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| The specter that haunted me across Kansas in 2006... |
This blog has 159 posts so far. Weird how the most popular post this year was about the one of the worst foods in the world you literally have to go to prison to sample, and FBITWC's most popular post of all time (with over 1000 views) was from the very beginning when I was posting every day, simply ranting about a broad subject that was just starting to unfold itself to me: sugar.
Though while I've been thinking a lot about my food and health in these final weeks of 2014, my mind has been wandering back to a bicycle trip I took almost a decade ago. I was still deeply mourning for my parents, and I was shifting gears in life, getting ready for married life and wanting to go big before kids would make dropping out of life for a few months impossible. The blog I kept was more for just friends who wanted to stay in touch and hear what was going on, but upon reflection, it was a tool to keep me present and aware of my surroundings.
For your entertainment and my reverie, I'm reposting my favorite post from that blog here, dating from September 18, 2006. This was pre-iPhone, my camera had died way back in California, and all posts were from internet-connected public libraries across the country. It's a long post, and covers a bunch of experiences that really shaped:
- the evolving view of bacon
- a realization that cycling is a skill that can be developed
- my white privilege in terms of interacting with cops
- an adult identity as a Jew (separate from bacon, oddly enough)
Rereading that blog, only now am I coming to terms with it, and putting into words what I got out of it -- I think I got out of it what I needed, and a lot more. If I were to ever write a memoir, it would probably be based on that blog, the private notebook I kept as a companion to it, and…oh, it's all too much. I'm grateful. Happy New Year and good health in 2015!
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If you ride a bike through Central Kansas early on a Sunday morning and listen to the radio, Jesus will find you. He will envelope every single radio station on the dial and speak to you through the various hosts. There was "Women on Women" with Phylis, which sounded kinda kinky with this woman who had 9 husbands, miscarriages, abusive boyfriends, drugs, etc, until all her problems were resolved by Jesus. On another station, Stephen Baldwin was being interviewed about the Jesus-oriented MySpace/Itunes website he was promoting for some God-really-only-knows reason. It was sweet relief to here the old man with the froggy voice take calls about old-time home-remedies....for plants and trees. Did you know that if you pee in a bottle, age it for several weeks, then spray it on your flowering plants and trees, it'll repel armadillos (pronounced ar-MAH-dill-ahz)?
I guess Jesus (and the priorities of public funding) has kept me off computers the last few days, as you will not find an open library on the Lord's Day. And I guess Saturday, too, just in case God is Jewish. This is not the bible belt, but I've seen big "Life: What a Beautiful Choice" and "My Mommy Chose Life" billboards in just about every town I've come through. Only one was vandalized. On the bike ride over to the library here, I saw a religousy building with a big "SHALOM" on it's sign....could it be? Nope, it's a Mennonite Church. Which in these parts where it's Presbyterian or Bust, that might as well be Jewish I suppose. Shalom, y'all!
The terrain out here is flat, and the weather has been cooperating. Except for the other day....Sunny, there was strong South/Southwest winds. The route I was on was mostly easterly, but 30 miles in, it turns straight south for 19 miles. Extreme wind warnings on the radio, 20-30 mph, gusting up to 50. Now I've been riding east with 15-25 mph s/sw winds which didn't help me much, but didn't hurt. At the turning corner, a sports bar/diner just opened up for a 10am breakfast, and I powered down a pancake as big as my head, hashbrowns and perhaps the best bacon I've ever had (more on that in a minute). I topped off my camelback (a 72 ounce bladder of water I wear on my back) and my bottle, and get ice. And then, into the wind.
Now, I didn't know what "50 mph wind" meant, and had I known, I would probably taken the day off for bad weather. The route itself was rolling little hills, with more declines than inclines. At the top of the first hill, I had to turn off the radio, because on top of all the howling, all I could hear snippets of "extreme wind warning" and "tornado last night" and "islamo-fascist". Damn them islamo-fascist wind-bombs!
Pedaling into that kind of wind is very much like climbing a steep grade, with one key difference. When going up a steep hill, you bring your chest up, your hands high on your handlebars, so you can open your chest and get full lungs of air. However, when pushing into the wind, you need to get low on the drops of your handlebars to get as aero as possible to lessen wind resistance. So you are pushing as hard as you would on a mountain, but have to tuck down and compress your chest. Or, as I did, open up like a sail and hammer in, taking breaks every five minutes on the flats, and walking up ridiculously small baby hills. Invisible babies became men.
When I would raise my head and the wind would gust, it felt like a thousand little hammers pounding my face, my nose, catching into my mouth and hammering the cheek inside-out. And then when I rubbed my face and looked at my hand, it was covered in granulated, powdery salt....
The 20 miles took me three hours. All farms, then a protected water-shed. Near the end, I was feeling disoriented and blown, no pun intended. All through the push, I was sucking on my water and choking down my hot gatorade. Then it ran out. The wind was sucking me dry. Even though I topped off, it wasn't enough, I had miscalculated. Food, I had on me, but liquids were gone. Within a mile, there was a stand of trees, which meant in all likelihood there would be a house cradled behind it.
My instinct is to NEVER knock on a stranger's door, it's just not done, unless it's an emergency. I had been feeling a bit disoriented for the last hour, but I chalked that up to the heavy pushing. If I became as dehydrated as the wind could make me, that WOULD be an ambulance-worthy emergency. So I dropped the bike, walked over the grass to the front door. I noticed a mini van parked behind. I knock, I hear a dog bark, but no answer. I walk around to the back, I see a hose, but feel weird just grabbing it. I knock on the back door, and a Sandy Duncan look-alike with a bit too much make-up answers it (my first thought was, uh oh, this is how a bad porn movie starts....hey, I was disoriented!) and I say sorry to bother you, but I ran out of water. She's very nice, says oh please, use my well, take all you can use, then walks me over and shows me how to flip the lever to cause a jet of ice-cold water to spray out into the wind. She quickly shuffles back in, and I water myself down to get rid of the salt-face, refill everything, then drink as much as my stomach will hold.
Back on the road, determined to meet my 72 virgins at the cross-roads (or Betsy, just as good!). Oddly, the house was less than a mile away from my turn east. The last 15 miles into town was flat and not too difficult, but I was done for the day at that turn.
Everywhere you eat bacon in NYC, it's mostly the same. Some fancy places will have'organic' or 'applewood smoked' stuff or deep fry it for a crispy non-dry consistency, but more or less it's samey. Every time I eat bacon out here, it's totally different. Sometimes papery thin and hickory flavored, the other time thick and ham-looking (like in England) but with a distinctly woody tinge. Wonderful!
You'll get big fat Chicago-style, and you'll get foofy California-style, but you will NEVER get Kansas-style pizza in NYC. Yesterday, I was in Sterling, a cute dimple of a town with only one open restaurant on Sunday, Gambino's Kansas-style pizza. Kansas-style, well, let's put our big Noooo Yawrk SITTEE! attitude aside and give it a shot. This pizza was aiming for Pizza Hut style....and failing miserably. The crust was bleachy white with no char and no air in it, flat and slightly crumbly with no chew to it. The cheese had no taste and the sauce was sweetly forgettable. However, I was one of the few customers in and the guy from the kitchen came out and asked if everything was ok - now THAT would never happen in a NY-style place, especially if the pizza wasn't top-notch! Rather than pull a 'tude, I said everything was wonderful and got out of there....into the cross-hairs of the local sheriff...
Next door was a little public park, between Gambinos and the closed public library. I rested my bike against a bench and sat at a concrete table and read the Sunday Hamilton News. If you were to remove all the AP and wire reports, then remove all the coverage of the Kansas State Fair, you'd have about 2 pages of newspaper. So as I'm quite literally sitting there minding my own business, I see a cop-looking fellow walking toward me. I see on the street there is a large white pick-up truck with "POLICE" painted on it's side in blue. He pauses to peer into a garbage can, sticks his hand in to push it around, then continues to walk toward me. "Hi, how you doin'? You from around here?" I give the usual shpiel about biking my way home to NY, blah blah blah. He asks me where I was last night, where I'm going. He seems friendly enough, but I can tell from my many hours of watching bad cop procedurals on TV that he's feeling me out. He mentions that being a stranger in every town, I must get a lot of this. No dude, I thought, yer the first. Is that your bike? Where's your stuff? I mention that I'm staying at the Inn, and all my stuff is in a trailer that I drag behind my bike. He says good day and splits.
Three minutes later, I'm still reading the thin News, and the sheriff comes back. Can I see some ID? Sure, no problem. He sits with me and my license and writes down my name, license # and DOB. He says there was a burglary in the area recently, and if any one asks him about the biker, he can say he checked him out. He also says he checked the trash can to see if the burglar dumped anything. Good thing I was reading the local news and not "In Cold Blood".
So a few hours later I'm in my room writing in my journal when the TV news announces that the Clutter home, where the murders of "In Cold Blood" occurred, was up for sale. As I'm writing, "and this cop comes over and asks me...", someone knocks on the door. Hmm. I put on my skivvies and answer it, and low and behold it's the sheriff again. Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Wildman, but I need to ask you a few more questions. Sure, no problem. You with the other cyclist at the Inn? No, I'm traveling alone. You talk to anyone in a truck with a trailer today? No, can't say I have. You been on any gravel roads today? Yes, one, here's my route map, there's the gravel road I was on. What time were you there? I called my fiance at the foot of it, so it must of been around 10am. Do you mind if I search your room?....I paused, hmmm, that's a bit personal. But I quickly surmised if I said no, he could probably take my ID, tell me not to leave town, then get a warrant. So I said sure, and he came in and gently went through my things....any medications or drugs here? Just some aspirin and sleeping pills in my toiletries. Can you open your trailer? Sure.....He explains that there was a burglary at the local pharmacy that morning, and all his leads are pointing to a 'trailer'. Since I mentioned I was pulling a trailer, he was came back to me. As I am not a drugstore pilferer, he thanked me heartily, shook my hand beefily, and split for the third time. I was a suspect in perhaps the biggest criminal peccadillo in the last 20 years of the history of Sterling, KS! Take that, CSI NY! Take that, Special Victims Unit!
Aside from All-Jesus Radio and Right Wing Shouter FM, K-Farm and Classic Shlock, you sometimes pick up an oldies station having an "All Fun Songs" weekend. Bippity Beach Boys, sugary psychedelic nuggets, some Funky Broadway Motowny bits, a lot less offensive than the other selections. But this song came on, "Wichita Lineman" by what I now know to be Glenn Campbell, as I never heard it before. I starts with this big mellow 1960's orchestral AM radio wash, and I groan, uh oh, here comes the sub-standard Elvis poot. Then I listened. The calm unfancy baritone sings a simple lyric about a truck driver/railroad engineer pining for his love while he drives across the long, straight roads of Wichita. Then these beautiful chord changes that made me want to smack Arthur Lee and my favorite band, Divine Comedy, for not coming up with them first. Just stunningly beautiful. That's me! I, too, am literally outside Wichita, chugging along the straight flat pancake roads, endlessly falling towards my love without getting there. Never heard it before, but by the end I was singing along, "But I can hear you through the whine, and the Wichita Lineman is still on the line." In three minutes, it went from an 'ewww' to one of my new favorite songs of all time. I can't believe I've never heard it before, a little googling has uncovered covers by the likes of Ray Charles to Urge Overkill, Sammy Davis to Kool & the Gang. Right song at the right time in the right place to the right person - I was jumping up and down and yelling, it made me so happy to be on my bike pedalling through the wheat chaff and cow-plots of Kansas.
I'm taking tomorrow off, I think I should of taken the day off after the windstorm, but wanted to lay down in a big town. Tomorrow, two more stories: The Old Lady & Her Senior Center, and the charming town of Buhler & Biker Jim. Buhler....Buhler.....Buhler....Buhler...
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addenda: At various motels, I'm seeing adverts for Verizon and their wonderful extensive network. I have Verizon and my phone has been on the "Extended Network" for a while now, meaning nothing except calls and texts. Where is my crowd of tech geeks and line-men that are supposed to follow me around? All I got is Farmer Hank and his wife Lydia working part time!
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addenda II: The Newton Librarian kicked me off in the middle of my cop story, as my hour was up and there was a line of people to get on the computers. (I'm now at the hotel, and fortunately they have a computer for the guests) I think I made a tactical mistake: I chose Newton (pop: 17,500) to take a day off because I was hankerin' for city life, but this is 4th-rate Kansas-style city life. Suburban sprawl with a highway bisecting one part, a railroad bisecting another, and 12 different kinds of fast-food chains lining the business district, all with drive-thru windows. Blechchch. I'll be living it hotel-style all day tomorrow, getting my head clear through large sunless HBO-treatments and a (albeit Rufusless) 4-hour soak...
The terrain out here is flat, and the weather has been cooperating. Except for the other day....Sunny, there was strong South/Southwest winds. The route I was on was mostly easterly, but 30 miles in, it turns straight south for 19 miles. Extreme wind warnings on the radio, 20-30 mph, gusting up to 50. Now I've been riding east with 15-25 mph s/sw winds which didn't help me much, but didn't hurt. At the turning corner, a sports bar/diner just opened up for a 10am breakfast, and I powered down a pancake as big as my head, hashbrowns and perhaps the best bacon I've ever had (more on that in a minute). I topped off my camelback (a 72 ounce bladder of water I wear on my back) and my bottle, and get ice. And then, into the wind.
Now, I didn't know what "50 mph wind" meant, and had I known, I would probably taken the day off for bad weather. The route itself was rolling little hills, with more declines than inclines. At the top of the first hill, I had to turn off the radio, because on top of all the howling, all I could hear snippets of "extreme wind warning" and "tornado last night" and "islamo-fascist". Damn them islamo-fascist wind-bombs!
Pedaling into that kind of wind is very much like climbing a steep grade, with one key difference. When going up a steep hill, you bring your chest up, your hands high on your handlebars, so you can open your chest and get full lungs of air. However, when pushing into the wind, you need to get low on the drops of your handlebars to get as aero as possible to lessen wind resistance. So you are pushing as hard as you would on a mountain, but have to tuck down and compress your chest. Or, as I did, open up like a sail and hammer in, taking breaks every five minutes on the flats, and walking up ridiculously small baby hills. Invisible babies became men.
When I would raise my head and the wind would gust, it felt like a thousand little hammers pounding my face, my nose, catching into my mouth and hammering the cheek inside-out. And then when I rubbed my face and looked at my hand, it was covered in granulated, powdery salt....
The 20 miles took me three hours. All farms, then a protected water-shed. Near the end, I was feeling disoriented and blown, no pun intended. All through the push, I was sucking on my water and choking down my hot gatorade. Then it ran out. The wind was sucking me dry. Even though I topped off, it wasn't enough, I had miscalculated. Food, I had on me, but liquids were gone. Within a mile, there was a stand of trees, which meant in all likelihood there would be a house cradled behind it.
My instinct is to NEVER knock on a stranger's door, it's just not done, unless it's an emergency. I had been feeling a bit disoriented for the last hour, but I chalked that up to the heavy pushing. If I became as dehydrated as the wind could make me, that WOULD be an ambulance-worthy emergency. So I dropped the bike, walked over the grass to the front door. I noticed a mini van parked behind. I knock, I hear a dog bark, but no answer. I walk around to the back, I see a hose, but feel weird just grabbing it. I knock on the back door, and a Sandy Duncan look-alike with a bit too much make-up answers it (my first thought was, uh oh, this is how a bad porn movie starts....hey, I was disoriented!) and I say sorry to bother you, but I ran out of water. She's very nice, says oh please, use my well, take all you can use, then walks me over and shows me how to flip the lever to cause a jet of ice-cold water to spray out into the wind. She quickly shuffles back in, and I water myself down to get rid of the salt-face, refill everything, then drink as much as my stomach will hold.
Back on the road, determined to meet my 72 virgins at the cross-roads (or Betsy, just as good!). Oddly, the house was less than a mile away from my turn east. The last 15 miles into town was flat and not too difficult, but I was done for the day at that turn.
Everywhere you eat bacon in NYC, it's mostly the same. Some fancy places will have'organic' or 'applewood smoked' stuff or deep fry it for a crispy non-dry consistency, but more or less it's samey. Every time I eat bacon out here, it's totally different. Sometimes papery thin and hickory flavored, the other time thick and ham-looking (like in England) but with a distinctly woody tinge. Wonderful!
You'll get big fat Chicago-style, and you'll get foofy California-style, but you will NEVER get Kansas-style pizza in NYC. Yesterday, I was in Sterling, a cute dimple of a town with only one open restaurant on Sunday, Gambino's Kansas-style pizza. Kansas-style, well, let's put our big Noooo Yawrk SITTEE! attitude aside and give it a shot. This pizza was aiming for Pizza Hut style....and failing miserably. The crust was bleachy white with no char and no air in it, flat and slightly crumbly with no chew to it. The cheese had no taste and the sauce was sweetly forgettable. However, I was one of the few customers in and the guy from the kitchen came out and asked if everything was ok - now THAT would never happen in a NY-style place, especially if the pizza wasn't top-notch! Rather than pull a 'tude, I said everything was wonderful and got out of there....into the cross-hairs of the local sheriff...
Next door was a little public park, between Gambinos and the closed public library. I rested my bike against a bench and sat at a concrete table and read the Sunday Hamilton News. If you were to remove all the AP and wire reports, then remove all the coverage of the Kansas State Fair, you'd have about 2 pages of newspaper. So as I'm quite literally sitting there minding my own business, I see a cop-looking fellow walking toward me. I see on the street there is a large white pick-up truck with "POLICE" painted on it's side in blue. He pauses to peer into a garbage can, sticks his hand in to push it around, then continues to walk toward me. "Hi, how you doin'? You from around here?" I give the usual shpiel about biking my way home to NY, blah blah blah. He asks me where I was last night, where I'm going. He seems friendly enough, but I can tell from my many hours of watching bad cop procedurals on TV that he's feeling me out. He mentions that being a stranger in every town, I must get a lot of this. No dude, I thought, yer the first. Is that your bike? Where's your stuff? I mention that I'm staying at the Inn, and all my stuff is in a trailer that I drag behind my bike. He says good day and splits.
Three minutes later, I'm still reading the thin News, and the sheriff comes back. Can I see some ID? Sure, no problem. He sits with me and my license and writes down my name, license # and DOB. He says there was a burglary in the area recently, and if any one asks him about the biker, he can say he checked him out. He also says he checked the trash can to see if the burglar dumped anything. Good thing I was reading the local news and not "In Cold Blood".
So a few hours later I'm in my room writing in my journal when the TV news announces that the Clutter home, where the murders of "In Cold Blood" occurred, was up for sale. As I'm writing, "and this cop comes over and asks me...", someone knocks on the door. Hmm. I put on my skivvies and answer it, and low and behold it's the sheriff again. Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Wildman, but I need to ask you a few more questions. Sure, no problem. You with the other cyclist at the Inn? No, I'm traveling alone. You talk to anyone in a truck with a trailer today? No, can't say I have. You been on any gravel roads today? Yes, one, here's my route map, there's the gravel road I was on. What time were you there? I called my fiance at the foot of it, so it must of been around 10am. Do you mind if I search your room?....I paused, hmmm, that's a bit personal. But I quickly surmised if I said no, he could probably take my ID, tell me not to leave town, then get a warrant. So I said sure, and he came in and gently went through my things....any medications or drugs here? Just some aspirin and sleeping pills in my toiletries. Can you open your trailer? Sure.....He explains that there was a burglary at the local pharmacy that morning, and all his leads are pointing to a 'trailer'. Since I mentioned I was pulling a trailer, he was came back to me. As I am not a drugstore pilferer, he thanked me heartily, shook my hand beefily, and split for the third time. I was a suspect in perhaps the biggest criminal peccadillo in the last 20 years of the history of Sterling, KS! Take that, CSI NY! Take that, Special Victims Unit!
Aside from All-Jesus Radio and Right Wing Shouter FM, K-Farm and Classic Shlock, you sometimes pick up an oldies station having an "All Fun Songs" weekend. Bippity Beach Boys, sugary psychedelic nuggets, some Funky Broadway Motowny bits, a lot less offensive than the other selections. But this song came on, "Wichita Lineman" by what I now know to be Glenn Campbell, as I never heard it before. I starts with this big mellow 1960's orchestral AM radio wash, and I groan, uh oh, here comes the sub-standard Elvis poot. Then I listened. The calm unfancy baritone sings a simple lyric about a truck driver/railroad engineer pining for his love while he drives across the long, straight roads of Wichita. Then these beautiful chord changes that made me want to smack Arthur Lee and my favorite band, Divine Comedy, for not coming up with them first. Just stunningly beautiful. That's me! I, too, am literally outside Wichita, chugging along the straight flat pancake roads, endlessly falling towards my love without getting there. Never heard it before, but by the end I was singing along, "But I can hear you through the whine, and the Wichita Lineman is still on the line." In three minutes, it went from an 'ewww' to one of my new favorite songs of all time. I can't believe I've never heard it before, a little googling has uncovered covers by the likes of Ray Charles to Urge Overkill, Sammy Davis to Kool & the Gang. Right song at the right time in the right place to the right person - I was jumping up and down and yelling, it made me so happy to be on my bike pedalling through the wheat chaff and cow-plots of Kansas.
I'm taking tomorrow off, I think I should of taken the day off after the windstorm, but wanted to lay down in a big town. Tomorrow, two more stories: The Old Lady & Her Senior Center, and the charming town of Buhler & Biker Jim. Buhler....Buhler.....Buhler....Buhler...
------
addenda: At various motels, I'm seeing adverts for Verizon and their wonderful extensive network. I have Verizon and my phone has been on the "Extended Network" for a while now, meaning nothing except calls and texts. Where is my crowd of tech geeks and line-men that are supposed to follow me around? All I got is Farmer Hank and his wife Lydia working part time!
------
addenda II: The Newton Librarian kicked me off in the middle of my cop story, as my hour was up and there was a line of people to get on the computers. (I'm now at the hotel, and fortunately they have a computer for the guests) I think I made a tactical mistake: I chose Newton (pop: 17,500) to take a day off because I was hankerin' for city life, but this is 4th-rate Kansas-style city life. Suburban sprawl with a highway bisecting one part, a railroad bisecting another, and 12 different kinds of fast-food chains lining the business district, all with drive-thru windows. Blechchch. I'll be living it hotel-style all day tomorrow, getting my head clear through large sunless HBO-treatments and a (albeit Rufusless) 4-hour soak...
