July 15, 2020
the scream, a special kind of idiot, tapping out
Day Two: Warsaw to Burlington
I was jolted awake by a scream in the early hours of the morning, the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up and my heart pounding. Imagine the most blood-curdling scream you’ve ever heard in your life. Not some fake-sounding TV scream, but one which tells you that there’s something TRULY horrible happening. Not just a regular murder, but one arising from the bowels of Stephen King’s imagination. Someone was being killed, brutally, and from the sound of it, it was happening very, very close to my tent.
In my sleep-muddled brain I slowly came to realize that my friend, Karen, hadn’t been repeatedly stabbed (but only knew for sure after I called out to her). Instead, it was some type of animal, probably a red fox.
Turn off the lights, get comfortable, close your eyes, turn your speaker volume up to eleven, then listen to this--> (click here) and tell me if you’d be able to remain continent if it woke you up at 2:00 in the morning from a dead sleep when it was thirty feet from your tent. It happened again, then again once more, each time shocking my nervous system like a cattle prod.
At exactly 3:11 AM, there was a 30-second peel of thunder, the echoes of which seemed to go on forever, and the rain started around 4:15. I woke up periodically to its soft patter against my tent and at 7:30 decided it was time to get up and going. In this instance, “get up and get going” meant mostly sitting in my tent and doing nothing as we waited for the rain to stop. I ate breakfast, reorganized my panniers, and generally piddled around.
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After about an hour, we met under the pavilion, fifty yards away, and discussed what to do with our day. The forecast said it would be raining all day and, not wanting to waste a full day just waiting for the rain to stop, we decided to start riding.
I'm going to digress for a moment to talk about weather forecasters, starting with the etymology. It seems revealing that the word's origin (forecast) comes from a late 14th-century word meaning "to scheme." A weather forecaster's job is to predict the weather, and there's a university degree for it, a graduate degree no less. So, why are they so bad at it? I have photographic evidence (a screenshot from my phone) from last winter showing the day's high/low temperatures. The high that day was slated to be 36 degrees, the low 30 degrees, and the current temperature was 26 degrees.
Just open a window and stick your head out.
Anyway, when we saw drops of water falling from the sky we realized it was going to rain that day and made one concession to the weather: Sarah would carry our gear. We each had enough rain gear to keep us dry so, shortly after 10:30, off we went.
After we warmed up from the exertion of riding, the rain was actually pleasant. I wasn’t able to navigate very well because I couldn’t unlock my phone: for some reason it couldn’t read my fingerprint, and the waterproof case wasn’t allowing me to push the numbers for the passcode. I eventually took off the passcode lock since I needed it for directions.
At one point I hit a bump and my phone came off its cheap holder, bounced a couple of times, then slid onto the road directly in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Reflexively, I slammed on the brakes (which actually stop my bike now), did a quick U-turn, scooped it up, and got out of the way just in time as the spray from the wheels misted me.
In retrospect, it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done (nor was it the dumbest), but it was one of those split-second decisions that, this time at least, turned out okay. Really, though, I think I could’ve laid down in the road and the trucker would’ve just gone around me. If he saw me, of course.
We had our first steep climb, although short, in Hamilton (pos 2,753). Passing through town, Karen’s front tire went into a crack and she went down hard on her left side.
Falls are weird. In our imaginations they happen slowly, a graceful swoon to the ground in which nothing is injured. In reality, they happen instantaneously. One second she was there, the next she was on the ground. My stomach still knots up when I picture her bouncing against the pavement. Karen, however, is as tough as they come, and was determined to continue riding. She brushed off our suggestion to take a break as casually as if I had offered her a stick of gum.
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In Nauvoo (pop 950), we stopped at Joseph Smith’s grave site where I ate my peanut butter/nutella tortilla wraps for lunch.
Nauvoo is a mecca for Latter Day Saints, aka Mormons, and every year more than 100,000 of them trek there to see where Smith, the founder of the religion, was killed.
Patrick’s Achilles tendon had started hurting during our overnight shakedown ride to Cedar Falls, and was worse than it had ever been today.
The rain continued, ranging from moderate to heavy.
Immediately out of Nauvoo we started climbing. The rain was coming down hard when we stopped under the awning of a grocery store. Not wanting to miss a turn, I raised my voice over the sound of the pelting rain to ask a pleasant-looking woman in her fifties coming out of the door,
“Is this the road to Dallas City?”
“Yes, it is.” Then, pointing, she said, “You just keep going down that road right there.”
I thanked her, then added, the wind whipping the rain all around us and water dripping off all three of us,
“I do have one other question.” She raised her eyebrows in response.
“I’d just like to know what special kind of idiot would be out riding his bike in weather like this.”
She laughed, shrugged her shoulders, then said,
“I’m not sayin’ anything.”
Leaving town, the rain became heavier and was blowing directly into our faces at a 45-degree angle. A headwind, a blowing rain, and now a continuous climb, all combined for a difficult ride.
In 7th or 8th grade I took a literature class which, as you can see from my writing, has been exceptionally helpful…. if you’re a 7th or 8th grader reading this. In that class, we learned about the four different types of conflict in a story: Man vs Man, Man vs Self, Man vs Society, and Man vs Nature. Since non-Man people can also be involved in conflict, those four have since been updated to using “Person” instead of “Man,” and in these troubled times there have been three additional Conflicts added: Person vs Fate/God(s), Person vs the Unknown/Extraterrestrial, and Person vs Technology/Machinery.
The reason I mention this is because at about this point in the day, as we were inching our way up a long hill, the headwind had picked up and was blowing the rain directly in our faces. A powerful headwind, rain spraying our faces, uphill and more uphill…. this was Person vs Nature, and I felt like Lieutenant Dan in the movie Forrest Gump when he strapped himself to the mast, shaking his fist at the sky and screaming, “Is that all you got?!?!? Is that it?!?!? Is THAT all you got???” Except, of course, I was grinning.
Here’s where the words “tempting fate” come in, and I shouldn’t have been surprised when, about ten minutes later, the storm DID become more severe. The rain became heavier, the wind became stronger, and the hill became steeper. I didn’t ask again.
Patrick’s leg pain continued to get worse, but he muscled on through the day.
I had my own peculiar malady… my eyes were burning terribly, and I could barely open them. This was an issue I’d never experienced before. Eventually, I came up with a theory: over the past several months of riding I’d done a lot of sweating, and had accumulated a fair amount of salt in my helmet pads. Now that the rain was coming down in swaths, it was washing all of it out of the helmet and into my eyes. They stayed red and painful for several hours until, if my theory is correct, most of the salt finally washed away.
At the outskirts of Dallas City (pop 805), Patrick said that he was hurting so much that he didn’t have more than an hour of riding left in him, if that, so we decided to stop in Lomax instead of Burlington, which had been our original goal for the day.
Once in Lomax (pop 404), we realized that there wasn’t actually a campground, so we were going to have to stealth camp or knock on someone’s door to ask permission to camp in their yard. However, as time passed, Patrick realized that there was just no way he was going to be able to continue the trip after today because the pain was becoming so bad.
After letting us know that he was going to have to "tap out,” he called his boyfriend to come pick him up, and Karen called Sarah (she had his gear). After some discussion, Karen and I decided to soldier on through the rain to Burlington (pop 23,982), which was “only” 17 miles away.
I felt really bad for Patrick, and still do. He trained for the trip, and is a stronger rider than me, but had to stop after a single day of touring. That means his only experience of touring consists of hills, pouring rain, headwinds, and Achilles pain. Even so, he SAID he enjoyed it. What a trooper. I hope he takes another trip someday so he can experience the pleasant aspects of touring.
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Karen and I left Lomax and headed into a 15-18 mph headwind which, along with the rain, gradually subsided and eventually stopped. After a day of rain and headwinds, that last seventeen miles down Carman Road was brutal and took its toll on Karen. I kept an eye on her in my rearview mirror and could see her glazed eyes staring at my rear wheel as she spun her crank in an exhausted trance. On occasion, I’d see her light up as she took in some of the passing scenery: Great Blue Herons and an abundant amount of flora.
The bridge over the Mississippi river was under construction, so there was only one lane and no shoulder. We slipped behind the bright orange cones, then behind the large concrete barricade which protected us from the traffic for the entire length of the bridge.
On the other side, however, we had to wait a few minutes until there was no traffic coming from either direction, then lift our bikes over the barrier and sprint to the other side in order to exit the road.
Once back on the smaller streets, we google mapped the directions to my friend’s house where we’d be staying.
Upon arriving at Jerry and Joyce’s home we set up our tents in their backyard, which was perched on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi river. For the rest of the evening Jerry, an engaging storyteller, described some of his Viet Nam experiences as a Marine grunt. I cooked my dinner, chicken teriyaki, followed by a crème brûlée. After dinner, Jerry brought out some beer and two kinds of moonshine (not homemade): apple (40 proof) and piña colada (50 proof). I had a small taste of each.
Jerry continued with his stories. He shared one about his very first patrol out into the jungle. He was having a hard time digging his foxhole because of the number of blisters on his hands when a massive African American named Ballard helped him dig it out. When one of Ballard’s friends asked why he’s helping out a white guy he responded, “I ain’t helping a white guy, I’m helping out our machine gunner,” then winked at Jerry. Their platoon was shelled shortly after that and Jerry would’ve still been digging if Ballard hadn’t assisted him. Regarding race, Jerry notes it was a Black man who saved his life and it was a White man who stole his pension from the foundry where he worked for 35 years, then took off to the Bahamas never to be seen again.
He also told the story of an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) that bounced right next to him and kept going, exploding somewhere else, and how they never wore their ponchos in the rain because when the drops hit them they made a distinctive sound that the Viet Cong could identify.
On another occasion, they were out in the bush and almost out of food. When a plane dropped some food on a nearby hill, Jerry was the one assigned to retrieve it. He picked his way over to the drop site, getting shot at but never getting hit, then grabbed the single bag and carried it back, dodging sniper fire along the way. When he arrived they hungrily opened it and found… onions… nothing but onions, which were generally used as a seasoning for their MREs. That would be the MREs they had already eaten.
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There was no need to shower this evening... we'd been showering all day and, not having had a lot of sleep the night before, we packed it in pretty early. Even considering the rain, wind, and hills, it was a good day, and I went to sleep feeling a little giddy.
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distance: 58.4 miles
average speed: 10.6 mph
max speed: 26.2 mph
moving time: 5:29:16
total time: 8:22:06
elevation gain: 1,643 feet
Today's ride: 58 miles (93 km)
Total: 95 miles (153 km)
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1 year ago