A story about my neck of the woods....

[Heads22]

A description of the most remote place in Iowa, about 50-60 miles NE of here....but it describes my part of the state....NE Iowa isn't like the rest of the state. Mainly just an interesting read.

 

Keeping their distance: Iowa's most remote residents

MIKE KILEN

REGISTER STAFF WRITER

 

May 7, 2006

 

 

Dorchester, Ia. — I can reach the supermarket from my West Des Moines home in less than two minutes if I hit the stoplight, and I can be inside a mall in five.

 

But after 40 minutes of driving northeast from Decorah — twice as long as necessary because the gravel roads don't seem to lead anywhere — I was lost.

 

Trying to locate the most remote spot in Iowa, I followed the meandering roads, close enough to Minnesota to smell the lutefisk, until I ran across a woman in an old general store selling T-shirts.

 

"Make a left, make a right," the shirt read, "No, you can't get there from here."

 

She was sincere. This place is remote.

 

I settled on a beautiful, distant corner of Iowa after some statistical foreplay. I calculated the areas farthest from any incorporated towns, and among those, found the place farthest from a city of 1,000 people or more.

 

It turned out to be a four-township segment of northern Winneshiek and Allamakee counties where most people are 10 miles or more from town.

 

I wanted to learn how the citizens manage to live so far away from the wide array of commerce that spins our world.

 

In one day, I discovered these people: A couple running a genuine country store, another couple living without electricity and modern plumbing, a Buddhist monk, a city man committed to re-creating a trout stream on his land and a student who drives 20 miles every day to school — and doesn't complain.

 

This isn't exactly lifeless western Nebraska. This is Iowa, settled in a pattern of small towns built close enough to permit a quick trip to the market by horse.

 

A gallon of milk, a six-pack or a DVD rental can be procured, residents say, as fast as a suburban Urbandale commuter can trek to downtown Des Moines.

 

Nonetheless, I found a place where there's more to peace and quiet than standing in the middle of 100 acres of corn.

 

What I stumbled onto was a mix of people comfortable with an undeveloped landscape, the silence along streams and bluffs — and even sporadic boredom.

 

About a dozen miles northeast in Decorah, an old building sits on top of a hill, just yards from a crooked, four-way gravel road intersection. Limestone bluffs that managed to avoid the last glaciers thousands of years ago provide a backdrop.

 

The old clapboard building off Sattre Ridge Road is simply called the Sattre Store. Handwritten signs are plastered on its exterior: "Cake mix 50 cents"; "Dozen eggs 50 cents"; "Phone cards"; "Grizzly chew $2.25"; "Night crawlers"; "Sloppy Joes $1.50."

 

Inside, Raffaela Rude stands at the cash register, as she has for 30 years. She waits on an elderly man who doesn't speak. He writes his conversation down on a notepad. He has kind eyes. He came in to trade flea market items, or antiques if you must, for an ashtray.

 

This goes on for at least 10 minutes until, exhausted, Raffaela gives the ashtray to him for a handful of items in trade and a promise to bring her something good the next time he shows up.

 

This is a country general store in the truest sense. Work gloves and vanilla, raisins and Christmas tree bulbs are packed into every crevice of the roughly 20-by-20-foot space.

 

Raffaela's husband, Duwayne, shuffles through without speaking — but not because he uses a notepad.

 

"He doesn't like to talk much," said Raffaela, who is the opposite.

 

Others along this country road were amazed when I later told them I got out of there in an hour.

 

Here's Raffaela's short version of being: She and hubby were driving to the river to fish one day 30 years ago, "stopped for ice cream and have been here ever since."

 

A lifetime of dairy farming in Winneshiek County was winding down a bit, and this became their dream store.

 

The store was built in 1892. It has run nearly continuously, with a short list of owners — the longest lasting 40 years.

 

Country people, Raffaela assumed, needed a place to get a few items. Waukon and Decorah are a good 20-minute drive or more away. Most country stores died out, she said, when the adjacent rural post offices closed, as did the Sattre post.

 

The store was to survive even more change.

 

The farm economy sank in the 1980s and '90s, and farm wives didn't stay at home anymore. They were working in Decorah or other towns. They didn't need a cup of sugar to finish a recipe. They needed a sandwich to take home.

 

"They were not at home baking," Raffaela said. "They wanted the finished product."

 

Even that wasn't enough to stay afloat, so 10 years ago the Rudes added antiques to the mix, cleaning out the family attic for starters.

 

"You got to sell something," Raffaela said.

 

She is 58, Duwayne 59. They have one daughter, who moved to Texas and has three children. Working alone, with no employees, leaves Raffaela at the store sunup to past sundown while her husband works maintenance for the city of Decorah.

 

Does she get lonely?

 

"I see people every day. Nobody is isolated anymore," she said, before going off on a cultural commentary.

 

"Farm wives eat as much Pizza Hut as anyone else," she said. "They are constantly on the run. Everybody is working. Everybody wants it all, don't they?"

 

Here's what I learned after talking to people who live in sparsely populated northeast Iowa: Driving long distances is no big deal and self-reliance is a way of life.

 

Rural Iowa isn't nourished by tiny towns anymore. Small regional centers supply the services, entertainment and goods.

 

"It's 16 miles to Waukon and 12 to Spring Grove, Minn.," said Lennie Burke, who has a restaurant called Wings in the unincorporated village of Dorchester. "Hell, it's farther than that around Des Moines."

 

Allamakee County is by no means the least populated in Iowa. Its population of 14,675 ranks 56th in population of the 99 counties of Iowa. The density, 22.9 people per square mile, ranks 67th.

 

Winneshiek is 30th in population, which has remained steady for the last 70 years. Many other rural counties have lost population while Allamakee and Winneshiek are on slight upticks from 1990.

 

There are fewer towns in this area and it's harder to get to them.

 

In much of rural Iowa, the roads are laid out in squares. Here, the roads curve around bluffs. The nearly 50,000 acres of state-owned land is preserved for its beauty.

 

In some ways, it's similar to other parts of rural Iowa. People are leaving. Towns are losing schools, businesses and services.

 

Burke, 53, attended a one-room school. Now there's no school in Dorchester, or anywhere nearby. Students drive to beat the bell.

 

Donna Beneke lives on a farm and has to drive 20 miles to Waukon High School, where she will graduate in a few weeks. She already drove a Grand Prix to its death and replaced it with a Taurus.

 

She claims not to mind the drive or the remoteness that many teens would hate. She says she will miss it when she attends nursing school in La Crosse, Wis.

 

"It's just so peaceful," she said. "I love all the animals and the nice clean air."

 

But the vast area with few town police departments also means that Allamakee County Sheriff Tim Heiderscheit can be 50 miles from a call.

 

No problem. After two bank robberies plagued the town of New Albin along the far northeastern fringe of the county, residents supplied law enforcement detailed information to make a bust.

 

They’ve also uncovered methamphetamine labs. They keep their eyes peeled.

 

“Rural people look after each other,” Heiderscheit said.

 

Around a few more curves on the gravel north of Dorchester, Michael Stephenson walks out of his wood shop. Long gray hair nearly touches his overall straps.

 

Come with me, he says, crossing the gravel to a little house where his wife, Jill, is weaving baskets.

 

The wood-floored home is more like a cabin, with a small loft bedroom a few steps up. It took a few minutes to realize that the Stephensons don’t have electricity. Or plumbing.

 

They heat and cook on an huge old cookstove, they read beside kerosene lanterns, do their business in an outhouse.

 

Every day, they carry 6 gallons of water from a pump up the road, dumping some of the gray water on plants.

 

They grow a lot of their food and can it. They go to town for some food and preserve it in two large coolers, filled in the winter with ice.

 

“In fact,” said Stephenson, a very young-looking 78, “We are doing what most of the world does.”

 

Tired of toiling by the clock in a conservation organization in Illinois, and with their children grown and gone, they fled Jo Daviess County in Illinois 14 years ago. The once-bucolic area was being fast overrun by escapees from the Chicago area.

 

He and his wife bought 14 acres off Waterloo Creek Road for $15,000 and took over an interesting, but tiny, home.

 

In 1889, a family with 14 children had moved it, piece by piece, to the country. The last son lived there all his life, literally wearing out the wood on the floor. It is truly a wonder that 16 people could fit into it.

 

“People say we live the simple life,” he said. “No, we live the direct life.”

 

The Stephensons watch the comings and goings of nature’s bugs and beasts. They toil over a vegetable crop. They take sponge baths in the winter, scoffing at the urban habit of two showers a day. They use a camping shower outdoors in the summer.

 

They claim their first winter here hit 52 degrees below zero. They gained survival skills.

 

Last winter it only took $300 for wood to heat their house. Michael built an extension to the house for a pantry, a little basket shop and a woodworking shop to make the goods he sells.

 

They say they are social and entertain friends, young and old, that they are not reclusive.

 

Malcontents, yes, who know when they are lecturing.

 

“Young people say they want less clutter in their lives, but they want all the goodies,” Jill Stephenson said. “If you have to install a sound system before putting in a garden, you’re not going to make it.”

 

An unmistakable beauty exists in this part of Iowa. Fishermen angle for trout in the streams. Hunters and campers join a steadily growing group of tourists.

 

A few people are retiring here — or plan to.

 

Michael Osterholm, a world-renowned expert on bird flu and a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, grew up in nearby Waukon. He often comes back looking for a place to buy.

 

In 2004, he bought property that included the well-known trout streams of Waterloo and Duck Creeks, but also a damaged creek that had been straightened into a ditch to accommodate farming.

 

He looked at 1940s photos and, with the help of several conservation agencies, began to re-meander the creek. Some 180 skid loads of dirt were removed down to the stream’s bedrock. He reshaped the channel and planted a native prairie.

 

Just months before it had been a cornfield. Today, the stream is beginning to run clear again. The avid fisherman hopes to stock native brook trout by next spring.

 

“It means a lot. I travel so much — I’m around the world,” he said. “But for me it’s the one place I can go to get away.”

 

South out of Dorchester, a new building with a sloping roofline sits just off the lane. It is a temple. A sign says Ryumonji Zen Monastery.

 

Shoken Winecoff sees me in. Winecoff, too, looks younger than his 66 years. His head is shaved, and he is wearing a denim samue, work clothes that might look like a robe to anyone else.

 

Winecoff moved from Minneapolis to Decorah 10 years ago. Four years ago, after 40 acres of rolling beauty were donated, he moved to the country to start a monastery.

 

A Buddha Hall is complete, and the temple, which will be the second of four buildings, should be finished within a year.

 

The ordained Buddhist monk lives in a restored farmhouse near the monastery, where he holds weekend retreats. The remote location is perfect.

 

“I was looking for a rustic setting for solitude and quiet,” he said. “Temples are built in remote areas, even in Japan. There aren’t many (remote areas) there, so they put temples on cliffs where no one else would build.

 

“Remoteness is hard to find,” he continued. “But the physical setting informs what you want to get. People live their other lives when they come here. In a sense, they take a different breath.”

 

Winecoff, who claims his full-time Zen center to be the first in Iowa, says that doesn’t mean you have to be a hermit to find peace.

 

“Deep in the mountain isn’t deep in the mountain. You have to be in the center of the rolling ball wherever you are,” he said. “That’s the whole point — being there, wherever you are.”

 

I’m not sure I totally understand, but after a day in far northeast Iowa, I’m starting to. I found little to criticize about living in the middle of nowhere. I heard the wind blow over the rolling hills and down across the creek beds.

 

“Mostly,” Winecoff said, “you hear your mind thinking.”

 

Not to mention, a Buddhist monk can get to Wal-Mart in 25 minutes should the need arise.

[Texsox]

That sounds like heaven to me. A good friend of mine lived in Decorah for a few years while working for Souled Out Ministries. He loved the area.

[NorthSideSox72]

A description of the most remote place in Iowa, about 50-60 miles NE of here....but it describes my part of the state....NE Iowa isn't like the rest of the state. Mainly just an interesting read.

Heads- could I get a link for this, if you have it? I'd like to send this to some people who I'll be doing RAGBRAI with in 2007.

[Heads22]

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs...=73243947518069