Big Ride Updates...

39. Kendallville to Napoleon, OH 7/26 Miles 69.9 Total 2623.8

We entered Ohio on a small farm road. There was no official sign to welcome us, but the Ohio members of the ride left camp early to constitute a welcoming committee and were reinforced by family and friends. Flags, music (the Ohio State Marching Band on CD), food (including chocolate and peanut butter "buckeyes") and lots of chalk signs on the roadway greeted us as we pedaled into our tenth state. It turned into a great celebration between the cornfields lining both sides of the road.

Norberto Soto held his thumb and finger a fraction of an inch apart when he told me that he joined this ride to make a difference "even if it's just this much". Norberto is a retired Air Force flight engineer from Willingboro, NJ. He worked for an oxygen supply company before he lost his job to come on this ride. His clients became his friends and spoke with real joy about one who received a lung transplant two weeks before the ride began. He also hopes that his ride will help convince his youngest brother to give up smoking. Norberto kept me company all afternoon and neither of us required prompting about which way to turn when an ice cream stand appeared on our right a mile from camp.

I was born and grew up (or at least as much growing up as one can do by age 11) in Toledo, just north of Napoleon. I remember our house: three bedrooms and one bath upstairs, and kitchen, living room and dining room on the first floor. The stairway going downstairs ended in a landing: two steps down to the kitchen on the right, or two steps down to the living room on the left, or chase your younger brother around the circle from the kitchen to the dining room, living room, over the landing and back to the kitchen. The basement was unfinished, but was heavily used by Dad (a work bench and tools), Mom (laundry) and the boys (all purpose indoor rough house space). The attic was storage space and, until my Dad installed a folding stair, I loved watching him climb onto my Mom's shoulders to pull himself up into the attic to pass down all the Christmas decorations and the Lionel. The yard was shaded in the front by Maple trees. An apple tree in the back yard dropped summer fruit that attracted yellow jackets to its sweet, sticky rotten flesh. Picking up the soft red-brown lumps was a summertime chore that I hated. The sandbox was good entertainment and there were lots of friends up and down the block for "cops and robbers", "cowboys and indians", softball games in the street, tag, "Red Rover", "capture the flag" on summer nights, and whatever spontaneous game we could create. I rode a tricycle until I was in the fourth grade; I graduated to a real bike so I could ride to the park and join the baseball games. I watched the man on the far end of the block launch firecrackers into the trees to scare away the flock of starlings that roosted there and covered the street and sidewalk with guano. I walked around the other corner of the block late in the afternoon to the bus stop to meet my Dad when he came home from work. We made root beer in the basement, cooked popcorn over a gas flame, mashed apples for applesauce and ate picnics in the backyard. Leaning on the kitchen counter to get as close as possible, I listened to "The Lone Ranger" on the radio every week and hoped for the day when we would have a television set. I haven't been back to see the house that fills me with so many memories; I won't go back on this trip. The memories are too numerous and too large to fit into that gray house with dark green shutters, but they are just the right size to carry with me.

40. Napoleon to Sandusky, OH 7/27 Miles 85.5 Total 2709.3

The Land Ordinance of 1785, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, squared up "the West". Beginning at an arbitrary point on the Ohio River where it departed Pennsylvania, surveyors began dividing the country into graph paper squares, every half mile marked by a 30 inch tall wooden stake driven 18 inches into the soil and marked with chiseled numbers. Within a few years, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had been "graphed" in numbered squares and those invisible lines became real in property lines, lanes, roads and the shapes of fields. Our route on the back roads of Ohio moving east by northeast, was a series of right angle turns almost certainly following the lines laid out by surveyors following Jefferson's instructions.

The air over the flat mid-west can be turbulent. The prevailing northwesterly stream of air blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle collides with warm moisture laden southerlies blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico. Baked by the sun all day, heat begins to rise from the open flatlands. As sun moves lower in the sky in the late afternoon and evening, the earth releases its heat rapidly sending columns of hot air upward which become swirls and gyres of intense aerial commotion. Towering columns of clouds form quickly in the late afternoon becoming gray and bruise purple. We raced the clouds into Sandusky hoping to set up camp before rain caught us. It was a glorious feeling to be speeding over the land under our own power, feeling very alive. We raced into and out of the cloud shadows on the road, cooled by the breeze we generated for ourselves. The corn and soybeans fields were interspersed with carrot and cabbage. We pushed our speed higher until we entered Sandusky. Success. We did not get wet, but not because of our efforts, not because of our swift pace; it never rained.

--- Paul Fairman, Big Rider #2152.
< pfairman@earthlink.net>

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