Sterling, Georgia

 

My spring tours have always been much more northerly than this one with conditions often more wintry than spring-like even bringing snow, such as last year in Kansas.  I have no worries if snow this year, at least for awhile as I head north to Philadelphia.  The eighty temperatures of Florida and now Georgia are giving me an early taste of summer.  The low eighties haven’t been ovenish at all, thanks to nighttime temperatures in the fifties, not allowing the heat to build up.  The sun has yet to become beating-down hot.  The midday direct sun isn’t too hot for young and old to be fishing from bridges along the road. 



It’s not so hot that I have to fear running low on water in my tent at night even if my four bottles aren’t full.  Nor is it so hot that I’ve had to soak my shirt or douse my head with water or even work up much of a sweat, especially with the flat terrain.  As pleasant as it is, I’m still happy to be heading north to cooler, less-sapping temperatures.

The 250 miles I’ve gained on the north have yet to give me a glimpse of the ocean.  That won’t happen until Savannah in another seventy miles where two Carnegies await me, the only two on my Georgia agenda.  I’ve gotten to the other twenty-one on several previous rides about the state—twice when biking down from Chicago for the School of the Americas protest at Fort Benning, once with Don Jaime when we met up in Atlanta and biked to his mother’s grave in Alabama,  four years ago on my ride from Miami to New Orleans and in June of 2021 when I biked from Memphis across Mississippi and Alabama and on to New York stopping in Atlanta once again to visit the president of my high school class who had biked to Mexico after graduating from Harvard.  I never got over to the eastern side of the state on any of those forays as all but two of the state’s Carnegies were to the west.

I considered a coastal route from Orlando to Jacksonville, but it was more direct and less settled to go inland.  Jacksonville resides on the Saint John’s River which empties into the Atlantic thirty away.  Beyond Jacksonville there was no coastal route to Savanah, so I headed due north on Main Street, just a block from its Carnegie Library on Adams Street in the former heart of the city.  There was a nearby mini-skyscraper, but the majority of them were a couple miles away to the northwest.  

I had camped twelve miles south of the city just off a six-lane divided highway in a small grove of bamboo.  The road had a shoulder that was sometimes designated as a bike lane.  When I got within two miles of the skyscrapers a police officer awaited me at an exit ramp and said, “This road isn’t for you.”  It was a Saturday morning so the traffic wasn’t too treacherous, but I was glad to be done with it.  With a population of just under a million, Jacksonville is the largest city in Florida, more than twice as large as Miami.  Tampa is third and Orlando fourth.  The three biggest all have an NFL team.  Orlando has to be content with an NBA team.

The stately Carnegie was once the city’s Main Library, but had now fallen into the commercial realm.  “Open to All” was chiseled over the entry, but not this day with the door locked.

I continued north reaching Georgia thirty-one miles later after crossing St. Mary’s River.  There were fishermen on a dock below the bridge.  The two-lane wide road continued through a thick forest.  I had yet to see an orange tree as most of the orchards are on the other side of the state along a ridge that goes on for over one hundred miles.  These forests were being logged.  I heard no chain saws but saw an occasional loaded truck on the road and off.

Florida was well off the path of the eclipse but a church message board urged, “Instead of looking at the sun, look at the son.”  Jeff B., reader of this blog and contributor to The Reader, let me know he had written an article for the Evanston Roundtable about driving down to a rural cemetery outside of Indianapolis with his family and friends to witness the event.  He pointed out it was appropriate for the eclipse to occur on a Monday, as the day was named for the moon.  He wondered if it is more than mere coincidence that the moon is 400 times closer to the earth than the sun and 400 times smaller making it the perfect size to block out the sun.  His article raises many points I hadn’t read elsewhere and is well worth reading. https://evanstonroundtable.com/2024/04/09/local-sun-worshipers-cast-into-indiana-darkness-briefly/

I was accorded the first act of generosity of these travels at the first service station/mini-mart I stopped in for water after crossing into Georgia.  As I sat eating a peanut butter butter sandwich in front of the shop the older woman who had been behind the counter came out with a small box and asked if I’d like a slice of pizza.  She didn’t need to ask twice.  The day before a woman may have wanted go slip me a bill when she asked if I was riding for a cause.  “Just to promote the bicycle,” wasn’t enough for her to want to make a monetary contribution.  

Ralph Nader would be happy to hear that generosity in rural America is alive and well, as his podcast from April 6 I had been listening to was with Chris Anderson, the author of the book “Infectious Generosity,” though it mostly referred to large-scale donors funding huge projects to combat hunger and disease and climate change and such. As Nader often does when it comes to billionaires being tight-fisted with their fortunes, he invoked Carnegie and all the libraries he funded.   He’d like present-day billionaires to fund arboretums and civic centers and playing fields and solar.  He complained that he been trying to get through to Mackenzie Scott, as she’s given away fifteen billion dollars of her divorce settlement with Jeff Bezos, to get her to fund such projects, but she won’t respond to him even though they are both Princeton graduates.

Like Trump he can be hyperbolic in his rants, and he was in this case too, saying Carnegie had funded five thousand libraries all over the world, when the number is actually 2,509.