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Title : Tall stack. Small town.
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Tall stack. Small town.

[By Marcia Milner-Brage in Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA]

 The Cedar Falls Utilities smokestack is tall. It’s the tallest structure in my small city. We have no skyscrapers. No other chimneys that come close in height. There is no great variation in elevation here. No mountains to put its man-made height into perspective. From much of the town, the stack is a point of reference. It is a landmark that orients us to where we are. In Lisbon, it would be Cristo Rei. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower. In Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument. In NYC, it was the World Trade Center. Unlike those famous towering landmarks, created to inspire, our smokestack was erected for one, totally functional purpose: to burn coal for electricity. But whatever the reason for its presence, something tall in our urban environment prompts us to look higher than the predominant horizon line. Something tall pins us to the sky.

The City of Cedar Falls is on a broad floodplain of the Cedar River. We are within the larger landmass at the center of the United States, the Great Plains. Yes, it’s flat here. Cedar Falls Utilities, with its tall stack, is located close to the river. (see above). It is improbably tall for such a small, flat town.

The smokestack still burns some coal, but more often it now uses cleaner fuel, like natural gas, biomass or wind. There are train tracks leading to our electricity plant. Coal cars are parked there most of the time (above). We have a smokestack that rarely emits smoke. That only happens when coal is the fuel.

Recently, the long winter yielded to a late spring, temperatures rose and I was once again able to stand outside to sketch, I wandered the neighborhood, hunting for angles of view that included the smokestack, where the Cedar Falls Utilities smokestack was a backdrop.

As I walk down the sidewalk alongside my house,  I spy the Utilities' chimney beyond the house across the street. At night, from this same vantage, one sees the flashing red and white lights on the very top of the smokestack.

I’ve lived here long enough to know that once the leaves emerge, the smokestack will not be as readily seen. Our streets are lined with mature trees. Here’s the first drawing of this recent series (above), a glimpse of the smokestack from Clay and 15th Street done ten days ago. I’ll have to check this spot out come summer when the trees have fully unfurled their canopies, to see what I can see.

On one of my recent, daily walks, I glimpsed the stack above these one-story houses. A willow, with its signature yellow–not from leaves but from its downward draping branches, added color to our painfully late spring.

Cedar Falls is a town of many churches. Most have steeples. This one, seen from a block away, is on Main Street. It was the Old Bethlehem Church, then it changed to the Grace Community Church, Then Prairie Springs Church occupied part of it. Now it’s no longer a church. It’s been converted to apartment lofts. Yet it is unmistakable church-like. The recently refurbished copper-topped spire still has its cross.

Find a view that includes the smokestack and find a facet of our town. Often, it’s not anything grand or inherently beautiful, but a view that defines our ordinariness. The ever-straight smokestack accentuates this precariously slanted utility pole. On my way back from buying cream for my morning coffee, I spotted the relationship of these two verticals, visually connected by the horizontal wires.

Unfortunately, a north-south highway bisects our town. (I don’t like the constant drone of traffic!) The highway is elevated as it crosses Dry Run Creek which soon after enters the Cedar River. The elevated roadway passes alongside the power plant. A spur of the City’s extensive bike trails goes under the highway.

Viking Pump, the building beyond the parked cars, is one of the original industries to secure Cedar Falls as a thriving community. In the early 20th century, three prominent settlers started the company to manufacture pumps to remove seeping ground water from the rock quarries being dug here. Viking Pump is now an international conglomerate. This is its corporate headquarters. It’s in the small downtown area called the Parkade. This parking lot is new and offers a new sightline on the two-story brick building and the more distant smokestack.

All of the above were done in the past ten days in my pocket-size Moleskin. But I have a stash of older drawings that include the smokestack. One I’ll include here from April 2010, because it illustrates another important function of Cedar Falls’ tall smokestack: it’s the perch for the vultures. Contrary to popular belief, robins are not the first birds to arrive in town to herald spring, the vultures are. And until they leave for warmer climes in the autumn, they use the two catwalks on the chimney as their roost and are seen circling it.

Hopefully, these drawings speak to this smokestack being a core to our city. In previous times, a fortified citadel might have stood at a highpoint of a city’s center, insuring the life of the community. In our modern times here in Cedar Falls, our smokestack and the electricity it helps to generate are what we need.

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