October 9, 2020What you see here is what I came across at the end of my only large vacation of the year. (I did not completely stop traveling. I wore a mask when I was around people.)
Neither the menu nor the newspapers outside the entrance to the King Tower Cafe in Tama had been touched for two months. The King Tower, like so many restaurants across the country, had been brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic, which took out the Big T Maid-Rite in Toledo. The derecho that swept through Iowa on August 10 was the killing blow. The cafe’s owners announced August 18 that the King Tower was closed for good.
The papers had already begun to pile up. The three copies of the Des Moines Register show Vice President Mike Pence at a campaign stop in Iowa, wearing a mask; a short notice about the derecho below a story that the Big Ten was preparing to cancel football season (but would later uncancel it); and the word “unconventional” in a headline about a Democratic National Convention being held mostly online.
In full journalistic disclosure, you can see a mark where I had slightly moved the stack before realizing how much the jumble conveyed. I moved the papers afterward to photograph the King Tower’s entire menu.
This photo references the economic toll, political standing, and Iowa’s biggest disaster of the year. (If I posted a paired #2 and #3, they would be the political signs across the road from the now-closed North Winneshiek school and on a lawn in Windsor Heights, each with the assortments you would expect for rural and urban Iowa. The #4 would be of the massive power poles in Cedar Rapids snapped by the derecho that cut my electricity for more than a week.)
It may not be my “photo of the year” in terms of “best” but it’s a photo for the year, or about the year, as I experienced it. Maybe I’ll retroactively select ones for previous years.