Scenes and leavings

Can you see me?
Who? I can hear you.

“How you shift them bikes?”
“The shifters are in the brakes.”
“How long you been doing this?”
“I started in mid-June. She started in late June.”
“What y’all need out here is your own lane. I wish they’d put one in on that road. We work with the coal, making sure the trucks are loaded and moving. There ain’t no room on that road. You can’t ride those bikes with them skinny tires in the gravel on the side of the road.”
Saturday. I wondered why coal trucks still ran on Saturdays, but maybe they start early and end early.
“Virginia sure is pretty though. You should see it when the leaves turn color. That’s the prettiest time of year. It’s really pretty in the winter with the snow too. I’m a motorcycle rider.”
“You ride your motorcycle out here in the winter?”
“That’s one way to do it. Doubt you’re gonna be riding a bicycle out here then.”
“I’ve thought about getting a motorcycle. I went some places that made me think that would be a good way to go.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“It gets all quiet and covers up all the junk. Looks so clean and pretty with a blanket of snow all over it.”
There were a few Adopt-a-Highway signs, but not many. I noticed a lot of trash on the roadside, mostly bottles containing drink. Several of them still had what looked like their original contents inside. Why do people throw those out? Or, how do they get there? Some of the bottles looked like they’d been discarded after more utilitarian purposes. I’m sure some of them had fluids of human origin inside, but I don’t like thinking about that too much.

Once upon a time I remember someone saying that archaeologist love trash. Trash tells a story. What is this story of the drink bottles and the broken glass? I learn something particular about the people who leave them as clues to their story. I learn about these people even though they are not there. Absence signifies. But these are a particular kind of people who I learn about from their leavings. What about the ones who don’t leave clues? What is their story?

I could be enamored with leavings. They prompt us to tell stories. History is that.

I like the buildings as leavings too. I like when people care for them, but I also like observing how nature reclaims structures. Every bit of material comes from the earth. We process and refine to organize certain elements or substances into like piles and then we form those piles into shapes. Later, we arrange the shapes into a pattern and structure. The degree to which we keep these structures maintained prevents their reorganization and subsequent reintegration by nature. Saturday morning yard maintenance reestablishes the line. In other places, the line no longer exists.

Plants, lichen, mosses – they all move slowly but with decided purpose. Maybe not all slowly. Friend Sarah tells us that kudzu, that delicious creeping vine, moves a mile a minute. What about kudzu? Is it in its own economic boom time, creating a sprawling settlement pattern? Will it grow so fast and furiously that it chokes itself out, using to excess the resources that have helped it advance so quickly? Will it soon learn new ways of transporting itself as an evolutionary solution to unsustainable growth patterns? What can our advocacy movements learn from kudzu? Does its rhetoric compel? What inspires and drives its motion? Is this a premiere example of active transportation?

Heidi, where are you?
I don’t know. I’m right here, lost in time and space. I exist. Something tells me I exist. I have this bicycle, and I pedal it. Like the kudzu, I move a mile a minute. Hah! I feel. I feel my body move against my bicycle seat. My tolerance is low for that sensation. I feel my legs move the pedals. Somehow, keep them moving, that’s how we get anywhere. I feel time. It’s still ok. Maybe time is better than ok these days. My internal clock sends a signal through me. “Now.” Now what? Where am I? Speed equals time over distance. How far? How much time? Wait, if it’s miles per hour, doesn’t that mean Speed equals Distance over Time? I stand still. My mind races.

I need to finish this journey. My destination is Washington, DC. I have a stack of writing to attend to. Now that all my physical pieces are together, my mental space has become scattered. Every time I move, I scatter my thoughts afield, like the drink bottles along the highway. I want to focus, clean up my mental highway and leave no drink bottle debris like the cyclists pedaling from one water stop to the next, refilling and refueling.

I turn off route.
What are you doing?
I need a ride.
To where?
Forward. I need to write. I need to practice. I need to finish pedaling. The pedaling part, for this trip, it’s basically done. I have my information. Now I must focus on the other part of this project.

Here. I have learned this. Attractive bicycle routes follow scenic roadways and wind through rural areas. In the east, the plentiful roads and ancient mountains accentuate the turns and curves. These journeys support a slower pace of life. We travel more slowly. A bicycle suits the pace.
“We hear so much about bicycle projects in cities, but there’s very little work being done, that I know of, on intercity bicycle travel.”
“It’s one of those chicken and egg things. We don’t really know how many people travel by bicycle from city to city. And, because not much infrastructure exists for it, we know less about what the real demand is. If we want to fund bicycle projects to make intercity travel more accessible, we have to have some evidence for the existing and real demand. Additionally, we have to make it easier for people to reach these places to ride – to get on and off the route. For example, how are you getting your bike back to San Francisco?”
“I’m flying back, but I’m going to ship my bike. I flew with my bike once, but I won’t do it again. It’s expensive, and if something happens to the bike, it’s not insured on the plane. If I ship it, it’s insured. This is an ok way to go if you don’t need your bike right away. At the end of the trip, it will be ok to wait a little while.”
“What did you do with your bike when you flew from Durango?”
“I left it with someone in town. I was really glad it was still there when I got back.”
“How do you travel at home with your 50-mile commute?”
“I bike to train to bike.”
I forgot to ask if the bike went on the train or if there are two bicycles involved.

I think about the two weeks I waited to be reunited with my bike when I shipped it from St. Louis. I chose to ship it because I couldn’t take it as checked baggage on my particular train route. My other option would have been to send it on a different train and pick it up at some time other than my arrival. Given the distance I would travel from the train station, adding another car trip to fetch the bicycle (since it would likely not be delivered closer to my destination) made little sense. Might as well ship it forward to a time and location when and where I would be. As things turned out, the bicycle was sent with “signature required” for delivery. Given various delays, my bike would be delivered when no one was around to receive it. To complicate matters further, because of the delivery location I couldn’t get my bike on either Sunday or Monday, not at the house, not at the main offices (wherever they were). So, I had to wait. And then, the train I wanted to take doesn’t run every day, so I had to wait another day for that to arrive.

Traveling in a car, we wouldn’t stand for these kinds of delays, even if we had major repairs we needed to make on our vehicle. I find them everywhere. Not that I move so fast pedaling, but sometimes I feel I could move my bike faster pedaling than waiting for my bike to make a journey without me. I set out to learn this kind of information. I had one more option to explore.

I departed from Mary and Dermot at Meadowview. I wanted to take a break, eat, evaluate my circumstances, and go no further away from the interstate than was necessary. If I left the interstate, I knew I’d be pedaling back to it.

“I’ll just ride up there until I can see that truck stop and then figure out how to get there.”
As I got up the hill, I saw a vehicle repair shop.
“I’ll go to the next exit. Not far, ¾ of a mile, and it looks like a college town. That’s promising.”
At the top of the exit ramp I could see nothing. I wasn’t sure how far the town was from the interstate. I sent a text.
“Ooh, a quick reply back.”
I called.
“What can I do to help? Is there anything I can do on the computer that would help?”
“Yeah. It would be nice to know how far this town is from the interstate.”
“Looks like it’s only a mile.”
“It’s a college town, it should have services, don’t you think?”
“That seems reasonable.”
“Ok. Let’s talk later after I get there.”

I rode into the town. College everywhere and people about, but not what I would consider a Sunday morning breakfast scene. I stopped at the post office looking at my google map of the town trying to guess where the commercial area might be. Someone pulled up to the post office and dropped a letter in the mail slot.
“Excuse me. Can you tell me if there’s anywhere to get breakfast in this town?”
“Hmmm. Well, there’s the college cafeteria. It’s that way. Or, if you go down the road to Glade, there’s a place there.”
She gave me directions to the main drag in Glade. I followed them until I got into Glade and found myself in a maze of roads, rail tracks, churches, and houses with no discernible commercial services. I looked at my google maps again and turned around in the direction of the business route. I found the downtown area and rode through it three times looking for something to be open. No luck. Sigh.
“Well, I’m in Glade Spring now, but there’s still nothing.”
“You’re a lot closer to where I was going to send you though. It looks like you can catch a Greyhound in Marion. It’s twenty miles up the road, less because you’re already in Glade.”
“Do they have services?”
“Yeah, it looks like at least five motels.”
“Gee, that’s a booming metropolis.”

I followed the directions to Marion but hadn’t gone but a few blocks when I spotted a grocery store. “Oh! Something is open!” I turned in and recharged from the morning ride and fueled up for the 15 miles to Marion. I took a few confused turns before I got on the right road and followed some beautiful country roads to the junction of Highway 11 and Interstate 81. Even with the interstate adjacent to Highway 11, the Highway was divided with two travel lanes in each direction. “Who would have thought? I get a lane to myself. That’s nice.”

I rolled into Marion, a town advertising its Main Street downtown and downtown historic district. I liked the look of it with some monstrous houses atop the hill in the heart of downtown. I stopped at a corner to evaluate my lodging options and noticed a fancy looking historic hotel across the street. Sounded expensive and I really wanted a place with no frills, just wifi. As it turned out, the wifi requirement sent me on a customer service journey too, and I wound up asking for a refund on the room I checked into and went next door to another motel that had an instant and reliable connection in a bigger room for less money. Odd how these things work out.