Tallahassee, Florida

My tent may no longer be bug-proof thanks to the scissor ants of Brasil, but it’s rainfly remains intact and water proof.  Thus I felt perfectly calm, confident of remaining dry, as I sat in the sanctity of my tent as a storm pelted us.  People had been warning me all day that a storm was approaching and even Janina in Chicago sent word of it, thanks to Tom Skilling and his WGN weather report. 

The rain wasn’t due to begin until six p.m., around nightfall.  I was hoping to ride right up to six and disappear into the forest I was riding through before the rain hit, getting me to within twenty miles of Tallahassee.  But the rain came an hour early forcing me to hurriedly set up my tent in the rain.  Fortunately it was just a light drizzle at that point, so my shoes didn’t take on much water, though my shorts absorbed enough water to necessitate immediate shedding.

As the storm intensified I had to put on ear plugs to hear the podcast I was listening to as the rain pounded the tent so hard and thunder and lightning went off every few minutes.  When a tree limb crashed upon my back it triggered a memory of being hit by my bike flung upon my tent as I lay sleeping by a maureder with a shotgun in Turkey.

I knew it was unlikely that I was under siege in this isolated nook of trees by someone who wanted my money, but a sign a few miles back alerted me that I was back in bear country, so I knew it was a possibility that I might have just been whacked by a bear.  After a few moments of tension, I felt assured that it had only been a tree limb.  I could only hope that none followed.   My chief concern was that the downpour might turn into a floodtide, but the storm passed before any water started gathering around me.

Thanks to Lynn, a friend in Alamosa, Colorado, I had a place to pitch my tent in Tallahassee.  She had arranged with her long-time friend Rose to put me up.  She lived outside the city out of my way, but arranged with a friend with a backyard for camping to put me up.  She lived less than a mile from the Florida A & M campus and it’s Carnegie Library. 

We all got together that evening with a few other friends with an interest in my travels for dinner.  My first order of business upon arrival in Tallahassee, even before searching out its Carnegie, was to find a bike shop, as I had snapped a spring in my rear brake caliper and had only been riding with a front brake for the last one hundred miles.  That was manageable until I came within twenty-five miles of Tallahassee and the terrain turned hilly, accelerating my speed on the descents, making braking hard with just a front brake a perilous proposition.  It was the first climbing my legs had been subjected to since French Guiana two weeks ago.  It felt good to have some variety in the terrain and also to put a little extra strain on the legs.  

Though I was gaining some altitude, it wasn’t much as Tallahassee sits at just 203 feet, 142 feet lower than the highest point in the state 125 miles to the west on the border with Alabama.  It’s the lowest high point of any of the fifty states.  Much of the state is just above sea level.  It doesn’t begin rising until before Orlando at 82 feet.  So Disneyworld could be save from the rising seas.

Tallahassee, being a college town and a city of 200,000, had a handful of bike shops, so I was confident I’d find one that could make the repair of my brake or could replace it if it came to that.  Rose recommended Joe’s Bike Shop, one I’d naturally be drawn to as the premier bike mechanic in Chicago, who has been my saviour many a time, is a Joe.  And this Joe was a master too.  Not only was he able to replace my brake, he had a spare bar-end shifter to replace one that I had been nursing along almost since the beginning of the trip, fearing it could go kaput at any time.   None of the many bike shops I visited in Brasil could improve upon it.  I was resigned to waiting until I returned to Joe in Chicago to have it resolved.

This Joe’s shop was on the north side of the city alongside a small lake. From there I had a five mile ride past the state capital and Florida State University to the Carnegie of Florida A&M, a black college founded in 1887, eighteen years before it received its Carnegie.  The library faced out on the wide-open quad.  It was the only non-red brick building on the quad, rather a stunning white with Carnegie Library in bold black letters.  It was an anomaly among the 108 academic Carnegies, most of which blend in with the campus architecture.  

The Carnegie has been replaced by a much larger library, also on the quad, and now served as a black heritage museum and research center.  Among its many exhibits and photos was a KKK outfit accompanied by Billie Holliday’s anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit.”  A sign behind the outfit said “No photographs.”

By the time I reached Beth’s home a little after five, she was home from work.  Ruth and her daughter and another friend, a retired schoolteacher arrived while I was setting up my tent.  After I took a shower we headed over to a popular nearby restaurant named for Cabo San Lucas that specialized in fish and Mexican fare.  They were all campers and lovers of the outdoors, giving us much to talk about.  We couldn’t make it too late of an evening as Ruth and her daughter had an early morning assignment to check on an organic farm, a part-time job of theirs certifying such operations.  My throat was weary from the most talking I’d done in quite some time, but it was nice to have an evening of socializing and learning a bit of life in Florida.  It hadn’t always been easy for my open-minded, progressive dinner companions coping with the local prejudices.

Ruth brought me two baked sweet potatoes wrapped in tin foil, perfect road food that harkened me back to China where there were regions that such fare was common street food, something I was on the alert for.  I could hardly wait to the next day when I could partake of them.