This Is My Favorite Kentucky Day!

May 16, 2017

The alarm goes off at five. I look out the open flap of the tent at fog so thick it's hard to see the road a few hundred feet away. The air is so heavy that a thick layer of moisture covers the inner side of the fly. Drip. Drip. Drip. It's raining on us from the inside of the tent.

Jerry and Bobby and Kristen and I ride out of town together in the thin, soft light of the early morning haze. We're one giant mass of reflectors, yellow jackets, and blinking lights. The bright eyes and smiles from last night carry over to today. The general consensus: it doesn't get any better than being out here right now on the TransAm.

But nine miles in we say our goodbyes for the day. To avoid twenty miles on U.S. 421 later in the day, we're heading off the route down desolate back roads through towns that don't even seem big enough to be called towns. Places with names like Arvel and Alumbaugh and Wagersville where there isn't a store or gas station or even a bathroom to be had.

We still have to crank up the occasional steep hill, but mostly the rises are low and gradual. After all the hard pedaling of the last couple of weeks it feels like the greatest reward. Down the backs of the hills we bend through gentle curves with the air thick and motionless and so cool it turns our fingertips numb. The sweet smell of fresh-cut grass fills our heads. The trees and hills work together to keep the rays of the sun at arm's length.

It's one old barn after the next, all red sheet metal roofs and dark black paint that time and weather are slowly stripping away. We make friends with the dogs and ride along ridge tops where the hills beyond stretch into the distance in layers of ever more pale blue. There's a car like once every half an hour. We're so far away from everything that at one point we get followed down the road by a cow.

"This is my favorite Kentucky day! It's so peaceful and beautiful and clean. And we're going to Berea!"

No argument here.

Soon we find ourselves riding where there are no houses or even fences, just the trees and the birds, the rippling sound of a slow-moving creek unseen below, and a smooth ribbon of pavement winding down through all of it in the cool of the shade. We find wild turkeys, a herd of goats, and even a sheep standing in the middle of the lane over the course of an hour.

We might have inadvertently found the most perfect cross-country cycling road in Kentucky.

It goes on like this all afternoon. Kristen spots a hawk swooping past with some kind of small animal clutched in its talons. Then we see a bullfrog eyeballing us from just below the surface of a dirty pond. Around them it's grazing cattle and the faint smell of skunk. It's hillsides where every square foot is covered in a canopy of green. It's the lazy path of a quiet back road along the bottom of the Red Lick Valley. We stop to rest in the shade cast by the front awning of a bright white Baptist church. The Dairy Queens and chidboys and rushed drivers are far away and today we're happy for that. We both agree that this is the best way to look for America.

It's not the easiest way to look for America. We're both dragging ass by the time we hit the last rolling hills into Berea. Kristen feels both tired and kind of nauseous, like she has on and off for much of the last week or so.

Berea is a college town. College towns mean coffee shops. That's where we head first. When Kristen walks to the bathroom, she overhears a couple of people having an in-depth debate about Marxism. Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco and Beach House play on the stereo. There are no fried foods to be had. This is not the Kentucky we've become used to.

Bobby arrived at the coffee shop a few hours ago. Jerry is there too, along with his wife Vicki and his dogs Sidney and Lunchbox, who came down from Northern Michigan to spend a few days on the road with him. Bobby tells us that not long after he sat down, a guy named Peter stopped to introduce himself after having seen Bobby's bike sitting out in front of the coffee shop. Bobby tells us how Peter is a professor over at Berea College who's teaching a summer course on entrepreneurship. His class is working on a project related to how people come through this part of the county on the Appalachian and TransAmerica trails, how they find places to stay and eat, and how they use maps to help them do this. Peter offered to buy the three of us dinner if we were willing to take an hour to talk to his students and let them ask us questions about how and why we travel the way we do.

We're in.

We walk our bikes to the Italian restaurant around the corner early in the evening. When we look to the left, we see a group of at least twenty people headed our way. We're warmly greeted as soon as they reach us and everything for the next ninety minutes becomes a blur. We head inside and order food and drinks and sit down at a string of half a dozen tables placed end to end that fill up with students and teaching assistant and the professor within moments. And then the questions start: Where are you going? How long will it take? Why are you traveling this way? Where do you stay? Isn't it dangerous? How do you find the time to do this kind of thing? How do you find the money for it? What do you eat? What do you use for maps? How do you decide where to stay? And dozens more. The questions come from all sides, often at the same time, so that it feels like we're standing at the podium of some kind of strange cycle-touring press conference. It's loud, chaotic, kind of overwhelming. At one point everyone gathers around and we all get our picture taken. It's such a dramatic change from just hours before, where our only audience was a small herd of goats.

At one point I mention off-hand how Berea was one of my favorite places when I rode across the country back in 2011 and how I've been looking forward to returning ever since.

"Why is that?" one of the students asks. "What is it about Berea that makes it so special?"

I say something about it being a beautiful town, a friendly town, a place where you can get good food and good beer and good coffee; about how it's a good place to take a day off and rest; about how it feels so much healthier and more alive than so many of the towns in Appalachia that precede it.

This is all true. But looking out at the twenty or so young faces staring back at me, what I want to say is that the reason Berea feels so rare is because it is as grounded as much in the future as it is the past. Just about every place we've traveled since leaving the coast looks and feels as if its best days are behind it. There's a strong feeling of what was, but little sense of what could be. Berea has its beautiful old hotel and attractive college campus and historical monuments. But it also has new homes, new businesses, and an openness to new people and new ideas.

And it has all of these bright young minds, who came from across the state, across the county, and even across the world to study and work and live here. Instead of spending these next six weeks in their home town, working a summer job and drinking and partying away their evenings, they're in this place, together, studying entrepreneurship and putting it into practice, imagining some different future while learning skills that will help them make that future a reality. Where so much of what we have seen in the last week makes me concerned for the future of my country, what I experience gives me hope.

I already look forward to returning to Berea again some day.

After saying our goodbyes to the students, Kristen and Bobby and I ride over to a fire station on the the north side of town that has been allowing traveling cyclists to camp on its property for longer than anyone who works there can remember. Jerry and Vicki and the dogs show up soon after. Then it's Freddie from Sweden and Ekaterina from Moldova, who are riding across America together. The seven of us spend the next hour laying back in the grass, laughing and sharing stories and petting dogs in the warm evening air as the light of day gives way to the dark of night.

Before climbing into the tent we get hugs from Bobby. He's rolling out of town early tomorrow, which means we won't see him again. It's too bad; he's the rare person out here like us, who isn't in college or retired. And he is the definition of a good dude. He's like a younger version of Jerry, in that everything is a little better and brighter when he's around.

But that's the nature of traveling in this way. Someone bursts into your life one day, makes an indelible mark on your memory the next, and then the day after that they roll down the street and turn a corner and leave you behind forever.

Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 789 miles (1,270 km)

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