Iowa, Grinnell College never far from mind of this East Coast resident

I arrived in Iowa on a sweltering summer day in August 1971 with a suitcase, a typewriter, and a guitar. Not yet 18, I had come from Rochester, N.Y., to start the next phase of my life at Grinnell College.

On the van ride from the Des Moines airport to Grinnell, I made awkward conversation with my fellow first-year students and watched the countryside go by. I remember thinking that the corn looked 12 feet tall and seemed to go on forever. I was more drawn to the lonely farms that dotted the rolling landscape. I observed that most of the farmhouses stood next to a row of trees that hovered over them like protective relatives.

I had never been to Grinnell before that day; none of us had. When we arrived at the college, I immediately noticed a set of what I took to be disused railroad tracks. Two hours later, a freight train rattled through campus, and I was enchanted. I had loved trains from the time I was a child. To me, they were the stuff of romance and song and legend, not to mention the history of our nation, and it felt suddenly like I had my own personal railroad in my new backyard.

Those train tracks became an indelible part of my experience at Grinnell. I would put pennies on the rails for the trains to squash and wave at the old men who rode in the cabooses. On nights I couldn’t sleep, I would listen to the mournful whistles of the trains as they approached and left town. On weekends, when we wanted a break from campus, friends and I would walk along the tracks out into the cornfields, debating the meaning of life while keeping our ears open for approaching trains. Many a college relationship started and ended along those railroad tracks.

For someone from the east, Grinnell didn’t seem like a college town in those days. It seemed like an Iowa farm town with a college in it. That’s what I loved about it. On Saturday mornings, I would get up early and head down to the soda fountain at Cunningham Drug Store. There I would buy a bottomless cup of coffee for a nickel and listen to farmers talk about hog futures and corn prices. Or was it hog prices and corn futures? Although the college campus was just a few short blocks away, it felt as though I’d wandered into a different world.

I’ve been back to Grinnell only three times since I graduated, twice for college reunions and once to take my twin children on the college visit I never had. Nevertheless, I have carried Iowa’s landscape — and my affection for the state — deep inside me ever since. On all three of those visits, I drove to Grinnell from Des Moines on Interstate 80, watching the rolling cornfields and lonely farms pass by, remembering the 17-year-old boy with his future all ahead of him, stranger in a strange land.

Peter Guthrie of Belmont, Mass., is a writer and psychotherapist in private practice. An English teacher in a former life, he also worked for many years in college counseling.