Grove City, PA

That four-hour post-hot cakes nap on Friday turned out not to be enough. I was still feeling so run-down that evening when I come upon a motel, rather than continuing on for a forest, I seized upon it, the first of these travels, and proceeded to sleep for nearly thirty-six hours straight.  I presumed it to simply be a case of extreme exhaustion, as I didn’t have an elevated temperature or nausea or diarrhea or loss of smell or taste, what I understood the symptoms of the corona virus to be, just the loss of hunger.  

I should have been starving, but had no desire to eat and had to force down a spoonful of peanut butter from time to time and bite of banana.   I had been negligent in not taking a single rest day in nearly forty days of cycling, considering a fifty-mile day a respite of a sort, and was finally paying the price.  Or maybe it was Tour de France withdrawal.  The day would have been the start of week two of The Tour and it’s foray into the Pyrenees.  It had been the focus of my July for years, even before I started riding it in 2004, and I was missing it.

When I mustered the energy to go fetch the motel’s meager complimentary breakfast, a paper bag with a cup of juice, a cup of yogurt and a granola bar, I was startled to hear just behind me a loud thunk and then a thud.  I turned to see a young woman with a low-cut blouse, and what the French would admiringly call “a full balcony,” laying crumbled on the floor with a hulk of a guy hovering over her. “Holy shit,” I thought. “An actual assault right here in the lobby.  The world truly is in a downward spiral.”  The woman who had just handed me my breakfast screamed, “Get out.  I’m calling the police.”  The young woman moaned, “That’s okay.  My parents are coming to get me.”

That further inclined me to avoid turning on the television and it’s window into the chaos of current affairs. I still felt exhausted after my thirty-six hour marathon and slept most of the next day too, just taking time to do some much-needed wash and repair a broken pannier and find microscopic punctures in two tubes and eat some potato salad and hummus and apple sauce.  Three nights in a motel was enough, though I felt like my body could use more down-time.  

I felt instantly rejuvenated when I began pedaling and knew I’d made the correct decision. The legs were full of pep. The northwest corner of Pennsylvania continued to provide superlative cycling on lightly traveled roads through thick forests and small towns with lots of Trump signs.  The bicycle is the curative force.  It was forty-two miles to the next Carnegie in Oil City, founded in the 1860s when oil was discovered nearby, and it became the center of oil production in the country.  It’s Carnegie, built in 1902, was as opulent as a boomtown Opera House with an abundance of ornamentation and extra columns flanking windows rather than the entry, a genuine stunner of a building.

It was my good fortune to have my arrival delayed by my spell of Rip Van Winkel time, as I arrived on the day when it reopened.  There were “Welcome back” signs plastered all over the library.  The interior had been fully modernized to match the large addition to its backside, so whatever ostentation may have graced it was long gone.  There were much fewer than the maximum of ten patrons allowed at a time, so the thirty minute maximum stay wasn’t being enforced.  It was my first opportunity to linger and relax in a library in weeks.  It hardly mattered that it didn’t have the intimate warmth of a Carnegie nor the glow of a Carnegie portrait to sit under.  A further bonus was a drinking fountain with ultra-cold water, just what I needed to fill my bottles before camping in less than an hour.

A respectable gent was sitting on a bench beside my bike when I exited, interested in my travels.  His daughter was a lawyer in Chicago.  He recommended a bike bath along the Allegheny that would take me to Franklin seven miles away, sparing me a four-lane highway.  It was popular with joggers in the evening hour.  There were relic oil wells here and there.  

Rather than continuing to Franklin I was able to disappear into the forest halfway there not far from another well. I could hear an occasional vessel on the river, but the dominant sound were deer snorting not too distant.

It was a couple mile steep climb out of Franklin away from the river and quite a bit more climbing before reaching Grove City thirty miles away and the next Carnegie on the campus of Grove City College founded in 1876 with the Carnegie added in 1900.  It was now the Alumni Center though it was still engraved with Carnegie Music Hall.  The modern town library was just a block away and had reopened the day before.  As in Oil City it was only allowing stays of thirty minutes.  I was handed a timer when I arrived, though I was able to prolong my stay as half an hour was hardly enough time to recover from hours in the ninety degree heat.