June 5, 1974
West Lafayette to Billings, 1974
Introduction
The full telling of this story really requires me to step back a bit, back before that ride from Bellingham to Salem; and really, back to that ride from Settle to Sun River when I was 14. Because we should at least know two things: why were we in Indiana and trying to get home anyway, and what bike am I riding? Let’s start with the bike, and see where spinning through those memory wheels takes us next.
It’s all about the bikes
I’ve finally figured out what my first bike was - it’s that red Schwinn theee speed in the corner of the photo of me waxing the car. I don’t recall now how I happened to come by it - maybe it was a Christmas present, or maybe I saved up enough from my morning paper route and selling blackberries door to door in season. In any case though I think I must have gotten it around when I entered high school (10th grade) at the age of 14. Before that I generally walked everywhere, or took the bus. My morning routine throughout junior high was to walk to school because I was a loner, was tormented by asshole guys a year or more older than me, and didn’t care for riding the school bus. Nathan Eckstein was around two and a half mpmiles away, and as I remember it I walked virtually every school day, in both directions.
This was confirmed years later when I returned to revisit this house, the first one my parents owned. The woman across the street, whose daughter Nadine was one of the kids in the Round-the-block Club I organized, still lived here and came outside to inquire and chat. And she remembered me - oh, you’re the boy who walked to school.know
The day began with me walking rhe rails on the all but abandoned line of what became the beginnings of the Burke-Gilman Trail a few years later. I would walk on top of the rails, trying to maintain my balance between 65th. And 60th streets, jumping from one rail to the other when I started to lose it. It was a major accomplishment I was proud of when I made it the entire stretch without hitting the ground for the first time; and by the end I often was able to make it the entire distance staying on one rail.
The Context
So why are we in Indiana anyway? You might recall that we were in Seattle so i could attend graduate school in the UW civil engineering department. Toward the end of summer I competed my masters thesis and ozbrained my Masters of a science in Air Pollution Engineering degree. The plan for the next two years was for me to start an air pollution program in Santiago, Chile in their professional track; and Carol Jo was accepted to accompany me, with an assignment as an English teacher.
We had just received our language training assignment and were scheduled to leave for Puerto Rico, and had begun consolidating or liquidating our belongings in preparation for departure. As the final step we went in to Carol’s part time employer Mr Lukoff, a real estate agent who paid CJ to clip quit claim notices out of the local papers.
He shook his head and showed us the day’s headline on the Seattle Times: Chile’s government had just been overthrown in a coup orchestrated by Auguepse Pinochet. The former president, Salvador Allende, was epimprisoned in a stadium with his supporters; so overnight we were left without a plan.
I forget how quickly a new plan formed, but it consisted of us moving back east to Wsr Lafayette where we would join an intentional community. Other members would be George, a faculty member at Purdue; Dick Curtis (Curtis, a to everyone referred to him), Dan, and Melissa. We knew Didk already from his friendship with my coworker adennis who graduated from the same program, as well as his friend Dan. The five of us had known each other throughout the summer and would often go to see films at the Harvard Exit and then discuss them over coffee, chocolate mousse and other beverages at a cafe on Broadway.
We relocated to Indiana by riding in the back of Dennis’s shiny canvasback red Jeep. DN and Dennis rode in front, while Carol and a sat sidesaddle in the back, with Dennis’s dog separating us. It was quite cozy. Trailing the jeep qpwa a small U-Haul trailer, just large enough for Adan and Dennis’s belongings with a small space left for whatever CJ and I could cram in behind.
It was a remarkable ride, with one memorable moment afte another. In Walla Walla or the Tri-Cities I saw the first hops of my life. I asked someone what they were and was quickly told “Them’s the hops.”. In Idaho we biked across the desert fo see the world famous Balanced Rock, a feature on our Rand McNally atlas. We felt gypped when we arrived and found it propped up by a brick foundation, but worst was the fine dust - it infiltrated absolutely everything, including may container of natural, oily peanut butter.
In Salt Lake City there’s a silouhette photo back in storage of the five of us. (Including the dog) on the salt flats.
In the Washatche Mountains we stopped in a town looking for a place to stay. We asked at the gas station, when suddenly a man emerged from the hood of the car and told us to go to Rosies’s place. And so we did,
Rosie wasn’t in at the moment but a dozen or so others were, and were for the most part stoned. They welcomed us in, we found a free space on the carpet and lay down for the night surrounded by mushrooms speouting from it. In the morning Rosie was back and preparing breakfast for the masses, lumbering around with her leg in a cast. Suddenly a man entered, announced that he’d just been laid off from his work, and a major celebration ensued.
We crosse Kansas on the I-70 Interstate at night, a long, long, long highway that was mostly straight. It made Kansas seem like the most unattractive place in the country.
Life in Indiana
We lived in a large, welcoming multistory Victorian house a few blocks from Purdue. There were six of us, and in many ways it was a wonderful experience unlike any other time in my life. Most days began with all of us at breakfast, and throughout the day there was always something happening and the opportunity to either engage in conversation or find privacy somewhere.
Carol and I both worked: she in the public library and in a pizza restaurant and I at an electronics component factory on the east side of the river. On most days I biked to work on the new Motobecane I bought not long after we arrived, commuting about three miles to a job where I worked my way up up to a fork lift operator. Work alternated between loading pallets of new coils and such and then hiding in the niches reading a book - I think it’s there that I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
i biked to work throughout the winter, the ground often covered in snow. One day I went steaighr sideways on a patch of black ice.
George, the electrical engineering professor, was also the lead oboist for the symphony. For my birthday he invited me to listen to his string quartet rehearse in our chamber.
The bicycle:
I rode west on a Motobecane Grand Record that I bought in West Lafayette at a bike store near Purdue University soon after we arrived in the previous fall, bikeless after riding east from Seattle in the back of the jeep.
I found before and after photos of what I’m sure is the same bike, a beautifully restored one like mine in this Bike Forum link. It’s a French 10 speed, with the same paint scheme as shown in the restored version. Really, it could have been my bike and it makes me wonder where he picked it up.
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Departure
I don’t recall now where the idea to bike home came from, but the plan was that CJ and Curtis would drive west to meet me after school was out in mid-June. Throughout the spring I was on my bike most afternoons, off on training rides. In early June I was interviewed and featured in the local newspaper, and a few days later I was off - no helmet, probably black converse tennis shoes, a bicycle cap but no helmet, and a small rucksack on my back.
Day 1: Bloomington (120 miles, 2,500’)
Lodging: dormitory at the (Illinois State University)
Other recollections: I stopped at a used book store in Hoopeston, where I found a new hardback title to add to Carol Jo’s nearly complete collection of E.D.E.N. Southworth romances, probably a first edition. I don’t recall now, but I think I must have just tossed in the rucksack and carried it the next 1,400 miles for extra ballast.
Day 2: Canton (62 miles, 1,400’)
Lodging: sleeping on a couch in a dormitory at the Illinois State University
Other recollections: somewhere west of Bloomington I was climbing through the woods and a hawk flew across the road from between the trees, not far in front of me at all, with a snake dangling from his talons.
Day 3: Fort Madison (74 miles, 1,500’)
Lodging: a local jail overlooking the Mississippi River above the mouth of Penitentiary Creek. I slept with the door open watching the sun set over the river and just biked off at dawn the next morning.
Day 4: Centerville (90 miles, 3,400’)
Lodging: a cheap motel below Route 2, rhe cross-state highway that spans southern Iowa just above the Missouri state line.
Other recollections: in rhe morning I walked up to the highway for breakfast in a diner in a mobile home. I and everyone else there were served massive truckwheel sized pancakes with aspirin on top, under the assumption that everyone was hung over.
And Route 2! The highway from hell, one of the toughest rides of my life. Three plus days biking into a headwind across one steep, cursed summit after another (southern Iowa ain’t flat!). I must have summited every three miles daily for the next three hundred miles. Two lanes, no shoulder. Worst though was the surface - a seam in the road every ten or twenty yards - whump, whump, whump! I got a disabling case of butt acne and wondered if it would be the end or the tour.
Day 5: Mount Ayr (73 miles, 4,000’)
Lodging: another cheap motel. And this is probably as good a time as any to say that I completed the tour on an under $8/day budget.
Other recollections: Route 2. Yesterday was awful, today it started to get serious.
Day 6: Clarinda (50 miles, 2,400’)
Lodging: yet another cheap hotel.
Other recollections: this is the town where I finally decided I was desperate enough to go to a pharmacy and explain to the nice lady what my problem was. A bottle of baby powder got added to the kit, and by the time I made Nebraska I was fine again.
Day 7: Lincoln (100 miles, 4,900’)
Lodging: fhe standard - another cheapo motel.
Other recollections: endless feedlots, for mile after mile.
Day 8: York (53 miles, 2,300’)
Lodging: sleeping on the couch of a nearly empty York University, closed for the summer.
Other recollections: in Norhern Nebraska now, on Highway two again, but a different Highway 2. The highway to heaven, the highway from hell.
Day 9: Broken Bow (130 miles, 3,400’)
Lodging: Another motel. I wonder what I did about meals though? Probably countless peanut butter sandwiches, truck stops, and quarts of milk.
Other recollections: Highway 2 - the road to heaven in Nebraska, the road from hell in Iowa.
Day 10: Mullen (70 miles, 1,300’)
Lodging: on a couch in the minister’s house, where I was invited by his son, a young man I met at the bar. After we left he and his friend took me for a spin doing ‘kitties’, driving at high speed in the dust in a small, tight circle and creating a dense dust cyclone you couldn’t see through. A unique experience.
Day 11: Thedford
Lodging: cheap motel, cheap eats. I forget now but I think motels in these towns ran about $2-3.
Other recollections: more of the same, in the best of all senses. Well, all but one. I’m biking the wrong direction, into a headwind ever since leaving Indiana.
Day 12: Alliance
Lodging: rhe city drunk tank, another unique experience. White lights, white walls, a stark night that was fine until around 2 AM when the town drunk came to join me. I spent the next hour listening to him try to die until he finally went comatose. In the morning they brought two brown bag breakfasts for us, and while he slept on I enjoyed my pastry and coffee before moving on.
Other recollections: it rained, hard. Hard enough for me to leave the highway and seek shelter on the porch of a ranch house at Hyannis. Afterwards I had one of those eidetic memories that I sometimes have, often associated with wildlife sightings like that blue tailed skink in a cemetery in the the northern panhandle of W. Va. When I was about 9. This one was a pod of Wilson’s phalaropes eddying in a smal circle in a pothole beside the road, stirring up a meal much like shovelers do.
Day 12: Chadron
Lodging: motel
Other recollections: one of the few days when nothing specific comes back. No Seth through the grasslands, heading for the order and the Black Hills.
Day 13: Custer
Lodging: motel
Other recollections: The high point of the tour, at the summit of Mount Rushmore, a spot I last saw almost twenty years earlier when we drove back to Seattle in our black 1949 Chevy. Dad always wanted to see Rushmore and Yellowstone, but after the Black Hills Yellowstone got Xed out because tHe car would never have made it. Near the summit it overheated and we had to stop by the side of the road. While the family waited for the car to cool down I first checked the grill to look for any interesting new dead bugs that might have gotten wedged in and then wandered off to the woods and found a large boulder - maybe football sized? - and promptly smashed it open to see what was inside: a bright pink rose quartz, a chunk of which went up home with me. It’s one of my oldest souvenirs.
Big climb, followed by a fast drop to Custer.
Day 14:Broadus (195 miles, 7,800’)
Lodging: dirt cheap motel
Other recollections: Oh my god. What an epic day, one I’ve thought about over and over again ever since. It began with a 40 mile drop to Rapid City, where I’d planned to spend the night but decided it made no sense since I’d just been coasting for the last 40 miles. Another 30 and Sturgis is also given a pass. When I get to Belle Fourche not long before sundown though a huge east wind picks up - rhe first and only real tailwind of the tour and I can’t bear to let it go so I continue on - to Broadus, nearly another hundred miles to the northwest in Montana.
I’m not far into this near century when sundown comes, and by the time I reach Broadus it must be 11 at night. It’s an absolutely black moonless night by the time I arrive, relieved to be alive and to find an open motel. On the way I stop three times for nourishment. It’s the same in all three stops: Belle Fourche, Hammond and Alzada. A peace of pecan pie and vanilla ice cream, and I’m off again.
Perhaps midway to Hammond and just before dark I’m shocked and thrilled by a herd of pronghorns that race across the highway maybe fifty yards in front of me. After that though it really is lights out - on the road, in the sky, all around, and I’ve no lights (or helmet ) on me. In retrospect it’s a wonder I’m still alive to tell the tale. For the next 60 miles I’m blown uphill at maybe 25 mph by this enormous tailwind that must be near gale force, on a straight line that I can only maintain by tailing the latest long haul trucker to pass me by. I use it as a pilot car to maintain my line until it finally disappears far ahead, but by then the next one approaches from behind, I get well off the road until it blasts past, and then repeat the cycle. A long, terrifying, exhilarating night. Of all the absolutely unique experiences of this tour, this is the one that stands above them all in my memory.
Day 15:Broadus (20 miles, minimal elevation gain)
Lodging: the same dirt cheap motel
Other recollections: The weather changed. It’s a headwind now, and probably a more ferocious one than last night. I get at best ten miles before concluding that cycling is impossible - I can’t bike into it, and I’m getting sand blasted - so i turn back and sit out the day.
Day 16: Hardin (120 miles,7,000’)
Lodging: a cheap motel, shared with Carol Jo and Curtis
Other recollections: Two things. In Crow Agency I stop to watch the native children play war games. Scantily dressed, they’re tossing wooden spears at each other. And in Hardin of course, there’s the reunion with Carol Jo and Curtis, and all the associated complex emotions that came with it. The plan worked! In an age with no electronics or meaningful method of communication, here we are 1,500 miles from home in the middle of nowhere, greeting each other almost giddily. For me it’s the first familiar faces I’ve seen in two weeks. Also though, there’s the uncertainty. After two weeks of absolute independence, how is this final third of the ride going to go?What kind of shape is Curtis in? How will it be sharing the experience? We’ll find out soon.
Day 17: Billings (50 miles, 2,000’)
Lodging: motel
Other recollections: First, the good news. Curtis has done his homework and came prepared to ride. We put 50 miles in with some climbing and into the headwinds, but we get it done. We budgeted 50 miles so we’re right on track.
The bad news: when we bike into Billings and see Carol Jo waiting there, it’s lightly snowing. And just like that, the ride comes to an end.
Epilogue
Let’s just say that the tour didn’t quite wrap up as expected. First, there’s the obvious disappointment of not seeing it through to the end. And in fact, I’ve always felt convinced that if I’d ridden the whole way alone I would have made it. I’m at least two or three days ahead of schedule, the snow is fleeting, and I’ve proven very lucky with the weather even with the nearly incessant headwind. I think for much of my life I’ve regretted the plan to ride the last part of the tour together, but I’ve come to feel differently about it in revisiting it here. There are several things that make it seem like ending in Billings was the right decision. For one there’s the big unknown about the snow. We couldn’t just pull up Weather.com to get a radar view into the days ahead. And there’s the big unknown of the fact that it’s Dick’s car, the conditions are uncertain, and there’s probably some anxiety on both Dick and CJ’s part about how she’ll do driving in them. Disappointing or not, it feels like the right call was made.
Back home, let’s just save some time and hit a few of the obvious points. As it turns out, I’m not destined to be a great environmentalist and save the world because in fact I have no marketing or self promotional skills and no idea about how to find employment. Instead, Carol Jo and I move back to Capitol Hill again, and the next year finds me making pizzas as a shift manager at Pizza Pete.
While I’m there, one day I see a flyer on a telephone pole that will have significance later in life: an advertisement for Rodriguez bicycles, which just went into production a year or two earlier. I want one of those badly, but I’m making pizzas so that’s not happening.
Most of our income is produced by Carol, who has taken up employment again as a service rep with the phone company.
Were still of a mind a try to set up a communal household. There is Curtis, and Dennis and Linda, and a street musician named Brian that we came across down in Oldtown somewhere. Brian comes with occasional visits with his girlfriend Jessica, who proves to be a full-throated, passionate screamer who shocks us all awake in the middle of the night every time she’s around. Community meetings convene to discuss the situation, and soon Brian moves on.
And there’s one more thing. We haven’t been back long when the Washington State adoption agency calls to let us that after several years of waiting our number has come up. Not long afterwards a two year old Shawn comes to live with us, and that really does change everything.
In memorium
Richard A. Curtis, Ph.D.
July 17, 1942 — May 27, 2006
Richard A. Curtis, Ph.D. of Dover, Ohio passed away Saturday, May 27, 2006 following a short bout with cancer. He was born in Dover on July 17, 1942 to Edith L. Curtis and Rowland Gerald Curtis, Sr. He was preceded in death by his parents and by two sisters, Dorothy A. Archinal and Grace M. Terry. He is survived by a sister, Shirley J. Mumaw of Akron, Ohio and a brother, Rowland Gerald Curtis, Jr. of Canton, Ohio as well as by eight nieces and nephews, including Marylynn Holt of Akron, Ohio and Michael Mumaw of Chicago, Illinois.Dr. Curtis graduated from Case Institute of Technology in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science in engineering science; from Cornell University in 1965 with a Master of Engineering (Aerospace); and from Cornell University in 1968 with a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. His career included several stints with the U.S. Government under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research; industrial consulting in the area of filtration and separations technology; and a number of teaching positions, including a period in the department of Aeronautics, Astronautics, and Engineering Science at Purdue University, and, most recently, with Kent State University, where he taught in the mathematics department at the Stark Campus.
Today's ride: 1 mile (2 km)
Total: 606 miles (975 km)
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