I lay outstretched on the mound, the belly of the pregnant Mother Earth. Is rebirth far off? I don't know what's behind these tears. Am I sad I never got to know my grandfather who walked this ground? Do I feel my own mortality? After all my grandad's name was Dean Curtis. Maybe I cry because he's dead, my dad's dead, and my other grandfather Gene Adams is now dying in Dayton. I'm so alone here. So lonely. Tears from the clouds join in.

Dean Curtis is reborn in some small measure, as he is more alive in me, now that I know him as a person who ran around this campus as a young athlete. My father used to say the only immortality a person has is in the minds of those who remember you.

Birds sing. Night covers me quietly. Rising, I walk the campus with a picture of my grandad in front of a building with the track and field team.

Walk to the delicate sound of thunder, fantasizing about being invited here to teach poli sci someday. I hear what sounds like a horse whinny, but the noise comes from up a tree. Slowly, I walk below the tree and sit down, letting my eyes acclimate to the dark. Finally I see a little furball of an owl, no bigger than a fist, with two eyes staring down at me as it cries.

We stare at each other for a long time, then it flies off. The bell in the steeple of the chapel rings eight times. Two people approach, a man and a woman. They focus on me. It turns out I'm sitting on their front lawn. I introduce myself and tell them of the owl. They've heard strange sounds but had no idea where they're coming from.

Steve's a college art teacher. Marion's an elementary school art teacher. She serves on the Iowa Arts Council. They give me the names of the Cornell poli sci department head and of an Iowa Senator, David Osterberg, who lives in Mount Vernon, then point me in the direction of a building they think is the one where my gdad sat for the picture. They're correct. The building is the gym, or field house. A security guard stands in the door. It now opens the opposite way, but everything else is the same.

Lite rain continues as the security guard says "I was just up at SAC (Strategic Air Command). You're not going to cut defense are you?"

I tell him yes, I'll cut nuclear defense but emphasize conventional force readiness.

"What about the E4?" he asks.

"There's going to continue to be a need for effective survellance," I respond, knowing the electronic's jammed plane he's speaking of, used for survellance and electronic countermeasures (ECM).

He tells me the college is private property, so no parking, but suggests maybe pulling in behind the field house anyway and says he'll tell the other guard.

"But we're only here 'till midnight," he says. "I don't know about PD."

I drive into downtown Mount Vernon before turning in. Rain pounds down now. I cover the exposed engine of my battered gold VW to keep the electrical system from getting soggy, and walk into Peggy Sue's Ice Cream Parlor. There I introducing myself to the owners Virginia and Rich Creager, who introduce me to their six and seven year old daughters Genevieve and Heidi. The group of us begin an hour long discussion of events.

Genevieve and Heidi want Bush out because they don't like Dan Quayle. They also want lower taxes. I tell them taxes can't go lower for awhile, but they sure won't go higher.

Rich encourages me to call local senator David Osterberg, but when I do I find he's out of town. Then Rich cooks me a burger and we talk at the family table. He speaks about how the evangelists "get their flocks to flood the caucuses," and says he offered himself as a pro-choice rep at the Mount Vernon caucus last time, but was soundly defeated.

Rich also tells how he sat on stage with Jesse Jackson and has since become persona non grata. He favors manned exploitation of space. I tell him it'll have to wait for a time as we send up probes with high resolution tv cameras aboard. He wants us to build power stations in space. I agree this will be good to do someday, telling him I too am a fan of the SPS, or Solar Power Satellite, as long as the microwaves it would use to transmit energy to Earth don't turn out to heat the atmosphere.

Rich continues that he's an L4 and L5 advocate. I tell him I too support the placing of space colonies between the Earth and the Moon, but note that the zones are not actually devoid of gravity, but are fraught with gravity currents on the cusp between gravitational regions.

The girls join us again and we talk about their space camp experiences. We wrap up our jabbering around 9:45 and I roll down the street to Cornell, park behind gdad's field house, and settle in for sleep with the strange sense the night will not be a peaceful one.

Lightning illuminates and thunder reverberates my bug bed. I attempt sleep amid my brain's horror movie scenarios.

I awake. The rain has stopped. I open my sunroof. Stars fill the sky. I think again of my gdad and his son my father as I look at the milky panorama above. Into my peaceful midnight rolls a compact police car. The occupants must see me, as they stop, then head off again.

What the hell, I've gotten some sleep, maybe its time to fly. I turn on my engine and lights and am casually crossing the parking lot toward the exit when a full-size police sedan pulls in and faces me headlights to headlights. I turn off my lights and engine. The PD officer asks for my license and if the car's registered in my name. I'm grateful he doesn't go around to look at the expired back tag. I show him the picture of gdad. He tells me the time, 1:30, and asks if I'm looking for a place to stay. Does he mean the slammer? No, I tell him, I'm heading for Waterloo. He gives me directions out of town. I leave on his recommended route with him on my tail.

August 17

Arriving in Waterloo sometime around 3:00am, I find an all-night coffee shop for a cup of decaf before my second beddy-bye in the bug behind the place.

Dawn. I stretch and drive around to try finding another coffee shop to clean up in for my "Waterloo Courier" meeting. Here's one that has nothing but four-tops filled with chain smoking senior citizens. Would stay but there's no counter or open table. I drive to a mall.

While changing my shirt prior to entering the mall with my bathroom "Dopp" kit, a couple girls cruise past me twice and we trade smiles. On the way into the mall I pass them coming out. "Nothing's open yet," they tell me. I clean up in a restroom.

From a mall phone I call the Courier, talk with the editor and arrange to drop off info in half an hour. This I do, telling him of my gdad's hardware salesman days and great grand's Illinois Central Railroad career, along with highpoints of my platform. We arrange for me to talk with a political reporter on Monday morning and I retire to the library next door for further Iowa research, plus phone calls east and west.

I ask my buddies in LA to put together a collection of donations to provide me with gas money home from this first round of campaigning. I ask them to send it to Jeff's mom in Cedar Rapids. Leave a message on my mom's machine telling her of my location, then arrange to meet the editor of the "Dubuque Telegraph Herald," a newspaper I discover researching in the library's upstairs periodical room.

The "Field of Dreams" movie site in Deyserville gives me an opportunity to walk topless between cornrows. I grab a piece of corn off a stalk and peel it for a taste. Blech! Feed corn for animals ain't too good for eating. Every tourist in Iowa seems to be here wandering into the corn, playing baseball. Very strange scene, but I understand it. I cried when Kevin Costner met the young version of his father at the end of the movie.

Stop for gas midway to Dubuque, in Manchester, Iowa. As I'm filling my tank, into the station pulls a colorfully painted old school bus with a trio of Rainbow People aboard. The first of them comes straight back to my VW to "connect" with me. He's a 54 year young version of Dennis Hopper's character in "Apocalypse" and a poet who recites for me a stanza ripe with significance for our time. "Unite with the many to oppose the few," is the chorus line he repeats several times. "Unite with the many to oppose the few."

I ask him to send a copy to the address on the back of the fliers I give him. Due to his long beard and bard-like ways, I call him Walt Whitman. He introduces me to the driver who wears a beaded headband and old fashioned black frame glasses. The driver picks up on my middle name "Adams." He too is an Adams.

A young woman I'm immediately attracted to sweeps out the bus. The poet hands her a copy of my flier. They all settle in and read it in detail while rolling joints for the next leg of their journey. The poet offers that he descends from Ethan Allen, leader of Vermont's Green Mountain Boys, the post revolutionary rebels. He and his Rainbow People partners have just come from a Green Mountain happening, via a stop on the Lower East Side of NYC to feed the hungry. They're heading for a gathering of Lacota People in Southern Minnesota before heading on to Montana.

The poet speaks of "Boyz in the Hood," bestowing on it glowing praise. I share these sentiments with him. He offers me some smoke. I tell him I'd ordinarily be grateful, but decline.

Oddly, Whitman predicts I'll meet a woman who will decide to travel with me and film my campaign, and that I'll end up marrying her. What's he doing, peeking in on my fantasies?

The Rainbows fade into the west. I move on east to meet with the editor of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. When I get there he tells me his political reporter won't be in till 7:30 Monday.

I head for Effigy Mounds National Monument and have a Mississippi River view for my dinner of hardboiled eggs, packed for me by Aunt Lois, plus pickles, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a plum.

A deer leaps across X56. I pull in late at night to Little Paint River Campgrounds, Yellow River State Park and select site number 56.

Sunday dawn. The sun rises in the mist abve a cornfield in a valley north of Effigy Mounds National Monument. Landscapes up here along the Mississippi are more rugged than those around most of Iowa, due to the acion of the river over the last 600 million years and to the fact that this region was the southern edge of the most recent sheet of ice covering the northern part of America.

I leave early before ranger rounds, without paying the $5.00 camping fee.

Now I'm high above the Mississippi again, this time sitting before a large indian burial mound, one of dozens in this wonderful national monument. Thanks again TR for preserving areas like this one for us.

I arrive before the park opens and am greeted by a ranger named Jennifer when she arrives, saying "This is a beautiful time of day to see the park."

We talk for a bit about the pregant mother earth theory of the mounds. She hasn't heard of it. I refer her to "The Chalice and the Blade" though it says nothing about these mounds specifically. She tells me a guy named Ray is already up watching the sunrise, as he does most mornings. She says if she likes what she sees in my flier, this will be the year she registers to vote. She says she always tells people who bug her about not voting that there's never been a candidate she liked.

I ascend the trail and learn about native food plants from small signs posted next to them, taking panoramic shots of the mounds, then run into Ray. He's hiked to the farthest end of the monument, five miles in, and is on his way back. He's a riverboat captain, operating his "oldest boat on the river" out of Praire du Chen, Wisconsin across the river. He offers me a ride on the boat and tells me of the turkey vultures he's seen below Hanging Rock. Excarnation probably took place around here, I think to myself. That's the ancient practice of exposing the dead to scavenging birds rather than maggots and worms, then placing the clean bones in mounds.

Ray tells me about a blackberry patch along the path. His hands are stained purple from his encounter with the berries.

"As with any destination," he says of his morning's activity, "it turned into a journey." Having not eaten breakfast he found himself hungry and thirsty on the way back from his hike and says he asked himself, "What would I do if I were an indian?" He foraged and came upon the blackberries.

We part. I sit observing the unique creatures of this area up close. The battle between the yellow and the red daddy-longlegs spiders is intense. Is it foreplay? The soaring of a red-tailed hawk, or what I spontaneously identify as such, graces the skies above the Mississippi.

A white caterpillar with black feathers fore and aft, strolls along like a marching band, passing directly below one of the yellow daddy-longlegs unmolested, searching out the same mites no doubt, partners on the same level of the food chain. A pretty brown and gold moth likes my purple t-shirt. A sleek black fly also lands on me. She seems to have far less hair than most and I name her "Mercedes of the Flies."

The wasps around here build their nests in small sand hills like ants. Are wasps just large flying ants? Small flying ants land on this page.

People come and go as I write. We say hi. A little girl spots a three inch centipeed. When one of the other little girls touches it with a stick, it curls into a coil just like the coiled effigy mound diagrams I've seen. Could the motif have been inspired by these centipeeds rather than snakes, or by snakes, centipeeds and all coiling creatures.

I eat a plum and grapes from the Aunt Lois collection and get back on the trail. I think for a moment of my own burial. My ashes are stored in an egg shaped urn lined with red ochre and buried under a small pregnant belly mound.

I come across Jennifer giving a tour, talking about how various non-native Americans sometimes hold "seances" on the mounds, meditate, tie tobacco pouches to trees, surround the mounds with feathers.

"Devil worshippers and Shirley McClain types try to hold ceremonies here, but we ask them to leave," she says. Then, as she talks about the bird effigies in the south unit, she turns to me, though I'm standing way outside the group and says "You'd like it there."

I hike the hidden south unit. Nobody else is around. I stop and listen to the wind through trees and smell the prarie grass. Butterly wings of luminous blue flash as they flutter. Yellow daisies feed green flying ants with purple wings. Inch long locusts sound like chain saws. A cream breasted brown bird visits. I sit under an oak alongside one of three bird shaped mounds.

Will Jennifer come to visit me here? I take off her ranger uniform and make love with her on the grassy mound, then eat a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and read an article in a special issue of "Iowa Conservationist" about Northeast Iowa. I purchased the mag for a dime from the selloff table of Waterloo's library yesterday. It tells me that one of the prime archaeologists to catalog this site was a professor at Cornell during the 20s, around the time gdad Dean would've been there. This causes me to begin wondering whether gdad was into these mounds as well.

Hike the two miles back to the Mississippi, along a trail covered with short grass and moss built for wagons hauling supplies to a fort that once sat west of here. I come across blackberries and feed on a few, avoiding wasps and spiders. The berries are mixed with purple thistles which interest the local bees.

Before wrapping my ten miles of hiking, I decide to take one last side trail.

My first theory about the architecture of this mound series is that they originated as a series of longhouses connecting circular central gathering areas. One set has three pregnant belly mounds connected by linear mounds, another has four. Turning once more before hiking away from these mounds, I look back at the many tree limbs protecting the mounds below them and feel as if I'm standing at the entrance to a cathedral.

On my way back up the trail I see a two inch brown and cream butterfly playing peacefully above the bird effigy mound, then run into a deer couple. The doe is in midpath as I round a corner, her partner is up the hill watching me. I raise my hand slowly, giving them what I imagine is an indian greeting. Neither move. The deer on the hill tires of me and moves on. The doe waits and waits. Our eyes are locked. We are hypnotized by each other.

Adams

dean's directory