ALABAMA TO ONTARIO, PART II

ALABAMA TO ONTARIO, PART I

The trip is more than half over as the day arrives on which I turn back towards home.

TWENTY-NINTH DAY: At a little after noon, I rode into Kenora. I had planned to ride on to Vancouver but hadn't promised myself. I said I would see after I got to Canada.

I could go on, but when I dread to face the plains of Kentucky and Tennessee again, the plains of Manitoba, Alberta and, on the way back, Kansas, seem doubly dreadful.

I could go on, but each day I get a little less out of the journey. It is better to turn back while it is still enjoyable.

And so to close with one of my pokes at romanticism: And so the poor, lone lad, with tears in his eyes for the distant mountains he would not see, turned his bike around to head for his native land and his own sweet home.

Vermillion Bay - Longbow, 59 miles, June 25. 

For the night, I camped on a bend in the old highway, a few yards from and higher than the new road. As I cooked my food, the clouds turned a blue as deep a ink but without a trace of black. In the night, it rained, but the rain is a bit of a bore here. Usually, it is less trouble to get wet than to try to find a shelter for the few minutes it rains.

In the morning, I met two Canadians from Ottawa, thumbing their way back home by way of Chicago (they liked it there). They have been traveling all summer long without any money, having to sleep once in a police station as a result. Since I have reached Canada, I have met boys by the dozens, thumbing their way to Toronto or Vancouver, half of them working along the way. It is the modern way to travel.

Today I really flew down the highway. I have been fighting the wind for so long I forgot it was there. I thought I must be lazy to travel so slow. For that reason, the wind is my greatest enemy. If I take a long time to climb a mountain, I can see what I've done, but the wind will make me kill myself and make me blame myself for being lazy at the same time.

Longbow - Nester Falls, 66 miles, June 26. 

Goodbye Canada! Goodbye riding hundreds of miles through wilderness. Goodbye chicken at 45 cents a pound [expensive] and pound and a half loaves for a quarter [cheap]. Goodbye Canadian accents, labels in French, and square nickels [exaggeration]. Goodbye Soo, Wawa, Marathon, Schreibner, Vermillion Bay, and Kenora. Someday again, I promise!

And now that I'm back in the states, do things seem different? Not much. Sault Ste. Marie seemed so different because it was a mixing place (and not a melting pot) for nations. The rest of Canada was not so strange. Perhaps the change I notice the most is the roadside. In Canada, the houses were well off the road and seldom seen. Here in the states, it is the woods that are well off the road, and houses and fields occupy my view.

Tomorrow, I turn south. Soon I will be reaching the Mississippi which I will follow on down. It has been a joke that going south is going "downhill all the way." Although my wheels aren't as sensitive to slope as rolling water, once I cross the watershed line, it will be true.

Nester Falls - International Falls, Minnesota, 67 miles, June 27. 

Birds were not my only escorts thought. All day long I have been chased by a swarm of flies. I made good time because of them, for if I stopped or even slowed down, they were all over me. Last night, when I camped, they also bothered me, but they were all that bothered me, and even though they annoy just as much as the mosquitoes, I suppose they are a lot better.

Once I stopped at Big Fork River. Along the edge of the red-brown water were flying dozens of blue, green, and yellow dragonflies with black tipped wings. The Big Fork is the last river I'll cross that empties into the Arctic. The next empties into the Gulf of Mexico; it is the Mississippi.

International Falls - Effie, 71 miles, June 27. 

I could even make out some of the colors -- the blue of the sky (it is rarely completely black), the green of the trees, and the blue-gray of the road. I didn't see the actual colors, of course, but the corresponding shades of gray -- the way a color-blind man sees colors. My bike, having an enamel paint, came out differently. It should have looked blue but instead looked gold.

After I rode about five miles, the fog began to fill the valleys, and it grew colder. I was now so tired that I stopped and immediately fell asleep, oblivious of the mosquitoes.

Today I crossed one of the continental divides. I have read Mark Twain exclaiming over the difference of an inch to a drop of water in the Rockies, going to the Pacific one way and to the Caribbean another. But where is any break greater than here? Water from one side of the hill flows eventually into the Mississippi and from there over a thousand miles to the sea. Water on the other side of the hill flows eventually into the Big Fork River, the Rainy River, the Lake of the Woods, and some thousands of lakes before it reaches one of the many rivers emptying into Hudson's Bay, a trip taking years in the lakes' slow currents. North is downhill to the sub-arctic and south is downhill to the tropics. And I guess that little of the original water reaches the Caribbean and almost none the Arctic.

Effie - Grand Rapids, 47 miles, June 29. 

This morning before six, I had found a lake with a beach. The temperature is getting hot enough to require shorts, and so I changed into them and went swimming. It is the first water I've had a chance to swim in since Lake Superior. The sun began to rise as I stood in the water, turning it to a pale red. And the wind from the shore sent small waves towards me, giving each little wave its own set of fingerprints by ruffling it.

Later I took a nap by the Mississippi. Yesterday, in Grand Rapids, the river was as large as the Coosa and already being polluted by a pulp mill. Where I rested, it was as big as the Tennessee River and was already acquiring its own particular muddy color.

Grand Rapids - Millelac, 63 miles, June 30. 

But the night is lovely to ride in. A motorist can't see at all, being blinded by the car's lights and the glare of reflections off of its windshield. I rode along the shore of Mille Lac Lake and would gaze out over the blue of its waters into the lights of some other shore. I only rode three miles and stopped and went to sleep on the very edge of the lake, with the wind blowing hard and driving large waves into shore.

In the afternoon, I accepted my first ride from a car, but not from laziness. I was riding down the highway, and the bumps felt worse and worse. I stopped to see what was wrong and found my rear tire flat. I'm a slow mechanic, and so it took me an hour and a half to remove the tube and begin to patch it. [It was not just the problem of being a slow mechanic; the panniers had not been made for rapid removal and had to be emptied and then untied at several places. The wheels were bolted on (lacked quick releases), and the fender braces used the same bolts.] But the necessary tube of cement had dried up -- without ever having been used. What is the sense of having a repair kit if it doesn't last as long as the tire?

I now have a very good reason to be glad that I didn't go on to Vancouver. My tire had developed a crack between Port Arthur and Kenora, and this was one of my unmentioned reasons for turning south. [The problem was that 27-inch tires were rare at that time; I wasn't sure if I could get a replacement if I went on to Winnipeg; all the Canadian bikes that I'd seen used 26-inch tires.]

As I was pushing the bike down the road, trying to get to the next town, a man stopped and gave me a ride the three miles.

In town, I found some cement and patched the tube. Now, I have to reach Minneapolis, over 50 miles away, before the shops close tomorrow. To do so, I am going down to a park near here to sleep for an hour or so. Then, I will get up and ride until I'm too tired to go any farther.

Millelac - Princetown, 60 miles, July 1. 

Yesterday I said I was going to try to make up the time I lost getting my flat tire fixed by riding at night. I did just that. At eleven I woke up and pushed my way out onto the highway.

I have spoken of the magic of riding at night, but last night most of the magic was gone. The weekend traffic rushing northward made me keep my light on, and the glare of their lights, especially since many never bothered with their low beams, kept my eyes unadjusted to the dark. But I rode twenty miles in three hours and found a flat area near the road and curled up and went to sleep.

In the morning, I rode into Minneapolis, got a new tire, and rode on.  [The hole in my tire was not the usual flat but was a rim cut. As I rode into Minneapolis, I noticed that the patch I had made in the tire had made a small balloon that was nearly big enough to hit the fender brace.]  Many people find big cities fascinating, but the only good I see in them is to keep people out of the countryside.

Princetown - Hastings, 60 miles, July 2. 

The hill was about 400 feet high, rising steeply from the bottom for about two thirds of that distance and then becoming steep yellow cliffs which looked as though they had been etched by some engineer. The sides were here covered with trees, here with grass, and here bare. The top seemed the very place for a castle, in fact, seemed to lack something because no castle was there.

After Redwing, I ran into whole ridges of these hills, which line both sides of the Mississippi. Together they remind me of pictures I have seen of Austria. But I kept wondering, "What caused these hills?" Then I saw a reference to the glacial Mississippi, and my memory and imagination supplied the rest.

Picture Canada and the northernmost part of the US covered with ice, the ice extending down over the Great Lakes and into Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. Picture the thousands of lakes of these states being scooped out by the great ice mass. Picture the overflow of water rushing down the Mississippi Valley. And picture a huge glacier slowly following the valley south, cutting it deeper and carving the sides of the hills as it pushes its way between them.

There was a Mississippi!

Hastings - Winona, 82 miles, July 3. 

Last night I awoke at one, with the air still misty from a recent storm. I folded my tent and my blankets in the semi-darkness, packed my bags and started at two down the traffic-less road.

I was still in Minnesota then and was following what has been called the second most scenic route in the US -- the section of the Great River Road from Hastings to La Crosse.

I don't think that the route is quite that pretty, but it is lovelier than most of the roads I've traveled, and certainly it is better than miles and miles of corn fields.

I described the hills as being spectacular, and yet in the moonless night, they were but a ghostly background. The things that seemed real were the small fields and short stretches of woods near me, the changes in the road as it passed beneath me and the slight sounds my bike and my body made as I rode -- the grind of the tires on pavement, the click-click-click of the gears, and the rubbing sound of my legs against the saddle -- sounds I never noticed in the day time.

Winona - Lynxville, Wisconsin, 87 miles, July 4. 

It made me wonder how I got my prejudice against riding through farming areas. I finally decided that it was my insecurity about finding a place to camp, which I since have lost, that gave it to me. Of course, the farms of Indiana were not the best place to enjoy the county: the roads ran as straight as rulers, the fences came right up to the roads, and the fields were all freshly plowed and lifeless. I prefer farm country with a little woods mixed in, and not flat fields as far as the eye can see.

At noon I was stopped by the rain and took shelter in a garage. The owner asked me if Alabama wasn't where the chiggers are bad. His question made me suspicious as he was the second person to ask. Later I felt an itching in my socks, and sure enough, there were chigger bites. The people here must be curious because they just recently started getting chiggers. Now, if someone asks me if we have them, I can say, "No worse than you do here." Anyway, better a dozen good old Southern chiggers than a thousand Yankee mosquitoes.

Today I have been getting wolf whistles. Although I am quite proud of my legs for having pedaled 2,500 miles, they aren't that good. The people here aren't yet used to shorts. I have seen, not counting kids, only half a dozen people wearing them. In Canada, nobody wears them.

Everybody was sympathetic with me as I left Dubuque this night. The could see me getting caught in the rain. But I was ready for the rain, and even though I have camped out in the open [my tarp tent had to be hung from ropes attached to trees], I'll stay dry by wrapping my tent around me.

Lynxville - Dubuque, Iowa, 87 miles, July 5. 

As I was sitting there, eating and writing, a man came by and asked me where I was from and where I was going. I told him, and he said, "That's a long ways," and went on. A few minutes later, a man from the bakery came out and offered me a doughnut, and asked the same thing. Then he left.

Next, a young and pretty woman, I would say in her thirties, with a white apron on, came out and asked me about my trip. She asked me if I wanted some cookies, and I said yes, and she went inside. When she came out, she had two bags full and a carton of milk in her hands. so I went inside the bakery to have a glass of milk.

Inside, I was surrounded. "Did you really go to Canada?" "Where are you going now?" One of the girls was just starting college and rode a bicycle some, and she wanted to know how hard it was.

One of the ladies was a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she wanted to get my picture before I left. I looked down at my clothes and said, "You do?" and everyone laughed. The first woman and the girl who sometimes rode a bike moved away and let her ask me questions and jot down notes. "Now where did you say you went to?" "Kenora?" "How do you spell that?" "How long did it take you?" "And where are you going now?"

When she finished, we all went outside. I had my picture taken, the girl took down my address and promised to send me a copy of the paper when it came out, I packed my cookies, and everyone said goodbye.

Someday, I would like to interview a reporter. How long have you been in this field? What questions do you generally ask people? Do they ever mind all those questions?

Dubuque - Davenport, 113 miles, July 6. 

For the last few days, I have been trying to beat my own record at distance per day. I'm on my way to St. Louis where I can stop and rest awhile at my sister's. The distance to St. Louis from Dubuque, which I left yesterday morning, is 360 miles, and I am trying to make it in three days. But I have covered 113 miles both days, so I'm fairly certain I can make it.

Traveling over a hundred miles a day gives me little time to anything except eat, sleep, write, and ride. It means that I spend more of the day pedaling than doing anything else. It means that I'm too tired to enjoy the countryside.

Then why ride so far so fast? I have all the time I need. Why should I make it hard for myself?

The answer is that I'm riding that much in a day because it is hard. I don't want an easy trip. It would have been cheaper to have gone to Canada by bus, but what would I have gained?

If I wear myself out, if I exhaust myself, I will recover. If I take it easy, I may never recover. To make myself suffer is to make it easy for me; to make it easy for me is to make me suffer.

Davenport - Canton, Missouri, 113 miles, July 7. 

To go to Canada, I traveled 1,070 miles in 15 days: Across Canada, through Sault Ste. Marie to Kenora to Fort Francis, I covered 975 miles in 16 days. To get to St. Louis from there, I went 925 miles in 11 days.

On my trip, I have crossed the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Ohio, the Nipigon, the Rainy, the Mississippi, the Des Moines, and the Missouri rivers.

I have passed through Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.

I encountered a fox, a raccoon, a woodchuck, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, two deer, three moose, two bears, a beaver, a muskrat, and a few dozen species of birds.

I have been bitten by mosquitoes, blackflies, horse flies, blue flies, and chiggers.

I have met people of German, Italian, French, Spanish, Finnish, and Indian origins who still use their native languages every day.

I have been passed by a hundred thousand cars, and I have passed a hundred pedestrians.

These are all interesting facts, but they don't mean anything. My 42 days of traveling can't be translated into statistics or explained in a summary. The meaning of them is burned into me as by a brand and will mark my mind for the rest of my life as surely as this birthmark on my arm marks my body.

Canton - St. Louis, 130 miles, July 8. 

The other day, my brother-in-law, his family, and I went by car to see Johnson's Shut-Ins, one of the sights of the type I have been careful to avoid. The shut-ins consist of a formation of rhyolite that passes across a stream bed. The stream couldn't wear through the rhyolite as quickly as through the surrounding rock and so it had to cut channels along any available faults to continue flowing. As a result, the stream now flows through half a dozen canals in the rock formation.

The shut-ins would have been a nice place to visit if it hadn't been named a scenic spot; it had, so there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people everywhere. Because of the cars, dust floated through the air or settled on the tree leaves, turning them brown. 

I asked myself many times while riding, "What is the one thing I'm learning from this?" And the answer was always -- discipline. With a tenth of the energy that kept me going every day, I could accomplish everything that I had tried and failed to do.

I said to myself that this trip would change me and make a different person out of me. But now that I've stopped to rest at my sister's for some days before continuing on, I see that it is not necessarily true.

I find that I am not only wasting minutes and hours, but days. My goal is to make each moment significant in some way. I may be doing something that I need to do, or I may be gazing out the window, but unless I am doing what I need to do as effectively and efficiently as I can, and unless I am seeing something through that window, my time is wasted. Being lazy means not only not working but not enjoying as well. 

Everyone who has an air conditioner is running it constantly, and those who don't have them are thinking of buying. One person told us that she had been running her air conditioner all morning and had never lowered the temperature below 80 degrees.

The use of so many air-conditioners has overloaded the power system. and so the electric company is cutting off power, first in one suburb, then in another. So far, 350,000 people have been without power at one time or another. This was the only alternative to a massive power failure as in New York.

The hospitals in the city are overcrowded with people seeking treatment from heat exhaustion, and some people are even dying. 

Since I have come to St. Louis, Joey and I have been riding together around the subdivision, him leading and me following on the outside, where I can give instructions. He looks cute pedaling in front of me, with his little body swaying back and forth on his twenty-inch bike as he rides. So far he has reached the fabulous speed of 20 miles per hour.

Because he's had little experience outside of riding in the backyard or down the street with his daddy running beside him, he's learned a lot these past few days. He can now steer well, turn without falling, keep on the road and in his own lane, stop without being told for stop signs, and get started on a hill.

In order to train him better, I decided to take him on a short tour. We started down Sulphur Springs Road at two in the afternoon. It was a nicely wooded route, although I think Joey was too busy pedaling and steering to notice. I tried to show him how to pedal on the front part of his feet and how to rush a hill, but he had to push his bike up many of them nonetheless. We tried to make it as far as the Merrimack River, but I could see Joey was beginning to get tired, and we came back.

I know quite a few bike riders who are afraid to travel out of their neighborhood because they feel they can't pedal very far. I cite my nephew as an example of what a bike rider can do. Although he weighs less than 50 pounds and has been riding for only a month, we went seven miles in an hour and a half [total time from start to finish, not riding time]. 

The worst incident that I've had with a car occurred on the old section of road between Jacksonville and Anniston a year ago. The traffic was unfortunately heavy, and I was hurrying to Jacksonville at 25 miles an hour. A car came up behind me, and I gave the driver as much room to pass as I could. For a few moments, he was afraid to do so, but when he finally did, he tried to lecture me while driving alongside at 25 miles an hour.

I stayed on the road then as I stay on it now when a car passes, and for a good reason. My tires are an inch and a quarter wide and are inflated to 65 pounds. If I hit a curb over half an inch high or ride into sand or gravel, I lose control. In Canada once, I was looking the other way, went off of the road (I always ride close to the edge), and started a skid that lasted some eighty feet, during any part of which any car coming behind could have clipped me.

The driver coming from Anniston did not know it at the time, but he was gradually forcing me off of the curb onto gravel where I would certainly wreck.

The real reason he was angry at my being on the highway was not because I was "blocking his way," since I never slow down anybody more than half a minute, but because I was riding a bicycle.

Most bike riders are kids, who ride on either side of the road, cut in front of cars, and generally ignore traffic laws. I ride one foot from the edge of the road and obey all traffic laws. In town, I often take the middle of my lane, but this is to keep cars from cutting in front of me or squeezing me off the road.

The law backs up my claim to my foot of highway. Bicycles are recognized as highway vehicles in every state and every country that I know of.

As far as passing a bike, the rule is simple -- slow down, and pass. I have had large trucks pass me both ways at once on a road as narrow as the one from Jacksonville to Anniston. Any driver should be able to pass me if he is willing to slow down. 

I was surprised as I rode that the going was so easy. In my first five hours, I covered 50 miles. When I had started out fresh at the very beginning of the trip, I was not in as good of condition. Later, when I was in condition, I was no longer fresh. Now I am both, and the miles have flown behind me.

I'm now in Illinois, having crossed the Mississippi for the sixth and last time and am on my way to Cairo. Between me and there is one of the most forested sections of the state, which I have barely entered.

Right now I'm in one of the first patches of woods that I've seen. On one side of me are two highways, on the other is a field. My bike is parked for the night, and I have eaten my dinner. The sun is on its way towards setting, and the crickets have begun to fiddle in the little woods where I'm camping. The quail on the ground near me are somewhat nervous, perhaps having detected my presence, and some doves have flown off that had been cooing above me. Perhaps I am not in a great forest, but if Hamlet could be happy in his nutshell, how can I be disappointed with this?

St. Louis - Chester, Illinois, 67 miles, July 16. 

My hands are stained with blackberry juice, and my mouth probably is too. In Canada, I longed to find some berries to eat, but the first I saw ripe were in Missouri. The berry season had never made it any farther north.

The lake is green with water plants and is covered with duckweed. Trees rise out of the water everywhere, as close together as in a woods, and one gets the untrue impression that the area was only recently flooded. My feet are resting on one of the many half-submerged boats here, covered with green, and filled with floating garbage, dead insects, and waterlogged leaves. Every now and then, I hear a slap as fish splash into the air. Inches above the water zigzag dozens of dragonflies and, from high in the air, swoop down white-bodied, black-winged swallows.

The sky is turning blue after a stormy day, and it promises to be a fair night.

Chester - Cairo, 75 miles, July 17. 

One was the Mississippi River, which I had met as a stream in Minnesota, crossed three times as it grew larger, crossed over and followed through Wisconsin, crossed over into Iowa, and crossed over from Missouri to Illinois, and saw for the last time as I traveled into Kentucky. The other companion was the Great River Road, which I followed off and on from 13 miles outside of Kenora to within sight of my sister's house in St. Louis, and on to Cairo, a distance of 1200 miles!

Almost every day someone asks me if I'm not lonely or if I don't need someone to ride with me. But how could I ever be lonely, having such comrades as the Mississippi and the River Road traveling with me?

Cairo - Fulton, Tennessee, 65 miles, July 18. 

Riding down the road, I every now and then see people wave or shout hello to me. Usually, I just turn and stare at them. When I first started north, I said hi to everyone, but all I got back was a look. I was well into Canada before I learned not to say hello. It's said that Yankees aren't as friendly, but I don't think this is so. I feel that they just don't have our habit of greeting everyone.

Then the countryside is no longer the same. From Iowa down, it was covered with acres and acres of crops, with perhaps a few trees tucked between fields. Here in Tennessee, it's much like it is in our section of Alabama, with the farms smaller and little woods everywhere.

But it's in those woods that I notice the greatest change. In the one I'm in now there is not a tree, shrub, or plant that does not look familiar. The only plant that's missing which I see at home is the pine tress, and I saw some of those for the first time yesterday. In a woods where I stopped yesterday, I noticed that the sounds of the birds were the same too.

Fulton - Henderson, 79 miles, July 19. 

Then I entered long sections of woods that came right up to the road, and began to feel that it was the best road I'd been on in several days. As I entered Tishomingo County, I saw a sign saying that the county had 222,000 acres of woodland. A very good county indeed!

When I came to a town called Iuka (pronounced Aye-yuka), I stopped at the springs for a drink. The spring water is supposed to have won a prize at the St. Louis exposition in 1904. As I was drinking there, some boys surrounded me and began asking me questions as to where I was going and so forth. I answered them clearly but they were too excited to listen and would immediate repeat a distorted version of what I said. A very hard earned drink of water! [I very often avoided having to answer a lot of questions by just giving the next town as my destination and the last town as my starting point.]

Henderson - Barton, Alabama, 79 miles, July 20. 

Now that I'm back in my home state, I should say, according to tradition, that every thing was nice but home is better. But I can't say that. Among the states I went through, Michigan is the most beautiful by far. And Canada -- with its miles of evergreens and circling hawks - is a land beyond compare. And yet Alabama does not fare so badly. The section of it I know best near Jacksonville has more charm than anything I've seen from Tennessee to Indiana and Minnesota to back home.

And Alabama has many places which bring memories to me that are worth all the grandeur in the world -- places I played as a boy or places where I went to dream some beautiful nonsense.

No, Alabama, you are not the brightest star in the sky, but you need not be ashamed as you make many of your 49 sisters look dim.

Barton - Florette, 84 miles, July 21. 

An adventure like mine sounds like an extraordinary feat, but it was not. All I had to do was to pedal a little. Thoreau says that if we are chosen town clerk this summer we cannot go to Terra del Fuego. Perhaps it was merely my luck that I was not chosen that I could go. But maybe it was more my determination not to be chosen that gave me my freedom.

The whole world is right outside the front door. We don't need to have money or methods to see it. I rode a bike, but I could have walked. Even if I had no legs, I could sit outside and see, hear, or feel. The idea is not to get as far away from home as possible. How many people I have met that traveled a thousand miles to ignore the world they overlooked at home! The idea is to find something that has meaning to you.

A great adventure can be traveling to Canada by the use of your own muscles and swimming in Lake Superior. Or it can be watching an ant climb a blade of grass. All we need is the desire to see it.

Barton - Florette, 84 miles, July 21. 

I assumed that I would be making many more long trips quite soon, and I did make a number of short trips in 1967 and 1968, but my next attempt at a long trip did not come until 1971.