Conway, South Carolina

 

I didn’t have to go searching for a bike shop in Charleston as there was one on the road I was following into the city.  It came two miles before the bridge over the Ashley River to the tongue of land that is central Charleston between two rivers emptying into the Atlantic. Cooper is the other river on the east side of the city.

The bike shop had a special entry for repairs, so when I pushed my bike in the two guys behind the counter knew I came in for a repair and not necessarily to buy something.  They instantly asked what they could do for me.  When I told them I had broken off a bolt attaching my rear rack to the frame, they unhesitatingly said, “Take off your panniers and let’s look at it.”  It was quite a contrast to the reaction I had received at the bike shop in Savannah, and was typical of bike shops in general.  They were as eager as could be to be of help.  

One of the guys got down on his knees and grabbed the slight nub of the bolt with a thin pliers that had a good grip and lots of leverage, but he was no more successful than I had been in getting it to budge with a vice grips.  So he got his drill and commenced drilling.  It took a few minutes so I had a chance to roam the shop.  It was ringed with vintage bikes and jerseys hung just below the ceiling.  The owner of the shop had been the team doctor for US Olympic bicycling teams going back to the ‘90s and was an avid collector of old bikes and memorabilia.  He had bought into this long-time shop founded in 1972 just ten years ago, partially as a place to display his many bikes.  The thirty or forty on display were just a sampling of his  collection.  He had so many, including bikes of Armstrong and Cavendish, that he bought a house across the street from where he lived as another place to exhibit them.  

The guy not tending to my bike asked about my trip and then if I used Warmshowers.  He said his mother was a host and would welcome me if I wanted a shower. It’s not the first time I’ve been invited to come have a shower in the middle of the day.  It is always tempting, but I didn’t really have the time to spare to get to Charleston’s Carnegie and explore the city a bit and then get far enough out of the sprawl of the city to camp.  I knew it wouldn’t be a quick in-and-out, but I’d have a prolonged conversation with my host.  He said hardly a week goes by that his mother doesn’t have a guest.  She had been infected by southern hospitality, as she had moved to Charleston from Rhode Island a few years ago before the pandemic.  At the time her son was a bike messenger in New York, a job he’d held for seven years.  And like every former messenger I meet, he loved it.

After the mechanic finished drilling through the bolt he needed another tool to remove the remnants,  preserving the threads.   He hadn’t used the tool for awhile, and asked who was the last to use it, as whoever it was hadn’t cleaned it.  The rest of the operation didn’t take long, so I was soon back on the road.  My fifteen minutes in the shop were a pleasant interlude, as a visit to a bike shop usually is.

The traffic over the bridge and into the city was more than I would have preferred, but after I crossed the bridge I could venture off on narrow side streets past old wooden homes crowded together, just about all with porches and trees providing shade. And like Savannah there were horse drawn carriages packed with tourists listening to tour guides.

The Carnegie Library was on narrow one-way King Street, a popular route for tourists lined with old historic buildings and shops.  It continued to land’s end and a view of the ocean five blocks past the library.  The classic building was clearly a Carnegie, but there was no acknowledgment of his gift inside or out, which he may have been glad of, as it wasn't a public library but rather a Library Society for members only, contrary to his beliefs of making libraries available to all, so much so that many of his libraries have “Free to All” or “Open to All” prominently chiseled on their facades.

The young woman tending the desk at the entrance knew nothing of Carnegie nor that he had provided the funds for the building.  She was proud to say this Society was one of just sixteen members-only libraries in the US and when it was founded in 1748 it was the second such library in the US.   She said one’s membership included lectures and programs and other amenities.  There were various levels of membership, the cheapest $150 a year.  The free, much larger public library a few blocks away on Calhoun Street, didn’t have the grandeur of the Carnegie, but more than adequately served the purpose of a library and had a great many more using it than I had seen in the “Carnegie.”

Charleston seemed to be a very monetary-oriented city.  The bean-and-cheese burritos that had been a dollar at every Taco Bell up the coast were a $1.49 at the Taco Bell I stopped at leaving Charleston.   And the mechanic at the bike shop charged me as if Medicare was covering the price of his operation, giving me a bill slightly less than what I’d recently been given back home for a new bottom bracket that required several days of labor to remove the firmly stuck old one.

Once I escaped the sprawl of Charleston after a couple of hours of riding and returned to forested terrain, I  began seeing dead armadillos for the first time of these travels.  Road kill had been minimal, a possum or two, a few stray snakes of assorted sizes and a deer being feasted upon by a couple dozen vultures.  When I passed the vultures they didn’t stir so I stopped for a photo.  They gave me a glance, but didn’t stop feeding until I dug out my iPad and pointed it in their direction.  They scattered way before I could get off a shot.

I continued cycling until just before dark finding a quiet secluded spot for the night down a dirt road into the forest. Like most of my camping there was standing water here and there and mosquitoes, but not so bad that I had to be frantic about getting into my tent.  I had closed to within thirty-five miles of the next Carnegie in Kingstree, a town big enough for several franchise fast-food outlets.  The MacDonalds was a rare one without self-serve soft drinks and ice, so I opted for the Burger King, which offered that luxury which I have become all too accustomed to.

The Carnegie was just a couple of blocks away around the corner.  It was now the local history museum packed with artifacts including a dugout canoe and a display honoring Julius Rosenwald, a large-scale philanthropist on the order of Carnegie whose wealth came from running Chicago-based Sears and Roebuck early after its inception.  Besides establishing Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry he donated millions of dollars beginning in 1912 at the urging of Booker T. Washington to construct over five thousand schools in small rural communities in fifteen states to serve the African-American community. There were 481 in South Carolina and ten in the local county.  

The retiree tending to the museum, who repeatedly called me sir, said the museum had been attempting for years to have plaques placed at the site of these former small schools, but the state had been resisting their efforts.  He had moved to Kingstree in 1980 and made use of the Carnegie until it was replaced in 2000.  It hadn’t had an addition and wasn’t large enough to house all the museum’s holdings, the rest of which were in a building across the way.  No portrait of Carnegie though, nor could he remember seeing one in the library, which he couldn’t have missed if there had been one in the tiny one-room building.