Parsons, Kansas

 

As the sky darkened ahead I wasn’t overly concerned, as I’ve had several occasions already where the black blot on the horizon bypassed me or didn’t amount to more than a few sprinkles.  There’d been a few intermittent showers during the night as a northerly wind took over from a southerly.  I was hoping that would be the end of the precipitation, but the northerly was still having its way.  It was 51 degrees when I broke camp and rather than the temperature rising as day came on, it continued to fall from the high of 88 the day before.  

It was 47 degrees at noon and 44 an hour later when I began to feel a few drops of rain.  I held off putting on my Goretex jacket for a few minutes, until my hopes for just a few stray drops were being dashed.  The wind was whipping at better than twenty miles per hour making putting on the jacket a tricky endeavor.  Rather than growing darker the sky closed in on me.  With the strong wind I couldn’t hear vehicles coming up from behind except when they swung wide and passed over the middle-of-the-road rumble strips creating a mini-roar.  I was surprised when I heard such a roar but no vehicle came around me.  Moments later I knew why when it was accompanied by a blast of lightning.  It was the first of several as the storm demonstrated its might, with a couple of strikes near enough to genuinely startle me.  

The storm was growing nasty.  I was headed east and the strong wind from the north was blowing the rain almost sideways just soaking the side of my pants, at least at first.  As it came down harder, my pants were getting soaked all round.  After a few minutes the rain turned to small pellets of hail and started accumulating on the road.  It was twenty miles to the next town with no hope of any shelter to be found in the wide open, barren plains.  If it didn’t let up I was in for a miserable and perilous hour-and-a-half or more. My only hope was to pedal with as much vigor as I could summon to generate enough body heat to stave off hypothermia.   I kept waiting for the occasional pickup truck that passed me to pull over and rescue me. 

Experience has taught me these bursts of meteorological fury generally last just a few minutes.  That was the case once again, but the wind persisted and so did a light rain, not allowing my soaked pants to dry.  If it had been ten degrees warmer, it would have been more manageable, but with it in the low 40s I was struggling to stay warm.  I just hoped the town ahead, Eureka, was large enough to have a motel.  If not, the next town was another thirty miles away.  If the rain would stop, I could put on dry leggings and be happy to continue another thirty miles.

When I arrived in Eureka, I was greeted my a motel with a sign advertising rooms for $52.  But there were no cars on the premises and no one was answering the doorbell.  A closer look revealed all the signs of it being closed down.  I was cold and wet.  I headed into town ready to stop at the first business and ask if there were another motel.  I came to a feed store that looked open.  When I tried to dismount from my bike I couldn’t lift my rain soaked right leg over the cross bar, catching my heel causing me to fall backwards, my head hitting the pavement and my bike falling on top of me.  If I weren’t wearing a helmet I might have suffered a concussion.  No one saw my calamity, as no one was in the store.  I proceeded a few more blocks to the downtown and was relieved to see the sign for a hotel beside an old four-story building.  But it too was closed down.  

I could see the neon sign of a Casey’s General Store a few blocks down the street. Before I came to it I passed the Carnegie Library that I had come for, presently vacant.  The older lady at the cash register confirmed the motel was on hiatus, as the Indian owners had returned to India.  But I had a choice of two other motels.  One was a mile away and had a swimming pool out front.  The other was a few rooms a restaurant/bar rented out.  That was closer and no doubt more of a bargain.  

A party of somewhat boisterous women filled a long table in the restaurant.  The bartender said that yes he had a few rooms available in back.  I couldn’t get a key fast enough.  I had to return though because I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the heat.  He accompanied me back and demonstrated the trick to turn it on and showed me an auxiliary heater that was much stronger than the other. If I had figured out how to operate the obvious heater I never would have known about the other, which made a considerable difference. I shed my wet clothes and stood in front of the one blasting out heat for several minutes.  It was a while before I dared to take a shower and douse my numb extremities with hot water.  In the meantime I spread out clothes everywhere to dry and rigged up a clothes line with my bungee chords.

I was disappointed to be ending my day early after fifty-five miles, especially when I thought I had a chance for a hundred mile day with a favorable wind.  At least I gathered two Carnegies, the first in El Dorado an hour before the storm moved in.  It was now home to an architectural firm—Gravity Works.  Unfortunately it was a Saturday and no one was in to explain its name.  Right across the street was a Statue of Liberty in the corner of the square block housing the county courthouse. Bobby Douglas, a left-handed, running quarterback for the Bears in the ‘70s, grew up in El Dorado.

I hadn’t had a short day since I had started, so an abbreviated day would be good for my legs.  The forecast called for one more day of a tailwind, so I’d be a tad rested to be better able to take advantage of it.

The day dawned sunny and all was well with the world with the wind with me all day. I could fully enjoy my day on the bike, knowing I’d be setting up my tent with a century under my belt, which I exceeded by nine miles while gathering three Carnegies and another Statue of Liberty.  I crossed the southern extremity of the Flint Hills, which was marked by a historical marker specific to this stretch.  

It came before the first Carnegie of the day in Yates Center, shrouded in trees on a block all to itself a block from the town center and its courthouse.  It was the only one of the day still serving as a library.  Its inscription was a simple “Library” on its facade above the entry.

As I headed thirty miles south to Chanute I began seeing armadillo carcasses along the road.  And a little later pecan orchards.

The Chanute Carnegie was now a Justice Center.  It had an addition and no indication that it had once been a library.  A guy who had stopped in on a Sunday was unaware of its origins.  The only library he knew of that the town had had was two blocks away in an old train depot it shared with a museum.

I had ninety-six miles for the day when I reached Parsons and its exemplary domed Carnegie, now the Carnegie Arts Center.  The twin doors to its entry had a plaque on each, one reading Carnegie Library 1909 and the other Carnegie Arts Center 1996.

A mile away on Main Street a Statue of Liberty stood off to the side of the Parsons Middle School, which had been the high school when the Statue was erected in 1950.

I headed out of town intent on at least another nine miles to get my Strava mileage for the week up to 490 miles, an average of seventy a day, the fewest of these travels with strong headwinds most of the week restricting my mileage.  I couldn’t remember what my biggest day on Strava had been since I joined the community three years ago, otherwise I would have tried to exceed that.  Evidently it was more than 109 miles, as at day’s end I didn’t receive congratulations for a new best effort.  Hopefully I’ll have another day of tail winds to make another attempt.

Newton, Kansas

 

I have completed my western swing back into Kansas and have begun heading east back to Missouri, and just in time, as a wind from the northwest has just arrived. I was lucky not to have to contend with a westerly since I returned to the state last Sunday, just a southerly.  Eight Carnegies in the southeast corner of Kansas await me and then I’ll have completed the state.  I have 250 miles of cycling left  in Kansas.  I’ll be happy to escape the state without experiencing a tornado.

The last on my westward push came in McPherson at McPherson College.  McPherson, as did Emporia, had a public library provided by Carnegie as well as a collegiate library, but tore it down, as was also the fate of twelve other of the sixty-six Carnegies in Kansas, including the main library in Kansas City.

The McPherson Carnegie is now Beeghly Hall, renamed in 1950 when the Beeghly’s gave funds to expand the library.  It was replaced as the school library in 1970. The transfer of books was performed by a long line of students passing them from one to another, almost a tradition with Carnegie libraries.  Beeghly Hall was transformed into a music hall for a spell.  It now houses alumni relations and marketing and human resources.  There were three large photos of the library in its early days and crowds of well-dressed students in coats and ties in front of it in the foyer along with a write-up of the library’s history.

The wind had picked up to twenty-seven miles per hour from the south when I reached McPherson, the strongest yet.  It had been such a struggle trying to stay on the road as I pedaled west into McPherson I couldn’t stoke my engine with nuts and dates in my handlebar bag, as I had to keep both hands on the handlebars at all times, and for the first time in these travels I felt the nagging of hunger.  There was no threat of bonking, just a sensation that I’ve successfully warded off all these miles.

Chocolate milk is one panacea and another is mini-pecan pies.  At fifty cents for 390 calories, they were perhaps Walmart’s greatest bargain.  Inflation has raised the price to seventh-four cents, still a good deal.  I try to save them until my final hour of the day for a sure-fire energy boost, but these tasty morsels are hard to resist at any time.

From McPherson I had to turn south into the ferocious wind.  It was tempting to take the rest of the day off, even though it was only noon, knowing that the next day I’d have a wind at my back.  I resisted, as I wouldn’t have to take it head on, as I’d be on a road angling southeast. I was glad that I did as I managed an additional forty-five miles.

At one of my rests at a service station convenience store two pre-teenaged boys asked me the most popular question of these travels, “Are you biking across the country?”  I affirm people’s perceptions, as even though I’m not biking coast-to-coast, at least this time, I am biking across the country, and the 1,700 miles I have already biked is the equivalent of having biked from San Francisco.  The boys then asked how many miles I bike a day.  Though the winds have been holding me to around sixty lately, I told them seventy to eighty miles.  “Wow, that’s a lot,” one said, then added, “After one mile, I’m out.”

My route happened to take me through a town with a Carnegie I had visited on a previous crossing of Kansas on one of my rides back to Chicago from Telluride.  It was in Newton, whose sterling library certainly merited a return visit, even though it was now the County Historical Museum, as it has been for years.  

The day before I had a similar experience, renewing acquaintances with a Carnegie.  It was in Peabody, home town of Laura.  The library she grew up with remains a library and has not been expanded.  It is a typical small-town Carnegie, one large room with partitions for a children’s section and computer section.  I was there in the afternoon when a couple of young boys showed up on bikes and scampered up the steps to play a game on one of the computers.  There was no sshhhing from the bearded librarian.  He just told them, “You know, the winner is going to have to play me.”  I was gone before that happened.

For the fourth time in five nights since I acquired the garden clippers along the road I put them to use clearing out a spot for my tent in a forested area.  The only night I didn’t put them to use was the night I spent in the cemetery.  The clippers have been so handy I keep them on top of my front right pannier for quick access.  I won’t want to be without them on future trips.

The Flint Hills

 

A twenty mile per hour head wind from the south was taking some of the luster off riding through the storied Flint Hills, elevated to even more acclaim for hosting the premier gravel bicycle race in the world, but I had become accustomed these past days to pushing into such a wall of air, so accepted my lot, and occupied my thought as best as I could on the beauty of the tall grass prairie all about me as I pedaled along on one of the two National Scenic Highways in Kansas, this one twenty miles west of Emporia through Strong City and Cottonwood Falls. 

I might not have ventured off on this byway if not for Laura, who grew up in the area and is another of my many friends I came to know through the Facets Cinemateque, including Janina.  When Laura learned I was bicycling about her home state, she sent me a series of emails from Massachusetts, where she presently lives with her husband Ken, a fellow Facets volunteer, who teaches economics at Williams College.  She apologized at one point for being so enthusiastic recommending the highway and other sites in the area, including the absolutely stunning courthouse in Cottonwood Falls.

I had to leave the highway for the courthouse, as it skirts the fringe of this small town.  It is so spectacular there should have been signs along the road promoting it, but many a driver, as I would have too, passes by without realizing what a marvel is three blocks  over. The towering edifice is almost a mirage at the end of the town’s Main Street, eliciting a spontaneous “wow” and “what in the hell is this doing here in a town of just 851 people.  This isn’t France.”  It goes back to 1873, when it’s population was no more than now, and is the oldest courthouse in the state still in use. It was designed by the same architect responsible for the state capital building in Topeka.  It is comparable to city halls all over France that are the centerpiece of every French city. 

Emporia offered up a similarly breathtakingly beautiful building, the domed Carnegie Library building of the College of Emporia with an address of 1200 C of E Drive, contrary to that of Wikipedia.  It is of special significance, not only as the first of sixty-six grants he gave to the state in 1900, seven of which were to colleges, but because he gave it in remembrance of Col. John Anderson, the wealthy industrialist who opened up his extensive personal library to working boys in Pittsburgh on Saturdays.  Carnegie, who ended his schooling at the age of thirteen to work in a factory as a bobbin’ boy earning $1.20 a week to help support his family, was so grateful to Anderson for the opportunity to read and learn that he vowed if he ever gained any wealth he would make a similar gesture himself, which resulted in the construction of 2,509 libraries all over the world. 

The first library he funded in the US, after one in his hometown of Dunfermline  in Scotland, was in Allegheny, Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh, where his family moved to from Scotland in 1848. He placed a bust of Anderson in front of it.  Anderson happened to be the president of the board of trustees of the College of Emporia, founded in 1884, so Carnegie offered it a library and placed Anderson’s name on it.  A plaque by the entrance expresses Carnegie’s connection to Anderson.

The College of Emporia closed in 1974 and was taken over by Way University.  When it closed in 1991, it was given to Emporia State University, which never found a use for it as its campus was several miles away.  It’s presently empty with a for sale sign out front.  

Emporia received a grant from Carnegie for a library as well in 1902.  It is presently a museum beside the new library.  A couple blocks away the Gravel City bike shop, one of several in this cycling hotbed, had a small Gravel Hall of Fame which it inaugurated two years ago with an initial class of seven—Bobby Wintle, Chris Skogen, Corey Godfrey, Dan Hughes, Kristi Mohn, Mark Stevenson and Rebecca Rusch. Four more will be added this year in its second class before on May 31 during Unbound week—Alison Tetrick, Joel Dyke, Miguel Crawford and Yuri Hauswald.  The shop offered a small booklet of recommended gravel rides in the area, ranging from several miles to over a hundred.  I could have taken a gravel route the twenty miles to Strong City and the official scenic route through the Flint Hills, but with a twenty mile per hour wind to contend with I didn’t care to be blown all over the gravel road when I’d be trying to stick to bands with the least amount of gravel, so opted for the paved highway.

I had spent most of the previous day pushing into a strong headwind from Topeka for fifty miles to Burlington and it’s Carnegie, which is now in the private sector owned by Merry Investments.  

My Garmin cyclometer beeps every five miles and gives me my time for those five miles.  They were all over forty minutes, confirming my average speed was around seven miles per hour.  

I had a rest stop at about the halfway point to Burlington at Lyndon’s quaint Carnegie tightly packed with tables and books.  It’s prime alteration, besides the influx of computers, was the addition of a rest room on the first floor to go along with the usual rest room in the basement, where the children’s room invariably resides as well.  I took advantage of the rest room to wash the first neckerchief of these travels, a purple one, a genuine prize.  It was a long time in coming, twenty days and nearly fifteen hundred miles, but worth the wait.  It will dangle off the back of my bike atop my tent and sleeping bag for the rest of these travels, a handy little swatch of fabric I can use as a napkin when eating for wiping my hands and knife and spoon.

After Burlington I headed west, turning the headwind into a side wind, dropping my five mile segments to under thirty minutes.  My legs were so relieved they didn’t stop pedaling until the sun touched the horizon.  It was a different story the next night in the Flint Hills when it was full on into a headwind greatly reducing my range.  I was prepared to stop much earlier if anything presented itself, especially since the prairie terrain was relatively treeless and barbed wire fence lined the road.  The rocky terrain wasn’t suitable for agriculture, though it’s stone made for good stacking as Janina and I saw Andy Goldsworthy construct at Kansas City’s Art Museum a few years ago. 

The undulating terrain provided dips I could disappear into, but they would have been near the road, though there wasn’t much traffic.  There wasn’t much tall grass in the prairie, as a million head of cattle graze on the two-county wide band of Flint Hills that extend from Oklahoma up through Kansas to just before the Nebraska border. There were patches of the grass here and there, some right along the highway.

As I scoured the terrain a church popped up in the distance.  If there was no accompanying preachers quarters that would be a possibility.  Just before it was a cemetery with a shed off to the side by a fence lined with trees.  Cemeteries have proved me with accommodation before and once again.

The forecast called for the wind to blow all night, tapering to ten miles per hour, and not accelerating back to twenty until ten a.m.  I set my alarm for six and dawn to take advantage of the diminished wind.  I had twenty more miles south before turning west.  With the surge of warm air from the south I was able to start the day in shorts for the first time.  The wind slowly increased, but I reached the turn before the wind was a demoralizing force.  

I feared the county road I turned on to would be gravel, but I was spared.  After twelve miles I turned north for a few miles on a state highway.  With a glorious wind at my back I registered a sub-twenty minute five-mile segment, one of the few of the trip, then turned west once again on a paved county road.

Among the many plaques in the area explaining the geology and the history and listing the twelve scenic roads in Kansas was one that mentioned Knute Rockne had died in a plane crash in the vicinity in 1931 at the age of 43 when he was at the pinnacle of the football world as the coach of Notre Dame. The road I was on didn’t go by the site, if any does, so I can’t report on whatever memorial there might be.  

Another plaque with a map of Kansas showed the eleven physiographic zones of the state—besides the Flint Hills there was the high plains, red hills, Arkansas River lowlands, Wellington and MacPherson lowlands, Chautauqua hills, Cherokee lowlands, Ozark plateau, Osage cuestas, glaciated region, and the Smoky Hills.  Kansas becomes more and more fascinating.  

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.”