Hi Everyone, 

This just in: Vinton, Iowa has internet! Unfortunately, accessing it is a logistical nightmare. Our local coffee shop and the Vinton Public Library have wireless, but both establishments generally close at the late hour of 4:00 pm. There is also a computer lab on campus but its ten computers are shared by over one hundred people during the two hours a day that it’s open. Facebook is also periodically blocked in the lab and really, why else would one need to use the internet? I will have even less access when we actually leave campus for a project. Anyway, the moral of this story is that I will not be able to entertain you all with daily rants about the Midwest as I’d originally hoped. We will all have to settle for much lengthier, less frequent updates. This first one is really long so maybe you could just read one paragraph each day to make it last… 

The reality of what I will be doing for the next 10 months of my life really only began to sink in when I was about ten miles away from Vinton. Driving across the US, I could sort of chuckle at small town America in an objective way; I was always far enough away from my destination that I didn’t have to associate any of the landscape with my own experience. However, when the 218 turned from a highway into a windy two lane road through endless cornfields and a sign notified me that Vinton was the next town, I began to panic slightly. For the first time I began to think, Holy shit I’m really going to live here. I haven’t seen a real person in an hour an half. There are barns here. Like big red barns with cows around them. And corn as high as my head. Everywhere. I checked to make sure I had cell phone reception every few seconds the rest of the way into town, knowing that if I lost my one connection to the outside world I’d probably start hyperventilating. Then I passed a sign proudly announcing “Welcome To…Vinton the City of Lights” (seriously); like it or not, I was home. 

I had some time before I needed to check-in so I turned left at a sign that said “Business District” and followed 4th Street into the “heart” of Vinton. Driving on Vinton’s main drag is like stepping into a time machine. There is one of everything in Vinton: Optometrist. Dentist. Chiropractor. Barber. Their painted signs proudly announce their profession in large cursive writing on storefront windows. There are two four-way stoplights on the main road that have no limit lines so I accidentally ran both lights in a span of five minutes while touring the town. I’m sure I’ve sparked a hatred for California drivers that will last several months. It’s too bad I didn’t arrive later because both lights actually stop functioning after 5:00 pm when everything closes and just start blinking red. The city court house, a really pretty historic building is also right in the middle of the Business District. Luckily “Lawyer” is right across the street should I ever run afoul of the law. 

There is actually a lot to do in Vinton if you are into small town fun. There is a $2 movie theater. It is currently only showing Adam Sandler’s “Zohan” film, but there are also large signs up all and down the road that say, “Sex and the City: POSTPONED”. I’m not sure what is accounting for the delay. Vinton also has a swimming pool, a malt shop, a bowling alley and mini golf, although I haven’t seen any of these places open after 5:00 pm which is generally when we have free time. It seems like the whole town shuts down after 5:00 actually. I’ve walked back into town a few times to explore with the AmeriCorps kids during the early evening we have literally strolled down the middle of 4th Street with no danger of ever being hit by a car or even a speeding covered wagon. 

When I first drove through the Business District, all I could think in my panicky state was “where on earth are all the bars?” I thought surely a town like this would have a local drinking hole packed full of Iowans on every corner. Thankfully, I finally found a bar called Mickey’s on the 218. It is a yellow, windowless building that looks like a gentleman’s club or a sex shop. It has beer on draft for $1.75 and karaoke on Wednesdays and every other Saturday. They will also make you a frozen pizza if you ask nicely. Obviously Mickey’s is my new favorite place. 

Overall, we have been warmly welcomed by the citizens of Vinton. Our presence has already provided a significant boost to the economy, not just because their three bars are now packed every night of the week, but because the government funding has allowed them to make improvements to the city’s infrastructure. 

We are staying at the Iowa Braille Institute and Sight-Saving School on 9th Street, just a few blocks away from the “Business District”. The school is really beautiful. The IBSSS was established in 1850, so the buildings are brick and stately and sit on several acres of open field space. There is an auditorium, a gym, a track, dorms and several administrative buildings on campus. Preparation for our arrival was delayed because of the floods, so unfortunately a lot of our accommodations are still unfinished. Toilets in our common bathroom are partitioned by pieces of plywood and shower curtains which I’m sure is beginning to cause chronic constipation among corps members. Our dorm rooms are asbestos ridden but we’ve been reassured that we are not at risk unless we hang posters on our walls with pushpins. I’m a bit skeptical that I am in absolutely no danger if my walls remain intact when a mere pinprick could supposedly allow airborne asbestos particles to contaminate my lungs, but I’m going to go ahead and not think about it. Right now there are 146 AmeriCorps members on campus but there will also be about fifteen students with varying degrees of visual impairment arriving in the fall. 

So far my experience here has basically been a repeat of freshman year of college. Everyone wanders around in tiny groups of people that they barely know making awkward conversation centered around their hometown and the weekly schedule. Here’s a conversation I’ve had about sixty-seven times since I arrived: 

“Hi, what’s your name?”
“I’m Marea, what’s your name?”
“My name is (something I immediately forget). I’m from Connecticut where are you from?”
“San Diego.”
“Did you drive here?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my god that’s so far!”
“Yeah. So what time is our next meeting?” 

For the next month, we will remain on campus filling out paperwork and training in areas such as disaster relief, CPR and power tool use. Because we are a government organization, obviously we need stand in lines, fill out the same information on multiple forms and waste a lot of time before we actually do anything of value. We still don’t know much about what we will be doing once we are sent out on “spike” to our project locations. We are the first class to be stationed at the Iowa campus so we are sort of the guinea pigs. Right now our only guaranteed project is a stint in the Gulf Coast building houses with Habitat for Humanity. 

AmeriCorps likes to fancy itself a branch of the military, so a lot of our day is structured in a similar way. However, since there are obviously no physical requirements to join AmeriCorps, we’re kind of army-lite. We have required PT, but it’s only three times a week for 45 minutes. We have to run a mile and do push-ups next week so we can be assigned to ability-specific workout groups while we are still on campus and everyone seems very anxious about it. I’m beside myself with excitement because I can finally do something borderline competitive, even if I’m the only one competing. 

We have standard issue uniforms we have to wear for everything, and they are seriously hideous. I know what you’re thinking: But Marea, you get to wear polo shirts and t-shirts, cargo pants and steel-toed boots. You’ve died and gone to dyke heaven! But alas…I am not exaggerating when I say the waistband of my pants and shorts are well above my belly button. The crotch of the shorts is longer in inches than the legs. I’m not sure what they’re expecting us to store in there, but let’s just say they’ve left a generous amount of room for a F.U.P.A. We are required to wear a belt and keep our shirts tucked in, which just makes the high waistband situation that much worse. 

I’ve decided I’m either going to gain or lose a bunch of weight while I’m here, so I guess there is some hope that I’ll eventually fill out the pants. On the one hand, we eat totally unhealthy Midwest, cafeteria food. Our first meals have been hamburgers, white bread sandwiches and oily tacos on flour tortillas. Breakfast choices have been limited to sugary cereals, pound cake and bagels. On the other hand, we only get three meals a day, which is about four meals too few for someone with an appetite like mine. I am constantly hungry. My freshmen year of college I gained a good twenty pounds because a) I only ate dining hall food, b) I never had the opportunity to see myself naked so I didn’t realize I was getting out of control. I haven’t seen myself naked since the Motel 8 in Cheyenne so if the cafeteria cuisine continues to be of this quality I’m going to go with gain weight. I hope I’m wrong. 

The other corps members seem very nice for the most part, and I’ve already found a few people that have also decided to make Mickey’s a home base of sorts. I am having a little trouble dealing with all the recent high school graduates, and I think reigning in the judging is going to be one of my biggest challenges here. Earlier this week, a kid who just turned eighteen a few weeks ago was jump roping in a sort of prancing motion across the gym where all 146 AmeriCorps members were gathered awaiting their team assignments. Literally in a matter of seconds, this kid managed to kick a basketball that flew across the gym and hit my leg and whip another girl violently in the face with his rope. All I could think was Oh god don’t let this little ADD brat be on my team. I immediately named him LJR (Little Jump Roper) to the girl next to me. Twenty minutes later I was standing outside the building with the nine people I’ll be spending the next ten months eating, working, sleeping and enjoying extremely long van rides with as a member of team Oak 2. LJR was one of the nine, and he started the meeting by complaining loudly that the Jolly Rancher our team leader gave us as a “welcome to the group” treat was stuck to his tooth. I am either going to return to San Diego an extremely patient person or I will be discharged in a few weeks for stringing LJR up by his jump rope. 

I think working with LJR will be good for me though. On the drive out here I had a brief run-in that I realize now was foreshadowing of the biggest lesson I will need to learn here. At a rest stop in Nevada, I saw a man in tight denim shorts, combat boots and a rather hideous mullet. The mullet was one of those really bad ones – not the puffy accidental mullet that Jerry Seinfeld rocks – we’re talking super short flat top style on top with long, greasy strands in back that fell well below the collar of his flannel shirt. I watched this gentleman exit the rest stop bathroom and walk toward the parking lot, fully expecting him to get into a pickup with a gun rack and antler horns or maybe a stolen sedan. Instead, he opened the door of a Hybrid Honda Civic with an Obama sticker on the back window for his perfectly normal looking wife before smiling pleasantly at me and climbing into the driver’s seat. So here are this week’s revelations: 

1) Mullets are always a terrible look, even when you have agreeable political views and good environmental priorities. 

2) Don’t automatically assume that one characteristic or action – like wearing the AmeriCorps t-shirt and boots all day before it’s actually required, totally misunderstanding one of my really fabulous jokes, pronouncing the “s” in “corps” or even a mullet – defines someone completely. As a person that has been consistently surrounded by amazing, likeminded people most of my adult life, I need to learn to give people more of a chance, especially such a diverse group of people. 

Well there’s probably a line somewhere I need to go stand in, so I’m out of here. AmeriCorps, with its DMV-like bureaucratic organizational skills, has managed to give us an incorrect mailing address three times so I have included the newest version below. If you’ve already sent something it will still get to me, but if you plan on snail mailing me in the future, please use the following address instead of the one I provided before: 

Marea Blue
AmeriCorps*NCCC – Oak 2
1004 G Avenue
Vinton, Iowa 52349 

I miss you all so much! 

Love, 

Marea