Elizabethtown, Kentucky

This swath across northwest Kentucky has taken on a music theme.  Central City had a monument to the Everly Brothers, as they gave an annual Labor Day concert there for fourteen years, starting in 1988, to raise money for a scholarship fund for local students.

The monument is just one of many honors around the country accorded them.  They were at the forefront of the origins of rock and roll and were in the inaugural group of ten enshrined in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, one of several music hall of fames that includes them.  They have a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but nothing attests to their stature more than that John and Paul, when they were getting their start, referred to themselves as the “British Everly Brothers.”  Paul said that when he and John started writing songs, he was Phil and John was Don. Paul further acknowledged them with a lyric of “Phil and Don” in “Let ‘Em In” from his 1976 Wings album.  They hold the record for the most top 100 singles by a duo.

Not far down the road from Central City is the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the originator of Bluegrass Music.  The small town of Rosine has a large museum devoted to him.  The genre derived its name from his band Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, which took its name from Kentucky being the Bluegrass State.

It was his adaption of country music played with an assortment of stringed instruments, including the fiddle, banjo and mandolin.  His most famous song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” was recorded by Elvis as the B-side of his first single for Sun Records in 1954.  I failed to get a full immersion into his life, as despite an official state car in the the parking lot it wasn’t open.  The car had a pro-coal sticker on it and an accompanying sticker discouraging the use of electricity to generate power.  More common were signs in people’s yards protesting the introduction of solar energy installations.  

Kentucky doesn’t have much concern for lungs, as is also out-of-step with the times with the continued proliferation of tobacco stores, some calling themselves marts. Smokers aren’t overly evident, though the motel I stayed at didn’t have any non-smoking rooms.  Fortunately my room didn’t have a strong lingering scent, as it was too chilly to open a window or leave the door open.  

My day in the motel began at three just as the rain commenced. I had lingered at the simple, basic library until then, making a dash to my sanctuary, half a mile away, when the first drops came.  I sat by the window watching it fall nonstop until well after dark, fully vindicating my decision to motel it, especially when the rain came down in torrents.  I had no longing, as I sometimes do, to be in my tent experiencing the elements.  I would have been panicking over the possibility of being flooded.  

The road was still damp in the morning and a mist hung in the air, but I fully trusted the forecast that had no rain in it and could enjoy being back on the bike.  The road I was on paralleled the Bluegrass Parkway Interstate drawing all the traffic to it, so I had the road all to myself.  It was the finest of cycling through rolling, forested terrain.  It was another day of over four thousand feet of climbing in just under one hundred miles.

The route included Kentucky’s lone Statue of Liberty in Leitchfield. It was another at the most common place for them, by the courthouse, except it wasn’t there.  Two women inside were surprised I couldn’t find it, as they knew it was there, though they had come to take it for granted and couldn’t remember its precise location.  They both peered out their second floor window but couldn’t spot it.  

One went outside with me and was flummoxed that she couldn’t remember where it was.  She asked a city worker doing some landscaping if he knew where it was.  Indeed he did, as he had moved it to the hospital a couple of years ago and then just recently transferred it to the auxiliary courthouse a couple blocks away when the hospital was torn down.   He told me it was inside the courthouse.

I had to be let into the courthouse and led down a hallway where Lady Liberty stood in isolation at the end of the hall out of public view by someone’s office.  Two ladies there were happy to show it to me, but they knew nothing of its origins, donated by the Boy Scouts in 1950 commemorating its fortieth anniversary.  They knew there were others scattered around the country, but they didn’t realize this was the only one in Kentucky.  

They, as those at the courthouse, oozed southern hospitality, expressing a genuine interest in my travels, more than the usual perfunctory queries.  I had more than a passing conversation with all of them.  The man who had shuttled the statue around even shook my hand at my parting.  Their accents also indicated this was the South.

 

Central City, Kentucky

 

These days of largely forested terrain have me anticipating where I’ll end up camping with a little extra anticipation knowing how nice it will be.  I have to resist the temptation to stop mid-afternoon and disappear into the forest at any number of inviting, isolated  spots.  I generally have a target for the day that precludes early stops, so I keep riding and never with an iota of regret, happy to be pedaling onward and knowing I’ll be happy with wherever I end up snuggling into for the night.  It is nice to have trees to the left and to the right as I glide along knowing I’ll eventually be within them. 

I did have a twenty mile semi-urban stretch into and out of Paducah, a city of 27,000 at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers.  After days of passing through small, manageable towns of less than a thousand, such a population seems enormous and not all that alluring.  At least Paducah’s historic downtown near the river had some charm.  It was enlivened by packs of grey-haired ladies roaming the streets in town for Quilt Week sponsored by the expansive National Quilt Museum.

A walled barrier above the river bank provided a pallet for mini-murals of the town’s past.  

As a prominent river town in the early 1900s, it earned an extra large grant from Carnegie for a most-distinguished library.  Unfortunately, it is no more, as it was destroyed by a fire on December 30, 1964 caused by faulty Christmas lights.  It was six years before it was replaced by the current library a few blocks away. 

Across the Ohio in Illinois is the much smaller town of Metropolis, which has anointed itself as the hometown of Superman since it is the lone community that bears the name of that factionalized comic book city. It has a Carnegie that still functions as a library that I visited in October of 2017.  Before the Tennessee River joins the Ohio, a large dam twenty miles away impedes its flow.  A few fishermen in boats were taking advantage of its still waters.  It always gladdens the heart to see others engaged in a pastime that brings them peace and pleasure.  

Without a Carnegie for nearly three hundred miles to beyond Lexington, I had to rely on small town libraries that weren’t much more than tokens.  This was a stretch of people living on the margins, many in trailers, which often means kindly, good-hearted folk. As was the case in Mississippi, and other places below the poverty line, people look after those who seem to be down on their luck, though they aren’t the best at perceiving that I am one who is way up on his luck.

For the first time since Easter someone approached me with an offering as I sat against the wall of a convenience store/gas station having a snack.  An older lady handed me a box of Kellogg apple/cinnamon breakfast bars with the words “Can I give these to you?”  Not wanting to disappoint her impulse of generosity, I happily accepted them.  A couple minutes later, after entering the store, she returned with a bottle of Gatorade and said,  “I’d like to give this to you too.”

Curiously enough, for just the second time in these travels I harvested a few silver coins from the road after Paducah.  The first occasion had been entering the college town of Pittsburg in Kansas.  I had been on alert for coins, as I needed eight cents to supplement the coins I had left from the young man who had given me a bundle on Easter, to have enough for the ninety-nine cent any-size soda special that Pete’s service station was offering, not wanting to pay with a bill, but to rid myself of the clunk of change I was carrying. If I’d really been desperate, I could have swung by any drive-up window of a MacDonalds or Taco Bell or Burger King, where there are invariably a few coins dropped in the purchase exchange. With these recent coins I can now purge myself of the weight of coins I have left at the next Huck service station, a Kentucky chain that has a similar ninety-nine cent deal.

After riding stretches of the Pony Express and Santa Fe Trail and Trail of Tears I am now riding through the Bible Belt.  Small Baptist churches can turn up anywhere.  Along with the ones I pass, often on a rise, signs indicate others down a county road.  An occasional mega-church is almost a blight on the land.  An older gentleman outside a grocery store asked if I was a Christian and if I had been baptized.  I had no wish to be given a sermon, so answered affirmative to both.  

Along with the Bible-thumpers are the gun-toters.  Firing ranges and gun shops are in no short supply.  Whatever gun mentality may prevail does not reflect itself in any outward hostility.  Women at checkout counters invariably call me “Honey” or “Sweetie.”

The forecast had been calling for an all-day rain starting at nine a.m. that was to continue through the night.  I camped fifteen miles before Central City, an old coal mining town that had several motels, so I could have my first rest day of these travels and first motel in nearly two weeks.  The sky was sunny when I broke camp at 7:30 with no hint of a storm coming in from any direction.  The forecast had been revised with the rain not arriving until three.  The next town with a motel was fifty miles away.  Rather than pushing to make it, I let my legs have the day off.

I checked that the bargain motel would have a room for the night and it let me have the room then and there.  Good news, as that allowed me to immediately wash some clothes, giving them a better chance to dry by morning.  The bad news though was the motel didn’t have Wi-Fi, though I discovered my room along the road was near enough the MacDonalds across the street to pick up its Wi-Fi.  

The wind will be from the west the next two days after the rain passes, giving way to the easterly of the past two days, so with rested legs I could have some good days, maybe even making it to the next Carnegie in Winchester, west of Lexington, two hundred miles away in two days.

Hickman, Kentucky

  

Armadillos have made it to Illinois.  Just as in southern Kansas and Missouri, they were the dominant roadkill along the thirty-five mile snippet of Illinois I rode from Cape Girardeau to Cairo.  The Mississippi River has not stopped their migration, but that should be no surprise as the Darien Gap did not thwart their penetration northward from South America, where they originated.  

With no predators to keep them in check they should make it to Chicago before you know it. They could drive out the raccoons and possums and skunks and maybe even the coyotes, who no doubt won’t know what to make of these armored creatures.  I have yet to see a live one, but they may be the ones I occasionally hear rustling near my tent.

The bridges over the Mississippi and then the Ohio were a sharp contrast of ease and peril.  I had a nice wide shoulder on the four-lane wide bridge over the Mississippi from Cape Girardeau to Illinois, wide enough to stop and enjoy the view. It was a different story crossing the Ohio into Kentucky from Cairo.  The two-lane wide bridge was barely wide enough for semi-trucks to pass.  I was lucky the traffic was adequately staggered that not once did I have to suck in my breath.  

At least the skimpy bridge was in better shape than Cairo.  This once prominent city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers is in such decline it doesn’t have a gas station or a grocery store or a fast food franchise, just a Dollar Store.  From a peak population of 15,000 in 1920 it’s down to a mere 1,700 clinging on.  Decades of racial tension, including a high-profile lynching in 1909 involving thousands, are partially to blame for the city’s demise, along with the diminishing of river traffic, though that hasn’t effected Cape Girardeau.  The majority of its buildings are boarded up and in a state of collapse.  Its monument of a library from 1883, before the Carnegie era commenced, is an extreme anomaly.  It was funded by a local woman in honor of her deceased husband.  At the time of its construction it was one of the few public libraries in the country and easily among the most magnificent.

Its internet wasn’t in operation, but it at least had Wi-Fi.  So few people take advantage of the library, the librarian asked me to sign a guest book.  She said she and most of the residents drive to Cape Girardeau to do their shopping.  It is a veritable boomtown in comparison with over 30,000 residents.  It doesn’t have a library though to compare.  It had a much understated Carnegie, not trying to match the library in Cairo thirty miles down the river.  It has been annexed to the large city hall adjoining it with its entrance turned into a window.  A statue of a Black soldier honoring those who fought on the Union side during the Civil War stands in front of it. 

The sprawling library that replaced it was built on the outskirts of the city not far from a large park where a Statue of Liberty stands at its entrance.  

The city had an abundance of motels and hotels.  I thought I might avail myself of one since it had been eight days since my last, but I felt the tug of crossing the Mississippi in the quiet of a Sunday evening rather than in the hectic Monday morning rush hour.  I was hoping I might be able to camp along the Mississippi, but it was too marshy.  Instead I pitched my tent four miles inland behind a derelict building that gave me a foretaste of Cairo.  No armadillos came around this evening.

The Carnegie in Cape Girardeau finished off Missouri.  It was the ninth in Missouri of these travels, joining the twenty-three others I had visited on previous forays across the state.   Only three of its thirty-five had been torn down.  Now it’s on to Kentucky, a state of twenty-seven Carnegies, of which twenty-four remain.  I’ve been to twenty-one of them, including a dandy cluster of nine in Louisville of which two were intended for “Coloreds” back in the era of segregation.

The first on my agenda in Kentucky was in Hickman on the Mississippi eighty-three miles from Cape Girardeeau.  It was a pleasant, relatively flat ride through forests along the river.  It was a reprieve from all the climbing I’d done the day before approaching Cape Girardeau, the first day of these travels that exceeded four thousand feet of climbing, nearly fifty per mile for the eighty-three miles of the day.

The flat day had a few climbs, including one shortly after crossing into Kentucky to a ninety-foot tall cross on a high point overlooking the confluence of the two mighty rivers.  It was erected in 1999 replacing a couple of smaller crosses that had stood in the vicinity, the first put up in 1937.   In 1984 the idea was proposed to build a cross tall enough to be seen in three states.  Thus began a drive to raise $150,000 for the project.  The cross sits on a two-acre tract, large enough to host weddings and memorials and other services. 

The Hickman Carnegie stands on a high point too, though the lush vegetation below obstructs a view of the Mississippi.  It is now a museum behind the new library, which isn’t that much bigger.  Wikipedia had the wrong address.  When I went looking for it down behind a huge dike along the Mississippi where the old jail and post office resided there was an empty plot of land.  I feared it had been torn down.  

It was early evening with no one about other than three kids playing in front of their house.  They, of course, knew nothing about an old library, nor did their mother.  All they knew about was the present library.  They were very helpful otherwise, filling my water bottles with bottled water, saying the tap water wasn’t fit to drink.  The mother offered to make me a bologna sandwich.  When I declined, she said, “How about a hamburger.”  If the light hadn’t been waning, I might have taken her up on the offer. She asked if I intended to take the ferry, as the last one of the day was departing in a few minutes at 6:30 less than half a mile away.  It’s one of the few still operating on the river.  

I headed back into town hoping to find someone who could confirm the Carnegie had been torn down.  I waved down an old guy in a pickup who, if he were a local, ought to know.  He told me the Carnegie was behind the new library, which I had stopped at on the way in for Wi-Fi and info.  It had closed at five and required a password for its Wi-Fi.  I would have saved half an hour if I had noticed the old library behind it, but I would have missed the offer of a bologna sandwich.

Silva, Missouri

 

My day didn’t get off to the best of starts when the librarian in the small town of Mansfield told me non-library card holders had to pay one dollar to use its Wi-Fi, and my Chicago library card didn’t count. That was a first.  I told the young woman I’d been to hundreds of libraries all over the country and had never been asked to pay to use the Wi-Fi.  Many actually promote themselves as Wi-Fi zones that anyone can use at any time of the day. I asked how this library came to have such a policy.  

She said she’d only been at the library a year and that was how it was when she started. I asked if the Subway a mile away along the highway had Wi-Fi.  She didn’t know, nor did she suggest anywhere else, though there was a Dollar Store nearby and they generally have Wi-Fi, though not the strongest. 

I wasn’t quite ready to give it a try, opting to spend a few minutes in the warmth of the library on this chilly morning to do a final typo-check of the blog post I had begun in the tent the night before and take advantage of the library’s electricity, if I could get away with that.  I didn’t have a chance to put that to a test, as when the woman told me I couldn’t bring in my water bottle, another first, I walked out, resisting an expletive.

The Dollar Store offered Wi-Fi, but it was so weak that it couldn’t download podcasts and struggled to download photos to the blog.  As I plugged away, a woman who drove up to the store told me a nearby store where I could sit inside had Wi-Fi, and she gave me the code—123456789–so I wouldn’t have to bother anyone for it. That left me feeling a little better about the day, especially when its Wi-Fi was adequate for my needs. 

The day took a turn for the worse later in the afternoon when I had a quick succession of three flat tires thanks to all the debris on the shoulder of the busy four-lane highway I was forced to ride, as there was no viable alternative in the rugged terrain. Two of the flats were due to tiny wires from the remnants of truck tires that had flatted and fragmented off the tire rims.  The roadway was a minefield of tire strands, just as I experienced in Senegal and Mali.  When I came upon them I tried to pass to their left thinking the rush of air from the traffic would blow the imperceptible wires into the ditch.  Not all the time.

The wires just cause a pinprick of a puncture, so they don’t result in immediate flats. One of my flats was due to the tire becoming imperceptibly soft, enough so that when I hit a stone it caused a double-pronged pinch flat that was too much of a gouge to patch.  I was down to just two spare tubes, so after the second flat I had to get to a service station with water so I could find the holes to patch the tubes.  One of the wires had caused a pair of punctures that a patch could just barely cover.  I resumed riding with just one spare.  A mile later I had another flat, so had to continue on nervously without a spare.  Luckily there was a Walmart ten miles up the road, my only hope for tubes.  It was a tense ten miles, as I fought off the dread of having to hitch a ride if I had another flat.

The Mountain Grove Walmart wasn’t a megastore, but it did have tubes and of the not so common Presta Valve type that I needed.   Walmart to the rescue! What a relief! I bought all three that were on the shelf. Good thing I didn’t need the more common Schrader valve tubes, as they were sold out.  And I was able to stock up on patches, as I was down to just two. That saved my day. 

I could have a peaceable sleep that night, other than being concerned that a barking dog might be given its release and come to my tent.  I had camped behind a broken down barn not realizing there was a homestead a little ways away through the forest.  I couldn’t be sure I was the object of the dog’s ire, but he hadn’t started barking until I’d finished setting up my tent in the dusk.  

It was a day without a Carnegie, as was the next, as I had a two hundred-forty mile stretch between the Carnegie in Marshfield and the next in Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River. Other than the long stretch on the four-lane highway with all the debris, it was fine cycling on windy, up-and-down roads through thickly forested terrain on the northern fringe of the Ozarks. 

The terrain and the sparse population and the lack of Carnegies and the presence of logging lent a resemblance to the Massif Central of France.  One marked difference, besides the excessively large pickups here, was how towns introduced themselves.  In France towns have signs indicating they are a Ville Fleuri with from one to four flowers representing their rank or a sign advertising that they had earned the designation of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.

Towns and even counties in Missouri announce themselves as a Purple Heart community, which any town can qualify for by simply applying to the military to be known as such.  They don’t even have to have any wounded military.  

Evoking flowers versus the wounded of war sums up the contrasting mentality of these countries. With a military budget larger than the next nine highest countries combined, some of which goes to pay for these signs, the US can almost be said to be dominated by its armed forces. The French don’t forsake their veterans, as nearly every town has a monument of a solider honoring those who sacrificed themselves themselves in the World Wars fought on French soil.

A further contrast between the countries is the slogan that forms their identity.   “Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité” is emblazoned on nearly every town hall in France.  The US doesn’t have anything so prominent, but the “Pursuit of Happiness” is a term somewhat synonymous with the US.  I came upon it at a Boy Scout camp outside the town of Silva that I made a four mile detour to for a Statue of Liberty.  Just behind the statue in the most picturesque setting of any I have come upon was a plaque with that phrase from the Declaration of Independence.

The sprawling grounds of Camp Lewellan had clusters of tents all over of scouts enjoying an idyllic weekend.  I was glad the Statue of Liberty had drawn me to it despite the steep hills to reach it.  It was a wonderful hideaway.

Hartville, Missouri

 

A cyclist with a wisp of a pony tail out for a morning ride in the sprawling city of Springfield, the third largest in Missouri, provided an escort for me to its Carnegie, a branch of the city’s network of libraries.  Todd came upon me as I was consulting my GPS and asked if I needed help.  He gave me directions to the Carnegie and then volunteered to ride there with me.

He was the first cyclist I’d come upon in two thousand miles since parting with Charlie almost a month ago now.  He was riding a high quality Trek with a Sunshine Bike Shop sticker, where his son worked.  He had aspirations of touring and fantasized biking about Kansas, waking up by a field of sunflowers all pointed to the rising sun.  

I’m not sure why, maybe it was seeing how laden I was with stuff so he may have thought I had room for more, but he asked if I’d like a cat, as he had eight of them.  They were good for teaching his daughter responsibility, he said, but eight was a bit much.  I told him I had three back home, which he didn’t think was enough.  I did travel with a German cyclist one year at the Tour de France who had a kitten he’d found along the way in his handlebar bag. It brought us plenty of extra attention.  I had no need of that.

I’d been to this Carnegie before, in September of 2014, when I visited Dwight and Susan on my ride home from Telluride, but didn’t have a precise memory of where it was located.  Dwight had come out of retirement and uprooted himself from his Bloomington farm  to teach a computer course at Missouri State University for a year.  That was before I’d discovered the Boy Scout Statues of Liberty and added them to my itinerary, so I missed Springfield’s, one of twenty-four in the state. I may have passed it, as it was  just a block from the Carnegie in front of the courthouse.  If I’d noticed it then, I would have gotten a couple year jump on that quest, as it didn’t begin until October of  2017 when I happened upon one in front of the library in Benton, Illinois, where George Harrison’s sister lived for a few years.  

Springfield was on the way between Carnegies in Aurora and Marshfield that I hadn’t been to before.  The Carnegie in Aurora had a large addition to its side, which now provided the entrance to the library.  The Carnegie portrait had been relegated to the foyer of the original entrance, which was no longer used.  

I camped fifteen miles before Springfield, fearful of approaching much closer, as its sprawl had a population of half a million people, the fastest growing metropolis in Missouri.  I had to contend with near bumper-to-bumper traffic in the morning rush to work, but the highway had a wide shoulder, so I was in no peril.  Of the hundreds of drivers, only one cretin felt the need to blast his horn at me.  I could only pity the sorry soul in such a foul mood already.  

When I glimpsed a sign within the city limits with the word “mow” on it, my initial reaction was one of delight that Springfield was among the enlightened communities that had joined the “no mow” movement of not cutting one’s grass in the month of May to let the bees and other pollinators feast on dandelions and whatever else provided them nourishment that would otherwise be mowed down.  But then my mind processed the rest of the sign, which read, “First Mow Free.”   It was the sign of landscaper soliciting business, and not encouragement to let one’s grass grow.

There was no mistaking a gigantic sign thanking the volunteers of the huge Wonders of Wildlife (WOW) Museum and Aquarium, one of the largest such complexes in the world.  Not only is it packed with creatures, live and stuffed, it had a room devoted to Lewis and Clark and a replica of Theodore Roosevelt's cabin, the conservationist president.  It was National Volunteer Week, and this vast enterprise relied heavily on animal-loving volunteers.  

Ironically, the subject of volunteering had come up on Tony Kornheiser’s podcast a few days before, as one of his regular guests had just retired from the Washington Post and had been subjected to a barrage of “volunteer-shaming” by friends and acquaintances who were trying to recruit her to volunteer for this and that now that she had time on her hands.  The opportunities were endless—dispensing food to the needy, teaching English as a second language,  serving in animal shelters, helping at day care centers.  It’s the thing to do, she was told.  But she wasn’t ready for any of that.  She just wanted to sit quietly at home and maybe learn to tap dance or play the ukulele.

Janina and I can certainly attest to the joys of volunteering.  We’ve recently become involved in the Palos Restoration Project, a group of volunteers founded over thirty years ago to restore the forests around us to their original state, removing the many invasives, mainly honey suckle and buckthorn, that have become a painful intrusion. We have been contributing one or two three-hour shifts a week in the forest cutting and burning with a dedicated crew that we have been delighted to come to know. Their dedication is quite heartening.  I recruited Charlie and he enjoys it as much as us, biking ten miles every Tuesday morning to a site just half a mile from us for the joy of being in the woods and engaging in physical labor and the camaraderie. 

It has been a real pleasure to broaden our circle of friends and also to gain an intimacy with the forests around us.  There are over a dozen different sites that the group works, all within a few miles of us, though work is not the operative word.  The weekly newsletter announcing the locations for the week ahead refers to them as “Play Dates,” a most appropriate term. 

The twenty-six miles from Springfield to Marshfield was on Historic Route 66 paralleling interstate 44.  There wasn’t anyone on motorcycles following the route this day despite the ideal seventy degree weather.  It had sufficiently warmed up I no longer needed the bulky wool sweater Gary in Edson had given me three weeks ago. I had been hoping to come upon a resale shop I could donate it to.  

Along this route, sitting all by itself,  was the unlikely site of a small building with a sign announcing  “Free Store” and “donations accepted.”  This I had to check out.  What all would it be giving away out in rural Missouri?  Would there be food?  It was virtually all clothes.  The pants I’d started the trip with were growing a little thin in the knees and seat.  I wouldn’t mind trading them for something less worn.  The older guy tending the store said most of the men’s clothes had been sent to a St. Louis store,  as they were needed more there than here.  

He said the store was started over fifty years ago, pre-dating freecycle and its many off-shoots.  A priest had initiated it, partnering it with a shelter for battered wives.  The shelter is no more,  but the store, and others similar to it around the state, all affiliated with a church, lives on.  I was glad to donate my sweater to it, and also to lighten my load a bit and create some space in a pannier.  

That weight-savings was short-lived, as soon after when I visited the Carnegie in Marshfield, which is now a county museum, the woman in charge gave me a book on the Carnegies of Iowa.  I’d already read it, but was happy to have a copy of my own.  It is one of several states with a book devoted to its Carnegies, including Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Kansas and Ohio, but not Missouri.

The museum had a sculpture of Carnegie done by a local and also an ornament commemorating the library.  I perused a thick notebook of clippings on the library.  It celebrated the first librarian, a woman who served in the position from 1911 to 1961, retiring at the age of seventy-eight.  A bench in front of the new library next door honored her.   The woman in charge was proud to say Marshfield was the smallest town to receive a Carnegie, a claim I’ve heard a handful of times.  There are several that had a population of around one thousand that like to make that claim.

I was happy for an afternoon dousing of rain, as it allowed me to take a several hour break.  I had just reached a Taco Bell when it hit.  Its dollar rice and cheese burritos are the best fast food bargain around.  And it was an even better bargain at this Taco Bell, as it gave a ten per cent senior discount.  Taco Bell’s are always a nice oasis as they also have Gatorade on tap.

Carthage, Missouri

 

The final three Carnegies of my Kansas perambulations were still functioning as libraries and each had an expansive addition to its backside greatly increasing its space.  The first of the set came in Pittsburg, without an “h,” a sizable college town with an enrollment of 7,400 students.  The Carnegie did not cater to the collegians and unlike many of the businesses and entities did not have a gorilla out front, Pittsburg State University’s mascot.

This simian infestation made for an odd site.  They came in all sizes, but most were in the same crouched posture, and though some were colorfully painted, the vast majority were black.

If such a creature could be tamed to serve as a watch dog, the Carnegie in Girard, fifteen miles to the northwest, could have used one, as it had two different notices protesting delinquent behavior.  

Its now closed entrance had a sign admonishing residents from loitering on its steps.  It warned that it had security cameras and, “If caught, the police will be called.”  It added, “If the rock throwing, fireworks display and trash all over our parking lot doesn’t stop, we will take further action.”  The rest room door had a sign forbidding hanging out and prolonging one’s stay there too, with a penalty of being banned from the library for two weeks.  Such is life in small town America.  

The final Carnegie of my Kansas swing came thirty miles north in Fort Scott. All was quiet there.  With it I completed the slate of Carnegies of another state, my sixteenth.  I had the pleasure of visiting twenty-five of the sixty-six that were scattered about the state in my thousand plus miles biking from one end of the state to the other, west to east and north to south.   Missouri will be the seventeenth, as I have only four more to visit there, the first nineteen miles due east in Nevada.

Shortly after I crossed the border I spotted a license plate on the gravel shoulder of the road.  Missouri is distinguishing itself as the license plate state, as I collected four others in my brief foray into the northwest corner of the state ten days ago, twice as many as Kansas provided.  

Nevada was another college town, though on a much minor scale, as its college, Cotteye, had a mere 302 students, all women.  It is one of twenty-six women colleges remaining in the US, down from 281 in the ‘60s. 

Nevada’s Carnegie was now home to an investment company, as was the Carnegie in Burlington, Kansas.  It was next to a MacDonalds that had such strong Wi-Fi that it triggered when I pulled out my iPad for a photo.  It was significant that Nevada had a Carnegie, as the state of Nevada had only one, in Reno, and it had been razed in 1931, one of the first to be subjected to the wrecker’s ball, not surprisingly in a state not known for having an interest in books.

After three days of blessed tail winds, it was back to a blast to the face as I turned south for over fifty miles, back to forty minute five-mile segments after some that were less than half that in the previous three days. It was grit and bear it and appreciate the greening pastures, mostly filled with cattle.  I was out of the wide-open plains, but the patches of trees did little to blunt the wind, almost serving to funnel it.  I longed for the roads of France flanked by plane trees, planted by Napoleon to provide shade and wind block for his marching troops.  

After thirty-five miles I made a slight detour to Lamar for a Statue of Liberty by its courthouse and was rewarded with the bonus of Harry Truman’s birthplace.  

It was a state, rather than national, historic site.  I arrived late in the afternoon after the home and the office across the street had closed for the day so could only peer in at the furnishings of the period, 1884, when he was born.  The small home had an outhouse to its rear. Truman’s family moved to Independence, a year after his birth, which is where he grew up.  He served as a senator from Missouri from 1935 to 1945, before becoming Vice President and president shortly thereafter with the passing of FDR.  He was a two-term president, succeeded by Eisenhower.

I battled onward into the wind to Carthage and its distinctive Carnegie, unique with “Andrew Carnegie” chiseled into its facade, contrary to the usual mere “Carnegie.”  It had a vast limestone addition to its side adding to its magnificence.