Storm Lake, Iowa is very properly named: It’s been raining pretty steadily since I got here. Not hard enough, though, to hide the fact that this is a quiet, friendly, midwestern town in an exceptionally beautiful location. My hotel room, at the brand new , looks right out across the lake. This country is full of wonders and hidden beauties.

Buena Vista University, a mile up the road, is a pleasant & spacious campus, lots of grand new buildings stamped with names of wealthy alumni, excellent library (where I am now sitting in between events), everybody very hospitable. The diffident, unostentatious manners of the Midwest are very appealing—a bit “English,” in fact. Driving across from Sioux City, the landscape even reminded me of Northamptonshire a bit: gentle hills dotted with farm buildings, horn & corn, an occasional pond or patch of woodland. Of course, back home the roads don’t head off dead straight to infinity.

Take my class this morning, for example. I gave them my 30-minute History of U.S. Conservatism presentation (this was a poli-sci class) & asked for questions. Nobody had any. My poli-sci host had warned me about this: “They won’t interrupt in a lecture, and it’s hard to get them to raise questions. They take everything in, though, and take plenty of notes, and come to my office 3 or 4 days later to ask: ‘That thing you said on Tuesday about X… Are you sure on that? I’ve been thinking about it…’ And they’ll have some really good point to make.”

So different from the New York style: “Hey, Prof., you’re full of it! Haw! Haw! Haw!….”

House prices here are amazing. You can get a lovely place for under $200K. Property taxes run about $1500. No traffic jams, no gangs, the hotel cleaning ladies speak English (look like German- and Scandinavian-American in fact). Jobs Americans won’t do? Out here, they’re doing them. (Though perhaps not for much longer. I’m told the local meat-packing industry is now manned largely by immigrants from south of the border.) Somebody remind me please: Why on earth do I live in New York?