In April 1991, as the senior class at Lawrence University in Wisconsin was planning various spring break trips to hike in the Ozarks. Playing on the beaches in Florida. or canoeing on the glassy lakes in northern Minnesota, a guy named David Godfrey and I would take what most people thought was a wacky, if not rather extravagant, trip: we'd drive a rented red lawn Cadillac through the rolling hills of northeastern Iowa, avoiding interstates and only taking back roads.
I had a terrible idea to do an independent study in Midwestern poetry during my last semester as a Lawrence student, and I had visions of writing a long paper on Carl Sandburg's landscape imagery. A road trip through the small railroad towns, under the blue silos and past the pig farms and corn silos seemed like a way to immerse myself in the subject.
I'm not sure why David agreed to this strange road trip, other than he shared his love of the dark elements of the Midwest and had a taste for quirky excursions. He could talk for hours on many subjects. People called him “Dayeed” because he once auditioned for a play at the conservatory that required him to speak with a historic Mediterranean accent. He loved to argue with me—or anyone who would stand still—about baseball, music, religion, and politics. Especially politics. I've never met anyone with a greater respect for the political side of government: not the flashy electoral circus that eats up all the attention, but the boring arcane of how a state delivers services to citizens and where gut-level decisions are made.
We smoked cigars, blasted the air conditioner, played “The New World Symphony” on the tape player, and pointed the Cadillac toward a town called Spillville, Iowa, where the Czech classical composer Antonin Dvorak had spent the summer of 1893 playing a church organ. listening to train whistles and birdsong and incorporating them into a string composition he called “The American Quartet.”
I'm not sure what else I expected from what should have been the darkest spring road trip of our senior class.
Turns out there wasn't much to do in Spillville, pop. 595. We looked at a derelict grist mill down by the Turkey River, we looked at the public park, we looked at the church on the hill, we saw the brick building where Dvorak had lived, I took a few derogatory notes, and that was about . Hardly anyone was out walking the brick sidewalks, and they probably would have been mistaken for us if we had approached them.
I'm not sure what else I expected from what should have been the darkest spring road trip of our senior class. As anyone who hails from a small Midwestern town could have told you, they don't offer much in the way of entertainment that you didn't bring.
So out of ideas and inspiration, we headed north to Minneapolis and spent the rest of the week drinking beer with mutual friends who also hadn't been to Florida or Mexico. My independent study of Midwestern poetry never happened. And then we both graduated and started our real careers.
Dayeed earned a master's degree from an institution named after his political hero: the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He then went to work as a policy analyst for the city of St. Paul and later for the state senate as a health care policy expert, helping people get the most out of their government—as he always believed it should.
With his open, bespectacled face, tuft of reddish hair, and a distinctive Copenhagen cigarette cap pinched to his jaw, he was a warm and approachable figure to Republicans and Democrats alike who trusted him with how the system worked, even though the his office was a messy disaster zone. He just somehow knew where everything was kept. He married, had two sons, attended church regularly at the Episcopal St. Clements and watched his favorite Twins every summer. We kept in touch, and I came to see him in St. Paul every now and then, and sometimes we wondered aloud what we were thinking on that ridiculous trip to Spillville. Honestly, I think we were embarrassed by what a nerdy safari it was.
I found out later that Dayeed had been hiding a problem from almost everyone he knew, which cost him his marriage and his job with the state. Although he never seemed to lose control when out with friends, he struggled with alcohol. Attempts at rehabilitation were unsuccessful and he developed rotting in his vital organs. I only found out when I received a message on Facebook from a mutual friend that Dayeed was at Our Lady of Peace Hospice, seriously ill.
He answered the phone by the bed there in a papery voice, but asked if he could call me back the next day. I hesitantly said “sure.” But he died the next morning, aged 48, and I think he preferred to do it the same way he lived his life: quietly, privately and without much fanfare. Like almost everyone else he knew, I never got to say goodbye to Dayeed. His funeral at St Clements – filled with many of his friends from Lawrence – felt incomplete and disappointing.
Maybe that's part of what a liberal arts education does to you in a sly way: it plants little mines in your consciousness that can explode years later.
When in the summer of 2018, I set out to write an article about immigration policy for a magazine, I immediately thought of a place I really should visit again. And so, on the Fourth of July, I watched the fireworks from the public park in the small town Dayeed and I had visited 27 years ago. The mill by the river had been demolished, but Dvorak's apartment remained standing.
I buttonholed the locals and engaged them in long conversations about migrant workers in the Midwest and how these native Iowans felt about them — complex and varied conversations that I'd like to think Dayeed would have enjoyed. Perhaps we would have argued about their relative merits afterwards. I'd like to believe so, and I could have even predicted how he would give me that confused shake of his head and launch into a mini-lecture about how quotas should be adjusted a certain way.
I know I would never have traveled to Spillville in the first place had it not been for him, or returned there more than a quarter of a century later, and I felt then what a lasting mark he left on my thinking about the moral dimensions of government and how it determines the course of individual of life. Maybe that's part of what a liberal arts education does to you in a sly way: it plants little mines in your consciousness that can explode years later in ways that surprise you. And you may also realize how much you are being taught not only by your teachers, but by your friends.
The resulting essay, “Spillville,” is, I suppose, the completion of the independent study I should have done at Lawrence but never did. It is one of fourteen pieces on American geography in a new book The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America.
Counterpoint editor Dan Smetanka, let me dedicate this essay to David's memory at backmatter. It's my own poor attempt at a monument.
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The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America by Tom Zoellner is available through Counterpoint Press.
