July 2, 2015
34 – Ya Gotta Cover up That Muffin Top!
I stayed up late last night researching the dangers of riding with aluminum handlebars that have been bent in a crash. What I found was dire. The short version is that the aluminum can turn brittle when bent but there's no way to tell by sight. If I keep going on the bars I've got I run the risk of then breaking into two pieces while riding somewhere between here and the few hundred miles it would take for me to have an exact replacement shipped out. That's too great a risk, so on a suggestion from a journal reader we decide to head toward a bike shop ten miles south that should have some kind of short-term fix. As I figure out the best way to get there, Kristen tries to prop up the top of her handlebar bag using a support system of wrapped tampons so that she can better view her directions.
A busy highway takes us past cheap motels, sketchy strip clubs, and beat-up old grocery stores that closed years ago. The shoulder is a minefield of dirt and gravel piles, chunks of wood, and the clank as clunk of who knows what kind of garbage that bounces up in the air as our tires run over it at speed.
But we keep cranking hard and soon we've made it to the bike shop in the town of Beaver. As we stand near the entrance, a young guy and his wife and their little girl walk out the front door and head toward their car. When he's almost past us, the guy stops.
"Hey, how far y'all goin' on them bikes, man?" he asks.
"Washington State," I tell him.
He thinks about this for half a second with a stunned look on his face. It's beyond anything he could have conceived.
"Washington State? What?! You some badass muthafuckas, man!"
It's one of the highest compliments we'll ever receive.
It only takes an hour to find new handlebars, install them, and then swap over the grips, brakes, shifters, headlight, and cycle computer. We head straight back to the road, but only a mile down the way we stop for ice cream. It's been a tough twenty-four hours; I feel like we've earned it.
It's also the only peace we get for the next hour and a half. We travel along a busy two-lane highway where the shoulder is covered with fat tree branches and where the heavy traffic never breaks. Then we hit a mile-long stretch packed with Home Depots and Applebees and so many gas stations and car dealerships. They soon give way to a four-lane divided highway that charges north toward who knows where. But the shoulder is wide and the grade gentle. That's the Western Pennsylvania bargain. Perfect cycling roads don't exist out here; you take the best you can get.
Everything changes when we hang a left and return to the back roads. Bird songs echo out crisp and clear. Cool waves of breeze wash over me and suck away the heat that builds on the short climbs. The stress of the last few days starts to fade within minutes. Within a few miles we fly down a hill, round a corner, and cross from Pennsylvania into Ohio. It's still hard for me to believe that we just rode all the way from Maine to Ohio with a dog and that we've had such a great time doing it.
We never expected we'd travel through Pennsylvania the way we did. We figured we'd pass through it along the shore of Lake Erie and be done in a day or two. And once we decided to head into Pennsylvania, we never expected we'd spend so much time working our way through it. But aside from some tough riding in the last day or two I leave the state with nothing but wonderful feelings. We met more kind and generous people than all of the places we'd traveled in the previous three and a half weeks put together. Despite warnings from most everyone we met, the drivers gave us more time and space and showed more patience than we thought we'd find in any state. We also passed through so much beautiful country and so much public land, which are two of the most important ingredients for good cycle-touring. As if this wasn't great enough, it all took place surrounded by the subtle but charming Pennsylvania accent that doesn't come through very well in the pages of this journal but will live on in my mind and my heart forever.
While we take pictures at the state line marker a van stops at the far side of the T junction. There's an older guy driving, maybe early or mid-sixties. He has a bushy salt and pepper beard as wide across as a soccer ball, dark shades, and dirty brown ball cap. After asking where we're headed he asks where we're camping tonight.
"Um, I'm not sure," I say. "Somewhere west, maybe twenty or thirty miles down the road."
"Well, if ya wanna stop sooner, ya should come join us. We're down past Rogers, thirteen miles or so from here."
Then he rolls off directions involving eight turns and landmarks in about fifteen seconds in the way that anyone who's lived in the same area their entire life has become programmed to do, even if they know you're from Washington State and you've never before been here.
"And I think we're havin' chili and cowboy stew tonight. Probably about seven."
"What's your name, man?" I ask.
"Tom."
"Thanks Tom. That's a great offer. I think we might see you there."
And I mean it. I can't explain it, but after so many years of traveling this way I get a good or a bad feeling about people who offer help more or less straight off. It's some kind of instinct and it's almost never wrong. Tom passes the test, and so the course of our day changes. We figured we'd ride for another three or four hours and get ourselves well into Ohio, but sometimes it makes sense to forget about the miles and take whatever weird stuff lands in front of you. This is one of those times.
Half an hour later we stand in front of a convenience store eating sandwiches to fuel up for the hilly roads to Tom's place. We're almost done when a lifted Dodge Ram pickup pulls up in the parking spot in front of us. A guy in his sixties and one in his thirties hop out and walk up to us.
"We're here to pick ya up," says the older one.
I stop mid-chew and turn around with a confused look on my face. "Um, what?"
"Youse the two ridin' them bikes, right?"
"Yeah, that's us."
"Well, Tom told us to come get ya. And when Tom gives ya an order, ya make sure ya do it."
Oh what the hell, I think to myself. Let's just see where this goes. That's how we end up loading out bikes and trailer and gear into the back of the truck and shooting off into the who-knows-where of Eastern Ohio with two people we don't know, bound for some unknown place filled with more people we don't know.
We end up at a group camping area in Beaver Creek State Park. We unload all of our stuff in a gravel parking lot and wheel the bikes up a wide pathway. The end of the path is flanked at its end by an American flag on the left and a Confederate flag on the right. Beyond sit no fewer than sixteen tents. Almost two dozen folding chairs have been arranged in something like a circle around a square fire pit made of iron where a fire has been burning since just after dawn.
There are dozens of people all around, from infants on up to sixty-year-olds. Smoke from Camel cigarettes mixes with the smoke from a raging fire, on top of which sit two massive iron crockpots filled with chili. We ask how many kids there are and no one know for sure. It takes about five minutes of figuring and arguing for the group to arrive at twenty-one. There are something like fifteen or sixteen adults, but it's such chaos that there's no way to know for sure. The people we meet tell us they've been doing this around the Fourth of July every year, and it's been going on for so long that no one can remember how long.
The kids are wild, always running and yelling and going from one place to the next in huge packs.
"You suck," says one little boy to another.
"No, you suck," the second says back like there's no debate about it.
"Hey, I gotta go find sticks!" yells out a third boy to no one specific before he runs off by himself into the woods.
Some of the kids have accents so thick we just have to guess when it comes to figuring out what they're trying to tell us. Some of them just stare at the two strangers sitting around their campfire. What they all have in common is that it's only a matter of time before they get in trouble again. It's "Landon James! You put that stick down!" and then two minutes later, "Hey! All of you! Get the hell away from that thing!" Sebastian gets in trouble for punching someone else and gets yelled at worse than I ever have in my life by a woman who seems to embrace yelling at people worse than they've ever been yelled at in their lives. I feel scared and shamed and I'm just watching from across the fire pit.
Kristen holds onto a baby named Becca as the drone and whine and strain of a chain saw returns every ten minutes in the endless quest to create more firewood. To a girl of about fifteen we hear her mother yell out, "Either pull up yer britches or pull down yer shirt. Ya gotta cover up that muffin top!" The woman sitting next to us puts out her cigarette on the sole of her boot while at the same time shouting at one of the kids, "Boy, you've already done been told about that, that's fer dang sure!"
Soon the topic of moonshine comes up. There isn't any, because nobody took the time to make it. Everyone's bummed about that fact.
"Man, I gotta ask, how do you make moonshine?" I say. "I'm from the West Coast and we don't do that kind of thing out there." They all laugh.
"Here's what ya do," says the grandmother of nine and former Girl Scout troop leader two chairs down from me. "Ya take a gallon of apple juice, a gallon of apple cider, two fifths of Everclear, some brown sugar and some cinnamon. Then ya cook the juice and cider and sugar until the sugar's dissolved. Once it's cooled, ya add the Everclear. And then, the longer it sits, the smoother it gets."
All of these things, and eight dozen moments just like them, happen overlapping and without end for six hours that pass between the time we show up and the time we head to our tent to go to sleep. It's chaos — so, so, so much chaos. And this isn't some one-off special occasion either. This is just what they do. On the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Father's Day, birthdays, and graduations, they're here or some place like here, eating and drinking and shooting the shit and taking turns yelling at out of control children. In the winter it's all just moved indoors. It's one celebration after the next between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It's family. It's sons and daughters, uncles, nieces, grandpas, and friends so close and with so much history they might as well be related. But it's family in a form that neither Kristen nor I nor anyone we know grew up with or has married into. For that reason, I think most people we know would be quick to dismiss what we're experiencing as some kind of hillbilly hangout that's too crude and different from what they know to be anything more than a crazy story to tell their friends and laugh about later. I know that's true because I know that five or six years ago I would have done the same.
To be clear, we're also going talk about this crazy story and laugh about it with our friends. But it's more than that. It's about the two of us finding ourselves in a weird situation and diving in. It's about talking and joking and having a good time with a bunch of strangers whose lives and experiences and worldviews are so unlike ours. And it's about being able to relate to these strangers as other people, not just the broad stereotypes that it'd be so easy to write them off as.
Evening turns to night and we sit in a pair of folding chairs a few feet from our first campfire of the trip. It hisses and pops and dances as chunks of tree branch and a chopped up pallet take the long, slow trip into becoming ash. Behind us, little black shadows run between the tents and around the phalanx of coolers long after they should have gone to bed. I stare into the flames and think about all of the little events that had to happen for us to end up here. If I hadn't crashed we wouldn't have gone to Beaver. If we hadn't gone to Beaver, we wouldn't have stopped at the ice cream stand or the fruit stand. And if those things hadn't happened when they did, we never would have met Tom. We would have taken pictures at the state line and continued on toward some very different future. Then I think about how I'll never again experience a day quite like this one.
Today's ride: 28 miles (45 km)
Total: 1,218 miles (1,960 km)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 1 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |