July 4, 2015
36 – The Most Wonderful Wrong Turn
When Walter sees a cat his instincts tell him to head toward it. If it runs away, those instincts tell him to give chase. So when he comes out of the tent to find one of the cats on John and Betty's property watching him, he takes off toward it. But this is no Portland house cat. When he sees Walter coming he holds his ground, arches his back, all of his fur stands on end, and he growls and hisses while looking Walter straight in the face. Our confident ball of fluff stops dead in his tracks, then jumps backward and runs behind the safety of Kristen's legs. When I move my cargo bike out of the shed where it spent the night, he hides behind the far end of the long metal frame.
We're also humbled this morning, but in a different way. Over steak and eggs with bread and coffee we spend an hour talking bikes and traveling and life with John and Betty. They give us advice for the roads ahead, a map to help us find those roads ahead, water from their tap (which goes through a 2,500-dollar filtration system because fracking in the area fouled the local aquifer), and hugs all around. It puts a bow on this random but fun encounter that everyone involved except for Walter will remember with fondness forever. As we pose for pictures and trade contact information before setting off on the bikes again, I realize how our time here meant just as much if not more to John than it did to us. Even though he lives far off any major cycling route, somehow two people doing the exact thing that he one day hopes to do showed up a few hundred feet from his doorstep. And instead of saying hello and talking about our trip and continuing on when most riders would, we gave him the chance to offer us showers and food and a place to sleep — all of which he was eager to offer us, because he's that kind of person. It's yet another reminder of the magic of bicycles. Without them, this entire chain of happy events never would have happened.
We're offered to stick around for another day and join John and Betty for their family's forty-person Fourth of July party later on in the day. But at this rate the mountain passes in Washington will be closed by snow when we reach them, so with full bellies and hearts we get back to it. Passing drivers wave and stunned cows watch as we head down one-lane roads where six-foot-high stalks on either side of us form a kind of corn tunnel for us to ride through. When we park in front of the grocery store in Minerva, no less than eight people ask us where we're going, or tell us how adorable Walter is, or wish us safe travels or a happy holiday. We may never again find a place as kind and welcoming as the state of Ohio.
It's warm enough that we sweat on the uphills, but a gentle breeze blows over our heads enough to cool us without slowing us down. Every person working out in their yard or riding a lawn mower or tractor waves to us and we wave back. Walter continues to bark at any plastic deer he sees, and there are so, so, so many plastic deer standing watch over the front yards in this part of the country. American flags follow us everywhere: hanging from the front porches of old white houses, planted next to cemetery headstones, attached to both mirrors of a passing Pontiac. Almost all of it passes on empty back roads. If you had to create some ideal Independence Day in Middle America it would feel like today in Eastern Ohio.
Oil storage tanks and yellow pipeline markers seem like suitable guides into the town of Mineral City. It's a place where we see at least three dudes in their twenties riding around shirtless on BMX bikes while yelling at each other within the first five minutes. It's also a place where happy hour at the tavern starts at eleven in the morning. Every time we see a person walk out of the tavern, get in their car, and head out of the parking lot we assume they've just turned into a drunk driver. Such is life in America on the Fourth of July.
Because of those possible drunk drivers we take side roads to Dover instead of the narrow and busy highway. But the roads bring with them two or three huge hills that leave us drained by the time we reach town. We spend more than an hour in the shade in front of the high school resting and eating dinner but still feel wasted. We try to keep our spirits up by drinking chocolate milk, eating cookies, and channeling the people we camped with a few days ago by saying to each other things like, "If ya touch that agin I'll tear ya arm off and beat ya with it!"
But there's nothing for us in Dover. Even though we know more big hills lie in wait for us ahead, there's no choice but to get back on the bikes and keep cranking. We head in the general direction of the setting sun, but the wandering path of the roads mean we almost never stare straight into it. In the stillness of the late evening we ride past an empty golf course; a paddock filled with fifty goats, some no bigger than Walter; Fourth of July parties where sprawling back yards fill with kids chasing each other around; and families piled into sedans and SUVs, headed off to try and get a good seat at the park or fairgrounds where fireworks will be set off two or three hours later.
The hills continue to make for hard riding, but the cool of the evening air helps. So too does the fact that some time tomorrow the big hills that have been our partners almost every day for the last five weeks will fade into the flatness of the Midwest. Until then we pedal to the sound of the first frog calls of the evening, which bubble up from the low wet spots near the edge of the road. We can tell we've crossed into Amish country when we see white fences snaking along the hillsides in front of us, horse poop on the roads, and big houses but with barns and buggies flanking them instead of garages and lifted Dodge Rams. They stand in such stark contrast to the guys who decided to celebrate the holiday by weed-whacking the edges of their lawns, and the sound of "Mustang Sally" being butchered by a cover band at a nearby party that echoes out through the otherwise peaceful valleys all around us.
Late in the evening we take a wrong turn. It's one of those deals where the road we want to take bends left and right multiple times but keeps the same name, so without a GPS in front of us there's no way to know for sure if we're on the right track. It isn't until we've been heading north instead of west or south for a couple of miles that it dawns on me at last. On the one hand it's annoying, but on the other it's not like we have a place to sleep waiting for us down the road anyway. It's impossible to end up behind schedule when you have no destination.
Our backtrack takes us past an Amish church and an Amish school before sending us south on Highway 93 toward the town of Sugarcreek. When a lone man of about forty years old driving a horse on a two-wheeled Amish buggy passes, we both wave to him and he waves back. A few minutes later the same man on the buggy heads back our way. He approaches us, draws even, and then speeds past, at least as much as a horse-drawn buggy can speed past. A few hundred feet farther on he pulls off into a driveway in front of a large house and comes to a stop. Then he jumps down from his seat and walks toward the road.
"Where ya headed?" he asks me when I reach the driveway.
"Toward Sugarcreek, although we're not sure where we're going after that."
"Do you have any place to sleep?"
"Well, no. We don't really have a plan. We're just kind of riding and we'll see where we end up once it gets dark."
"Ah, well, you can set the tent up in the yard if ya like."
For the last few days we've wondered what it would be like to spend an evening with an Amish family, to see how their lives look and feel similar or different to ours. Now there's no need to wonder; we're about to find out. I thank the guy for his offer, tell him that we'll take him up on it, and then thank him again.
His name is Lonnie. A few moments after we wheel the bikes up to the top of the driveway we meet his wife Neva. They have ten kids, she tells us, and then she runs through all of their names and ages for us in a blur of sounds and syllables that don't stick in my memory so much as bounce off its sides. Lonnie suggests that we pitch the tent on a flat spot in the yard behind their house, so that's what we do. The kids watch us from a distance as we set up for the night and hurry Walter inside the tent before he can start barking. Four-year-old Noah seems more unsure of the whole business than anyone.
Lonnie and I talk for a few minutes on the topics Kristen and I get asked about so much these days: where we're going, how we're getting there, how long we think it'll take, where we sleep, what we eat, and so on. As the questions and answers wind down, he excuses himself and tells me that he's going to head over to the house and take a shower to clean up after a hard day's work.
"So you didn't take today off?" I ask, thinking about the fact that it's the Fourth of July.
"Nah," he says with an amused little half-smile. "We normally save that for Sundays."
Lonnie comes up to me again we when he returns from his shower.
"We're takin' off in about twenty minutes to go see the fireworks," he tells me as I'm grabbing the last of my panniers. "They're down by the golf course on the other side of the hill over there. You're welcome to come. But you don't have to ride those things," he says looking over at the bikes. "You can come with us in the buggy."
No way.
We finish setting up the tent and get Walter tucked inside on a bed made from a puffed-up pile of sleeping bag. At the same time, we pull our phones out of our pockets and tuck them into a corner of the tent. I grab my camera with my right hand, hold it for a moment, then put it down and set it next to my phone. This happens in part because we don't want to offend; we know different Amish families have different levels of tolerance and acceptance when it comes to those things. But more than that, we also know that an experience unlike any that has come before waits for us. We don't want any distractions. We just want to live it.
At the same time, a couple of the kids work together to add an extra seat to the buggy so that we'll have somewhere to sit. We notice that as they talk to each other and to their mom, they switch back and forth between English and a dialect of Pennsylvania German without any break in their speech. Soon we're told that English is, in fact, their second language. It isn't used with the kids at home, and they don't learn how to speak it until they go to school. This means that the Noah, the youngest boy, speaks only German right now.
When it's time to go, some of the older kids head out on their bicycles. A group of younger kids take one buggy, the kind that's covered with a roof and has a windshield. The boy who drives it can't be a day over fourteen. We go with Lonnie and Neva and two of their little ones in an open-air buggy. Kristen and Neva and the boy squish together in the back, while I sit on the left up front with Lonnie on the right at the reins and a five-year-old girl in between us. Every so often she sneaks a look up toward the unusual sweaty stranger who just over half an hour ago pedaled into their lives.
We travel up a steep hill and along the ridge line beyond it at just above bicycle speed. It's a smoother ride than I thought it would be because of the buggy's spring suspension, but also noisier because the layer of rubber that wraps around the wooden wheels is thin and hard. Along the way I feel a few light drops of something washing over my left leg in a mist. It takes me a moment to realize that it's coming from the one horsepower engine that's pulling us. With the sun charging down toward the horizon behind us, I go from warm to cool to cold in the span of about six minutes.
As we approach the golf course we realize that's where the horrible music we heard an hour ago was coming from. If we'd hadn't made that wrong turn we'd have passed by the golf course, hung a left, and continued on toward Sugarcreek. Instead we roll into a small public park on a horse-driven buggy and step into the middle of a big gathering of Amish families, where maybe seventy or eighty people stand around talking or eating or playing on the swing set and playground equipment if they're young enough. Yet for as unique as the scene looks and feels, mosquitoes hang over the park in clouds and swarms so fierce that it's hard for me to notice anything else. They wouldn't be such a big deal if I had the long pants and long-sleeved collared shirt that all of the other men wear, but in shorts and a shirt made of synthetic material thin enough for the little assholes to bite straight through I can't go more than four seconds without rubbing my legs, smacking my arms, or squishing a mosquito that landed on my forehead and leaving behind a streak of dark red blood in the process.
The fireworks start as soon as darkness falls. It's a good show by small town standards, but having seen thirty or so Fourth of July shows in my life, the excitement and awe that I felt toward them back when I was five or six years old has all but disappeared.
What's more memorable is what happens once the fireworks end. Lonnie and Neva and most of their kids stand near us off to one side while they wait for the remaining kids to come back from watching the fireworks and find them. Lonnie's brother Lavell and his wife and kids stand near us on the opposite side. A few other people who may or may not be related also hover nearby. On the way down to the park we learned that Amish people refer to themselves as Amish, and everyone who isn't Amish is called English. In this collection of people we're the only English around. Spread out in a semi-circle in front of us it's all long dresses, bonnets, beards, and large-brimmed hats. After a minute or two, Lavell says that he heard we were headed to Washington State on bicycles. We fall into a conversation about the logistics of our trip, about what it's like to see the country from the seat of the bicycle, and about all of the kind and generous Americans we've met along the way so far. When we mention that we traveled in New Zealand and Australia over the winter, the interest grows. One person asks us if it felt like another world over there, because that's what it seems like when you read about it in books.
The moonless dark of the night has grown so heavy that I can only see the broad features of the faces looking back at me and not the subtle details, but as I look around at the assembled crowd there's just enough light for me to tell that we have everyone's attention, even though we've been talking for the last fifteen minutes. As much as we've never met anyone like them, they've never met anyone like us. It's this unplanned moment of discovery and wonder and it travels in equal parts in both directions. The term once in a lifetime gets overused a lot in our culture, but in this case there's little doubt that we're in the middle of a moment that we'll never again in our lifetime experience.
When the car traffic from around the golf course thins out we hop back up into the buggy for the ride home. It turns out that whether it's your car or your bike or your buggy, if it's your main mode of travel you outfit it with headlights and tail lights to make sure you stay safe at night. And so we head back toward home with the road spotlit in front of us in a warm yellowish light. At first the horse trots ahead as he should, at a measured and even pace. When he starts to gallop, Lonnie slows him back down with quick calls of "Trot! Trot!" Farther on, Lonnie hands the little girl the reins. With his oversight she uses the them to nudge the horse a little to the left or a little to the right as needed. It's only when we start to veer off onto the gravel shoulder that Lonnie takes back control and keeps us between the painted lines on the pavement for the rest of the trip.
In between all of this he tells me how the family has traveled as far south as Mississippi and as far west as San Francisco to deliver the horses they raise to their customers, some of whom are Amish and some of whom aren't. In one of the next few summers they hope to make it out to Washington State, traveling either by train or by bus. He also mentions that when they go on vacation it's often to Sarasota, Florida, which it turns out is a kind of vacation mecca for the Amish. It wasn't so much having ten kids that made him feel old, he says, but a moment on one of these Florida vacations where he tried to play basketball against a bunch of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids and realized he could no longer keep up. As we make the turn toward home, he explains that although most Amish don't drink alcohol, they still end up having to deal with addictions or compulsions. In his dad's case, it was a habit of drinking two two-liters of Mountain Dew every day that went unchecked and helped contribute to a stroke that hit him at the age of forty-eight.
Not long after the buggy pulls into the driveway and comes to a stop Lonnie offers us to come inside and take showers. In part because we like to say yes to everything, and in part because I stink after a long day of cranking over the hills of Eastern Ohio, I take him up on it. As I stand under the hot water, feel the dirt and salt wash away, and watch them mix in with the soap suds that swirl down the drain, I can't help but crack a little smile and shake my head. Of all the possible places we could have ended up, and all of the possible people we could have met on this trip, there's no way I could have imagined an evening like this. It's the kind of thing that's too far-fetched to even try to conjure up in my head, and yet somehow it's where we ended up. It's that same bicycle magic revealing itself again.
When I step out of the bathroom and walk into the kitchen I find Kristen, Lonnie, Neva, and a few of the youngest kids sitting in chairs around the huge table. One of the teenage girls sits on a nearby countertop with her legs and feet dangling off the. An older boy leans against the jamb of a door off to the side, with the kind of disinterested expression unique to seventeen-year-old boys. When I take a seat next to Kristen I hear a hissing sound and feel a flash of warmth above me. It takes a moment to realize that what I'm hearing and feeling and seeing is one of the house's many gaslights. Beneath its yellow glow, everyone snacks on slices of beef summer sausage that the family makes themselves from the cattle they raise.
A couple of minutes later Lonnie pulls out a small container filled with sliced of some kind of mystery meat.
"Do you have any idea what this is?" he asks.
We don't. It could be a part of a cow, but there are so many possible parts of a cow you could eat that it seems pointless to try and guess.
"It's boiled beef heart," he tells us. "Now, you don't have to eat this stuff if you don't want to. But it's good. Most people like it until they find out what it is."
Kristen declines. A few of the kids make grossed-out noises and scrunch up their faces. But I take the offer. Yes to everything, after all. Lonnie suggests dipping one side in the crystals of salt that he poured out into a little pile on the container's cover, so I do. And then down the hatch it goes. I expect the worst, because when it comes to food I've never tried before that I think might be disgusting, I always expect the worst. But soon I realize that it's not just decent or passable but good. Good enough in fact that I have a second slice and then a third.
Then a huge plastic jug full of the palest yellow liquid comes out of the natural gas-powered fridge. With the kind of great care that suggests he's done it a few hundred times in his life, Lonnie removes the lid and tips the first inch of the liquid into a glass that sits a foot and a half below the lip of the jug. He spills only a few drops.
"Sorry if it isn't very cold," he says. "This was from tonight's milking."
Once the cream has been skimmed, the rest of the jug's contents are poured into a separate jug made of glass. To help offset its warmth, Neva drops in a handful of ice cubes. Then she pulls out a mason jar filled with dark brown chocolate syrup and places it on the table. When a long spoon arrives, the syrup gets dumped into the jug and then stirred for the better part of a minute until pale yellow gives way to pale brown. Glasses soon appear as if from nowhere and are passed around to every man, woman, and child. It feels like some kind of ritual. There's a reverence to it that I never knew chocolate milk could have. When I look around the dining room I notice that every kid has a smile on their face and seems happier than they have at any point in the night, save for the fireworks. It must be a special treat.
We all talk for another half hour or so. They ask questions about the strangest places we've camped. We ask about life on the farm. Lonnie rattles off each of the ten kids' birthdays from memory. As the kids grow more tired, one by one they slip out of the room either in silence or with a simple goodnight and then put themselves to bed on their own without a hint of fuss. Compared to the out of control little brats we camped with a few nights ago — the ones who refused to listen to anything an adult said to or yelled at them — each of this family's children seem like something approaching perfect. They're quick to respond to what their parents ask of them, they help themselves and each other without complaint, and they have more social grace and curiosity about the world around them than a good percentage of America's adults. It's one of the only times in my life when I've watched a family at work, paused to consider what I'm seeing, and then thought to myself, I want to have a child of my own some day.
When it comes time to say goodnight ourselves, we thank Lonnie and Neva and the three children who are still awake for inviting us to set up our tent on their lawn, for taking us with them to the fireworks, and for welcoming us into their home. When Neva asks us to write down our address, I do. We agree that if they end up coming out to Washington one of these years that they'll write a letter and drop it in the mail to let us know.
As we rise up from our seats and start to push in the chairs, Neva looks at both of us and says, "Thank you for the conversation." It's a phrase I'm not sure I've ever heard. But the more I think about it, the more I realize she's right. That's what it was: a real conversation. There wasn't a television or a radio droning on in the background. No one checked their phones over and over again or sent text messages to the person they wished they were talking with instead. There wasn't any chatting on the side or a splintering of the group into different rooms. We all just sat down, looked at each other, talked to each other, and learned some things about the world we never knew before. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't seem like a special event, yet in the fast-paced and mediated world that Kristen and I and most everyone we know lives, it's exactly that.
We take a look at our phones when we get back to the tent. It's 11:30. That means we rolled up to the farm, rode to the fireworks, watched the fireworks, rode back, showered, ate, and had that long talk in the kitchen in just three hours. It felt like twice that. And the series of memories those three hours helped create will stay with us for as long as we live. As I scoot down into the sleeping bag with Walter at my side, I hear the sounds of a cow mooing in the distance, frogs croaking, and the clip-clop-clip-clop of a horse and buggy passing on the road in front of the house. In that moment I once again can't help but crack a little smile and shake my head and give thanks for the most wonderful wrong turn we've ever taken.
Today's ride: 55 miles (89 km)
Total: 1,301 miles (2,094 km)
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