photo credit: Trish Nelson

This letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette by Jim Walters, Why I won’t be Riding on RAGBRAI 50,   was being passed around on social media the week prior to RAGBRAI 50.

On that first ride, we went through vibrant small towns, past hundreds of family farms, seeing livestock in the fields. At every creek or stream, we stopped to cool our feet, wade, or swim. There were fence rows where wildlife abounded.

That Iowa is gone. I recently went to Dubuque to visit the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium. Highway 151 used to go through pleasing small towns and passed dozens of family farm dairy operations. Now, the road bypasses those towns and the dairy farms are gone — replaced by ethanol grain operations.

Iowa is now the most degraded state in our country — bathed in chemicals, inundated in livestock waste, and with the smallest amount of usable public space for its citizens. Is this hell? No, it’s Iowa. The Iowa we’ve allowed our state to become.

The thought of riding across Iowa and seeing the abandoned farmsteads, smelling the stench of the CAFOs, looking in vain for the fencerows and windbreaks, enduring miles of endless corn and beans, and being fearful of any contact with our surface waters, would be too much for me. So, count me out.

I feel his pain. I don’t disagree. But we’ll be riding on RAGBRAI as we have every year since 1979 because it is the last great thing about Iowa.

Early morning riding east into the sun – the best time of day. Photo credit: Trish Nelson

Local pie stand. Rhubarb is always the first to go. Photo credit: Trish Nelson

Riders from all over the world wait in line to sign a community wall. Photo credit: Trish Nelson