Thoughts From The Bellysize>

copyright February 2006

By: Dan Mayssize>

I particularly enjoy this "in between" portion of the year. The pace of activity has certainly slowed but occasional vestige glimpses of spring keep luring one onward with thoughts of coming promise. I try to utilize this time constructively by doing research and reading books that caught my attention over the past months, when other priorities deferred time for reading. My hope is that I can nourish my brain so that I can harvest ideas and solutions to problems throughout the coming year. Although my reading topics are diverse, they lean heavily toward the nonfiction because I find fiction generally unrewarding.

I am always on the lookout for fascinating ways that clever wordsmiths can describe the mundane in ways that place the common in a new light. I am not talking about the flowery pap English writing classes try to push. That is just superfluous addition of little-used, unnecessary words. A few, carefully selected words seem to always say the most.

I recently stumbled into an excellent example of my-kind-of-book. It is perfect for grooming oneÂs thought processes on these chilly weekends when the television offers programming that should be considered an insult to any intelligent person. This author is a modern day icon of the Iowa prairie, Carl Kurtz. Carl is an interesting story in and of himself. However, it is his insight into the minutia of the everyday world around us that fascinates me in his book, IowaÂs Wild Places. As a tremendous compliment to the text, his photography of the ordinary is extraordinary. Rather than just capturing images, Kurtz displays his innate ability to photographically capture concepts. His images penetrate oneÂs retinas and become lodged in your soul.

I marveled that he, too, took note of an anomaly in nearby Wildcat Den State Park. On vertical, north-facing, seemingly bare sandstone surfaces, hepaticas are found growing abundantly amongst walking ferns. I can remember looking at this natural oddity with my son, Ben, just a few years ago.

I love the fact that Carl Kurtz does not attempt to embellish his descriptions of our fine state. As the blurb on the cover flap says, "Â he reveals the beauty of the ordinary as well as the spectacular." His descriptions canvass the entire state. Delightfully, many of the sites are familiar to me and lay well within an hourÂs drive of the Quad Cities. However, many of the more distant, described places evoke an allure that shouts, "Road trip!"

Particularly, if I can locate a bed & breakfast (my preferred lodging) reasonably close to some of these areas, my lovely wife, Cyndia, is sure to accompany me. A day spent stomping around in nature, followed by a nice meal, a bottle of wine and perhaps a hot tub at the bed & breakfast helps one to savor the natural delights that Iowa has to offer. At this point, a good book becomes optional.