Moline, Illinois

 

 As I cycled the thirty miles from Muscatine to Davenport along the Mississippi,  I stopped at each of the series of state campgrounds hugging the river to see if they had sites available over Memorial Day weekend for Janina and I.  The first three only had a handful of sites presently occupied, but all were booked full starting Friday.  

It was a relief to discover that the fourth I came upon, the Buffalo Shores Recreation Area, a county campground, didn’t take reservations.  It operated on the old-style, first-come-first-served basis. Once one claimed a site, they could hold it for fourteen days, so there were people who had come early to stake out a site, paying for a few extra days, and then leaving.  

Half of its sixty-five sites already had been tagged through the weekend, even though they weren’t occupied.  The campground hosts couldn’t guarantee that if Janina and I showed up Friday, when Janina will be driving in from Chicago, that any sites would be left.  I could chance returning on Thursday in two days, but that was a bit iffy too.  Maybe I’d come back Wednesday, the next day, and hang out for two days before Janina’s arrival.  

I had a couple of other options to check on before having to make that decision. I went on-line to see the camping situation at the large Mississippi Palisades Park halfway between Moline and Galena that we had stayed at before.  Two of its 165 sites were still available. I clicked fast to book one before anyone else beat me to it, only to learn they were special handicap-accessible sites only available to the handicapped.  

Next I tried an Army Corps of Engineers campground just north of Moline. And bingo, it had several sites available and there were no catches.  What a relief.  I didn’t have to sweat out going back to the county campground ten miles south of Davenport, and Janina didn’t have to remain in suspense of whether or not her escape from the city would be derailed.  We could be happy that we’d be spending the holiday camping.  And we could also be happy that so many others had a similar desire, almost enough to give one hope for the future of mankind.

I could have a stress-free two days hanging out in the Quad Cities resting my legs and reading awaiting Janina, who couldn’t come any earlier as she didn’t want to miss her Thursday University of Chicago class on the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I had been wanting to get to Moline for awhile, as its library is just one of a handful of libraries in the US that has the cycling memoir, “The Wind at My Back: A Cycling Life,”  by the English novelist Paul Maunder published in 2018.  Maunder is a regular contributor to the highly literate cycling magazine “Rouleur.”  I am always  happy to see his by-line, and evidently many others are too as worldcat.org, a website that is an archive of the holdings of libraries all over the world, listed libraries in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany and cycling-mad Slovenia with copies of his book.  

Fortunately the book was on the shelf allowing me a fine day immersed in its 259 pages. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pleasure at Moline’s grand downtown Carnegie, as it had been replaced in 2005 by a sprawling two-story library on the outskirts of the city with all sorts of amenities including a pair of exercycles with trays to lay a book upon and read while one pedals away.  I could hardly object to the setting and the consciousness of the librarian who had acquired “The Wind at My Back.”

The book was laced with Maunder’s acute insights into the cycling life, ringing up observations that are at the forefront of my thought as I pedal along.  Though he’d never done any touring, thInking a three-hour ride brought him happinesses enough, he expresses many a thought of the touring cyclist.  He wrote that he always rides with head up through villages as “there’s a whole range of human quirks to be observed.”  He’s always monitoring the wind and tries to guess when he’s about to turn into it “whether it will feel like riding though maple syrup or molasses.”  

Much as the book is  about his life as a cyclist, beginning with riding with his father and his friends when he was but ten, it is as much about his life as a writer .  He acknowledged that he identifies himself as a novelist, though none of his four novels have found a publisher, a startling revelation. He was forty-three when he wrote this memoir and had only stumbled into writing about cycling a few years before when a friend suggested he try his hand at it.  And there he found his niche.  

In his teens when he took up racing he had the ambition of becoming a professional cyclist.  At nineteen he realized he didn’t have the ability for that and hardly biked at all while at university, devoting his leisure time to attending raves and doing drugs.  He resumed cycling after college and realized it defined who he was. When he spoke all too much about cycling at his writer’s group, someone asked if he’d rather be a writer or a professional cyclist.  Without hesitation he replied cyclist.” He has fully come to terms that he failed at that as well as at becoming a novelist and winning the Booker Prize, as he’d initially hoped. 

The book was much less of a full-on cycling memoir than I was anticipating.  Whole swaths of his cycling life are overlooked.  He mentions Greg LeMond was his hero, but leaves it at that.  He hardly writes about his racing career, only the race in the summer of 1992 he dropped out of, never racing again.  

There is no mention of his first race or any of his wins or what made him think he could represent England at the world championships.  It’s not until page 195 that he mentions a cycling holiday in France as an eleven-year old with his family.  His father rode a tandem with his younger sister while his mother completed their foursome on a bike of her own. 

His father surprised him by intersecting with the Dauphiné-Libéré, a week-long pre-Tour de France race, where he’s thrilled to get his picture taken with two of the stars of the time, the Australian Phil Anderson and Irishman Stephen Roche.  He tells Roche he’d like to ride the Tour de France some day.  Roche told him he had the same ambition when he was his age. 

There’s not a single mention of Merckx or Coppi or Anquetil or much of the lore of the sport that cycling memoirs generally pay homage to.  He grants a couple sentences to Henri Desgrange, founder of The Tour, and his intent to make it a test of human endurance, but gives him short shrift too.  As fine a writer as Maunder can be, he could have woven more of the sport’s past into his narrative and given that past new meaning.

He is most fascinated by climbers rather than sprinters but gives no mention of two of the greatest climbers (Pantani and Gaul) and how they and many others of the climbing set became tragic figures.  He lumps in Indurain, Ullrich and Armstrong as strong riders who didn’t have the flair of the climbers, so failed to capture his imagination, and that is all he has to say of them.  Nor is there a peep on the drug-taking side of the sport.  As worthwhile as much of the book is, its failure to be as comprehensive as it could have been may be at the root of why none of his four novels have been published.

West Liberty, Iowa

 

The road construction season inflicted me with a couple more unwelcome doses of gravel with road closures forcing me on unpaved roads.  It is beyond my fathoming that riding gravel has become a fad.  There may be a minimum of traffic on such roads, but what little traffic there is speeds by spewing up a cloud of dust and is a threat to shoot out bullets of the loose gravel.  The gravel reduces one’s speed and increases one’s effort.  Descents are wasted, as one must brake, ever wary of hitting a thick patch of gravel which can catapult one over the handlebars, as happened to me a few years ago in Nebraska nearly breaking a collarbone.

But I can thank the road construction for sending me off on a detour that took me by the birthplace of Herbert Hoover in West Branch.  The two-room cottage where he was born in 1874 is part of a large park that includes a museum and his presidential library. The grounds administered by the Park Service is just a mile off Interstate 80.  I’ve passed it many a time in too much of a hurry to stop, always thinking, “maybe next time.”  At last, the bicycle gave me the opportunity to gain some intimacy with the first person born west of the Mississippi to become president.

I passed through West Branch on my way to Iowa City, where I had the unexpected bonus of two Statues of Liberty.  The Statue donated by the Boy Scouts placed in front of the high school had begun deteriorating and had been replaced in 2010 after sixty years of enduring the elements.  The original now resides in the foyer of the school. Only a discerning eye could tell the replacement hadn’t been cast from the same mold, as they were remarkably similar.  The major difference was that the new one had a more mature face.  The girlishness of the original was a point of contention with some. If the plaque on the replacement hadn’t revealed it was a replacement, I wouldn’t have looked closely enough at the face to notice the difference.

It was after five when I arrived.  The school was locked, so I feared I wouldn’t have the opportunity to see where the elder Lady Liberty had been placed.  One had to be buzzed in even during school hours.  I received no response to my several buzzes.  As I was about to leave several students came out the locked door, so I was able to slip in and go down a hall lined with lockers to the foyer and there she was with a coat of brown paint somewhat rejuvenating her.  It was the first of the couple dozen I have searched out that was confined to an indoor space.  It didn’t seem quite right, but it was nice she lived on. 

The day before I swung by Cedar Rapids for another Statue, this one in a position of honor at the tip of a small island in the Cedar River that runs through the city, the second largest in the state.  

Its Carnegie was just a few blocks away and was now an art museum with a large addition.  It no longer bore an identification on its exterior that it had been a library other than the faint engraving of four authors below its roofline—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Virgil.  The new library faced it separated by a large park that was populated by a dozen or so homeless.  

I was glad the first floor of the new library was largely constructed of glass so I could sit by a window and keep an eye on my bike remembering all too well that I’d had my tent swiped from my bike while in a library in San Francisco and my sleeping bag by a homeless guy I’d seen lingering outside a supermarket I went in outside of Washington D.C., the only two thefts I’ve suffered from my unattended bike, not counting a thwarted theft in South Africa. 

I included the small towns of Clarence and West Liberty on my perambulations as they too had Statues to offer.  The one in Clarence gazed upon its large park on the outskirts of the town.

The Statue in West Liberty stood in front of its City Hall.  As the one inside the Iowa City high school it had been slathered by some unsightly preservative.  

It brought me within twenty miles of the Mississippi, which I’ll ride along for thirty miles up to the Quad Cities scouting out potential campgrounds for my rendezvous with Janina.  There will be a bunch to choose from on both sides of the river. And there will be one more Statue on the way in the river town of Muscatine.  This region has provided a big bounty of the statues.  Iowa has twenty-five, more than ten per cent of those scattered around the US.  Only Kansas with twenty-six has more.  Illinois by contrast has a mere three.  If I’d been on to them sooner, I’d have been to most of them by now.  

Fayette, Iowa

A gentle breeze from the north gave me an assist for another hundred mile day.  But the northerly also brought with it colder temperatures, much colder than I realized, as shortly after I commenced riding the next morning I realized I needed to put on my tights.  I could manage the forty-nine start-of-the-day temps of the day before, but this day’s forty-one under cloudy skies was too much.  And I needed my gloves and wool cap as well.

At least it meant I could buy a half-gallon of milk, my preferred volume, if I could find a grocery store, which haven’t been so common in this sparsely settled corner of Iowa.  I went sixty miles before I came upon a Dollar Store and could get that hall-gallon of chocolate milk and take advantage of the day’s refrigeration, as it never warmed up much above fifty.

Though there was only one remaining Carnegie in the Northeast sector of Iowa that I had yet to get to and was indeed the only Carnegie in the state that had eluded me, I had another in Waverly I needed to stop by as I hadn’t realized I’d seen it two-and-a-half years ago. It had been entombed by a red brick facade on all sides and since I was there on a Sunday I couldn’t find anyone to verify it had been the Carnegie.  

The expansion that swallowed up the library took place in 1968, before the time of the few people I asked if they knew where the Carnegie had been. An older couple out walking their dog told me the library had been across from the supermarket, but the plain brick building certainly wasn’t a Carnegie.   Wikipedia ordinarily gives the address of the Carnegie, but not this one.  It didn’t report that it had been razed, so I figured it was wrong again.  It wasn’t until the next day when I called the Waverly library did I learn the dog-walkers were right and that the red brick building contained the Carnegie within it.  

So I was happy to return this year and look at the red brick building with a different perspective.  First I stopped at the new library.  A librarian told me that a cornerstone had been placed in the wall surrounding the old building acknowledging its past.  Indeed it was there with the dates 1867, 1905 and 1968—of the town’s first library, its Carnegie and then its expansion.  It continued as a library until 1998 when the new one was built and the old one passed into the private sector, now serving as an investment firm. 

A few blocks down the street in front of the courthouse was another of the Statues of Liberty provided by the Boy Scouts, part of a cluster of me-too-ism along with those in Manly and Mason City to the north, that I mentioned in my last post, and a fourth fourteen miles south in Cedar Falls. 

As I pedaled on the shoulder of a four-lane divided highway to Cedar Falls a police car came up from behind me and sounded its siren.  The officer told me it was too dangerous for me to be riding on this road, calling it an interstate.  It had the features of an interstate with on and off ramps and a grassy median separating the two-lanes of speeding traffic going in both directions, but it was designated as state road 218 and had no signs forbidding cyclists.  But there was no debating the issue with the officer.  He said he would follow along behind me for the mile to the next exit to make sure I got off the road.

It made for a long, circuitous route to the statue in Veterans Park on the south side of the sprawling city and forced me to ride through the busy downtown of the city.  I was careful to obey the traffic signals lest I encounter the officer again and give him the excuse to issue me a ticket.   I’m always a little nervous when I approach the park where a Statue is supposed to be, never fully trusting Wikipedia, so when I spot the Statue it is a glorious, triumphant feeling.  

And even if I fully trusted Wikipedia it would still be a glorious feeling to lay eyes on this emblematic figure whose original in the harbor of Manhattan has welcomed millions.  I can well remember quite a few occasions spotting it from the water or land, and even walking up inside it.  My last encounter was with Janina returning to the US on the Queen Mary standing at the bow of the ship with a mob of passengers, mostly Brits, watching the distant iconic figure grow larger and larger.  It was an emotional experience for all. 

The surge of pleasure is not dissimilar to that of seeing a Carnegie, particularly when there is a lengthy period of expectation or if it completes the slate of another state, as was the case with the one on the campus of Upper Iowa University in the small town of Fayette, fifty-four miles northeast of Cedar Falls.  The enrollment of six hundred is half the size of the town.  

The university had already commenced summer vacation, so the library was closed.  The campus was deserted other than a couple of groups of prospective students being given a tour.  It was a personable, cosy campus, but utterly isolated, surrounded for miles by cornfields.  The Carnegie was its most noble building and had a large addition to its backside. The library was named for David B. Henderson, a ten-term Congressman and Speaker of the House from 1899-1903, the only Iowan to serve in that capacity.  He attended Upper Iowa University and was a personal friend of Carnegie.  A statue of him stands in front of its original entrance.  

Mason City, Iowa

I was stacking a load of change I had gathered along the road into two piles of one dollar each to pay for a couple of one-dollar burritos at Taco Bell, when a young man behind me reached around and handed the cashier a five dollar bill and said, “I’ve got it.”  He had earbuds and a distant look, so I couldn’t engage him in conversation other than a “Thanks a lot.”  

And then another “Thank you” when he gestured to the cashier to give me the change when she started to hand it to him.  My mission of lightening the load of coins in my pocket thumping against my thigh had been thwarted, and had, in fact, been exacerbated by another eighty-eight cents worth of coins.  It was the first such monetary offering of these travels, coming on Day Twenty-Nine, much later than usual.

It was my second stroke of good fortune for the day.  I had gotten on the road by seven to beat the rush-hour traffic on a five-mile stretch of four-lane divided highway.  I was forced onto the highway the evening before when the county road paralleling it turned to dirt.  With the threat of rain I wanted no part of that road and subjected myself to the steady roar of traffic whizzing by at over sixty miles per hour.

I camped just before the road narrowed for road construction.  I knew there was a threat of the shoulder disappearing.  When I returned to the road the next morning it was already backed up with traffic that had come to a halt.  A police car with siren blaring followed by an ambulance came up from behind me and had to go on to the grass to get around all the backed-up vehicles.  I was able to slowly bike past the line of traffic.  

Half a mile ahead a car that had crashed into a barrier was the cause for the blockade.   I got around it and had the single lane without a shoulder all to myself for the five miles to the intersection where I could leave the highway and get on a paved county road.  If not for that blockade I would have had a harrowing five miles.  I was most certainly thanking the cycling gods for providing me free passage on that perilous stretch.

If this set of good fortune had come in threes I might have topped it off with the acquisition of a Carnegie portrait, which would have been an unimaginable stroke of good fortune.  The official portrait in the Spring Valley Carnegie, now a town hall, was sitting in a corner with a pile of rubble, looking as if it were destined for the scrap heap.  I tried not to sound too eager when I commented to the town clerk, “If you’re discarding the portrait, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.”  I’d already told her I was visiting Carnegie Libraries, so would be a worthy recipient.  

Unfortunately, it wasn’t for the taking, as she said it had been taken down from the wall in front of us, as the wall had suffered water damage and was being repaired.  It was good to know it at least had a place of honor as the first thing people saw when they entered the noble building.  She said it wasn’t at the new library as they said they didn’t have a place for it.  It was more that they did not have an appreciation for it, as there was loads of empty wall space.  

It wasn’t the first time I’d made a stab at acquiring the portrait.  When I don’t see it hanging in a library I ask if it is hanging somewhere.  Usually the librarian will gladly point out where it is.  Sometimes the librarian will confess the library doesn’t have a portrait and was unaware of it.  In the small town of Boswell, Indiana the librarian said it was sitting in a closet, as they hadn’t decided where to hang it.  When I happened to visit the library again two years later and the portrait was still sitting in the closet, I asked if I could acquire it for a donation to the library.  The librarian said she’d have to check with her board of directors.  A couple weeks later she emailed and said they wanted to keep it. The next time Janina and I drive to Bloomington, we’ll stop at Boswell again to see if the portrait has been freed of its confinement.  If not, I’ll pull out five twenties and see if that will win his freedom.

I wouldn’t call it good fortune, but I at least had a quiet twenty-miles well off-the- beaten track when I was forced onto an unpaved road paralleling Interstate 90.  The road alternated between hard-packed dirt with just a few stray bits of gravel, that was almost like riding on pavement, to light gravel, that slowed me to eight miles per hour, to thick freshly laid gravel that reduced me to five or six miles per hour, and sometimes four, as a slogged through it.  It was most tiresome and required my full attention.  It came at the end of the day reducing my hopes for a ninety-mile day to just seventy.  At least I had a premium campsite in a small wilderness area with signs posted permitting hunting, though not this time of the year.

My last Carnegie in Minnesota came in Albert Lea, named for an early surveyor in this region in the 1830s.  As with the first in Luverne nine days ago it was diamond-shaped with a corner entrance, the third in Minnesota and fifth in all, the two others just over the border in South Dakota.  Those with a fascination for such architecture could pay them all a visit in a day if they don’t mind traveling by automobile  The former library was now the law offices of SMRLS—Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services.  It was the eleventh Carnegie I had visited in Minnesota during these travels.  With fifteen on previous trips, I have gotten to twenty-six of the forty-eight remaining Carnegies in the state.  Getting to the rest could be my fall project. 

It was just ten miles south to Iowa from Albert Lea where a bounty of eight Statues of Liberty will be on my route to the Carnegie in Fayette and then on to Rock Island.  The first of the Statues came in the small town of Manly in a tiny park.  It was the first I’ve come upon adorned with a globe.  It wasn’t in the best of shape and didn’t have the plaque crediting the Boy Scouts for providing it. 

The Statue in the much larger Mason City ten miles south came with the plaque and was well-tended standing in the corner of a large Central Park.

Zumbrota, Minnesota

 

With the wind slackening to single digits for the first time in days I regained the pleasure of leisurely pedaling along gazing around at the scenery, happy to have forests to regard wherever my eyes may glance.  Those early pioneers who pushed past this forested terrain into the wide open barren plains had to have a high tolerance for isolation and emptiness or desperation to get away from it all.

The traffic has increased considerably, so much so I was happy to have a bike path to ride on for nearly twenty miles to Faribault between the Carnegies in Janesville and Northfield.  I didn’t even know there was one around until a motorist shouted at me “Get on the bike path!”  I didn’t spot it until a few miles further when it came within sight of the road.  I had its smooth pavement all to myself.  I’ve hardly seen a cyclist in my month of travels in Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota.  Not even the spiraling price of gas can get people out of their cars and onto the bike.

There wasn’t even a cyclist to be seen, and only a few stray bikes locked up, in a couple of towns with colleges and a Carnegie I just passed through.  Both towns, however, were enlightened enough to have held off Walmart despite populations of twelve and twenty thousand.  The smaller of the two, Saint Peter, home to the small college of Gustavus Adolphus, had enough of an upscale population that its Carnegie has been taken over by a spa/salon offering massages and facials and waxing and all manner of hair styling.  

It was the fourth of these travels with a corner entrance, all within range of one another, as if inspired by the urge to “have one like that,”  as they are otherwise a rarity.  They all vary, with none matching the stunner in Milbank, South Dakota, so they don’t seem to be designed by the same architect. 

Northfield was a genuine college town with two colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf, and a combined enrollment of five thousand students, a quarter of the town’s population.  Both have rigid entrance requirements and boast being among the universities with the highest percentages of students who go on to earn PhDs.  Both colleges were established soon after Northfield was settled in 1856, Carleton following ten years later and St. Olaf eight years after Carleton by rival religious groups, Carleton by Yankee Congregationalists and St. Olaf by Norwegian Lutherans.  Its Carnegie came in 1910 and continues as a library though greatly expanded.  A large sign out front proclaims it an “Historic Carnegie Building.”

Besides its two respected colleges and Carnegie, Northfield is also known for having thwarted a bank robbery by Jesse James and his gang in 1876.  Movies have been made about it, and the town has an annual re-enactment that is part of one of the largest festivals in the state, The Defeat of Jesse James Days, the week after Labor Day.  It attracts thousands and includes a parade and rodeo and lots of music.  The bank they attempted to rob lives on as a museum.

Zumbrota, thirty-five miles south, lays claim to having the last covered bridge in Minnesota.  As one enters the town, signs point the way. It is across from the new library that replaced its Carnegie, which is now an art gallery.  The yellow brick of the stately Carnegie leant it a bit more luster than the standard red brick of Northfield.  An “07” like a crown graced the top of the building, which a bird was perched on.

A series of plaques gave the history of the one hundred and twenty foot long  covered bridge. It was constructed in 1869 over the Zumbro River on the stage coach route between St. Paul and Dubuque.  It was retired in 1932 and moved to the fairgrounds where it hosted various exhibits.  A Covered Bridge Society was formed in 1964 to preserve it and had it moved in 1970 a mile to near its present site where it was finally moved to in 1997 less than a thousand feet from its original location.  

The Carnegie in the quiet town of Janesville continues to serve as a library without having been expanded.  The town has considered increasing its size, but not at the cost.  Its budget is so meager a sign on the lone rest room warns one use it at their own risk as it is cleaned only every two weeks.  

Back in forested terrain there is no challenge finding a place to camp.  I could quickly slip into the trees last night the moment the forecast light rain commenced.  With no sky to the horizon as in Nebraska and South Dakota I didn’t have the pleasure of watching it move in.   I could only wait for the cloudy sky to start leaking.

I’m now into the home stretch with only two more libraries in Minnesota close to the Iowa border on my agenda and then two in Iowa.  There is also a cluster of Statue of Liberties in the northeast corner of Iowa to supplement the Carnegies.  Then I’ll get to camp with Janina along the Mississippi who will drive over with her bike.

Redwood Falls, Minnesota

When my thought occasionally drifts transporting me to France where I’d ordinarily be this time of year, one of the things that jolts me back to home turf is an “Adopt a Highway” sign, something that is unique to the US.  One might think the French would have embraced or even inspired the concept with their natural inclination to community spirit, but they have no need of appointing a group to clean litter from the highway, as individuals do it on their own, as I witness year after year along the Tour de France route when no litter remains at the roadside despite its being lined with fans for hours.  Everyone picks up for themselves.

I don’t see all that much litter along the roads in the US, and not from do-gooders cleaning the roadsides, but because people generally know better.  I don’t know if the time of “Adopt the Highway” is past, inaugurated in 1985 by Texas, but I welcome the signs as I know they are spaced two miles apart and in most instances there isn’t more than one preceding a small town.  When I come upon such a sign it is a happy indication that I’m two miles from a town I may have been anticipating for miles as an oasis of some sort.  When the winds are against me, it also means I will soon have a bit of respite from it.

I’ve had a sense that I’ve been on the Tour de France route that last couple of days as I’ve been maximizing my time on the bike, as I must do when following The Tour.  I’ve had a rare tailwind and I don’t want it to go to waste, so I’ve been riding and riding.  I had my first century of the year yesterday and would have had another the day before if I didn’t have to turn into the wind for twelve miles to slip across the border back to South Dakota for a Carnegie in Milbank.  I spent an hour-and-a-half pushing into the hearty wind that had otherwise been pushing me all day.  

It was one of four Carnegies for the day and the best of the lot by far, even though it was no longer a library, but a museum.  It had a corner entrance and stone of two hues and trim of a third, all gleaming with pride.  

The first of the day in Browns Valley was vacant and almost as forlorn and dilapidated as its cousin across the border in Sisseton.  Its brick facade wasn’t crumbling as was Sisseton’s, but one of the light fixtures flanking the entrance was mournfully dangling.

‘Twas a shame it was being neglected, as it had a most attractive intricate yellow brickwork pattern.  If this town of less than five hundred inhabitants weren’t in decline, the building could certainly be put to a useful purpose.  It gazes upon the main street through the town begging to be saved, 

It was thirty-three miles to the next Carnegie in Ortonville riding along the Minnesota River which separates the two states. It was a joy to be back amongst trees after days of nothing but endless plains in Nebraska and South Dakota.  When I stopped at an intersection to study my map, a car with Georgia license plates stopped and a forty-year old guy got out, not to ask if I needed help, but to ask about my travels, hoping I was on some epic ride, as he said he was a cyclist himself.  He was up from Atlanta helping his father on his farm.  

He had grown up in Sisseton and had spent many an hour in its Carnegie library reading  after school every day.  He went on to be an adjunct professor teaching statistics, but presently worked as a mechanic for Delta Air Lines.  He said he had seen me bicycling out of Sisseton the evening before and thought I could use a reflective vest, the second person of these travels to tell me so.  He said he had a spare in his trunk and that I could have it.  He was so cordial and took his time in bringing up his concern for my safety rather than haranguing me about it from the start, as had an older woman back in Nebraska, I gladly accepted his offer.  Now I have an official Delta Air Lines vest that might allow me to bypass lines and wander about at will the next time I’m flying out of O’Hare.  

Only once before in all my travels has someone rebuked me for not being visible enough on my bike.  I wonder if twice on one trip is a new trend or just a fluke.  I wonder too if I’d be setting off concerned citizens if I were riding without a helmet.  I know of one person who isn’t hesitant in telling unhelmeted cyclists to get a helmet.  When she’s out riding with her dog, who’s wearing a homemade helmet, she’s known to say, “My dog wears a helmet.  You should too.”  

The Ortonville Carnegie still served as a library and had a lovely location on a hill looking out on the river.  It had been augmented by an elevator, but hadn’t been added on to.  It was still one large room with a second room in the basement.  It was most pleasant to sit at one of its original wooden desks surrounded by the original wooden book cases.  

From there it was back over the Minnesota River into a punishing wind to the magnificent Carnegie in Milbank.  I had to delay regaining the tailwind when I headed back to Minnesota, as road construction forced me to ride a rough dirt road for eight miles, further undermining my bid for one hundred miles for the day, having to settle for eighty-eight ending up in the town campground on the outskirts of Madison, less than a mile from it’s Carnegie, riding almost until dark with the wind hardly letting up.

The Carnegie still served as a library with an addition to its backside tripling its space.  A family of four patrolling the town in an ATV told me the whereabouts of the campground.  I had it all to myself, though I had to wait for the lone shower, as an older guy in a pickup truck had stopped by to use it.  Though I’d much prefer to be camping in the woods, I’ve come to appreciate these minimal town campgrounds, even when there is a service station across the road.  I almost feel a sense of duty to put them to use, to justify the town making one available.  As I was pushing on until the setting of the sun, it was assuring to know that Madison would most likely offer a place to camp and how nice it would be to have electricity and hot water.

I followed up a four-Carnegie day with just a single what with the next eighty-four miles away, mostly east but also a bit south in Redwood Falls, the second city of the day naming itself for some falls, the other Cedar. As long as I was going east I had a wind on my back.  Two southern legs of about twenty-five miles required me to summon a little more effort from my legs than when the wind was firmly on my back, but there was no worries about going over one hundred miles for the day.  

I stopped at 107 when I came to a state park, even though I had an hour of light left and the wind urging me to keep riding.

The Carnegie in Redwood Rapids, the second city of the day named for a rapids, the other Granite, stood gallantly on a slight rise it had all to itself and was now home to the Minnesota Women’s Indigenous Society (“Advocacy for native victims of sexual and domestic assault”). The town was large enough to have a slew of fast food franchises, so I was able to grab a McChicken and fill two of my thermal bottles with ice and water, all the reward I could want for my hundred miles.

Sisseton, South Dakota

 

I was romping along thanks to an end-of-the-day strong tailwind from the south that I was enjoying as best as I could what with a storm due to hit at six p.m.  The sky to the west was darkening while ahead and to the east the sky was a pale blue.  I was hoping I might be able to outrace the storm and gobble up as many miles as I could before dark taking advantage of this rare assist.  

At five-thirty a motorist heading south stopped in the road and the driver, a woman, ducked her head out of the window and shouted, “There’s a bad storm coming!”  I continued riding pellmell monitoring the clouds closing in on me until a glance caught the image of pitch dark just behind me.  I should have realized the strong wind from the south was blowing in the storm and been monitoring the southern sky more than that to the west. 

There was a recreational area along a lake four miles ahead that I had been considering as a campsite if I couldn’t ride further.  That didn’t look as if it would come soon enough. After a mile a cluster of tall fir trees beckoned, but it was surrounded by a barbed wire fence.  A mile further a small deciduous forest separating the road from a wheat field had no barrier, so I slipped into it just as the rain started and the wind accelerated and seemed to gust from all directions.

I thought I was saved, but the slim canopy of trees was no match for the lashing rain.  I was well-drenched by the time I set up my tent and had quite a bit of water to soak up within the tent that had gathered before I got the rain fly on. Once I got all my gear in I shed my dripping Goretex jacket and removed my saturated shorts.  I dried my legs and proceeded with the task of draining the pools of water within the tent.  

I put to use an oversized black neckerchief with red trim I had found along the road the day before, the first of the trip.  My socks were wet, so I used them too, as their fluff was better at absorbing the water.  My torso was perfectly dry thanks to my Goretex jacket.  I just needed to slip on my wool sweater and I was toasty warm as the rain continued to stab and bounce off the tent.  

I tried not to begrudge that fence around the first forest, as I would have had the tent set up before the storm hit if I could have slipped into it, but at least there had been a second forest and I was spared of riding in the fury of the storm.  I would have been a test for every motorist who passed whether they should rescue the poor soul on the bike.  As it was, they all should have been stopping to offer me refuge as the storm bore down.  I could well have led to some marital strife as a sympathetic female suggested stopping and the male at the wheel thought otherwise.  

The rain stopped before dark and I was able to hang my dripping wet gear on the bike.  These storms pass quickly, though their slightly diminished winds can continue for days, festering for another assault.  The black sky of the storm makes them easy to spot and attracts storm-chasers from all over.  Two days ago the Washington Post ran a story about a storm-chaser from Mexico City who was killed twenty miles from the Carnegie Library in Luverne, Minnesota the day after my visit. She was traveling with three other storm-chasers, two from Chile, and had pulled off the road to avoid downed power-lines and was struck by a tractor-trailer.  

My shorts hanging on my bike had dried enough to wear in the morning.  The rest of my gear quickly dried when I laid them out in the sun during my first rest stop, though I had to secure them so they wouldn’t blow away.  The day of the storm included just one Carnegie, as they have become more spread out as I head north.  It came in Brookings, a larger town, somewhat thanks to the presence of the South Dakota State University.  

A graduate student in the business school passing by the Carnegie commented, “It looks like you’ve been everywhere,” as that was among his aspirations.  He’d already been to thirty-five states, but no foreign countries.  I told him I hadn’t been everywhere, but almost, just throwing out Oman and Madagascar and the Philippines. He didn’t really expect to hear that, as he’d been more figurative than literal in his reaction to my loaded bike, and was at a loss for words, just wishing me “good luck” and continuing on his way.  

The Carnegie was now a Cultural Center and art gallery.  It was presently full of quilts, a popular western art form.  A huge children’s museum was across the street.  If the storm hadn’t cut short my day I could have reached Watertown and its Carnegie later that day.  Instead I had to wait until the next day for the pleasure of the second corner entrance Carnegie of these travels.  “Codington County Heritage Museum” above the entry covered however it had been referred to in the past.  A plaque by the entrance acknowledged Carnegie and the “free public library” he provided.

I was having a fine wind-assisted ride north to the next Carnegie in Sisseton, less than twenty miles from North Dakota, when the county road I was riding paralleling Interstate 29 turned to dirt for twenty-two miles, cutting my speed in half.  I was having to brake on the downhills, the last thing I wanted to be doing.

Sisseton’s Carnegie was in a lamentable state of disrepair, it’s front door boarded up and bricks fallen from its facade littering the steps to its entry.  It had last been used as a homeless shelter, largely for native Americans.

The highlight of the small town was its roundabout, just the third or fourth of these travels, all in South Dakota.  It came complete with a sculpture such as is common in France, where I’d be right now if I were attending Cannes, which commences next Tuesday.  

The artist’s statement (Alan Scott Milligan of St. Paul, Minnesota) on a plaque across from the roundabout, explained that it was a Cloud Horse—“a family of horses running fast and wild as low-bearing clouds, as the glacial waters which once covered this land.”  A community with the sensitivity to commission such art ought to have the initiative to preserve its Carnegie.