At the End of a Straight Road

In a powerful passage, the prophet Isaiah used the image of a highway to proclaim the coming of a Savior: “In the desert prepare a way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God” (Isa. 40:3). Centuries later each of the four Gospels applied these words to the ministry of John the Baptist. He was a voice in the wilderness, crying out, “the crooked roads shall become straight.… And all mankind will see God’s salvation” (Luke 3:5–6).

Those of us who live in the Midwest have an advantage in understanding these passages, for, when it comes to highways, we know straight.

Good ice cream in Big Rock

U.S. Highway 30, for instance, is the road you want if you are headed west from the Chicago suburbs to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For most of my adult life, I have been making that trip several times a year, and so I know this straight road close up. To be sure, from Rock Falls on the Illinois side of the Mississippi to just past DeWitt on the Iowa side, Highway 30 does roll along with the countryside as it dips and turns down to the river. Otherwise, for most of the 200-mile journey it is pretty straight.

I have heard well-meaning folk from both coasts call such a road flat and uninteresting. For me, it is open, high, subdued, and—notwithstanding overzealous truckers and an occasional vehicle piloted with geriatric patience—tranquil.

Part of Highway 30’s charm is the unobtrusive way that modern civilization encroaches on the vast expanse of fertile prairie. Reasonably clean bathrooms in Clarence, Calamus, Clinton, and Morrison. Still pretty good ice cream in Big Rock, though nothing like you once could buy at a much-missed Elmwood’s Dairy Bar on the outskirts of Clinton. More recently, a series of well-run Casey’s quick-shop emporiums on the Iowa side, and a nicely maintained Hardee’s in Morrison.

God’s country

Most of the beauty of Highway 30, though, is found in a terrain lying between the 17 towns and one small city (Clinton) that divide the trip into roughly equal segments of about ten miles each. For the most part, this is not nature red in tooth and claw. Granted, the open countryside must be respected. Driving along at 20 miles per hour in a snowstorm is no picnic—in fact, it can become abjectly terrifying when a semi zooms by in a whirling swarm of white.

But usually the land looks like it was meant to look when God put humans on the earth to till it. We have seen the fields of corn and beans in all stages of growth—and all beautiful, both for how they look and for what they say about the hard work, persistence, and courage of those who “keep” the land. We have seen the cattle huddled against a biting November wind; hogs rooting with pointless abandon in the spring mud; horses ambling contentedly through the heavy heat of summer. Late fall might be best, with harvests in, corn piled high to dry, trees like sentinels on the north and west of the farm houses, the earth at rest. These are delights to savor when the road is straight.

The western terminus

Our family will not be making this trip as often as we once did. Francis Noll, the father and grandfather who was our western terminus, died of cardiac arrest on January 6.

The man who waited for us in Cedar Rapids possessed many of the virtues of the land through which we traveled to visit him. Raised on a farm, my father did not lose the farmer’s directness, the farmer’s facility for getting things done, and the farmer’s capacity for toil when, more than 50 years ago, he left the farm.

Straight as he was by nature, this pure-bred Iowan was also straight because of grace. At the stage in life when many Iowans worry (and with good reason) about where to spend their winters, he got excited about Evangelism Explosion. He died in the western part of the state at the house where, 74 years and two months before, he had been born. He was there to help his older sister come home from the hospital and, characteristically, he would not let her pay for the groceries they picked up on the way. He died as he had lived: a straight man at the end of a straight road who knew the straight highway of his God.

MARK A. NOLL

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