From the Archives - Bike Tour Journal Part III

Introduction

Twenty-eight years ago, my wife and I did a cross-country bike tour. We kept friends and family apprised of our exploits via email, which was a new technology then, and a very slow one over my external 2400 baud modem. Still, I managed a decent chronicle of our exploits and offer some highlights for you here. (For my previous installment click here.)

Resting in the Midwest  – July 12, 1994

TURIN, IOWA: We’re stopped here for a few days, on Erin’s great-aunt’s soybean farm. She has three sons—Terry, Jimmy, and Johnny—who live nearby. Addah, the great-aunt, is in her eighties and therefore doesn’t cook anymore, but her sons see to it that we get to the local restaurants, where we eat “beef … it’s what’s for dinner.” (Have you seen that ad campaign?) Yesterday, Jimmy, who is a cattle buyer by trade, took us to lunch and I had a steak sandwich. He asked me what my favorite cut of steak is. I’d never really thought about it, but was apparently expected to have a strong opinion and a ready answer, so I decided on the spot that my favorite is prime rib, and said so. Well, that evening we went out for dinner and Terry, Jimmy’s brother, said to me first thing, “Well, I’m really sorry Dana, but they only serve prime rib here on weekends.” This means the two brothers had discussed my tastes sometime during the afternoon: so you can see how seriously they take their beef. I hope they approve of my preference. (By the way, if it strikes you as odd that they’d naturally assume I’d have a steak for dinner after having a steak sandwich for lunch earlier that day, you’re not alone. But of course I did.)

Since Topeka, when I last emailed, we rode north through the rest of Kansas to Nebraska, which was unbearably hot and sticky. We were in a bar cooling off with some iced tea and one of the locals told us it was 93 degrees with like 70% humidity. I should mention that everybody in bars loves us, and they’re all really friendly. At one place the locals bought us drinks—Bubble Up and Squirt (two soft drinks I remember from the ‘70s but never dreamed still existed). We even went into a biker bar in Gypsum, Kansas, a long line of Harley Davidsons out front, and most of the patrons were old men—”the old retired men’s biker club,” they told us. The proprietor himself was a biker—huge, with long hair and a beard, very jolly. He was cooking burgers on a little hot-plate. (We picked up a book of matches embossed with “Gypsum Bar – Cold Beer, Greasy Food, & Grouchy Service.”) All the guys came outside with us when we left—”We wanna take a look at yer hogs,” they declared. We’re like their skinnier, non-motorized brethren of the road.

In Nebraska we were eaten alive by mosquitoes, horseflies, and chiggers. I hadn’t heard of chiggers but my American Heritage Dictionary for DOS tells me a chigger is “any of various small, six-legged larvae of mites of the family Trombiculidae, parasitic on insects, humans, and other vertebrates. The chigger’s bite produces a wheal that is usually accompanied by severe itching. Also called chigoe, harvest bug, harvest mite, jigger, red bug.”

The more useful definition came from a neighboring camper: “You know that movie ‘Alien’ where the alien takes over the guy’s body and then bursts out of his stomach at the dinner table? Same thing, but smaller.” We hope he was kidding. Between these suckers and the mosquitoes and horseflies, I think when we’re done touring I'm going to become a career exterminator.

After Nebraska, we crossed a bridge over the Missouri river—the fastest navigable river in the world—and we were in Missouri. All the locals pronounce it “Missoureh.” It took us about half a day to get through the state (since we only cut through a corner of it). We encountered rude drivers, no shoulder, obscenely hilly terrain, and a headwind. We realize that a 20-mile section of Missouri on one highway on one day is not a representative sample of the state, so we will withhold judgment. But I must tell you about one incident that occurred there.

We were in a gas station/convenience store buying ice cream novelties, and I had to call my eye doctor to order a replacement contact lens (one blew away on a horrible Nebraska morning when my entire body was itching). The pay phone was severely malfunctioning—instead of prompting me for my calling card number, it was connecting me immediately, which I initially thought was a happy mistake. But it would only connect for a few seconds, long enough to begin talking, before realizing its mistake and hanging up on me. All the 10-ATT-0 tricks were failing to work. And the whole time, I was aware of an absolutely heinous odor that was slowly enveloping me. I thought I would pass out. It was as though rotting feces were being shoved up my nose and blown through my nasal passages with a hair dryer. I finally realized that the smell was the fellow behind me waiting to use the phone. He is without a doubt the smelliest human I have ever encountered. Eventually the odor became too much for me and I abandoned my phone call, letting him go first.

The moment he left the store, the clerks—without a word—picked up cans of aerosol air freshener from under the counter and began hosing the place down. They did it with a certain perfunctoriness, which I asked about, and they said this was a daily ritual. The fellow has a job hauling away dead livestock, roadkill, and other festering animal corpses, and every day he checks in with his boss using their phone. Can you imagine a more wretched career?

The second we entered Iowa, still on a shoulder-less road, still on a hilly stretch, still with a headwind, things improved. The first car that passed us slowed way down, gave us all kinds of room, and the driver grinned from ear to ear and gave us the thumbs-up for about half a mile. Iowa plates. Everybody in Iowa seems fanatical about bicycles. Iowa calls itself the premier bicycle state in the nation, and everybody I’ve encountered here knows what the RAGBRAI is. (It’s the Iowa Register [local newspaper] Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.) We’re following the route of this ride, which has 10,000 riders annually (and turns down countless others who lose out in the lottery-style registration). [RAGBRAI is “the oldest, largest, and longest multi-day bicycle touring event in the world.” The 2022 edition just so happens to have wrapped up yesterday.]

The night we rode into our first Iowa town, that of Shenandoah, we were so exhausted and fed-up with bug bites, we bit the bullet and stayed at a motel. We asked the proprietor about alternate highways to the one we were on, and he told us about a special bike trail they were building out of an old railroad track. The trail is called the Wabash Trace Trail, and here’s how they built it: they found an old railroad track that cuts its way through a thick growth of trees, and they pulled up the tracks and the ties and everything, leaving only the coal and cinder bed on which the tracks were initially built. Then, they scraped off all the coal and cinder, leaving only the bare ground. This ground would soon be overgrown with grass and bushes and whatnot, and eventually trees, if left alone, so they poured crushed limestone all over it. Then the limestone is rolled flat and packed down, and then you have an excellent and durable surface, the construction of which doesn’t disturb the ecology of the area, and which is cheap and does not require servicing. [This was part of a whole movement, we later learned, called Rails to Trails.]

The only problem was that the trail wasn’t done yet, so we got the name of the person involved with the Shenandoah leg of to see if it’s even rideable. This guy, Bill, is the owner of a café built out of an old railroad depot in town, called the Depot Deli. After sleeping in at the motel (a rare treat) we headed over to the Depot for lunch. We had no idea we were entering a cycling, and Everly Brothers, mecca. I don’t really know who the Everly Brothers are, other than their being musicians. Turns out they came from Shenandoah, and Bill knew them and described to us a big blowout concert here years back. He really did mean blowout—a tremendous windstorm kicked up during their finale, and “blew everything and everyone quite literally away,” he said. That kind of thing evidently happens here in the Midwest.

Anyway, mere seconds after we’d sat down at the Depot Deli, some guy ran up to our table and said, “Cyclists! Wow! Where are you headed?” He sat down in our booth and began talking to us, telling us all about the rides in the area, how many cyclists come through, how many he puts up, etc., and invited us to go to his farmhouse for a couple of days to eat steak and drink beer. (We politely declined.) Several other locals wandered over, including a grease monkey in a jumpsuit, whom we’d seen the previous evening on the road (he’d pulled his truck over, leaned out the window, and asked if we needed anything). We all got to talking, and pretty soon the grease monkey sent his son out to drive 10 miles home, get us an Iowa cycling map, and come back with it. We ended up staying in the café for two hours, and learned all about the Trace Trail, its origin, its level of completion, Iowa cycling, and Iowa in general. The first fellow bought us our lunch, and we left completely refreshed, informed, and stoked.

The trail was incomplete for about 15 miles or so; we rode it anyway since we’re on mountain bikes, after all. Much of it was in the pre-limestone phase, so we were riding through native grasses up to 2 feet tall, on a flat smooth surface we had to assume existed beneath. (It was like riding on the bike path in Boulder in the winter in a foot of snow, where you assume you’re indeed still on the path, not over some field or stream.) Huge trees lined either side of us, shading us completely and often hanging over the trail and making a tunnel that we rode through. We call it the Indiana Jones section of the tour. It was all fun and games until we got to an old bridge that was far from complete.

It was a long, long way down. Erin crawled over the bridge on her hands and knees, which only took slightly less time than me wheeling our much-laden bicycles, one at a time, over its tire-wide steel frame. But we made it.

Drying out upstate – August 14, 1994

ROCHESTER, NY: A couple nights ago it rained all night and our gear got soaked. In the morning the rain finally quit and we’d just finished airing out the rain fly, and were airing out our sleeping bags (which we do by laying them on the tent so the sun) when the rain started up again. We had to put the sleeping bags back in the tent, and the rain fly back on it, while we packed the rest of our gear (which takes about 45 minutes). We ended up setting off with a packed-up tent that was dripping wet. Too much of that and we’ll get mold on the tent, after which it won’t be waterproof anymore.

Since I last corresponded, we’ve been through the rest of Michigan, which was, actually, the only state where we’ve had consistent trouble being cyclists. The upper peninsula was nice, with a fairly reliable shoulder; only occasionally did we have to ditch off the side because of a giant RV towing a boat. Mackinac Island, which we reached by ferry, was quite touristy and expensive, but we had a good time. The lower peninsula, which tends to be more industrial, was awful. The small highways had the same traffic volume that a gorgeous California freeway would—but no shoulder. Meanwhile, the motorists seem to hate us on sight and gave us no room, often laying on the horn just to let us know we weren’t welcome. At one point we pulled over the try to splice our frazzled nerve endings, and when it was time to start pedaling again, I couldn’t get Erin to move. She just stood there, straddling her bike, staring off into space as if her mind had been sucked out by cable TV. Finally we found a smaller road, not caring where it went or even what direction. The county roads in Michigan are populated by terminally psychotic old bastards who would squeeze by us with inches to spare, and then cut in front of us. I refrained from making obscene gestures only out of fear that they were packing heat.

Finally we left Michigan, hitching a ride in a pickup truck over the (non-bike-friendly) bridge into Sarnia, Canada. The border guards took away our hot pepper spray at customs, since it’s illegal nationwide. Sarnia is a pretty big town, and looks exactly like the U.S. It has all the same fast-food chains, K-Marts, etc. Very pretty place though, and it seems more safety-oriented than the U.S., even. There are signs warning cyclists about the danger of riding over railroad tracks; signs on the road warning that a school bus turns here; etc.

Our first campground was a KOA, which cost $18 Canadian, which is actually a deal because the US dollar is worth $1.37 there right now. A deal for a KOA, that is, but of course a rip-off by any other measure. The second campground, also private, was worse—$18 for a little plot on the side of a hill, sandwiched between a jerry-rigged outhouse and an RV. We were the only tent in the place. It was actually the most amazing campground I’ve ever seen—a trailer park, really, with mostly permanent residents. All kinds of trailers shoved together, with dirt roads between them bearing names like 5th St. and Park Ave. As we rode through, we saw all kinds of corrugated steel awnings and porches built onto these vehicles. One had a mural of the Simpsons. One place had an actual wooden house constructed around this trailer, completely encasing it. The outer wall of the trailer was the inner wall of this family’s living room, with a picture hanging from it and everything! I wonder if the trailer could still be driven away in an emergency, forcefully, dragging the living room carpet with it, like a James Bond style escape pod. Amazing. The campground was basically a shantytown.

After that, we stayed in provincial parks exclusively. These are the finest campgrounds I’ve ever stayed at. The first one had giant, perfectly flat tent sites that were sectioned off by trees and bushes. The shower and bathrooms are cleaned four times a day, and are immaculate. Instead of being coin-operated—which invariably leads to groping for quarters with soapy hands, shampooed hair, and lathered face—these ones have a photocell in the wall. To turn on the shower, you simply pass your hand over it, and water of the most pleasant temperature cascades over you magically. Everybody is pleasant and patient, and even the mosquitoes are more tame. They wait for you, holding perfectly still, so that you can swat them easily. And they would never bite you. It’s not in their nature. Okay, I’m exaggerating here, but really, Canada has great campgrounds.

Most of the scenery we encountered in Ontario was tobacco fields. We asked a clerk in a store if it was a big industry, and she lamented, “It used to be, before the government came in and ruined everything, eh?” Perhaps she’s referring to the splendid warning labels on the cigarette packs. Instead of being in fine print, in a little box, they’re in a huge font, right on the front of the pack, just below the brand name. Here are a few of them: “Smoking shortens your life expectancy.” “Smoking can kill you.” “Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer.” “Smoking is a leading cause of heart failure.” “Smoking causes cancer in exposed non-smokers.” “Pregnant smokers give birth to extra-terrestrial lizards with weak chins.” Okay, I exaggerated a bit on the last one.

We stayed in a youth hostel for two nights in Niagara, home of the giant waterfalls. I had no idea what to expect, but it really is impressive. The water falls so violently that an incredible mist rises up past the height of the falls, like steam. Looking down, I was amazed to see a boat down there, practically right beneath the crashing water, rocking from side to side. The scores of passengers were clad in shiny blue hooded jackets. This was one of the Maid of the Mist boat tours. I wondered how much it cost: $20? $100? It seemed like such a privilege to be taken into such peril, your fate in the hands of the expert skipper. We took the tour, for $9, and it really was breathtaking. I fought hard to get some photos without drenching my camera in the spray. No photo could do justice to the panorama of crashing water and spray all around us. I ended up getting my hair drenched, and the camera strap, camera case strap, and binoculars strap all twisted and tangled together. We were at the very front of the boat and it was like being in a Spielberg movie. Rockin’ good time.

We’re in a motel now in Rochester, New York, which we got to after a long, hard, rainy day yesterday. We hung up our wet gear, laid out our sleeping bags, turned the heater up to 90 degrees, and left for a few hours. When we returned, our room was a sauna and everything much drier. I fear our tent is getting moldy, because the floor near its foot leaking badly now, and the leaking section seems to be moving towards the head of the tent. We’ll have to make that the foot from now on.

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From the Archives - Bike Tour Journal Part II

Introduction

Twenty-eight years ago, my wife and I did a cross-country bike tour. As the journey unfolded, we kept friends and family apprised of our exploits via email. This digital correspondence wouldn’t seem remarkable today—I guess email is even considered old-fashioned now—but back then it was cutting edge. I carried a laptop in my bicycle pannier; it was roughly the size and weight of a big-city phone book (if you even remember those). The power supply alone was several pounds. The modem, which was external and attached via a 9-pin RS232 serial connector, was the size of a pack of cards and connected at 2400 baud, which is roughly 1/42,000th of the speed of my current Internet connection. I couldn’t email very often because most of the time we were camping. Even when we splurged on a motel, many of those fleabag places didn’t even have phone lines. When we stayed with friends or family, I had to time my CompuServe session carefully, as it took our hosts’ phone offline.

Recently I came across some email chronicles that somehow didn’t make it into my bike tour memoirs. (The first of these was written twenty-eight years ago to the day.) I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting passages to give you a little travelogue. Enjoy please enjoy.

(The photo below was snapped by Erin’s great-aunt; she wrote on the back of the print, “7-5-94 Erin & Dana waiting at Coop to weigh bikes & gear before going to Iowa.”)

Kansas – June 30, 1994

I had a good birthday: we went to the Barbed Wire museum in La Crosse, Kansas, which I’d really been looking forward to. (I wrote my high school research paper on barbed wire, which turns out to be a fascinating topic.) But when we got there the sign said “Post Rock Museum,” so we were confused. Turns out there are three museums in a row there: the Post Rock one, then a Historical Society museum, and then the Barbed Wire museum. This little old lady in the Post Rock museum was incredibly knowledgeable. “I’ve been here longer than the museum!” she quipped: and it was true, she’d been in La Crosse all her life and had taught in a 1-room schoolhouse there.

She knew all about post rock, which is the limestone they dug up from quarries to use as fence posts. There was a whole piece of quarry resurrected inside the museum (which was an old house). You could see the layers of soil, then rock. The crew would dig down through the limestone, which would be fairly soft since it hadn’t been exposed to the air. They’d drill holes, then tap in these rods just until they were about to split the rock, then stop and put in another one.  Once a whole row of these pins was put in, they’d tap the end pins extra hard, and the whole rock would split along the pins. Then they’d haul up this whole piece of limestone, and within twelve hours it’d be hard as, well, rock.

Then we went to the Barbed Wire museum, which had gobs of fascinating displays, but a very poor so-called guide who watched TV the entire time. That was a disappointment. The Historical Society museum, though, was amazing. Stuff in there from the 1700’s, and another little old lady who knew everything. This museum was built in an old Union Pacific depot that had been moved from a little town called Timkin, named after a ball bearing magnate who owned the land on which the depot was built. The depot, too, goes by the name Timkin. This little old lady worked there back when it was a depot, and she pointed to a bench and said, “I’m gonna have them move that over by the door, which is where it belongs.” They had a whole collection of ancient typewriters, some so old (1726, I believe) that the shift key hadn’t been invented, so it had two entire sets of keys, one set for uppercase and the other for lowercase. This museum had dozens of photo albums from the 1800’s and thereabouts, and old books and diaries, and old dental equipment, and clothes, nothing in any particular order but all of it absolutely fascinating. We hung out there until 4:30 in the afternoon when it closed, then finally hit the road. It was 106 degrees out there, the sun blazing, and we stopped 25 miles into the ride for Dairy Queen: my birthday treat.

By 9:30 p.m., when it was just getting dark, we were 50 miles outside of La Crosse in a little town called Caskill or something: I can’t remember the name and I don’t feel like digging out the map. We found a cop and he gave us permission to camp in the city park. There, Erin set to work on my birthday dinner, but it was not to be. The little fuel line gasket in our camp stove had given out, so the stove was worthless. So we had cold chili and cold canned corn—but good! These little kids wandered up, and it seems in a small town like that kids are allowed, probably even encouraged, to talk to adults. So they chatted with us until about 11:00, at which point a few of the parents who had heard the legend of our bike tour came out and talked for another hour.

The policeman we’d gone to for permission to camp had been driving by every so often to make sure we were okay, and at about midnight he came by and we talked until like 1 a.m. He manages a Rug Doctor franchise by day, and is a part time policeman (two weekends a month) for $5/hour, mainly as a community service to his town. He bought a house in that town for—get this—$6,000. No, I didn’t slip a decimal point there. Heck, Erin and I could’ve bought a house there with cash, on the spot, and lived there the rest of our days, supporting ourselves on a minimum-wage job!

Now we’re in Topeka, staying with Erin’s Great-aunt J— and Great-uncle V—. They’re a 60-something couple, retired (she from the phone company, he from the police force), in a very nice house they designed themselves on a couple of acres. They’ve got a pond and pasture land, a brand-new John Deere tractor, and a horse, and chickens and pigeons and even several hundred pet catfish. Uncle V— walks out to his pond every evening with a giant pail of pellet-style fish food, and yells “Here, fishy-fishy-fishy-fishEEE!” while rapping the side of the pail. Even though the pond is easily 200 feet from his front door, you can see the ripples where the fish are approaching. He strolls down there, and the fish converge. When he feeds them, you can see them all plain as day, their huge (4”) mouths wide open as they thrash about. We were sitting out there one evening after feeding the fish, and V—’s son J— (a policeman himself) said, “Look, dad, a snapping turtle.” To my amazement, V— whipped out a small handgun and fired at it. “Missed him, Dad. Too high,” said J—. “Yup,” said V—. Erin protested, horrified, and V— explained that the turtles eat the fish.

Speaking of eating, they feed us gobs here. At every meal my gut ends up ready to bust open. If I stop short of being stuffed, V— seems to sense it and says, “Nope, you better finish it up. No sense feeding it to Harley” (i.e., Harley Davidson, their Rottweiler). We’ve had pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, handmade egg noodles with chicken, bacon and eggs, a picnic, all-you-can-eat-fried-chicken, biscuits-&-gravy, a patty-melt, and ham with scalloped potatoes. J—, Erin’s great-aunt, is so happy: “Just like having our son at home again!” I can’t believe how much they feed me. I eat until I’m sure they’ll be exchanging glances and shaking their heads, making comments about tapeworms, trying to figure out how to get rid of me—but no, they don’t seem to think there’s anything strange or wrong about me eating 10,000 calories at a sitting. Since we had a late dinner tonight (with about twenty relatives visiting, invited over in our honor), our hosts insisted we have a big afternoon snack—so we got onion rings and ice cream at Dairy Queen. And they are absolutely refusing to let us leave before the 4th of July. So we’re here, living high on the hog, until then. I’m loving it, needless to say. Thing is, I’m eating so much I just can’t seem to stay awake between meals. I walk around in a stupor, yawning, my body working overtime to convert all that food to fat. I’ll look like Big Boy by the time we leave.

Kansas itself is really nice. Rolling hills are the rule out here—don’t let anybody tell you it’s flat. (Sure, it might seem flat when you drive along, but with our loaded bikes we feel every little rise.) Although our hosts say everything’s brown and dead right now, it’s greener than Colorado or California ever get. And they’ve got lightning bugs here (fireflies, by another name) that are just amazing to watch. I can’t get over them. Everybody here thinks I’m crazy for thinking they’re anything special.

Cracked rim – July 19, 1994

We have arrived at [my stepfather’s brother’s] place in Northfield, Minnesota. Earlier this evening they fed us a very spartan dinner: this strange casserole made with brown rice and veggies, and just a smattering of cheese on top. It was almost non-caloric. I asked for seconds and our hostess seemed taken aback, like I was some absolute glutton or something. For dessert they served the tiniest, most stingy portion of ice cream I’ve ever seen. When I channeled Oliver Twist and asked for more, she frowned and said she’d already put it away. In desperation I offered to fetch it myself, at which point she relented, but she seemed really put out. I hate to be an ingrate, but man, what’s wrong with these people?

After dinner it was still light enough out for me to check over my bike and troubleshoot a braking problem. One of the most common questions we get from locals along our route is, “Have you had any major mechanical failures?” This is asked with the same sort of enthusiasm you see in bike race spectators who watch from the most dangerous corner, hoping to see a good crash. So far, we haven’t had an exciting tale to tell—we’re on only our second pair of tires, with zero mechanical problems—but that just changed. It turns out my rear rim is imploding. Like a star collapsing on itself, it is trying to achieve a smaller diameter. The rim has huge cracks along the surface that the brake pads contact, and the metal is beginning to overlap there. At any time it could crush flat like an aluminum can.

Thanks to the time zone difference, I was able to reach my former boss at the bike shop in Berkeley and order a new rim. He’s FedExing it, to arrive tomorrow morning. I ordered a model of rim identical to the old one so I can use my old spokes (i.e., tape the new rim to the old one, and swing the spokes & nipples over), to avoid the nightmare of trying to buy the right length spokes from an old geezer in a small town bike shop. I know full well it’s unwise to lace up a new rim on old spokes; last time I did that, the wheel came apart on a fast descent during the Berkeley Hills road race, and someone yelled out, “Get away from him, HE’S GOIN’ DOWN!” But I’m not of the racer or bicycle mechanic mentality anymore. I’m a tourist now—I really ought to be fixing this thing with duct tape. Then I’d have more stories to give people goose bumps with.

Solo Joe Nobody – July 22, 1994

While riding along near Mondovi, Wisconsin we met the most amazing guy. He calls himself Solo Joe Nobody and has written (and self-published) a book, which we bought. His bike is loaded up to 150 pounds, so he’s the closest person I’ve come across to my state of lunacy. (I weighed my bike at a grain/feed lot, on the accurate scales, and it was 180 pounds.)

But this guy is different: his bike is loaded up like a homeless person loads his shopping cart—stuff just tied on, willy-nilly. He’s even got a portable stereo dangling precariously from the handlebars. All his equipment looks at least twenty years old. Hard to tell what kind of bike he’s on—it’s covered with the stickers advertising the bike shops he’s stopped in at. He has them from all over the country. He rides along smoking a pipe; even has a little leather holster for it. He wears mirrored sunglasses … for reasons I shall get to in a minute.

Within a minute of talking to this guy, we knew he was not your typical bicycle tourist. He’s a Vietnam vet and suffers from brain damage. After three years in the Navy, including a combat tour in ‘Nam, but while still on active duty back in the U.S., he was in a heinous car accident—forced off the road by an oncoming car in the wrong lane, he went off an 80-foot cliff. I could see the scar in his throat from the resulting tracheotomy. He was in a coma for two months and in the hospital for another thirteen. Because he was on active duty when it happened, he receives disability money and can eke out a living. The sad part is that he really can’t do anything productive because his left arm—indeed, the entire left side of his body—shakes visibly, all the time. In addition, one leg is now shorter than the other, and together with badly disrupted balance (related to his brain damage), he can’t walk right. He looks like a drunk, which alarms a lot of people. In fact, he’s been picked up many times by cops thinking he’s drunk; when they look in his eyes, they fear worse: for his eyes, since the accident, don’t work right. They roam totally independently of one another, each pointing off in a skew direction. So the cops often think he’s on drugs. His solution for avoiding public scorn and whatnot is to wear mirrored sunglasses, and not walk anywhere. Everywhere he goes is by bicycle. How he balances with all that load, given his balance problems, is beyond me, but he insists it’s easy.

Another strange idiosyncrasy of this fellow is that he swears like a sailor all the time. He apologized profusely, saying he couldn’t help it, “it’s left over from the Navy.” I wonder if it’s from the brain damage; remember Phineas Gage, that 1850s railroad worker who was tamping down explosives with a 4-foot long iron tamping rod, and the explosives exploded (as explosives tend to do), launching the rod through his head, and though he survived he began cussing all the time? Maybe when Solo Joe Nobody says he can’t help cussing, he literally can’t. (This is all my own speculation; I’m only 130 pages into his autobiography.) Anyhow, for whatever reason, he throws more profanities into his speech than anybody I have ever encountered, but is the nicest, most easygoing guy you could imagine. For somebody with his disabilities, or even for somebody bicycling into a headwind for thousands of miles (as he was doing, coming from east to west), we found him an amazingly upbeat and cheerful person. We spent an hour chatting with him.

He tours about half the year, every year, all over the country. He prefers the interstate highways, because they’re the flattest and most direct routes (never mind that he’s not trying to get anywhere in particular). He tours, amazingly enough, with only one chainring on his bike: the big one. I can’t imagine how he gets over the hills, nor why he would want to tour without low gearing. We asked him why he doesn’t prefer scenic routes like we do, and he said, “Aw, fuck, you can see all that shit in a library!” He uses a German-made Ciclomaster bike computer, because its display has enough decimal places to record tens of thousands of miles. Imagine breaking 10K on a single bike computer battery!

At the end of our conversation, Solo Joe said to me, “You know Dana, you and I have something in common. We both love your wife!” That was a good cue for Erin and me to wrap things up, shake Joe’s hand and bid him adieu, and get back out on the road.

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From the Archives - Horsefly Spider Smackdown!

Introduction

Here is another bike touring tale from my archives. I had photographic proof of this remarkable incident, but this was 24 years ago and I can’t find the photo. Alas.

The spider and the horsefly – July 1994

Stopped at a town along the way to Iowa, I had one of life’s great unexpected moments. While my wife talked to her aunt and then her mom on a payphone, I waited, straddling my bike, not doing much of anything. Then I saw a tiny lime-green spider on my front pannier. His front two legs on either side were twice the length of his body. When spinning a web, he would wave these front legs about majestically in the air, like giant batons. He was building an as-yet invisible web when I suddenly saw a small emerald-green horsefly land on the pannier, not so very far from the spider.

You can tell a horsefly by its giant, menacing proboscis, which can pierce cotton, denim, and even leather on the way to your skin. “Hideous blood-sucking parasite, I’ll kill you,” I swore. These creatures are mighty hard to swat—they seem to have better instincts than a housefly, perhaps as a result of dodging a horse’s tail all their lives—but I had bigger plans for this one.

Reflecting on the the three-week old scars still left on my body from the horseflies in Colorado and western Kansas, I decided I would catch this horsefly alive and feed it to the tiny green spider, who would slowly eat it alive over a period of hours. I stared at my prey and tried not to think of the tremendous odds against me. Could I possibly execute this plan? No point deliberating on the matter: in a perfect, miraculous Zen moment, I just struck out, as I would for a typewriter key on the home row, and got him.

I had to restrain myself from doing a victory dance and tipping over my bike. I looked at the doomed creature for a moment, sizing up his treacherous syringe, before holding him out before the spider. The green spider instantly recognized the largest buffet he’d ever stumbled across, and groped out for it. He couldn’t get a good enough purchase—the fly was larger than he by several times—and finally I just set the fly down near him. The fly was injured and thus struggled, futilely, to right himself. The spider walked towards him and then—amazingly—walked right by. I guess with six or eight eyes, you could have trouble with depth perception.

So this horsefly was struggling to fly away with only one wing, and finally gave up and crawled towards the end of the pannier and jumped off the edge, as if committing suicide to save himself the horror of being eaten alive. Furious, I picked him up off the ground and set him back on the pannier, and again the spider missed him. I was about to put him in the spider’s path yet again, when suddenly the spider shimmied up an invisible web he’d made, all the way up to my handlebar.

By this time my wife was off the phone, and ready to get moving again. Even on these long summer days, we always get a little antsy in the evenings about finding a place to camp for the night. (We’ve come up empty a few times and had to sleep under a bridge or in a pricey motel.) I was torn about whether or not to ask my wife to wait just a little longer so I could complete this spider-feeding operation.

Well, before I even had a chance to broach the topic, an old man pulled up in an RV, stopped, and jumped out to chat with us. He’d seen us from the road and made a special detour to see what we were about. I expected the normal volley of questions, the expressions of amazement that we’d come all the way from San Francisco, the excitement that with a whole nation to tour around in we’d chosen this little town to ride through, etc. But this guy didn’t actually seem that curious about our trip. What he really wanted to talk about—and did!—was his 20-foot Winnebago Atasca, and what great gas mileage he’d gotten on his trip over from Michigan (or maybe he was headed to Michigan; I wasn’t paying super close attention). He talked and talked, and my wife was anxious to go since we’d miles to go before we’d sleep, miles to go before we’d sleep . . . and there was the fly, and there was the spider, still, but I’d had to suspend my operation so as not to be rude, and my magnificent plan was falling apart before my eyes. Finally, the man drove off, waving, and I grabbed the fly once again. I told my wife, “Observe. I will feed the fly to the spider.”

The spider was doing laps around the circumference of my handlebar now, but I caught his attention, waving the fly before him, its helpless legs groping the air. Now I held the fly right spang in front of him, and the spider groped out for the prey. I swear that I could feel the tiny spider legs brush my fingers as he betook his purchase. Perhaps he was enclosing the hapless fly with a web; in any case, after 20 or 30 seconds he’d pulled it in. I let go, and to my delight the spider wrapped his tiny mandibles around one of the fly’s red eyes. Yes, yes, I thought, oh yes sweet spider, suck his fly brains out his eyeball. This was pretty much the most satisfying moment of my life to that point.

The spider rode on my handlebar for the next 13 miles, feasting on its still living, still twitching, grossly oversized prey. Then we stopped at a country store for ice cream confections and when we came back out he was gone,  and the horsefly with him.

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