Sunday, February 22, 2004
Our little Chinese corner of the Midwest,
or, Back in China Again
Today my girlfriend and I drove north on I-29 to Sioux City. It's a drive of about 90 miles from where I live, and along much of the way the Loess Hills of western Iowa are our traveling companions to the east of the highway. I live beneath the Loess Hills in Iowa, and the viaduct I drive over to get to I-80 is, just like that stretch of I-29 north to Sioux City, a part of the "Loess Hills Scenic Highway." So though I'm new to the area, the sight of those silty hills is becoming an important part of my sense of the place's identity.
And that's just as it should be. Really, I thought at first that the Loess Hills were just, well, hills, the same sort of bluffs that are features of many towns that run next to rivers. Honestly, they're quite obviously just big, open-faced, dirt cliffs. Sure, they're distinctive, but they didn't initially strike me as spectacular. But I've learned otherwise. The Loess Hills of Western Iowa are one-of-a-kind in North America, or even in the entire Western hemisphere. Their only geographic equivalents on our planet are to be found in the Shaanxi province of China. The government's handouton the area is much more informative than I could hope to be, so check it out for the official geologist's analysis. It's good to spend time with geologists, because they, like physicists, see places and things we thought we knew differently than we could imagine, like they hold its very secret stories.
The government handout is right in saying that we don't typically think of Iowa as having much topographical variation. So it's no surprise that I didn't think that I lived in the shadow of a geological formation unique to our continent. But how ignorant we are to think of so much of the geography we see, especially in the Midwest, to be without a rich and interesting history. As I'm learning from books like Dakota by Kathleen Norris living in a place like the Great Plains affects you deeply. Most people who drive through here and think it's "boring" have no idea they're driving across the bed of what used to be an ancient inland sea. Not that knowing that makes the drive less flat, but it's good every once in a while to remember that not everything is exactly as it seems.
Angel at Back to Guangzhou (to which several of us have been back already) should only know that she is, in a way, so close to a land feature that has its twin so close to her hometown. You just never know where you'll find the most spectacular gems.
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