July 10, 2015
42 – I Bet This Kid Can Rake
We know it's morning when we hear the pounding of little feet on the floor above our heads. Over breakfast Levi tells us he had a dream about Walter. Myles wants to know if we're coming with them to grandma's house. Then we answer the last fifty or sixty of their questions about bicycles and Walter and why do you carry all that stuff and aren't you going to be cold today and did you know that our grandpa has corn plants.
Jason and Levi ride ahead as we bend left and right through a maze of quiet suburban neighborhood streets and paths laid out in some refined mental map in Jason's head. But within a few miles the subdivisions fade and we're back among old white barns, wheat fields, and acres and acres of lawns. Levi moos at the cows who stare back in mid-chew with blank expressions on their faces. All of the trucks out here are Chevys because they're built in a factory just down the road in Fort Wayne.
Kristen and Levi run through more furious bell ringing as the tandem turns to the west and we continue south toward Roanoke. With just the three of us the world becomes a quieter place. The chirps of the birds, the hum of our tires, and the distant rumble of an approaching train become the new soundtrack. At least part of every field that parallels the road sits underwater and much of the corn looks weak and stunted from the over-wet soil. We know Walter is returning to his normal self because he barks back at every dog who barks at him first.
We spend the morning skirting the edges of Huntington and Andrews along the Wabash River, but by mid-day we're back on the Northern Tier in Lagro. We eat at the only cafe in town, where Kristen's bean salad and cole slaw seem more like mayonnaise delivery vehicles than actual food. Around this time we realize that it's not hot and it's not cold today. There's no rain and the wind blows at like four miles per hour. We have a lot of energy and we slept well. Walter's getting back to good health. We know we have some long wide-open stretches of countryside ahead of us, and almost all of them run flat. It's the ideal day to crank hard and charge to the west and so that's what we decide to do.
One of those wide-open stretches starts right after town. The road runs straight to the west, past a bunch of old barns where the roofs all stand pitched at the same angle. There are small grain elevators alongside the railroad line and we reach the point in the system of gridded roads where Road 200W crosses paths with Road 200N. Each farmhouse has a mailbox in front of it with family last name printed on the box in block letters. In front of one of the few houses that isn't a farmhouse I watch a father and son playing catch on the front lawn. All of these things line up so well with what I imagined riding across Indiana would look like. And it all feels good and safe and wholesome, in the way that I hoped riding across Indiana would.
I dance in place and lip sync to the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'" in the carpeted aisles of the Bestmart grocery store in Denver to try and make Kristen laugh while she searches for a ripe tomato. The store looks and smells like it's been there for sixty or seventy years and might last for another sixty or seventy. It's the kind of place where the cashier doesn't scan the bar codes for what we buy, but instead punches in the prices listed on the little orange stickers stuck by hand onto every item in the store.
We pedal a few blocks over to the park, where we eat dinner beneath the shade of an oak tree that stands beyond the outfield wall of a baseball diamond. On the other side of the fence two Little League teams warm up for their game. Looking down on them are the amber-colored lights of the electronic scoreboard in right-center that read 0 and 0 and 1. I played enough baseball as a kid to know that just by the organized way they warm up that the team in the gold jerseys is going to wipe the floor with the kids in the red. That feeling gets stronger when one of the heavier players for the red team trots into the outfield to shag fly balls and says to one of his teammates, "Hey, do you smell pizza?!"
The leadoff batter launches a foul ball over to the first base side in an arc that sends it toward a parking lot filled with the cars that brought more than a hundred parents and grandparents and siblings out to watch the game. The coaches for both teams bark out a constant stream of instructions and criticism. Players on the bench call out "Hey batta batta! Hey batta batta!" When the kid who's two inches taller than all his peers comes up to the plate, I find myself thinking, Man, I bet this kid can rake. Then he hits a home run over the right field fence. All of it takes me back to when I was nine or ten years old. I just want to throw on a uniform and run out there and take the mound. But even though I can't, the feelings of nostalgia and the comfort that comes with watching a game I understand and appreciate in great depth makes it hard for me to pull myself away. It connects my far-off past to the present in a way that few things in my life can.
The clouds fade away by the early evening. We head north out of Denver on a charming paved rail trail that keeps us in the cool of the shade, with birds and squirrels darting from one patch of trees to another. Then we hang a left and crank straight into the harsh glare of the setting sun casting long shadows behind us. On an empty back road I watch a mama wild turkey and her eight little ones shuffle across the road a hundred feet in front of us going between tall stands of grass. Farther on frogs smaller than the end of my thumb try to do the same. With no cars bearing down on me, I work on the critical cycle-touring skill of forcing a terrible song out of my head by singing a different and better song to myself over and over again. An unlit lightning bug lands on the tip of my front fender when I stop to take a picture.
The flat roads and flawless weather and total lack of cars make it feel like we could ride all night and never turn tired. But when a campground next to a lake appears seventy-seven miles down the road in Fletcher we call it good. In true Midwest fashion there's an old guy a few hundred feet away from where we set up our tent taking great care in sweeping off his boat-less dock. The thing is maybe twenty feet long and he's at it for half an hour. I'm not sure how much all these docks and ponds and lawns we see everywhere get used or if maintaining them is some kind of zen thing, but if and when the fun times show up in the Midwest, these people are ready.
We're far enough from any highway that no cars pass after darkness falls. All we hear is the stuttered croaking of a bunch of bull frogs, the bark-howl of a lone dog, and the steady high-pitched whine of the clouds of mosquitoes that stalk the lake's shores and swamps. As far as summer nights in the Midwest go, this one's just about perfect.
Today's ride: 77 miles (124 km)
Total: 1,658 miles (2,668 km)
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