It has been difficult to drive this summer in the southeast corner of downtown. The streets are so torn up, the effort looks so frantic, one wonders if the mayor lost his keys and pushed the panic button. But no, it’s an expensive effort to improve the infrastructure.

On the extra-challenging day of the State Fair parade last week, I tried to dodge the gridlock via West Martin Luther King Parkway – you know, the easternmost section of MLK – but even that had its hazards. Almost 9,000 people were beginning to arrive for an Iowa Cubs baseball game. They moved slowly, of course, because anyone who intends to visit the concession stand needs to bring along a small suitcase full of cash.

Then it got still more challenging, as I foolishly went on east past the Fairgrounds and saw what the world would look like if every adult were required to drive a big pickup truck and tow a long livestock trailer.

Then we went to Jethro’s BBQ & Jake’s Smokehouse Steaks in Altoona, which was jam-packed on a Wednesday night.

Throngs of people working and playing everywhere. And yet, the stock market dropped 500 points that day.

They tell you to invest based on what you see around you, but maybe it’s not that simple. Look around here, and you wouldn’t think you were living in a time of economic angst.

Out in the countryside, the soybean fields are lush, and the cornfields are packed so tight the leaves can hardly rustle. The farmers are itching to harvest crops destined to draw fabulous prices.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove through lots of that countryside to drop off and pick up our son at a camp at Wartburg College, where soccer camp bumps into choir camp, which bumps into cross-country camp, and on and on all summer long. Hundreds of kids take part, and their families pay hundreds of dollars apiece. It’s the same at the other colleges.

The southern entry to Waverly, by the way, is being extensively revamped. On the first round trip, I tried to come back through Parkersburg, but Iowa Highway 14 was closed for improvements, too.

On the final trip home, we sat at a railroad crossing west of Marshalltown while a 150-car train laden with coal thundered eastward at 60 miles per hour, the very image of a busy, prosperous nation.

Maybe it’s especially hard to tell from here. We used to ask our parents what the Great Depression was like in Iowa, but they didn’t come up with anything too dramatic. They got their first lawn mower off a truck headed for the dump, but otherwise it was just that “nobody had any money,” my mother would say.

Old photographs show people standing in soup lines, but that was in the big cities. Rural and small-town Iowa got off easier, they say.

Whether it was because of a suddenly booming market for tanks and landing craft, or maybe somebody moved a decimal point somewhere, the Depression finally went away. However, the habit of living modestly hung on for a while. In the late 1950s, I was still wearing patched jeans and shirts that my mother made on her sewing machine, and nobody made fun of me. Well, they made fun of me, but not because of the clothes.

The United States steadily got richer, and today, American families classified as living in poverty have DVD players and air conditioning.

However, judging by the gyrating stock market, we haven’t hit upon the perfect economic model yet. So all we can do is fix roads, plant corn and dine out until the whole thing falls apart – then we’ll try to remember where we put our sewing machines.

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com