Windshield Wonders

With notable exceptions like the Ozark hills and the picture-perfect main streets of places like Cottonwood Falls, Kan., and Pella, Iowa, the center swath of the United States is not visually riveting — unless you find soybean fields mesmerizing.

Yet I averaged something like three hours a day alone in the car without going stir-crazy. For that I can in part thank local radio, like KILI, a station run by the Oglala Lakota nation out of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Members of the tribal council spoke about an effort to bring in solar energy to the reservation, whether cellphone companies should bill them for local taxes and how frustrating it can be to work with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. I also got a crash course on country music from the Ozarks’ 99.5 FM (“the Rooster”), and laughed (and perked up) when an NPR affiliate in Iowa warned that corn stalks were now high enough to impede views of oncoming traffic at intersections. You don’t hear that sort of thing on WNYC.

At other times, signs offered moments of insight into the places I was whizzing by. Often that was when a small town had incongruously proclaimed itself the world capital of something. Le Mars, Iowa, for example is the “Ice Cream Capital of the World.” That’s because it is home to the Blue Bunny brand; drive through town and you’ll see colorful fiberglass ice cream sculptures just like the fiberglass cows that have decorated more urban landscapes. Then there was Stuttgart, Ark., self-declared “Rice and Duck Capital of the World,” perhaps the only world capital to provide both a main course and a side.

More than once these signs lured me from my car. In Yates Center, Kan., I pulled over, took a picture of the sign proclaiming it the “Hay Capital of the World” and posted it to Instagram, adding a caption: “Also home to the world’s most challenging needle-finding contest.” But within a few days, as I drove past field after field studded with bales that stretched to the horizon, it became clear that hay deserved more respect than I was giving it, important as it was to both the local economy and the quality of my landscape photography.

Rural architecture also intrigued me. I stopped more than once to shoot picturesque barns and the grain elevators that tower with alarming incongruity over otherwise flat landscapes. And I couldn’t get over the old cars and rusty machinery that dotted many people’s lawns. “People are very junky in the Ozarks,” said Fred Pfister, a Missourian who had helped me find a real-deal fiddle jam. “They save everything because they think they might be able to cannibalize it someday.”

Cultural Legacies Can Be Delicious

I like to brag about how my New York neighborhood is home to Tibetan, Colombian, Pakistani and Russian markets and restaurants, all within a few blocks. But now I realize an Iowan might rightfully respond: “What, no Dutch letters or Czech kolaches?”

Of course, like New York City, the rural Midwest was the place many Europeans migrated when they came to the New World. There’s just been much less turnover, so more cultural relics have endured. My first clue came in the form of “Dutch letters,” S-shaped pastries for sale at the Downtown Farmers Market in Des Moines. Figuring it was just a one-off, I shrugged. (By which I mean I bought one and gobbled it up, loving the hidden layer of almond paste.) But then I spotted another stand selling almond bread with the pitch “Tastes like a Dutch letter!”