31 – Maybe I Don't Know What's Going On - Travels with Walter

June 29, 2015

31 – Maybe I Don't Know What's Going On

If we'd forgotten it was Monday we're reminded in the first mile back on the road when no less than ten coal trucks speed past us with a furious howl and the strong stink of diesel exhaust. But before they have to chance to run us over at sixty miles per hour we lean to the right and head down back roads for the next few hours instead.

Some of the roads are paved and some aren't. We're far enough from the highways that the dogs are all unleashed and give chase, yet they know to stop when we yell at them to stop. We pass tanks meant to store oil from fracking that sit empty because of the recent collapse of oil prices, and then moments later watch as broad vistas of the surrounding countryside open up before us.

Turkeys and rabbits shoot off into the underbrush when we approach. There are a lot of them out here because we head through long stretches of public land with no houses or farms or rock quarries to push them away. A lot of the hills are short and steep and leave us breathing hard by the time we reach the top, but on this sunny summer morning it feels worth the effort. We're in a part of Pennsylvania no tourist sees, not even cycle-tourists. And because we don't cross paths with a single car for hours we let Walter run alongside for more than a mile. All of us love it out here.

On the way back toward the highway we pass through a construction zone where we find out from a couple of the workers that the bridge we're crossing over won't exist two days from now. It's a lucky break in a morning that feels full of luck for all of the great things that have fallen our way.

We stop for a few hours at the Little League field in Plumville to rest, to eat lunch, and to spread out in the sun all of the gear that turned so wet and nasty over the last few days. Walter charges through the outfield in long straight lines and then wide circles at top speed as the crazy energy he's been storing inside for so long at last has a warm grassy outlet.

Just as we're about to leave, a white Ford pickup rolls into the parking lot. An older guy and his granddaughter hop out and head toward the diamond, where our bikes sit in the shade of the covered third base dugout. As I latch the tops of my panniers and tie the dried-out tent and sleeping bag back onto the bike with bungee cords, the guy tosses a mixture of softballs, baseballs, and tennis balls underhanded toward home plate. The girl he refers to only as Slugger pounds almost all of them back up the box or down the line toward first base.

When the bucket of balls turns empty the two take a break and walk over to check out our bikes and our dog.

"She's hittin' .850," he tells me with a smile on his face and a lightness in his voice. "You hit .300 in the pros you're in the Hall of Fame. And she's hittin' .850!"

His name is Jim. He lives out of town back the way we came, and within thirty seconds of starting to talk to him he offers us a place to stay if we ever make it back to this part of the world again. He's also got a plug of chewing tobacco jammed in the gap between the his left cheek and his lower jaw. Every fifteen or twenty seconds he spits a fat black wad of juice onto the dirt at the edge of the backstop.

"We take softball real serious around here," he explains. "We'll travel twenty-five miles for a game. All the way to Butler, Kittaning, everywhere. But she's into all kinds of stuff, not just softball. I take her fishin' around here. She's a good fisherman. Trout fishing, that's what we have around here. She's a gymnast too. And a dancer. Doing that hip-hop stuff now."

We spend the next twenty minutes talking a little about life in Western Pennsylvania, a little about what people around here do for fun, but most of all about Slugger. He's proud of her in the way it seems like every grandfather should feel about their grandkids. Before we push off again, he asks where we're headed for the rest of the day. I tell him.

"Yer goin' the wrong way then!" he shoots back, without thinking about what I've said for more than half a second.

I'm starting to think it wouldn't be cycle-touring if he'd had any other answer.

We head west through small towns where it's the most normal thing in the world for an eight-year-old to speed around the front lawn of his family's home on an ATV. When the towns end, vast fields of corn replace lawns along the valley floor. But for the most part we spend our time bitching about the PennDOT worker who thought it a good idea to place rumble strips right in the middle of an otherwise wonderful shoulder so that Walter's trailer either hangs out into the traffic lane or bangs over the strips at a pace not that different from machine gun fire. The farther we go, the more narrow and winding the road becomes and the more. Drive time traffic starts to pick up. We're tense but focused. And we benefit from the fact that the road trends down far more than up. That combined with a willingness to dive off into the grass to avoid danger keeps the afternoon rolling in our favor.

A brake-torching downhill drops us into Kittanning and takes us to the shores of the Allegheny River. It's a place where the guys we see on bicycles aren't riding them because they want to but because they've had their drivers licenses suspended. The streets of downtown are lined with three-story brick buildings built seventy or eighty years ago and the roads don't feel like they've been repaired since. Most of the storefronts seem empty at first, but when I look closer I notice almost all of them are filled — although every store than isn't a bar looks like it's living on borrowed time. It's the kind of town where the old-timers who have been here forever and can get by on healthy pensions seem happy to live out a normal retirement, but where most people of working age that we see on the streets look tired and a little beaten down, in the way you get if you don't work as many hours every week as you wish you did. It feels like some kind of economic reckoning is coming for Kittanning but no one knows for sure when it's going to arrive.

And yet small-town soul still remains around the edges. As we head back through town toward a pizza joint, church bells tolling out a hymn guide the way as they echo and bounce off all the brick buildings. After stuffing our faces with stromboli we pedal away to the north past dozens of people sitting on their porches and kids riding their BMX bikes in the streets. The Eagles hall parking lot is almost full. And more than a hundred parents fill the grandstands and outfield grass at a late evening softball game.

Maybe I don't know what's going on in Kittanning. Maybe the people who live here are doing fine and just happen to shop somewhere else because the nearby businesses don't have what they want. Maybe the dozen people I saw on the streets in downtown don't represent anything at all. I guess that's always the risk on trying to make judgments about a place when you only spend an hour or two in it and ride down some small fraction of its streets. It's just as easy for me to be right as it is for me to be wrong.

We ride upstream along the east bank of the glass-smooth Allegheny. We're on another former rail line, the Armstrong Trail. A few joggers and bikers pass, but for the most part I focus on the deer hoof prints left in the thicker piles of gravel that stand along the trail's edge and the fact that the massive river flows past us while making no sound at all. It rains but not that hard. We pedal but not that hard. When the rain goes from not-that-hard to kind-of-hard we stop next to a bench and a patch of grass just above the river and set up for the night. It's earlier than we'd like to set up on a trail like this, but we figure the rain and the fact that it's Monday will keep anyone from walking or riding past until long after we're gone in the morning.

A couple of hours later I step outside to water the grass. The trees that flank the trail are filled with hundreds of fireflies, all flickering bright in varying degrees of chartreuse at uneven intervals. Together they fill the world around me with soft, irregular light no human could replicate. On the surface of the river to the north I see the street lamps of the town of Templeton reflecting in wavy lines of amber and dirty white. The only sound is hear is the constant rush of water falling over the edge of a nearby dam. It's a simple but wonderful moment of the kind that might never again repeat itself. I stand unmoving for a few minutes in the cool, wet darkness and try to lock into my memory its shapes and textures and character as best I can.

Today's ride: 53 miles (85 km)
Total: 1,114 miles (1,793 km)

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