It Was Lucky We Missed Smashing the Monarch

Cloudy day–on a county highway south of Lisbon. The weather slowly improved and it didn’t rain, so clouds just added a bit of interest. I didn’t mind AC, but it would have been cool enough for an old school, windows down, drive, too.

It happened on Highway 1, south of Mount Vernon, Saturday, Aug. 27. I was driving at probably close to 60 mph (I know, the speed limit is 55, I wasn’t that far over), when suddenly, to my right, a bright orange butterfly came flitting towards the path of my van.

If it had gone too far, I would have smacked right into it—neither my life nor the lives of my passengers were worth endangering over a butterfly—but I would have felt bad. Luckily, it appeared said Monarch zigged instead of zagged and eluded the Kia of death.

Such was the drama of my Saturday drive. The drive itself was a spontaneous event—the 8-month-old grandson who is staying with us has had an ear infection and may be teething and today was a bit cranky at times. He didn’t sleep well last night, and was acting tired late in the morning, but would not go to sleep. So, Audrey and I tried an old-fashioned family remedy—the drive. You strap the cranky baby in his car seat, put it in a vehicle and head out.

It worked rather well. As I headed north out of Cedar Rapids on the C Avenue Extension, the baby slowly sacked out. And so, we just went for a drive.

It felt very 1960s. When I was young, especially between 1966 and 1972 when we lived in Clinton, Iowa, the weekend “drive” was not a rare event—the family  would pile in the car and head out to see what we could see, no particular destination in mind.

The car, back then, was a chartreuse VW microbus named Clarissa. At least for the early years, it was—although, after a brief interlude owning a Ford station wagon, it wasn’t long after Clarissa’s demise that my parents brought a shiny new 1969 VW microbus.

The “drive” was a bit different, now. Our Kia minivan today has air conditioning, for one thing, so we sojourn with windows closed. A Saturday or Sunday drive in Clarissa was windier—no AC, so windows open—and also much noisier not just because of the wind, but because the small 4-cylinder German engine in the VW squeaked and thumped like an angry sewing machine. We didn’t use the radio much back then, although today we had an oldies station on.

Sutliff Bridge. You can walk on it, but we did not because the baby was asleep, which was kind of the point, anyway.

Besides the fact that I was driving, and not my dad, another difference was bugs. Anytime we went out in the countryside for a drive in the old days, the VW bus front and windshield collected quite a coating of insects. Today, we weren’t responsible for anywhere near the bug carnage. I know it’s anecdotal—there is no careful measurement to check the accuracy of the impression—but an Iowa drive today is almost eerie for how less buggy is seems than a drive a few decades ago.

Our weekend drives, usually Sunday evenings, ended, for the most part, about the time that the family moved to Muscatine. Life became busier and more complex as the Sheller kids became teens and adults, and gas prices in the 1970s put an end to most pleasure cruising.

But today’s drive was a pleasant reminder of that bygone pastime. We meandered across part of northern Linn County—finding to our surprise that the village of Lafayette is actually a thing—there is more “there” there than one sees simply passing by on the Cedar Valley Nature Trail—and eastern Linn County near Mount Vernon is hilly and pretty. We went south of Lisbon and ended up in northern Johnson County at the old Sutliff Bridge. We’ll have to come back there and walk the bridge, sometime when the baby is awake and the place is not quite so overrun with motorcycle bar patrons.

It was kind of fun to drive, for a bit, on the route that I had ridden on RAGBRAI last year. Jesus—did I really bike some of those hills in rain?

Anyway, I don’t think we’ll be regular “drive” enthusiasts. The time of the Sunday drive as a carefree family fun activity is an artifact of a time when gas was under $1 a gallon and global warming not such a hot issue. Pleasant as today’s drive was, I would rather see the countryside from a bicycle seat. But I don’t think the bike is quite as good for soothing an uncomfortable baby.

On the way home, the baby woke up, in a pretty good mood. Grandma was riding in a middle seat beside him, and put a pillow on her head. “Look at my hat,” she said, and then the pillow slid off. The baby thought that was hilarious and chortled. So, my wife did it again, and again, and again.

No, I didn’t really tire of the joke, because it kept being funny for the baby. Such is the entertainment on a weekend drive.

Stopped at light on Highway 100 near home. A few more patches of blue in sky. Pillow has probably just slipped off of her head. Sound of baby laughing.