A Confession

Okay, folks. I can't fake it any longer. I am sitting writing in the air-conditioned comfort of my home. George and I got back to Chicago the day before yesterday after back-to-back 90 plus mile days.

But do not let this disturb you. Lest you are worrying you will no longer get those eagerly-anticipated little notices in your in-box, never fear. I've got a backlog of material from this trip that could keep me going for months. Just kidding.

So, everything should look the same to you, though there may be a confusion of time and space, which was already the case since one email may have been written in two or three different places at different times, which wreaks havoc with verb tenses.

So disabuse yourself of the romantic fantasy of Jim out there on the road tapping out his message to the world by the campfire on his little Pocketmail Composer. He's sitting in the middle of Chicago, trying to remember what happened when.

George and I savored the descent from the bluffs into the town of Pepin, and we agreed we were adequately repaid for the climbs. As inviting as Pepin was, with its little shops, cafes and such, we pressed southward in our search for the Mighty Mississippi. So far, we had seen lakes, tributaries and sloughs, but no River, and we were soon to have another wetland experience crossing the Tiffany State Wildlife Area, the first of several we would encounter.

I remember this dramatic change in the character of the landscape from bluffs to wetlands, after a long careening downhill, as one of the most invigorating moments of the entire trip. George indulged me, waiting as I stopped several times, once to get a picture of a snowy egret, a swath of pure white swooping skyward from the dark, shadowed greens into a cerulean sky. Back on our bikes, we began moving through the warmth and fecund odors of the lowland landscape surrounded by the garrumphing of frogs and the twittering of birds.

"Looks like a good place for duck hunting," said George as he pulled up alongside, shattering my contemplation. I was jolted by George's different view of this scene, expressing an opposing vision, though not necessarily his own, as he's neither hunter nor fisherman. He offered the regard that it wasn't a "scene," in the picture postcard sense of the word, but something to be used. This difference in interpretation of the landscape is probably related to our differences in map preferences, as I described in "the scale of things" a few days ago. And it's not, of course, an issue unique to me and George here in this Upper Mississippi lowland, but a national schizophrenia about nature dating back at least to John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's time, if not earlier.

But I remembered that George has biked through nearly every possible geography on the face of the earth, so what's one more swamp to him? On the other hand, I know from his writings and conversations during our trip that he is extremely sensitive and just as aware of his surroundings as I am.

So there is something deeper going on. Perhaps it has to do with out circumstances. Throughout our trip, I have been humbled by George's frugality--his ingenuity in squeezing maximum benefit from minimum expense. How else could he travel so much on three month's bike messenger pay? And me? Let's face it: my income combined with my wife's over the past few years puts us embarrassingly smack dab in the middle class demographic. So while I am oohing and aahing over the beauty of nature with ample cash in my pocket, George is scanning the roadside for Marlboro box coupons.

This confirms what I predicted in my first email, that I have a lot to learn from George Christensen.

Jim

Writing in the comfort of central air

Eat Your Heart Out, Lance!

YEEHAA! A glorious day of biking! The roads of Wisconsin are beautiful. It's as if the whole country road system is one big bike path.

We left Yellowstone Lake, near Mineral Point, this morning at nine, and just pulled into a campground near Belvidere, for a whopping 94 miles, including the 30-mile stretch from Monroe to Beloit in two hours! We were scorching at close to forty miles per hour down some of the hills.

After fueling up at Beloit with two Chicago style hot dogs and a chocolate malt, we mounted up again and crossed into Illinois, heading due east with the sun and wind at out backs, watching our shadows on the pavement ahead and the setting sun skimming across the cornfields as we rode fast and silent beneath canopies of huge oak and maple trees. We averaged almost 25 mph for one five-mile stretch.

This is biking to die for!

Jim
70 miles from Chicago

Next: backtracking to the search for the Mighty Mississippi

Lake Pepin

Lake Pepin, according to the various brochures and historical markers, is a "natural," perhaps THE natural, part of the great Mississippi waterway. It was formed by too much silting at the mouth of some tributary, presumably the Pepin River, although I can't find any evidence of it on my map, and it would surely not be shown on George's. I suppose this silting explanation may satisfy your average tourist, but it's not enough for me and "Curious George." Why should this one river silt up and not the hundreds of others we see on the map?

Whatever the root cause of his glacial age phenomenon, it poses somewhat of an inconvenience for George and me in the here and now. As you may have heard, or even seen for yourself, the eastern shore of the "River" is lined with bluffs, maybe as high as 500 feet. Most of the time the River Road runs comfortably between them and the waterway, allowing us to appreciate them at a distance, which is the best way to appreciate bluffs on a bicycle.

Up river of Bay City, before Lake Pepin kicked in, we had glided easily along, looking up at the outcroppings, musing on the mysteries of geologic time and the power of flowing water. We also speculated, in our idle time, on whether or not there are rattlesnakes living up in those rocks. That's what the wife of the nuclear engineer cum amateur environmentalist and ecologist told us at the Methodist ice cream social. Something about "microclimates," she said, but wasn't sure what that meant.

But downriver of Bay City, the terrain took a turn for the worse. The "Bay City Hill," which, as you may remember, was requiring heavy sag wagon support among the MS riders, was just the first of a number of inconveniences caused by Lake Pepin, despite its beauty from afar. Having apparently clogged itself with its own silt, it became bloated to the point where it overflowed its bed, flooding the plain to the foot of the bluffs, forcing us, several millenia later, to pedal over them.

George and I are on one right now, having stopped at a covered "scenic overlook" for a brief respite from the drizzle that has kept us moisturized all morning. I peel a banana and have a few Fig Newtons while putting my clothes and sleeping bag in a plastic bag. George pulls out his Ziploc bag of peanuts, which never seems to diminish, from his handlebar bag. While we wait for the rain to slacken, George tells me one of his many travel stories I came to enjoy on this trip. Perhaps Lake Pepin reminds him of some high Andean lake, Titicaca maybe, or it could be the rain. At any rate, he tells me about the time he was camping at the 13,000 foot level on the Altiplano of Bolivia after biking 129 miles that day. A steady night-long drizzle threatened to inundate his tent, as it wasn't soaking into the hard ground. It was barely above freezing, and he feared hypothermia. He spent all night sitting in a corner of his tent on slightly higher ground than the rest, bailing water out of his tent with his socks. He tells me this in a soft, understated voice, like he is talking about going to the store for a loaf of bread.

The rain has lessened so we cinch up and head down from the bluff toward the town of Pepin, ten miles away.

Jim

In Search of the Mighty Mississippi, Part 2

"Mississippi rises, swells and bursts like a bloated bubble, and the bayou feels the pulse of a beat in the heartland.

"Mississippi rises, gathers range to range, flows down from the highlands, grows high in the lowlands as the water sheds its power, lays its burden dam to dam St. Paul to the Delta plain.

"Mississippi rises, a rogue tide beneath an aberrant moon, rouses from its bed like a nocturnal beast and stirs the prairie for a trace of its ancient path.

"Rise Mississippi, raise your crest above the braided hats and levees of the army corps, breach their gates and go for the coast, for the freedom of the gulf stream waters.

"Rise, Mississippi, rise!"

This poem, which I wrote in 1993, was inspired by the big flood of that year. Its relevance to the story at hand is a certain "pro-river" stance against the Army Corps of Engineers, and their efforts to control the river.

I have been intrigued by the relationship between the River and Corps ever since I read John McPhee's piece in "The Control of Nature," about the Corps' construction of a massive system of levees and other structures near Baton Rouge to prevent the Mississippi from exercising its natural tendency and "going for the coast" by the way of the Atchafalaya River, thus bypassing New Orleans entirely.

As you may know, the work of the Corps along the Mississippi is not limited to that levee down in Louisiana. In case you haven't heard, keep reading.

We left Prescott in the early afternoon, heading south on highway 35, a smooth two-lane blacktop with ample shoulder. It teases the river bank for 130 miles, where the once-mighty upper Mississippi ebbs and flows to the rhythm of 26 dams from the once beautiful St. Anthony Falls to St. Louis.

After riding for five miles along what the maps show as the river bank, we still haven't seen the river. Thirty-five soon cuts inland through marshes and doesn't return to the river path until Diamond Bluff, where we saw a body of water we thought was finally the River. "Nope," said Dallas, the greeter, you may remember, at the Methodist Church ice cream social across from the nuclear plant, "That's Sturgeon Lake, there." And the other Methodists present nodded in agreement.

After leaving the social, under guidance from the church folks, we turned right on US 63 at Hager City, six miles to the south, which crosses a bridge into Red Wing, Minn. Just before the bridge, we spotted the small campground they had referred to, nestled down along what we though was surely the river. With its grubby little tent site between two RV's and the constant traffic noise from Highway 63, the only thing this campground had going for it was the Mr. Sippi Bar, within stumbling distance of our tent site. This was enough for us.

That evening, after we showered, we decided to partake of the local ambiance of the Mr. Sippi. During a conversation with one of the patrons we learned that the Mr. Sippi Bar was not on the Mississippi at all, but something called the Wisconsin Slough, which, by the way, according to him, "flows backwards." I told him I was from Chicago, so it didn't seem so unusual to me.

Disappointed once more, the next morning we resumed our search for the elusive River, only to find ourselves pedaling upstream against a river of colorful MS riders heading north on the fifth day of that annual event. You may remember from a previous e-journal entry that this is the group the City Manager of Prescott was anticipating, having mistaken George and me for advance scouts.

For at least an hour we passed them and their various motorized support vehicles. There were many expensive recumbents, tandems and otherwise. Many shouted, "Hey, you're going the wrong way." This was funny at first but got old fast, so we just started ignoring them.

Stopping at a Kwik Stop or whatever, we struck up a conversation with one of the more eccentric riders, with a handle-bar mounted squirt gun and a bubble machine on his rack. In our brief conversation, we learned that this was really the Minnesota MS ride, and they were just on the Wisconsin side for a diversion. He was an interesting fellow. He had biked to Alaska, something George has also done, so he and George chatted a while. I took their picture together, then we headed up the 250 foot "Bay City Hill" just south of town. Freewheeling down the 1.5 mile descent on the other side, we noticed there was plenty of sag wagon activity among the MS'ers.

South of Bay City the more "scenic" part of the road began in a gentle but persistent rain, the road curving up 100 foot bluffs to reveal striking views of...the River? Guess again. It's...Lake Pepin! a 22-mile long natural lake that somewhat resembles the River as we think we know it.

Jim

Roosters, Darkness and Drizzle at River's Edge Campground

I'm in my tent at the River's Edge Campground in Stoddard, Wis., seven miles south of LaCrosse. I've been awake, off and on, since the rooster started crowing probably an hour-and-a-half ago. Last night, we were happy to be camping twenty feet from a chicken coop, since we wanted to get an early start and expected the rooster to help us in that regard.

The rooster did his job, but we haven't done ours. Soon after he crowed, rain began pelting my tent, which lulled me back into a half-sleep dozing state. Perhaps because of the rooster, or the bizarre circumstances of being in this little tent in the rain down by the river in a strange little town for who-knows-what reason, or the pressure I'm beginning to feel to make the 300 miles back by Tuesday, or quite possibly it's the pain from four of my ten toes rubbed raw by the relentless pedaling, or the 49-cent hot dog I created for myself at the local Kwik Mart last night, or maybe it was the noise of last night at the Thirsty Turtle Bar across the tracks with too many small-town drunks on a Friday night invading my personal space with pointless conversation and loud '70s music while I was trying to write.

I had to get out of there and I came back to take a shower, but the cramped bathroom/shower facilities (his labeled "bullheads," hers labeled "catfish") at this dumpy little campground for recreational fishermen was foul-smelling and dirty. Perhaps because of all this, during my periods of sleep interrupted by the occasional cock crow and rain specks dotting the top of my tent, I had the darkest dream you can imagine which kept its continuity from doze to doze in the drizzle. I won't burden you with the actual imagery of the dream, but suffice it to say it was heavily loaded with guilt symbolism and twisted lines of communication relating to my parents, both buried down in Alabama. I swear, I couldn't stop the dreams until I sat bolt upright, at which time I reached for the Pocketmail Composer and started tapping it out.

Well, the drop-sounds on my tent are lighter now, and I think I hear George unzipping his tent flap, so we will be on our way south toward Prairie du Chien, 40 miles away.

Jim

The Scale of Things

George and I are getting caffeinated and fueling up at the Yellowstone Lake campground restaurant which overlooks the lake. We're examining each other's maps planning our route to our first destination of the day, Argyle, some six miles to the southeast.

Why, you may ask, do we have separate maps? Aren't you going to the same place?

This is a good question and deserves an answer. My preference in maps, as you may remember from my Des Moines trip, is the DeLorme series of Gazeteers, one for each state. I carry the appropriate Gazateer bungeed cross the top of my Bob bag in a waterproof, transparent bag. Admittedly unwieldy for bike touring, my wife asks me why I just don't xerox the pages I will need. She misses the point of the maps. For one thing, suppose I find myself somewhere I hadn't anticipated? If I don't do this at least once on a trip, I figure I've over-planned. And Xerox copies are ugly. All the beautiful and subtle colors are reduced to grainy line art. These maps invite me to explore places I wouldn't find if I used a AAA map like George.

He says my maps are overkill. So when it comes time to make a route decision, we take out our respective maps. If there has been any tension between us these last five days, it has revolved around our differing interpretation of the landscape based on the view presented by the scale of our maps. His shows the big picture, the most direct roads deemed worthy of the automobile. Mine shows the detail, the little-used country roads, the twists and turns. Due to its large scale, it has the added benefit of portraying our progress, inch-wise, in a much more favorable light. He says my maps offer a confusion of roads--too many choices. I say his are made for people in cars needing to "get somewhere." Goal-oriented versus process-oriented.

But I cannot discount the opinion of someone who has pedaled 75,000 miles over a period of 25 years. I have learned that every detail of his bicycle and touring equipment, from his rear hub to the precise arrangement of his panniers, is the result of a long trial and error selection process. Presumably, his choice of maps evolved similarly. So I pay attention when he talks about maps and routes.

But not once on this trip has George given me any unsolicited "advice" on how to do things, despite the vast experience gap between us. Even on the road, he lets me set the pace, and not once has my somewhat lesser speed capability become an issue. Last Thursday morning, as we were leaving our second campground, adjacent to the Mr. Sippi bar on a backwater of the River, I consulted my DeLorme and discovered a shortcut to highway 35. George was skeptical, but went along with me anyway. It turned out to be a dead end, but George took it in good humor.

But now, here at the Yellowstone Lake restaurant, he's taking a more serious look at my DeLorme because according to his map, we have to backtrack five miles to the park entrance to get on Highway G toward Argyle. My map shows an alternate exit to the east following Lake Road to Highway N, which connects to G, then highway 81 right into Argyle, saving more than five miles. We took the back route and encountered one of the most beautiful roads so far on our trip. We're having smoothies and savoring the morning's ride on the town square in Monroe, having already put in 25 of the 75 we plan to do today.

So the truth is that both maps serve a purpose. The secret is on knowing which to use when.

There must be a lesson in that, somewhere.

Jim

Sitting with George in Monroe, Wis. on what may have once been a large green town square but has been reduced to a pathetic remnant surrounded by four concentric layers of parking which I am sure pleases the merchants, which is what counts.

Jim and George Find Religion

It happened just a few miles north of Diamond Bluff, as we were climbing a steep hill.

These uphills provide ample opportunity to scan the shoulder for discarded items, most, presumably enhancements to the landscape from passing motorists. In fact, wherever cross-country bikers are gathered together, the subject of found roadside treasures is bound to come up. For example, Andrew Morton, who rides all over the place and maintains a great website of his travels, seems to find an unusual number of bottles of discarded urine, and is particularly distressed with the frequency of mutilated American flags apparently blown from patriotic SUV drivers. I myself have never once encountered either of these artifacts. My traveling companion, George, is drawn to bandanas, and can tell you how many of each color he has found in his 75,000 miles of roadside scanning. In fact, just yesterday he found a perfectly good red one which I am now wearing around my neck.

Riders have found a lot of things along the road, but as far as I know no one has found religion.

It came, actually, in the form of a copy of the New Testament, perhaps thrown from the car of someone who was not currently being blessed by our Lord. Soggy, with a red leather-look-alike cover, it was open to the book of Galatians. Even George was awe-struck by this holy roadside find. Bikers on long, lonely trips are prone to attribute mystical properties to the most mundane roadside items. So what would they think about a copy of the New Testament? After I digitized it "in situ" as it were, George picked it up, reverently, of course, and we began reading it for some symbolic message to guide us on the rest of our journey. Paul was speaking, I think, and he was apparently spreading the Word of some significant event to the citizens of Galatia. George and I interpreted this to mean that we likewise must spread the Word, urging the multitudes to give up their oil-burning Chariots of Satan and embrace the Holy Bike henceforth.

Thus inspired, we ascended the hill effortlessly and enjoyed a God-given freewheel down to the town of Diamond Bluff, where, I kid you not, the first thing we saw was a homemade sign on poster paper that said, "Ice Cream social today," out front of the Diamond Bluff Methodist Church.

Now, I think I can speak for George as well when I say a church ice cream social, under ordinary circumstances, would not attract our attention. But in this case, given out state of mind from our recent find, it seemed fore-ordained, even predestined, that we would stop.

We were welcomed warmly at the door of the small church by a member of the congregation whose name we later found out was Dallas. The room was full of friendly church folks enjoying not only ice cream, we were surprised to discover, but an array of homemade pies, cakes, cookies, and assorted sandwiches. I chose the double-dip apple pie a-la-mode for $1.50 and George selected a sloppy joe at $2.00, and we made our way to a table beneath a picture of Our Lord, presumably just before his ascension, with a table of his closest associates.

We found another table, next to a woman who also had ordered a sloppy joe. Our strangerhood attracted her attention, and she made a point of welcoming us. Then Dallas came to our table and welcomed us again. In fact, I can't remember being welcomed so many times in one place. Dallas told us this was an annual event, and we were lucky to come along the right day. We didn't tell him it all seemed divinely prearranged. He ended up by inviting us to spend the night in the church, if we so desired. We graciously declined.

It turns out the lady with the sloppy joe lived in Red Wing, across the river, and her husband worked at the nuclear power plant ("It's just a small one," she apologized), plainly visible from the church window. She said he was a nuclear engineer, and was the "only environmentalist working there." This led to an animated conversation with this Methodist lady, as you might imagine. On a side note, her husband had in the past been stationed on a nuclear submarine in Charleston, S.C., as was I myself. We talked about this, too, while her sloppy joe got cold and my ice cream melted.

I suppose the climax to this whole story was when I again directed my gaze to the picture of Jesus and friends on the wall. What I had previously assumed was a halo around His head, and His eyes back lit with an eerie glow in anticipation of His eminent ascension, took on a whole new meaning in view of the nuclear plant plainly visible in the adjacent window.

Holy Nuclear Power, Batman!

Jim

Cecil's Landing on the Great River Road somewhere between Stoddard and Prairie du Chien

later: crows attack camp food!