Journey Home

Big Grove Township was established before Iowa Statehood. The first sawmill was built here in 1839 by Anthony Sells on Mill Creek. Put the big groves of trees together with the sawmill and you have us. The oak, walnut, hickory, ash, elm and cottonwood that once thrived among numerous pure springs were gone when we bought our lot here. What dominates is the culture we and others brought with us to an area where all trees indigenous to the Northwest once existed in abundance yet no longer do. There is something essentially American in that. We moved to Big Grove Township in August 1993.

There is a subdivision named Mill Creek today, suggesting this history. Throughout the area, people refer to early settlers and builders of homes instead of the people who now own those homes and live in them. The names Cerny, Beuter, Andrews and Brown persist, as does the more recent name of Don Kasparek upon whose former farm our home is situated.

On the vacant lot we purchased, there were scrub grasses and a lone mulberry tree. The tree appeared to have been planted by a bird’s droppings while it perched on a surveyor’s re-bar marker. The ground had a high clay content which suggested Kasparek had removed the topsoil before subdividing the plats. When he died in 2003, I recognized him in our association newsletter. We speak of him from time to time in the neighborhood, although not always in a positive way.

I looked at an old picture of a building on Main Street in Solon, the nearest city. In sepia tones, seven teams of horses and wagons are lined up in front of the building on the dirt street. We can make out the lettering on the shop windows: Cerny Bros Grocery, Cerny Bros Hardware, and Cerny Bros Feed. While the roads have been paved for many years, much of downtown and the surrounding area resonates with the area’s origins in history before automobiles.

We built our home during the record-breaking floods of 1993. Governor Terry Branstad described the extreme weather event as “the worst natural disaster in our state’s history.” At one point that summer, it rained 50 out of 55 days. The Des Moines Register published a commemorative book titled Iowa’s Lost Summer: The Flood of 1993. Extreme weather delayed construction of our home that summer, causing us to stay with relatives and in motels for about a month after we moved from our house in Indiana. We finally moved in, the same day technicians were hooking up electricity and cable television. I was used to severe flooding from growing up in Davenport where the 1965 Mississippi River flood broke records. I was not used to flooding, 1993-style.

I couldn’t believe who I was expressed itself in any of local history. My culture was what I brought with me, rooted in coal mining, factory workers, farming, home making, and the rural cultures of Virginia, Minnesota and Illinois. Our history as a family goes back on both Jacque and my families to the Revolutionary War. My line in Virginia goes a hundred years prior to the revolution. This seemed to have little relevance to local culture in Iowa.

That my ancestor Thomas Jefferson Addington is a common ancestor to the Salyer girls of the Salyer-Lee Chapter 1417 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy stands in contrast to the story of Maciej Nadolski working in coal mines in Allegheny, Pennsylvania after the Civil War and then buying land from the railroad in Minnesota. What of my father’s birth in Glamorgan, Virginia? What of the suppression of Polish culture by the Russians after 1865 that led to a massive migration of Poles to North America? If I weren’t here, we wouldn’t speak much of these things in Big Grove Township. Perhaps with time we will.

Dear Dennis,

The pioneer spirit! So much of popular culture lauds these people. Their hard work, and inquisitiveness have been amalgamated into a hagiographic portrait: the very founders of modern society. I take exception to this, rather, the importance and interest of the pioneers is over-emphasized. They struck new settlements in the wilderness, stayed 3-5 years, then sold out to move to Kentucky, then Indiana, then Iowa, then beyond. Restless, not enduring, their influence has been too much. I’d rather look at those who followed in their footsteps. Those who took the broken wilderness and made something of it, in many places the wilderness is, figuratively, still broken, transients residing there, waiting development. (Letter to Dennis Brunning, April 19, 1986).

If the 1980s was a time of our getting started, the 1990s were a time of work and supporting our family. We saved for our child’s college, and for our retirement. During the flood, we established ourselves. The time here was one of making a career and making time for family. We bought the home we could afford, and proceeded to fill it with boxes of stuff, many of which we do not now have a clue about what is inside. We are working on that as I write.

We took vacations, supported our child in high school activities, and took them to college. I worked for the income but took two long hiatus periods because of a nagging dissatisfaction. I had a retirement party and a cake in July 2009. We had been able to establish a financial foundation that, while not luxurious, was okay. All three of us were trying to make our way in a world that did not appear to care whether we succeeded or failed. I believed we were succeeding.

Iowa was one of the last areas settled by horse and wagons. If the United States is provincial when compared to the cultural centers of Europe, what then of us, twice removed from Europe? New York and Washington seem as removed as Paris and Bonn. So, culture in Iowa, even as we sit in Big Grove Township is not an indigenous thing. It is derivative, just as the language I write in is English. What I do, and experience from that point of view is indeed, as so many have said, provincial. But what about this? I cannot say because my life is based on study of western civilization. My view is it is no less pure, and beautiful and useful than the rigid cultures of Europe or the East Coast of the United States.

When I wrote journals, they were not the kind written by Samuel Pepys, or Henry Adams. They do follow journal forms as they came down. To say something new, and private: a creation in its own right. That’s what my writing was about. If it accomplishes nothing more than the calming of a Sunday afternoon, then it will have been of some use.

Creativity in Iowa often takes something of outside origin and incorporates it into a new creation, that is fed from the soil yet showing the genetic traces of the ancestor. This journal might be recognized as something it is not by an easterner or a European. Though nature has presented what it will, we must and will nurture nature’s presentation to our own new, creative intentions. I did not recognize this as we moved to Big Grove Township in 1993, yet that’s how things evolved.

By Aug. 6, I had begun journaling again:

I stopped keeping a journal some time ago. But now, in the basement of our unfinished house I take pen to paper and begin it anew. Here, in Johnson County, I hope for good things to take place.

I notice now… the ringing in my ears, the sounds of birds, and a car now and then driving in front of the house. It is a quiet place. There is much to do to make it a productive place. (Personal Journal, Big Grove Township, Aug. 6, 1993).

In late Spring 2025, while I’m digging in a garden plot or walking on the trail, my mind is consumed by how to pull everything in my autobiography together and bring the narrative to a close. Up to the time we moved back to Iowa, a chronological narrative seemed appropriate. Beginning here, in this place that was a vacant lot when we arrived, life got complex to an extent a time-based narrative doesn’t really capture those 32 years. There was no single narrative. And so it shall be in these closing chapters of this book.

~ An excerpt from an autobiography in progress.