiation upriver and the few disjointed stories I hear from the handful of refugees that have made for the interior with hopes of eking out a living in this open country they sneered at not half a decade before.

Well, the plains certainly are open, now. Those strong lake winds dusted every cornfield and pasture with fallout from the hot zones out east, and both of the state's major rivers are toxic, the whole of the Mississippi and the Missouri south of Omaha, at least. The crops have withered, and almost anything edible's been picked over by scavengers and blight. Everything's gone except for scrubby ground cover that I presume might purge this land in a decade or so. I don't know, I'm not a biologist. I can't help but pretend like this desolation is all for some purpose.

I guess it doesn't help that most people are gone. Many of the small towns that speckled the countryside just packed up and left wholesale, after pillaging the local WalMart for supplies. That's community for you, I guess. I hear in other places there are riots and bandits, but I haven't seen much of that here apart from the occasionally hoodlum trying to get his. They pick over the remains of the migrant towns and steer clear of thers, where the burnt-out WalMarts and hobbyshops hide a community gone to ground, to grow small crops in makeshift greenhouses and live off of canned goods until the seeds they've squirrelled away in a dozen basements become useful again.

I am writing this here from one of these remaining collectives, lodged in the cinders of a town called Newton about fifty miles outside Des Moines. It lies along an old highway that used to be I-80 when cars drove on it, but now all it sees are the occasionally travellers from the anarchic ruins of Iowa City, Des Moines, and further east, passing through towns like Ames and Davenport looking for a new home or maybe just plunder.

I too was a wanderer, a couple years ago, and I also thought I just needed a place to hang my hat. After more months than I care to count scrounging for gasoline, eating baked beans, and listening to old Nelson Eddie records behind plywood barricades, I'm not so sure. Lately I've been thinking about heading down the Mississippi river valley. I know it will get worse, near all those boneyards down south. I know this, but it's getting colder, and I can't stand the thought of another sunless winter, especially when each one seems just a little longer.

I'm leaving Iowa, and I don't know when I'll be coming back. Maybe when something green grows here again, although right now that's the hardest thing for me to picture. I guess I just miss the way things were, but my mother always told me not to cry over spilled milk.

-Recovered from the corpse of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico near Alabama.