Leaving Iowa City on Wednesday, we took an hour's drive due west to
Grinnell to have breakfast with Bruce Whiteman and Kelly Maynard. When
we arrived, Bruce was in full cooking mode, tending a pan of herby
thirty-minute scrambled eggs that, when served, blew our collective
minds.
(Farm fresh eggs have become a competing sub-pursuit of this
trip. Each new freely-laid egg that we consume is accompanied by tales
of the One-That-Has-No-White, the egg that is little more than a
tumescent orange-yellow yolk. To experience this much-remarked Ideal Egg
has lodged in my mind as one of life's lofty goals.) After sopping
up the last of our breakfast we looked at books for an hour before
heading back on the road, winding our way north east through the Iowa
countryside to Decorah. I have never been to Iowa before this week and
prior to arriving I had a hard time conjuring an image of what we would
find. At every turn the towns, the landscape, the food, and the people
have primed our visit with delighted surprise. In conversations with
other visitors the most frequently mentioned feature of the Iowa
countryside is "CORN!" but in mid April the fields are just being
planted, meaning there are no corn rows to obscure the view. Driving
through Iowa at this time of year is to be enveloped in a variegated
pastiche of brown, chamois, and a thousand different greens, punctuated
with red barns and blue or silver silos, light-gray grain elevators,
green and yellow tractors, brown black and white livestock, gamboling
deer and red wing blackbirds, all arrayed against a plan of man-made
vertices, softened by the gently rolling fields. Iowa is a beautiful
place, with or without the eggs.
Annie and I on the road in Iowa.
Chamois, green, brown.
The goal of the day was to visit
David Esslemont
and his family in Decorah. David is an artist, letterpress
printer, book binder, and contract farmer who has been making a series
of calligraphic paintings, or
calligrams,
in recent years. I first met David in San Francisco in October 1990
when, at Joyce Wilson's behest, I picked him up from the airport. David
was visiting from Wales and was scheduled to address the Colophon Club
as part of an extended stateside tour. I was barely nineteen years old
at the time and I took an instant shine to David—he was passionate and
fun and he referred to his Heidelberg cylinder press as the "Rolls-Royce
of presses," rolling his "R"s a little too long for emphasis. At the
time he was in charge of the historic press, Gwasg Greynog, and his
tales of the Welsh countryside filled me with romantic visions. After a
few days as his informal San Francisco tour guide I did not see him
again until 2007 when, at the
CODEX Book Fair,
I heard the same rolling "R" when he asked over my shoulder "Is that
young Russell?" Since I had last seen him, David had left Gwasg Gregynog
and moved to Decorah. As we corresponded after our reunion, the stories
and pictures of David's new home conjured similar bucolic images as the
stories he told me of Wales nearly twenty years earlier. Few stories
attracted me as much as those of the wood-burning pizza oven he and his
son Tom had built from the mud of his fields.
Immediately
upon arrival in Decorah we set to "work." Through a lazy afternoon we
stoked the pizza oven, played a little soccer, took a walk around the
property, looked at books, drank wine, and eventually sat down to eat
trout pate on home made bread,
David's award-winning chili, beautiful lettuce greens, and fresh pizzas.
The next morning we gathered some eggs from the hen house, ate breakfast, and hit the road for Stockholm, Wisconsin.
