November 19-21 -- Midwestern Hospitality (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois)

The drive from Denver to Chicago took two days and blended in my mind more than I'd like to admit.  Its high points were two extraordinary gestures in Midwestern hospitality, and a few odd museums by the roadside.

I got it in mind I wanted to see where Warren Buffett lived and so I took the route through Nebraska and across.  Most of Nebraska's population density is loaded over toward the east side of the state, so I drove as far as Kearney, about halfway across, and stopped for the night.  


It was the first time I stayed in a Microtel.  Warren Buffett would have been proud, in that it is a budget chain. And if I were Warren Buffett, I would invest in the place.  It's great -- everything you need -- laundry, one bed, a duvet, a huge flatscreen TV, wireless internet -- and nothing you don't.  I got dinner from a restaurant down the street called Whiskey Grill, where you walk in and think there is sawdust on the floor only to realize it is peanut shells.  There were correspondingly vast buckets of unshelled peanuts on the counter, and they were delicious.


Just before I got as far as Microtel in Kearney, after dark, was site of midwestern hospitality, no. 1.  I was fully into Pony Express Country, on the interstate around 8pm when I saw a sign for the Robert Henri Museum.  I think of him as being a Philadelphia artist but figured this must be his birthplace.  (I would later learn that he was born in Cincinnati but his family moved to Nebraska and founded the town of Cozad.)  I really love his paintings so I stopped.  As I got out and took one picture of the house, my camera battery died.  

So I went over to the grocery store across the street 

and surreptitiously plugged in my camera battery and took a lap of the store while it charged.  (Midwestern hospitality 1.a: nobody steals it or thinks I am a terrorist.)

At the checkout, the guy bagging groceries picked up a four cheese pizza belonging to the person in front of me and said, in very good humor, "quattro formaggi!  that's four cheese."  When it was my turn, I asked the clerk if she knew anything about the Robert Henri Museum.  She said the quattro-formaggi guy might know, so we should wait till he got back inside.  She added that the person who would really know was Jan Patterson.  So, I waited for the guy to come back inside and we asked him.  His immediate response, "Oh, Jan Patterson would know."  And before I could do anything, he started walking over to that counter where they keep tobacco and lottery tickets and pulled out the phone book and started calling Jan Patterson.  

She didn't pick up the phone, so he said to me, "Do you want her cell phone?  If you are going to be here tomorrow, maybe she can meet with you."  This is when I learned that Jan Patterson is the director of the Robert Henri Museum.

I am not there the next day so I decline and thank him profusely.  I have also been staring at scratch-off lottery tickets the whole time he has been calling and, for the first time in my adult life, buy one.  It is a "Nebraska Natural History" commemoration ticket.  I do not win.

As Robert Henri wrote, and I found excerpted earlier in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, "Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing."

I can't remember the name of the guy at the grocery store -- I think either Bill or Mark -- but my thanks to him.  And Jan Patterson, in absentia.  Here is the feel of the Henri building, elegant and sparely proportioned:

The next day, midday, I reach Lincoln, yet another lesser known state capitol of my trip, and a surprisingly cool town.  There was a great food co-op, at which I saw two very old farmers buying hormone-free milk.  

Organic food has such a new, hip, sometimes sanctimonious image.  I forget about people shopping at the co-op to buy probably exactly the same thing they could get at the regular store sixty years ago.  Bad picture, from the parking lot, but they are with the milk and the truck.

Down the road from the co-op I happened upon a cool letterpress studio, Porridge Papers (porridgepapers.com)

Here is the proprietor, Christopher James:

They make one-off letterpress designs to hang on your wall and sell a bunch of cards made by Sabrina's company, www.hellolucky.com, the same Sabrina who introduced me to my publisher.

This midwestern territory is the birthplace of presidents.  I passed, in alernation, an exit for the Koolaid Museum, the birthplace of Herbert Hoover, and the hometown of Ronald Reagan.  The Stalking Warren Buffett mission had met with limited success in Omaha.  I did find his neighborhood, but I am pretty sure this is a picture of his neighbor's house.

Something about the vibe of the neighborhood itself makes you stop wanting to stop in front of his house and just to let people get on with their lives.  I can imagine that is why he hasn't moved.

Later that afternoon, remarkable midwestern hospitality, no. 2:


I arrived in Des Moines to see the Art Center at 4:10 thinking I could take a quick lap before it closed at 5.  

It closes at 4.  

I had never been before and knew it to be a national museum.  I figured people were still there and it wasn't locked down yet and so I asked at the staff desk -- attached to a working art school, interestingly -- if someone could possibly take me around, literally just to lay eyes on the gallery, five minutes.

The man at the desk was extremely nice.  The first person to come talk to me gave me a politely dismissive attitude I think she thought was less transparent than it was.  "Did you know that we have an outdoor sculpture garden?"  I was not in the slightest dressed as a museum worker, more like an amateurish version of a Vermonter.  I explained as nicely as I could the truth, that I was going to be writing about my experience any which way and it would be a whole lot better for me to write about the space than about the fact that it closes at 4.


A new woman emerged, Jill, the head of education, who offered to take me around, and off we went through this door and into the galleries:

Of course having someone agree to a tour made me immediately feel a bit guilty or apologetic or obsessively appreciative.  Jill took this all in good humor.  I was reminded of what Bruce, head of painting at the Slade, once said, that the most important thing to figure out as an artist is your politics.  Jill had my same politics, hospitable with a sense of humor.  She was a populist.  It wasn't that big of a deal for her to take ten minutes, which turned into at least twenty or thirty, to take me around.


It was well worth seeing.  Des Moines is a nearly perfectly formed original building, designed by Eliel Saarinen.  The additions by I.M. Pei and Richard Meier are interesting, the first almost brutalist in style.  Having just come from Denver, I was in a frame of mind to see how well the work had been curated -- arranged so you could see it and experience it, things talked to each other but not in an overt way.  The collection is outstanding.  It has the feeling of a teaching museum where there is one of everything so you can see them didactically, except that the one of everything is also a masterpiece, not just an example.  The museum is like a survey to scale with a person, an elaborate tasting menu more than an all-you-can-eat buffet.


We went through the building, around through the storage hallway, up the other side into a Meier and Pei additions, the former of which had a few alcoves that would have been really hard to arrange work in.


As I was leaving, I said something about having a sense of public justice that looks just like self interest.  Jill laughed the same good natured, genuine laugh, at me as well as with me.  On the way out, Vince of the front desk asked me to sign the postcard I had shown them offhandedly from a recent book event.  I gave her and Vince copies of the book.


I did go see the outdoor sculpture garden, which was beautiful in itself 

and in the lens it cast over Des Moines.

This is a work by Ume Plensa, called Made, 2007:

Back into driving, I stopped in one of these mesmerizingly large shopping malls, a marker of bad winter weather.  There was a food court, a carousel, a rink, a pool, a children's museum, shops, and seemingly the entire town. . . 

My stop that night was Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan's boyhood home.  It has a fantastic small town feeling, and you could imagine "Dutch" and his brother playing football next to this house, now a museum:

From there, it was a short walk into town.  I was staying further out and drove in that morning for the best proper cup of coffee in town, at the bookstore:

I thought this was a really nice touch, and sign of being a community fixture, that they had secret Santa for underprivileged children in the area.

Larry, the owner, is half of an artistic and inventive couple.  He knew everyone in the shop, and their families, and helped me pick out a couple of books as a gift.  We talked for a while and I had that small town feeling that the guys sitting at the adjacent bar were soaking up every word, just in case.

Larry also reported to me, in good humor, that the main book distributor listed my bio as having an MFA from "the Shade."  Again, I remember art school where people took turns checking out the school sign and repainting it what they wanted.  This wasn't so different from the week I attended the Slade School of Swimming.  I dilly-dallied for a while drinking coffee and going across the street to what I am pretty sure is the nicest dollar store on earth.  Then I hit the road 

for the homestretch to see Pete, and to visit Chicago for the first time outside of Hyde Park.

Local color in Ronald Reagan's hometown: