Somewhere between those two extremes, recent news suggests that an arsonist in south central Iowa is intent on erasing a literary landmark from the state's landscape. When one of the historic covered bridges in Madison County burned last year, the connection with Robert James Waller's "slim" but profitable novel, The Bridges of Madison County, could have been dismissed as a coincidence. But the subsequent fire damage of another bridge featured in the novel, and more recently the torching of the house featured in the Clint Eastwood movie adaptation, just before the county's annual covered-bridge festival, make the destructive intent inescapable. The serial arson is fanned by some sort of perverse literary backdraft. There, as in Dyersville, literature is itself altering the landscape of Iowa.
The multiplied ironies of this landscape transformation seem entirely appropriate in Iowa, which in the popular cultural construction is a location virtually WITHOUT landscape -essentially one big, flat, bleak, featureless bean field, where children do well in school because there is nothing on the horizon to distract their attention.
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