July 9, 2015
41 – All That Steel and All Those Spokes
We head back to the same place we had dinner last night. We sit in the same booth and have the same waitress. Again we order breakfast.
"Gonna be able to ride today without all that rain?" she asks.
"It'll be hard," I say to her with a laugh, "But we're gonna give it a shot."
Breakfast is just as massive as dinner and just as cheap. When we walk out the front door of the diner we spend a few minutes talking to a kind older local guy and then have our picture taken with Walter by the editor of the Monroeville News. From the moment we arrived until the moment where we swing our legs over the bikes to leave, the town made us feel welcomed and valued. On long trips like this, a lot of the places we pass through lose their detail over time and fall into this big generic mass of nameless small towns. They're more of a broad idea than a complete picture. But Monroeville will live on in our hearts and minds in full color.
When we hang a right beyond town and head west it's into a huge headwind that blows the falling rain straight across our faces. There are many times when I pedal almost as hard as I can and still I can't break eight miles per hour. The wind and rain lead me to ride with my face angled down toward the ground, which makes me notice how the low corner of every field has flooded. If I didn't already know it was summer I wouldn't believe it.
We get excited when we roll down a short hill after Hoagland and hit our top speed of the day: 14.7 miles per hour. We also get a lot of waves from people headed the other way. And then we get a pair of waves from a father and son riding a tandem stopped by the side of the road. It's Jason Cordes and his five-year-old son Levi. A few weeks ago Jason invited us to stay with his family for a night, and he decided to ride out this morning and together with his son become our bright orange cycling escort into Fort Wayne.
Jason and Levi talk as we ride. The little one points at signs and creeks and anything else that looks kind of interesting, and asks the kind of simple yet hard-to-answer questions that only a five-year-old would dream up. The bigger one tries to find sensible answers to these questions, but also keeps the gears turning in his passenger's head by asking him about how many miles they've gone, what direction they're heading, and where he thinks that airplane above us might be going. It's so different from dragging a kid behind you in a trailer that's so far back you can't hear them. Jason and Levi are moving together, living and breathing and thinking about the world around them. Kristen and I can't help from looking over at each other and smiling every few miles.
"Look how huge that tire is!" Levi yells out to no one specific. "And look what's inside it!"
I look. We all look. It's only a tractor tire, and inside of it there's only a big rock. But to Levi it doesn't matter, because it's different from everything else around it in that moment, and that's enough to make it so, so, so wonderful. From the back seat of a car he'd notice a fraction of this stuff, but on the back seat of a bicycle he's locked into the details of the world around him in a way that few kids could ever manage and that adults could only dream of.
"Do you think we'll like your brother?" Kristen asks him as we push west against the headwind.
He wrinkles his nose, pauses, considers the question in great detail, and then says, "Well, maybe — if he's not in a whiny mood."
The kid is realistic, too.
Jason tells us how both Levi and his younger brother have been on bikes since before they were a year old. They started by riding in trailers, but now both of them sit on the back seat of one of the family's two tandems, or on the two back seats of their Bike Friday triple. Not only do mom and dad ride, but also two of their grandparents and a lot of their friends. Getting somewhere by bicycle isn't strange to the kids; it's just normal life. Jason also explains to us how it's his dream to some day ride the Northern Tier with his wide and kids, either all at once or in separate trips over two summers so that the kids don't grow tired of it along the way. To most people that would seem crazy, bordering on impossible. But for a family that's as committed to cycling as this one, the riding might be the easiest part.
Levi isn't concerned about any of this. What matters is asking about our favorite kinds of pizza and telling us how the tooth fairy visited his house last night. We talk about the movie How to Train Your Dragon 2, the design on the front of my shirt, whether Kristen or I am the best Lego builder, why do we ride bikes every day, and are we heading home on our bikes. By the time we're halfway to his house, Levi has invited us to his birthday party. Not long after, he and Kristen invent a game where on the count of three they ring the bells attached to their handlebars at the same time. The sounds of joy and furious dinging echo throughout the corn and soybean fields due south of Fort Wayne throughout the half mile that follows.
When we roll up to the house we meet Jason's wife Lindsay and their three-year-old son Myles-with-a-Y. Myles just woke up from a nap and doesn't feel like talking. I don't think that's a feeling Levi has ever known. As the family's sixty-pound Border Collie and Shepherd mix plays with Walter in the backyard, he tells me detailed facts about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and about how great his mom is.
"Mom makes the best mac and cheese," he says like it's a fact everyone already knows. "It's white mac and cheese. It's so good. And she makes the best brownies. She makes almost the best of everything, because she's mommy and she's the best. That's what daddy tells us, and he's right."
In the evening we head over to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner — on bikes, all of us. That's how this family rolls, even in the car-choked outer suburbs of Fort Wayne. And so we skirt the edges of massive grocery stores and chain hotels and a McDonalds, two tandems and a cargo bike and one normal bike, six people in all, like some kind of pedal-powered passenger train. Everyone seated next to the windows at the restaurant turns to stare when we roll up and look for a place to park all that steel and all those spokes.
The kids are going to their grandparents' house tomorrow. Back at the house, Jason and Levi decide on a whim to ride the forty miles there on a tandem instead of driving with Lindsay and Myles. It's not some grand choice. There isn't much debate put into it. It's just what they do. And it's a practical example of how Jason and Lindsay go against the idea that you have to give up the things you love in life when you have kids. It's sad to say, but that's the default state in modern America, to set aside most or all of your passions to focus on raising your kids.
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But one of the most important things I've learned in the last year of life on the road is how much those passions matter. They're the source of so much challenge and inspiration and happiness in life, no matter what your age. And although a child's needs matter more than those of a parent, if kids don't see their mom or their dad living a passionate life, the kids miss out on a chance to learn what that kind of life looks like. To see that theory come to life in front of us today is the greatest gift Jason and Lindsay could have given us — although good Mexican food runs a close second.
Myles goes to sleep almost as soon as the last of the bikes have been rolled into the garage. Levi follows maybe half an hour after that. Walter is long gone, curled up in little ball in the middle of the downstairs bed that's ours for the night. And even though we didn't ride all that far, didn't have to take care of anyone but ourselves, and had to change zero pairs of wet underpants today, by the time nine o'clock rolls around we're ready to collapse into bed and do the same.
Today's ride: 37 miles (60 km)
Total: 1,581 miles (2,544 km)
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