LaCrosse, Wisconsin

 

The time of Trump is past.  I have biked three hundred miles in the past four days and haven’t come upon a single Trump sign or flag or proclamation.  For the past six years, and as recently as my spring ride around Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota,  rural America has been thick with Trump mania. No more.  I’ve encountered just one lone tired tirade from one of his ilk who avoided invoking his name and so off-the-wall that one could only question the mental health of whoever might be spewing such ravings.

It is a wonder that the authorities haven’t whitewashed these blathering.  Even those who might agree with his bent would not want to be associated with such crazed forthrightness.

The most common sign on the byways of Wisconsin has been “ATV Route” and in small towns “All streets are ATV routes unless otherwise posted.”  I have yet to see an ATV, only hearing a couple barreling through the forest.  They may be more common in the winter months.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen signs warning of horses and buggies on the roads as they have been a common site.  It may be that motorists are so accustomed to seeing them that there is no need to note their presence.  They frequently overtake me on ascents.  I can hear the clip-clop of horse hooves coming up from behind me at better than ten miles per hour.  I can fly past them on the descents.  All greet me with a smile and a wave, whether passing me from behind or approaching me from the opposite direction.  

The sound of clip-clops is so ubiquitous they’ve even intruded upon my dreams or so I thought, as when I awoke I discovered I wasn’t dreaming as someone was actually trotting by in the midnight hour. I heard them well into the night when I camped along the road in some high weeds behind a pile of rocks when no cornfield offered itself, only soybeans.  So far I’ve only seen one of the clan who forego motorized vehicles on a bike, a woman in a bonnet and dress leisurely pedaling along with a wicker basket on the front of her upright handlebars. 

The landscape has become much hillier and forested after crossing into Wisconsin.  There are patches of corn, but nothing on the scale of the vast fields in Illinois that have narrow grassy breaks amongst them that are ideal for camping.  I’ve camped the past two nights in high weeds shielded from the road by thin bands of trees.  The dew has been heavy and there has been a lingering fog in the morning, not so thick as to limit visibility too much, other than putting a mist on my glasses that I have to wipe every minute or so.

As I closed in on the Mississippi and LaCrosse I had a couple of options of what road to take.  A retired school teacher at a Casey’s General Store where I was taking a break advised me to stick to the main highway rather than going off on the county roads, saying it’d be less hilly.  He returned a couple minutes later saying he’d taken a poll inside and the consensus was it’d be better for me to take the county roads.  No one knew though that ten miles down the road a bridge was out, forcing me to take a detour.  There was no traffic, so I just appreciated the extra miles it allowed me in such a pristine setting.

Only one Carnegie has presented itself so far since crossing into Wisconsin.  It came in Platteville and was as pristine as it was when it opened in 1915 having been recently fully restored.  It had served as the town library until 1975, then had a brief tenure as a teen center before an architectural firm bought it. A plaque gave credit to the present owner of the building, who bought it in 2015, for a six year renovation of the building, completed in 2022. 

Platteville was once prominent in Chicago sports as its college hosted the Bears pre-season training camp during their years under Mike Ditka.  I was among the legions of Chicagoans who made the two hundred mile drive there for a close-up look of those Super Bowl Bears on the practice field.  I took an Australian friend who had a short stint as a professional in Australia Rules Football.  He was astounded at the size of his American counterparts.  He played without pads and couldn’t imagine trying to contend with someone the size of William Perry, the Refrigerator.  

Shortly before LaCrosse I joined up with the Great River Road that will take me along the Mississippi for better than one hundred miles.  I am ready for a cascade of memories of biking it from the opposite direction with Don Jaime twenty years ago.  His account of our journey from Minneapolis to Chicago can be found on the blog in July of 2002, ten posts worth.  You can read of our intrusion upon a church social and finding a Bible along the road and Jim’s time on a nuclear submarine.