Sometimes the most memorable part of a road trip isn’t a giant popcorn ball — it’s a small town you almost missed.
I took the back roads on the way back home from a writers’ conference last weekend.
By back roads, I mean they were way back. Some of the highways started with a letter rather than a number. One of the places I encountered was a small town called Odebolt, population 994. The name lodged its way into my mind for some reason. Maybe the uniqueness grabbed my attention. I don’t know.
If any town should have stuck with me, it was nearby Sac City, which boasts the world’s biggest popcorn ball, weighing in at 9,000-plus pounds. I didn’t stop for that, but now I wish I had. That must be one stale popcorn ball.
Back to Odebolt. According to the city’s website, it was once the “popcorn center of the world,” supplying Cracker Jack and Jolly Time.
I’m sensing a theme in Northwest Iowa. Now all the state needs is a nearby city that stakes a claim to be the butter capital of the world, and it’ll make quite the combination. Alas, Steele County, Minnesota, already staked its claim. But Cork, Ireland, makes a similar claim – at least at one point in history.
Nothing profound happened on the edge of Odebolt that day, nor in any of the small towns I passed through on the way home. Perhaps the value of the back roads isn’t that they reveal something extraordinary every time you choose one, but instead, they remind us how much of life is made up of ordinary things.
Ordinary gas stations. Ordinary trees and clouds. Ordinary cemeteries. But not so ordinary that nearly 1,000 people call small towns like Odebolt home.
Somewhere in Odebolt, a man walked his dog, families sat down for dinner, someone worried about a medical test result, friends celebrated a promotion, a widow grieved her loss and a father prayed for his daughter.
Tomorrow is Creek Days in Odebolt. I’d like to think that the dog walker, the praying father and the widow might encounter one another and make things a little easier for each other.
I probably drove through the edge of Odebolt in less than two minutes (not counting the pitstop I made at the Cubby’s gas station). Someone else has spent an entire lifetime there.
To me, it was a town name on a highway sign. To them, it’s home.
