52
PARTISAN REVIEW
road when the wind blew. We drove West North West and passed wide
around Chicago the next evening.
The rolling country of Wisconsin builds up toward the west in a cool
table land that at times gives you a sense of northern altitude. Then this
falls away abruptly to the Mississippi. The river as we crossed it looked
clear and wild; it was full of sandbars, perhaps at low water here because
of the two neat hydroelectric dams the Army has built upriver.
All across Iowa the concrete Lincoln Highway had, instead of level
shoulders, a low up-curving curb on either side. Whatever the intention,
it served to make the road seem narrower and groove-like. Driving in this
groove toward late afternoon and about a hundred miles west of the river
we became aware that the land had begun to rise and fall in mile-long
regular swells; over these for hours the road cut straight west into the
glare, into the sunset, into an afterglow of remarkable clarity and, for us
pursuing, of remarkable duration. Against the polish of that light the
finest detail of windmills, roofs and foliage, even hilltop blades of corn or
grass, seemed graven in pure substance of darkness. On the road behind us
the painted center line shone brightly under a rising full moon.
It was a frosty night. At Shady O!lks Cabins we parked the car's
radiator close to our cabin wall and left the stove on low in the cabin all
night.
On
the way to town for breakfast we stopped at a frame school–
house where men were registering, but the line ahead of me was too long.
At mid-morning, in Nevada, Iowa, cruising slowly down the main street on
whose curbs little flags fluttered from a hundred flagpoles, we found a
County Court House where there wasn't much activity. A young man pain·
fully took down my data and printed it slowly on a card. His colleagues
on the registration board were three for-the-moment-idle 'ladies, one of
whom, continually touching up her hair, beamed, passed pleasantries and
seemed about to cluck. The headmistress was one Mrs. H., a keen li.ttle
grey-haired number who decided doubtful points. The county clerk, I
suppose. Musing she said she suspected it was a mighty important day.
I suspected this myself and took a good look at the scene when I came
out: a yellow brick court house with a terraced yard toward whose corners
pointed respectively a captured German field piece from 1918 and a Civil
War cannon. Dead, black, decorative iron. It was a beautiful day.
It begins, the West does, in Nebraska. We crossed the Missouri north
of Omaha and were soon driving parallel with the scrubby willow growth
along the North Platte, the bald prairie cut off by low elevations to the
north which were obviously perfect for the first appearance of Cheyennes.
Less readily recognizable were several surprisingly new, clean, healthy
looking towns, Columbus, Central City and Grand Island. At Grand Island
we had dinner in the hotel that was Democratic Headquarters while a high
school band {girls in white cowboy boots) thumped and tootled in the
starry evening outside Republican Headquarters. The hi11; front page story
