Iowa

I went to Iowa last weekend. One thing I saw was that a lot of the middle-aged to 60ish white men look a lot like Tim Walz. In fact, I thought I saw him at one point, but it was just some other guy. It made me think, even more, he could be a good choice for Kamala Harris.

I also saw a nature center dedicated to Iowa's geology and biomes, and while there I learned a few things I didn't know:

• The dreaded yellowjacket wasp (Vespula maculifrons) is a native insect.
• The word "flark" means a depression or hollow in a fen, formed at its heavy peat base.  
• Iowa has seven land form regions. I knew about the Driftless Region (labeled the Paleozoic Plateau in the center's handouts), located in the state's northeast corner, because it's contiguous with southeastern Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin, which are also in the Driftless Region. But I didn't know about the Des Moines Lobe, which is in the north central part of the state, and which still looks like a glacial flow. The glacial flow created Iowa's nearly all natural lakes, including Lake Okojobi, where I was for the weekend.
• The parts of the states along its bordering rivers are narrow alluvial plains, with most of the rest of the state covered by three areas that are flat to rolling landscapes. They vary more in terms of what's below the surface, from lots of soil to not as much, and different kinds of rock beneath.

One of the things that drives me a bit wild in national media — even media I like — is how they cover us here in "flyover land," and one of the worst examples of that is how they cover Iowa. We here in Minnesota even denigrate the state and its people. As I showed in a post from last year, and as writer Lyz Lenz demonstrates in her writing, there's more to Iowa than most people think.

By the way, the nature center also had this taxidermied owl:

Those are some eyes.