One of my best memories from Iowa is when we set the GPS on “least use of freeways”. Country was playing on the car stereo and corn followed us along the way. In the northern part of Iowa, the corn was some one meter high and still green; the further south we got, the higher it went, and the drier it was. I played A soft place to fall and leaned back against the car seat. Now and then, the corn was interrupted by roads, always completely straight, like someone had just drawn them up with a ruler. I guess it’s possible to do that if all you’ve got is flat ground.

No other song is so intimately linked to Iowa and my book as A soft place to fall by Allison Moorer. I still love it, which is probably a good thing seeing as I have it tattooed on my shoulder. Literal people sometimes point out to me that the shoulder is not a soft place to fall on. “That may be so”, I reply, “but it just felt indignified to tattoo it on my stomach.”- “Or your ass”, some less polite people might reply.

A soft place to fall is part of the movie soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer and what might be my favorite movie dance scene ever (after Dirty Dancing, of course. No one puts Baby in a corner). It’s also the starting shot, the first flicker of an idea, to my book The Readers of Broken Wheel recommend. For a long time I used the song title as a working title (“So you used your working title as a tattoo? Shouldn’t you have waited for the final version?”)

And here I am. Amongst corn and a soft place to fall and straight roads and anti-abortion signs which shows up depressingly often in this Christian Iowa, reminding me not to idealize it too much.

I still  think all of us need it sometimes, a soft place to fall. And I still think that often, it’s all we’re ever looking for.