Category: Bicycling

On the first day of our ride, Dave’s morning began with a flat tire before he even got on the bike. Here on the final day, he’s greeted again by a flat tire as we roll the bikes out of the hotel room before dawn. Like a pair of bookends, a flat to begin the ride, a flat to end it. This one, however, we’re changing under the lights outside the hotel door, on a humid morning, with hungry mosquitoes all around us. Needless to say, we’re as quick as we can be getting the flat fixed, into the saddle and headed down the road.

One of the things about today that’s even nicer than most days of our ride is that Carol is schlepping our stuff to our destination. She’s going to tour Lindsborg in the morning, then meet us in Hoisington around noon, which is when we figure we’ll get there. Not that we have a lot of stuff to schlep, but it’s nice to lose the 20# sitting on the back of the bike.

The ability of the human mind and body to adapt to and “meld with” a tool is more than just interesting to me – it exhilarates me when I experience it. On this ride, the degree to which my mind and body are connected to my bike has become increasingly evident, and I notice it again this morning as we take off. The loss of the trunk on the back of my bike makes the bike feel fast and responsive beneath me. I’ve become adjusted to the heavier bike, and the way it responds, but now getting the bike back closer to the balance that it has when not touring makes me smile, and touches that place in my mind that loves to meld with tools.

I grew up in a time when all the boys played baseball. I played baseball a lot, and loved it. Earlier in the summer, I met my brother to fish for a few days, and we both brought baseball gloves. We stood out in the street and threw that ball back and forth for 15 minutes or so. There was something absolutely magical about what was happening during those 15 minutes.

Before we threw the ball the first time, I started to feel that magic as I slipped my hand into my old mitt. Even though it had essentially been 40 years since I’d put that glove on, I could feel the leather welcome my hand like a dear old friend welcomes a best friend after a long absence. The familiar smell of the worn leather, the look of it, the weight of it on my hand, everything about the glove on my hand brought my mind into a zone of familiar harmony that can only happen when you experience that integration of body, tool, and mind that is so uniquely human.

Picking up the baseball, feeling the perfect size of it beneath my fingers, feeling the stitches fit perfectly beneath my fingertips as I handled the ball. All these sensations heightened my already keen sense of harmony. I threw the ball, and that familiar arc and release of the arm brought a warm smile to my heart – I suspect my face was smiling as well.

While the 40 years of absence disappeared in an instant as it relates to the feel and sensation of the glove, and of throwing the ball, other aspects of the experience had, shall we say, lost a bit in the period of absence. 40 years ago, I could throw the ball pretty hard, and with a good deal of accuracy. When Erik and I played catch that day, I was shocked at how many times the ball fell short of the mark I was aiming for. This inability of the body to perform to the standards that the mind/body interface remembers is humbling for sure, but frankly I felt a strong drive to start throwing the ball more, so that I could either approach the standard that my mind recalled, or reset the standard, so that I could find that complete delight that I yearned for.

This melding of human and tool happens when we spend a great deal of time with a particular thing. Our mind/body coordination adapts to the exact dimensions and weight and shape of the thing we’re using, and it becomes wired into us. The “thing” becomes part of us – almost like an arm or a leg is part of us. I really think that our mind develops an attachment to the thing, much like it would to an arm or a leg. At some deep level, the “thing” becomes a part of “me”.

I’ll bet there’s an evolutionary advantage to the delight we gain when we meld with a “thing” in this way. Our march toward dominance of the planet has been largely enabled by our ability to use tools so effectively, so it makes sense to me that finding delight in extremely close harmony with a tool – a fascination and exhilaration with “being one with” a tool – would make us more likely to find ways to use tools more effectively with each generation.

This morning, what I know is that I’m delighted by the light and responsive feel of my bike. Just like I smiled when I slipped my old baseball glove on when I played catch with my brother earlier in the summer, I’m smiling at the familiar feel of the bike I love beneath me. I love my bike, I really do.

We stop at the c-store on the way out of town, and grab some fluid and a quick bite of fuel. As I’m stepping out of the door, I notice Dave using his cell phone. I’ve seen him messing with his cell phone before at the beginning of the day, and never really thought about it – I guess I assumed he was checking messages from work or something. But this morning, I come to understand what this cell-phone ritual is.

It’s slick really, and I’m impressed. The computer on the bike keeps track of when we’re rolling and when we’re still, how far we go, how fast we go, and all that. But Dave is applying a little technology to a much more simple approach to how far we go in a day, and how long it takes us to do it. First thing in the morning, as we leave the c-store and hit the highway, Dave sends himself a text message, which records the time. Then, at the end of the day, when we look at each other and decide to call it a day, Dave sends himself another text message. When the trip is all over, we have an official beginning and ending time for each day.

While this might not sound like a big deal, it’s actually quite useful. The bike computers recorded our average times while we were riding, but this doesn’t account for all the time we spend messing around, eating, taking pictures, all of that. Dave’s method allowed us to bookend the days with start and stop times, and just count the miles in between.

Just one more of Dave’s “counting” things. And as is often the case with these counting things that he does, this one lifted the veil from an interesting little piece of information. That is, our average speed across days was almost identical, no matter what we did and no matter what the wind did.

Of course, any logical reader just re-read that last sentence a couple times, and is dead certain that I either typed it wrong, or somehow or another I just don’t know how to add and average. But I’m tellin’ ya’, it’s absolutely true. In the next chapter, I’m going to talk about some of the expected and unexpected lessons we learned on this ride, and I’ll detail out our daily stats. For now, let me just say that regardless of wind, road,humidity, heat, mileage, mood, moon phase, or anything else, our daily speed including both rolling time and stopped time averaged about 11 mph. Amazingly, the days with tailwinds were NOT the days with the higher averages.

It’s completely counter-intuitive. However, our final day highlights something for me that – as I’ll look back on it later – will help me to get my head around what I think is going on.

On this final day, as we leave the c-store and head out of town, the weather is wonderful once again. The humidity feels good on my face and in my lungs as I ride, and the weatherman promised a NE wind today – a quartering tailwind for us as we ride pretty much due west. Leaving town before any wind has started at all, I’m once again sitting up in the saddle, spending a good deal of time watching the scenery around me, enjoying one more perfect morning.

We’re deep in the heart of cultivated land, surrounded by young beans, ripening corn, and freshly cut wheat fields. I watch several groups of whitetail deer on the edges of the fields. In some cases they’re using the last few minutes of low light to grab the last snacks before daylight, but generally they’re moving quietly along the edge between the trees and the field, or rapidly across the field headed for that edge where they feel comfortable. In the low light they’re hard to see, but once you find the pattern in your mind’s eye, they start to pop out at you in quite a few of the fields. By the time the sun has crested the horizon and started to shine into the fields, there isn’t a deer to be seen anywhere.

I stop to take pictures several times along the highway. The air is heavy with humidity, painting the landscape with a soft, attractive blanket. This is one of those conditions that I find tough to catch with the camera, so looking back on the pictures later I’ll be disappointed. But this morning, I’m enjoying myself.

We assumed there’d be some good breakfast options along the way when we started out this morning, but we make an early tactical mistake. We pass the turnoff to the little town of Marquette as it’s still pretty early, assuming that we’ll be able to find something else within the hour. If you check out Marquette with Google maps, you’ll see that they’ve got a nice cafe downtown, as well as a c-store. The savvy rider will stop here for a meal, as it’s longer than you expect to the next place to eat.

There’s a certain rhythm that we’ve come to expect along the highway with respect to when we’ll find services, and as I ride this morning, I’m coming to learn a bit about how this rhythm is determined by the nature of who uses the highway, and what they use it for.

Along US-160 across the southern part of Kansas, folks who are traveling are a combination of local residents running errands and doing business, as well as regional residents who are traveling many dozens of miles – maybe 100 miles or more in many cases. In addition, there are a few travelers who are using the highway as their route across the state – traveling many hundreds of miles. Consequently, it’s likely that there’ll be folks who want to stop for refreshments now and again, so in each little town we were able to find a c-store and generally a place to sit and eat.

However, along K-4, you’ll find only local traffic. Anyone traveling east and west for any significant distance will be traveling along I-70, which is not that far north of K-4. Folks on the road are just moving along from point to point, with no need for stops between. Consequently, it’s unlikely that a business would spring up along the way to support those travelers who’d want to stop for some reason – nobody’s stopping.

Tip for the savvy rider: When riding from Lindsborg to Hoisington, it’s probably a good idea to stop in Marquette for breakfast…

It’s not long after passing Marquette that I get the inkling that we’re not going to have our tailwind today. For a few miles we’re headed SW, and it’s definitely a headwind along that stretch, though a very light one. Turning back due west, it feels like when the wind varies from the S, it varies so that it comes slightly from the W. Again, it’s a very light wind, but I’m feeling a little cheated that the promised tailwind has become a crosswind, with a tiny flavor of quartering headwind every now and again.

My reaction is predictable in the face of a wind – I put my head down and go to work.

My mind readjusts quickly to the new events, and resets the expectation for the speed that I’ll ride and how much work it will take to ride. While slightly disappointed, I’m real OK with things – it’s a short ride today, and the wind is light, and it’s a crosswind not a headwind. It’s OK.

But that initial reaction – that “putting my head down and getting to work” – is the key to understanding the fact that our average daily speed was essentially the same regardless of how hard the riding was. Maybe it wouldn’t be the same with everyone – maybe it’s unique to Dave and I. Maybe everyone reacts to things much differently. But I think this little quirk explains why our average daily speed was always the same.

Here’s what happens, (to quote Mr. Monk).

When the wind’s at my back, and the riding’s easy, then I sit up and relax. I spend my energy enjoying my surroundings, being a part of where I am. I fall into the “moment” by reaching out and connecting to what’s around me. I see more, and stop more, and ride easier. I consciously take it easy in order to enjoy my surroundings, and let myself connect.

When the wind’s in front of me, my mindset changes completely. Now, the component of the “moment” that becomes foremost in my mind is the wind, and my need to put my head down and work against the wind. I still find little places where my head comes up and I appreciate what’s around me, but my primary focus is finding and maintaining that sweet spot where my body’s producing efficient work. I fall into the “moment” by reaching inside of me, and finding the harmony of efficient output.

I suppose most folks would scold the second scenario – the condition where I put my head down and work. Most folks would probably say that its better to find a way to enjoy your surroundings even when the work is hard, or maybe to ease off the pedals and just go really slow to avoid too much focus on the work. But I don’t buy that.

I think there’s real joy in hard work. I think we’ve lost touch with that real joy in our culture. I’m certain there are many readers who focus on what I’m missing when I put my head down and work hard. And they’re right – I am missing quite a bit when I do that. That side of the equation is easy for any of us to see, and easy to understand.

But there’s a balance to everything. Every time I give something up, there’s something that comes back to balance what I’ve given up. Every time I take something, there’s something I’m giving up. If I reach to pick something up, I have to empty my hand first, right?

And that thing on the other side of this balance beam is the pure joy that comes from hard work. While we’ve come to think of hard work as something to be avoided, we’ve been missing the joy and benefit that it brings into our life. Our culture has built this myth that doing manual labor is a bad thing, and that if we’re successful in life, we can avoid the need to do hard physical labor. While our economy richly rewards executives who sit on their ass all day and wouldn’t know the business end of a shovel if it hit ‘em across the side of the head, it punishes those who spend their days using their hands and their backs to actually produce something – to actually do productive labor.

This balance beam feels to me a bit like that balance between giving and taking. When I sit up and relax – taking in my surroundings – it falls more on the “taking” side of the equation. There’s joy in it for sure, and I love it when it happens. But there’s more to life than just taking it in.

Not that I’m actually “making” anything when I put my head down and ride harder into the wind. It’s still a very selfish action in many ways because in the end it produces joy for me. It’s just that I’m pouring something of myself into what’s around me, and this is what produces the joy inside of me. At the end of the day, there’s surely a sense of accomplishment that comes with that sense of exhaustion, and I’m sure that’s part of what creates the joy in hard work.

But there’s more to it. Earlier I talked about that sweet spot that occurs when the heart rate, respiration rate, and cadence all seem to come together into a sweet harmony. That’s a harmony that only happens at high work output – I’ve never found it otherwise. There’s no waiting for a sense of accomplishment in that case – the joy is right there in the moment – right there in the “doing”.

At the end of the day, for all those who criticize those of us who put our heads down and hold our nose to the grindstone rather than sitting up and relaxing and enjoying the moment, I say I get it, and I think you’re right in many cases. However, I’d also say I think there are other ways to enjoy the moment, and other shades and complexions of joy. I’d recommend you find some ways to do hard work whenever you can, and begin to look for the joys locked up in those places where we put our back into the work and let the work carry us away.

Today is a mix, with some moments spent enjoying what’s around me, and some moments putting by back into it and enjoying the work.

Why Aren’t Cattle Truck Drivers As Courteous As Other Truck Drivers?

This might not be a fair question. It’s an over-generalization for sure. But here’s the deal: 35 years ago when I rode on these same highways, it seemed pretty consistent that the truck drivers who were the most dangerous were the ones driving cattle trucks. For years, I figured that wasn’t a fair generalization, and that it probably just seemed that way since so many of the trucks in this part of the country are cattle trucks after all.

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to say that I spent a few years as an over-the-road truck driver in my 20’s. I have no axe to grind with truck drivers – my experience as a cyclist and as a truck driver has been that truck drivers are generally the most safe and courteous drivers on the road. They have to be – their livelihood (and their life) depends on how safe they make the road around them.

But to this point in our ride, the pattern that I’ve been seeing supports my observations from the past on these roads. For whatever reasons, if there’s dangerous behavior on the part of a truck driver, the odds seem pretty good that the truck is a cattle truck.

And this morning is no exception to that “rule”.

The highway along here is much the same as it’s been since we turned onto K4 back at Alta Vista. There’s no shoulder, but the road itself is in pretty good shape. The traffic is so light that nearly always, when a car or truck is passing, they move all the way over into the oncoming lane to pass. I can’t tell you how appreciative a cyclist is when a driver does that. Especially when the driver of a truck does that.

It just makes sense to do that, doesn’t it? Weren’t we all taught as youngsters to respect and take care of the little guy? Aren’t most of our traffic laws designed with that ethic in mind – for the bigger to yield to the smaller? It’s just a matter of common sense, courtesy, and respect. I work hard to maintain that ethic of respect when I drive a vehicle. Even when I ride my bike, I work hard to always yield to a pedestrian or a slower bike.

I’ve noticed as the miles have rolled along on this ride that my ears have gotten quite good at predicting how much space a vehicle is giving me from the sound as they approach. I do wear a mirror, but as a vehicle is approaching, I like to focus all my attention on staying straight and predictable on the road. Twice this morning already, cattle trucks have passed quite close – barely moving over at all as they pass me. Behind me I hear a truck approaching, and it sounds like it’s not going to give me much room. I focus intently on holding the wheels right on the white line, and am nearly blown over as the cattle truck passes within inches of me rather than feet.

There’s no reason he needed to do this. If he moved at all from the center of the lane, it was over to the right to crowd me even more. There was no oncoming traffic, and the road ahead was free and clear for him to see that he had all the road he needed. Purely and simply, he was being an ass. Worse than that, it would have taken only a small variance in my line and he could easily have killed me. I watch ahead as he does the same thing to Dave.

What’s this about? Why on earth does he want to risk the lives of cyclists on the road, and his own ability to make a living driving a truck when he eventually kills someone – because eventually it’s likely he will? This selfish aspect of human nature, this ugly piece of who we are that wants everything for ourself rather than looking for ways to share what we have – especially when sharing costs us nothing, is a piece of our evolutionary makeup that it would sure be nice to find a way to get rid of…

Because at the end of the day, isn’t that what this is most likely about? If you drug that guy out from behind the wheel of that truck, and beat the snot out of him and asked him why he’s being so stupid, most likely he’d have some response that would sound something like, “bikes don’t belong on the highway”. We’ll argue the ups and downs of that later, but for now, let’s let him think he makes some sense, and ask another question: If he saw a little old lady walking down the middle of the road, would he try and run her over? There’s no question she shouldn’t be walking down the middle of the road, but there’s plenty of road, and it’s no big deal to move over a bit and avoid running her over. Just common sense and common courtesy – there’s more road than anyone needs. Now expand that to the bicycle, which does, in fact, have a place on the road, and try to justify attempting to running a cyclist off the road. Pure and simple, that’s what he was doing – trying to run us off the road – his road in his own mind.

Let’s talk more about that later…

We’re approaching Hoisington, and we can see the grain elevators in the distance. We pull out at the last highway marker of the trip, and read about the Cheyenne Bottoms Refuge, which we’re now on the edge of. We take the final picture of the bikes there at the pullout, saddle back up and head into Hoisington. It takes us no time at all to find a bar that’s open for lunch downtown, and call Carol and Peggy and let them both know where we are. It’s no surprise to either of them that we’ve found beer and fried food…

After we’ve had a beer and some fried bar food, we pack up the bikes into our respective vehicles. We make the acquaintance of a fella’ who might be traveling through Hoisington, and who might just be a local homeless guy, depending on which complexion of his story you believe. He’s carrying a veritable junkyard worth of old bike gear with him on his old mountain bike, including a couple of extra wheels. It’s tempting to believe that he really is making his way across the country as he says, and that our paths just happened to cross here on Main Street in Hoisington. But as is sometimes the case with folks who find themselves outcast and homeless in our culture, this fella’ seems to be a sandwich or two shy of a picnic.

Regardless, we enjoy the little conversation we have with the guy, and have fun pretending his story is true. It might just be true, but either way, it’s a fun story to listen to. We smile and nod, and he enjoys telling the story.

We make up stories about ourselves that fit the image that we want to believe in about who we are. We’re prone to stretch the truth of these stories a bit here and there to make ‘em fit better. So long as the story we tell is a good one, then people find us interesting, and we feel good about ourselves, right? Just a little grain of truth – that’s all it takes for a story to be a good one. I suppose the only difference between this homeless fella and me is that the stories I make up about me are a little more grounded in a believable reality – but probably only slightly so.

Peggy’s cousin Steve is a world-class storyteller. It’s truly a gift. He’ll tell ya’ straight up that a good bit of what he tells might stretch the truth here and there, or might embellish a spot or two that needed embellishing. But it’s part of a good story – fillin’ in the spots that need fillin’ in, and pullin’ out those pieces that don’t fit that well.

Because it’s about the story we want to believe, and the story is always about the journey we’re on. Whether our homeless friend is headed where he thinks he’s headed, or even if he has no idea where he’s headed, he’s building the story of who he is, and we wish him good luck and many blessings on his journey.

Our adventure is over for now. We’re feelin’ pretty good about the trip we just took. We’re already starting to embellish the stories we’ll tell about the trip. We’re 100% positive that we’ll continue this wonderful tradition with another adventure next summer, but time will judge that promise.

Like all journeys, ours between this ending and the next beginning might take many unexpected turns. When we hit Winfield, we turned our back to the wind and decided to ride where the wind took us. No doubt some of that will happen on our journey to the next adventure. Whether we’re headed where we think we’re headed, or even if we’re completely doped up on where it is that we’re sure we’re headed, we’ll hope for good luck and many blessings between now and the next adventure.

Thunderstorms rolled through the Flint Hills overnight, and the air is heavy with humidity as we strap the bags onto the bikes in the dark this morning. There’s a light fog around us, and I can sense a heavy fog hanging above – between me and the sky. Some combination of sight and sound and smell makes that layer apparent in the dark. I’ve often wondered how we know it’s there, but we seem to be good at sensing it.

We fill the bottles with water, as we’re not sure if we’re going to find a c-store on our ride north along K177. Technically we go through Strong City right away, but we’re not sure what we’ll find this early. We each eat a granola bar – again just in case there aren’t any c-store calories waiting for us. Better safe than sorry…

The roads are still wet from the overnight rain. There’s a delightful quality to the sound of riding your bike down the streets of a small town early in the morning, before there’s light and before anyone’s up. The sound of the tires on the road and the chain as it turns bounce with a lonely feel off the walls of the homes as you pass. It’s one of my favorite parts of bicycle riding – that early-morning ride through a small town. This morning it’s enhanced by the light fog around us as we ride.

K177 follows a route that misses “downtown” Strong City. By doing this, we avoid a mile or so of travel on US56, which would have been greatly appreciated during the day when the road is busy, but this time of the morning, we’d have preferred to go through the middle of town in case there was a c-store. We recognize what’s happened when we’re crossing over US56 a mile or two west of town. We briefly consider heading back to town in search of a c-store, but quickly decide it’s not worth it – we’ve taken in a few calories, and we’ve got full water bottles.

It’s about a 20 mile ride to Council Grove before breakfast this morning. The air’s absolutely still as we move into the beautifully rolling landscape of the Flint Hills north of Cottonwood Falls. This section of highway might be one of the most beautiful in the country. (I probably said that about the last section too, didn’t I?) The combination of cool morning temperature and complete lack of wind of any sort, combined with the anticipation of riding this section of highway that I love so much, has me energized and excited.

I feel myself trying to edge toward riding harder – maybe getting up out of the saddle and hitting the pedals hard on some of the climbs. As my heart rate settles into a nice high-aerobic rate, and the respiration rate rises on the short climbs, I feel my body trying to find that aerobic “sweet spot” that’s so enjoyable.

This “aerobic sweet-spot” is fascinating to me. I’m not sure if most people experience it or not, but I know Dave has expressed that it happens to him. It’s not exclusive to cycling, but seems to happen with any aerobic activity that has a rhythm to it. Since I’m an atrocious runner, I can’t speak about running, but I know it happens when climbing hillsides on foot and when cross-country skiing.

I don’t have a good singing voice, but I’m passable at harmonizing with other voices. When I’ve sung with folks in the past – especially when singing accapella – there’s a really sweet thing that happens when the voices come into tune with one another. It usually doesn’t just happen with the first note, but rather it’s a progression that starts with folks struggling to find the right pitch. You steal sideways glances at each other, and might see a furrowed brow now and again. Folks are leaning away from the other voices to avoid distraction. Then, as the tune progresses, you hit a spot here and there where the voices come together very nicely. From these little spots of good harmony coming together, folks begin to smile, the wrinkles smooth out of brows, and tension is replaced by relaxation. Folks start to sing with their ears, letting the voice in their vocal chords act as a piece of what their ears are hearing. Most of the time, this is as far as it gets – a few really sweet spots where the harmony is just right, surrounded by a tune that’s close enough to sound pleasant.

But now and again, something happens that feels like a little piece of heaven. The voices come together in a perfect harmony, and they stay there. When this happens, eyes close, and everyone leans together so they can better hear the voice as a whole. Instead of 4 voices, the sound becomes a single voice. If you’re lucky enough to be part of that when it happens, it makes the hair on the inside of the back of your head stand up. You feel chills all the way to your toes. You never want the singing to stop. When it does stop, you feel an unspoken connection to the others in the group that’s quite powerful.

The aerobic sweet spot is a little like that sort of voice harmony to me. It builds slowly, and usually happens on a long climb – especially a gradual climb. My legs find a cadence that feels good. My respiration rate falls into some connection with that pedaling cadence, and it feels particularly good. Sometimes, that’s the end of it, and it’s a really enjoyable climb. But now and then, the heart finds a rate that blends well with the respiration and the cadence, and this sweet feeling of harmony wraps itself around me, and I never want the climb to end.

It’d be interesting to know if there is really a connection in the rhythm of these 3 functions – cadence, breathing, and heart-rate. When you’re in that sweet-spot, are the 3 rhythms actually relating to one another – could you see a pattern like you’d see in music? When it’s happening, the last thing I want to do is start to analyze something, so I never really try and pay attention – I just fall into the little slice of heaven that’s happening around me. Pedal, breathe, smile, and enjoy.

I also know that when I find this sweet-spot, I’m not fully aerobic. That is, the rates are high enough that I’m burning calories anaerobically. My sense is that I’m extremely efficient in how I’m burning the calories, but I’m anaerobic none-the-less. This morning, depending primarily on stored calories and hoping for 120+ miles before the day is over, the last thing I need to do is start to dip into the glycogen tank by burning calories anaerobically before I’ve even had breakfast.

So I sit back and focus on the wonder of the morning around me, resisting the temptation to lose myself in that sweet-spot harmony of strenuous work. It’s easy to focus instead on the world unfolding itself around me this morning as the sun moves toward daylight. It’s hasn’t risen yet, but it’s letting us know it’s on its way with a wonderful light show bouncing off the low clouds on the horizon, enhanced by fog that’s still stealing across the plains and hiding low in the valleys.

We come to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, and stop to admire the place. I try taking some pictures, but I’m not hopeful that they’ll turn out well in the low early-morning light. The architecture of both the house and the immense barn structure are beautiful, and we admire the property for a few minutes.

This farm is headquarters for the 11,000 acre preserve. It was built in the mid-1800s as a mansion for a large landowner/cattleman from southeastern Colorado, and changed hands many times since. In the end, it was combined with other properties to form the approximately 11,000 acres that are the current preserve.

When I lived here 35 years ago, the notion of a Tallgrass Prairie Preserve was being hotly debated. Back then, there was a significant portion of the regional population, as well as many at a national level, who could see in the Flint Hills the remnants of what was once the vast savanna of the Great Plains. The only reason that it still survived in the Flint Hills was that, with the exception of a few rich bottom lands, the hills weren’t suited to farming. Consequently, there were some pretty big stretches that had never been tilled, and still held a good measure of native grasses.

There are several varieties of tallgrass native to this region, but Big Bluestem was the dominant player in the tallgrass prairie, (Indian Grass and Switchgrass were also common). While Big Bluestem takes quite a while to become established when it’s first planted, it slowly and methodically expands and strengthens its root system over the years, eventually reaching deeply into the rocky soil in a way that allows it to withstand the ferocious winds, blistering heat, and deadly cold that’s part of life on the prairie.

Prior to 1820, it’s estimated there were 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie across the Great Plains. As America evolved into the version that we know now, the vast majority of this prairie was broken and tilled to be used as farmland. By the 1970’s, only a tiny portion of that original prairie still held the native tallgrass that had defined it. Some of that tiny portion existed in the Flint Hills, where generations of private ranch ownership had used the land for grazing. Generally, grazing is exactly what the prairie wants. However, when Big Bluestem matures and gets big about the middle of the summer, it’s value as forage to domestic cattle goes down dramatically. Consequently, grazing practice over the generations in the Flint Hills has evolved to a very efficient system, where large number of young cattle are brought in about April, and they graze until sometime in July, when the grasses are starting to get too mature. Then the cattle are taken to market, and the land waits until the next grazing season, or in some cases are cut for hay. This works well, except for the fact that Big Bluestem doesn’t tolerate heavy grazing well – especially early in the season. So year after year, the stands of Big Bluestem decrease little by little as they’re heavily grazed when they’re young. The prairie exists and all seems to be in balance, but the “tall” is being taken out of the tallgrass prairie, replaced with species that are more tolerant of the grazing patterns that come with domestic cattle production.

I should mention that Little Bluestem is also a pretty common plant that exists throughout the prairie. My guess is that it would grow just about anywhere in the country. It’s a beautiful plant whose seed-heads stand about 3’ tall in late summer. As autumn progresses, Little Bluestem ripens into the glory of the prairie, standing a beautiful rusty red throughout the winter. By the time spring finally rolls around, the ripened and dead top has finally surrendered to winter, laying down on the ground to let the new growth of spring push past it toward the sky. This species is a big player in prairie that’s referred to as “midgrass prairie”.

Big Bluestem, on the other hand, is a massive plant. I’ve hunted birds in fields that’ve been restored to large stands of Big Bluestem, and it’s like working your way through a forest. The seed-heads are 8’ tall, and the plant base is 6’ in diameter or more. I can imagine a stretch of prairie where Big Bluestem has established itself, and has been growing for hundreds of years. It once ruled the tallgrass prairie, and I imagine it was Big Bluestem that caused early white settlers to talk about prairie grasses to high you had to stand in the stirrups of your saddle just to see over the top.

As the years went by and Big Bluestem was pushed further and further from dominance in the tallgrass prairie, a number of efforts were launched to try and find a way to establish some sort of National Park or other protected area, where Big Bluestem could be allowed to reestablish itself, and the “tall” could come back to the tallgrass prairie.

Conservation organizations tried many times to find a way to establish a park or preserve over the years. Local landowners, however, were distrustful of government, and didn’t want the government to own a big piece of the Flint Hills. A generation earlier, the federal government had come in and used eminent domain buy up large tracks of land to flood for Tuttle Creek Reservoir – there were probably other examples like this as well – and this left a bad taste in the mouths of the landowning community in the area.

This is a classic battle in our country. Our culture is fiercely devoted to the rights of individuals, and from the early days we’ve defended private ownership of land, and the rights of the landowner. (Of course, we only got this fervor after we’d used eminent domain principles to take the land from its previous owners in the first place – the native cultures who were here before we were – but that’s a discussion for another time…)

So long as there was an endless supply of land still to the west of us we were OK. As we moved west, we would simply use the might of the federal government to apply principles of eminent domain, and take the land from the existing “owners”. But once we “settled” the land, and re-established ownership under European sounding names, we forgot how much we’d previously supported the notion of the federal government obtaining land in the interest of the nation as a whole. We became fierce supporters of the rights of the individual property owner, and we began to despise any efforts on the part of the federal government to act in the interest of the common good over the interest of the individual owner.

I describe the narrative in this way because it’s important to understand the history of the role of the federal government in land disputes. From the earliest stages of the development of our nation, the federal government has been active in defining the shape of our nation, and the ownership and control of the land of our nation.

It was under the leadership of a visionary Republican president, with the support of both houses of congress under Republican control, that the country took a dramatic turn toward increased involvement of the federal government in the management of vast tracks of land in this country for the common good. It was Teddy Roosevelt who began the National Park System, and who defined and shaped strategy and policy that recognized clearly the need for the federal government to act on behalf of “The People” of the nation overall, even when this was at odds with the interests of individual owners.

Which really brings us back to that word – conservative. I make no bones about the fact that Teddy is my #1 hero in the history of presidents in this country. He was conservative deep into his bones, and believed passionately in a new kind of conservation. While he absolutely supported the principles of individual land ownership, and was a fierce defender of the rights of the individual, he also believed deeply in the principles of pluralism upon which our country was founded. He believed that the interests of The Common Good, or The People, were the interests that the government needed to defend. And as a conservative – a conservationist – he brought more land in our country under government stewardship than all other presidents combined – before and since.

Of course, with power comes corruption, and there’s no doubt that there have been many instances in the history of federal, state, and local government in our country where the power of the state has been abused in the “taking” of property from individual landowners. Look at any major city in this country, and you’re likely to find that the city abused power in the taking of land to build sports stadiums, and that the primary beneficiary of this action was generally a very small group of wealthy owners. Not to discount that the public in general might enjoy some benefit from these stadiums, but when you try and stack the “common good” of a new stadium against the rights of the previous owners of the property, I suspect the math rarely works out so that it’s really “worth it” to the common good to take that property. A few who are already wealthy get more wealthy, the ownership rights of several people are stripped, and the “common good” might see a tiny little boost.

In this particular case, I really believe that the great fear was leftover from what folks in the area considered the abuses of power of the federal government when they created Tuttle Creek Reservoir. Throughout the Midwest, the Army Corps of Engineers was taking possession of thousands of tracks of rich farmland, and flooding it beneath a network of reservoirs meant to allow control of flooding further downstream in the Kansas, Missouri, and Mississippi drainage systems. Once the Corps decided on a project, they came in and took what they needed to create their reservoir.

I suspect that this network of flood-control measures has reduced downstream flooding tremendously over the past 4 or 5 decades, but I’m not qualified to argue that science. For the sake of argument, let’s say it has. We were able to control flooding downstream, but doing so required that we take the land of hundreds of farmers upstream. Surely some good resulted, but was enough “greater good” won to justify the taking of the land? Was something saved that couldn’t be replaced?

If you’re one of the landowners who lost your land, the answer is probably no. If you’re one of the folks downstream who experiences less flooding, the answer is probably yes. But what about me and the other 99%+ of America – do we feel that the equation was fairly weighed out? I can only speak for myself, and I’ve got to say that I’m not so sure the system was worth it. Why not accept that flooding occurs, and make sure that when people build in a flood plain, they accept responsibility and risk? Sure we loose some portions of cities, but when it happens, rebuild on higher ground. Even if the government picked up some of the tab, how much would we have saved when compared to the cost of building and maintaining this network of reservoirs? Bottom line – the costs incurred from a flood are avoidable – don’t build in the flood plain. If you choose to build in the flood plain, why should the federal government – The People of our nation – step in and bail you out? All we do is set ourselves up for continual and endless bailouts when disasters strike.

In the case of the Tuttle Creek project, I think I’d come down on the side of the landowners – there’s just not enough common good at risk to justify taking land. I could sure be full of s–t, but that’s the way I see it.

In the case of finding a place to preserve the final remnant of a once giant sea of tallgrass prairie, I think I see enough greater good to justify it. But the funny thing was, in this case, there probably wasn’t a lot of eminent domain type purchasing that would be required. In the end, after the preserve was created, the Nature Conservancy stepped in and bought all the land. So, it sits in private ownership, managed by the federal government. I suppose that’s a nice compromise that gets the job done. And of course, there’re probably big pieces of the story that I just don’t get.

The most important piece of this story to me is how important it is to see things from the other guy’s perspective. If I’m a landowner in this area, I’ve been brought up with a severe distrust of the government. No different than the Pawnee or Kansa tribes that lived here before, and were swindled by us through our federal government out of their land. Both sets of landowners distrust the government, because they’ve both seen abuse. They’re distrustful for good reason – they want their individual rights to the land protected above all else, and the federal government has proven that it will sometimes come down to protect the greater good of The People over the individual rights of owners.

On the other hand, folks who would benefit from the Prairie Preserve – essentially everyone who isn’t a landowner in the discussion – sees benefit, and can’t figure out why landowners are so distrustful.  They stand to benefit from a Prairie Preserve, in that we’ll successfully preserve an important ecological piece of this great nation. These folks aren’t a bunch of wild-eyed radicals – they’re average Americans who believe in conservation and preservation – they’re extremely conservative in this respect. In fact, they’re probably a whole lot like the ancestors of the current landowners, who saw great benefit when the government took the land in the first place from the Pawnee and the Kansa.

Remember back on Day 1 of our ride – back when we talked with the folks who were opposing the expansion of the bombing range in southern Colorado? To my little tiny eyes, that’s a clear case of government abuse in trying to take land for something that just doesn’t serve enough common good to warrant the taking of the land.

Every situation is different. There isn’t a single right answer that applies all the time. That’s what I loved about the way Teddy approached things – pluralism – looking for that balance that represents the broadest possible interests while respecting individual rights.

We do live in a wonderful country, don’t we? How lucky we are. Lucky indeed.

And I’m feeling like one of the luckiest guys in the world this morning as I enjoy this perfect morning ride. This morning I take more pictures than any other morning of the ride. Before we stop for breakfast in Council Grove, I take over 100 pictures. In one spot, I’m so taken with the gestalt of the morning – the combination of beautiful early morning light, zero wind, low traffic, and the glorious morning sounds that I stop the bike and turn on my digital voice recorder – seeing if I can pick up some semblance of how nice the birds sound this morning. I’m not real handy with the machine, so just hit the “record” button and hold the little machine up in the air for a minute.

After an hour or so on the road, we make a nice fast descent into Council Grove. There’s a lot of history in this little town. It was a key point of “interface” for the Indian tribes that owned this land before we did, it was an important supply and provision point on the Santa Fe Trail, and it was the site of more than one important “treaty”.

Council Grove was right at the boundary between the lands of the Pawnee and the lands of the Kansa prior to the middle of the 19th century. What became known as the Santa Fe Trail had been a trading trail for many generations prior to the coming of the wagon trains, and I suppose it made sense that this ancient trading route would serve as a boundary between nations.

We look for a place to eat breakfast. There may be more places open for breakfast, but we found only the Saddlerock Cafe. I suppose with a great place like this to eat, a little town might not need any other breakfast spots. It’s toward the east end of town, just south of the main drag through town, at about 6th and Main.

Their chicken-fried steak and eggs might be the best of the trip. We end up sitting down next to the “big table” – the one where the local men gather for breakfast in the morning. It’s not a particularly big (physically) table, so the guys sort of rotate through as is generally the practice when it comes to this grand small-town tradition.

After breakfast we climb back into the saddle, and head further on up K-177. The wind is supposed to come up out of the NE today, so we hope to make it to Alta Vista and K-4 before it kicks up. By the time we reach K-4 and turn west, the wind has been hitting us in the face more and more strongly, and the left turn feels heavenly.

I’ve probably said it a dozen or more times, and I’m gonna say it again: There are few things in life as sweet as turning your bicycle so that the wind stops beating you, and starts to favor you. One minute you’re hearing the constant irritation of the wind blowing in your ear, frustrated by slow progress working against the wind, and the next minute a sweet and beautiful world opens up to you. The wind is on your back, the pedaling is suddenly easy, the sounds of the prairie around you replace the bitter wind in your ear, and you begin to notice the sweet smells blowing across your face.

K-4 has no shoulder on it, but the traffic volume is so sparse that it really doesn’t matter. While we’re still in the Flint Hills as we turn west, it doesn’t take long until the landscape around us has changed from prairie grasses to tilled farmland. We’ve transitioned to yet a new face of Kansas along this highway, with a deep earthy smell when we pass recently tilled fields with dark black soil. The population seems sparse still, though it seems to get a little thicker as we move west during the day.

On the map, it would appear that there are towns every 15 or 20 miles. While this is true, don’t expect to find much in the way of services in these towns. Since they are not on a major highway, they seem to serve a pretty small population. While you can find a gas station at most of them, and a c-store if you’re lucky, a place to sit and eat is pretty much out of the question until you hit Herrington. And if you want to eat at Herrington, you’ll need to detour off of K-4 to the south for 3 or 4 miles to get to a Pizza Hut. This morning we don’t want to take a chance, so we make the detour and eat at the Pizza Hut. As it turns out, there’s a place in Hope that we could have eaten as well, which is probably about 15 miles west of Herrington. Noon buffet at Pizza Hut is pretty hard to beat when you’re looking for lots of calories though…

One thing that surprises me along K-4 is that I’m still seeing Scissortail Flycatchers. I’m not sure why I’m so fascinated by these birds. They have a long scissor-tail, as the name would suggest, and they’re quite pretty. In addition, they’re grace in the air is pretty hard to match, and they seem to display and enjoy their graceful gift often as they frolic in the air in pairs between the power lines and the fence lines. It may be that they’re actually catching bugs together like that, but it sure looks like dancing in the air to me.

I don’t remember these birds appearing this far north 35 years ago when I lived here. It might be that they were here and I just never saw them, or it might be that they’ve extended their range northward as part of the general warming that appears to be effecting us. Whatever the reason, I’m happy to see them.

I’ve been trying to point them out to Dave, but have never been riding close enough to him when I see them to get his attention. He’s stopped up ahead at a dirt road, and I’m excited because I see several Scissortails on the lines overhead. I point and holler, and he smiles and nods his head – I assume letting me know that he sees them. When I get up there though, he’s enthralled with the road sign that he’s stopped under, and hasn’t seen the flycatchers at all. The road that he stopped at is called D Avenue, and the sign reads “D ave”. Cute. The flycatchers are gone, so I take “D ave’s” picture by his sign, hoping they’ll return so he can see them. A couple of them do, so I feel great to have shared this wonderful little bird with “D ave”. He nods and smiles with obligatory appreciation, but I’m pretty sure the street sign is way more cool to “D ave” than are my little flycatchers…

With the wind at my back, I’m sitting higher in the saddle, and looking around more. I’m seeing lots of birds and hawks this morning, including several pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers. We don’t get those in Colorado either. I’m excited to point these out to Dave as well, and I get the obligatory smile and “neat”, but I’m pretty sure Dave’s still watching the street signs. And I’m right of course, because pretty soon he describes to me the pattern that this particular county seems to use in naming their roads. Turns out this is one of the many things that Dave’s been counting and cataloging along our way – how the different counties name their roads.

Dave loves to do that stuff. Count things, catalogue things, find the patterns. Did you know that “Main Street” almost always runs north and south in towns through southeast Colorado and southern Kansas? I might have that wrong, and Dave’ll correct me when he reads this if I do. But they consistently run one way or the other. This is one of the many little patterns that Dave pointed out to me as we rode. I think he found an exception or two, (he can probably tell you exactly how many and where they were), but it was clearly a consistent pattern. Typing these words, I’ve checked Google to see if someone else has explained this, but am unable to (easily) come across this observation. But it’s true.

Bringing us back to that wonderful yin and yang thing that goes on between Dave and I on this ride – the difference in what we see, what we notice, what we enjoy, and how the miles pass beneath our wheels. Dave’s commented on it before, and today I’m noticing it more than any other day of riding. Dave focuses on the “things” of the ride, hence the counting and the cataloging. Neil focuses on the “experience” of the ride – the moment if you will.

I love being mature enough to appreciate this difference. There’s no right/wrong or better/worse about this fundamental difference. Dave stated it one day earlier in the ride in a way that made it clear that he thought it would be better to be able to “experience the moment” rather than “count the things”, but I still don’t agree with him. Sure I’m finding exquisite joy in our ride this morning, but Dave is smiling and enjoying the ride just as much as I am. He’s busy cataloging road names, counting miles, making all sorts of connections to patterns that I’ll never see. He’s smiling the whole time. I’m oblivious to the things that are giving him joy because I’m wrapped in the experience of the “moments” that I’m passing through. It’s his focus on those things that are giving him joy that distract him and keep him from experiencing the ride in the same way that I do.

And right now, riding west along K-4 with the wind at my back, its the sweet smell of alfalfa that I’m experiencing. I’ve been around alfalfa all my life, and I’ve never noticed until today just how intoxicating that sweet smell can be. Off to my right is a quarter section of rich ground planted in alfalfa that hasn’t been cut at all yet this year. The flowers cover the field as far as you can see, and the butterflies and bees form a thick layer of activity over the top of the flowers. The smell is a deep one that blooms in the top of your head as you breathe in, and then hangs deep in the back of your throat with each breath. A mile further down the road, I’m still able to taste that deep, rich smell in the back of my throat.

Alfalfa is a fun crop to observe. It’s a perennial that comes back for several years. I’m not a farmer, but I’ve had farmers explain the cycle to me before, and I’ve come to appreciate the cycle when I hunt farmland for whitetail deer. (Alfalfa is to whitetail deer as tenderloin steak is to me.) It seems that when you plant Alfalfa, the first couple of years are the best and richest crops, and then the quality of the crop starts to drop off significantly. By the time you’re 3 or 4 years past the planting year, it’s time to plant something else. Which works out great because Alfalfa – being a legume – sets the nitrogen into the soil, making the soil that much better for nitrogen-hungry crops like corn. Synergy.

This field must be in its first or second year, judging by the thick, rich plants. A couple miles down the road, as Dave and I are riding together for a change, I mention the field to him, and he has, indeed, noticed the smell. I make some comment to him about alfalfa, as-if to educate him on this little bit of knowledge that I’ve got about farming, and he looks at me as-if I’m describing to him how to pedal a bike. Dave, you see, did grow up on a farm. This little tidbit that I had to wait until I was probably 30 years-old to learn was something that he probably knew before he was very far out of diapers. Maybe I exaggerate. But suffice it to say I feel pretty silly – a city kid trying to tell a farm kid about farming…

We have one more day to ride on our adventure, and this fact hits me about the middle of the afternoon. Carol is driving across Kansas today, and will pick Dave up tomorrow and head back to Colorado. It strikes me that she could drive to Lindsborg where we’re likely to end up tonight, and we could all have dinner together, not to mention that Dave and Carol could have a room to themselves, meaning (selfishly) that I’d have a room to myself. I tell Dave about this idea, (making it sound, I’m sure, like I was suggesting this for his benefit), and he calls Carol and they hatch a plan.

Now we have our hard destination for the day – Lindsborg. I’m really happy about this, as I have fond memories of Lindsborg from when I lived in Kansas. I remember it as a friendly and quaint town, and I’m sure Carol will love it. While part of me now starts to feel excitement and anticipation about “nearing the finish line” tomorrow, the other half of me is feeling pretty blue about the ride ending. (I should mention that the part of me that sits on the saddle is definitely anticipating the finish line…)

As we near Interstate 135 running north and south between Salina and Wichita, K-4 turns south and parallels the interstate for a while. This section has a shoulder, but it’s also very busy with both car and truck traffic. When we come to Assaria, the signs tell us that K-4 turns right. Turning right here would be a mistake for a bicycler, because if you follow the “official” K-4, you’ll spend about 4 miles on I-135. The savvy cyclist will NOT follow the sign and turn right here, but will stay on the nicely paved road headed south, and eventually join up with the official K-4 where it exits the interstate. It’s pretty dang silly that they did this.

On this day, Dave and I are not savvy cyclists, and are not aware of this little mistake. We follow the sign, and turn right. In about half a mile, we cross the overpass, and see the mistake – we see that in order to stay on 4, we’ll need to get on the interstate for a few miles. We’re not willing to do this, and just keep riding forward. The road we’re on is paved, and surely we’ll come to a paved road headed south soon, and this will take us to Lindsborg.

Someone should do a doctoral thesis someday on why it is that male humans find it so hard to turn around and backtrack. Our choice here is a really simple one: Backtrack half a mile and follow the nice paved road south, or just keep going forward on the off-chance that a nice paved road will appear out in the middle of nowhere that will take us to where we want to go. How stupid would we have to be to just keep riding forward? Deranged. Idiotic. A sandwich or two shy of a picnic.

Of course, we keep riding forward. After several miles, we comment to each other that the smart thing to do would have been to backtrack. Right. But it’s too late now, right? Duh. So, we get on a gravel road headed south, and the final 10 miles of the day into Lindsborg we ride a gravel road on skinny road tires. Which is a lot better than backtracking…

Dave and I beat Carol to Lindsborg by 2 beers. By the time she rolls in, we’re feelin’ pretty dang good. I notice that she’s not sitting very close to Dave, and figure maybe it’d be nice if we connected with a motel and showered before we ate. Carol agrees – quite enthusiastically it seems to me. We decide a nice little B&B would be fun, so we decide to try a couple that we’ve seen downtown.

Lindsborg really is a pretty little town. But I’m a bit disappointed by the general “feeling” of the town today. We walk into a B&B downtown – I think it was The Swedish Country Inn – and the guy behind the counter is downright snotty to us when we ask if he has any rooms. He doesn’t have any, and doesn’t know of anyone who might. Maybe he’s just having a bad day. But the gal who waits on us at supper is a little less than happy as well. Maybe it’s just a bad day in Lindsborg.

After all the miles we’ve ridden, and all the little towns we’ve been through on this adventure, I guess we’ve come to expect a certain sort of midwestern “feeling”. I can’t really call it “friendly”, though it certainly is that. Hospitality doesn’t seem like quite the right word either. It’s something bigger than either of these things.

I think it’s that genuine and real sense of care and concern that we’ve felt from so many folks along the road. Not overtly friendly. Not all sugary-sweet fake hospitality. Real, heartfelt care and concern. That’s what we’ve come to learn about the little towns and the people who live there.

That’s a rare thing, and one that we found often along our road. I’m realizing tonight how lucky we’ve been to have experienced it so often on this trip.

Without a doubt and without a close second, waking up at the Millstream Motel early Wednesday morning is more pleasant than any other morning of our ride. I’m sure that some of this has to do with the realization that this is a day off – a day of rest and relaxation after 5 days of riding. But there’s more to the “goodness” of the morning than just this knowledge.

For one thing, the room is the nicest we’ve stayed in so far. For another thing, it’s really quiet – the only real sound outside being the sound of the stream falling over the little dam that was built when there was a mill operating on the site. For another thing, I’m really looking forward to exploring the town a bit on our day off. But there’s more as well – something I’ll just call “good energy” for now.

The room we’re in feels warm. It’s almost a suite, with a small bed and chair in the front area where the TV is, and a bed in the back area where the bathroom is (and the back door). Dave has been more than gracious and lets me have the nicest part of the room – the back section with the real bed – while he’s taken the front room with the TV, A/C, and smaller bed. I sleep really cold, and rarely even need an A/C, so part of this decision is based on the fact that Dave wants to be closer to the A/C. Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt that I got the better end of the bargain, and I’m grateful as I wake up before first light on our day off. Though I’m an early riser, Dave is usually awake and up before I am. This morning, I try and sneak outside without waking Dave.

It’s a perfect morning as the pre-dawn light grows around me. Sitting on the back veranda, I’m surprised by the lack of bugs. Listening to the sound of the water in the creek, I lean back in my chair and watch a fisherman sitting on the bridge with a line in the water. I watch for quite a while as the light grows around him, and figure he might be sleeping in his lawn chair. I wonder if he’s spent the entire night there on the bridge.

After the light grows a good bit, I take a walk down to the bridge, and chat with the fisherman. I’m not a big fan of catfishing – just because of the static nature of it – but am enough of a fishing nut that I’m always interested in how someone’s doing when they’ve got a line in the water. Turns out that he’s been there a good bit of the night, and hasn’t had any luck. I would have thought that with the water up like it is, there’d be a good chance at catching some catfish – but what do I know about it?

Fishing is a funny sport. I’m a fan of a more active style of fishing – one where I’m pursuing or hunting the fish – but there are some odd aspects to the sport that seem to be common across most styles. This fella sitting on the bridge has spent hours in this lawn chair, watching his line down in the water, and hasn’t had a single bite. I might spend hours in my boat, softly trolling along a shore and casting hundreds of times up against the bank, and never get a single strike. But we keep coming back, and keep trying again.

On the surface this seems like odd behavior, but if you fish, it’s perfectly reasonable. There’s something about the activity of fishing that pulls us back to it all the time, and it doesn’t seem to be (as logic might suggest) connected much to the actual catching of fish. There’s some combination of factors that stack up to a complete “gestalt” of fishing that’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t infected with an attachment to this particular pursuit.

First off, there’s the peace, tranquility, and thoughtful space that usually surrounds the act of fishing. This isn’t something that’s always part of the sport, but it’s a pretty common component. For some, (like myself), there’s the hunt, which is powerfully addictive if you’re wired in a certain way. Learning the patterns of the prey, learning how he behaves, “becoming” or assimilating with the prey in order to hunt him. And for some, it’s a sport with the challenge that sports often bring to the individual.

For myself, I don’t really think of fishing as a “sport” – at least that’s not the aspect of the activity that grabs me. I think it’s more the combination of the peace and tranquility of the space, and “the hunt”.

Of course, in college I had a neighbor who used to go down to the creek (or crick depending on your dialect…) and fish for catfish every evening after work. He’s spend most of the night down there, then come back to sleep a few hours and head off to work again. He eventually confided that the real attraction to fishing for him was that it allowed him to get out of the house and away from his wife. I guess it was his escape – his way of avoiding conflict. I’m thinking there must be more effective ways of solving that particular problem, but then again, I suppose marriage counseling can get expensive…

Following my conversation with the fisherman on the bridge, I wander around to explore the town in the early morning. It’s still cool at this early hour, and the early light gives limestone a warm glow. A good bit of this town is built of limestone, right down to the sidewalks. Of course, over the years, most of the limestone sidewalks have been replaced with concrete, but there are a number of places where you can still see the old limestone. I’d like to believe that the replacement of limestone with concrete happened only when the limestone got broken for whatever reasons, but it’s pretty easy to believe that there may have been a time when limestone seemed too old-fashioned, and a modernization effort replaced much of it. Either way, it’s pretty cool to see those spots where it wasn’t replaced. My son designs and installs decorative concrete in ways to make it look like stone or slate or other materials, and the results are usually quite beautiful. But to see these old sidewalks – 100+ years old – in such perfect shape and continuing to grow in beauty as they age is a great reminder of just how tough it is to replicate what mother nature takes millions of years to create.

Dave is exploring the town too, and I run into him down by the courthouse. We each spend the early morning hours on our own self-guided walking tours of the town, before meeting up again at the hotel room around 10:00 or so. By that time, the Emma Chase Cafe is open, and we’re more than ready for breakfast.

Looking at the name, you might think that the Emma Chase Cafe is named after Emma Chase, who must surely have had something to do with the naming of the town. In a little bit of reading that I did at the historical society there, I think someone saw a picture once of a woman from the 1800’s, and they just “named” her Emma Chase, hung the picture on the wall, and called the place the Emma Chase Cafe. Subsequent to that day, someone came along who could actually identify the woman in the photo, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t named Emma Chase.

But the photo still hangs, and the name of the place remains. And I like it. Sort of like Roslyn’s Cafe in the fictitious town of Cicely on the old Northern Exposure show. In the show, the story went that the Cafe got it’s name from a woman who was part of a couple who founded the town. In the show – as in Cottonwood Falls – it’s irrelevant whether the story is actually true or not. It’s a good story. That’s all that matters.

In fact, the town of Cottonwood Falls reminds me in many ways of the Northern Exposure town of Cicely, and I see a lot of similarities in the people as well. It’s a neat little culture and community that seems to be evolving in Cottonwood Falls. On the one hand is the old ranching community – folks with local history that usually goes back a couple of generations or more. I know that culture well, having lived in the general area for many years myself. That community is pretty darned conservative in the true sense of the word. They’re generally independent, and don’t want to edge into other folks’ business. They generally figure we’ve all got our own eccentricities, and one man’s are no better or worse than another’s. On the other hand are the folks who come from a more “alternative” style of America. Interestingly, their leanings aren’t really that different from the old ranching community – they just have a different set of eccentricities. The two groups might speak in a slightly different dialect, and might dress differently from one another, but their basic conservative tendencies match up pretty nicely.

That word – “conservative” – is one that I need to talk about a bit in this context. I don’t use the word in the same way political talking heads on TV or in newspapers will use the term. Those folks seem to think the word conservative is synonymous with right-wing. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. In the same way, the talking-head elites seem to want to use the word conservative to describe a particular brand of religion in the country, and again I say, nothing could be further from the truth.

When I use that word – conservative – to describe the folks that I see building this community, I use it in a very pure sense, in the sense of pure and foundational conservative values. I don’t use it at all to describe someone’s political (right-wing or left-wing) or religious (progressive vs fundamentalist) beliefs. In the most pure sense, a conservative mindset could be summed up with a few bullets I think:

• I mind my own business – if someone needs help I help them, but short of that need, I keep my nose out of the affairs of other folks.
• I don’t spend money I don’t have. We each have different jobs to do, some make more money than others, but making more money or less money isn’t what conservative is all about. It’s about not spending money that you don’t have.
• I need convincing to make a change. It’s not that all change is bad, it’s just that I need convincing before I’ll embrace the change – the change has to improve the situation in some way.
• I’m generally tolerant and accepting of differences in people. Since I mind my own business, I accept that there’ll be a lot of differences in folks, and it’s not my job to try and make other folks behave the same as me.
• I’m frugal and careful with the resources that I have. I don’t waste money or other resources. In other words, I conserve what I have.

In the town of Cottonwood Falls – as in the fictional town of Cicely in the Northern Exposure show – the nice harmony of folks from many different backgrounds, and their basic conservatism, seems to make the town work well.

The proprietors of The Millstream Motel fit into this little harmony well in my opinion. Sharon and Richard Clute haven’t lived here their whole life, but moved into the area and bought the motel at some point in the not-too-distant past. They have the motel decorated in a way that makes you feel quite comfortable – I could easily see myself spending many days there sometime. While their appearance doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of small-town Kansas, they fit in perfectly here and seem to be both pillars and ambassadors for this unlikely little pocket of quirky harmony in the heart of the Flint Hills.

This morning, when I asked Sharon if there was a laundromat in town, she insisted that we just give our clothes to her, and she’d take care of them. While we’ve been washing our kit in the sink every night, we figured it’d be good to actually run everything through a washing machine at this point. As I dropped the clothes off with her, we sat and talked for quite a while about the town and the motel.

The Millstream Motel hasn’t been around all that long – at least I don’t think it has. I think Sharon and Rick purchased the property not that many years back from the fella who originally built it. The exterior walls of the motel are constructed with pieces of limestone that were once sidewalk in Cottonwood Falls. Sharon impresses me as someone with a nice blend of eccentricity and practicality. In talking with her, it sounds like she’s done more than her share of recruiting of folks to move to Cottonwood Falls and set up shop. Sharon’s a quiet and gentle soul I think, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to venture a guess that she may once have considered herself a hippie, I also wouldn’t expect that she’d be upset if I did say something like that…

While we’re talking, my stomach is growling for breakfast. Dave and I head down to the Emma Chase Cafe. Which is where I was in this story before I wandered over into this discussion of Northern Exposure… Dave an I sit down at a table at the Emma Chase, looking around for a menu. My breakfast menu has pretty consistently been chicken-fried steak, and I’m thinking that since we’re not riding today, maybe I should eat a little more lightly this morning. The waitress sees us both looking around, and lets us know they don’t really print a menu.

“What do you usually have for breakfast”, the waitress asks.

I shrug and look out the window before replying, “Eggs and toast I suppose – maybe some bacon.”

“Then that’s what I’ll fix for ya’”, she replies. Then looking at Dave, continues, “How ‘bout you?”

I don’t remember what Dave orders – I’m so enthralled with this nifty way to run a restaurant. Just fix folks what they like. I suppose it makes sense. If someone wants something you don’t feel like fixing, just put on your best Jedi Mind Trick Voice, and inform them that they really don’t want that, and maybe even suggest something that you feel like fixing. It’s such an elegant solution!

After breakfast, we have pie for dessert. It is late in the morning after all. And they’re darn proud of their pie at the Emma Chase – I figure it’d be an insult not to order pie. (Of course, for those of you who are really in the know, you know that no pie could really compare to Peggy’s Perfect Pie…)

We talk to a gal who I assume is the proprietor, and she tells us about their schedule of get-togethers during the month. It sounds like this is the happenin’ place to be on Friday nights, as they rotate the flavor of live music they host throughout the months, but always on Friday nights. This Friday, (being the third Friday of the month), is gospel night, and she’s sure we’d truly enjoy the jammin’ and singin’ and pickin’. I’m positive I would as well, and I’m sorry I’m gonna miss it.

I also learn that on the first Sunday of each month, they host a bicycler’s breakfast buffet. I’m sorry I’ll miss that as well. I think if I do this ride again, I’ll try and end up here on a first Sunday just to enjoy it!

Dave and I head back to the motel for a little rest between breakfast and lunch. I’m pretty sure a nap is going to catch up with me as the day moves along, and I also want to explore downtown now that the shops are open, but right now a little rest on the shady back porch is in order.

Dave and I settle in to chairs on the back veranda of the motel. The day’s getting quite hot already, and the breezy shade on the back of the motel is the perfect place for us to palaver. Dave and I like to talk politics. Even though there are things we disagree on, we both enjoy the benefit of a slightly new and different way to look at something that we already have an opinion on. And really, there’s not much I don’t already have an opinion on…

In America today, it’s unfortunate that the art of social discourse has become so crude and intolerant. I place the blame for this partially on the media for the hate mongering that they’ve become so good at over the last 30 years or so, but even more of the blame has to rest on us – the American people, who seem to harbor some addiction to watching this trash on TV and listening to it. We only want to talk to and listen to people like us – they must hold exactly the same opinion that we do, or they must be an idiot. The ability to respectfully disagree with someone is lost, as is the ability to have a conversation with someone and believe that they might be a little more right about the topic that I am.

I feel very grateful for my friendship with Dave. We often will pick a topic, and find that we have different opinions about the topic. We’ll dig in and toss things up and about for a while, and quite often end up realizing that there’s not a gnat’s hair’s worth of distance between what we believe about the topic after all. In the process we get to have some great conversations, I always learn a bit more about the topic that we’re discussing, and most importantly, I generally learn a little something about myself in the process.

Today we’re talking about corporations, and the role of the corporation in our culture and our economy. As always, the conversation moves back and forth and around to many different complexions of the issue. Dave and I have both worked in Corporate America for most of our career. We’ve both had high-responsibility jobs in large corporations. I’ve run my own business, as well as businesses owned by others. How how businesses (large and small) are run is something that we’re both familiar with.

It’s interesting to me how the media has portrayed a competition of sorts between government and the corporation in recent decades, as-if they’re two different forces designed to achieve the same thing, and we always need to choose one over the other. As we’ve privatized more and more public functions, it’s often been portrayed as an improvement, because private enterprise (ie: a privately owned company) is always more efficient than public enterprise (ie: government).

First off, I’ll say that my experience has been that a smaller enterprise is almost always more efficient than a larger enterprise – whether its public or private. I’ve always worked in the private sector in one way or another, and I’ve seen some very efficient operations, and I’ve seen some that are astoundingly inefficient. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in the word private or public that makes something more or less efficient.

However, in terms of focus, I will say that it’s much easier for a public enterprise to lose focus, and that can lead to inefficiency. In a private enterprise, the focus is extremely clear. Nearly always, the core mission of every private corporation is ROI for the shareholders. Plain and simple, make money for the people who own the company. There’s nothing evil or inherently bad about this – it’s the heart of a capitalist economy. However, it’s also important to realize that at the heart of the matter, this is the sole function of a corporation.

A corporation is not designed or chartered to do good things for the economy of the nation, or to help people, or to behave in a way that builds strong community, or anything like this. (Of course, there are exceptions to this – there are non-profit corporations who are chartered to do this sort of thing. However, in the context of this discussion, I’m referring to the for-profit sector of corporate America.)

In fact, if you’re acting on behalf of a corporation, (as an officer for example), and you behave in a way that might contribute to the community or the nation in some way but harms the shareholders of the corporation, you might just be taken to court – might even be held criminally liable for harming shareholders.

This is really critical to understand. The corporation exists for itself and itself only. Given the choice between greater good (something that might help the community or the nation), and individual good (something that helps the shareholders of the corporation), agents of the corporation MUST ALWAYS choose shareholders over everything else.

Once again, I don’t see this as bad. I just see it as misunderstood in our country. The for-profit corporation is a very selfish agent, out for its own good only. This is the nature of the beast, and the way it should be.

Public enterprise, on the other hand, should have the sole mission of serving the greater good of the public that has chartered the enterprise. A public enterprise should serve no profit motive, but should instead serve only a motive of achieving the greater good of the public that they serve.

Viewed this way, there’s no competition between public and private enterprise. They serve two very different masters. The master of the private (for-profit) enterprise is the shareholder of that corporation, while the master of the public enterprise is the public body that chartered the enterprise. They should both be strong, and they should both work to keep the other in check. If private enterprise becomes too strong, then we’ll see growing disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, as those with power, money, and influence in the nation gather more power, money, and influence into their “empires”. If public enterprise becomes too dominant, then we’ll see growing inefficiencies as opportunities to leverage profit from the economy in the form of private (for-profit) enterprise diminishes.

This is the backdrop of our discussion this morning, as we talk about concepts of “greater good” vs “individual greed”. It’s hard for guys like me and Dave – who grew up in the for-profit world – to equate The Corporation primarily with “individual greed”. We’ve both seen good people do good things in the for-profit world, and surely seen some pretty selfish and greedy actions as well. We’ve grown up believing in this alter of “privatization” and “profit motive”. But at its most basic truth, it’s very hard to argue with the premise that the for-profit corporation is chartered to fulfill the individual good of a small group of shareholders, and this can often be at odds with the greater good of the community or the nation.

The lens that Dave is looking through in our discussion shows Corporate America in the more positive light, focusing on the good things that do get done in the private (for-profit) world. I’m arguing that while I see good things happen as well, I believe that they’re generally blips – they fall outside the charter of the enterprise in-which they happen. It’s people behaving as people, not as agents of a corporation, and those same people will behave well regardless of what sort of enterprise they’re an agent of.

This gets us to the core – the people. We’re social creatures – wired by evolution (or whatever you might believe has honed the wiring) to strive for survival, and our survival depends on community. I’m sure social scientists have lots of competing theories about the hows and whys of all this, but if you just back up from the forest and look around at us as humans today and throughout history, it’s plain that we’re wired to live in community. It’s also plain that we’re wired to survive as an individual. While a honeybee will immediately sacrifice her life at the slightest hint of a threat to the hive that she’s part of, we’re much more likely to give it some thought – to do some internal math to find out whether it’s worth sacrificing ourself for the good of the community.

Inside each of us, it’s like there’s this ongoing calculator hooked up to a scale of some sort, and the thing’s never unplugged. All through life, it keeps calibrating and recalibrating itself, building the algorithms that get applied to every situation that we come up against, guiding us to make decisions that might come down on the side of serving our selfish interest while sacrificing the interests of community, or might come down on the side of serving community interest while sacrificing our selfish interest. I don’t think the algorithms are built-in to us when we’re born, I think they develop within us as we live our life.

Within the context of a small group of people – especially when the group is isolated – it seems to me that the little “algorithm builder” would see a real possibility that the life of the community could end. I would likely see myself as a much more important member of the community – I would see clearly how much those around me depended on me for our mutual survival. By the time I’d reached adulthood, it’d probably be rare that many of my decisions would lean toward my selfish interest over the interest of the tribe.

As we’ve become less and less tribal, and few of us can really even identify a small group that we’re an important part of, I think the little “algorithm builder” inside of us tends to see little reason to help us make decisions that go against our selfish interest. I think that’s why when people do act in a selfless manner, it’s so often highlighted and seems like a really neat thing to us.

An enterprise is just a collection of people, and those people are going to try and act in the way that they’ve been wired. While we’ll surely try and carry out the mission of the enterprise, we’re going to do so within the confines of that little algorithm builder that we’ve been feeding and building all our life. At their core, and enterprise can’t be good or evil – it’s just a set of rules that the members need to live by.

As with all really good conversations, this one raises more questions than it answers, leaving us both pondering deeply when we’re done. The next day we’ll agree that one of the central functions of any government is to assure that the playing fields are tilted in favor of the greater good over the individual’s ability to be selfish – whether that individual is a person or an enterprise. But now, we’re thinking it’s time to do more walking and eating.

We explore the old courthouse in Cottonwood Falls together. This is a gorgeous structure made of beautiful limestone on the outside, and trimmed with native walnut on the inside. I think the literature said it cost $40,000 to build 100+ years ago – heck the walnut trim alone would probably cost that today! There’s no “guided” tours of the building – you just open the front door and walk around – but everyone there is more than happy to answer any question that you’ve got.

As we’ve walked around downtown, we’ve noticed a place that seems to be a coffee shop, but wasn’t open quite as early in the morning as we wanted coffee. It’s open now, and we walk in to investigate. Elexa Dawson is the proprietor, and the name she calls the place is “The Gallery at Cottonwood Falls”. It’s a fun and eclectic mix of furniture, art, books, coffee, and pastries. Both Elexa and her store seem to fit perfectly in the fun little harmonious mosaic that is Cottonwood Falls.

Dave and I both spend a good deal of time rummaging through the historical museum. I’m a nut for that sort of thing anyway, but this is a much better museum than I’d expect in a town many times the size of Cottonwood Falls. We enjoy a good lunch at the Emma Chase – followed by pie – and then head back to the room for a nap.

After a brief nap, I wander over to the little cabin that’s part of the Millstream Motel, and sit on the front porch for quite a while. The sound of the river is wonderful, the shady breeze is warm but pleasant, and I can think of nowhere I’d rather be right now. I drift off to a place close to sleep a few times as I’m kicked back in the chair, and enjoy the wonderful energy of this quiet little corner of the world.

Tomorrow I’ll have to face saddle sores again, but right now I feel like I’m tucked into a little niche made just for me and my day off.

Wheels

I’m having a new set of bicycle wheels built. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My current wheels have enough miles on them to warrant replacing, so a new set of wheels will be my budgeted “bicycle investment” at the end of this riding season.

This decision to buy new wheels is something that I’ve thought about for a while. One possibility for replacing the wheels would be to go online, read reviews of commercially available and mass-produced wheels, and purchase whichever wheels appear to meet my needs and seem like a “good deal”. This is the buying process that I’ve become familiar and comfortable with in my life – collect the alternatives, analyze the options, and make the best choice. But another possibility rattled around in my brain – a different way to approach the process. Two big factors drove me to explore this other possibility, and to eventually decide to follow this path:

• I knew enough about how wheels are designed and built to know that there is a good deal of both science and art involved – a combination that calls into question the effectiveness of the commodity-based, mass production model that drives the majority of our buying decisions.
• In my life, I continue to look for more ways to support individuals who are in business for themselves – local merchants in a manner of speaking – over the big bureaucracies that control more and more of the economy.

Passion

Guided by these underlying factors, I did a little research, and decided to contract with a wheel maker in Portland, OR. The gal who runs the company (Jude) seems quite passionate about wheel-building, and I figured if I’m gonna spend the money for new wheels anyway, I’d really like to do business with someone who’s building them because they’re passionate about the craft – not to mention that I’m supporting another small businessperson.

And in this respect, I already feel good about the process – even before I have the wheels. The currency being exchanged feels better than a purely dollar-based exchange. Sure I’m handing money to Jude, and Jude is handing me back a set of wheels, but there’s a whole lot more that’s being exchanged here. I’m also giving Jude an opportunity to express and pursue her passion, and she’s also giving me a product that’s wrapped and blessed with her true care and concern for a good product. Even now – in the early stages of the transaction – this exchange of currency is happening as we email back and forth about the kind of riding that I do, and what sorts of options we might want to design into the wheels. Before the first wheel component is touched by her hand, I feel good about the transaction.

Vision

In one email, Jude was talking to me about the color of the hub. If you know me, you know that I’m a color idiot – I just have no ability to visualize colors well, and understand what goes together and what doesn’t go together. I explained this to Jude, but could still sense from her that she needed me to be telling her what I wanted in hub colors. She explained that she wanted me to love the wheels, not be talked into loving them. I explained to her that Jesse and I have the same issue when it comes to garden design and implementation – we can visualize the gardens and the plants much better than the customer in most cases, and that our customers depended on us to design things that are “most right”, rather than depending on them to tell us. I explained to her that I needed to trust her to make better design decisions than I could make.

At the end of the day, isn’t this exactly what that wonderful sweet spot tastes like – that one that lies right in that bright space between art and science? Sure there’s the pure analytical science of a thing like designing a wheel or a garden, but transforming the wheel or the garden into something truly special – into something we might call “art” – that requires a special eye, and a special vision. That important step that so many of us need to take – stepping up to the plate to claim that special vision that we each have in our own unique niche – that’s the step that’s so often hardest to make.

How’s that Beatles song go? …And don’t you know that it’s just you? Hey Jude, you’ll do
The movement that you need is on your shoulder
…

Or something like that. Step on out and claim the vision you’ve been designed to give to the world. Help all the poor slobs like me out there who need your vision!

Well before daybreak on day 5, we’re in the saddle and headed east from Wellington. A fitful night in a loud and hot room has left us a little less rested than we’d like. We stop at a c-store before leaving town, and are astounded by the viscous ferocity of the mosquito population here. Stopping the bike is gonna be something we’ll want to avoid this morning, lest the little winged critters carry us off.

After the storms of the night before, this morning is covered in a dense and beautiful fog. Our enjoyment of the mystery and beauty of the foggy morning is cut a little short as the city roads narrow down into highway headed east from town. The highway is narrow, the shoulder is non-existent, and the traffic is VERY heavy. Add to this the fact that the dense fog has cut visibility tremendously, and you end up with 2 very nervous bike riders. There’s nothing friendly about the honks we get from cars on this stretch of road.

After about 10 miles, we go through the little town of Oxford. Here, the road actually widens out a bit with a little shoulder, and the traffic drops to a fraction of what it was between Wellington and Oxford. This is a much nicer ride now, as we make our way into the town of Winfield feeling a lot less nervous than we did during the first 10 miles of the morning.

Winfield is a town that feels both healthy and quaint. Well maintained and vibrant, it’s home to a big bluegrass festival in the fall of the year, as well as many other regional events throughout the year. Downtown is still full of activity, and you feel good when you’re in town. We find a little diner downtown that we like the look of, and step in for some breakfast. The humidity is so thick you could cut it with a knife, so leaving any gear on the bike to “dry” is a joke – I take it inside with me instead.

Once again, a chicken-fried steak and eggs breakfast puts a smile on my face. Listening to the folks moving around us in the diner, it’s clear that most everyone here knows one-another. The gal who runs the place goes out of her way to say hi to everyone, and stay connected. While I pay the check, she asks me about where we’re riding from and to, so I give her the 10-second synopsis. As we’ve seen so many times on this trip, this gal is genuinely and sincerely concerned for us, telling me repeatedly to be sure and stay hydrated because of the big heat they’ve been having, and stay out of the way of the cars and trucks. Her chicken-fried steak has filled my belly with warmth and fuel, and her caring spirit fills my soul with strength and nourishment.

When Dave and I started on this trip, our plan called for options by the time we got to someplace around this point in the state. If the winds had been strong and consistent from the west, we could just keep going east. With good winds, we figured we could end up with something well in excess of 800 miles before we ran out of time – ending up someplace in Missouri. We had a couple other options as well. At this point in the ride, though, we’ve been fighting some version of a headwind for way more of the trip than we’d hoped, and frankly we’re tired of the fight. At dinner the evening before, we’d decided that on the remaining days of our trip, we’d determine direction and destination based on the wind forecast – avoiding wind in the face whenever possible.

This morning the wind is blowing from the south, with a bit of east in it as had been its habit during most of the last several days. Stepping out of the diner, we look at each other and agree that north is the direction of choice for the remainder of the day.

This northward turn through the Flint Hills has always been my most favored option, and I’m delighted that the wind will push us there today. Having grown up in Kansas, and having gone to college in the northern Flint Hills, the place feels more like home to me than any other place on earth. I have fond memories of bike rides and hikes from my college days, and have hunted in the area many times since.

I think most of us have a “place” that we call home. I think our heart puts roots deeply into the substance of the “Place” that we call home, linking our heart to this “Place” forever. Whenever we get close to our home – either in body, mind, or spirit – the place sings to us, calling us to reach out and feel the connection. I’ve always thought of the Flint Hills as this Place for me – this home of the heart – and I feel the song that it’s singing today, pulling my heart toward its heart.

Headed north from Winfield, we’re riding on a section of highway that I rode decades ago when I was in college. I’d attended the bluegrass festival, and was riding my bike back home to Manhattan. I’d left way before sunrise, and had very fond memories of a beautiful pre-dawn and early morning ride all the way up through El Dorado, before the winds came up and changed the complexion of the ride. I remember watching the antics of the Scissortail Flycatchers to the side of the road as the light was just coming up, a nice and easy tailwind, and essentially zero traffic.

This morning I’m a bit disappointed, as our ride doesn’t match that memory. The traffic is pretty heavy for the first 15 miles or so as we head north on US-77, but then diminishes quite a bit. The traffic is largely trucks, though they are courteous for the most part – giving us as much road as they can. I wonder why I have no memory of this busy section of highway from 35 years ago – has the traffic increased that much, or was it the day of the week and the time of the day 35 years ago that made it so much nicer? I’m thinking it’s probably a combination of those 2 things, plus something else that’s got me thinking more and more – the selectivity of memory. Probably the ride 35 years ago wasn’t as perfect and idyllic as the ride my memory has created. I’m sure it was a good ride, but I also think my mind has created the ride that it wants to remember, using the best pieces of that ride 35 years ago, and ignoring a few pieces that it didn’t like.

Interesting. Just how much of the life that I remember, and that I claim as “me”, is mythology that my mind has created?

It’s been only a few weeks ago that one of the RAAM riders was hit around El Dorado by a motorist. I remember reading the account of the accident. Thankfully, the RAAM rider was only injured, but it was one more reminder of just how biased our laws and the judgement of some of our law enforcement officers is. The facts were pretty clear – the bicycle had been riding on the shoulder, and the car had wandered over onto the shoulder and struck him. I don’t think I need more information than this to know that the driver of the car was being careless. He may have been much worse than careless, but at the very least, he was being careless. A person might read this and assume that he would have been ticketed for careless driving at the very least, and most probably ticketed for something more serious. He had, after all, caused and accident with injuries. But alas, as is so often the case, the driver received no ticket, and the bike rider went to the hospital.

I’ll spare the reader an extended soapbox session. I think my opinion is pretty apparent. I’ll just say that this is one of those glaring areas of injustice in many areas of our country – one that results in death and injury to many people. It’s also a glaring cultural hypocrisy. On the one hand, we want to believe that we encourage people to be healthy and fit, and encourage a decrease in the use of oil. As much as anything else, the objective of lowering our consumption of oil is a national security issue. Half our defense budget is spent defending private oil companies and their assets. That’s a great big chunk of welfare that we as taxpayers give away to these folks. Even with that, we find ourselves mired in significant “conflagrations” all across the globe, as our foreign policy is so heavily influenced by our addiction to oil.

With this in mind, we talk about our need to use less oil. You’d hope that the talk would be backed up by some significant incentives to get folks to use less oil. Riding a bike sure qualifies. You’d also think that we might even modify our laws of the road, to give folks like bike riders a bit less to worry about from cars.

But alas, the opposite is true. In case after case, the price that drivers of motor vehicles pay in the form of penalty or punishment for violating the thin rights that bicycles do have is paltry or non-existent. Officers investigating accidents routinely seem to view the bike as something that shouldn’t have been there, rather than viewing the driver of the vehicle as someone who was acting irresponsibly.

It’s not just Kansas – most states have this imbalance of justice and stark hypocrisy. And I’m sure that El Dorado and Wichita are no more dangerous than most American cities. I ride roads and highways all the time. But on this trip, we’ve had such overwhelmingly good experiences with roads and drivers, and I’m a little concerned that it won’t take too much rotten urban traffic to sully some really good and consistent “goodness”.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been riding this morning, enduring more traffic than I like. Peggy’s in Wichita visiting family, and I’m thinking about calling and asking if she’d be willing to meet us where we are, and give us a lift to the other side of El Dorado in exchange for lunch. I suggest this to Dave, who agrees with no need at all for arm-twisting.

Our target today is to make it to either Cottonwood Falls or Council Grove. The heat’s rising quickly, and if it were any more humid it’d be fog. Cottonwood Falls would be 120 miles, which shouldn’t be too bad with some tailwind. The ride that Peggy so graciously gives us cuts 52 miles out of our ride for the day, dropping us off at Cassoday, and we head north. We’re now on one of my favorite highways in the country – one that I rode many times 35 years ago – K177.

Within a mile or two, I begin to notice a bird that’s a pleasant companion on the ride. While I’m not positive, I’m thinking that this bird is a Grasshopper Sparrow. Every 100 yards or so, it seems like there’s one of these little guys on a fencepost on one side of the road or the other, singing their song. It really becomes comforting to have this predictable serenade along the road – much like the Meadowlark serenade a few days ago east of Meade, only these birds are even more numerous. I’m reminded yet again of that audible and aesthetic quality of a tailwind – the ability to hear the sounds around you rather than the rush of wind in your ears.

It’s a glorious tailwind that we have now, one that’s got a little east to it, but it’s mostly out of the south, and it’s blowing a steady 15 MPH or so. Oh, the joy of a tailwind… Sure it’s blistering hot and more than a little humid, but things are pretty darned good right now.

Well, there are the saddle sores…

Did I mention – way back at Day 1 or Day 2 – that I’d begun to develop some saddle sores? I may have suggested that this fact would become more irritating as the days rolled on.

The days have now rolled on, and the miles have stacked up. The saddle sores are irritating to say the least.

I’ve never had saddle sores before. I suppose I’ve had them develop on a long ride, but then they have time to heal before the next long ride, so I’ve never really experienced the, shall we say inconvenience, of saddle sores like I am experiencing them now.

If you’re in the saddle for 10 hours a day, and you maintain an average cadence of 80 RPM, that means you’re turning the pedals close to 5000 times and hour – 50,000 times in the day. That’s a bunch of times to be doing something that irritates a place that’s already raw and open. Need I say more?

As I’m riding north on one of my favorite highways on earth, enjoying the wonderful wind that we’ve put at our back, I’m finding myself working to keep the discomfort of the saddle sores out of my mind. And it’s becoming more and more work all the time. I’m really looking forward to being off the bike tonight.

On a normal day, I probably stop more than Dave likes in order to take pictures. I’ve actually gotten pretty handy at just pulling the camera out of my jersey pocket, pointing it in the right direction, and taking pictures as I ride. Today, though, I’m finding that I’m looking for every chance to stop the bike and take pictures. And it’s kind of a neat little thing that I’m discovering – I’m actually enjoying the additional stops. Sure I’m enjoying the few minutes of breaking that interface between me and the saddle, but I’m also enjoying the ride a lot.

We’re back to that “journey vs destination” discussion, aren’t we?

Today I have a tailwind, and I’d thought we’d get in some high miles. I’m struggling in my mind to balance a few things right now. First, like a fire that just won’t go out, the voice of a few tender saddle sores is increasing in volume. Second, after only about 70 miles of actual riding today, we’ll be at a quaint old historic town that many consider to be the heart of the Flint Hills, a place that would be a great place to take a day off. There’s a big chunk of me that was kind of hoping we’d find a place to stay here for 2 nights and enjoy a day off tomorrow. Third, there’s that destination spirit inside of me that wants to get something over 100 miles in today. I’m accepting that it’s unlikely that we’re going to find a way to do 100+ miles today and still stay in the heart of the Flint Hills, but I’m finding it hard to stop after only 70 miles. On the other hand, the Song of the Saddle Sores is trying to get me to see another point of view on the “only 70 miles” thing…

One of the things that I’m surprised by today is the how much of K-177 winds its way through the flat bottoms rather than rolling up and down the hills. This doesn’t match my memory at all. I’m thinking that this must be due in large part to the fact that the riding I did in college was generally further north in the Flint Hills, and that I’ve just forgotten this section. I’ll find out in the next couple of days that this is generally true, but riding along today I’m reminded once more about the selectivity of memory.

After many miles of generally flat riding along a creek, we finally start to climb again. I didn’t realize until now how much I’ve been looking forward to these hills, and this first real opportunity to climb gets me up out of the saddle and into the rhythm of climbing that I love so much. The effect of the tailwind that is essentially blowing at the same speed that I’m climbing, (which means that I have no air moving across me), and the very humid air, is that the sweat is flowing off of me. I mean this very literally. It’s not that there are drops of sweat drip drip drip, but that there is this almost constant flow of wet stuff falling from my face and head. I keep myself leaning well over the bars while I’m climbing, so that the stream of sweat is falling on the pavement in front of me rather than running down my bike. I don’t recall ever having sweat pour off of me at quite this rate while riding before.

At the top of this little hill is a scenic turnout – this one with some signs describing the Flint Hills. We pull into this little turnout to enjoy the scenery and read the history.

I should note here two things. First, Dave and I never missed one of these scenic turnouts or historical markers – we really enjoyed them. Second, we both commented many times that there should be far more of these markers and turnouts than there are. There’s history all along the road. Every “place” has it’s story to tell. These stories should be told.

Of course, when it comes to telling stories and relating history, it’s always a matter of perspective, isn’t it? The storyteller always gets to tell the story the way he wants it told. The winner of the wars always gets to write the history. This was evident in the signs that we read – without a doubt is was plain to see. It was frustrating in some respects, revealing and thought-provoking in other respects. Just like my own memory, and the mythology that it’s created in my mind, we build our history and our mythology in a way that makes us look like the people that we want to be, ignoring the warts and smelly parts, highlighting the nice parts.

There’s a side of me that’s pretty beholding to a sense of justice. (A wise mentor once pointed out to me repeatedly that this little piece of my personality could be viewed as either a feature or a flaw – sometimes as both – and that it is important to understand clearly at any given time the degree to which it was a feature or a flaw. See Dale, I was occasionally listening…) This side of me gets pretty outraged when history get’s written that shows only a tiny slice of the truth – ignoring huge swaths that create an important context for the facts that we want to remember. In our culture generally – and we certainly saw it on this trip – the history that gets written largely ignores the people and the habitat that existed here for thousands of years, and concentrates instead on the last 150 years – the years when this land has been controlled by our own culture.

There’s also a side of me that’s more curious and academic than outraged – a side that understands a bit about human nature, and enjoys learning more about it. This side of me sees our tendency to be selective in the history that we tell, and understands it for what it is – a cultural coping mechanism. This side of me is fascinated rather than outraged. Today as I’ve ridden a road that I’ve ridden in the past, I’ve been reminded of how selective my memory can be – how it can easily push aside information that doesn’t fit into the “memory image” that my mind wants to paint, and highlight those pieces that fit well into the picture that I’m trying to maintain.

The truth is that the America that we’ve become did some rotten things to get where we are. That doesn’t make me or you a bad person. I don’t think that I’m responsible for the actions of my ancestors. I am, however, responsible for my own actions. Telling the truth, and taking the time and energy to understand and acknowledge the truth about the past is something that I’m absolutely responsible for. Failing to do this – denying the wrongs of past generations – this is something that starts to draw me into some level of culpability. I think we learned that quite well when we spent so much energy making sure that the atrocities of the Nazi’s were very public and were acknowledged. Even today you see those who desperately want to re-write history into something that whitewashes the evil that occurred.

In my opinion, most successful entities did some pretty rotten things in the process of becoming more successful. In America today, we’re part of a culture that wiped out entire cultures and civilizations on our way to conquering the lands that we eventually consolidated into this country that we now call ours. We hunted and cultivated entire ecosystems into extinction or near extinction in our hunger and greed for yet more farm and pasture land. That’s all in the past, and I can’t go back and un-do what happened. The truth is that I realize many benefits in my life today because of the evil of previous generations. I’m not afraid to recognize this, and I’m not willing to whitewash the past – it is what it is.

I think that there’s a healing that can only occur in the arms of the truth. Embracing the truth of the past – even when it’s not a pretty truth, or a flattering truth, can liberate me from bondage to that which is evil and ugly in that past. Through this liberating embrace of the truth, I open paths to the future that remain closed so long as I am a slave to lies of either commission or omission regarding the past. If the story of the past is a lie, you see, then the road that I claim as my past is not a road that leads to where I really am. By accepting the truth of the path that leads to where I stand today, I’m able to move honestly toward the future that I truly want.

This “truth about the past” thing is heavy on my mind as I enjoy the rest stop at the top of the hill. All around me are ancient hills and valleys, once covered in a sea of prairie teaming with giant herds of animal diversity. The earliest white folks who came into this area spoke of vast herds of antelope, bison, elk, and other animals. They spoke of native grasses so tall that you had to stand in the stirrups of your horse to see across the top of the prairie. This was prime habitat for many tribes of people too – a crossroads of sorts where the land of several nations of people intersected.

But there’s very little talk of this on the signs that I read. The words that I read on these signs minimize the impact of white civilization on this ancient land, blaming the demise of the Bluestem prairie to things like “wind”, as-if the wind started blowing out here on the prairie about the same time that white settlers arrived. In fairness, many things are mentioned on these signs, but the overall effect is to minimize the bare and essential truth. The truth tells us that when European style civilization arrived here, the existing civilizations were wiped out. In addition, the Eden-like vast savannah was subjugated, plowed, cultivated, and fenced. The native flora and fauna were decimated, replaced with domesticated animals that could live in pastureland, pasture grasses that were more to the liking of those domesticated animals, and in the bottom-lands the land was tilled for farm production.

Plainly spoken, we changed this place to be what we wanted at the time, and in doing so, we decimated the wonder that was already here. We need to say this plainly. And in saying so, we need to move on – what’s done is done – it can’t be undone. But by realizing what we’ve done, perhaps we can make choices and decisions moving forward that are less destructive when possible. You see that happening on much of the land around this area, as more and more the ranchers and managers move back to native grasses and management practices that are more in line with the “will of nature”. It’ll take generations to repair much of the damage, but you see great progress already.

I mock the words on the signs – probably more than I should – as Dave and I coast out of the turnout area. It’s a long, sweet coast down toward Cottonwood Falls, and I’m really looking forward to filling my water bottles with ice and liquid. We reach a c-store at the edge of Cottonwood Falls, and ask the clerk whether she knows of any good B&Bs in town. If we’re going to stay for a rest day, we want to stay somewhere nice. She doesn’t really know of anywhere, so we saddle-up and get back on the road.

It’s easy to pass right by Cottonwood Falls. As is the case with so many rural towns, the highway doesn’t go through the middle of town – it skirts along an edge of town. There’s a doctoral thesis that someone should do on this someday – this notion of the evolution of a rural town and how the placement of the highway route through town impacts the development of the town. Like everything, there are many factors that will surely be involved, but I can easily imagine that this placement of the highway is a critical one. Of course, 150 years ago, towns were made or broken by the route that the railroad company chose. Later it became the highway, though I don’t think that the highway decisions have gotten the attention that they deserve.

Dave and I almost ride past Cottonwood Falls, but decide at the last minute that we should at least ride through the downtown area to see if there’s something to our liking for a place to stay. We take the old carriage road across the river and into town, and just on the other side of the bridge, we see a place that captures our attention immediately – the Millstream Motel.

When we were googling around for B&B options in Cottonwood Falls, this motel always came up, and I never checked it out. It sounded like a regular old motel, and I kept picturing something out along the highway. While this would have been dandy for any other stop, we really hoped for something out of the way and quiet for a rest day.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about the Millstream Motel. We can tell immediately that this is a great place to spend a rest day. The place has a good feel to it – a nice energy all around it. We call it our home for a rest day.

My destination focused mind is a bit disappointed, but it’s all alone. Everything else about my heart and mind are delighted with where we’ve stopped for the day.

And the part of me that has to put up with some blazing saddle sores is ecstatic…

Day 4 of our ride was the only day where I spent any significant amount if time riding ahead of Dave. I’m not sure how or why it happened. There were a few other times where I ended up setting the pace, but this was the only day where it happened for a fairly big chunk of the day. I don’t think that I was actually stronger than Dave was that day – I think I just ended up with a little more go-juice in the legs early in the day.

I’ve always wondered at the physiological ins and outs of why this happens – why we feel really strong on some days and not others. I don’t understand it at all, but it’s something I’ve watched and felt happen many times. On those days when you feel strong, it’s a real high – both physically and mentally. And spiritually – how does spiritual strength fit into those days of high physical strength I wonder? Where’s the chicken and where’s the egg?

We ride out of Coldwater before dawn, after the morning routine at the local c-store – filling bottles with water and ice, wolfing down a few calories. We have about 40 miles to ride before breakfast, and I’m looking forward to this section of the ride as much as any other section that we’ll do. This morning, we ride through the Medicine Hills of Kansas.

These hills are called by several names. The name that shows up on the road signs is “Gypsum Hills” for the gypsum that’s mined from them. I’ve heard that the Americans who lived here 200 years ago had other names for the hills, many of them translating to something like Medicine Hills. For hundreds of generations I suppose, the folks who lived here considered that these hills had some sort of magic – of medicine. There was something inherent and integral to these hills that was sacred and honored. There was even a river called the Medicine River, as folks believed that that water had curative powers as it flowed from the hills. I believe the river carries that name still.

This is an interesting juxtaposition to me – this difference in how we name this Place as a snapshot of the difference in the way that we see it.

On the one hand, we name the hills Gypsum Hills, because we take the Gypsum from the hills, and haul if off to be used elsewhere. Gypsum is primarily used to make wallboard – that material from which essentially all interior walls in our country are constructed. To the eyes of our culture today, the hills are a place where a mineral has been left for us to take, and use to construct things elsewhere.

To another people, the hills were named for the medicine or magic that they felt when they were here. When they came to this Place, there was an expansion and connection of Spirit in some way. After coming here, I can imagine that they felt enriched and enhanced in some way. When they left, there was something that they took with them as well – but it was a richness of spirit rather than a mineral. Perhaps they left something of themselves behind as well – I’m only imagining. The net effect, though, was that rather than taking something away from the hills, they brought themselves to the hills, and became something larger as a result. Nothing was taken – it was a symbiotic – maybe even synergistic – relationship. An ability to grow and gain without taking anything away.

In the first case, we find a thing and we take it – we haul if off in trucks and use if for the things that we are building elsewhere. In the second case, the Place gives a thing to us, but the Place is not depleted as a result.

One is taking, the other receiving a gift. One is redistributing a resource, the other discovering synergy.

I’m not suggesting that it’s somehow evil to mine the gypsum from the hills – that’s not what I’m saying at all. I think our culture and our mindset is very dependent on materials like gypsum in order to continue to build the world that we’re building. I don’t think that we’re evil in our outlook.

I’m only observing a difference in how Place is perceived by us today, and how it seems to have been observed by the Americans who were here before we were.

I choose to refer to this Place as the Medicine Hills. I suppose it’s because whenever I’m here, I feel that magic and that medicine. Out of respect for the magic in this wonderful little slice of Creation, I call it the Medicine Hills.

The first 20 miles or so of the ride keeps us in terrain much like we were riding through yesterday – rolling hills of green grass and rocky outcroppings. We see many places where ponds have been created at sites that appear to be springs, as there is no windmill feeding them water, and they lie just outside of watercourses. The traffic is light – as it has been generally all along our ride across US 160 – but we’re disappointed that a pretty good portion of what traffic does exist is comprised of big trucks – associated I assume with the gypsum mining.

The further we move into the hills, the deeper the hills become, and the wider they open beside us. The outcroppings changes their nature a bit, and “rises” or peaks can be seen in the landscape – sometimes they look almost like distant volcanos. The early morning light is perfect for revealing and highlighting the deep reds of the landscape beneath the green of the pasture. Most trips that I’ve taken through these hills have been in winter, or in dryer times, and I’m delighted to see the rich and lush green of the pasture covering the hills this season.

It’s common on the hills that Dave will pass me as we go up the hill, and then I pass him on the descent. I outweigh Dave by about 20 pounds, and that manifests itself very predictably in my slower ascents and faster descents. At the bottom of one of these early descents, I notice how strong my legs are feeling, and decide to go ahead and power up the ascent, finding that by the time I reach the top, Dave is still quite a ways behind. Since another descent is approaching, I decide to let my body set the pace that it likes, while I enjoy the scenery and the magic around me.

The first few hills this happens on, I’m not sure what to make of it. The combination of the frequent stops that I make while I ride – mostly to take pictures, but also because of aggressive hydration – and Dave’s greater strength always translate into Dave being out if front of me. I stop to take some pictures, and Dave catches up and pulls alongside me. I can tell that he’s working hard, so it’s not like he decided to just hang back and relax – I seem to be setting a pace that he’s good with.

We start rolling again, and I find it easiest to go ahead and pull away in front, and a nice gap opens between us. And I feel really good. Really good.

Many things seem to be in tune to make me feel so good. First, my body really seems to have hit it’s stride this morning. Second, my spirit is filled with good feelings as well, riding through these hills filled with good medicine. Third, I feel emotionally good about being in front for a change.

I’m not sure which is the chicken in this equation, and which is the egg. I recall as I ride hiking trips with my kids when they were little, and what a difference it made to put them in front. If they were following, the pace was much slower, and the complaining spirit rose easily in them. But put them in front, and let them set the pace, and they always set a significantly higher pace. Is that what’s happening here? Is Dave letting me set the pace so we’ll go faster? My gut says Dave isn’t consciously doing this, but the realization that this “leading” effect might be part of why I feel so good gives me great food for thought as I ride.

I wonder if this is a universal phenomenon? I wonder if the opposite happens with some people, depending on personality? I know for certain that when I’m in front and setting the pace, I feel a sense of responsibility that I like – that someone behind me is depending on me to set a good pace. Being in front is also more invigorating – making me feel like I need to keep the pace high or I’ll get caught maybe. Being in back makes me wonder if I’m holding people back. Being consistently in back is discouraging, as I’m constantly reminded that I’m not as strong as the guy who’s consistently in front.

I wonder a lot about the whole chicken and egg thing here. Did being in these hills this morning make me feel good and strong in spirit, and this then translated to physical well-being and strength, which put me in front, which made me feel good? Or was there some other order to what happened? Or maybe things just needed to come together harmoniously – a good day just formed by all things coming together?

This has pretty broad implications to me. If filling and feeding my spirit can result in such start physical results, then I need to modify my training program. Or if I’m able to glean strength of spirit from strong physical performance and good emotional feelings, then I need to modify my prayer routine.

I’m thinking through this stuff as I ride, interrupting my thoughts often with broad appreciation of the beauty of the place that I’m in. All this psychological stuff makes sense to me, and it’s fun to wonder how it might translate to the population as a whole, but something even more significant strikes me as I’m enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of this Place through which I’m riding:

How insignificant it all is in the big scheme of things. My selfish little thought games about what makes me feel good and what doesn’t make me feel good don’t amount to an itch on the ass of a flea within the context of this Place. Millions of years ago, this Place was a big inland sea. It dried up, and the geology of a shifting earth has pushed it up as rain and wind have eroded it. The result is some really cool landscape to the eye of a human.

For thousands of years, humans have related to this Place. Who knows the many ways that we’ve related to it, but we know that in recent history the hills have been revered as sacred and magic, and that right now we’re stripping the gypsum out of it and hauling it away to use all across the country. Tiny little humans moving around on this vast and beautiful Place, that’s been forming and evolving for millions of years.

And here I come, worried about why I feel better when I get to ride in front. Silly human…

There’s a pullout up at the top of the hill that I’m climbing, it’s marked as a scenic overlook. After all the great scenery that we’ve been immersed in over the last 20 miles or so, I figure this one must be really spectacular! I pull out, and stop there on the pavement at the top of the hill. Not long afterwards, Dave pulls up next to me. I’m really disappointed in the view – it’s not nearly as good as much of the view we’ve been moving through. Dave comments that if you were in a car, you wouldn’t have been moving through it as slowly as we were, and you wouldn’t have been stopping so often on the road to take pictures, so this spot where you could pull the car off the road, stop and take pictures, would feel like a really good spot.

It strikes me once again just how much more intimately we’re able to experience the places that we’re rolling through. The sounds beside the road wrap our ears in the music of the place, and the wind across our face drenches us in the smell of the place. Whenever we see a windmill or a pond that strikes us as particularly nice, we stop and enjoy it – take a picture of it.

I remember many years ago, when as a young man I’d been hiking in the northern Georgia mountains on the Appalachian Trail. I’d had a really beautiful day hiking, and at the end of the day, had descended down a long ridge to a low spot on the trail. Here we crossed a highway, where there were folks stopped and taking pictures. It struck me that my “low spot” for that afternoon – the place where the nice views and wilderness had been interrupted by this highway – was the high spot for the people in the cars. This was as good as it was going to get for them – this was their best experience of these wonderful mountains. I couldn’t wait to get across the road and start climbing back into the good stuff, while they wanted to spend as much time as they could soaking in this high point.

Perspective. I remember my appreciation that afternoon of the beauty that I was experiencing, and my gratitude that I was able to experience “the high road” – the one where the good stuff was.

I have that same feeling this morning as we look across the view from this pullout. I’m sure there are even better ways to experience the real depth of a place like the Medicine Hills, but it’s plain to me just how great the bicycle is as a mode of experience for this great place. Once again, I’m grateful to be on 2 wheels this morning.

I think we’re both feeling this, and without a word, we mount up and head down the road.

Coming in to the west side of Medicine Lodge, the landscape changes dramatically and suddenly. Swooping down out of the wide hills, the final mile or so into town is down in a lush and flat river valley. We ask someone locally where a diner is, and we’re pointed again to the truck stop. A part of me is sure that there’s a real diner someplace in town, but we settle on the truck stop – I think we’re both good and hungry this morning, and don’t really want to dilly-dally around looking for the right place.

Our breakfast is chicken-fried steak and eggs, round 2. With hash-browns and lots of gravy. Throw in a diet Pepsi, and you’ve got a breakfast of champions. Eating our breakfast, I watch as several of truckers and locals look our bikes up and down as they walk into the diner. As usual, we’re quite the spectacle in town. Bikes aside, sitting in a truck-stop diner in tight spandex shorts will make a guy stand out any time, any day. I kid around with a couple of the guys in the diner, and before long, we’re all kidding around together. The table next to us is a biker (the kind that makes noise) and his buddy. HIs buddy is hard of hearing, and when the biker tells the buddy that “these 2 guys are riding their bicycles across Kansas – that’s something else isn’t it?”, the buddy responds, (not too quietly), that we ought to have our heads examined.

Hard to argue with that…

Outside, the horsing around with the truckers and biker continues, until we mount up and head down the road. We aren’t but a few miles out of town when the biker pulls up alongside me as I’m riding, and we chat and kid just a bit more, then he hits the throttle and heads on up the road.

The country we’re in is now pure farming country. The change that occurred at Medicine Lodge is large and abrupt, from hilly, dry rangeland to flat, moist farmland. The humidity is rising noticeably as we move east, and I notice that this high humidity seems to have kept that sinus infection that I felt starting a couple days ago from blooming into something worth treating.

In the little town of Attica, we watch as a Peregrine Falcon makes a short but blazing fast dive at a bird. We can’t tell for sure if he hits it or not, but we’re amazed at the speed of the dive so close to the ground. I figure that we’re getting close to Wichita now, so the manner and friendliness of the people will likely change, but I’m pleasantly surprised to find that the open and friendly sense that we get from folks continues, even though traffic levels have picked up just a bit.

We stop for lunch in Harper, and have what Dave and I both agree is the best sub sandwich yet invented. It’s so good we order a second one and split it. We’ve observed on our ride that there seems to be a correlation between how good a meal is, and how easy on the eyes the waitress is.

Neither Dave nor I consider ourselves to be connoisseurs of much – certainly not food. While I enjoy a good meal as much as the next guy, the fact is that eating is a task – one that’s nicer when the grub is good. Our observations (purely academic just for the record) regarding the attractiveness of the waitresses gets me thinking more about the interconnectedness of the senses.

I think real connoisseurs of food recognize this, and go to great lengths to “plate” food in an attractive manner in order to please the eye. But the degree to which all the other things that are in my “field of vision” as I sit down to a meal can effect my perception of that meal is pretty big. How delicious was that sub sandwich really, and how much was my enjoyment of it enhanced because my eyes, (which were probably sore from the bright Kansas sun), were soothed and comforted by a pleasant visual environment?

Our trip to this point has been a really nice one – even with winds that I’ve not liked, I’ve enjoyed the trip even more than I thought I would. The entire “trip” experience is a collection of all sorts of little factors, and trying to come up with how much each one has contributed to the overall positive feeling is tough to do. Before the ride began, I would have bet good money that the wind would be the single biggest factor. Clearly I would have lost that bet, because the winds have not been good, but I’m enjoying the trip more than I thought I would.

Sitting in the cool A/C of the restaurant, enjoying a sandwich and a wonderful view, I realize that I’m more effected by the little side components of a journey than I’ve realized in the past. The solitude of the road, the friendliness of the people, the company of a good friend – these things sit on the positive side of a scale, and on the other side of that scale sit the fact that it’s hot, the wind isn’t kind, and we aren’t progressing at the pace that I’d hoped we’d progress.

The balance of the scale makes it clear to me that I’ve changed quite a bit since 30+ years ago when I drove people nuts with my obsession with getting from “point A” to “point B”. I’ve changed more than I’ve realized. I’m far more focused on the “moment of the journey” than on the end point.

Good or bad? Probably a bit of both I suppose. The “moment” of this journey hits me square in the face as I step out of the A/C and into the sticky July heat. Depending on where we stop for the night, we’ve got at least another 40 miles left to ride today, and it feels like we’re in a steam bath.

The next 40 miles – from Harper to Wellington – is a stretch that I expect will be pretty busy, and starting to feel a little more urban. We’re fairly close to Wichita after all. And once again, I’m pleasantly surprised and wrong. This stretch must be one of the most quintessential rural farmland areas in the state of Kansas. All along the roadside are picturesque farmsteads that look like they were put there for Norman Rockwell to paint. The corns is healthy and tall, the wheat’s been neatly cut, the kitchen gardens are all neat, trim, and well-tended. The drivers give give us the entire lane at nearly every opportunity. Folks are as friendly as they’ve been the entire trip.

Reaching Wellington, we feel plenty strong and have lots of gas left in the tank. We’re at 114 miles for the day, and WInfield is only another 20. While we feel good about getting to Winfield, we’re also pretty worried about the storm clouds that are rapidly building all around us – especially off to the SE. We decide to stop in Wellington for the night rather than risk getting caught in a thunderstorm.

To this point in our trip, we’ve stayed in cheap but acceptable motels. One of the nice little “features” of rural Kansas is that most towns have a little motel that won’t cost you much, and will be acceptably clean and quiet. (I should note that “acceptably clean and quiet” is a relative term. I’m not the pickiest guy on earth, but I do have reasonable “guy” standards. If you’re a princess, you won’t like most of the places that I find acceptable. In fact, most gals probably find my standards to be a bit low. All I want is reasonable cleanliness and comfort.)

But in Wellington, we’re introduced to a motel that neither Dave nor I will find acceptable. It’s called the Sunshine Inn, and I suspect that the other one or two motels in town might be just as bad – I’m just guessing. The proprietor is a nice enough person, but when we call and let her know that the A/C isn’t cooling the room, her solution is to offer to provide a fan for the room. I’ve grown accustomed to A/C units that are loud on this trip, but this one might have violated some OSHA standards – again I’m just taking a guess here. She did have another room that she’d let us try if we wanted, but the A/C unit was even louder in that room, and by this time the trouble of moving wasn’t worth it unless we were sure we were going to improve the situation.

It does storm as we feared, so the old “any port in a storm” adage carries a little weight with me as I listen to the thunder outside. We might have made it all the way to Winfield and stayed dry, but we might also be rolling into town like a couple of drowned rats. We’ll find out the next morning that the road from Wellington to Winfield is busy and dangerous at any time, and during a rain-storm it would have been a really bad place to be.

I’m glad to be dry.

Not one who sleeps deeply or easily, I slept like a rock on that second night, despite an AC unit that sounded like it was channelling a couple of jackhammers that I’ve used. Upon waking, I realize that a sinus infection is trying to develop inside my head, and that I’ve developed some nasty little saddle-sores. The sinus infection will never develop into anything worth treating, thanks to serious and thick humidity that I’ll be swimming my bike through in the coming days. The saddle sores, on the other hand, are something that I’m going to learn a great deal about as the days roll along.

A SW wind is up before we are in the morning, and 6:30 finds us at the local c-store again, wolfing down some calories and filling water bottles with ice and liquid. We crossed into the central time zone yesterday, so our starts are a little later now. Once again, our first several miles of the day follow a busy highway, (this time US 54 from Plains to Meade. This early on a Sunday morning, the traffic is pretty light.

When Dave and I were choosing a route, we wrestled with what we were looking for in the roads that we wanted to follow. On the one hand is the argument for highways with nice wide shoulders that allow plenty of room for cars to pass. This tactic will keep you closer to civilization for sure, with a greater number of c-stores I would guess. On the other hand is the argument for low traffic levels, even if that means a smaller (or non-existent) shoulder.

If you check out advice on the web, you’ll most likely be shown routes like US 54 as a good bicycle route. The state of Kansas has got an absolutely dynamite resource for bicyclers – it’s a map that describes both shoulder size and traffic volume on all the routes in Kansas, as well as some recommended cross-state routes. Of all the states that I’ve looked at, Kansas is hands-down the best at providing these sorts of good resources to cyclists. In Colorado we think of ourselves as bicycle friendly, but Colorado can’t hold a candle to Kansas in regard to these sorts of resources. Hats off to the folks who made this happen!

In our case, Dave and I decided that we really wanted to opt for less traffic – especially since the first 200 miles or so of the trip would be extremely low traffic. This turned out to be a really good decision on our part, as it contributed tremendously to the enjoyment of the ride. It’s so nice to have big stretches of road with zero traffic, where you can hear and enjoy the prairie around you.

This morning, we recognize the importance of that decision during the first dozen miles of the day, as we make our way over to Meade along US 54. While traffic is light, we still have a big truck passing every couple of minutes, which just grates on the psyche. In addition, even though there is a huge shoulder, it’s littered with a fair amount of glass and other garbage. Even when the traffic is relatively light, most of your attention is focused on listening and watching for vehicles coming up behind you, and watching the road ahead for glass and other “junk”.

We stop at the truck-stop diner in Meade, and I have my first of several chicken-fried steak and eggs breakfasts. After the bonk on the day before, I’m committed to pouring lots of calories into the engine room today. We ride around town a bit before circling back to the truck-stop diner, hoping to find a real diner in town. But alas, we’re able to find no diner that’s survived the ravaging of the walmarting effect.

For many years, I’ve had a special fondness for the small-town diner at breakfast time. There’s always the “big table” – the one where the men in town come and have their breakfast. Seems like there’s always a well-defined but unspoken pecking order and structure defining who sits at this table, and generally where they sit as well. Guys will come and go as the morning rolls along – seems like about the time one guy leaves, his replacement comes in and has a seat. A woman would never have a seat at that table, nor would a stranger in town. This is the morning gathering place, where men socialize like men do, and then it’s off to chores at the farm or the store in town.

A social place, where good-natured jabs are traded, talk of futures prices and rain chances are common, as are good-natured ribbing and teasing, and the bonds that hold a community together are reinforced each morning as the day begins. Women have their spots I imagine – the places and the ways that the local bonds are molded and reinforced – but that’s just not something I’m tuned into. But the “big table” at the local diner is something that I’ve watched and enjoyed most of my life. There’s an energy that comes from that gathering – that “place” in town. It’s one of the sources of energy that holds a town together, and holds a people together. Surely not the only source of important energy in a town, but one of the really important ones.

How can we wonder why so many small towns dry up and blow away in America. A town is a “place”, and people are connected to this place. There’s an energy of place that grows as people build and maintain their relationships between themselves, their families, and their community. They become tied to that place, and the place to them. When we stop sitting together at the big table, the energy starts to drain from this “place” that is ours, and time is all that stands between us and our disconnection from place. Our town dries up, and the wind blows down Main Street in the morning all by itself.

This morning, we check everyplace we can, and find no diner. I’m sad that the only place to eat is the truck stop on the highway, and that we don’t get to sit and enjoy the energy that comes from that big table at the diner. That’s my loss for this morning. I guess I’m even more sad that the town has lost the diner and the big table, and the regenerative and supportive energy that is stirred in that place every morning.

Following breakfast, we head out of town with our bellies full, and the fine feel of the wind on our back as we head east. US 160 forks off off of US 54 just outside of town, and we immediately feel the quiet of the prairie embrace us as we glide along with a tailwind, leaving the noise and clutter of 54 behind us. The sound of truck tires buzzing on the highway is replaced by the sweet song of the Meadowlarks as they sing us down the road.

We’re deep into the hilly grasslands now that were once the northern reaches of the great Comanche Nation. The land has a different feel to it than it did 50 miles back, with the irrigated flatland replaced now with big rolling hills covered in grass and cattle. Riding along on 2 wheels, I can imagine this same ride 200 years ago on a pony, watching herds of buffalo make their way across this rich grassland. The place has a feel that makes it easy to conjure up the presence of the folks who once called this “place” home. 200 years ago, they were the most feared warriors on the plains, mastering the art of horsemanship to a level no other tribe matched. Their nation stretched from just north of where we ride today all the way down into Mexico, from west Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle all the way to the forests of eastern Oklahoma and Texas.

I think about this as I ride, serenaded by the meadowlarks on either side of me, watched by the occasional Marsh Hawk and Red Tailed hawk above. I think about this sense of “place” that the Comanche Nation of people – Americans before I was an American – was attached to. They were part of this place, and it was part of them. They lost their “Place” to invaders who had greater numbers and greater technology. What is it that Americans 200 years from now will attribute to the loss of our Rural Nation and the sense of “Place” that Rural Americans are letting slip from their hands today, diner by diner, hardware store by hardware store? Will it be technology? Will the historians say that we sacrificed the Big Table at the local diner to watch some idiot talking head on some crackpot cable news channel? Will they say that we sold our heritage to the Big Box drug of aisle after aisle of aisle after aisle? Will the fox have stolen the goods out from under our nose while we watched the plasma TV in a stupor?

Having grown up in Kansas, and spent my formative years on the prairie, I feel very attached to this land that we roll through this morning, cruising easily at 20+ MPH and feeling strong and vibrant with a clean wind behind us. This is my favorite ride of the trip so far, by a long shot.

Whoever thinks of Kansas as flat, by the way, has just never ventured to the many places in the state where you have more hilly terrain. These rollers are wonderful going east – they’re probably a little more work going west. Add a tailwind to the eastbound ride and the world is in perfect harmony.

The highway turns south for a few miles, traveling through the area known as Big Basin. Big Basin is a giant sink hole that’s over a mile in diameter. You see these sink holes all through this area, and they really add to the mystique and beauty of the landscape. As we head south, we feel the west wind on our right shoulder, reminding us how sweet the tailwind feels, as we look forward to the turn east again a few miles down the road.

I’ve learned another nice little bit of wisdom by this point on the ride – the difference between the way Dave and I like to view the road in front of us. As we turn south and need to be unhappy about the wind for a while, I want to have a picture of my mind of exactly how far we’re going to ride this direction. I know that it’s about 5 or 6 miles, and then it starts bending east again. Dave, on the other hand, wants to think that its farther than that, and be pleasantly surprised when it isn’t as far or we make it faster than he expected. So I tell Dave it’s about 10 miles, and he’s delighted when we turn before that.

This is a fun little difference that I’ll think about often. I find joy in predicting and planning just right, and  if anything tend to be overly optimistic about what I can get done. Dave wants to plan for the worst and be happy about things going better than expected. Dave is the guy who you want to have planning your trip if life and limb is on the line. We’ve both found the way to look forward that works best for us, and from which we find the greatest joy. Switching outlooks would make us miserable, but working together, we end up with some pretty good planning and execution.

After turning again to the east, Dave finds what must be the only tree along the road on the 70 miles between Plains and Coldwater. We stop under the tree and enjoy a few minutes of shade before mounting up again for the remaining rollers leading into Ashland.

In Ashland, we stop for an early lunch at the Ranch House Cafe. Our timing is perfect, as the proprietor is just laying out the Sunday church crowd buffet, but the church crowd won’t arrive for another 30 minutes. I’ll find out 30 minutes too late that shoving 2 big plates of meat loaf and mashed potatoes into your belly before going out and pedaling down the sweltering asphalt on a hot July Kansas day isn’t the wisest thing a guy can do, but I’ve never been accused of being the wisest guy rolling down the asphalt either. Remember that I’m trying to assure that I keep plenty of calories stacked in the engine room today, and I overdo it a bit at the Ranch House. Leaving the cafe, we fill our bottles with ice and water at the c-store in town, and look at each other with great disappointment as we realize that our wonderful west wind has now died – there isn’t a breath of air moving. This makes the temperature above the asphalt soar, as there is no breeze to move the heat off the blacktop as it collects. The food in my belly sits heavy and sorry in the rising heat as we continue out of Clark County and into Comanche County. The rollers continue, but they’ve lost some of their joy as the tailwind has abandoned us and we feel the hot air sap the energy from us. It got up to 109 that afternoon. We didn’t know at the time what the temperature was – we just knew it was hot.

We take a quick break at the c-store in Protection, enjoying the AC and some fresh ice. We’re in very familiar country to me now, as Peggy has family here in Protection, and I like to spend time with them. I hunt here a good deal most years as well – usually whitetail archery.

That sense of connection with “place” is very strong for me here in these slowly rolling hills. I feel great kinship with this space. It’s all I can do to resist turning off the highway in order to go sit on the land that I hunt. Each year when I spend time on this land, I feel more connected to it. There are certain corners and spots where I find myself drawn year after year, just to sit and listen.

This connection isn’t an “ownership” thing at all. I’ve many places where I feel this connection – this sense of “touch” with the place. Many of those places are on someone’s private land, many are on public land. That sense of connection and touch actually belies the entire notion of “ownership” of land in many ways. If I lived 200 years ago in the America that supported slavery, how would I have felt toward people that I “owned”? Just how much would I have felt that a slave was really “mine”? My apologist mind likes to think that I would have considered the labor of this person to be “mine”, and the goods that they produced, but that the notion of actually owning the “person” – a person with a soul and a calling – that this notion would have been unthinkable to me.

Of course, I’m not naive enough to think that there weren’t a great many (probably most) people who really did feel like the “owned the person”. In fact, I know that there was significant “religious” teaching at the time saying that we only enslaved people who were “soul-less” – that they weren’t people in the same way that we were people.

And what about a land – a “place” – can it have a soul of sorts?

I think it can, and I think our soul often connects to the soul of a “place”. Maybe the nature of the soul is different among people and land, but I surely feel it’s there somehow. I surely think that when a “people” are strongly connected as a tribe or a group or a community, that this people can then become strongly connected to the soul of a place.

This gets to the nature of the misunderstanding between the Americans that lived here on this place 200 years ago, and the Americans who came later. Our culture today views ownership as a really important notion – in fact we have politicians who like to use the term “ownership society”. The Americans who we conquered didn’t have such notions. They seemed confused by the concept of “owning” a “place” – it was a foreign concept to them.

Not being an anthropologist, I’m conjecturing here and exposing many of my own biases, but I find it interesting that most of the folks who were here 200 years ago seemed to accept a certain notion of “slavery”, in that it seemed common that women and children would be taken on raids from other tribes, and would be raised in a slavery of sorts, but maybe it was different than our concept of slavery? It seems that it was pretty common among most tribes that people taken as slaves would evolve into members of the society – no longer “slaves”. I’m not sure at all how this happened and why, but the fact that it happened suggests to me a different notion of what slavery was, and what “ownership” meant in that context.

Maybe things were thought to move in and out of your life – that you were given certain “assets”, and that you took others. Maybe there was a sense of responsibility for those “assets” for which you were a steward? Maybe the land that supported you was seen as something that you were a partner with – something that you was meant to steward and get benefit from? But maybe it bordered on blasphemy to think that the land that you was partnered with and connected to could somehow be “owned” by you?

Today, I might hire people to work for me. I expect to profit from their labor, and I expect to treat them fairly. They expect to be paid and treated fairly, and they expect me to profit enough from their labor to stay in business and prosper. They expect me to manage the business well. While it’s an employment relationship, implied in this relationship is a sense of shared responsibility to one another. There is an inherent respect and honor that is part of the relationship.

This is very different from the slavery relationship as we conceive it today. While an employer today profits from the energy of his employee, there is no sense of “ownership”. The relationship must nurture both parties.

Because people have souls – they are important in the cosmos – they are not beings to be owned.

And land? If there is a sense of “place” – an energy and feeling with which we connect to a place – then doesn’t this imply some sort of “soul-like” thing? Can you really “own” such a thing?

Don’t get me wrong – I own my house, and my truck, and my business. I’m firmly entrenched in our cultural notion of “ownership”. I’m not planning on rejecting that any time soon.

But I am offering some questions about what this all means. I suppose I “own” my dog too, but that word doesn’t really describe the relationship well. My dog lives with me, and gives me unconditional love and affection. When I grow up, I want to be half the man my dog things I am. I take good care of her, and feed her, and return her love and affection. She and I have spent countless hours in the field hunting birds together. There’s a very strong bond of energy and connection between us, and I’ve seen it working magically in the field. She lives with me still, and I take care of her. She’s my dog, and I’m her man. Ownership isn’t really the right word.

Riding down the blacktop, I’m thinking about this place that I love – just a mile off the road where I’m now riding. It’s “owned” by someone I know well, and he’s been kind enough over the years to allow me the access to the land that’s allowed me to develop a strong connection to the land as I’ve hunted it.

We’re coming up to the final rise before the road where I would turn to get to that land, when I hear the cry of a Broad-Winged Hawk coming from the direction of the land. There’s something wrapped around its head in some way, that turns out to be either a Blackbird or a Kingbird. As we watch, the small bird disengages from the hawk – flying above it again for a few wingbeats – before descending again and literally landing on the hawks shoulders. We watch in amazement as the hawk cries again while the smaller bird harasses it while riding it’s shoulders and head. For several wingbeats the smaller bird hangs on, before disengaging and flying off again. I’ve never seen anything like this, though I’ve heard of it happening, and I’m amazed and pleased that this unique little thing happened just as we were passing by the land to which I feel so connected.

As I crest the next hill, I expect to feel like I’m descending. While I do feel a bit of a descent, it’s not nearly as much as I expected, and I’m having to put energy into pedal strokes much more than I thought I would right here. When I look back later on these next couple of miles, I’ll realize that the heat was taking a bigger toll than I thought it was, as was the anger in my belly over the volume of food I’d stuffed it with before subjecting myself to this heat.

Dave is a couple hundred yards up the road, and it looks from the way he’s riding that he’s suffering too. About a half mile or so up the road we turn, and I see a pickup with a big horse trailer make the same turn that we’re going to make, only coming in the opposite direction – toward us. I see him pull over to the side of the road, and watch as Dave rides over to him when Dave gets to where he has pulled over. I can’t imagine he’d be asking us for directions, and figure maybe he’s just wanting to chat.

All across Colorado and Kansas, we’ve been repeatedly surprised by the friendliness and genuine concern that people have for us as we ride. I’ve often been honked at by cars in my years cycling, and we’ve had a few of those incidents on this ride too. But one of the new things that I’ve seen on this ride is the occasional “friendly honk”. Of course, I can’t say for absolute certainty that the driver was honking in a friendly way when this occurred, but I really felt that was the case, based on how they did it and the circumstances and conditions.

On this afternoon, as I approach the driver and Dave as they chat, the nicest gesture yet was occurring. Just as I arrive, the driver waves and climbs back into his pickup, and Dave hands me a bottle of ice cold water. The driver had seen us cycling, and had pulled over and dug a couple bottles of water out of the ice chest in the trailer, and handed 2 of them to Dave. Then he’s off up the road.

Where else would you see this happening I wonder? This guy takes the time and energy to pull over and dig the water out of the trailer, handing it to us and heading down the road. He wasn’t looking for anything from us, wasn’t wanting to talk. He just sees a couple guys who could probably use some ice-cold water, and he wants to share some with us.

Now, there’s cold water, and then there’s ice-cold water. This water has obviously been sitting in ice for a while, and man is it cold. I’m sure the contrast with the temperature on the road makes it feel even colder, but I don’t remember many times in my life when I’ve had cold water like this. I never stop the bike – just take the bottle from Dave as he hands it to me. I drink it while I slowly ride the bike there on the side of the road, and savor the ice-cold liquid as it sucks some of the heat out of my insides. It’s the perfect elixir – meant for exactly this moment – delivered by an angel in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, with as many wrinkles as I’ve got myself, sporting a smile, a wave, and a heart of gold.

Riding north for a few miles into Coldwater, I think we’re both questioning whether we want to continue past Coldwater today and into the Medicine Hills. We want to enjoy the ride from Coldwater to Medicine Lodge, and the heat this afternoon is rapidly draining the pleasure from the riding. Plus, there’s a hint of NE in the air movement that we’re feeling around us, making us wonder if we’d be fighting a headwind if we continued. There’s nothing at all on the 30 miles or so from Coldwater to Medicine Lodge, so we don’t want to start the ride if we’re not positive we’ve got those miles left in our legs.

We stop in Coldwater and sit down at the the place that has become the local diner – Dave’s Pizza Oven. Dave’s has been around for several years, and does a pretty darned good business. Sometimes they have a dynamite buffet, but today we just order something light and some ice water. Dave (Pizza Oven Dave) comes over and chats with us for a while. He’s a bike rider from way back, and once worked in a bike shop up in Hays. He says he doesn’t spend much time on the bike these days, but I suspect that some bike riding days are coming around again for Dave in the future.

Peggy meets us there at the Pizza Oven for lunch, dropping off a couple things I forgot, and taking from me some things that I found I didn’t need to drag around with me any more. She’s headed to Wichita to visit with family for a few days, and we’re glad to have the chance to do some equipment exchange here.

With a short day behind us, (our first sub-100 mile day), we rest up in the afternoon, and come to realize just how much the heat had taken out of us during those last 30 miles on the sweltering blacktop. We enjoy dinner at the Pizza Oven early, and with some rest behind us, we’re game for some good discussion.

To this point on the ride, we’re usually pretty wiped out at dinner. But this evening, our afternoon rest has re-energized us, and we’re up for good conversation. In this sparsely decorated old corner-store-turned-pizza-oven, there’s a vibrant energy of connection. It’s that energy that happens in the town diner, where folks come together to “just be together”, and truly socialize. While most towns have lost their diners, Coldwater is lucky to have someone like Dave who’s willing to keep that “place” and that energy going. And the pizza’s not bad either.

Dave (not Pizza Oven Dave) and I really enjoy the kind of discussion that usually gets us kicked out of casual encounters – stuff like religion and politics. This is important stuff, and Dave and I both feel strongly and passionately about many things. We might not always agree, but we respect each other enough to disagree with respect for the opinions of the other. And at the end of the day, even when we don’t agree, we usually find that the points of agreement dramatically outnumber the points of disagreement.

It’s sad that we’ve lost that ability to disagree in America. I guess its because so few people actually think for themselves anymore – they just find the TV channel that will feed them the opinions and the slanted facts that they want to believe, and learn to demonize everyone who doesn’t agree with them. My grandmother is 101 years old this year, and this is something that she has lamented with me many times – this loss in our culture of respect for opinions and beliefs that are different from our own.

If people actually spent the energy to learn real facts, and form their own opinions, they’d usually find that there really isn’t a great deal of difference even with those with whom we disagree. Generally our foundational values are similar, and we just see things from a slightly different perspective, colored by the different life events that we each carry inside the lens through which we see the world. However, when people only watch news feeds that tell them the facts that support their already held opinions, then it becomes harder and harder to see the similarities, and it becomes harder and harder to see and understand the subtle differences in the lens that we’re looking through, and to see the real and big similarities that do exist.

This evening, Dave brings up an idea that he’s tossed around a bit before – the notion of how much real joy different people find in the things that they do in life. This is a real interesting line of conversation, and I’ve continued to think about it often since that evening.

On the one hand are the “destination folks” – the folks who view life in general as a series of checklists. Folks with this mindset tend to move through life, and participate in activities, in order to “check them off” of a list someplace. They are focused on the destination more than the journey – the journey is something that must be traveled in order to check the destination off of the list.

On the other hand are the “journey folks” – the folks who are headed toward a destination, but they find the joy and the satisfaction in the journey. While arriving at their destination might be important, it is really only important in that it marks the final milestone on a journey. It’s the journey and the joy in the journey that they focus on.

I like this juxtaposition, and the ideas and discussion that it stimulates. I remember reading somewhere that a difference similar to this translates pretty effectively to the political leanings that a person has – that the more “destination” focused someone is, the more likely they are to support more authoritarian and right-wing political positions and outlooks, while the more “journey” focused someone is the more likely they are to support more liberal and left-wing political positions and outlooks. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but have to say that the anecdotal evidence in my life would support this idea.

I know that in my life, I’ve evolved quite a bit in this regard. Earlier in life, I was pretty darned destination focused. In fact, when I got married, I dang near caused my wife to divorce me on our honeymoon by driving us straight through from Kansas to Myrtle Beach, stopping only for gas and food – and probably not often enough for the latter. I know I took a couple of 1-hour breaks for little naps along the way. It was something like 1400 miles, and when we pulled into our destination at sunrise the second day, I could almost hear the cheers of the crowd delighted with this great accomplishment. What I was actually hearing, I think, was the fading sizzle of any remnant of affection or positive feelings that my wife may have had for me prior to that drive. A little more journey and a little less destination was what my wife seemed to have had in mind, but all I knew about at the time was destination.

From that day forward she understood that all she needed to do was give me the destination for the day when we traveled – tell me where we were going to stop for the night. That way, I had my destination, and as long as we made reasonable progress toward that destination, I learned to find satisfaction. I can be taught.

That’s a key point – that satisfaction that I learned to find. Because it isn’t as though the “destination” folks are joyless – we find great joy in checking things off our list! We miss a lot, but we do have that one thing that we know gets us high – checking that item off the list.

Dave feels certain that he falls generally into the “destination focus” group, and is pretty hard on himself for this focus – seeing it as a weakness I think. I have to admit, Dave is a walking adding machine, able to recite at any moment exactly how many miles we’ve gone on the trip so far, and how many today, and how many to the next town with a motel. He keeps track of our mileage covered hour by hour, so in the middle of the day he can tell you exactly what our average speeds have been hour by hour throughout the day.

I usually don’t even want to know this stuff, because it changes the complexion of the ride for me. But for Dave, he finds real joy in keeping track of this stuff and thinking about it as he rides. True joy I think. And what’s wrong with that?

Over the years, I’ve changed quite a bit in my “journey vs destination” focus. I’ve learned that there’s often real joy and magic along the journey, and if I’m too focused on the destination, I’ll miss this joy and magic. I’ve learned that I still require a destination of sorts – a place where I’m headed – but as long as I have that destination on the map, I’m able to focus my attention on the path that I’m walking. By doing this, I often find that the place where I arrive is very different from what I expected – that allowing the journey to change me and define both me and the journey itself, I can find a much greater destination than I had envisioned.

By the same token, if my attention and drive is focused too much on the destination, then I seem to find a way to arrive at exactly the destination that I am aiming at, missing the opportunities that present themselves along the path that might expand and present a “more right” destination. I become blind to everything except the goal. If not blind, then at least oblivious to the real joys and magic that might be lurking in a little corner now and again, and certainly unable to allow the journey to redefine or enhance the destination.

Of course, I’m sure there’s lots of folks who fall prey to the other extreme – they have no destination in mind at all, and just wander along from path to path. This isn’t an extreme that I’m familiar with, but can imagine that it would be equally as dangerous as the “destination only” focus. Wandering from path to path, never having any focus for where it is that you might want to end up, spinning wheels and wandering in circles.

Like everything, there’s a balance in there someplace that seems like the healthiest place to be. Some notion on where it is we’re headed, but allowing focus on the journey, the joy, and the path. Enough tolerance and open-mindedness to change the destination and the direction when the wisdom of the path suggests it would be a good idea, enough discipline and drive to make sure that it’s the most right decision.

Dave and I talk through these notions as we quell what little remaining appetite we have at the end of this day. We certainly don’t end up knowing much more about the great questions of Life, The Universe, and Everything, but we’re pretty sure the answer is 42. (For more on this subject, see Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker Guide To The Galaxy series…)

Day 2 (Sat, July 10, 2010) – 138 Miles from Springfield, Colorado to Plains, Kansas

• The Joy of a Tailwind
• The Beauty and Harmony of Drafting
• The Misery of a Headwind
• Walmarting Rural America
• Warm and Genuine Concern
• The Art of Bonking

5:25 AM on Day 2 of the Prairie Ride v1, and Dave and I are standing at the c-store in Springfield, Colorado, wolfing down a banana and an orange, filling the water bottles with ice and Gatorade. The wind is up a bit out of the south already this morning, and we’re both hoping for a little more west in the wind as the day wears on. We’re filled with optimism and excitement over our upcoming ride for the day, hoping like crazy that we don’t have to face a headwind again. We will be disappointed on that count.

It’s 63 degrees, and the south wind blowing up a quiet and deserted Main Street has a lonely feel to it this early on a Saturday morning. The sun isn’t up yet as we pedal our way south along 287 to get back to 160. A couple of trucks pass us in that couple of miles, and we’re glad to turn east onto our lonely highway when we get there. We’re even more glad to feel just a touch of west in that wind, and we smile at the hope of tailwinds.

The sunrise this morning is beautiful, and I stop often to take pictures before settling in to a nice pace, listening to the morning birds, enjoying the sunrise ahead, reveling in a glass-smooth pavement, and basking in a slight tailwind. Life is truly good.

This morning Dave and I try a little drafting. Drafting isn’t something that Dave ever feels comfortable with, and I’m curious about whether he’ll get the hang of it and get comfortable with it on this trip. It’s a really smart way to ride on a trip like this, allowing the riders to conserve quite a bit of energy and make better time as a unit. Coming in to the ride, Dave was pretty sure that he wasn’t ever going to feel comfortable drafting someone else, but was fine if someone drafted him. Since Dave is considerably stronger than I am, this seemed like a pretty ideal arrangement to me. I could imagine myself hanging on to Dave’s wheel as he pulled me 700 miles across Colorado and Kansas, and this morning we were going to test whether we could work together going down the highway. Of course, I’d have been delighted to share the load and split the work so long as we rode at a pace that I could maintain, but Dave was just convinced that he wanted no part of riding so close behind someone else.

Drafting on a bicycle is a fun blend of art and science. The science part of it is that you have to be able to ride a straight line at a very steady pace. Wheels are sometimes only inches apart, and tiny little movements and speed changes can bring riders into unexpected and unwelcome intimate contact with the pavement below more quickly than you can imagine. The art part of it is that  you have to develop a keen unspoken communication and “harmony” with the other rider(s) in order for things to work smoothly and comfortably. It’s a really neat left-brain / right-brain integration exercise.

When you’re riding in a paceline with a person or group and everyone’s in harmony, it’s really quite a wonderful experience. I liken it to working with bird dogs with whom you are closely in tune. It’s also a lot like singing accapella with a group of people when everyone is tightly in tune with each other. The difference is that in a paceline, you can never let your concentration and focus slip for even a second – you have to keep both sides of the brain tightly engaged.

So as Dave and I ride along, I find myself working on to his back wheel, looking for a way to fall into that harmony. I figure that if we can develop it with me behind, he might just eventually develop the comfort to share the work.

And I discover something about riding that I’ve never really experienced before – that people can have drastically different riding styles that make finding that harmony impossible. Since the wind is primarily from our right, blowing slightly from the rear, the sweet spot of the slip stream is behind Dave and to his left. I find that spot and settle into it, and it’s really the perfect spot because its far enough to his left that I’m not right behind him, and can see up ahead just fine as we ride. I find the right gear, and settle into a nice cadence. Dave is doing his typical “looking over his shoulder” at me, but I’m used to that now, and figure that as we settle into a rhythm, he’ll become more comfortable that he’s not leaving me behind, and concentrate on holding his pace and watching in front.

But just as I’m feeling like we’re settling in to a nice pace, Dave sits up and drops his speed. It’s not a problem, since I’m off to his left anyway, so I just ease up beside him and glance over at him. Clearly he’s not winded, and I don’t really think that he’s wanting me to do the pulling, so I just ride beside him until he seems to drop back down and start a steady pedaling again, at which time I ease in behind him on his left again, find that sweet spot in the draft, and settle in to a nice rhythm again.

And again, just as I’m feeling like we are finding that nice steady pace, Dave sits up again and drops a couple miles an hour. Again, I ease up beside him and we ride side by side for a while, and after a couple minutes he drops back down and we do the whole thing over again.

After 3 or 4 rounds of this, I decide to just keep the same pace when he sits up, and I ease around him on the left, and pull over for him to fall in behind me. While I can’t keep Dave’s pace up for a long time, I figure maybe I can hold it for 30 seconds at a time to his couple minutes, and we can develop a nice pattern that way.

But looking in my mirror, I see that Dave is not sitting in my draft. So I drop the pace back figuring he’ll pass. Eventually he does pass, and then I drop in behind him, and we start that whole yo-yo process again. We go through this pattern several times, as we turn northeast and have a really steady wind at our back, until we hit some new chip seal surface and we’re riding apart because of the bad surface.

At first, this is really frustrating to me, as I can’t figure out what it is that I’m doing that is making it hard for Dave to find that rhythm. Funny how our mind does that – it’s always trying to figure out why it is that the other person doesn’t think and act just like we do. By the time we crossed the Kansas state line, I’d come to grips with a really simple truth that I’d just never really given much consideration to before.

People take really different approaches to riding, and their approach is usually the one that works best for them.

In my case, I love to find a sweet spot of exertion and a gear where I can hold a steady cadence, and just go and go and go. I love that steady rhythm and that perfect spot where the heart-rate, respiration rate, and cadence seem in perfect tune, and once I find it, I feel like I can go for hours like that. To me, that’s nirvana on a bike.

Dave, on the other hand, likes to change things up. He likes to vary his cadence, and his position, and his effort. He likes to vary them pretty often. This feels good to him, and allows him to maintain interest in the pedaling.

So as you can imagine, this difference in style would drive each of us nuts if we let it. What we settled on early on was that it works best if Dave gets ahead on the road, and varies his pace however he wants – just taking care to stay within sight when possible. I find a steady pace, and just hold it, knowing that Dave will yo-yo somewhere out in front of me, but will generally stay 100 or 200 yards ahead of me.

As we got a couple more days into the ride, I would discover that Dave’s style has an inherent advantage on multi-day rides like this, in that it seems to leave him less prone to saddle sores. My style has me spend a great deal of time in the same position, meaning that if, (and in my case on this trip when), saddle sores develop riding will become very uncomfortable, as my body has about 3 positions that it wants to sit in, and each of these positions has saddle sores intimately connected to it.

On this second morning of riding though, saddle sores are nowhere on my mind as I glide along a pavement that is generally glassy smooth with a wind at my back. The highway continues ENE as we make our way across western Kansas toward Johnson City. We’re feeling the wind shift a bit now, so that it is directly against our right shoulder as we continue down the road. We both know that this means once we angle back directly east, we’ll have a quartering headwind again – not something that we’re looking forward to.

By the time we roll into Johnson City, the wind has picked up to a steady 20+ mph. We stop at the only diner in town, and have a double cheeseburger for breakfast. We’ve put in 50 miles this morning before breakfast, and averaged 20 mph over that 50 miles. We’re feelin’ good right now, but we know we’re about to feel a lot worse once we start facing a piece of that wind.

I learned a lot about wind on this trip. Having grown up in Kansas, and ridden a lot in my younger days, I felt like I knew it pretty well, but I still had a lot to learn. For starters, a dead crosswind is a pain in the ass for sure, and certainly slows you down significantly, but the tiniest little slant to that wind into your face makes it a whole lot uglier. You can get down low into the drops, or onto aero bars if you have them, but that only cuts you through the forward wind – the profile you present to the crosswind stays the same. By the same token, a tiny little bend of a crosswind onto your back is way more help than you’d think it would be, but on this particular morning, that doesn’t happen to be the lesson that I’m re-learning…

By the time we hit the 75 mile mark for the day – in Ulysses – the wind is a pretty solid gale. I’m guessing a steady 25 – 30 mph, with gusts higher. When we ride into the wind shadow of the grain elevators coming into Ulysses, it feels like the weight of the world is lifted from my shoulders for just a second, as I can suddenly hear something other than the gale in my right ear, and can ride the bike upright again rather than leaning several degrees to the right. That shadow doesn’t last long though, and we’re back in the wind. We stop at McDonald’s in Ulysses for ice cream, and fill our water bottles with ice and liquid before leaving town. It’s worth noting here that this is the last real “food” that we take in during the day – this ice cream in Ulysses. We have many more hours to ride, but for some reason our brains just kick off here, and we forget to keep calories moving toward the engine room.

It’s hard to talk about western Kansas without talking about wheat. We started running into wheat country just west of Pritchett, CO. Back at the western edge of wheat country, the harvest was just getting underway, and most of the wheat had not yet been cut. At first, it was primarily dry-land wheat, but by the time we’re in Ulysses, it’s clear that most of the land is irrigated, and the combine crews have already been through the area.

There’s something magnificent about wheat. Maybe it’s because I come from Kansas, but I think it’s more than that. The graceful feel of a bright golden field of wheat when it’s ripe, rolling in waves under the wind, gives the world a feel that’s big and bright with soft edges. Even after it’s been cut, it has a warm feel to it. Riding through this part of Kansas during the wheat harvest would be an ideal time in many ways, letting the feel of the wheat and the harvest seep into you as you ride.

About 12 miles east of Ulysses, we turn due south for a bit, directly into the teeth of ferocious wind. It’s a 10 – 12 mph slog in a down position, but once you accept that you’re going to crawl along at this pace, it’s not that bad. At least it’s not that bad most of the time – every now and then you realize just how hard you’re working for those measly 10 – 12 mph, and it seems that bad… After a few miles, the road turns to the SE. For a couple miles, we have ripe corn on our right, and it is amazing just how much wind-break that corn gives us when it’s there.

I also begin to notice smells more. The smell of the ripe corn falling on us from the wind as it blows over the top of the field is strong and sweet, and if there were a couple more weeks of ripening on those plants, I might be tempted to pull an ear and enjoy it – even field corn is good if its fresh enough. The increased humidity as we work our way eastward across the state enhances the ability of the nose to pick up scents, and I begin here to notice the many rich smells that work their way through my nostrils as I ride.

Reaching Satanta, we’re grateful to have a very brief respite from the headwind as we follow US 56 for a mile or so through town toward the NE before turning straight south again into the wind. At this point in our ride, we’re feeling like Meade is our target for the day. It’s another 50 miles of riding, and we’re a little over 100 miles into the ride already. Although the wind is a bugger, we’re feeling good about another 50 miles. I know that I’ve been working fairly hard, but I’ve been watching my HR monitor, and I’ve been careful to keep myself far away from my lactate threshold. What the monitor has been telling me doesn’t measure up to the amount of work that I think I’ve been doing, but I just attribute that to the fact that I’m working now at about 2000 ft above sea level, and I live at 6000 ft above sea level – I must be able to generate a lot more power with a much lower heart rate.

A word about HR monitors. I thought about putting a new battery in mine before I left, but the one in there was less than 6 months old – I figured I was fine. (You can see already where this is probably going can’t you?) When the battery in most HR monitors starts to go, the symptom is that the HR that gets registered is something slightly less than the actual HR. As the battery winds down, the registered HR continues to drop. So, when I thought I was generating 135 bpm, I was generating something more than that – who knows what. This is what my body was telling me, but I was paying more attention to the HR monitor than I was to my body.

Now, had I known that I was working as hard as I was, I would have paid a lot more attention to taking in more calories. Since I thought that I was keeping my HR very low and controlled, I figured there was no way I was putting myself in calorie deficit. I had some gels in my bag for emergency, and could easily have been using those up to fill this deficit.

So, when we pulled in to a C-Store in Satanta, food wasn’t really high on my list of needs. I thought about some cookies, but since they didn’t have what I wanted, I just picked up a tube of chips for Dave and I to split. Really – that’s the extent of what we ate – split a little tube of chips. Liquid we were pretty diligent about – we were hot and thirsty so took in lots of water, but food just didn’t sound good to us…

The c-store was what I call the typical “rural” c-store, with a few tables to sit at. This is an interesting phenomenon that has developed in recent years – this evolution of the c-store in rural America. It’s evolved in parallel with the destruction of the small-town culture – the walmarting of America as I like to think of it. (notice that I don’t capitalize walmart here – I view it not as a proper noun referring to the actual company, but more a verb describing the trend that the company has been on the cutting edge of. Not flattering I know, but I think it’s a well-recognized trend in America.)

Back before walmarting, small business was the lifeblood of rural America. Every 20 miles or so of every highway in America, a small town existed that supported the needs of the folks there in town, as well as the rural folks living close to the town. There was always a diner, a “general store”, a hardware store, and usually a few other small stores to support the population. These weren’t super-stores, but they carried the items that folks needed, and charged a fair price. Folks depended on one another, and supported one another. There was a web of interdependency and support that was the very fabric of rural America.

When the big-box superstores came into existence, they seemed to have targeted centers of rural activity – medium sized towns that could draw from a pretty good rural radius. They set up their stores, and marketed to the rural folks within their radius. Slowly but surely, folks stopped supporting their friends and neighbors in the small businesses in town, and started to support the super-store instead.

Nobody really gave this much thought, like sheep we just started doing what the advertisers told us we should want to do. Slowly but surely, the economies in the small towns in America shriveled up and lost the critical mass necessary to sustain themselves. Like a drug addiction that creeps into our life, slowly but surely taking hold of us, we became addicted to whatever it is that we find walking up and down the aisles of the super-store.

I’m not sure what it is that we find in those aisles. Sure, sometimes the prices are a bit better, but generally they’re not. In my life, I work hard to support the remaining small business people in my town, and I find that the big-box prices are really no better than the small business price. Sure I might save a few pennies on the items that are on the end-cap, but on all the other stuff I buy, I spend as much or more at the big-box.

I have a good friend who owned a hardware store in a small town for many years. He bought it from his dad when his dad wanted to retire. His was the sort of business that small towns were built on in the pre-walmarted America. He knew everyone who walked in the door, and knew their kids. He was an employer to folks in town, and knew his employees, and did right by them. He made money at his business, but he understood clearly that his business, his profit, and his future was tied to the prosperity of the town. While the prosperity of his business was important to him, it was only important within the context of the prosperity of the community. If the community went down, he went down with it.

My friend is retired now, and has sold his store to someone else. I don’t know the details, but I suspect that his kids could see the handwriting on the wall regarding the viability of a small business in a small town today, and maybe they didn’t have an interest in buying him out like he bought his dad out. Or maybe they just didn’t see a future for themselves generally in small-town America. The reasons aren’t important – what’s important is the result.

And the result is stark and sad.

Maybe in Satanta there’s a diner where a person can sit down and enjoy a conversation. Maybe there is a “lunch special” in Satanta, where the proprietor brings you the menu, fills your water glass, then goes back into the kitchen and helps the local kid who he’s given a job to grill the burger you ordered. If that diner is there, we didn’t see it – all we saw was the c-store, so that’s where we stopped. For the record, our preference was a diner, but we didn’t see that option. And also for the record, the c-store also employs a local kid, who stands behind the cash register and rings you up.

But in and around the town, like warning bells that just won’t shut off, are people who still long for the diner that they lost some time back. They still long for a place to sit and visit – to strengthen the ties that hold the community together. Their town was built years ago with these important places integrated into the fabric of the town, but now those places are locked and boarded.

But the people still long for this place – this place to sit and share.

All across rural America, c-stores have responded by adding a couple small tables or booths along the window in front – a place for people to sit and chat. I’m not sure whether the c-store adds those tables before the diner closes, or in response to the need. My gut tells me that adding the tables is actually something that contributes to the demise of the diner, making me wonder whether c-stores pump the same drug into their air that the walmarts pump into their air – addicting people to these aisles that destroy their town…

In Satanta, Kansas, the c-store was hoppin’ the day that we pulled up to the hitchin’ post and swung out of our saddles. It was full of folks who were older than us, (and that’s sayin’ something)! For the most part, these folks could have been our parents. They were gatherin’ at the place where they gather these days, and I’m sure that we became the talk of the town for several days following.

We chat with a couple of the old guys, learning about one fella’s brother who used to ride bikes, and somebody else’s nephew. They ask us about where we’re from and where we’re headed, and they have plenty of good advice about the road.

But most of all, the thing that strikes both Dave and I most is their concern – their genuine concern – for our safety and well-being. They ask lots of questions about whether we have plenty of ice in our water bottles, and if we’ve been drinking plenty of water.

This is a recurring theme that I’ll talk more about I think – this theme of genuine concern that people across Kansas and Colorado have for our well-being and safety. You grow accustomed to the way most metropolitan folks say the words of caring without the true underlying and deep concern. I do it myself – ask folks how they’re doing but I really don’t want any long answers, tell folks to take care but it’s just the polite thing to say.

On that hot and windy afternoon in Satanta, Kansas, there was a group of old folks gathered at the c-store, and they really cared about how Dave and I were doing, and where we’d been, and where we were going. And they were truly concerned for our safety and well-being.

And I felt very good about that.

We swing out of town and head straight south again into the wind for a few miles, then back to the east, then south again along US 83 for several miles. The wind has shifted just a bit, and is mostly straight south now, with an occasional leaning slightly west or slightly east. We pause before heading east again as we leave US 83, Dave eating a granola bar and taking liquid, me taking liquid and eating… nothing at all…

17 miles later, I notice what feels like bonk storming down on my system like a horde of emptiness. I’m glad when Dave pulls over for a quick drink, and I eat a couple crackers I have in my bag. Did I mention that I had some gel in there too? Notice that I don’t take that in here though…

Dave’s feeling it too I think, but not as bad. We’re only a couple of miles from Plains, and we both agree that if there’s a motel in town, we’ll stop here for the night rather than pushing on the next dozen or so miles to Meade.

If you’ve never discovered the joys of bonking, congratulations. If you’re a runner, you might know this as “hitting the wall”. In either case, it’s a really sad place to be. It’s happened to me twice now, and I’ll do all I can to avoid it in the future.

The short story of what “bonking” means is this, (note that this is my synopsis, and might or might not be exactly accurate…): Your body uses this thing called glycogen for two things – making your brain work and delivering high-octane anaerobic fuel to your muscles when they are pushed to that point called the lactic threshold. (Lactic threshold is that point of exertion where your muscles start to burn – the lactic acid that makes them burn is the byproduct of the high-octane “combustion” that is occurring with the glycogen.) You’re body stores about 2000 calories worth of this glycogen – evolution having determined I suppose that this is plenty to fuel the brain and allow for the average bursts of high energy required to throw spears or run from bears. If you’re riding a bike for 8 hours, it’s likely you’ll burn several thousand calories. If you are spending any significant amount of those 8 hours exerting heavily, you’re probably dipping further and further into that 2000 calorie glycogen tank. When the tank’s empty, then shut-down mode commences, and it feels like self-destruct mode.

Remember when I said that the brain runs on glycogen? I guess that this is the one and only fuel that the brain can run on. When the glycogen tank runs out, the brain is out of fuel. It’s bad enough that your body is shutting down on you, but it’s even worse that you seem to have no ability to think. You really, really, shut down.

The good news is that if you can stop working and start taking in calories, your body starts to fill the glycogen tank right away. An hours’ worth of rest and food, and your brain is powering back up.

I’ve often wondered about the glycogen equation. I mean, guys like me who seem averse to using our brain on a regular basis, (remember I had a double cheeseburger and ice cream cone today – that’s all), should have more glycogen to use for riding, right? And since we seem to be able to operate with so little of our brain engaged, it seems that we wouldn’t notice much difference when the brain runs out of gas. But I’m here to tell ya’, it’s just not a pretty site when that tank runs out.

So, riding into Plains, Kansas late on a hot afternoon, my body is shutting down, and my brain doesn’t even know how to wonder why it’s suddenly so stupid. Downtown is deserted. We stop on a corner to get out our little cheat-sheet with all the hotel numbers in all the little towns written down. We must look way worse than we feel, (which says a lot right now), because a lady goes out of her way to drive up to us and ask us if we need anything. She points us to the motel (a block away – if our brains were working we would have seen it…), and tells us the one and only place to eat in town. (It’s a good thing it’s Saturday night, because that’s the only night that the local bar serves steaks in addition to the regular bar food – and the local bar is the only place in town to eat.)

We ride to the hotel, and as I apply the brakes and come to a stop, I notice that my arms are shaking uncontrollably, and my vision is getting pretty squirrely. I sit in the chair, and am delighted that Dave has the presence of mind to go in and get us booked.

A shower, some steak, potatoes, and beer, and lots of liquid transform the rest of the day into quite a pleasant evening. It didn’t hurt that the waitress at the bar was quite easy on the eyes – that seems to help significantly when the brain is recovering.

That’s my theory anyway.

For weeks before the ride started, I had dreams of my first 200 mile day. The first 200 miles of the route had a net elevation loss of perhaps 2000 feet, and the route went pretty much east through a high prairie with winds that generally prevailed from some flavor of west in the summer. While 2000 feet in 200 miles isn’t much – hardly noticeable in fact – it was one more tiny piece of advantage that I hoped would help us make that double-century mark.

But alas, as the day neared when we would begin our ride, the winds shifted to the east as a cold front settled in on top of the area. While this brought welcome cooler temperatures, it also brought a demon east wind that would make 200 miles into a very long (if even attainable) day.

We began in Trinidad, Colorado on July 9. Hoping to roll out of the B&B where we spent the night at something like 5:15, we were faced with our first flat of the trip before we even rolled our bikes out of the house. We quickly changed the flat, took a couple of perfunctory pictures together before we left, and headed east out of town.

The first couple of hours were quite nice, with very cool temperatures and a tiny little movement of air from the west. US160 fulfilled its promise of very low traffic volume, as we rode side by side, falling into single file only a couple of times as cars passed. We were also dropping in elevation, which you could feel slightly as well.

Somewhere in the second hour, the first hints of contrary air movement started to make itself felt on our face and in our ears. Slowly, the volume of air movement increased until you could clearly call it a headwind, coming directly into our right ear. By the time we were into our third hour and began 50 miles or so of gentle climbing, we had a steady 15 – 20 mph quartering headwind out of the SE. This wind stayed with us for the next several days, varying only slightly as we continued to move east at a pace that was definitely slower than we had hoped.

For the first 75 miles of this route – from Trinidad to Kim – there are no services at all. Not a C-Store of any kind, and few ranch-houses close to the road that you could use for water. In our case, we brought about 100 oz of water apiece over this section, and it turned out to be plenty. However, the high that day only reached 86. I can imagine that if the high would have been a more seasonable 100 or so, our 100 oz apiece may have left us a bit dry before we reached Kim. If I had it to do again, I’d carry a bit more water I think.

The only crash of the trip occurred early on that first morning as well. I’d like to make up some fun and elaborate story about a spectacular crash that left my leg with a little road rash, but Dave knows the true story and would rat me out I’m sure. Fact is that the first time I stopped the bike to, well, let’s say take pictures, it simply fell over, with me still clipped on one side. You become accustomed to the feel and the weight of a bike when you ride it a lot. You know how it leans against your leg when you stop, and you can predict what it’s going to do while you stand over it. Add 30 pounds of water and stuff, and it acts differently. So there I was, standing over my bike, uh, taking pictures lets say, with only one foot unclipped, and shazam – over the bike goes with me attached. Nothing pretty, elegant, or exciting about it – just plain clumsy.

With that little acrobatic out of the way, and our first flat tire behind us, we pushed on through a slightly evil wind, enjoying still the low light and the coolness of the high prairie, as well as the distant peaks to our right as they slowly disappeared behind us.

On some maps, there’s a little spot called Ward’s Corner that shows up along US160 about halfway between Trinidad and Kim. Most likely, back when travel along the roads went at a much more civilized pace, there was actually some sort of town here. Now, all that remains is a single structure that appears to be inhabited. Signs in the window indicated that there might be times when someone was there and business occurs, but it wasn’t open when we came spinning past. It’s not really a café – I suspect it’s a gallery of sorts, though a person might find a cup of coffee or something if it were open – I’m just not sure. We didn’t stop – it looked too much like a private residence of some sort.

But we did pick up a friend who traveled with us for a few miles.

Dave was riding a bit ahead of me. (Did I mention that this was generally the case – something that I got used to on this ride?) I watched as a big black dog galloped out from the place that might be a business, cast his head up to catch Dave’s scent as he rolled past just a couple of feet away, then stopped in the middle of the highway and watched Dave riding along. Then he heard me coming, and turned to watch me pass, sniffing at me as I passed. We must have passed some sort of test, because the big ‘ol dog decided that we and he were kindred spirits, and he wanted to run with us for a while. So he did – for several miles. Remember that there was essentially no traffic on the road, and we had a nice enough headwind at that point that we were only rolling along at 11 or 12 mph.

Here we were, 2 guys on bikes and a big black dog, loping along down the middle of the highway together. The speed we were traveling was a perfect loping pace for the dog. He had a look of pure joy on his face as he galloped along beside us, moving easily from one side of the road to the other, sometimes running in the ditch on one side, then bounding up across the road and over to the other side. He had found a pack to run with, and the pack was out running.

We worried about our friend, and just how long he might run with us. We worried that a car would come along eventually, and would be know to get out of the way? We worried a bit about him, but we also shared in his joy as we all made our way down the road as a new-formed pack. One of us had his tongue hanging out over the side of his lower jaw as he ran, soaking in every little molecule of this wonderful moment when we came together as a pack. I don’t remember which one of us it was…

Eventually, the wind shifted a bit for a few minutes, so it was only a cross wind and not quartering to us, and maybe we had a little downhill too. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that our speed started to pick up a bit. I was surprised as our friend hung with us for quite a while at 15 or 17 mph, but eventually he decided that this was just faster than he wanted to run on a summer day. I felt sad as I turned and watched him watch us roll away from him and his little universe there along the lonely highway.

It was sometime before the 75 mile mark and Kim that I’m sure we both realized that our 200 mile day was just not going to happen today. I think we both still help out hopes for a 175 mile day to Johnson City, but we also knew that we wouldn’t be able to make that call until we approached the 125 mile point of no return in Springfield, CO. By the time we turned north and headed into Kim, we were more than ready for our first stop of the day.

The Kim Outpost in Kim is the picture of an old Mercantile. Over on one half of the store is what appears to be the town library, including videos to borrow. You can buy limited groceries, and they’ll fix you whatever sort of sandwich you might want. Playing on the TV is live coverage of the livestock auction. Now, if you think that live coverage of a livestock auction would be the definition of boring, you wouldn’t be able to prove it by the local ranchers who would watch it for a few minutes when they came in, and then banter back and forth a bit about whether the prices were good or bad, and how could you possible make money with a $28 spread?

We made friends with some bikers (the kind that make noise and go fast when you twist the grip) out in front, and participated in some good-natured jabbing about the sanity of anyone riding their bicycles across this kind of desolate country. We asked them to throw us a rope when they passed us and help us along. A good time was has by all, and we headed on up the road. When the bikers passed us in 10 or 15 minutes, they whopped and hollered just a little, and gave us smiles and waves.

I’ve got to say that over the 8 days of this trip, it was neat to see the kindred spirit kindle with the bikers that we passed and that we met. I think they saw us as little brothers of sorts, and almost always gave us that dropped-hand wave that they give each other. Once, a guy that we’d met at a truck stop back the road slowed down and chided and chatted for a few seconds while we rode side-by-side, but then he took off before I could grab the back of his seat…

In eastern Colorado – about 20 miles or so west of Springfield – is a little dot on the map called Pritchett. It’s an old prairie town that was obviously wiped out in the 30’s when most of the little prairie towns were wiped out. Based on what I could see ahead of time, I didn’t expect to find anything there in Pritchett. So as we were rolling through what appeared to be the old deserted downtown square, I was surprised when Dave pulled over at a storefront. There was one old truck in front of the building, but nothing else anywhere downtown. Dave said that it looked like they had ice cream, so I pulled in, tied up to the hitching post, and headed in.

Inside Kathi fixed us some ice cream, and we sat and chatted with her and her husband Steve for quite a while about their diner and their business. They’re new to the area, and have been pleasantly surprised by the friendly reception that they’ve gotten in town, and how well the local folks support their diner. They open for breakfast and lunch, then on Friday nights they open for dinner. Sitting at the table, chatting with Steve and Kathi and soaking in the AC while eating a nice dish of ice cream, I sincerely hoped that they would be successful in the long run here in this little town.

I’m not sure what it is that draws some folks to played-out old towns like Pritchett, and makes them want to make a go of it. If you sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper, I just can’t imagine that you could make a viable business plan that would justify pulling up roots and moving yourself out onto the desolate high plains. But in the case of Steve and Kathi Service, that’s just exactly what they’ve done. They raised a family on traditional jobs in more traditional cities, then decided it was time to pick up and start over again in the tiny little town of Pritchett, Colorado. They have a little diner called the Pritchett Café, and Kathi sells antiques and other little stuff in the shop next door called the Blue Willow Trading Company. They also own an old house in town that they’re renovating and will run as a B&B in the near future.

I admire what Steve and Kathi have done. I think that our country and our culture would be greatly improved if more of us had the courage and the vision to make the kind of move that they’ve made. But I have to say that I just can’t make sense of it. I wish that I could. In many ways, their spirit is exactly the spirit that brought the first white folks into that town over 100 years ago. There was no sense to it back then either, but folks were willing to try and make a go of it.

There’s an allure that seems to hide in the high prairie. Not everyone hears it I think, but for those who do hear it, it’s a powerful song. There’s no logical reason to expect success out there in the desolation and the wind, but there’s a powerful draw that some folks simply can’t resist. I know that song, and I feel that draw – I think it’s part of what drew us to this ride in the first place. I don’t yet know how to wrap words around this allure that give it adequate description, but I know that I feel it, and I recognize it in others now and then – folks like Steve and Kathi Service.

I sincerely hope that the local folks will continue to support a local diner, and I sincerely hope that enough folks will be willing to spend a couple nights at a B&B in Pritchett that they can make money at that venture as well. Steve and Kathi seem to be good, hard-working folks who will add value to their community, and my fondest hopes for success go out their way.

Making our way into the town of Springfield, Colorado after 125 miles of riding – mostly with a quartering headwind – Dave and I are both pretty beat up. While the mind would love to go on another 50 miles, the body is just plain tired. Once we agree that we’ll stop for the night, I can almost feel a warm shower to wash the grime off, I can almost taste a good dinner, and I’ really looking forward to some serious rest in a good bed. We ride up into town, and both see a little downtown hotel that looks really nice. Unfortunately the “No Vacancy” light is on, so we keep riding to the north end of town where a couple of motels are. We stop at the first one, and are informed that not only are they booked, but every motel in town probably is, due to a rodeo and several other activities going on in town over the weekend. The guy at the desk calls the other motels, and confirms no availability.

Bummer. Double bummer really. Now I’ve let myself start looking forward to a shower, food, and time out of the saddle, and I’m told that I need to keep riding for another 3 or 4 hours. Ugg and double ugg.

So we buck up and get back on the bikes. As we’re riding back through downtown, I say to Dave, “Let’s just stop in the downtown hotel and see if maybe they’ve had a cancellation”. Dave’s thinking the same thing. So we pull up to the old hitching post (really) at the Stage Stop Hotel in downtown Springfield, and dismount once again – with much less vigor than earlier in the day. We drag ourselves up the steps and open the front door. “Hi”, we start up, “we know you say you don’t have any vacancy, but we were wondering if you…”

Cherry Gonser – the owner – smiled and cut us off before we could finish. “I’ve got a room with 2 beds, and it’s waiting for you”.

The weight of the world lifts from my shoulders, and I sit down in the shade of the front porch while Dave signs us in. When he’s done, we sit there on that front porch, soaking in how good it feels to have a place to stop for the night. It’ss the first of many very sweet moments on our ride, and I want to savor every little morsel of it.

We have a nice evening in Springfield, enjoy a decent steak for supper, and start our habit of watching the weather channel to see what the winds are supposed to do the following day. Cherry had said to Dave that she thought that G-d had brought us together. Dave figures that she might just be really picky about who she rents to, and keeps the No Vacancy sign on, sizing up potential tenants before deciding to rent them a room. It could also be that she really did just get a cancellation before we walked in the door.

It doesn’t much matter to me either way – I find tremendous joy in our ability to stop for the night, relax and clean up, enjoy a great dinner for the night, and allow our bodies to recover for the next day. If you believe that G-d’s hand is present in everything that happens, then one way or another Her hand helped us find lodging that night. If you don’t believe this happens, then maybe it’s as simple as dumb luck, and the fact that Cherry decided Dave and I looked like upstanding enough citizens that she was willing to rent to us.

Go figure.