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Iowa Probably Never Existed, Experts Now Say |
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Quaint notions about looking through the screen door at the back forty in the so-called 'Land of Ioway' are just yearnings for a place we all wish was real but probably never existed, according to new research. |
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August 23, 2009 When Iowa was reported missing earlier this year, it sparked a national research effort into questions surrounding its disappearance. But now this has resulted in experts challenging the idea that it ever existed as a real physical place at all. The explanation given at that time was that perhaps the state had somehow moved to the Atlantic coast and became the state of East Carolina. "But states don't just pull up stakes and move a thousand miles to the east, that's preposterous," sez Biff Klowndisendr of the Flyover Research Group. |
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An Iowa that emerges from the rural morning mists with bulging grain elevators persists as a pleasant and prosperous vision of flyover America in our collective imaginations. |
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"I think we'd all like to believe in a place called Iowa, because it provides us with comforting images of a land of vast cornfields and fattened livestock, of hardworking farmers and a kind of family life touched with wholesome goodness." "Unfortunately, there is very little evidence that such a place exists, or ever existed as a matter of fact. Just because we want something to be true, doesn't make it so." The Great Oaf-Bound North, as we all know, is a vast, harsh region of middle America which encompasses the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Somewhere south of this region, Iowa or 'the land of Ioway' as it is sometimes wistfully referred to, was said to have been located. Experts now know that this middle region of North America is far from what we would call arable land - it's mostly swamps puncuated by sand dunes. "Still, it makes us feel good as we look out the plane window to believe that a lush, productive land lies underneath us." |
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Cozy farmsteads in mythical Iowa where reds and browns weave a rich autumn quilt or where green farm buildings match green trees, green corn stalks, green rushes and even a green pond - nobody really believes such color-coordinated places ever existed. Experts tell us that we create such myths because they help us to meet the demands of mundane everyday tasks like finding matching clothes to put on every morning. |
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Fat hogs lazing in the shade at an Iowa farm paint a picture of a land of plenty but the reality of this area of the country is a land of phlegmatic swamps infested with dengue fever and tse tse flies. |
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Bucolic bovines grazing in the warm sun is what we've come to believe this region offers, but in reality the poor sandy soil is only capable of supporting coarse and undigestable quackgrasses instead of luxurious shrubbery, aow, so shrubberly sittin' abso-bloomin'-lutely still. I would never budge 'till spring crept over me windowsill. Someone's 'ead restin' on my knee, who takes good care of me, aow, wouldn't it be shrubbery, shubberly, shrubberly. |
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This ancient pigskin map of Ioway Land conjures up images of agricultural abundance and relaxtion, and of prairie schooners discovering hitherto unknown lands, much as sailing ships might discover Atlantis. Scholars who have subjected the map to closer scrutiny have declared it a fake. |
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