26 – Like a Canvas That Stretches out to Infinity - Travels with Walter

June 24, 2015

26 – Like a Canvas That Stretches out to Infinity

We're back on the road at 5:45, but it's been light enough to ride for the past half an hour. The long summer days in the northern part of the U.S. are just the best.

A few miles away in Wellsburg we see a red and blue neon Open sign hanging in the window of a diner. It's only been open for five minutes but there are already six retired men and one woman drinking half-full cups of coffee. Five more people show up by the time our food arrives. They sit in their own corner of the restaurant with a table three times longer than any other. It's the kind of group where people say things like "Mornin' shithead" and "Feel any better? You don't look any better." I listen in on them while looking over a black and white placemat that's covered with ads for local businesses like Roberts Funeral Home and Bryan's Meat Cutting and Country Butcher Shop. A different set of ads are printed into each coffee mug. Small town breakfast joints are just the best.

It must have been a heavy snow year, because even though we're in the middle of the fourth week of June we see kids and parents waiting near the edge of the highway for the school bus to come. Later we ride past railroad bridges that used to look black, but that age and weather have turned into so many shades of rusted orange. When we notice that the person-like figure on the yellow pedestrian warning sign has a well-rounded butt, we debate the merits of drawing a fart cloud coming out of it. Somehow adulthood wins.

And then we cross over a short bridge and into Pennsylvania. We'll miss New York. I've ridden in twenty-three states over the past seven years and none of them are set up better for bicycle touring than New York. The highways all had great shoulders, and there were so many highways that it was easy to avoid even small cities. There's state forest land everywhere and it's free to camp on almost all of it. When we wanted to clean up and rest up the state parks were cheap and beautiful. And the gas stations can only be described in one word: epic. From fruits and vegetables to craft beer and posh sodas and upmarket cheese curds, the not-so-mini-marts of New York kept us energized and happy everywhere. On top of all of that, we traveled through some of the most beautiful areas this country has to offer, during one of the most pleasant times of the year, and still almost always had the space to enjoy them by ourselves. We plan to come back for an extended trip around New York on bicycles some day soon.

We don't even make it a mile before the hills of Pennsylvania start. It seems a proper beginning for a state that I imagine will be defined by them. But for the moment they're not that steep and not that long and we keep our bitching to a minimum.

This happens every time we stop for more than about six minutes.

After almost four weeks of pedaling we're still deep in a part of the country where the act of good lawn care is one of the greatest virtues a person can have. The air is cool and yesterday's humidity is gone, so the riding mowers are out in force. The rumble of their engines is the main soundtrack alongside roads that remain calm and quiet. We also still ride in the valleys between broad-shouldered masses of hills, and they're still tall and imposing in their scale. But with an unbroken blanket of trees covering every slope and ridge and peak, to the distant eye the hills appear soft and gentle. And no matter where we look it's bright shades of green and blue and white. It's a great day to be riding across America on a bike.

I had no idea what to expect of this part of the country. I can't say I'd ever given much thought to it; I never had reason to. But I'm blown away by what spreads out in front of me today. It's a landscape that seems so healthy and rich and in many ways unspoiled by the advance of humans. I can't stop looking ahead, off to the sides, and behind me in this kind of uneven rotation.

"I've ridden a lot of miles in my life," I say to Kristen when we stop to rest. "But this is one of the most wonderful places I've ever seen."

I mean it. We look like a couple of tiny dots in the bottom corner of what feels like a canvas that stretches out to infinity. More than once I have to remind myself to shut my open-hanging mouth. It's an honor and a privilege to cycle through such a pristine corner of America on a day as fine as this one. That I didn't expect to find it here makes those feelings even stronger.

And yet we never planned to come this way. It wasn't until a helpful person dropped us a message and told us about the sixty-two-mile-long Pine Creek Rail Trail not far south of here that we changed our plans. If not for them we'd have followed the southern tier of New York all the way to Lake Erie. I'm sure we would enjoyed it. But we never would have known about all of the beauty this part of Pennsylvania has to offer.

The rail trail takes us away from the highway straight off. We see only a few houses and some small farms. There are no cars or trucks to share space with, no power lines to cut in front of our view, no deep cracks in the pavement to swerve around. It's just mile after mile of crushed granite guiding us through quiet country at any easy nine or ten miles per hour. It's a place to ride my bike, relax my mind, and try to wonder if it looked much different than this fifty years ago when trains filled the valley with clouds of steam or smoke and all that commotion.

Steep hillsides replace farms the farther we go. And as the miles slip by these hillsides start to close in on us. It gets to the point where the valley becomes a canyon, where I have to tilt my head back to see the rim above, where Pine Creek goes from placid to swift. They call this the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, which might be the most optimistic name I've ever heard. But riding bikes through it on a warm summer evening with mama deer and their little ones crunching up the hillsides next to us is wonderful all the same.

Within ten minutes of arriving at a campground along the creek, Walter flops on his side and falls right asleep. After four straight nights of sleep that fell somewhere between poor and what do you mean it's only 3:15 in the morning? Kristen and I feel like doing the same thing.

We hold on for awhile, but by 8:30 the weight of tiredness has joined forces with the subtle hiss of the moving river, the warbling of the birds, and the cool stillness of the air that hangs in the cradle of the canyon. It's a supergroup we're powerless to resist. Darkness is only a suggestion at this point, but we know that by the time it shows up we'll be long gone.

Today's ride: 65 miles (105 km)
Total: 890 miles (1,432 km)

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