Talking Community and Caucuses at the Waveland Cafe

DES MOINES, Iowa — It isn’t difficult to feel at home at the Waveland Cafe.

The waitresses greet everyone as if they’d welcomed all of them a hundred times before, and if you happen to sit at the counter rather than take up a table, a copy of the Des Moines Register stands ready for reading.

What’s more, the place is packed with people from the neighborhood — no doubt drawn as much by the feeling of camaraderie that permeates the place as by the hefty portions and near legendary hash browns that come from the back kitchen.

No one says, “Thanks, come again soon,” as a diner leaves the Waveland Cafe.

Instead, one is much more likely to hear a “love you” shouted toward the slowly departing patron. “Be careful out there.”

And it doesn’t hurt that the place is a regular breakfast stop for hometown hero Jason Momoa — “Aquaman” to you and me — who grew up in nearby Norwalk, Iowa, after his parents’ divorce.

A picture of a very young, muscled and shirtless Momoa, who played soccer for the Norwalk High School team, hangs near the chocolate milk machine.

He even has a breakfast named after him. “Breakfast Momoa Style” is a full order of hash browns, topped with a full order of biscuits and gravy, two sunny-side-up eggs and a side of bacon.

“So how are the caucuses treating you?” we asked our waitress, Molly, as she brought over a massive order of pancakes, bacon, sausage and, of course, the hash browns.

“We had a crew from CBS in here this morning, but nobody was really talking to them,” she said.

“You kind of have to ask the question the right way if you really want people to start talking, and they didn’t do that,” she said.

“If you ask, ‘Are you caucusing?’ Everyone’s going to say no, you know what I mean?” she said as she continued to move quickly from customer to customer, taking an order, delivering another and even fetching someone the Mountain Dew they wanted to drink with breakfast.

“It’s not that people want to give reporters a hard time,” Molly said. “And I told them, if you want people to open up, approach it a different way. But they didn’t listen, so nobody really talked.

“They were here for maybe 40 minutes before they finally gave up.”

Molly, who has worked at the Waveland for six years, admitted she’s not the biggest follower of things political.

“I don’t even know when the caucuses are this year,” she said.

“Monday night? This coming Monday night?” she said almost in disbelief when told they were right around the corner.

“Truthfully, we’ve been paying a lot more attention to all these snow storms we’ve been having lately. Business has been kind of dead since right after Christmas, so hopefully it’ll pick up after the next storm passes.”

Molly was asked if, in light of her attitude toward the caucuses, she found it strange that reporters, political pundits and out-of-towners found the whole thing so fascinating.

“Well, why are you so fascinated?” she asked.

There was a bit of talk that included words like “unique” and “first” and finally, the observation that while most voters across the country feel they have the sacred right to keep their political preferences private, Iowans actually declare the candidate they support out loud.

“I guess some people think, ‘What the hell are these crazy people doing?’ But I don’t find it weird at all,” Molly said. “I think that people here feel that they have a voice and they want to be heard and they want their opinions to matter.

“They don’t want to hide behind … whatever. It matters to people here that they can openly express themselves,” she said.

Nearby Eric, his son Wyatt and his daughter’s boyfriend Tom — Tom from Indiana — were enjoying their breakfasts.

Soon Eric and I were talking about the weather, and how well the city of Des Moines and its residents seem to deal with it.

“Well one thing you’ll notice is everyone here has four-wheel drive,” he said.

“But the city is also very good about getting the plows out and keeping the roads as clear as possible,” he said.

Soon, the conversation with Eric picked up where the conversation with Molly left off.

“I heard you asking about the attention the Iowa Caucuses get,” he said. “I think part of the reason it gets so much attention has to do with our being a relatively small state.

“You don’t have to be super wealthy to be able to come around and get to speak to people who are going to be casting the votes,” he said.

“The other thing is, as far as people in Iowa are concerned, we are a population who, even if we’re only mildly interested, we go and see every one of the candidates — sometimes you might even go multiple times.

“And there are a couple of opportunities here that make it very easy for voters and candidates to interact — like the Iowa State Fair, where they come walking by and you can go up and ask them a couple of questions,” he added.

Eric admitted that he doesn’t go to the state fair as much as he did when he was kid, but he said he still considers it a crucial measure of a candidate.

“Oh, I’ve often known whether or not I’d ultimately vote for someone based solely on an encounter at the fair,” he said. “And I’m not sure candidates really understand that.

“A lot of people form negative opinions about candidates — and never entirely get over them — solely based on the fact the candidate wasn’t very approachable or personable during a single encounter at the fairgrounds.

“I mean, you know when someone is genuinely paying attention to you and when they are just going through the motions. And that makes a big difference when you’re considering voting for someone to be the president of the United States.”

Later, Eric added: “Of course, that doesn’t mean everybody makes up their mind quickly. I mean, the polls make this current year look like a majority of people are going to go in one direction, but if you go back to as recently as 2016 and really look at what happened, people were still making decisions right up to the caucuses … because there wasn’t a clear frontrunner.”

Molly returned with a coffee refill, just as Nikki Haley’s recent apparent surge was being discussed.

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” Molly said.

“Do what?”

“A woman president.”

“Huh?”

“Women run off their emotions,” she said before moving on to other customers.

With that, we returned to the subject of the Waveland Cafe itself.

While Wyatt and his dad had gone with the biscuits and gravy, Tom was working on a bacon cheeseburger and fries.

“I think a big part of the appeal of this place is you can look at a dish being taken to another table and you think, ‘I never had it. I’ll never order it. But I’m sure it’s delicious because this place makes really good food.’

“The other thing is you feel a connection with the people,” Eric said. “You might have noticed the waitress who was talking to us when we first came in.

“She started here as a teenager and she’s still here, in her late 20s, and so, she remembers how small Wyatt was the first time she met him, that kind of thing. And it’s not like I come in here every week. We come maybe once a month, but the waitresses here are Facebook friends with my wife,” Eric said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue