Just for The Record

I've stayed at one of Lileks' Iowa motels.

Yeah, I know you care.

Shush.

Anyway, it'sThe New Frontier in Ames, to be specific.

I don't know if it's still there, but it's where the parentals used to stay whenever Christi and I moved back to school. Ames is just far enough away from Omaha that even if you manage to get out of town and on the road first thing, by the time you reached the dorms and unloaded all of your kid's assorted crap, it would have been pushing the limits of your endurance to get back home. It was much easier to stay at the New Frontier because it was right on the way out of town---or at least it was on Mom's way out of town: everyone else took Highway 30 going the opposite direction to hook up with I-35 to Des Moines, which would lead you to I-80, which went to Omaha. Mom....well, she's never enjoyed driving on freeway through cities all that much, so whenever she could find a back way, she'd take it. And her back way into Ames was via Hwy. 169 to Boone, where she'd hook up with Hwy. 30.

This is also the part of Ames that was, at that time, still quite rural. The New Frontier was right next door to the drive-in, which was next door, to, well....not much that I remember. There was a good steak house, The Broiler, on the other side of the motel, which pretty much was one of three fine dining experiences in Ames. It was a quiet little place, only about twenty rooms, always clean and tidy. There was a chain-link fenced pool in the middle of the parking lot that no one ever swam in, and a neon sign that I only remember flashing "no vacancy" once all the times we stayed there. It wasn't fancy, but, as the Cake Eater Mother reminded us more than once, it had beds and it was clean. That's all that really mattered.

Reaching the motel was always a signifier that we weren't in Omaha anymore, too. Now that may sound more than obvious, but while Ames was a smallish city, it really wasn't anything like where we grew up, and this was as good a place to remember that fact as any other. There were cornfields behind the motel, and when the wind picked up, the stalks rustled loudly enough to disturb your sleep if you'd left the window open. The air was different, too. It was always August when we stayed there, hot and sunny, and unbearably humid at times, but the air was sweet with the fragrance of the country. And, no, I don't mean the fragrance of cow shit. It's something much, much different. Something sweeter, fresher than anything you could ever smell in the city where cars and pollution and people subtly thicken the air. It was the fragrance of productive, Iowa black dirt mingled with the hot, tarry, asphalt of the parking lot, with something green and sunny mixed in.

All these years later, I can see that it was a good transitional place. At the time, however, I will admit I could never see the place in the rearview mirror fast enough. I was always anxious to get back to school---and I drove my mother to distraction trying to get back there. Being home wasn't a happy place for me in the summers---all I ever did was work, read, and watch MTV---so whenever it was time to go back to Ames, where my friends and my social life lived, well, that was a good thing in my book. It seems the place was aptly titled, because that's where another new frontier started, even if I was as itchy as hell to get out of the place.

It looks like the place still exists. It undoubtedly still hosts families with itchy college students, just raring to get going on their lives and who wonder why they heck they're staying out in the middle of nowhere.

Posted by Kathy at March 7, 2006 04:06 PM | TrackBack