Albion, Nebraska

 

Thanks to the generally remarkably accurate hour-by-hour weather forecasts I knew I had to find shelter by seven p.m. when a severe storm with “damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado” was due to hit.  The advisory concluded with the ominous advice “Have a plan and be prepared.”

I was on schedule to reach Albion and its Carnegie by five p.m.  I just had to hope I’d find a motel there or some protected spot for my tent.  As I approached Albion I could see a huge agricultural processing plant, no doubt another Cargill operation, the largest privately held corporation in the US,  promising a motel for executives, contractors and others drawn to it.  And indeed, just behind the Cargill was the Cardinal Inn, so I was saved.  I could mosey over to the Carnegie, half a mile away, and fully enjoy it.

It would be memorable, regardless of its condition, as it would be the thousandth of my career.  I began these travels with 983.  After thirteen in Iowa and three so far in Nebraska, I had come upon that seminal number.  As I clicked off the miles, over eighty of them from number 999 in North Bend, I dwelt upon the countless memories of the many Carnegies I had already visited in over thirty states and seven countries.  Many of the memories were of state specific circuits such as California and Ohio.

Though North Bend’s Carnegie was vacant, it had lost none of its allure, radiating that classic unassuming dignity that is typical of those of small town America, beckoning any passerby into its warm confines.

And so did that of Albion, a little more majestic, graced with columns and slightly more ornate light fixtures, a fitting number one thousand. It had an addition to its rear that hadn’t replaced its original entrance.  It identified itself as “Albion Public Library” with a cornerstone acknowledging its benefactor stating “This building donated by Andrew Carnegie.”  His portrait hung to the right of the circulation desk peering at all those who entered.

I didn’t linger lest the storm come in ahead of schedule.  I had been riding in a light mist for better than an hour as the sky darkened.  If I hadn’t known rain was predicted to continue through the night and into the next afternoon I might have slithered off into a rare thick forest about ten miles before Albion before I got soaked not knowing if I’d have a motel to retreat to, as they aren’t common at all in the small towns I had been passing through.  

If I hadn’t had a good wash the day before I’d have been a lot more eager for a motel. The temperature had gotten to 80, so I was able to douse myself at a small state campground along the Lincoln Highway I rode for nearly one hundred miles.  Markers regularly reminded motorists they were traveling on the first transcontinental road completed in 1913 that ended in San Francisco.  It had earlier been the Mormon Trail before automobiles took over the land. Between 1836 and 1866 the government recorded at its forts that more than two-and-a-half million people crossed Nebraska in covered wagons.

The first telegraph line to the west coast inaugurated in 1861 also followed the route, as did the first transcontinental railroad.  I camped where many of those thousands who had followed the route may have also camped in a forest along the still busy train tracks with freight trains, some long and some short, rumbling by all night.

When I reached Columbus, I turned off the Lincoln Highway and headed northwest to Albion.  I had visited the Carnegie in Columbus in the fall of 2016 when bicycling back to Chicago from Telluride.  I checked to see if it was still the home to a law firm.  

And I also tracked down a Statue of Liberty in the sprawling Pawnee Park.  I flagged down a police car on patrol when I couldn’t find it.  The officer said he wasn’t aware of such a thing and asked where I’d heard about it.  I told him Wikipedia, and he replied with that cliched exasperation of many, uttering “That Wikipedia.”  

I’d seen a Chamber of Commerce near the park and was heading back that way to ask if they knew, but first I stopped at a historical marker devoted to a local citizen, Andrew Jackson Higgins, who designed the WWII landing craft that was the key to the D-Day landings.  Eisenhower said Higgins was “the man who won the war for us.” While I was at the marker, the officer returned and said he remembered there was a Statue of Liberty at the entry to the nearby water park.

I stopped in at the Chamber of Commerce anyway to confirm the location of the Carnegie Library, as Wikipedia gave an address of 48th Street, which was on the outskirts of Columbus, contrary to the usual central location.  Wikipedia had it wrong, as it was near the City Hall on 15th Street and 25th Avenue.  Out of curiosity I asked the young woman helping me if she knew about the Statue of Liberty in Pawnee Park.  She knew it well, as she said she used it for scavenger hunts she organized.  It was a busy day for her, as she said I was the second person who had come in asking questions about the town’s history.  She recommended the nearby Platte County Museum if I wanted to learn more, and said it was only two dollars.  I would have gladly visited it if rain wasn’t imminent.

The storm did hit at seven, lashing the window of my motel room.  It almost made me regret I wasn’t experiencing it pelting my trusty tent.

Tekamah, Nebraska

 

And a calm settled on the land, sort of.  After three days of apocalyptic gale-force winds, a wind in just single digits seems like a trifle of a breeze.  Though it be comparatively slight, it still makes a difference whether it’s in my face or on my back. But at least when it is more of a pest than a pestilence, I can pay it no mind, freeing my thought to roam where it may into the realm of the good and well.

Some speak of going off on a long tour to “find” themself.  I well know who I am and what makes me tick.  I don’t need to find myself.  Rather I go off to “lose” myself, to let my thought drift from the present and forget about all the front page news and chew on the cud of past tours and glorying in all that the traveling life has to offer.  As I heard one old-timer say to another the other day in a library, “The newspaper is full of stories of the horrible things that just happened to other people that I don’t want to know about.”

All day long my circling legs perform an act of unwinding, releasing whatever tension the trumped-up, media-inflamed travesties of current events may have wrought.  Off on the bike I need not be preoccupied by worldly concerns and can take pleasure in the many amenities along the road, such as a gallery of vintage wind mills, “Sentinels of the Prairie,” that I came upon just past the small town of Jackson shortly after I’d crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska.

Each was accompanied by a plaque giving its fascinating history.  

HIstorical plaques have been in abundance on this side of the Missouri as well.  I’ve come upon more already in a day than I saw in a week in Iowa.  Many relate to native Americans, but there are almost as many relating to the early settlers.  I’ve encountered just one “Lewis and Clark camped here” plaque so far, but will doubtlessly come upon more.  One on the Omaha Indians explained Omaha meant “those going against the wind or current.”

Wind has been the topic of the day for several days now.  The day after the ferocious winds ended everyone I encountered asked how I’d  handled the winds.  A farmer who noticed me taking a break sitting and eating along the fence of one of his fields zipped over on his ATV to ask if I needed help.  He said he could only work in his barn during the winds and wondered if I’d been waylaid as well. 

He’d planted one of his fields in corn already and had his planting in his others delayed by the wind.  He would have been doing it now, but he shares a tractor with a neighbor who had it this day.  He said government officials come around and advise him on what to plant where, but he doesn’t much abide by their wishes, as they are all young and going by classroom, rather than hands-on, knowledge.

My final day in Iowa was packed with four Carnegies.  Only the first in Odelt still served as a library.  It had a large addition to its back.  With the original entrance no longer in use the distinctive small wooden sign with “Free” on it over the door, that was once a calling-card, now goes largely unnoticed.  The Carnegie portion of the library had become the children’s section and was thoroughly modernized denying me the pleasure of its original ambiance.

The Carnegie in Le Mars has been an art gallery for nearly fifty years.  It retained the original arched wooden circulation desk and wooden floors.  It was most spacious with just two walls inserted in the floor space for hanging art accompanying the actual walls where the shelves had been. Nothing on the building identified it as a library, other than its architecture and Carnegie’s initials “AC” at the peak of the building over the entrance.  

Sioux City on the Missouri River was large enough for Carnegie to fund a main libary and a branch. The branch was quite small, but not without charm.  It had been the quarters for the American Legion after its days as a library, but now is a residence.

The former huge main library also provided an opportunity for people to live in a historic Carnegie Library.   It had been converted into twenty apartments in 1996.  A librarian I spoke to at the new library just down the street didn’t know if any of its librarians resided there.  I know where I’d be living if Sioux City were my home.

My first Carnegie in Nebraska on this trip was twenty-two miles up river in the small town of Ponca.  When one turned off the main highway to enter the town, two blocks away on a slight rise sat its regal Carnegie where the street ended.  It remained alive as a library and without an addition.  It didn’t open until 12:30, and it was just 9:30.  I was in need of groceries but the town had no grocery store or even a Dollar Store.  It was forty miles before I came upon one.

I had to backtrack fifteen miles and then continue south for fifty-five miles to Tekamah passing through a Winnebago and an Omaha Indian reservation for the next Carnegie.  It sat at the main intersection in the center of town and had an addition to its side more than doubling its size.  A plaque beside the door to its now closed entry below “Carnegie Public Library” stated it had been placed on the Registery of National Historical Places. 

Storm Lake, Iowa

 With no forests of corn stalks to disappear into this time of year and clusters of trees not so common in Iowa, I’ve had to be more inventive than usual in scrounging a place for my tent come dark.  One night I burrowed into a handful of fir trees with branches bending to the ground in the corner of a churchyard.  

Two nights ago I set up in a not-so-dense thicket of leafless tress in the corner of a cornfield.  It was near dusk and along a lightly traveled county road, but some eagle-eyed motorist spotted my tent and roused me with a “Hey you” shortly after I’d settled in.  When I emerged from my tent a burly, surly forty-year old with a pickup truck standing safely fifty feet from me growled, “This is private property.  Do you have permission to camp here?”

“I thought it was a patch of wilderness,” I said.  “I’m just passing through stopping at Carnegie Libraries.  I just visited the one in Rockwell City (seven miles back) and am  headed to Sac City (thirteen miles up the road).  I’ll be on my way first thing in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you stay in Rockwell,” he replied in no less of a gruff tone, clearly antagonistic to vagabonds, whether they be an Audubon or Muir or Johnny Appleseed or Daniel Boone.

“I wanted to push on into this headwind so I wouldn’t have so far to Sac City tomorrow morning.”

“Well you can tell that to the sheriff,” he snapped and retreated into his truck.

Evidently he wasn’t the owner of the property, just a busybody.  If he had said he wanted me off his property I would have offered him twenty bucks to stay.  I wasn’t entirely sure if he would call the sheriff, hoping he would be content with just throwing his weight around and trying to intimidate me and asserting his masculinity to his wife sitting in the passenger seat. 

I knew there was a creek two miles up the road with the possibility of trees along it to camp amongst, as I had one night already, but that was no certainty.  If I took down my tent and hit the road there was a chance the sheriff would pass me on the road and give me trouble with my flight providing an assumption of some sort of guilt.  I preferred to wait and reason with him if he showed up.  On a couple of other occasions when that happened the officers either let me stay or gave me an escort to some place else to camp.  They recognized I was no ne’er do well, nor threat to the community and were always most amiable.  With the wind still blowing hard and the temperature just forty, I had no desire to resume pedaling, especially with dark imminent.  

All was resolved when no one showed up, maybe thanks to his wife urging him to let me be.  After half an hour I breathed a sigh of relief and after an hour I filed the incident into a distant corner of my mind, only wondering if the cops didn’t wish to bother or if the guy hadn’t bothered them.

It had otherwise been a fine day, as I was able to capitalize on a tailwind that made for a three-Carnegie day.  I wished that the first in Odebolt had been the one that my rescuer the day before had taken me to, as it would have given him a jolt of awe that such a majestic building could reside in such a small town and make him want to search for more.  He would have fully understood why I was biking hundreds and thousands of miles to search them out. 

The next in Lake City, named for Lake Creek rather than a lake, was more quaint than spectacular, but it too was an eye-catcher that would have affirmed to my rescuer that my quest was fully justified.  It had been converted into a bistro and ale house and faced on to the town’s central park that filled an entire block.

I had to give up my high octane tail wind and battle a side wind after Lake City when I turned north to Rockwell City.  Its distinguished Carnegie was vacant and in disrepair, but a sign out front told of the ongoing effort to save it, soliciting funds for the cause.

From Rockwell City I turned west and had to push into the strong wind that had been at my back for seventy miles the majority of the day.  My average speed had begun plummeting from well over fifteen when I turned north, and now threatened to fall below twelve.  It had been my second day of ferocious winds with more forecast for one more day.

I arose before seven before the winds truly picked up and also to be gone lest the guy from the evening before came to check on me.  The wind was already strong and only grew stronger.  I spent the day pushing into a twenty-five mile per hour wind, the toughest day yet, just forty-five miles in just under seven hours on the bike, barely seven miles per hour.  

And it was cold.  There was some northerly in the wind dropping the temperature considerably.  It was twenty-nine when I broke camp.  After half an hour I could feel my nose going numb with the fierce headwind creating an arctic windchill.  I pulled out a neckerchief to wrap around my neck and pull up over my face.  I put my new down puff jacket to use for the first time.   I had hoped I wouldn’t need it, just bringing it along for an emergency such as this.  I wore it all day as the temperature stayed below  forty.

I have never experienced such prolonged strong winds, day after day, raging at over twenty-five miles per hour, not even in Iceland, notorious for its howling winds that broke the resolve of just about every cyclist I met there.  Usually such spells of nasty, gusting winds are short-lived, like torrential rains. The planet is certainly rebelling against what the human beast has inflicted upon it.  

When the wind was head-on I could just drop into a low climbing gear and grimly push into it, but when from the side it was a painful ordeal trying to stay on the road or out of traffic.  The rumple strips made it all the more treacherous, as I couldn’t help but be blown into them every so often, especially when an eighteen-wheeler passed from either direction and played havoc with the wind.  I had to hang onto my handlebars for dear life. 

I contemplated spending the day at the Sac City library reading  the e-book “Nature’s Metroplis,” a history of Chicago which I was greatly enjoying, but there was another Carnegie just twenty-six miles away in Storm Lake.  Ordinarily that would be a pleasant two hour ride.  But in these conditions it would be a hard-fought four hours of biking.

Sac City’s Carnegie sat on a hill and was now the town’s Chamber of Commerce.  The town had long outgrown its modest size when it was replaced in 1989.  The several blocks along the town’s main street to its new library was lined with large, statuesque homes, more striking than I had seen in other small towns on this trip. I figured the town must have had some industry other than farming, but it was all farm money other than a small factory.

Halfway to Storm Lake I stopped at a closed weigh station to sit against a wall of the building to rest and escape the wind for a spell.  Before I’d dug out my food a state trooper stepped out and invited me in.  I didn’t realize how cold I was, as I didn’t remove my down jacket or wool cap for the fifteen minutes I spent inside eating a sandwich.  I resisted asking the very kindly trooper if he could check the records to see if anyone had reported a trespassing cyclist at about 7:45 the night before.

Storm Lake had resort revenue along with farming to make it a more substantial town than Sac City or most I had passed through these past five days, the first with a Walmart since Council Bluffs, and a rare for the region McDonald’s as well.  Its Carnegie had a turret, leading to its new incarnation as Santa’s Castle, a museum celebrating Christmas and jolly Saint Nick, which it had been for more than fifty years, since 1971 when a new library was built. The museum had limited hours so I could only peer in at its jumble of ho-ho-ho offerings.  It looked like a genuine hoot of a place.

Onawa, Iowa

 I left Chicago with so much food packed in my panniers, I have been spared the ordeal of grocery shopping yet.  I’ve been gorging on hard-boiled eggs, hummus, bean salads, cheese, cranberry bread, Ramon, canned ravioli, nuts and assorted sweets.  Somehow I’ve managed without chocolate milk, which will be among my first purchases when my stores are exhausted. 

My only expense these first four days has been the five dollar admission fee to the Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn, money well spent.  As the only Danish museum in the US, it pays tribute to all things Danish and has Danish-related artifacts from all over, including Victor Borges first piano that he bought in Denmark as a young man in the late ‘20s.  

Along with the piano were an assortment of videos of his performances on the Ed Sullivan show and before eleven presidents and sessions accompanied by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and other luminaries.  He is a Danish icon and was a great favorite of my father.  He was among a dozen Great Danes listed at the entry of the introductory exhibit of the museum along with Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Scarlett Johansson and Viggo Mortensen.

I arrived at the museum in the early evening after it closed, so was the first customer the next morning.  It resides on the outskirts of Elk Horn surrounded by cornfields.  With no nearby residences I pitched my tent on the grounds behind an old cabin that had been the home and school house of a Danish immigrant in North Dakota that had been transferred to the museum.  

With the museum not opening until ten it allowed me time to do some early morning meandering about town hoping some house would trigger a memory of it having been where my grandparents had lived and I slept once or twice on family trips to Yellowstone and Colorado many decades ago.  There were quite a few likely candidates, but nothing clicked.  

I stopped by the cemetery to see if my grandparents might have been buried there.  There were two Andrew Christensen’s among the many Christensen’s, but the dates didn’t correspond to my grandfather and neither were accompanied by his wife Mildred.

The town’s early library with a cornerstone of 1950 fitted into a narrow slot between larger buildings on its Main Street and was now a tattoo parlor.  It was mere wisp, especially compared to the Carnegies in Atlantic and Audubon twenty miles to the south and north. The contrast was a strong testimonial to what the generosity of Carnegie could have provided if only Elk Horn had had a citizen or two or women’s group, as was the case with many towns, to rally the town to meet the prerequisites that Carnegie set for a library—providing a centrally located piece of land and passing a bond issue of ten per cent of his grant to maintain it.   The present library is attached to the city hall and has very limited hours, but a most fetching mini-mural.

The attendant at the museum wasn’t a Christensen, rather a Peterson, ending with an “son” rather than the Danish “sen.” She said her mother was Swedish and had married a Dane, who like her had the Petersen surname.  She assumed his version of Petersen, but when they divorced she wanted that “o” back and changed her name to the Swedish version, which her daughter also adopted.

When the museum was initiated in 1983 it was known as the Danish Immigrant Musuem, but in 2013 changed its name to the more inclusive Museum of Danish America. In the latest census one-and-a-half million Americans claimed Danish ancestry, which I was among.  A good many of them, 300,000, immigrated between 1850 and 1920, including my grandparents.  Twenty thousand of them were Mormon converts, as the religion had taken hold in Denmark.  The first language the Book of Mormon was translated into was Danish.

The Danish immigrants had to be overwhelmed by the size of America, as Denmark is the smallest of the Scandinavian countries and is just one-third the size of Iowa. Its present population is five-and-a-half million.  The museum pointed out they are the happiest people among the world’s nations according to many surveys.  Universal health care is one of the reasons and also undoubtedly their close relationship to the bicycle with fifty-five per cent of the population commuting to work and school by bicycle.  The exhibit included a Danish made bicycle, a Principia, that a Danish journalist pedaled across the US in 2012.  But it made no mention of the EPO-tainted Bjarne Riis, the only Dane to win the Tour de France, breaking the five-year run of Indurain in 1996.

 

A second floor exhibit was devoted to the “Danish Pioneer,” a newspaper established in Omaha in 1872 and continues to be published, though just twenty-six issues a year.  It relocated to Chicago in 1958.  It was originally published in Danish, but English has been its language for quite some time.

I lingered in the museum almost long enough to be able to drop in on the library, which didn’t open until 12:30.  But with the possibility of rain I made the Audubon Carnegie, twenty miles northeast, my library for the day.  It resided in a park facing a statue of its namesake.  

The walkway to its original entrance, now closed, was lined with tile mosaics of Audubon’s bird etchings.  There were several dozen throughout the park.  There was a mural of Audubon at the new entrance to the library in its addition to the rear of the building.  Another mural devoted to Audubon graced the interior of the post office thanks to the WPA in 1942. 

The librarian was one of several people who informed me there was a high wind warning for that afternoon and tomorrow.  It blasted up from the south shortly before I turned west to Onanwa, seventy miles away near the Missouri River.  It was so strong I had to bike in the middle of the lane to prevent myself from being blown off the road.  I was leaning into it so severely I feared scraping my left pedal on the pavement.  Fortunately I was on a county road with little traffic.  When I stopped at a gas station for water a woman apologized for not stopping to offer me a lift, as she saw me swerving all over trying to stay upright.  She said she had a dog in the cabin of her pickup and he wouldn’t take kindly to me.

I passed up an abandoned house that would have provided  refuge from the wind, either inside or as a blockade, as I wanted to get further down the road fearing the conditions could be even worse the next day.  I came upon a cluster of trees and a recessed river bank out of the wind that was just fine.  Still my rain fly flapped against the tent all night regularly waking me.

The wind had calmed a bit in the morning and I didn’t have to battle for each mile.  The wind did pick up after I’d take a break after thirty-two miles, forcing me to lean into its force from the south.  Thirteen miles later after I’d stopped for more food just seven miles from Onawa the wind had become a gale force.  It was impossible to remain upright.  Even walking was a challenge with one gust blowing the bike out of my hands on to its side as I walked along pushing it. 

I kept waiting for a pickup truck to stop and rescue me.  Half a dozen or more passed until one pulled over after I’d been at it for nearly half an hour.  It was a guy from Kansas City pulling a rusty old Volkswagen bus he’d just purchased for $1800 to restore and sell.  When I saw him stopped ahead, I figured the wind was playing havoc with his load, but he was a cyclist himself and knew what impossible conditions I was up against.  We hardly got to talk as it was just six miles to the Carnegie.

My rescuer didn’t know anything of Carnegie libraries, just asking if it was the same Carnegie as Carnegie Hall.  I was hoping Onawa’s Carnegie would have a strong “wow-factor” to impress him, but it was of the restrained dignity faction.  As with Audubon’s, its original dignified entrance had been closed and replaced by a lackluster entrance through the addition, denying one the pleasure of being immediately immersed in the high-ceilinged Carnegie aura.  The Carnegie-experience is always blunted when one has to pass through an ordinary contemporary setting.

But Onawa’s addition had some pleasing features.  One was a pyramid of books.

Another was an Einstein benediction akin to his more famous “I thought of it while I was on my bike.”  This one was, “The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.”  I was shocked that I had never come across it before.  It should be inscribed in every library.

By five o’clock when the library closed the gale force winds had somewhat abated and best of all had switched to a southwesterly.  And since I was turning back east and heading a bit north I was in business.  At times I was flying along at twenty miles an hour without pedaling and at other times had to lean into the wind when the road did some winding.  A large bush behind an electrical plant provided a wind block for my tent.

Atlantic, Iowa

  

Unlike my previous excursions on Amtrak this year (to Little Rock and back from Baton Rouge), I had to share a seat on my latest trip, this one to Omaha.  The train was fully booked and seats were assigned.  It was no hardship, as it wasn’t an over-nighter for me, just nine hours, arriving in Omaha at eleven p.m.

The mask mandate had been lifted and most passengers were revealing their full face.  The conductors though remained masked.  The conductor making the announcements may have been auditioning to host the Oscars.  As we approached the Mississippi, he gave the startling news that we were about to cross the Atlantic Ocean and would be arriving in Cuba shortly.  

At the stations where the train stopped long enough for passengers to step out for a smoke, referred to as “fresh air” and “stretch your legs” breaks, he said that passengers were welcome “to try out some dance moves.”  One of the smokers was excited about our arrival in Omaha, and said, “I’ve never been to Nebraska and I’ve been to thirty-seven of the fifty.”

I too was eager to set foot in Omaha and to take to its streets on my bike.  I’d passed through many a time when taking the California Zephr to and from Colorado, but had never made it my destination.  I would have disembarked in Council Bluffs in Iowa, just across the Missouri River, but the train didn’t stop there.  I’d just have to bike back over the river for the first of seventeen Carnegie libraries awaiting me in the northwest corner of Iowa.  

There are another eighty-one scattered about the state, all of which I’ve visited, many in the fall of 2019, except one on the campus of Upper Iowa University in Fayette in the northeast corner of the state.  I plan to get to all of them on this outing along with a couple dozen more in Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota just over the border from Iowa in thIs four corners region, though Nebraska doesn’t quite extend all the way to Minnesota making an official”four corners” as with Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The highlight of the trip might be a visit to Elk Horn in Iowa.  It doesn’t have a Carnegie, but is the small farming community where my father grew up and is home to the only Danish museum in the US.  It’s six miles north of Interstate 80.  I can vaguely recall visiting my grandparents there in my youth, the last time when I was twelve, nearly sixty years ago.  My strongest memory is the steep hills leading into the town and thinking it would be fun to bike down them.  I’m finally going to get that chance.

The small Amtrak station in Omaha remained open all night, but it was too brightly lit and had no secluded corners and no WiFi, so it offered no temptation to linger until daylight.  Instead I had the pleasure of finding a place to pitch my tent in the midnight hour. I had no worries whatsoever when I set out from the station eager for what would reveal itself as a place to camp, elated that “now the adventure starts,”  fully confident I’d find a nook to pitch my tent. 

There was a patch of wilderness just across a pedestrian and bicyclist bridge to Council Bluffs.  I feared it might be steep terrain, a bluff, so I kept my eyes peeled for what might offer itself on the three mile stretch to the bridge.  There were some possibilities at a construction site and amongst some trees along the train tracks by a vast empty parking lot by a stadium, but I wasn’t so desperate to avail myself of them, and deny myself the pleasure of riding over the Missouri in the dark.

It actually wasn’t all that dark, as the bridge was illuminated with alternating pink and blue spot lights to show off it’s award-winning architecture.  The bridge was completed in 2008 and received the Project of the Year Award from the American Public Works Association.  “Travel and Leisure” magazine named it one of the world’s most spectacular pedestrian bridges.  It is one of the longest at 2,300 feet.  I wasn’t the only one crossing it in the midnight hour, sharing it with another cyclist and a young couple strolling along holding hands.

I was happy to see the wilderness area below the bridge as I entered Iowa was relatively flat, and was relieved that it wasn’t swampy when I ventured into it.  The ground was plenty soft.  I had no concerns of being spotted, as a fog had settled in and was still thick in the morning.  As I pedaled into downtown Council Bluffs and the Carnegie in the morning, four miles away, I kept waiting for the sun to burn off the fog giving me a clear view of the library.  It somewhat dissipated, but not fully until ten, well after my rendezvous with the library.  

Council Bluffs was a significant river front city in the early 1900s, earning it a sizable grant from Carnegie for a much more grand building than those gracing smaller towns, almost too much so.  It was now the Union Pacific Museum, though it retained “Free Public Library” high above its entrance.  

The next Carnegie was in Atlantic, forty-five miles east through quite hilly terrain awaiting to be planted.  Though my legs strained, my spirit soared, delighted to be off pedaling on roads new to me and that I pretty much had to myself. As always, I gloried in being footloose and worry-free and blessed my good fortune, especially after a retired friend who’s finding it a challenge to find things to do with his time had recently told me I was lucky to have a hobby.  Hobby!!!  Riding my bike is no hobby.  It’s my passion, my calling, my purpose, my raison d’etre.  Hobby it is not.  

But I appreciated his sentiments and do indeed consider myself lucky to have something I look forward to doing when I awake every morning.  And so it was too during my years as a bicycle messenger. That was no more of a job than biking is a hobby. As I biked in to the Loop every morning, whether rain or shine, hot or cold, I exalted at being able to ride my bike all day with purpose and at accelerated speeds. The Loop was my playground, and I was as gleeful as a kid at an amusement park as I galavanted about it all day. Hail, hail to the bicycle.

The Carnegie in Atlantic further emphasized the pleasure of being on the bike, as it brought me to another gem of a building.  Its quiet dignity lent stature to this small town and pride to every citizen that their town had such a noble structure full of books.  It still served as a library and identified itself as simply “Carnegie Library.”  Its orignal entrance had been usurped by an addition to its side in 1996.  The elevated area around the entrance was now a fenced-in picnic area.  A table with a fireplace in the background had a display of weather-related books under a “Spring Forcast” sign and a prediction of “One hundred per cent chance of reading.”  

I didn’t have the heart to tell them their “forecast“ was missing a letter. 

“Signs of Life,: A Doctor’s Journey to the Ends of the Earth,” Stephen Fabes

Ten years after he and his younger brother spent five months bicycling the length of Chile when he was nineteen, Stephen Fabes set out on an around the world bicycle tour that lasted six years, recounted in “Signs of Life,” published in 2020, four years after his return to the UK.

There is no denying his intrepid spirit.  He was two years out of medical school when he gave in to his wanderlust once again, a condition that has an actual medical term (dromomania), one of many that he sprinkles throughout his narrative.  Though the book is subtitled, “A doctor’s journey to the ends of the earth,” he writes much more through the lense of a touring cyclist than a physician. It is a travel book through and through, filed in the travel section of Chicago’s main library rather than the bicycling section, where most of such books end up, of which there are quite a few.

Faber mentions several including those of Dervla Murphy and Ian Hibbell and Thomas Stevens.  They are among dozens of books by a wide range of authors from Edward Abbey to Henry Miller listed in his seven-page bibliography.  If there had been an index one would have found Jens Voigt and Heinz Stucke, two noted German cyclists, one a Tour de France racer and the other deemed by Guinness to be the most-traveled cyclist in the world, someone who spent fifty-one uninterrupted years bicycling all over the world before returning home.  Faber stopped by Stucke’s home towards the end of his ride and devotes nine pages to him, more than most countries.  

Mexico earned a mere three paragraphs, though it included one of his many amusing and astute observations.  He wrote that Mexico was a long succession of dusty towns, “where men sat with their t-shirts hoisted, airing their paunches like over-heated cars with the hood up.”  Another of his noteworthy descriptions was personal.  After biking Africa top to bottom at the start of his travels followed by South America bottom to top he was in peak fitness.  He could see it in his legs, where “in a certain light the pattern of veins on my calves had a creepy likeness to Che Guevara’s face.”  

He’s not the first author to see some sort of design in the veins of a cyclist’s leg.  Ned Boulting, another British author, wrote that the veins in the legs of the American racer George Hincapie’s are so prominent that one day they’d be numbered like the switchbacks on L’Alpe d’Huez and given plaques bearing the names of famous domestiques, such as him, who never wore the Yellow Jersey. 

Four years into his travels, as his funds diminished, and he began to rely on ramen noodles more and more, which he said had the nutritional value of talcum powder, he began giving talks to schools and publishing articles.  By the time he wrote his book he had honed his writing skills, though at times he could go a little too deep into his jar of adjectives, particularly when it came to describing sunsets.  Occasionally he’d extract an adjective rarely associated with the setting of the sun—enormous, raucous, extravagant, lingerie-pink, smudge of wine.

The only typographical error I detected in this Simon and Schuster book was sun-related.  He wrote that he generally rode from dusk to dawn, meaning dawn to dusk.  That fit in with his preference for wild-camping, which one puts off until dusk and the cover of night and obliges one to begin cycling in the early light before one might be discovered.  He attaches “rough” and “stealth” to his style of camping along with “wild.” 

He gloried in the camping, writing that it defined his journey as much as the cycling.  His favorite statistic of his travels, more than the 53,568 miles he pedaled, was that he had camped for free just off the road over one thousand nights, as it “reminds me of the capacity for freedom in a world more dependable than I’d ever imagined.”

Most of his campsites were lost to memory, but a handful stood out as “glorious victories: the Jordanian clifftop, the Californian sea cave, the center of a French rond point, the ramparts of a ruined Ottoman castle.”  Unfortunately none of them came up in his narrative and were given a mere belated, bare mention.  If I ever cross paths with the good doctor, the first question I’ll have for him is about that French round-about and what it was thick with that provided adequate cover and also what it was like to have vehicles circling around him through the night.

I’ll also thank him for giving the medical term for the sensation of feeling ants crawling on one’s body—formification.  He didn’t pass through Brazil, where I suffered the condition numerable times.  He experienced it in El Salvador during a quick dash through Central America, where he wrote that he was changing countries more often than underwear. 

One aspect of the touring life he overlooked was the joy of getting a shower.  Those can be seminal moments when one hasn’t had the opportunity for days.  But he or his editors understood that getting a shower becomes a cliche in many cycle touring books, so they elected to purge this book of any mention of showering. Also ending up on the cutting room floor were many of those who had done him good deeds, providing lodging or other acts of kindness, that were a theme of his travels.  He would have liked to have credited all of them, but his editors wouldn’t allow it.  He apologizes to the overlooked in his acknowledgements.  

Nor did he write nearly enough about two of his travel companions, a friend who joined him for eight months during the early part of his travels and through most of Africa, and then his girl friend who joined him for several months starting in Australia and ending in Singapore, when she surprised him with the news that she had had enough and had just bought a one-way ticket to Japan.  

He could have sacrificed the four pages he wrote on leprosy or the five pages devoted to a Calais refuge camp for more of his travel experiences.  But, of course, it was a near impossible task to reduce over two thousand days on the road to a mere four hundred pages.  He easily has enough experiences to mine for another book or two, such as Ted Simon did after the success of his classic “Jupiter’s Travels,” about his around the world motorcycle trip published in 1978.  

India figured prominently in both their books.  It was there that Simon’s motorcycle was anointed “Jupiter.”  Fabes had a similar experience when an Indian policeman told him, “You are like Braveheart in the Mel Gibson movie.”  He could have titled his book “The Travels of Braveheart” if he hadn’t opted for a medical-related title.  

As all such travel books do, this stirred the urge to be back at it and stirred a steady flow of memories, many long-forgotten.  Just as one can lose one’s self when out biking, I’d lose myself flying along reading this book, suddenly realizing an hour or two had passed.  After finishing it I discovered a catalog of many of the articles he’d written at his website stephenfabes.com offering some more fine commentary on the touring life.