The alarm rang at 5am, which is pretty typical. With 30+ miles ahead of me, and what typically settles out to be a ~3mph average (including breaks), that early departure helps to ensure that I finish the job around 4-5pm. With the hottest part of the day landing between 3 and 6, it’s nice to not have to slog through the entirety of that if I can avoid it, and when I have a hotel room waiting, an extra hour or two of air-conditioning can go a long way.
So, I dutifully worked through the morning routine. Clothes were already packed, thanks to the rare pleasure of a washer/dryer, so I perfunctorily completed ablutions, stowed the chargers, remembered to grab snacks from the refrigerator, topped off the water bottle, and then settled into a simple breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. At this point, I checked the weather forecast, discovered that at least a couple hours of thunderstorms were about to rip through the area, and realized that this should probably be my first action item in the morning. People like to condemn weather forecasters for their unreliability, but that’s mostly a consequence of people not understanding probabilities. That said, in Iowa it seems like a total roll of the dice whether a thunderstorm might pop up on any given day.
As a consequence of all of this, I had the unusual experience of a slow, leisurely morning on the couch, watching local news. I’m not going to make a habit of it or anything, but I realized that it’s a surprisingly effective way to learn about a place. Consider, for example, the scale they use for tracking dewpoint, which correlates with the heat index or “feels like” temperature:
(That’s not from the morning I was couch-bound; I was too slow to grab a shot when it popped on screen, so I found another example online.)
More substantially, the broadcast focused on the imminent implementation of Iowa’s “fetal heartbeat” law, which is more commonly referenced as an abortion ban. Since this law uses the first appearance of cardiac activity as the defining mark of independent personhood, which happens around the six-week mark, it means that many women will discover that they are pregnant only after abortions are no longer legally permitted. And that was the first detail that stood out to me in the broadcast–they very directly framed the law in that fashion, emphasizing that many pregnancies aren’t identified until after six weeks. From there, the report proceeded to include two expert perspectives, with one articulating the moral and legal defense of the law, and the other raising health concerns for the mother. It wasn’t particularly long–gotta pack seven different weather reports into a 30-minute local news window, after all–but it struck me as fair and evenhanded. I had hoped to find local polling on how Iowans view this law, but such data eluded me after some quick searches. Nationally, such laws are certainly unpopular, with 63% of Americans in favor of abortion being legal in most/all cases, but the best I could find in Iowa was a 2023 poll of likely Iowa Republican voters, with 58% saying the law “gets it about right,” which was lower than I had expected.
Before too long, the focus shifted back over to the weather, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been so snarky before, because this was fascinating. The station’s meteorology expert does a series of special features on specific weather issues, and on this occasion he was discussing the common perception that corn exacerbates hot, humid weather. I’d heard this from a family at the John Deere Pavilion, after my hardest day en route to Annawan, so I liked the idea of it. I’m not weak–it’s the corn!
Well, it turns out that it really is the corn. The phenomenon at work here is something called evapotranspiration, or “corn sweat.” When corn takes up water from the soil, two things take place–water vapor is released from the leaves, while evaporation also occurs from the soil, adding to the vapor.
Now, Iowa has 13 million acres of corn. (To which I reply: does that mean there are only 13 million acres of land in Iowa?) Here’s the hairy part: one acre of corn can release 4,000 gallons of water vapor to the atmosphere per day. That, on its own, can elevate humidity levels substantially. That’s not all, though. It can also increase the potency of storms, increasing rainfall and the prevalence of thunderstorms. The shift in the Midwest from prairie grass to corn literally changed the weather here!
As for the walk… whew, nothing about today’s route was efficient. Leaving Cedar Falls, I moved southward, swinging first wide to the west then back to the east, and eventually swinging back further to the west. When the rain picked up, I ran into a convenient McDonald’s and grabbed a second coffee, further delaying my departure from Cedar Falls. I just couldn’t say goodbye! Finally, though, the city released me, and I was back in the corn, moving in a southwestward direction through two small towns, Hudson and Reinbeck. I ran into no people on the trail and the streets of both towns were empty. As such, my interactions were limited to courtesies with the 16-year-old girl working the counter at Casey’s, and the 60-year-old woman at Reinbeck’s grocery. I mean, the corn was all ears, of course, but I didn’t have much to say.
