July 3, 2015
35 – Hillary Clinton's in Town Campaigning and She's Flying a Confederate Flag
We climb out of our tent around eight in the morning to find all of the adults sitting around the fire, smoking and drinking and bullshitting just as we left them. I don't think they stayed in that position all night, but there's no way for us to know for sure.
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The deal I made with the guys last night was that we'd take the offer of a ride to camp, but only if we got a lift this morning back to where we started. I'm in love with the idea of pedaling across America, but it wouldn't feel the same if I know that I rode all the way across America except for those thirteen miles back in Ohio. It's a gap that would eat at my insides until the day I die. And so we load the bikes back up in the truck and soon find ourselves in front of the same mini-mart where we stuffed our faces with sub sandwiches sixteen hours earlier.
Cars are everywhere at nine in the morning even though we're in the heart of what seems like nowhere. Last night the people at The Gathering told us how the cars are all headed to this thing called the Rogers Sale. It's a massive flea market that covers something like fifty acres, where the whole idea is spending the money you worked hard to earn on a bunch of stuff you don't need now and won't ever need in the future. It happens every Friday, but because it's the Fourth of July weekend and no one's working today, it means that more than 50,000 people from Ohio and Pennsylvania and even West Virginia are headed our way. But there aren't any freeways or public transportation out here to lighten the load. It's just two highways; one running north-south and one east-west. That's it. And so the cars back up for almost ten miles, to the point where we have no choice but to pass them on the right. It's a mass of idling traffic, feet propped up on dashboards, arms hanging out windows with cigarettes pinched between the fingers, and a feeling of boredom so strong we can almost smell it.
We're in a half-mile gap between two huge groups of cars when something explodes beneath my bike. Kristen screeches to a stop in front of me because the noise is so loud she thinks we've been shot at. In fact it's a tire blowout to beat all other tire blowouts. The tube of my front tire has ripped apart, leaving behind a gash of about eight inches. I can tell this by sight because the force of the blowout pushed the bead of the tire out so far that the right-side bead sits on the left side of the rim. It leaves me a quarter of an inch away from riding on the rim itself. Only the fact that I was pedaling on the flats at ten miles per hour instead of downhill at twenty or twenty-five means I escaped another horrible crash that could have ended our trip, put me in the hospital, or both.
Right away I know why it happened. I think back to yesterday morning, when I noticed the guy at the bike shop putting air into my front tire after he finished adjusting my brakes. Although the sidewall of the tire says that it can handle up to seventy pounds of pressure, the fact that I'm running the widest tires my rims can handle means that anything above about forty pounds can force the bead away from the rim and cause the exact kind of blowout that just happened. After leaving the bike shop I was running well over fifty pounds in both tires.
I'm once again a lucky dude.
For a bunch of reasons, we haven't ridden all that much in the last three days. Now that we've reached Ohio and we know the flats of the Midwest are only a few days away we're anxious to start cranking and get there. But first we have to roll past all of the traffic headed to the world's largest flea market in the opposite direction. The driver of every third car asks us what's going on. They're the ones who aren't looking to buy a bunch of useless crap that will sit in their garage for the next sixteen years. They just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and have to sit in traffic for the two or three hours because of it. I tell them some variation on flea market or it's a big fucking garage sale, but after a few minutes I've grown so tired of the whole thing that I want to shout back "It's a zombie apocalypse!" or "It's an Ebola outbreak!" or "Hillary Clinton's in town campaigning and she's flying a Confederate flag, it's so weird!"
All of the back roads and highways we have to ride on to keep cranking west are filled with cars and trucks that don't want to wait for anything, least of all two crazy guys on bicycles. It's a dangerous and stressful morning. We stop a mini-mart in Lisbon and do what we can to calm our nerves and build back up our spirits. For Kristen this means chocolate-covered cherries, coffee, and a cleanish bathroom. For me it's a sleeve of Nutter Butters and a half-gallon of chocolate milk. Walter gets cold water, chunks of bacon jerky, and so many rubs on his head and ears and chest.
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But five miles beyond town we leave the highways behind and all the pressure that built up over the morning releases. We ride over one-lane bridges, I wave at a multiple shirtless old men wearing jean shorts while cutting their lawns on a riding John Deere mower, and we can hear the corn stalks slap against each other on the breeze. We pass a sprawling field where a father and son sit on an orange tractor cutting grass hay, and because there's so little noise around us I can hear them talking to each other even though we're hundreds of feet away. Farther on, old hound dogs bellow at us when we pass but don't give chase because they're so heavy they'd be out of breath by the time they hit the end of the driveway. After several days of narrow, dangerous highways with obstacle-covered shoulders we appreciate the simple peace of Ohio's back roads. I can't find the words to explain how much better our afternoon feels compared to the morning that came before.
We're all set to ride long into the evening when we reach a T in the road and stop to check our directions. As we stand over our bikes a white truck approaches with its passenger window rolled down. The guy inside asks us where we're going. When we tell him he's quick to offer us a place to stay for the night.
"I don't know how many miles you were plannin' on doin', but you're welcome to stay with us," he says. "I live just up the way there. We got a lawn for the tent, or a bedroom, got showers, whatever you need."
"How far up there?" I ask.
"Two houses down," he tells me with a big smile.
It's still early. We could go a lot farther. I think most people in our situation would. But the more adventurous choice is to hitch our wagon to a man named John and see where the rest of this holiday weekend might take us, and so that's what we do.
"Now what are you two's names?" he asks as we park our bikes in his driveway a couple of minutes later.
We tell him.
Five seconds after that he opens the front door to the house. "Honey!" he calls out. "Kristen and Jeff are gonna spend the night!"
This is how we end up sitting around a dining room table with John, his wife Betty, and Zander, one of their nine grandkids. Soon we learn how both John and Betty grew up within eight miles of here and have lived in the area their entire lives. John worked at a manufacturing plant just up the road from the time he was sixteen until the day he retired. Their grandkids live within a fifteen-minute drive. Eastern Ohio is the center of their life and it always will be. As we're taken around the house and shown where we can put up our tent, where to do laundry, and asked what we'd like to eat or drink, Walter shoots around the backyard and looks as if he'd be happy to spend the rest of his life in this exact spot as well.
Over dinner John explains how he had a stroke back in 2003 that almost killed him. After it happened there were questions about whether he'd be able to walk again, and how much of his speech and memory and normal mental functions he'd ever regain. But a year or two later, Betty saw a couple of old Schwinn bikes along the side of the road while driving home and suggested that she and John buy them and take up riding. And that's what turned the tide. Since then he's put over 10,000 miles on his recumbent and his classic Trek 520. The two of them have ridden trails all over Ohio together. John rode the Allegheny and C&O trails from Pittsburgh to Washington D.C. and back a few years ago, and he's doing it again in a couple of weeks. He also has a bunch of Adventure Cycling Association maps and has his eyes on a longer tour involving the Northern Tier, Underground Railroad, Southern Tier, and Atlantic Coast routes that will take him from Ohio, all the way down to Florida, and then back home again.
Although John's right leg still isn't what it was and there's sometimes a stammer in his voice, most of the effects of the stroke have disappeared. And instead of talking about television shows or politics or other idle subjects we'll have forgotten about by the time we close our eyes to go to sleep, we talk for hours and hours about riding bicycles, traveling by bicycle, the routes we take, the gear we use, and our favorite stories from the time each of us has spent on the road. It's a testament to what bicycles and cycle-touring can do for your body and mind and spirit, even if you're the type of person who never gave a second thought to bikes after the age of about twelve.
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Laying in the tent in the darkness with the air calm and still and so humid that every surface is already wet, I think about how maybe tomorrow we'll break forty miles for the first time in almost a week. It's not like we haven't been trying. But maybe we'll cross paths with some more interesting people long before we have the chance to get there. With no deadline in front of us, we're in the mode of saying yes to everything and seeing what comes of it. So far it's been a wonderful choice.
Today's ride: 28 miles (45 km)
Total: 1,246 miles (2,005 km)
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