Green Bay

For the third time in these travels Wikipedia had it wrong on a Carnegie.  It was wrong on the address of the Carnegie in Wisconsin Dells.  It was wrong that the Carnegie in Kaukauna still functioned as a library. And it was wrong that there was still a Carnegie in Two Rivers.  It is now a parking lot and has been for quite some time according to a woman in a beauty parlor facing the parking lot.

The first person I spotted to ask about the library was sitting in a wheelchair on the porch of a retirement home facing 1516 16th Street, where it was supposed to be located.  She was lucid, but didn’t know anything about a library having been located there, as she’d recently moved to Two Rivers from Chicago.  All she knew was that there was a library a block down and then a block over.  It was 8:30 in the morning, too early to go over there to find out about the Carnegie.  Fortunately, the beauty parlor was open, so I didn’t have to linger and could commence my ride up along Lake Michigan into Door County,  as my legs were eager to do on this sunny autumn morning.

I had camped five miles out of Two Rivers, declining to arrive in the early evening fearing it would be too dark for a photo of the library.  That fear of not being able to get a photo was resurrected as I biked into Two Rivers swallowed by heavy mist blowing in off the lake. It didn’t burn off until just before I arrived in Two Rivers.  I was lucky to have a decent shoulder to ride on, as visibility was greatly limited.  A shoulder of bike lane proportions has graced most of the non-county roads I’ve ridden.  No need for a shoulder on the county roads as they have little traffic.  The roads have been pleasingly amenable.  Wisconsin has a most enlightened transportation department, which has added roundabouts to many intersections, some even landscaped.

As I headed up the peninsula of Door County, named by a Frenchman in the 1600s initially as Death’s Door for a narrow perilous passage at the tip of the peninsula, the traffic greatly diminished.  Suddenly I was transported to Japan where I experienced a similar sensation when I headed up a peninsula that led to a ferry to Hoikado, Japan’s northernmost island.  The traffic had been relentlessly thick for over two hundred miles from Tokyo, and then it instantly evaporated, just as it had here, a most dramatic, almost miraculous, event that left a deep impression.  What a relief it had been, and here too.  

It was nice to go down my Japanese memory lane for a spell and wonder how different it would be cycling in Japan now, nearly twenty years later.  Noodles and politeness and bowing and extreme obedience to the speed limit would no doubt still predominate, but I doubt there would be as many, if any at all, discarded girlie magazines on the roadsides.  

I had never encountered such a proliferation.  I used to occasionally come across Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and such in the US, jettisoned by men who couldn’t bring such magazines home, but no more, what with the easy accessibility of such material for free on the Internet. I suspect it would be the same in Japan, as I was there in the early days of the Internet before pornography became so widespread on the net.   Girlie magazines, mostly featuring Japanese school girls in their ubiquitous uniforms, were on prominent display in convenience stores.  Hardly a day went by that I didn’t see one along the road.  I’d gather them up and deposit them in boxes of sand along the road in the mountains for motorists who got stuck in the snow as a little surprise for them.

As I sped along on the porn free roads of Door County with an occasional glimpse of Lake Michigan and pristine scenery all round, I could revel in fully leaving behind all the nonsense of the everyday world.  All that mattered was absorbing the simple beauty of my surrounding and the pleasure of being outdoors, my legs spinning without any prodding.  It was glorious to know it would only get better as I penetrated further north to the UP and Lake Superior after my dalliance with Door County for it’s lone Carnegie in  Sturgeon Bay. 

My reveries were interrupted by the first cyclist I had encountered since leaving Chicago, a sixty-year old guy on a Cannondale who came up from behind me. He greeted me saying he looked forward to doing what I was doing when he retired in a few years. He was from upstate New York and had his heart set on bicycling a relatively new 3,000 mile route from Maine to Florida, about a third of it so far on trails converted from rails.  “My wife will be happy to have me out of the house,” he said.  

He was in Door County, as he was meeting up with ten of his high school buddies the next day who were gathering to attend Sunday’s Packer game against the Steelers.  They had all grown up in Pittsburgh and for the past dozen years or so had met up somewhere for a Steelers game.  They had scattered all over—to LA, Houston, Indianapolis and elsewhere.  Only two still lived in Pittsburgh.  He and one other weren’t football fans, but they still participated in the reunion.  Most were flying in.  He had driven, making it easier to bring his bike.  

He was the only cyclist among them.  He was delighted with this fine ride.  I would have liked to talk more, (to hear of the other stadiums they had visited, if wives ever came along, how easy it was to get tickets and if they could get seats together, if the media had learned of them, what he knew of Carnegie’s Pittsburgh roots and more of his biking and how his drive was from New York, which included taking a ferry across Lake Michigan), but he was impatient and wished to ride harder than I could on my loaded bike, so he bid me farewell.  I hardly had a chance to tell him of the extent of my travels, other than my football biking event, pedaling to the Bears Super Bowl in New Orleans in 1986.

Sturgeon Bay’s Carnegie was now the offices of an accounting firm, which was honored to be in the Carnegie.  A pair of placards propped up against each other in the lawn out front had reprints of two articles from the Door County Magazine which gave a history of the Carnegie and the efforts of the accounting firm to restore it when it took possession of it in 1981 after it had stood empty for several years.  The woman head of the firm said the library had fallen into significant disrepair with mushrooms even growing in it.  The renovation cost a lot, but she said, “It’s like when you fall in love.  You don’t care what it costs.”

The ivy-covered Classical Revival building was across the street from the first-rate Door County Museum packed with several rooms of material, including a tribute to the Packers Golden Girl cheerleaders and their dedication, showing them bundled up at the legendary Ice Bowl.  The entry to the museum is a magnificent wilderness recreation with an array of stuffed animals (a deer, a bear, a raccoon and others) and over one hundred birds, any orthinolgist’s delight. There were videos among the exhibits, including one of a huge community fish boil, intrinsic to the local culture.  The museum, which was free, would more than justify biking up from Chicago to see.  

Another noteworthy attraction fifty miles away in Green Bay was the vast Packers gift shop attached to Lambeau Field, which might have had as much space as the museum. It was mobbed on a Saturday afternoon with young and old, male and female, many in Packer attire. 

The Stadium is on Lombardi Drive facing a neighborhood of modest homes.  Statues of Curly Lambeau and Vince Lombardi, the teams first and winningest coaches, graced its entry.  Nearby was a statue commemorating the Lambeau Leap, originated in 1993 by Leroy Butler who spontaneously flung himself into the arms of fans in the stands after a touchdown, a tradition which continues to this day.  An accompanying plaque titled “Love at First Leap” explains, “It declares nothing gets in the way between Packers players and their fans.  In all of football nothing symbolizes a greater connection between players and fans than the Lambeau Leap.”

Green Bay’s Carnegie, three miles away in the center of the city on the other side of the Fox River, was in a cluster of prominent buildings matching the grandeur of the Carnegie, now a US District Court. It still bore it’s original inscription of “Carnegie Building,” implying that it had been more than a library, as some were with a theater and meeting rooms as part of the facility, sometimes even a swimming pool.

It was no strain to bike into and around Green Bay.  It is more of a large town than a city.  Many were out for a morning jog, a few wearing Packer garb.   Packer tributes abounded, including a street called Packerland and another adjoining it named for an old receiver Don Huston from the 1930s.  There are doubtlessly many others.

I  encountered the first homeless of these travels, a few in tents in a park across from a large homeless shelter run by the Catholic Church four blocks from the Carnegie.  A large cluster of bikes were locked out front. And for the first time in these travels I was taken for being homeless, or an indigent, outside a supermarket.  As I was packing the food I had bought into my panniers by a garbage can, a man approached with an aluminum can to throw away, first asking if I was collecting cans.  Ten days without any one offering me money is the longest I’ve gone on my recent tours in the US. Evidently Wisconsinites are accustomed to touring cyclists and recognize I’m on an adventure of a sort.  Several have asked where I’m headed and where I’ve come from.  Not a one was familiar with Carnegie Libraries.