The eye of Hurricane Fran passed over Cary, NC early on Friday morning, September 6. Our house and yard suffered minor damage (we lost a tree and some large branches), but many of our neighbors had trees fall on their house and cars. With all the broken trees and branches accumulating on the streets, it was a good time to get out of town (we had planned the trip two weeks earlier). We went to Iowa in two waves; Missy and Eric arrived late Tuesday night September 10, Curt (hoarding a couple more vacation days) arrived two nights later to Eric asking, "Did you miss me?" Most of our time in Iowa was spent visiting family and longtime friends of Missy. Missy's grandmother (on her mother's side) Esther lives in Waterloo as does Missy's aunt Julie (Esther's daughter), her husband Rich, uncle "Ole" Richard (Esther's son), and longtime family friends Jeannette and Roy Brasch. A two hour drive away in Des Moines are Missy's brother Don and his family. Julie and Rich put us up (put up with us?) while we were in Waterloo, Don and Wendy hosted us for a weekend in Des Moines, and Grandma Esther (Great Grandma to Eric) gave us the use of "The Cougar" for driving around. We are very thankful for their wonderful hospitality. Some memorable aspects of our vacation are detailed below.

The highlight of our trip, and the primary motivating factor for making it, was seeing and being with Grandma Esther. We hadn't seen her in over three years and we'd only seen her twice in the past six years. Grandma had recently had some health problems but she has moved beyond them. Her strength and endurance, two attributes that had been hallmarks of her personality, have been significantly curtailed; yet her positive attitude and mental acuity remain as strong as ever. Visiting with her was pure joy! During much of our time together, Curt and Eric would play on the floor of her apartment, while Esther regaled Missy with stories about and photos of their family. Esther generously gave Missy a dozen old and full, photo albums. Included in them are pictures of Esther's grandfather (Eric's great great great grandfather). In gratitude, Missy has assumed the responsibility of organizing and documenting the large number of photos she has received. She intends to share the results of her efforts with her family members.

Although he lives in the same building as his mom, Esther, we only spent a little time with uncle Ole. He had work and other responsibilities and he prefers solitude to company.

Julie and Rich were gracious hosts; feeding us vegetarian meals, sharing stories and photo albums, bike riding with us, and providing Eric with some of their son Jason's old toys with which to play. (Jason, now in his twenties, lives in Chicago–we dined with him at Michael Jordan's restaurant when we were there two years ago.) Jason's toys included many cars and trucks (perennial favorites for Eric) and Star Wars figures (a new favorite). An unfortunate aspect of the Star Wars figures was that they reminded Eric of his newest toys back home (Star Wars spaceships–the items that got him started on Star Wars). We decided not to bring these new toys with us because of the risk of breakage. Their absence had Eric intermittently pining, throughout our vacation, to go home. Rich and Julie are ardent cyclists. They had enough bikes to let the four adults ride together and they borrowed a trailer for Rich to pull Eric along with us. We biked on some of the extensive bike trails in Waterloo Rich was instrumental in getting installed–which was good for novice biker Curt. Eric got a chance to burn some energy by riding the neighbor's old tricycle and playing at a nearby park. Outside of those activities, Eric's play was much less energy intensive than it normally is.

Rich and Julie's daughter Heidi made a run home from The University of Iowa and spent time with cousin Missy and Eric. Unfortunately she was back at school before Curt arrived.

Our visit with the Brasches was a lot of fun. Roy and Jeannette are a delightful couple, full of life and vigor. They and their friend Margaret treated us to a delicious vegetarian meal (vegetable soup, rolls, peach pie) and warming conversation. They have a large yard which Eric and Curt took advantage of to fly paper and Styrofoam airplanes. Formerly farmers, their house sits among cornfields and near a hog farm. Flies from the latter descended on The Cougar like a plague. While we were using it, The Cougar was being regularly parked under a tree dripping sap and the flies, hundreds of them, sat on The Cougar feasting on its syrupy coating.

Don, Wendy, and their sons Stroh (6) and Dalton (almost 4) took us to see a couple of the biggest tourist attractions in the Des Moines area (more on those below). Stroh and Dalton had a lot of toys of interest to Eric. The three boys had been together seven weeks earlier during a vacation just south of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Eric, stressed because of all the traveling and visiting he'd been doing, not spending much time in high-energy expending play, eating new foods on an irregular schedule, and missing his new toys left in NC, was slow in re-establishing the playful relationships that were developed in South Carolina. By the end of our visit those relationships were restored.

This was the first time in nearly four years the four of us adults sat together to share thoughts. We talked for hours after dinner Saturday night openly sharing our personal and relationship histories and thoughts on family and parenting. We admire Don and Wendy in many ways. We have much in common with them and see them as soul mates.

In Waterloo we visited the child-oriented, hands-on Bluedorn Science Imaginarium. There were maybe five other visitors the whole time we there. Our favorite parts of this museum were:

• Its two putt-putt greens
• A device demonstrating centrifugal force in which you are the center of the experiment (this made Missy dizzier than usual for the rest of the day)
• A hot air balloon (Eric heated the air in a ten foot balloon to raise it to the ceiling)
• A model plane in a wind tunnel (Eric controlled the flaps on the wings to make the plane turn, dive, and rise).

1700 Ioway Indian Village - these Indians lived in oval huts called "nahaches" (or "tcakiduthan") made of tree bark. Demonstrations were given of drying vegetables and making pottery. There was also a deer hide partially stripped of its fur with the animals bones lying nearby.

1850 Pioneer Farm - consisting of a cabin, garden, fields, smokehouse, barn, and several animals (pigs, bull, and chicken). The interpreter in the cabin talked about meal preparation and let the boys help her prepare beans, the interpreter in the barn showed us some of the old technology used on farms of that era, and another interpreter was busy picking corn in the field.

1900 Farm - a huge improvement from the farm of fifty years earlier. We watched the field being worked by a farmer and team of draft horses, got close up looks at the horses in the large barn, close up smells of the hogs and their pen, and saw old John Deere equipment in the tool shed. The farmhouse on this farm was light years removed from the one room cabin on the 1850 Pioneer Farm. This house was spacious and two stories tall. It looked like a house of today; though it had stoves for heat and lanterns for light. Don, Stroh, and Dalton used the local outhouse. Phew!

1875 Town of Walnut Hill - one moves between this town and the above farms by a short ride in cars pulled by a John Deere tractor. Being in the re-creation of the 1875 town gave one a strong sense of being in the West over a hundred years ago. The town looked like the one we see in period photographs or in western movies and TV shows. We walked the wooden sidewalks and stopped in each of the stores and buildings, many of which had interpreters explaining what would have been done in that building 125 years ago. The buildings in the 1875 town (listed below by their relative positions on either side of the main street):
 

Had it not closed for the day when it did, we probably would have spent another hour or so at Living History Farms.

A forty-five minute drive north of Des Moines took us to Boone, birthplace of Mamie Eisenhower (we didn't bother to turn down that street and see her house). Our goal was to ride the rails of the Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad. On their weekend runs, the Iowa Railroad Historical Society uses an immense steam locomotive to take sightseers on a scenic 24 mile, 1¾ hour ride. The locomotive was purchased from China in 1988 for $400,000. It is the last of its kind (2-8-2 type JS steam engine) manufactured in the world. The engine reminded us of the Chinese locomotive we stood in while visiting the Transport Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland; that one had pieces held together with electrical tape. China was the last country to stop building steam engines, the efficiency of which is far below that of diesel engines.

The air was warm so we rode in open air cars. The train ride took us past the "yard" (containing historic railway cars waiting to be restored), cornfields (surprise!), and over three bridges. The High Bridge is 784 feet long and 156 feet high above Bass Point Creek. We slowed on the bridge and the engineer released steam. In the bright sun this created a beautiful rainbow that reached from the bridge to the valley floor. During our ride we saw dozens of Monarch butterflies making their way from Mexico towards Michigan (a journey which lasts three generations. How do they do that?)

On our drive back from Des Moines to Waterloo, we stopped in Eldora to visit Great grandma Esther's home of 31 years. She had moved out only two months before. Missy hadn't been to that house in about fifteen years. She shared some stories about the house and yard. We peered in the windows and circumvented the house and just as we were getting into The Cougar, neighbors arrived home looking at us with interest (they recognized The Cougar but not the people). We told them who we were and "Red", Esther's longtime neighbor, produced a key and gave us a tour and the history of the house. Esther and her husband Aage had lived there with Ester's dad Ole, the original owner of the house. As he showed us around, Red gave us a couple of souvenirs from the house (a squirrel feeder he had given to Esther years earlier and a sign and nameplate of Ole's related to his occupation as corn seed salesman).

Back in Waterloo, we drove by another house from Missy's past, Grandma Margaret and Grandpa Johnny's house. This one hasn't been lived in by a family member for decades and we didn't ask to tour it.

While in Waterloo, we had hoped to tour the John Deere factory (uncle Rich's employer), but tours are restricted to those 12 and older. The Ertl toy factory tour in nearby Dyersville has no age restriction. (A cornfield in Dyersville was used in the movie, "Field of Dreams". We didn't go to that site.) The Ertl Company makes authentic plastic, die cast and steel replicas of tractors and other farm machinery, planes, cars, and trucks. (Ertl also produces plastic model kits but most of that production recently moved to Mexico.) The forty-five minute tour led us by one assembly line after another and was most interesting for what we saw that wasn't talked about; the boringly repetitive jobs. It seems many of Ertl's products are geared at the collectibles market. The stores downtown sell Ertl toys and do a great deal of business via phone (Curt found out about one of the stores by visiting their website on the Internet.) We bought a toy John Deere tractor with no intention of preserving it as a collectible.

To Curt's surprise, Iowa actually has paved roads! (His feigned surprise was an ineffectual attempt to goad Iowans). The map of Iowa shows the state has a grid of highways, nearly all roads running due north-south or east-west. That is very unlike older and eastern states. Part of that regularity is due to newer and better planning, much of it is enabled by topology. Iowa is flat. There aren't mountains to swerve around. Driving through Iowa one finds oneself on long, straight highways with cornfields on either side. The weather was gorgeous the entire time we were there.

The weekend we were in Des Moines was the weekend of the Iowa/Iowa State football game. The big rivalry. Whole sections of the newspaper were devoted to the game; hyping it, detailing possible strategies, histories, players, coaches, etc., and analyzing the results; another Iowa blowout. Iowa was a 17 point favorite before the game and the win was their fourteenth in a row over their in-state rival. From an outsider's perspective, there didn't seem much reason to get excited about how the game might turn out. Was the pre-game hype meeting an audience desire or creating it?

Ten hours after returning from Iowa, Curt was in his manager's office being invited to take a new role within the organization. Just before leaving, Curt was involved in discussions about how the departments in his area may be re-organized. While he was gone, the decisions were made and announced with one exception, who would be the team leader of the major work effort of the area. His management wanted Curt to assume that responsibility. Curt had anticipated doing (and hoped to do) more technical work as his current responsibilities were concluding (he had recently given up the second and only remaining team leader role he had). His management wanted him in the new team leader role allegedly because of his leadership abilities (perhaps they were trying to preserve the integrity of the technical work and didn't want Curt messing it up). Not feeling too strongly about it either way, Curt accepted the new responsibilities. (His flexibility in decisions like this is much appreciated by his management.)

Just before we left for Iowa, Missy was offered a position of greater responsibility within La Leche League, Missy turned it down. The planning time and energy she spent in preparation to run the bookstore at the La Leche League conference in Greensboro, NC, steered her away from assuming more organizational responsibility.

What stands out as the most memorable aspect of the sightseeing part of our Iowa trip was an unexpected aside to our Ertl factory tour–the condition of the assembly line worker. In the making of Ertl toys, we watched dozens of people repeatedly doing no-brainer tasks which they probably do forty hours a week all year, every year of their "career". One person would lean a 4 inch rubber tire on a rim on a conveyor belt which led to two large rollers that pressed the tire over the rim. She (all but a small handful of the factory workers we saw were females) did this over and over and over again. A set of three people were placing small metal rims on hooks which slowly and endlessly passed in front of them. A man spray painted the parts on hooks that moved past him. Twenty people sat on either side of a conveyor belt turning twenty parts into a finished and boxed earth moving toy. Each of them attaching the same part to the same place in the same way over and over again. There were no distractions for the workers. No shared conversations (only a few people worked close enough to each other to talk, yet even they did not; company policy?), no music, no scenery changes, and few breaks in their monotonous routines as everyone had to work together to make the line work (people aren't free to go to the bathroom or get a drink whenever they want; they need to have coverage).

The union wages for performing these no skill tasks were about $15 an hour. The pay is not bad but the work is demeaning and demoralizing. Contrast it with my flex time job in which I can work my own hours–including working from home–doing mentally challenging and stimulating tasks, frequently interacting with intelligent and interesting people on business and personal topics, and I can "work" while listening to music of my choice on CDs in a clean and quiet environment. Plus, I get paid lots more money, have far better benefits, and get many other perks such as opportunities to work on the French Riviera. I don't think the difference in our employment situations is based primarily on intelligence. We saw intelligence in the eyes and faces of many of the assembly line workers (there are IBMers and other highly paid professionals who seem short on intelligence). I think a lot of their present condition has to do with choices they did and didn't make, consciously or unconsciously.

That night uncle Rich informed us that the Ertl factory in Dyersville will be closing and all Ertl manufacturing will be moved to Mexico within two years. A few hundred will lose their jobs. It so happened, that day's local newspaper had a front page story about all the jobs that were moving out of the United States because of various free trade agreements. The tone of the article was hostile towards government policies. The next day's newspaper reported how IBP (formerly Iowa Beef Products) was caught with dozens of illegal immigrants working in its meat processing and slaughter house factory. For years IBP trawled the Mexican border to find cheap labor to fill disgusting jobs. We wondered, why fight to save jobs like these? Who could argue with a company moving operations when they have to pay relatively high wages for such low skill jobs? (You could be "trained" to do these jobs in less than five minutes. A monkey could do them but the training period might take longer.) Then we thought about a "normal" American lifestyle. We thought about our lifestyle. The foods we eat, clothes we wear, cars and planes we ride, toys we play with, computers and other electronic devices we regularly use, appliances that make our daily life easier, etc.. All of these things were either produced in an assembly line or handled in some assembly line like manner. If we think "good riddance" when jobs like these are "lost" to another country, what are we left with? It seems there may be job problems with any form of mass production; yet without mass produced products, few would have what is considered to be an acceptable standard of living.

What to do? It seems long term, and this is probably at least several decades away as predicted by someone ignorant of economics theory, as we inexorably move into a one world economy, the richness of a country will depend on its natural resources; most importantly its citizens. Artificially high wages (like those in the Ertl factory and probably most American assembly line jobs) will not exist. The jobs themselves may not exist, the need for them eliminated by machines. Indeed, American salaries paid to the highly skilled professional will also drop as other "poorer" countries contribute their own less highly paid professionals to the world market. (Curt works with IBM business partners from India who are outstanding computer scientists and programmers, receiving significantly less pay than their American counterparts.) The keys for individuals will be education, intelligent (sometimes lucky) choices about what skills to develop, and flexibility. To the degree you don't have those things you will be left in the lower economic echelons of the society in which you live. No well-intended welfare state (unless we have a welfare world) can lift you up.

In my opinion, this bodes ill for the United States. We have a high standard of living so we have farther to fall then most. Our education system, already fundamentally flawed in many ways, is further compromised by having to deal with drug, violence, and behavior problems. Our laziness about making choices–recognizing and accepting that responsibility and its consequences–is not peculiar to Americans but we have raised it to an art form. Our country was based on the primacy of rights and freedoms for the individual. Better the individual than the government. So we find power in having rights and we expend energies in keeping, redefining or extending them. But having rights is, of itself, non-productive and ineffective. It is at most an enabler for productivity and personal effectiveness. It is the choices we make, the skills and education we develop, and our flexibility that makes us productive and effective. Claiming a right for a decent living wage may, temporarily, succeed but it is misdirected energy. It is not a "rights" issue but a choice issue. If you choose poorly, and you have the "right" to do so, demanding compensation for your poor choice and inflexibility will be costly. It may be a cost you personally won't have to bear but someone will. Because we are also a society that prizes individuality, we have raised another common human trait to an art form, selfishness. Many of us don't care if we pass along our costs to the next guy (witness the huge budget deficit and national debt and the success politicians have by pandering to our "what's in it for me?" mentality).

As a country, we may change over the next several decades but it's my belief that we'll have a lot more internal pain before we grow healthier. Our emphasis will be slow to shift to one of recognizing and accepting personal choice and responsibility in part because we have to overcome our perception of what it means to be an American. Our education system is an entrenched institution and as such is incapable of swift overhaul (institutions consist of many, largely inflexible people serving large numbers of inflexible people). On the bright side, the United States is very attractive to capable people in other countries; if they emigrate here, this country benefits. We have high expectations of ourselves and those can lead to achievements people in other countries don't dream about.

What to do in the short term? We can help people recognize they have choices and accountability for what they choose. Regarding assembly line work that we find so troubling; it would be a minimal expense for a company to provide some forms of stimulation to people repeatedly doing simple, no-brainer tasks. Their brains aren't being used on the task at hand so give it another outlet. Allow people to wear walkman radios, provide TVs with educational programs of choice, provide headsets and microphones to enable conversations to be held in even the noisiest factories. Employees may choose to accept a pay cut to fund these stimulations; if these or other stimulations make the job more desirable, they may even accept a pay decrease to the point where the company doesn't look elsewhere for cheap labor. I do many no-brainer tasks all day long; normal living bodily functions like breathing, adjusting my internal temperature, digesting food, etc.. I'm not bored by doing those tasks because my mind and attention are off doing things I find interesting. Perhaps assembly line workers do that as well or strive to. I think it would be hard to do that staying completely in one's own head the whole time forty hours a week. It's appalling simple ideas like these haven't been demanded by assembly line workers or offered by their management. It shows a profound lack of respect for self and others but no shortage of ignorance regarding human nature.

© 1999 frantzs@geocities.com