The Journey Begins: Back to Bonair

If we were approaching Bonair from the east and we were about a mile away the first thing we should see would be the top of the elevator and the church steeple. As we come nearer we should see the houses and the white schoolhouse standing apart from the rest of the town...

So began the description my grandmother had written about her hometown in 1907. Fifteen years old at the time, she had gone on to describe the main street of her little town in careful and loving detail, building by building, ending her first entry with a description of the depot of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway.

A low and rather small building…painted yellow, with brown trimmings…in one corner of the room there is usually a bright fire...Four maps are on the walls and a candy and gum slot machine is in one corner…Throughout the whole building everything will be found neat and in order.

I first read these words—in old-fashioned handwriting, in fading ink—eighty-five years after they were written, sitting in the unfinished attic of the brownstone in Brooklyn where I lived: a long way from small-town Iowa. As I read I felt a sudden rush of connection across the miles and the years—and a growing, and painful, sense of closeness I had never before felt with my grandmother.

As I turned the fragile pages slowly and carefully, I discovered a side of her I had never known. To my surprise, I also found evidence that the mischievous streak I had always felt she had disapproved of in me was not entirely foreign to her own character, as revealed in one of the letters she had written, apparently as an assigned exercise for school:

Dear papa,

Now you know very well, my dear, that I am a very economical girl, but it would certainly cost at the very least one dollar (small sum, indeed) to attend a county fair, and I beg of you to allow me to call your attention to the fact that it would injure my health to remain at home on that notable day when the fair is to be held, so you may observe what an economical turn of mind I have, for doctor bills would certainly amount to more than the named sum. Please forward the required amount at once.

From your dutiful daughter, Effie

As I read on, I began to develop a desire—amorphous, inchoate, but also very strong—to follow the backward trail of my grandmother’s life. It was clear from the descriptions in her notebook that Bonair had been a very small town. I didn’t know if it even existed anymore, but if it did I wanted to find it, and see what it was like now. Most of all I wanted to learn more about the girl who had become my grandmother.

That summer I had the opportunity to visit Bonair. At first it had seemed that it probably did not even exist any longer: this was pre-Google, and Bonair was not on most maps. But I went to the library, I kept looking, and finally I found it: it was near Cresco, in the northeastern corner of the state. Not too great a detour on the road from Minneapolis, where we would be visiting my dad, to Chicago, where we would be going to see my husband’s parents on our way back east. So when we left my dad’s house in early August that year, instead of heading southeast from Minneapolis and driving across Wisconsin on the interstate, we dropped straight south and drove on smaller highways, into Iowa.

The Mississippi River valley in northeastern Iowa is hilly, with forested riverbanks and high bluffs. The highway, US 52, curves and dips along through these hills, and it is quiet, peaceful, and beautiful. As we neared Decorah and began to move in a more westerly direction, the land flattened out and we were driving past fields of corn and soybeans. We found our way to Cresco, and from there got directions to Bonair.

Finally the magic moment arrived, when