July 17, 2015
49 to 57 – Do You Like Barbra Streisand?
We wake up in the morning and learn from the regional TV news station that yesterday evening's storm included a tornado that barrelled through Cameron, a town we had ridden through only a couple of hours earlier. On most days this would seem like a big deal, like we cheated death or happened upon a great stroke of luck. But Walter's so sick that a near miss by a tornado is only a distraction, a small tangent of fact to consider for four seconds before moving on. Our little guy is still losing weight, still refusing to eat, and still so weak. The medication he was given isn't working. We have to confront the fact that something far more serious might be going on. Even though we're less than fifteen miles from the grand dividing line of the Mississippi River we have no desire to cycle anywhere. Instead we pile into our borrowed car and drive across the river and into Iowa, where our tour of the animal hospitals of the Midwest continues.
To our huge relief the vet tells us that Walter's blood work shows nothing wrong aside from mild dehydration. She says that he just needs more food, more water, more rest, and another four or five days of antibiotics. The vet assistant gives him fluids through an IV, we're handed a few cans of food formulated for sick dogs, and then we're sent on our way.
The vet's office is in Burlington. This is the town of about 25,000 people where Kristen was born and lived until she was fourteen years old. It's the kind of place where the crosswalk indicators don't say Don't Walk and Walk like every other city in America, but Leave Curb and Don't. It's the kind of place where the steering wheel of the car is already so hot at 9:30 in the morning that it burns my palms and fingertips when I first reach out to grab it. And it's the kind of place where this strange feeling washes over me when I roll up to a mini-mart to grab an iced tea. For some reason all I want to do is leave the car's engine idling so that the interior stays two degrees cooler than it otherwise would.
Kristen's grandmother Rosemary has lived in Burlington for every one of the eighty-nine years she's been alive. After wrapping up our business with the vet we head to her modest one-story vinyl-sided home on the west side of town. There we settle in for a week or more off the bikes, off the road, wrapped in the cold embrace of hyper-powered air conditioning.
It's a week that lines up well with what I thought the heart of the summer in a small Midwest city would feel like. On Friday we take Rose to get her hair cut at the salon a few blocks down the street. The salon belongs to Jackie, who is Rose's daughter and Kristen's aunt. Long ago the building in which the salon sits used to be the post office. Rose tells us how she went there four times a day back in the forties when she worked at the trucking company next door, hoping to receive new letters written to her by her husband Pat while he was stationed in Hawaii during World War II. When we ask her about the houses where she's lived over the year, she rattles them off from memory as if reading from a list. In all her years in Burlington she's never left the same four-block radius.
The next night we take Rose and her sister Lucia (one of fifteen siblings) to mass at the Catholic church, which is only a few more blocks beyond the hair salon. In between communion, singing from the hymn book, and shivering from air conditioning that seems stronger than it's possible for air conditioning to be, the radio-announcer-voiced priest gives the congregation updates on the local high school baseball scores. After mass we light a candle as an offering for Walter's health, make small talk with half a dozen people related to Kristen in some distant way, then head to McDonalds for thin burgers, over-sugared iced tea, and chicken that may or may not be made from actual chicken. All of our travels around town take place in a mid-nineties Mercury Tracer station wagon with only 43,000 miles, to the sounds of a Lisa Loeb cassette tape bought back in 1997 for what the price tag says was $2.50. When the tape reaches its end we sit in confused silence for a couple of minutes until we remember that we have to rewind the thing to start it over again.
There's still the matter of our bikes sitting at Kristen's dad's house in Illinois where we parked them several days before. Early Sunday morning we drive back in what feels like the wrong direction, pick them up. and then start the twenty-something-mile ride back to Burlington. We're not as early as the hundreds of starlings that shoot through the air all around the road and almost into the spokes of our wheels, but early enough to avoid much of the traffic. Every creek and river runs swollen and brown from the rain that refuses to take a day's rest.
"We might see bald eagles," Kristen tells me as we hang a right turn down a back road toward the Mississippi.
"Might see some meth heads," I say. "We've probably already been passed by one."
"Yeah, probably."
The leading edge of a thunderstorm leaves us cold and wet as we crank up the eastern side of the broad bridge that spans the river and reveals downtown Burlington in front of us. But what should have felt like some significant achievement — having pedaled from the Atlantic to Mississippi under our own power — instead seems anticlimactic. We drove this same way in a car a few days ago. We've been in Iowa for two nights already. And the trailer that bounces unloaded behind Kristen's bike is a constant reminder that our adventure just isn't the same without Walter there to join in the excitement with us.
The next night Kristen's dad John picks us up and we sit shoulder to shoulder on the bench seat of his old white pickup as we drive across town to the baseball stadium. This takes all of about four minutes. The Burlington Bees are in class A, one of the lowest levels of professional baseball. The stadium that seats 3,000 people isn't even half full. But the thunderstorm that passed through an hour before first pitch leaves the evening clear and warm and perfect. We sit in the third row, just to the left of home plate, and look out on outfield walls plastered with ads for the local grocery stores and radio stations and carpet companies and George's Lawnmower, Inc. Old men with collared shirts and Bees baseball caps fill out their scorecards with great care. Cans of Bud and Miller Lite and PBR are just three dollars; popcorn and hot dogs and soda are all a buck each. Between the third and fourth innings an eight-year-old boy takes on the giant bee-headed mascot in a footrace, which the kid manages to win despite a few extra pounds and the fact that he has to reach down to his waist every three seconds to pull up his shorts. It's all set to the familiar, comforting sounds of the ball popping into the catcher's mitt, hits exploding off the barrel of the bat with a crack, and the banks of fluorescent lights behind our heads droning with a dull buzz.
In the later innings I ask Kristen what she's doing tomorrow.
"Taking Gram to her doctor's appointment," she tells me. "Then I might take her out to lunch. There's a cafe; it's called The Ivy. It's in a car dealership."
"I'm sorry, it's where?"
"It's in a car dealership."
"That's a thing? Really?"
"Yeah. I dunno. I don't really like going. It smells like tires in there."
With the Bees down by half a dozen runs we leave some time in the eighth. John's truck sits in the lot out front, in a parking spot that's not actually a parking spot, with the doors unlocked, the windows down, and the key still in it. No one has messed with the truck while we were gone. No one here ever would. The short drive home fills the truck with the warm, thick July evening air and the smell of baking cookies from the nearby factory.
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John takes us fishing on the Mississippi a few days later. It's early morning, just after the sun has crawled up over the horizon. We sit in a flat-bottomed aluminum Jon boat. There's one proper seat in the back covered with olive green-colored vinyl. Kristen and I sit on chairs like you'd find placed around the dinner table or out on the front porch of the average American home. They aren't attached to anything, which means that if we lean back too far we'll dunk ourselves head first into the Big Muddy. Because the rest of the fishermen are stuck at work it's quiet and still except when a grain barge bound for New Orleans rumbles past. There's no humidity and it's about sixty-five degrees. It might be the best morning of the year to be out on the river.
We cast and reel for half an hour in one spot, but when it's clear the fish aren't biting we pull up the anchors and motor north to some other marker or shoreline or line of flats where they might be. Later we end up tied off to the back of an idle grain barge. Fish jump out of the water all around us, but none of us get anything more than a little tug on the line, and I don't even get that. Swallows dart in chaotic patterns six inches above the surface of the water picking off bugs, crickets chirp on the nearby islands, and pelicans and egrets watch us while standing in the shallow water of a sand bar. Clouds streak across the sky as if being pulled by the fingers of some invisible hand. I spend the better part of two hours trying to figure out the proper casting technique and hoping I don't end up flinging the hook into the back of anyone's head.
There's not much to say about the fishing, so we end up talking about hunting. People around here love to hunt just as much as they love to fish. I ask John what sort of animals they go after.
"Turkeys, pheasants, beaver, muskrats, river otters. Yeah, I'll eat all that stuff. It's pretty good, too. But not possum. Not possum."
Pause.
"Why not possum?"
Pause.
"I seen one crawl outta a cow's ass in Wyoming once."
When we motor back up to the boat launch ramp I see half a dozen pickup trucks sitting idle with empty trailers attached to them. They're all American, almost all painted refrigerator-white, and every one has the windows down with the keys sitting on the dashboard or in the hollow of the ash tray.
We spend most of our time with Rose, shivering inside from the air conditioning and beading up with sweat the moment we step out the front door. It doesn't take me long to figure out the degree to which she's in charge of the state of her house.
"I had ice cream last night," I tell Kristen one morning. "When I took it out it was on the shelf in the door, laid on its side. But it was warm in the kitchen and it got kinda soft, so I put it back in the freezer upright, so it wouldn't leak out. When I opened the freezer this morning and it was back in the door on its side.
"Oh yeah, she's gonna do that," Kristen says like it's nothing. "She's watching you. She knows everything that's going on in here."
Rose becomes taken with Walter during our week and a half in Burlington. For someone who's not interested in pets and has always been nervous around dogs it's an unexpected shift. But Walter has that effect on people. It only takes a few days before she starts having one-sided conversations with him in the way Kristen and I do.
"Do you like that music?" she asks Walter as he follows her around the kitchen. "Do you like Barbra Streisand? Do you want to stay here with Grandma? You like Iowa, don't ya?"
Walter comes with us the following Friday when we take Rose to have her hair done again at Jackie's salon. He does slow, wandering laps around the inside, sniffing in the corners and along every surface within six inches of the floor. In between he gets so many rubs on his head and his back and behind his ears, breaking hearts with his adorable face and charming personality. He also seems to be well down the road to recovering from whatever has been churning up his insides for the past two weeks. He's been eating again, sleeping through the night, going on walks, and playing fetch in the front yard. He's still slower, weaker, and weighs less than he should be, but we feel confident that he'll be healthy enough for the three of us to return to the bikes in a couple of days and continue our push to the west. It gives us feelings of relief and optimism that have been missing since somewhere back in Ohio.
On our last evening in Burlington I notice how much tighter my shorts fit than when we rolled into town. I can't help but think that it wouldn't have been a true Midwest vacation if they didn't. I also can't help but think how ready I am to leave all of the distractions and idle time and deep-fried food of settled life behind us. The Great Plains, the Continental Divide, snow-capped peaks, glacier-fed lakes, unbroken forests of pine trees, and the endless horizon of the Pacific Ocean lie in wait. It's time to go. It's time to move.
Today's ride: 22 miles (35 km)
Total: 1,992 miles (3,206 km)
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