June 30, 2015
32 – A Lonesome Pony with a Mane That Makes It Look like Gwyneth Paltrow
Fog hangs over the Allegheny in the still of the morning when we return to the trail just after six. Deer dash off into the woods when they see us coming, we watch families of a dozen geese waddle their way toward the river, and the morning's first fart clouds float up into the air behind us.
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Beyond Templeton the road takes a hard right back toward the hills while we continue on the trail next to the river. The sound of cars and trucks goes away and the path follows tight bends to the left and right and back again. With no wind or waves to break the surface, the river reflects back at us the trees and grass and armies of immobile fiberglass travel trailers of the opposite shore in crisp brown-tinted detail.
We also pass a house where one bicycle sits upside down in the lawn, one has been wrapped around a tree, and a third hangs from a high branch of that tree at the end of a noose tied just below its seat. It's the angriest anti-bicycle statement I've ever seen. That it exists on a trail that it seems like eight bicycles per day use for maybe five months out of the year makes it all the more insane.
The trail dumps us off in the town of East Brady. While stuffing our faces with donuts and coffee at the gas station we notice a laundromat across the street. It's been long enough since we last washed our clothes that the just sight of the place fills our hearts and minds with joy. There we spend the next two hours surrounded by music from an eighties station with the volume turned up about two times as loud as it needs to be. We bless some rains down in Africa, find the eye of the tiger, have fun tonight, Wang Chung tonight, take the highway to the danger zone, and think about how every rose has its thorn. It's so much awful dancing, so much lip-synching, and so many flamboyant air guitar solos. The locals who wander in and out won't talk to us. But hey, we're having fun and feel great today. There's no reason to hold back.
We've come far enough that people seem impressed when they find out we started in Maine. But we still haven't reached the point where the Are you shitting me? look no longer spreads across their faces when we tell them that we're headed all the way to Washington State. Yet to us it feels like we're making serious progress now. Tonight's our last night in Pennsylvania. By this time next week we'll have passed through Ohio and crossed into Indiana. Little by little America is falling beneath our wheels.
A bald eagle swoops in front of us as we ride through pouring rain, sunshine, and then rain again on the same steep two-mile climb. At the top we hear the crack and rumble of a thunderstorm that sits just beyond the next line of hills, so we do what any smart cycle-tourist would: dive for cover beneath the porch of the cafe that appears as if from nowhere a few hundred feet later, and then stuff our faces with fried cheese sticks and an extra-thick chocolate milkshake.
As flashes of lightning pop and rain pours from the sky in near-biblical amounts, a group of three young girls, a young boy, and a woman who seems like their overmatched babysitter sit down at nearby table. In between licking their ice cream cones they grill us with questions about where we're going, where we sleep, how many miles we ride each day, and what kind of dog Walter is. Because we're in Pennsylvania they don't call the two of us you two or you guys but youse — like "Where youse headed on them bicycles?"
"Are you gonna sleep here tonight?" one of the girls asks.
"Nah, I think we're gonna move on when the rain stops," Kristen tells her.
"I wouldn't sleep here," says the boy, pointing at the cemetery right behind us. "There's all those dead people over there."
When the rain clears we follow a series of empty one-lane back roads. If there's such a thing as backcountry in rural Pennsylvania, this feels like it's it. In the warm and heavy post-thunderstorm air we sweat our way over steep hills, past a puttering old oil derrick and a lonesome pony with a mane that makes it look like Gwyneth Paltrow. A gang of five vultures picking at a possum left dead in the road all spring into flight as we approach. It's a thousand shades of green in any direction we look. If it was possible to cross America only on roads like these we'd do it every summer.
Even though it seems like we're in the middle of nowhere, somehow we end up at a KOA. It seems weird to say, but we're kind of excited about finding it. All of the KOAs we've stayed at have been aimed at travelers, at people on vacation, at people looking to have fun — even if that just means watching TV in the woods next to three dozen people doing the same thing.
But the excitement lasts about eight seconds. As we roll down the driveway it becomes clear that it's just like all of the other campgrounds we've stayed at since setting out from Maine. It's full of the same parked RVs that rent spots by the month and have all kinds of awnings and satellite dishes and garden gnomes hanging off of them. It's a place of golf carts, bad tattoos, and health problems. There's nothing fun about any of it. I feel the strongest sense of sadness for the couple of kids I see — kids who will spend so much of their young lives not living in a home or even an apartment, but in an old travel trailer in a campground miles from the nearest town.
Thunderstorms come and go throughout the afternoon and the evening, causing lakes and rivers to form in the campground's parking strips and driveways. We hole up in our cabin to stay dry, clean up, rub Walter's belly, and stuff ourselves on tortilla chips and beans and cheese. By any of these measures it's a runaway success. We fall asleep to the sound of still more rain with dreams of Ohio dancing through our heads.
Today's ride: 36 miles (58 km)
Total: 1,150 miles (1,851 km)
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