Las Milpas en Iowa

What do I visualize when I think of Iowa except, like everyone, a cartoon image of it: corn and pigs and big healthy farmers who eat hearty American food. I’m on my flight out of the Dallas–Fort Worth hub, on a regional ER4 jet, a 50-seater, and I’ve got the single-side on aisle 12, the emergency exit, with the extra leg room. The two-seat side on my right is empty up to the very last minute, when a huge, healthy man who moves into it before take-off. He has to be six-five easy, 250 minimum, but I wouldn’t call him fat, anymore than I’d dare to call the Red Sox’s David Ortiz fat. Medically too heavy, he’s not anyway weak or soft. He’s a friendly guy too, smiles at me like we’re onto it like a stash, us big guys, and all those others are not—might as well enjoy the ride, he tells me. He reads a newspaper slowly, the not very taxing USA Today, though there’s a lot in it, lots of sections, and at least he’s reading, that skill becoming more and more rarified. What I see are his hands. Oversized too, wrinkled and thickened by work. Up above a few rows is another Iowan. A man so huge I can’t see how he isn’t making the plane dip. There are so many other passengers who are not small on this small plane. Iowa, or I’m used to flights out of shorter cultures?

When we land, I call my friend Mando, who is due to pick me up. “El aguila ha tortillado,” I joke. Lately we’ve been stuffing bad words into a tortilla. “I’ll be there in ten, tortillero.” As I stand and move to the aisle, not having to watch my head as much as my row 12 partner, out of nowhere an older woman appears two rows ahead on the two-seat side. She is staring at me like she overheard. I didn’t see her before because, seated, her head was beneath the headrest, hidden. Con una cara morena, a dark face classic of historic Mexico, she would make a perfect tourist painting. She wasn’t much higher than the headrest now either, standing. We file out, through the exit billows, into the airport market corridor, signs with arrows from the ceilings. She is ahead of me, walking slow, many looping around her, look side to side, and I when I reach her side it seems to me she is waiting for me to catch up. “¿Vas a la mochila?” she asks me. I assume she’s meaning the baggage area, so I tell her that and to just follow me. “¿A la mochila?” She’s almost frightened about getting lost, because a couple of times we’ve had to curve around people and make a turn. Yes, straight ahead, it’s a walk, it’s usually a long walk in airports, it’s more in front of us, and we’re going there, I have baggage too, I have a suitcase. This appeases her, she’s walking faster, I’m walking slower, we travel side by side. It’s nothing but summer from below Dallas and above Iowa and to the east and west, it’s too warm even inside, and she is wearing a thin pink sweater over her flowery black dress that seems to bury her shoes. Her trenza, her black and gray braid, reaches below the middle of her back.

She’s from Guadalajara, and it’s her first time here, not Iowa, not the United States, and it was only five hours. She’s still tense. Thinking maybe it was immigration or customs lines she’s worrying about, I tell her that she passed through that once, when she went through Dallas—thinking maybe this is a worry. And she’s never been on an escalator. I have to show her. I want to hold her hand, but don’t want to be too forward. I have to...