19 – I Think You Mean Freedomville! - Travels with Walter

June 17, 2015

19 – I Think You Mean Freedomville!

The tree cover above us grows so thick that when I wake up in the middle of the night it takes a few seconds to realize that I'm not going blind. Long after dawn we wake up for good. We both feel well rested after eleven hours of sleep with the woods cool and damp and fresh and still. I can't think of a better way to start the day.

We bang over roads and shoulders turned cracked and potholed by the harsh Adirondack winters, paralleled by a snowmobile trail. Deer wander out of the woods in front of us, all lit up and glowing golden brown in the rising sun. We ride next to small ponds where a lone egret watches us pass from the far shore.

It's beautiful country out here, with the lakes, fresh air, hiking trails, and so many pine trees. But if you're the kind of person who thinks to yourself Yeah but who needs that shit? then the twin towns of Old Forge and Thendara are there for you. Instead of snuffling groundhogs and rushing streams and deep woods they're all about water parks, mini-golf courses, ice cream stands, useless gift shops, overpriced motels, and giving you dozens of places to sit and stare into the warming glow of your iPad screen.

The farther west we go, the more the hills in front of us begin to level out. Bridge construction stops traffic behind us. It means that cars fly by in a single pack that's gone in fifteen seconds and then we get five or ten minutes of open road before the next wave arrives. We eat lunch under the shaded porch of a fire station. Walter rolls around on his back in the grass before hopping into the trailer, flopping over on his side, and falling asleep. It's a slow and easy day for everyone.

We leave the highway behind at Woodgate and follow a quiet back road toward Boonville. Four cars pass us in seven miles. In their place it's butterflies of black and orange and yellow and tall trees packed close to the road's edge that cast shadows across both lanes. I don't see the houses out here, just the ends of their long driveways and the mailboxes that stand watch over them like sentries. Well, that and the yellow and orange No Trespassing signs nailed into every fourth tree, dagnabbit.

Soon the road starts to angle down. We lean hard to the left and the right to follow the tight curves. Something about the rhythm of it causes all of the hollow thoughts clanking around in my brain to gain gravity and fall away into my wake. My arms and shoulders and legs all relax and at everything seems right with the world. It's like a wonderful going-away gift from the Adirondacks.

And it gets better. We turn onto a gravel towpath and step back in time. It follows the gentle bends of a canal that might be older than anyone still living, where the grass along the edges grows as high as our saddles and ducks sun themselves along the grassy banks. Except for a peloton of eight tourists on mountain bikes and a middle-aged guy with weird facial hair we have it all to ourselves.

We stop at a laundromat in Boonville. To wash the dirty clothes I've been wearing for the last eight days, I have to change into the few clean ones I have left. I do this in the bathroom. As soon as I step out, the attendant walks in to the bathroom, picks up a can of Lysol, and starts spraying waves of chemicals back and forth from an aerosol can like she's creating some sprawling work of graffiti art. Then she stops, thinks about what she's done, and makes a few more chemical halos before waddling out the front door and speeding off in an old American-made sedan missing a few of its hubcaps. We haven't been on the road three weeks and it seems our hygiene has already sunk to biohazard levels.

After stuffing our faces on eggplant parm and a calzone, we walk up to our bikes and get ready to push on and find a place to rest our heads. But as I latch the tops of my panniers. I notice a group of people sitting on the grass in front of the drug store.

"It looks like there's a parade or something," I say to Kristen.

But it's Wednesday. That's kind of strange.

I like strange. I want to know what's behind it. And so I walk over to an official-looking guy wearing official-looking dark-tinted sunglasses and an official-looking broad-brimmed hat.

"Can you tell me what all of these people are here for?" I ask.

"Got the replica of the Vietnam War Memorial comin' through," he says. "You know, the one with the wall, the one they got in Washington with all those names on it. It's the kinda thing that goes from town to town, all over the country. And the town's have gotta compete for it. It's gonna be here for a week or two. Now in maybe ten or fifteen minutes there's gonna be a hundred or more bikes comin' through here to lead the wall into town. So that's what's goin' on."

Soon Main Street fills. There are hundreds of people on benches, leaning against the walls or sitting on the steps of closed stores, or watching from their cars with the windows rolled down. Even the guy who walks around town with a lizard perched on his shoulder shows up to watch. We see American flags big and small, American-flag patterned folding chairs, and we watch as shopkeepers adjust the flags flying above their doorways so that they hang at some ideal angle. Parents pull their children in red metal wagons and the kids all have tiny American flags with white plastic handles in their hands.

This kind of thing doesn't happen in Seattle or Portland or Los Angeles. It never has. It never will.

We hear the herd of motorcycles long before we see them. Then an escort of police and sheriff's vehicles with lights flashing appears and leads them through downtown. The air fills with the smell of burning gas and the sound of exhaust valves opening and closing at uneven intervals in the way that gives Harley-Davidsons their unique sound. When the engines rev I feel it in my chest. The bikes pass in a soft blur of tattooed arms, leather vests with intricate insignias sewn into their backs, Marine Corps and POW-MIA flags, and serious faces looking straight ahead. It goes on and on and on. There are at least two-hundred of them. There could be as many as three. Every time I look up I see more motorcycles headed our way. As the procession rumbles past it hits me that I'm flush with emotion. If all of the motorcycles stopped and someone started belting out a beautiful version of the Star-Spangled Banner I'd start weeping. There's no doubt.

I'm more surprised about it than anyone. I love my country in a more profound way than most people I know because of all I've experienced while traveling by bicycle in the last four years. For all of its flaws, I know what an incredible place it is to live and work and explore. I know how lucky I am to call America my home. But on the spectrum of what most Americans consider to be patriotism I sit on the low end of the scale. I've never owned an American flag. My family hasn't sent a son off to war for several generations. I don't feel a connection to Memorial Day or Veterans Day. I know the words to the national anthem but I never sing along or hold my hand over my heart. If handguns disappeared from every state in the union tomorrow I'd be happy. I don't even eat that much red meat anymore. But I have deep respect for what the idea of this memorial represents, what it means to the men whose lives were forever changed by what they experienced in Vietnam, and why the people of Boonville have come out to honor it.

The truck towing the replica of the wall turns the corner in front of us after all of the motorcycles have passed. It's one of the most anti-climactic things I've ever experienced. It's just a Chevy truck towing a long covered trailer with the words "The Wall" printed down the side. But of course that was never the point.

With Harley exhaust still hanging in the air we head out of town to the south. We ride past small farms with fifty-year-old tractors that still make money for their owners and country homes where each lawn looks more perfect than the one that came before. But soon the road sends us into a narrow valley. Thick woods surround us on all sides, waves of cool from streams we feel but can't see rise up from below, and we're never far from the crash and splash of a tiny waterfall. If it wasn't for the wide shoulder and lack of Busch Light cans in the ditch I'd think it was Eastern Kentucky. It's so different from this morning, so different from the rest of New York, so different from anything else that came before.

When we find a cross-country ski trail covered with overgrown grass that leads off into the woods and toward the river we pull the bikes off the road and take it. It seems like the perfect place to spend the night. But it turns out Boonville's a big enough town for people who live there to think jogging is a good idea. Not ten minutes after we finish setting up the tent and crawl inside, a couple of twenty-year-olds pass with a quiet Hello before charging off down the trail to burn some calories and make sure they're unable to walk without pain by the time they hit age sixty.

I stare off into the bushes as they disappear from view.

"We have to leave," I tell Kristen.

We think we're on state-owned land but we don't know that for sure. Those people could call the sheriff, and even if we have the right to be here we'd rather not deal with that. Or worse, they could come back with someone or something else. I know the chance of that happening is slim, because most everyone is good. But it's not a chance I'll take — ever. It's one thing to free-camp in a place like a town park, where other people are around to act as deterrent to bad things finding you. It's one thing to free-camp out in the country or in the woods when no one knows you're there. But it's something else to lay down your head in the middle of nowhere with the knowledge that two people know right where you're sleeping.

And so with the warm of the setting sun fighting against the cool of the Black River we press on. The slope of the river works in our favor, so we crank out big miles. Along the way we pass through a tiny town called Frenchville.

"Boooooo!" I yell out like I'm bitching about a bad call at a football game.

"I think you mean Freedomville!" Kristen yells back.

We're drunk on patriotism. Thanks Boonville.

We pass a lot of state forest land, but it's all steep-sloped and impossible to reach. When the road sign for Delta Lake State Park appears we hang a hard right turn and don't look back.

It isn't remote, it isn't free, and there are so many more rumbling generators and satellite dishes and flaming tiki torches than the ski trail we found earlier. But it's five feet from the water's edge, we hear a flock of geese honking into the darkness toward the far shore, and we don't have to worry about anything disturbing us in the night. Today that's enough.

Today's ride: 57 miles (92 km)
Total: 642 miles (1,033 km)

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