Bethany, Missouri

 

Though it’s not going to provide a tailwind, or headwind for that matter, I am pleased that the forecast calls for winds from the south for the next week.  That promises night time lows in the 40s and 50s rather than the 20s and 30s as they have been.  No more frigid nights in the tent will spare me of bundling up and alleviate worries of waking to cold feet and ice in my water bottles in the morning.

I have been warding off cold feet without having to resort to Charlie’s handwarmer technique of sticking the tiny packs in my socks.  Rather I have been stuffing my feet and lower leg in the arms of the wool sweater that Gary in Edson gave me.  It being a sweater with a zipper it opened up perfectly for the purpose and keeps my feet toasty.

Day-time temps in the 70s will allow me to squeeze honey from its plastic bottle and will also grant me the pleasure of drinking ice cold drinks from my water bottle packed with ice from service station and fast food self-serve ice and soft drink dispensers.  MacDonald’s is no longer a sure outlet for ice, as several in Kansas had done away with that self-service feature, as customers were taking advantage of its beverage offerings filling large cups of their own.

I have ventured off into the northwest corner of Missouri to gather five Carnegies and then will head back to Kansas to finish it off.  With these five in Missouri only three will remain, all in the south of the state that will dictate my route to the Mississippi where I’ll complete the state in Cape Giradeau, an old river town that I’ve always wanted to visit.

The same with Missouri’s St. Joseph on the Missouri River, as it was the starting point for the 1,960 mile Pony Express Trail across the west ending in Sacramento. I’ve ridden portions of fhe Trail for years, including this year. Why I never made the effort to get to its starting point I don’t know.  Thanks to it having two Carnegies, I finally got there.  

It was fully steeped in Pony Express lore with a museum and statues and plaques and giant mural.  

I know that if I ever come upon a medium who specializes in past lives, I’d be told I was one of the one hundred young men who served as a rider in the eighteen months of its existence that began in April of 1860.  It was rendered obsolete by the telegraph.  Until then getting mail and news delivered in ten days across the great expanse of the west with a relay of riders putting in one hundred mile all-out efforts was considered a miraculous achievement, akin to putting a man on the moon.

A large rock with a plaque marked the spot from which the riders set out. It was in a park across from the stable where our horses were kept, which is now the museum.   In the center of town, a mile north, stands an over-sized statue of a rider.  It is surrounded by plaques recounting the glory of the enterprise.

I had the pleasure of riding the Pony Express Highway for forty miles into St. Joseph from Hiawatha, Kansas, which I was drawn to for its Carnegie Library, although it preferred to be known as the Morrill Library in honor of the state governor, Edmund Morrill, who provided the land for it.  The young librarian, who’d only been there a year, was unaware of its Carnegie heritage.  A mismatched portico of an entrance had been tacked on to the library, blocking its original Carnegiesque facade and plastering Morrill on it.

After I crossed the Missouri River into St. Joseph, I went south for two miles, turned left on Illinois Street for half a mile and then turned on to Carnegie Street for two blocks which led me to the stately Carnegie standing in the middle of a park which it had all to itself.  When the library was built in 1901 to supplement the main, non-Carnegie, library, St. Joseph had a population of 100,000 people and was the 35th largest city in the country.  Its present population of 80,000 has dropped its rank to 534.  

The librarian I spoke to had been with the library forty-seven years.  She apologized for the drab circulation desk, saying it wasn’t the original.  She wanted to make sure I’d locked my bike and offered a lock if I didn’t have one.  It was the first library of these travels that required a key to the rest room.

The Washington Park branch on the north side of the city was equally grand.  It resides on one of the many hills that dominate the northern half of the city.  As I approached it, four boys on BMX bikes asked if I’d like to trade bikes.  “My bike is faster than yours,” one boy said.

It was fifty-two miles northeast to the Carnegie in Albany.  Halfway there I stopped at the post office in King City to ask if the town had a library.  The postmistress said the nearest was twelve miles north, but suggested I try the senior center down the block if it were open as a place to get out of the cold. The post office was plenty warm and spacious.  I thought I would just sit in the adjoining room where the PO Boxes were and eat my oatmeal.  Moments after I returned to my bike, she came out and said she had a spare chair I could sit on inside.  That was perfect. 

Not much later a middle-aged guy picked up his mail and said he was a member of Warmshowers, as I am, and said I was welcome to a shower if I needed one.  I asked if he’d had many guests.  Only one, he said, as King City being on a north-south road didn’t attract many touring cyclists.  He’d only joined Warmshowers because his son and a friend had cycled coast-to-coast several years ago and had taken advantage of the service.  

A shower would have been nice, but not at ten in the morning, especially when I was trying to take advantage of a westerly breeze that would end tomorrow.  It took me to Albany and then to Bethany.   First I stopped at the library in Stanberry, one of the few these days that required a password for its Wi-Fi.  It was Alpacaelsa, as the library’s IT person had a few alpacas.  That was a little more complicated than the ReadBooks of an earlier library.

The Albany Carnegie happened to be closed for the day and no sign offered an explanation.  It was a small enough town it would have been a one-person operation. Whoever it might be could have had an emergency.  An older woman who walked past, stopping to pluck a handful of dandelions, could offer no explanation. The postmistress in King City had lived in Albany and said she was glad when the library put in an elevator as she didn’t like its steep steps.  I could feel their extra steepness when I mounted them to peer in.

Not a day passes that a podcast doesn’t offer some stunning fact.  Today it came from the Paceline, a cycling podcast, when the discussion between its two voices touched upon Lycra.  John Lewis asked if his cohost Patrick Grady knew that the word spandex, a form of Lycra, was derived as an anagram for expands, when DuPont invented it in 1958.  That was news to him, commenting “that’s too clever by half.”