June 23, 2015
25 – It's a Hell of a Way to See the Country
We plan to leave early but thunderstorms roll in and put a hex on that plan. They make it so warm and humid that when we step outside at a quarter to ten that Kristen's sunglasses start to fog up within ten seconds of going on her face.
As great as it's been to get rested and clean, it's time to move. More than 3,000 miles of America still wait for us. But standing in our way is the fact that Ithaca sits at the bottom of a bowl with steep sides all around it. To get out we have to go up — way up. The first couple of miles are like trying to pedal over a mountain without the help of a trail. I work as hard as I can to sustain three miles per hour. Kristen gets light in the head and almost passes out more than once. Our sweat starts to sweat. I can't help but wonder if we'll see wildlings when we reach the top. And all of this happens as cars and trucks pass within two feet of our panniers on a narrow road that has no business carrying as much traffic as it does.
But we make it. Somehow we always do. And just across the street from the top sits a gas station where we can get Twix bars and a giant can of sugary iced tea. It only takes a few minutes before everything feels right with the world again. When we turn around to figure out where we came from we realize that Ithaca's already so far down we can't see it anymore. We've gone all of two miles.
I have this hole on the left butt cheek area of one of my pairs of shorts. You can't see the cheek because I wear padded cycling shorts underneath, but the hole is still a problem because it tends to catch on the nose of my saddle when I hop up to start pedaling. And every time it catches I hear it rip a little more. Some time last week I described the thing not as a gaping hole on the ass of my shorts but just as my gaping ass hole. Hilarity soon followed.
But in true Jeff fashion, because Kristen hates the term so much I keep using it every chance I get. Like today, when I get up after sitting down in some wet grass next to the road. "Oh no!" I call out to her. "My gaping ass hole's all wet!" I get a scrunched face of disapproval pointed back at me. The same thing happens when we pass a library and I insist on calling it a libary. As a librarian, Kristen hates this one almost as much as the first. These are just a couple of the small and underrated joys that come with riding across America with someone else instead of alone.
Even though we're not that far from Ithaca, rural life surrounds us. There are the twenty-two-year-old women who are already mothers to three screaming children. There are the overweight guys with tribal tattoos on their arms who talk about what engine mods to make to their lowered Japanese shitboxes to help them go faster. Cars idle for fifteen minutes for no obvious reason in front of the mini-marts. I try to figure out if a confederate flag flying on a house in upstate New York could mean anything beyond I'm a racist and I want everyone to know it.
But this part of rural New York is also a place of well-kept parks named after important dead locals. It's a place of attractive baseball diamonds where dads help their sons work on hitting and every eight seconds the metallic ping of a baseball on an aluminum bat echoes around the neighborhood. An old guy on a John Deere riding lawn mower waves to me as he pulls it into the sheet metal garage that towers over his modest one-story home. When we pass by certain farms we watch the planted grasses ripple and wave on the headwinds like the surface of an exposed ocean bay.
This place is beautiful and strange and interesting and maddening all at the same time. I think that's why I love it so much.
In Spencer we find a filtered water machine in the middle of a parking lot all on its own. With the high humidity we've already gone through a gallon of water each, so we stop to refill. In the parking lot two young kids see us walking toward them and say, "Hey, look! We're stuck together!" And they are, with bungee cords they took from their dad's car as he tries to fill five-gallon plastic jugs from a machine that keeps eating his money.
Kristen talks with the kids. River is the boy and looks about six. Shaman is his sister and no older than four. Kristen mentions that we're riding across the whole United States on our bicycles. River thinks about this for half a second and says with a serious tone, "Today?" The kids aren't shy. We learn that River likes dinosaurs, and triceratops most of all. Shaman likes the rain because she gets wet. They had a dog, but it died. They had a grandma, but she died. River lost a tooth the other day and got a nickel, a dime, and a half dollar from the tooth fairy.
I talk with the dad, who has a wild mop of semi-curled hair on his head and ripped Carhartt pants. He stays nameless, because unlike kids, adults have lost the desire to tell you their name within eight seconds of meeting you. Wouldn't you know, he's done some bike touring of his own.
"It was maybe ten years ago," he says. "Me and a buddy rode from Washington D.C. to Florida, then from Florida to Texas. We had no money, just rode department-store bicycles. But we had the best time. It was so great."
"Did you just camp wherever you ended up?"
"Yeah man, we were penniless. We camped wherever. Camped all the time because that's all we could afford."
"How far into Texas did you get?"
"West Texas. I don't remember exactly where, but it was far. But it got to the point where it started snowing and we decided we'd better not push our luck any farther, so we hitchhiked to Phoenix."
"It's good stuff isn't it?"
"Yeah man, it's a hell of a way to see the country. You get such a good understanding of what all these different places are all about."
We spend most of the day riding in the narrow valleys pinched in between long lines of tall hills. Cloud shadows cover wide bands of the hills in shifting shades of green. Deer shoot off into the brush, hawks spring into flight from the tops of the trees, and we know the turtles are somewhere in the marshy areas because we see the crushed remains of those that tried to cross the highway but failed. The farther we go, the more I realize how right it feels to be here. People have been traveling through this corner of the world in this way — following what the land gives them, to avoid going straight over the steep hills — for centuries and millennia. There's something proper and natural about it.
We almost reach Pennsylvania in Waverly. The state line sits no more than a hundred feet from the grocery store where we pick up food for dinner. But just before we're about to cross it, we hang a right and head down a cracked and potholed road that runs along the northern bank of the Chemung River. It'll keep us in the Empire State for one more night.
We press on along a quiet country road. We're passed by huge tractors with implements hanging off the back that take up the width of almost two lanes. Fields of corn surround us. Historical placards describe with matter-of-fact pride how American troops killed a bunch of Brits and Indians somewhere around here in the name of something a few hundred years ago. At one point we're passed by a polo-shirted middle-aged guy on an expensive new motorcycle with a song from Rihanna blasting from speakers turned up as high as they'll go. The banners that hang on every fourth telephone pole in the town of Chemung have both an American flag pattern and a picture of a bald eagle spread across them. There's so much going on out here, even on a Tuesday evening. You just have to pay attention.
In the grass behind the town's mini-mart Walter runs back and forth over and over again, flops around on his back, and bounds from place to place with his happy wagging tail held high. If you had to explain how we're all feeling using interpretive dance, that's how it would look. It has been a wonderful day. The time off in Ithaca did so much for my mind and body and soul.
About an hour before darkness we pull the bikes up a narrow and kind of muddy path into the woods. The moon shines through the boughs of the trees far above our heads. Lightning bugs dart around the trunks of those trees in what seem like aimless patterns. Semi-trucks drone on the interstate; train horns blare. The birds chirp and chirp and chirp until all of a sudden they don't.
Yeah man, it's a hell of a way to see the country.
Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 825 miles (1,328 km)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 0 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |