If you picture a story about a world-shaking time anomaly, your mind probably jumps to New York, London, Tokyo, glass towers, crowded streets, and satellite dishes on every roof.
Bus Number 43: The Midday Run does the exact opposite.
It starts in Dubuque, Iowa. Quiet streets. A squat brick bus depot that smells like cigarettes and floor wax. A river town where the Mississippi never stops being a presence in the background.
And then, on a perfectly ordinary August morning in 1955, a Greyhound bus rolls north on Highway 52 through cornfields and little Lutheran towns… and drives straight into the most impossible thing anyone there has ever seen.
By the time that bus stops again, Dubuque and nearby Elkader have gone from dots on a map to the first line in a global news story.
A Route Nobody Notices, Until Everything Breaks
Raymond Olsen’s day begins the way it always has: up at 4:47 a.m., shower, shave, bitter black coffee, and a walk through the humid Dubuque streets to the depot.
His route is the opposite of glamorous:
- 5:30 a.m. departure from Dubuque
- Fifty-three miles of Highway 52
- Rolling farmland, river towns, grain elevators, filling stations, Lutheran churches, and bars that all blur together with enough repetition
It’s a “milk run,” the kind of route kept alive mostly so farmers can get to the county seat and back before noon. Nothing about it screams destiny. It’s just the way people and paperwork move between small towns.
And that’s exactly why it hits so hard when this unremarkable stretch of two-lane blacktop becomes the site of something that feels like it should belong in a lab or a sci-fi blockbuster, not between cornfields.
Dubuque as Launchpad, Not Just Backdrop
The book doesn’t treat Dubuque as vague “Middle America.” It feels lived-in:
- Ray walking six blocks to the depot through air that smells like river water and diesel fuel
- The Mississippi running high, levees in the background, the unspoken anxiety of people who know exactly what floods can do
- A cramped bus terminal where the dispatcher works a crossword behind the ticket window while passengers drift in one by one
These details matter because they ground the surreal. When the light appears later on Highway 52, you know what “normal” looks like here: early sun over fields, familiar road signs, the same towns Ray has called out for years.
So when reality fractures, you feel the contrast sharply. This isn’t a sleek urban “anomaly.” It’s an intrusion into the most dependable, predictable route in a bus driver’s life.
The Column of Light Over the Cornfields
Ten miles south of Elkader, Ray sees it.
At first, he thinks it’s a trick of the sun, August brightness, maybe a reflection. But as the bus rolls closer, it becomes clear this is something else entirely: a vertical pillar of light, about fifty feet wide, too white, too clean, with shimmering edges that make his eyes hurt.
There’s nowhere to turn off. No alternate route. Just Highway 52 running straight into that impossible brightness. Every instinct tells him to stop, but something deeper, something he can’t name, tells him this is the way forward.
The moment the bus enters the column, the familiar Midwest world is ripped away:
- Sound vanishes completely, the diesel engine, the passengers’ voices, even the wind.
- Time stretches; movements slow to a crawl, like everyone is swimming through syrup.
- Colors twist into impossible shades, and the bus interior glows as if lit from inside the metal itself.
This isn’t just a “we jumped ahead” gimmick. The column of light feels like a violation of the everyday rules that Dubuque and Elkader citizens have relied on their entire lives.
And then, just as suddenly, it’s gone.
The corn is back. The hills are back. Highway 52 is back.
Except… something isn’t right.
Elkader, 1955, That Isn’t 1955 Anymore
When the bus rolls down the hill into Elkader, the outline of the town looks familiar: courthouse tower, brick storefronts, river cutting through the valley. This should be the same small county seat Ray has rolled into a hundred times.
But the details betray the truth:
- The cars on the road are sleeker, more aerodynamic, built in designs no one in 1955 has ever seen.
- Road signs look newer, with fonts and reflective coatings that don’t match anything Ray remembers.
- Parking meters on Main Street are digital, not mechanical, a design Ray has never seen in his life.
The true gut punch comes from something so ordinary it’s almost funny: a newspaper stand outside a gas station.
From the driver’s seat, Ray can see the date on the paper’s banner:
August 15, 1995.
Not 1955. The same day, same month, but forty years later.
Dubuque and Elkader haven’t done anything to become “special.” They’ve just kept on living. It’s the bus and its people who were ripped from their place in time. In that instant, this quiet little pocket of Iowa becomes the landing zone for something humanity has never experienced before: a time displacement event with witnesses, documentation, and living, unchanged survivors.
From County Route to Classified Facility
It doesn’t stay a local oddity for long.
Once authorities realize that the passengers of Bus 43 haven’t aged a day since 1955, while records show them missing for forty years, the story jumps from small-town jurisdiction to federal concern. The passengers are moved from rural Iowa to a secretive facility, where “The Awakening (1995)” begins in earnest.
There, behind gates and under fluorescent lights, doctors and scientists like Dr. Hartman examine them, test them, and begin to grasp that their biology has been altered in ways no one can explain.
From Dubuque’s depot to a secured military-style complex, the story tracks how a single rural bus route becomes a matter of national security, and eventually, international concern.
Fort Dearborn, introduced in Chapter 5, is where the anomaly stops being just an Iowa story. An army base, medical labs, observation rooms, suddenly these people from a 1950s small town are under the same kind of scrutiny you’d expect for astronauts or experimental pilots.
Dubuque may be where it started. Fort Dearborn is where the rest of the world fully takes notice.
Small-Town People, Global Stakes
The table of contents alone gives a sense of how far this “little” story travels:
- “The World Outside (1995)” – news coverage, public reaction, and debate about what the Bus 43 incident means for everyone, not just one county in Iowa.
- “The Plan” and “The Break” – legal teams, courtrooms, government responses, and press conferences in Chicago and Des Moines, where the fate of these time-displaced Iowans becomes a test case for human rights in the age of anomalies.
- Later chapters – international bodies like the WHO and the UN get involved, because what started as “one weird bus story” might hold the key to global protocols about enhancement, reproduction, and what qualifies as a human subject.
But even as the stage expands, Chicago law firms, UN testimony, global medical debates, the emotional center never leaves those Iowa roots. These are still Dubuque and Elkader people: farmers, ministers, widows, runaways, and a tired bus driver trying to carry passengers safely from one stop to the next.
The world may see them as:
- Evidence
- Assets
- Threats
- Miracles
But the story never stops seeing them as neighbors.
Coming Home to Where It All Began
One of the most satisfying arcs in the book is the way it eventually circles back to Elkader in 1995, this time with full awareness of what happened and what’s at stake. Chapter 13, simply titled “Elkader (1995),” tackles memorials, press, and the complicated act of returning to a town that literally watched you vanish forty years ago.
In those chapters, small-town America isn’t just the place where the anomaly occurred; it becomes the place where the meaning of that anomaly is worked out:
- How do locals honor the people they thought were dead, who are now alive and unchanged?
- How does a church congregation respond when members who vanished in 1955 walk back into the sanctuary in 1995?
- What happens when national media cameras crowd Main Street, trying to turn a town’s grief and confusion into a segment between commercials?
Those scenes answer the question in the blog title: how does small-town America become ground zero for a time anomaly?
Not just by being the location where it happens, but by being the community that has to absorb it.
Why Setting It in Iowa Makes the Story Hit Harder?
Putting a reality-breaking event over a cornfield instead of a skyscraper skyline changes everything:
- It makes the impossible feel closer, like it could happen on any quiet stretch of road you’ve driven a hundred times.
- It lets the story explore not just science, but culture, how ordinary people, churches, diners, county courts, and local papers react when something bigger than all of them crashes into their world.
- It keeps the stakes emotionally intimate, even as international agencies and global debates get involved.
In the end, Bus Number 43: The Midday Run isn’t really about a mysterious column of light.
It’s about Dubuque, Elkader, and all the places like them, towns where people trust that tomorrow will look basically like today. And it’s about what happens when, one morning, a bus leaves as usual… and comes back carrying proof that time itself can skip like a scratched record.
Next time you drive past a quiet rural bus stop or watch a coach roll through a two-stoplight town, it’s hard not to think of Highway 52, and wonder what might be waiting just over the next rise in the road.
