Detour: RAGBRAI, Savages, and Iowa Trailer Trash

Des Moines, IA -- If you're wondering why I haven't posted in a while, here's an answer you may not expect: I was swept up in a crowd of 15,000 bicyclists riding across Iowa from West to East. The Des Moines Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, RAGBRAI, crosses the state every year and draws thousands of riders, so for the few days preceding it, a lot of people who saw me with my loaded bicycle figured I must be heading for the starting point. Every time but one, I just explained myself and went on my way, but on a bike path outside of Des Moines I met a group who just wasn't satisfied with my "I'm heading in the other direction" line. They told me that RAGBRAI was an experience not to be missed, and that if I rode it back to Des Moines, they'd drive me west again so I didn't lose too much time. And so began my adventure.

These folks were pulling bike trailers with their gear, ("Trailer Trash," they called themselves.) and riding with them was a change in my routine. We slept later, stopped in bars in towns along the way, and generally took it easy. I haven't been powering through places too quickly, but taking it slow for a few days was really nice. We met a really cool young woman who had bought the bar she used to work at in Panora, and in Lidderdale I had the best prime rib dinner of my life. I left them at a campground on Sunday and rode on to a RAGBRAI overnight town to see the show and join the big ride the next day.

And what a show it is. Aside from the fact that it still involved riding my bicycle all day, RAGBRAI had almost nothing to do with the rest of my trip. The ride does require people to do pretty good mileage every day -- 60 to 80 miles, usually -- but they don't have to carry their gear, there are people selling food all along the roads, and every town the ride passes through is like a big party. Actually, the whole ride is like a big party. People dress up themselves and their bicycles, eat and drink to excess, and even decorate the road kill they pass. In the overnight town where I picked up the route, Ida Grove, I met the Subtle Savages in between getting a gyro (only one of many dinner options) and getting a beer (I'm not sure if Miller Light is an official sponsor, but they may as well be).


RAGBRAI has a tradition of teams that ride the route together, have team support veichles to carry their gear, and party together every night and in towns along the route. The Subtle Savages distinguish themselves by wearing kilts instead of bike shorts, (yes, instead of bike shorts, not over their bike shorts) have a well-appointed remodeled red school bus, and party as hard, if not harder, than they ride.

I hung out with them that night, and rode with them on and off for the next two days. My bike path friends sure were right -- RAGBRAI was unlike anything else. By the time I finished, I had was wearing two bracelets from bars identifying me as of legal drinking age, a Michelob Lite pendant in the shape of the state of Iowa strung onto Mardi Gras beads, and my left thumbnail had been painted blue with a white bicyle on it.

So it was quite an experience. I'm in West Des Moines right now, staying with these Trailer Trash folks, and true to their word, they're going to give me a lift onwards this weekend. I'm going to head into South Dakota. I want to see the Badlands.

Iowa's only about three hundred miles across, but it's going to end up taking me about ten days from entry to exit. It's been well worth it, though. South Dakota's got a hard act to follow.

Corn Country

Fairfield, IA -- Well, I've crossed the Mississippi. I'm not very far into Iowa, though. This morning I only rode about thirty miles before stopping for a snack here in Fairfield. I went to the Second Street Coffee House expecting a diner, but was served by a long-haired young man in a tie-dyed T-Shirt that reminded me more of Northampton than the Midwest. I got to talking to people and found out that the city is a center for the Transcendental Meditation movement, and home to the movement's university, the Maharishi University of Management. The movement's brought a lot of people into the area, apparently, and there's lots of art galleries and performances around. In the words of several people I met today, "it's a pretty happening place." I got to talking to people, and soon enough the owner of the coffee shop took me vegetable shopping with her then steamed me some fresh-picked Iowa corn. With that in my stomach, I explored the University's campus, went to the whole foods store, and spent some time at the town library looking at the paper and Iowa history books.

Aside from that delicious sweet corn, though, the town barely felt like it was connected to all the corn and soybeans I had been passing. Back on the eastern side of the Mississippi, though, I stayed with two wonderful cyclists who were also farmers. In addition to taking me to a family gathering and a triathlon, and showing me around the area, they showed me the farm equipment and told me a bit about farming and marketing corn and beans. The marketing is a bigger part than I had understood, and I'm glad I know a bit more about it all as I head through more farm country.

It's been really, really, really hot -- at the worst points, I've been making thirty miles on a gallon of water. It's raining now, though, and I'm hoping things will cool down for my ride out of Fairfield tomorrow.

Hoosier Hospitality

Lafayette, IN --Friends' cousins have been treating me well in Indiana. After a nice evening in Indianapolis I came up here, and here's quick update before I leave Lafayette. I spent another day here because the forecast called for lightening storms all day and riding my steel bicycle through soybean fields in a thunder storm didn't sound like it'd be the smartest thing I'd ever done. Rick and Paulette own a pair of frozen custard stores called Snowbear Frozen Custard. (Frozen custard, for those of you wondering, is kind of like super-creamy Midwestern ice cream. You can learn more at the site.) So on my rainy day off I hung out in the shop, eating fresh custard, drinking coffee and reading all of both the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. All you can eat frozen custard and two newspapers --can you imagine me being happier? The day before we did some sight-seeing around town and I looked around Purdue. And now I'm heading west again. Today I'll enter Illinois and even more exciting, Central Time.

Riding

Lafayette, IN -- Stopping places and talking to people has been fun and interesting, but most of the time, I'm riding my bike.

I do plenty of looking around while I'm pedaling (Recently, I look at corn, soybeans, and the signs telling me what brand of genetically modified corn or soybeans I'm looking at.) but I also do a lot of listening. More than I had expected. The tires make noise on the road, and the chain moving the gears while I pedal does, too. The shifters click when I shift and then the derailleurs make a different click when they respond and move the chain onto the right cog. Other clicks, especially repeating ones, can mean something on the bike isn't running quite right. A funny noise that doesn't stop when I stop pedaling is something on one of the wheels. If it does stop when I stop pedaling, it might be something like it was today -- the end of the front derailleur cable hitting the crank arm and needing to be tucked back into place. Off the bike, cars make different noises depending on their age, type, and their distance from me. There are birds from time to time. When I go under high tension wires the sound reminds me of hearing light rain from inside a house. After the sun's been up long enough, tar on the road starts to form bubbles that crackle when my tires pop them. Rocks make a kind of snap when I run over them and bugs make a quiet crunch when they're flattened, but buzz and then tap when they hit my helmet or bike in mid-air. Sometimes people honk, but not too often.

The wind is the most constant noise, though, and it can keep me from hearing most other things. Today, when I was heading west, straight into it, I could barely hear my tires on the pavement or myself singing. I sing from time to time, usually a song that I hear in a store when I stop or that I have stuck in my head because of its lyrics. While I crossed Massachusetts, James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," ran through my head with its line about "the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston." There's a song about Ohio that hasn't quite left me even though I'm in Indiana now. I whistle, too, and I talk to myself sometimes.

I take breaks as they seem necessary or interesting, or mostly, when I get hungry. Out here, I've been riding through a lot of fields so enough shade to sit under is also a good reason to stop. Most of the time I just eat something and move on, but sometimes it takes me a while to get back on the bike. Today I stopped to buy bread and was sitting there eating it when 75 people on Harleys parked across the street. That turned into a longer break. They had planned their ride as a fundraiser for a man running for Sheriff, but their candidate was killed two days ago in a motorcycle accident, so they turned it into a memorial ride. Later in the afternoon, what was going to be a food stop in Frankfort lasted almost two hours when it turned out to be the site of the county fair. And my stop here in Lafayette is going to last a day longer than I expected as my friend's cousins show me around town. ("Hoosier Hospitality," they're calling it. Great by any name.)

There'll be more riding tomorrow. Out here, I'm riding 80 miles a day without any trouble because it's so flat. My hosts tell me that I'm going to hit the Great Plains soon, so then it will be even flatter. That would speed me on to my next destination, except that I don't really have one. Anyone have family or friends in Illinois, Iowa or Nebraska?

The Chautauqua Institution

Chautauqua, NY -- I'm in Ohio now, but I didn't get out of New York State without one last interesting stopover. About mid-morning on Monday, I rode past The Chautauqua Institution, and stopped in at the visitor's center to try to figure out what it was. And, well, I'm not sure I can explain it. The woman selling postcards may have put it best when she said, "It's like a resort kind of place, but with learning." The website probably explains it best, but it runs lectures, classes, and performances all summer and people come for a week or more to go to them and hang out. It's also a sort of village with houses, a hotel, and its own post office and library. Interesting, I thought, and rode on.

A few miles down the road I saw a hand-lettered rainbow sign next to a dirt driveway that read, "PFLAG Picnic." (PFLAG, for those of you who don't know, is Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) This sign was the only remotely queer thing I'd run into since Western Massachusetts when I thought I saw a lesbian, but she turned out to be a twelve year-old Mennonite boy. I figured I'd stop in and that if I was lucky, I might get a sandwich out of it before I went on my way. I found a whole lot of friendly people, though who were quite interested in my trip and filled me up with food and drink. Some were from the town of Chautauqua, but the majority were spending at least part of the summer at the Chautauqua Institution. A lovely bicycle enthusiast invited me to come share her house with her and her grandsons and I ended up spending the next day there.

I went to a lecture about public school reform and a book discussion at lunch time, and spent plenty of time wandering around the grounds looking at the architecture and all the different buildings. It certainly is a remarkable place. The schedule of events was impressive -- lectures on all sorts of topics, musical performances and religious services for various Christian sects, classes on all sorts of topics, and programs for kids all day, every day. It's also home to the country's oldest continually running book group, which started as a correspondence course when the club had to print its own books. "It's like a little slice of heaven," said one person I met, who was there for the first time.

And I think it's because of its utopian leanings that my good ol' Wesleyan education made me suspicious of it from the start, despite how cool I thought the "intellectual summer camp for all ages" concept was. Where there are gates, people are being kept out, and there has to be something fishy going on, right? Unsurprisingly, money is an issue. To get through the gates you have to buy a gate pass for the day, the week, or the whole summer, and that's one expense, but I was interested to find that real estate is an even bigger expense. Apparently, Chautauqua privatized the land within its grounds when it was going through financial trouble in the 1930's, and in the 1990's the value of property within the gates skyrocketed. According to the Century 21 office near the drug store, a 40 foot by 50 foot undeveloped lot on the grounds starts at $279,000. Five acres of undeveloped land are available elsewhere in the county for $30,000. At the picnic, I talked to someone in the town (not Institution) government, and he said that the property taxes generated by the tiny institution grounds make up almost three quarters of the funding for the local schools. This means property taxes are becoming a major burden for people who have lived there for some time (a couple hundred live there year round) and it also means that people who buy or rent there these days are, to put it bluntly, loaded. Oh well. Still an awfully cool kind of place, though.

I had been planning to pick up one of these Adventure Cycling routes soon, but I'm having a lot of fun talking to people and being the one of the first touring cyclists they've seen, rather than part of a regular phenomenon of bicyclists passing through. So I've pulled out some maps, done some internet research, and I'm just going to head west from here and see how things go. Wish me luck...