Jackson, Tennessee

 

I’ve become accustomed the last several years to being regarded as some sort of indigent when I’m plopped on the ground beside my loaded bike, which appears as if it might contain all my worldly possessions.  The site of me and my bike tugs at the heart strings of kindly souls, prompting them to offer me food or a bill or two.  Rather than hurting their feelings and discouraging their generosity I accept their offering.

Thus it came as a bit of a surprise when a slender, older black man missing a few teeth approached me outside the train station in Memphis just after I’d arrived to begin a tour of the Deep South and meekly asked if I could help him. Evidently the haircut Janina had recently given me, my first since going off to Brasil over a year ago, leant me an air of respectability and perhaps the impression that I was a person of means.  

He needed $17 so he and his wife and three daughters could stay at the homeless shelter that night.  He said he’d lost his house in Nashville to a flood a month ago and had come to Memphis looking for work.  He was a welder and had a job lined up in a day or two.  He spoke softly and sincerely.  Since I had been parceling out the $3000 Covid money the government had bequeathed me to various non-profits that meant something to me, I was in a mood of giving, so I obliged him with a $20 bill.  

He graciously thanked me and shook my hand.  I expected to bike off with a smile in my heart, as I imagined those who have given me money have felt, but I pedaled along with a sour taste, feeling that I may have been took.  It was six a.m.  What was he doing at the train station and where was his family?  He seemed too old and frail to be welding or to even have daughters that needed looking after.  Oh well.  At least there wasn’t alcohol on his breath and he had to have been in need.  

As I glided through the city in the early hour the only others out were occasional joggers and dog-walkers and homeless just rousing themselves from their little encampments covered in blankets.  It was just 51 degrees, only ten degrees warmer than it had been in Chicago the evening before when I biked to Union Station to board the City of New Orleans at eight p.m.  I had a seat to myself as the train was just at 65 per cent capacity, all that Amtrak was presently allowing.  There was a periodic announcement saying that as of May 23 it would be back to one hundred per cent.

Just a few blocks from the train station I passed the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum.  The room where Martin Luther King was assassinated had a wreath outside it.  A nearby street was named for King.  In many cities the street named for King is a main boulevard.  Here in Memphis such a boulevard a couple miles further bore the name of the largely forgotten actor Danny Thomas who died in 1991 and wasn’t even born in Memphis.

Traffic picked up making my escape from the mini-metropolis less than idyllic.  I did make the rare find of a quarter and then another a mile later, maybe a blessing from the cycling gods, slightly alleviating my concerns that I had fallen prey to a scam artist.  Nothing though could deter my joy of being back on the road for the first time since October, over six months ago, venturing off after getting my two shots. I’d had several mini-getaways in the past month somewhat satiating my urge to be on the road.  The first was a drive  to Rock Island with Janina helping long-time friend Ron move a van load of his books from Chicago.

  We brought our bikes and tent and camped at Mississippi Palisades State Park and biked along some trails along the river, including one into Galena.

A few days later I took an overnight ride to Midewin National Prairie, a ninety-mile round trip, and camped along the buffalo enclosure.  I saw several clusters of the magnificent beasts, reintroduced to the Prairie in 2015.  They are thriving.

I managed a two-nighter a week later in southern Indiana, driving down to Bloomington with Janina to visit Dwight and ride along with him and Jeff, the pizza king, for the monthly Full Moon Ride.  It was a delightful mini-Critical Mass. While Janina hung out with old college friends I took a two hundred mile loop to Columbus and down to DuPont, to see another of those mini-Statue of Liberties the Boy Scouts made available to communities in 1950 to celebrate its fortieth year of existence.  There are six in Indiana and I’d already biked to three of them.  This one gazed out on to the road somewhat hidden by a row of trees lining the Boy Scout retreat of Camp Louis Ernst.

I got to make my introduction to Dwight’s thirteen goats he had started accumulating two years ago since my last visit. They were almost as dazzling as the buffalo.  They followed us all over and we pleased them immeasurably by constructing a pallet-pyramid/climbing gym for them with three pick-up loads of pallets from a nearby flooring place, all that they had otherwise we would have built it even higher.

Other than the dead armadillos along the road, biking in western in Tennessee wasn’t much different than southern Indiana through forested, rolling terrain.  With it pleasantly cool I didn’t need to gobble down the half dozen hard-boiled eggs I’d brought along.  I could parcel them out during the day, two for breakfast, two with lunch and two in my dinner of ramen.  As I shelled my first egg, I had an instant rush of hard-boiled egg memories.  The first was of coming upon a little girl with a bowl of hard-boiled eggs in a small village in Madagascar when I was in need of food.  I was thrilled with the eggs and the little girl was so thrilled with her sale that she dashed into a nearby house as if to tell her parents of her first ever sale.

That led to a memory of dining on hard-boiled eggs at a two-table cafe in the Sinai Peninsula.  The proud proprietor brought the eggs to my table and deftly shelled them as if he were a master chef flambeauing a steak.  Some of my most poignant hard-boiled egg memories though are of breakfasting on eggs with Andrew of Sydney that he had hard-boiled the night before as we took down our tents in France. That was always a great start to the day.

My first destination on this trip was Jackson, Tennessee, for its former Carnegie Library, eighty-five miles northeast of Memphis.  With my early start that was within range of my first day despite a gentle headwind.  I was rewarded, as I generally am, with a beauty, constructed of yellowish stone, with inset columns and four large windows in front and Jackson Free Library inscribed over its entry.  It now serves as the Legends of Tennessee Music Museum.  Jackson considers itself the birthplace of rockabilly.  The Rockabilly Hall of 
Fame is a few blocks away.

With Jackson I could celebrate having visited all fifteen of the still standing Carnegies in Tennessee, the fifth state I’ve completed after Colorado, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. There had been twenty in the state. Six still serve as libraries  including two branch libraries in Nashville.  I’d gotten to the other fourteen on rides through Tennessee in 2010, 2014, 2015 and a visit to Wendy and Michael  in the Far East of the state in 2019. Now it’s on to Mississippi and Alabama where I’ll complete their states and drop in on some Strengthen the Arm of Liberty Statues of Liberty as well. Tennessee is a state without any.

I headed south nine miles out of town with at last a bit of a tailwind before finding a forest to disappear into.  It would have been nice to make my first day a century, but rain was imminent, leaving me six miles short.