Topeka, Kansas

 

I was the beneficiary of several Easter offerings, though I’m not sure if all were related to Easter.  The first came when I was sitting outside against the wall of a Casey’s General Store eating a peanut butter sandwich, something that I wasn't to do very often earlier in these travels when it was so cold.  A young man wearing shorts, maybe nineteen or twenty, approached and said, “Nice day isn’t it?”  I agreed, saying, “It’s a good day to be on the bike.”

He didn’t ask where I was going, evidently taking me for a transient and not a traveler.  Instead he said somewhat sheepishly, “I don’t have much, but I’d like to give you this,” and handed me a plastic bag filled with coins.  “No, no,” I resisted, “I’m fine.”  He walked away a little disappointed.

A couple minutes later he returned and said, “Could I offer a prayer for you?” “Sure,” I said.  He began, “Dear Lord, look after this man and help him make the right choices,” and continued for a minute or two and then presented me with the coins again.  This time I accepted.

A couple hours later when I jettisoned the majority of the weight of those coins at a MacDonalds for the two McChickens special, a thirty-year old guy came to my table and said, “Happy Easter,” and handed me a ten dollar bill.  I don’t know if he saw me counting out and stacking all the coins at the cash register, most of which were pennies, for my meal, or if it was my overloaded bike that inspired his kind-heartedness, but I appreciated the gesture.

Later that night in my tent I dined on a bounteous Easter dinner compliments of ALDIs—a genuine feast of Bob Evans macaroni and cheese, hummus, shredded Monterrey jack cheese, sliced ham, apple sauce, yogurt, and cheesecake.  I couldn’t wait to get to my tent and start gorging.  I was within the sprawl of Kansas City after crossing back into Kansas in Leavenworth.  

I was getting a little worried when half an hour before sunset suburbia was just beginning to give way to farmland.  After a couple miles of fenced-in pastures I came upon a break in the fences under a column of electrical towers.  It led to a most welcoming mini-forest of firs and far enough from the road for a most peaceful evening and calories galore.

The Carnegie in Leavenworth was an early day version of great grandeur with plenty of steps and four columns and many embellishments, an architectural marvel for its time.  It sat on a rise and now provided offices, an art gallery and loft apartments.

A mile back on the same street a Statue of Liberty presided in front of 
Leavenworth’s City Hall.  It shared the grounds with a statue of Lincoln.  He was honored, as he had honored Leavenworth with the first speech of his presidential campaign on December 3, 1859.  He had come to Leavenworth, as Kansas had voted to be an anti-slave state.  He was gratified it hadn’t joined the slave states and with slavery the key issue in the election kicking off his campaign in a state that had sided with his views couldn’t have been more symbolic.  

Choosing to go against the proponents of slavery is a legacy Kansas remains proud of.  The Carnegie in Lawrence is now the center of the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area bringing attention to the enduring struggle for freedom across the Kansas-Missouri border.  There are a couple dozen sites including the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City.  

One of the plaques on the steps leading to the library entrance quoted Langston Hughes, who was a library patron in his youth.  It quoted his autobiographical book “By the Sea” from 1940: “When I was in the second grade my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me.  And I was unhappy for a long time and very lonesome.  Then it was that books began to happen to me and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books.”

The new library a couple blocks away filled nearly a full block in this university town.  Rather than students, it was aswarm with transients inside and out.  I was leery of leaving my bike out front where many were hanging out having had a sleeping bag and tent pilfered off my bike in similar circumstances.  I circled the library to see if there was a window I could park it by so I could keep an eye on it.  I couldn’t find one, but settled on the rear entrance near an open door where people could drop off donations. The guy who drove the Bookmobile parked nearby said it would be fine there.

As with Manhattan, home of Kansas State University, that I passed through last Sunday, the streets of Lawrence were filled with Kansas students driving aggressively, coming to stop signs and speeding up without coming to a complete stop and showing no deference to the lone cyclist on their streets.

It was twenty-seven miles to the next  Carnegie in Topeka, the state capital.  I feared the traffic might be thick and steady between these two cities, but after five miles of mayhem, I had the road pretty much to myself as the bulk of the traffic was on Interstate 70, linking the two cities.

Topeka was relatively calm compared to Lawrence.  My first destination was the state capital for another Statue of Liberty.  The dome of the capital towered above the city, so I didn’t need to navigate with my GPS.

Topeka’s library wasn’t funded by Carnegie, but he provided Washburn College, south of the city center, with a library, one of seven academic libraries he provided the state.  It now houses offices and is known as Carnegie Hall.  A statue of Bob Dole stands in front.  He graduated from Washburn in 1952 after serving in WWII. The plaque below the statue quoted him as saying, “Washburn gave me a strong foundation to set my sights on great things.”  He distinguished himself serving in the Senate from 1969 to 1996, holding the post of Majority or Minority leader from 1985 to 1996.  He was the Republican nominee for president in 1996.

I was tempted to take advantage of a cheap motel on the outskirts of Topeka, but it was sixty miles due south to the next Carnegie in Burlington and the forecast for the next day was a strong south wind.  At present it was just a light breeze, so I passed on the opportunity for a shower and knocked off a few of those sixty miles when they wouldn’t be so hard to come by.

Platte City, Missouri

 


Missouri has been much hillier than Nebraska and Kansas.  There have been lulls, but rarely for long.  They leave the legs more depleted than the headwinds, but they are not as dispiriting, as the descents allow some respite, and can almost be fun when they are tight enough for the rollercoaster effect. But it does take a lot out of the legs when riding vigorously trying to maintain my momentum from the descent all the way to the summit of the next hill.  The level of strain is definitely more extreme propelling upward than the relentless pushing into a wind.

The county roads can have steeper grades well beyond the more heavily trafficked main highways, which try not to go beyond five or six per cent to accommodate the 18-wheelers. The gravel roads are the steepest of the steep. Luckily I’ve only had a couple of gravel interludes and of less than five miles each.  They give a deeper sense of being away from it all, but it is always a joy and a relief to return to the smooth rolling of pavement.  With the threat of washboard or thick patch of loose gravel, I have to keep my speed well under control.  The down hills are wasted.  

I didn’t much mind several hours on a divided four lane highway, route 36, which turns into the Pony Express Highway after it crosses into Kansas, as it had a wide smooth shoulder and was moderately graded.  I still accumulated a goodly amount of vertical feet, as a two per cent grade could go for half a mile or more.  But it was just a barely perceptible strain on the legs, thanks to a modicum of assist from an easterly mixed in with the predominant wind from the south.  I could maintain a steady pace gliding upwards and feel as if I had diamonds in my legs, as racers say when they’re on a good day.

And the busier highway provided for good scavenging—two license plates, a pair of purple shoe laces and a pair of garden clippers.  The clippers will come in handy when I have to snip limbs to clear a path through brush for a place to camp and to further clear a space for my tent, especially when the growth is prickly and it is difficult to get a grip on something I’d like to break off.  They would have come in handy several times already, enough so that I ought to consider adding clippers to my kit.  

Shoe laces are always in my reserves, not for my shoes, but as string for securing something.  The purple laces were too colorful to resist.  They were in a pair of Nikes, which were luckily not my size, or else I would have been tempted to try to find space for them, which would not be easy after Gary in Edson added a sweater and down vest to my gear.  As it warms I may jettison the sweater despite its quality.  The vest packs up relatively small, so will be nice to keep.

A pair of Carnegies nearly one hundred miles from the last in Albany completed my brief incursion into the northwest corner of Missouri.  They were just twelve miles apart.  I passed through Chillicothe, which lays claim to being the birthplace for sliced bread, tracing its origins to July 7, 1928 when the Chillicothe Baking Company began selling pre-sliced bread, reputedly the first time sliced bread was available commercially anywhere in the world.  They used a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Iowa.

It was twenty-eight miles east to Brookfield and its barely recognizable Carnegie, taken over by the VFW quite a few years ago.  I had to ask several people before receiving confirmation that it had indeed been the old library.  The only hints were the steps up to the door and some ornamentation by the steps.  The windows weren’t the usual larger than normal, nor was there anything on the facade indicating it had once been a library, as is usually the case. 

There was no mistaking the Carnegie in Marceline. Not only does it still serve as a library, but it was prominently branded with Carnegie on its facade.  It forwent the usual “Public” preceding “Library,” simply identifimg  itself as “Carnegie Library,” clearly and proudly understanding that was a mark of distinction.

My three hundred mile loop through the northwest corner of Missouri yielded the first Trump signs of these travels, a mere pair just a couple miles apart.  One was accompanied by a “Fuck Biden” flag and the other was part of an ornate display including a large metal elephant. 

Earlier I passed through a small town of less than one hundred residents where a Confederate  flag flew in the corner of someone’s property.  I took a rest against the closed down fire department across the road from the flag.  A neighbor evidently saw me snap a photo of it, as a couple minutes later a young woman came by in a car and stopped in front of me and said, “My mother wants to know why you’re taking pictures of her property.”

“I liked the small building,” I said.  “It’s rather quaint.”

“It used to be the tourist office,” she replied with a sense of pride and maybe relief.  

After this brief interruption I could resume listening to the highly entertaining and informative “Watts Occurring” podcast of the Ineos Welsh teammates Geraint Thomas, Tour de France winner, and Luke Rowe, team road captain.  These veteran, hardened pros give unvarnished insight into the peloton.  They scoffed at a rider who recently got in a scuffle in a race, saying it meant nothing as the racers are all friends off the bike.  Rowe commented he could think of only a handful of competitors he’d like to have a beer with, and he was sure the feeling was mutual.  

They have been mightily impressed with the strong early season of two-time Tour winner Pogačar, just about ready to concede July’s race to him, as he’ll be extra motivated after coming in second last year to Vingegaard. “Poor Vingegaard,” Rowe said.  “It looks like he’s just going to be a one-time winner of The Tour.  What a loser.”  That got a chuckle out of Thomas, as he’s a one-time winner himself.

Rowe is highly attentive to the fines levied against riders in races by the UCI, as he’s been fined for petty infractions, like holding on to a team car for too long in a race.  He pointed out that the UCI finished second to Jumbo Visma in money accumulated from fines at the recent week-long Tirreno-Adriatico race in Italy.

Rowe mentioned he watched the television coverage of a race he wasn’t at and noticed that Thomas was the only rider wearing arm warmers and wondered why.  He explained he was late in taking them off and when he was ready to shed them the action was too furious to risk the effort.  

Rowe complimented Thomas for being superb on the bike in just about every respect, but then added, “Your Achilles Heel is taking a piss while riding,” which necessitates Rowe pushing him along while he takes care of business for longer than he’d like.  Thomas said he’d been working on it and thought he’d improved.  

Theirs is as fine a cycling podcast as there is out there.  The journalist Daniel Friebe of the Cycling Podcast, the granddaddy of them all, from time to time mentions something he has picked up from their commentary. 

Bethany, Missouri

 

Though it’s not going to provide a tailwind, or headwind for that matter, I am pleased that the forecast calls for winds from the south for the next week.  That promises night time lows in the 40s and 50s rather than the 20s and 30s as they have been.  No more frigid nights in the tent will spare me of bundling up and alleviate worries of waking to cold feet and ice in my water bottles in the morning.

I have been warding off cold feet without having to resort to Charlie’s handwarmer technique of sticking the tiny packs in my socks.  Rather I have been stuffing my feet and lower leg in the arms of the wool sweater that Gary in Edson gave me.  It being a sweater with a zipper it opened up perfectly for the purpose and keeps my feet toasty.

Day-time temps in the 70s will allow me to squeeze honey from its plastic bottle and will also grant me the pleasure of drinking ice cold drinks from my water bottle packed with ice from service station and fast food self-serve ice and soft drink dispensers.  MacDonald’s is no longer a sure outlet for ice, as several in Kansas had done away with that self-service feature, as customers were taking advantage of its beverage offerings filling large cups of their own.

I have ventured off into the northwest corner of Missouri to gather five Carnegies and then will head back to Kansas to finish it off.  With these five in Missouri only three will remain, all in the south of the state that will dictate my route to the Mississippi where I’ll complete the state in Cape Giradeau, an old river town that I’ve always wanted to visit.

The same with Missouri’s St. Joseph on the Missouri River, as it was the starting point for the 1,960 mile Pony Express Trail across the west ending in Sacramento. I’ve ridden portions of fhe Trail for years, including this year. Why I never made the effort to get to its starting point I don’t know.  Thanks to it having two Carnegies, I finally got there.  

It was fully steeped in Pony Express lore with a museum and statues and plaques and giant mural.  

I know that if I ever come upon a medium who specializes in past lives, I’d be told I was one of the one hundred young men who served as a rider in the eighteen months of its existence that began in April of 1860.  It was rendered obsolete by the telegraph.  Until then getting mail and news delivered in ten days across the great expanse of the west with a relay of riders putting in one hundred mile all-out efforts was considered a miraculous achievement, akin to putting a man on the moon.

A large rock with a plaque marked the spot from which the riders set out. It was in a park across from the stable where our horses were kept, which is now the museum.   In the center of town, a mile north, stands an over-sized statue of a rider.  It is surrounded by plaques recounting the glory of the enterprise.

I had the pleasure of riding the Pony Express Highway for forty miles into St. Joseph from Hiawatha, Kansas, which I was drawn to for its Carnegie Library, although it preferred to be known as the Morrill Library in honor of the state governor, Edmund Morrill, who provided the land for it.  The young librarian, who’d only been there a year, was unaware of its Carnegie heritage.  A mismatched portico of an entrance had been tacked on to the library, blocking its original Carnegiesque facade and plastering Morrill on it.

After I crossed the Missouri River into St. Joseph, I went south for two miles, turned left on Illinois Street for half a mile and then turned on to Carnegie Street for two blocks which led me to the stately Carnegie standing in the middle of a park which it had all to itself.  When the library was built in 1901 to supplement the main, non-Carnegie, library, St. Joseph had a population of 100,000 people and was the 35th largest city in the country.  Its present population of 80,000 has dropped its rank to 534.  

The librarian I spoke to had been with the library forty-seven years.  She apologized for the drab circulation desk, saying it wasn’t the original.  She wanted to make sure I’d locked my bike and offered a lock if I didn’t have one.  It was the first library of these travels that required a key to the rest room.

The Washington Park branch on the north side of the city was equally grand.  It resides on one of the many hills that dominate the northern half of the city.  As I approached it, four boys on BMX bikes asked if I’d like to trade bikes.  “My bike is faster than yours,” one boy said.

It was fifty-two miles northeast to the Carnegie in Albany.  Halfway there I stopped at the post office in King City to ask if the town had a library.  The postmistress said the nearest was twelve miles north, but suggested I try the senior center down the block if it were open as a place to get out of the cold. The post office was plenty warm and spacious.  I thought I would just sit in the adjoining room where the PO Boxes were and eat my oatmeal.  Moments after I returned to my bike, she came out and said she had a spare chair I could sit on inside.  That was perfect. 

Not much later a middle-aged guy picked up his mail and said he was a member of Warmshowers, as I am, and said I was welcome to a shower if I needed one.  I asked if he’d had many guests.  Only one, he said, as King City being on a north-south road didn’t attract many touring cyclists.  He’d only joined Warmshowers because his son and a friend had cycled coast-to-coast several years ago and had taken advantage of the service.  

A shower would have been nice, but not at ten in the morning, especially when I was trying to take advantage of a westerly breeze that would end tomorrow.  It took me to Albany and then to Bethany.   First I stopped at the library in Stanberry, one of the few these days that required a password for its Wi-Fi.  It was Alpacaelsa, as the library’s IT person had a few alpacas.  That was a little more complicated than the ReadBooks of an earlier library.

The Albany Carnegie happened to be closed for the day and no sign offered an explanation.  It was a small enough town it would have been a one-person operation. Whoever it might be could have had an emergency.  An older woman who walked past, stopping to pluck a handful of dandelions, could offer no explanation. The postmistress in King City had lived in Albany and said she was glad when the library put in an elevator as she didn’t like its steep steps.  I could feel their extra steepness when I mounted them to peer in.

Not a day passes that a podcast doesn’t offer some stunning fact.  Today it came from the Paceline, a cycling podcast, when the discussion between its two voices touched upon Lycra.  John Lewis asked if his cohost Patrick Grady knew that the word spandex, a form of Lycra, was derived as an anagram for expands, when DuPont invented it in 1958.  That was news to him, commenting “that’s too clever by half.”

Pawnee City, Nebraska

 

Two mornings in a row I began the day with a mystery clicking sound coming from my front wheel.  I figured it was a twig I had snagged pushing my bike out of the brush where I had been camping.  I stopped to extricate it, but none was to be found.  Nor was there a clicking sound when I raised the front end of my bike and gave the wheel a spin.  

Sometimes such a sound can come from my rear wheel, though it sounds as if it is coming from the front of the bike. But there was nothing rubbing there either.  I resumed riding hoping it would go away.  When it didn’t I feared the ball bearings in my generator hub were grating.  That could be a tricky operation if I needed to overhaul it.  As I fretted the noise vanished.

But it reappeared the next morning.  Could the cold possibly be effecting the hub with it getting down near freezing at night?  Once again I checked if a twig had been caught in my spokes and once again I could spin the wheel freely without it creating a noise.  Maybe my pedaling motion was clicking on my lock or derailleur.  But the noise persisted even when I wasn’t pedaling.  It didn’t care to go away this morning.  Twenty minutes later when I stopped to shed a layer and opened my pannier I glimpsed a twig that had been caught in it and was scraping the road.  Mystery solved and a testament to another fine rustic campsite.

I’ve been taking advantage of clusters of tightly packed, bushy pine trees lately that I sometimes have to break dead lower limbs off of to make space for my tent or to force my way into.  They form a great protective shield from the wind and from wandering eyes.

I have yet to be forced into a desperate campsite.  They have been turning up within minutes of when I have reached my set stopping point thirty minutes before sunset.  I have had to resist abandoned farmsteads several nights when I have not quite been ready to quit, though I did settle on one when I needed a substantial wind block from a strong cold wind and didn’t think nature would provide it.  Ordinarily I like to keep riding until I’m within thirty miles of the next library, Carnegie or otherwise.

My return to Nebraska brought with it my first three Carnegie day of these travels, edging my average up over one a day with thirteen in eleven days in 816 miles.  The day was also highlighted by the first license plate I’ve come upon.  I had warned Charlie that I stop for license plates and neckerchiefs and bungee chords and whatever might be interesting, but I came upon nothing in our four days of cycling together.

The first of my Carnegie three-pack came in Fairbury.  I didn’t notice the sizeable addition to its rear, so was a bit perplexed when I walked in and to the left and right was given up to children’s books.  The librarian explained the adult section of the library was in the addition and the Carnegie portion of the library had become the children’s library, greatly expanded from the basement section it had had before the addition.  There was a sign at the entry to the library that I’m accustomed to seeing forbidding food and drink, accompanied by a not so common explanation that crumbs would attract ants and be a detriment to the books.  I wasn’t admonished about bringing in my water bottle, possibly because the librarian was holding a cup of coffee. 

I had to push into the strongest headwind of these travels to Beatrice.  It took me over four hours to cover the twenty-seven miles, greatly relieved whenever trees or a hillside deflected the wind and I could up my speed or relax my legs.

Beatrix was a big enough town to warrant a $20,000 grant from Carnegie, two or three times the normal.  It was the first of these travels with a dome.  The beautiful building was now home to the Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Office and an economic development company.  The Tourist Office had a large display on the Homestead National Historical Park, administered by the National Parks system, north of the city. 

It was past five, so I would have to save that for another day, which I know there most certainly will be with all the sites I have come upon in this region that I would like to share with Janina.  The new library was on the outskirts of the city and was huge.  Among its features was a table of seeds free for the taking with a limit of three packs of any individual seed.

It was fifteen miles south to the third Carnegie of the day, dealing with a side wind, which was much less of a strain than heading directly into it.  Wymore was a much smaller town with a much more modest library, but it continued as one with an addition to its side.  

I didn’t have to go far out of town before coming upon a pasture with thick firs on a ridge and a dirt road leading to them that showed no fresh tire  prints.  It was another pristine spot to pitch my tent, as fine as sleeping under a dome, such as the stars provided. 

I had a slight wind assist the next morning from a strong southerly wind as I was heading northwest to Tecumseh.  I could see from several miles away its towering city hall.  Usually the first indication that I’m closing in on a town is the site of its water tower poking up in the distance. It’s tiny, rather plain, but still attractive Carnegie was now a resale shop.  The new truly plain library wasn’t open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I had to sit outside for my rest and internet time.  Luckily there was an outlet for recharging.

Then it was another battle directly into a twenty mile per hour wind for the next three hours to Pawnee City, twenty miles south.  The strong wind from the south rocketed the temperature to 88 degrees, thirty degrees warmer than the day before.  It was the third time I’d been able to wear shorts and search for ice.

Pawnee City’s distinguished Classical Revival Carnegie had been replaced ten years ago and had had several owners since.  Its present owner was a local who had grown up with it and used it as a “man cave” according to the librarian in the new library.  He wished to maintain its heritage with a colorful, homemade sign on the door identifying it as “Old Library” even though “Carnegie Library” stood out boldly above the double columns and just below 1907.

It is one of fourteen places in the county that are on the National Register of Historic Places.  Another is the birthplace of Harold Lloyd, silent film star.

Washington, Kansas

 

A regular theme of these travels is the settling of Kansas.  Historical markers, museums and historic sites, national and state, recount stories of the state trying to attract people to fill and farm its vast expanses.  The Homestead Act of 1862 brought many, including quite a few Europeans.  A black reverend and a white businessman recruited Blacks after the Civil War to found a community of their own.  Oddest of all was the transport of orphans from eastern big cities to Kansas and elsewhere, some as young as two years old, to become part of a family and eventually field hands.

The story of the orphan movement is recounted at the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia.  The former train depot was an appropriate location for the museum, as the orphans were transported by train, which came to be known as Orphan Trains, though not so crassly at the time. Between 1854 and 1929 some 200,000 orphaned, abandoned and homeless youth were brought to communities where they were put on display and locals could take on those that captured their fancy, sometimes two or three.  It was an early version of foster care with a hint of slave auction.

Throughout Concordia are mini-statues of orphans and a plaque giving their history, from their origins to what they made of their lives.  There was one in front of the former Carnegie Library, now a history museum.  It was the first Carnegie of these travels that included “Free” on its facade preceding “Public Library.”  As with others, it had its date of inception, 1908, in a prominent position.    

The subject of the orphan plaque was Rudolph Jubolet, who arrived in Clyde, Kansas in 1884 at the age of nine.  He remained in Kansas until his mid-twenties then served in the Spanish American war.  He married, had two children and worked as a restaurant owner, commercial fisherman and farmer in California.

Another one in front of the post office was devoted to John Lukes Jacobus.  He arrived in Ottawa, Kansas in 1915 at the age of two. After graduating from college and working assorted jobs he served in the Army Medical Corps in WWII. He worked in the postal service in Long Beach, California until retirement in 1972.  He and his wife traveled extensively for two years.  He then worked in a mortuary from 1974 to 1997, retiring for good at 85, then living another fourteen years.  If I didn’t have a favorable wind I might have spent the next couple of hours searching out the rest of them scattered around town.

On may way from Concordia to Clay City, forty miles away, I stopped along the road for a rest and a snack.  When I returned to the road I rubbed my tires to make sure they hadn't picked up any burrs. I noticed a slight bulge in my front tire, explaining the bump I’d been feeling.  I thought it was due to too large of a tube in the narrower tire, and was going to wait until later to swap tubes.  But it was actually because the tire hadn’t been properly seated.  I let out the air and pushed in the bulging spot.  There was still a slight bump when I resumed riding that I would tend to later, not wishing to deflate and inflate all over again.  

A couple miles down the road a pickup truck had pulled over and a guy hopped out to wave me over, a not uncommon occurrence, but the first of these travels.  The middle-aged fellow said a friend of his had seen me working on my bike and called him as he owned a small bike shop in a town ahead and thought I could use his help.  Talk of guardian angels.  I explained what I had been doing and said I hadn’t quite fixed the problem.  He could see the slight bulge.  He apologized he didn’t have a pump with him, knowing the effort a small hand pump would require, but said I could stop by his shop in Miltonville up the road.  It would have required a couple mile detour that I did not wish to make,  which he could understand. 

The Carnegie in Clay Center mirrored the grand style of the Carnegie in Concordia.  Clay Center hadn’t grown as had Concordia, so its library hadn’t been replaced nor expanded.  Unfortunately it had limited Saturday hours from ten to two so I didn’t have the pleasure of its interior, which would no doubt have matched the majesty of its exterior.  While I sat in back taking advantage of its Wi-Fi, I was able to do some charging thanks to a pair of benches facing each other with solar panels and USB outlets.

It was another thirty-eight miles southeast to the next Carnegie in the sprawling college town of Manhattan, home of Kansas State University.  There were four-story condo complexes everywhere and every franchise known to man, including the first ALDIs I’d come upon in these travels.  I arrived early Sunday morning, an optimum time for checking on its dumpsters.  A three-pound plastic container of grapes was perched on a post beside it, a nice welcome.  

A quick perusal yielded a slightly crunched loaf of multi-grain bread, a dented canister of oatmeal and a large container of cottage cheese with the day’s expiration date, all I had room for.  I would have traded the grapes for a dozen brown eggs, one cracked, had Charlie still been along, as he had a stove and we could have had hard-boiled eggs for a couple of days, as I always enjoy when traveling with Andrew in France. I was just sorry not to spot any bananas, a usual item.  How sweet it was to grab food for a couple of days in a minutes time. Free food is always nice, but equally nice is the convenience, just stopping and grabbing and not having to walk around a store I’m unfamiliar with trying to find what I want.  And the dumpster always expands my diet, providing me with items I never would have thought to buy.

The cottage cheese mixed in nicely with my ramen.  Charlie reports he has become a convert.  He’s had ramen for lunch nearly every day since he returned last Monday, saying “it’s easy to make and easy to punch up with vegetables and beans.”

Manhattan’s Carnegie was in a complex of civic buildings across a small plaza from the courthouse.  It now served as civic offices.  It completed a trifecta of large, two-story, stone Carnegies, a sharp contrast to the smaller, not much larger than one-room, rural Carnegies, each distinguished in their own way.

On the way back to Nebraska for five Carnegies in the southeast corner of the state I passed through Washington, twelve miles south of the border.  Its Carnegie had been torn down, but the town had a Statue of Liberty in its central plaza containing its courthouse.  It’s new, rather small, library, scrunched between two businesses faced the courthouse.  It’s Wi-Fi required a password, so I had to ask a passerby if he knew who won the women’s NCAA championship earlier in the afternoon.  His answer was, “Iowa lost.”  I was sorry to hear Caitlin Clark’s storybook year didn’t finish with a flourish.

Downs, Kansas

  

I camped a little early Thursday so I wouldn’t arrive in Osborne before its bike shop, Blue Hills Bikes, opened, which I presumed would not be until ten, and hopefully not later.  I was lucky a bicycle shop popped up on my GPS out in small town Kansas, as I was in need of tires and tubes, and bike shops are almost as rare as bison.  The tread was beginning to wear through on my rear Shawlbe tire and my front was approaching 5,000 miles and thinning too.  Though my spate of flat tires wasn’t entirely due to the diminishing tread on my tires, it was a contributing factor for some of the tiny thorns of those bristly goat’s heads penetrating through.  

I guessed right on the shop’s opening time, though my first thought when I arrived at its front step at 10:10 was that it was no more, as it’s sign was terribly faded and there was a closed sign in its window.  It’s hours of operation, 10 to 5, were still posted on its front door and peering inside I could tell it was still in operation.  Below its hours was the phone number of the owner with the note to call in an emergency.  I jotted down the number hoping the librarian would be willing to give the owner a call.

I was so eager to go to the bike shop, I had gone to it even before checking on the town’s Carnegie.   It now served as a research library with the new library next door.  When I walked into the Carnegie, still wearing my helmet and clutching my handlebar bag and a water bottle, the librarian enthusiastically greeted me with “My husband owns the bike shop in town if you’re in need of anything.”  That was as good of a greeting as I’ve received in any library.

“I just went by it and it wasn’t open.”

“Yes, he said he would be late, as he was going to trim his beard.  It was down to here,” she gestured placing her hand in the middle of her throat.  “He’s going camping this weekend with his youth cycling team and he wanted to tidy himself up.  They have their first race of the season on trails in a state park.”

She was equally enthusiastic telling me about the Carnegie and presented me with two thick scrapbooks with every article that had been written about the library since it opened in 1913 and rededicated as a research library in 2001.  The opening was a huge community event with a band and speeches and invocation from a reverend.  The town newspaper said the reverend “touched a responsible chord in every heart and all joined him in his prayer for wisdom in using wisely the powerful tool placed there for the betterment of not only the present but coming generations.”  The article also noted, “Miss Martha Hatfield never sang better.”

 

The transfer of books from the old library to the new was also a notable community event, a bucket brigade of high school students lined up between the two libraries passing books from one to another.

The library didn’t have the standard Carnegie portrait, but had another and also a montage of Carnegie photos as a 16 and 27 year old along with portraits of his mother and wife and a photo of his Scottish home before his family moved to Pittsburgh when he was 13.

When I ventured to the bike shop the owner was there with a neatly trimmed beard.  He was as friendly and talkative as his wife.  He was such a likable fellow that this town of 1,300 had made him its mayor when he accidentally, he said, raised his hand when serving on the town council and they were trying to decide who should next be mayor. He said the secret to his success was knowing that there are three kinds of people—doers, those who with a little impetus can be made into doers and those who bitch about everything.  He has learned to pay as little attention as possible to those who bitch and try not to antagonize them.

He didn’t have exactly what I wanted, but I made do with a 700X28 folding tire for my rear and a 700X25 wire beaded tire for my front.  He provided me with a bowl of water so I could check on my three spares.  One was fine, one showed two more pin prick holes and the third had a puncture by the valve, which rendered it kaput.  

As I swapped out my tires on the sidewalk in front of his tiny shop he kept up a conversation telling me about starting his shop at the instigation of his wife who thought he needed more space for doing bike repairs than their garage.  His customers come from over a hundred miles away.  He had a map of Kansas inside the door of his shop with pins in towns all over the state of his clientele.  He gave me a trick for forcing my front tire on without using tire irons pushing in on the tire starting a few inches away from the final insertion.  I always thought it took stronger wrists than I had, but that wasn’t entirely true.  We used his compression tank to inflate the tires, much easier than a floor pump or my mini-hand pump.  He told me if I didn’t have a gauge to determine the pressure in my tires when I was using my mini, I’d know they were up to 70 or 80 pounds when my eyes started popping out.  That’s about right.

He, like a gentleman at the library, recommended a couple of county roads to the next Carnegie in Downs, just twelve miles away, both saying it was flatter than state highway 24 I had been riding since Goodland and would also have considerably less traffic.  I was enjoying a strong tailwind and was eager to take full advantage of it but the talkative husband and wife kept me in Osborne for three hours, when I had hoped to keep it to less than half that, and it would have been twice as long if I had allowed it or if there had been a headwind I didn’t want to get back into.  

They were not unique, as the Downs librarian sat me down in a rocking chair alongside hers and gave me a thorough history of her library and much more.  It preceded Osborne’s by eight years, even though it was a smaller town, as it was a railroad town.  It’s town newspaper also hailed the arrival of a library declaring, “There are few things, aside from the churches, that tend toward the moral growth of a city more than a good library.”

The library had the standard Carnegie portrait by the circulation desk and a portrait of the town’s first librarian, Mrs. Chatty Allen, over the fireplace.  Her nickname could have applied to quite a few people I’ve met in Kansas, including the woman beside me.  The Chatty over the fireplace was also known as Miss Lavender, as that was her favorite color.  She was a charismatic figure.  The present librarian is a member of a group called The Legends putting on performances celebrating significant figures in the area’s history.  Chatty is among their subjects.  

The present librarian follows a family tradition.  Her sister was the town librarian and also her daughter.  Usually daughters succeed mothers, but in this case it was the opposite.  She was working as a dental assistant when her daughter left town and convinced her mother to take up her position, which she gladly did.  Among her many innovations have been teas and also a “Reader Feeder,” such as a bird feeder, putting out books on the two benches in front of the library for people to take.  

One of the biggest changes since she began her tenure has been the popularity of DVDs.  When she started they took up a small shelf.  Now they fill a whole wall of shelves facing a collection of pie tins that can be checked out.  Hardly anyone uses the pie tins any more.  

The Osborne and Downs Carnegies were part of a string of three Carnegies all on state route 24 that began the day before in Stockton.  I didn’t arrive to it until just before closing so there was no time for conversation with its librarians, as there were two on hand in this library.  Unlike the Carnegies in Osborne and Downs it had an addition that now provided the entrance to the library.  The Carnegie portion was now used merely for meetings and small gatherings.  It had pretty much been cleared out, though the Carnegie portrait remained.  The most notable feature of the library was the bison out front.

Janina and I will have to make 24 our route to or back from Telluride later this year, not only to drop in on Gary in Edson and to revisit these Carnegies and the bike shop, but for several other attractions, including the world’s largest ball of twine and the Cottonwood Ranch, an exceptional state park of an early homesteader and also the town of Nicodemus, a post Civil War settlement of Blacks, that is now a National Park and still home of 24 residents, mostly Blacks.