October 30

Working backwards:

I just rode a mile and a half through rush-hour traffic in St. Augustine to a Winn-Dixie for microwavable and refrigerable groceries for two days. The Winn-Dixie has the first bike rack I've seen at a supermarket, and it was filled, and all the bikes are locked. I parked mine at the end of the rack, and left it, unlocked, as I have been doing. Inside the store, as I was pushing my cart towards the produce, I met a fellow struggling with shopping bags, assorted clothing and his bicycle. I asked him if bikes got stolen that much around there (to my shame I didn't offer to help him in his struggle) and he said,
"It's unbelievable".

Having emptied the milk crate on my bike in order to carry the groceries back to the motel (Ramada Inn, pool, internet, microwave and fridge, $60) I realized that my bike would be the perfect shopping cart. I go back to get it, and follow a big guy in his early forties towards the bike rack. This guy was 6'4", big shoulders, nobody to mess with. He went to the end of the rack, put his groceries in the milk carton of his bike, and we congratulated each other on our intelligent choice of hardware.

Another guy, who was also black, at a filling station/convenience store thirty minutes north (by bike) of St. Augustine struck up a conversation while I was drinking a bottle of chocolate YoHo. I was standing on a verandah five feet above the ground, where he was standing next to his car. He admired my rig and we talked about the usual stuff: where I came from, how long I've been on the road and where I'm going. He has been to Canada, but not to Nova Scotia. Loved Montreal, includes it with his favorite cities: New York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Lima. He recommended a couple of seafood restaurants in St. Augustine, and said that I gotta see the something Basilica, the oldest church in America.

An hour before that, I was riding on Ponte Vedra Blvd, past immaculate mansions between the road and the beach. That's pronounced "ponty vaydra". I had to ask my way from a carpenter, when Adventure Cycling misdirected me. The carpenter addressed me as "sir". That's been happening a lot in the South, but one black guy, younger than me called me "boy", which is another improvement in race relations. The sun was bright and the air redolent with the fragrance of a blossom (hibiscus maybe) which I've been smelling all day, and which triggers deep but murky memories and puts me in a playful mood. A guy going north in British Racing Green convertible slowed and signaled to me to stop. He wanted to talk. He has made several bike tours in North America and Europe, and he asks knowledgeable questions, and we have a good conversation. He said that he would have invited me to stay at his little beach house, but his wife wasn't there and he wouldn't be back for several hours. I rode a long, long way before I saw a "little" beach house.

About 11:00 this morning as I was taking a rest before crossing the Amelia River a guy, about 60, riding passed me and then turned around and came back to see if there was anything I needed. He races his bike, but has never toured on one, and wanted to know all about it.

I mention Erin in all these conversation, how supportive she has been and how we plan to meet for a couple of weeks somewhere warm this winter.

I'm feeling a little guilty about the pleasure I've had today: it's been that good. Shorts and T shirt since sunup, tail winds, a no-sweat 52 mile ride with lots of breaks, tropical vegetation and an armadillo on the roadside, that fragrance, which verges on clinging but never gets there, and which filters vision.

At sunset, which gave a soft warm light to the genuine and the schlock alike in St. Augustine's Old Town, I got lost returning with my groceries to the motel. I asked directions of a man on a park bench: tobacco stains on his fingers and in his beard and a bicycle beside him. He gave me perfect directions to the motel. I cannot call it home, but it sho feels good. I was surprised this morning as I rode past mansions and pristine beaches and verdant growth by my lack of envy or greed, and then realized that I still don't want to live, permanently, anywhere but Chester, with my family and friends. But for the first time since I left I feel good about being on the road. Kerouac wouldn't have had the stamina to do this.

Amelia Island Parkway, just south of Fernandia Beach, runs through a super-plush stretch of gated estates. The road, like many in the Deep South, is narrow with wide grassy shoulders. There were places on back roads in the Carolinas where those shoulders were so littered that there were times I needed to pee and was reluctant to stop. Not so the Amelia Island Parkway. The only litter I noticed was a solitary champagne bottle.

I spent last night at the Ft. Clinch State Park. I set up camp, cooked my supper, crawled into my tent and bedroll at sunset, read a little, drifted off to sleep, and woke an hour later to the rattle of the pans I'd left on the picnic table. I grabbed the flashlight and looked outside. Several raccoons were investigating my gear, and especially the milk crate on my bike, which holds my food, and was leaning against a fence: superhighway for raccoons. They didn't like the light much, but they didn't dislike it enough to leave, so I told them to go away, which they did, reluctantly. I wasn't fully back into my sleeping bag before they returned. This time I shouted and threw a shoe at them. That was a much greater inconvenience to me than to them. The shoe missed, they continued their burglary, and now I had to get dressed to retrieve the shoe. I put my glasses on and the world was weird. I had sat on them, popping out a lens and bending the frame. One-eyed, I got my shoe, and took everything out of the milk crate and put it in the tent. The raccoons, two adults and two smaller ones, stayed five feet from my bike on the other side of the fence and watched. They would turn away from the flashlight if I shone it directly in their eyes, but they wouldn't leave. One of the small ones once nuzzled up to one of the adults and got what I took to be reassurance. After I got everything I thought they might try to eat into the tent, I went back to bed and tried to sleep.

The Metta Sutta, as translated and paraphrased by Gil Fronsdal, contains these lines:
"Let no one, through anger or aversion, wish for others to suffer. . . . Toward all beings one should cultivate a bountiful heart. With loving kindness for the whole world should one cultivate a bountiful heart."

I repeated those lines the rest of the night when I was awake, which I frequently was, trying not to worry about how I would get my glasses fixed, and trying not to think of ways to murder raccoons. In the morning I managed to get the lens back in, and twisted the frames so that I could see again.

October 28

I spent last night in a $10 campground, and rode today to the Okefenokee National Wildlife refuge, where I'm in a $20 campground. The price goes up, but there's no other difference in these campgrounds. There was a guy riding a recumbent bike going the other way, and we stopped and talked for fifteen minutes. He's in his late fifties, traveling by car, and does long rides on his bike from his campgrounds. He was a war resister, and we shared Movement stories and memories.

October 26

I'm in a campground that is as good as any I've stayed in, administered by an ancient couple who are devoutly Christian and crippled by arthritis. It cost $7., and has all the amenities. A grandson in his 30's does the maintenance, and Mr. Spot, a small friendly dog, who had been introduced by the old lady, came by for a taste of beef jerky.

October 23

Statesboro, Georgia. I rode 70 miles today. Left the Best Western at 8:00, having finished a huge, greasy breakfast and Denny's (never again) and arrived at the Trellis Inn at 3:50. Stopped frequently: put more clothes on; have a drink of water; buy a pint of milk and a banana from a friendly guy dressed in camouflage; pee and lubricate bum; eat the banana and drink the milk; buy juice, water, and a cheeseburger from another nice guy in a small store (my earlier observations about urban sprawl are being contradicted here); remove some clothing; pee and lubricate bum; stop for a hundred-car funeral, led by a squad car. The hearse was white. Strong headwinds by the end of the day, but I did well, and wasn't exhausted.

And I rode through an interesting variety of landscape, from densely wooded swamps and riverbanks, to huge, flat fields.

The Trellis Inn is another under-equipped and over-priced place, but it is well maintained and has a nice ambience (never thought I'd use that word on this ride, but I can't think of a better).

October 22

Last night, after I had finished the above, things were quiet, just a few cars passing by, until sunset, when traffic increased. I wondered what was going on, but didn't think too much about it and drifted off to sleep. About an hour later, when it was good and dark, I was awakened by the sound of a ½ ton truck, or maybe an ATV driving slowly past my road, and then slowly accelerating. Anticipating visitors, I laid awake for an hour or so, listening to every vehicle that passed by, and there were still quite a few, waiting for one to slow down and stop. None did, and I finally relaxed and went back to sleep. For less than an hour, when about ten or fifteen dogs started howling and barking. That went on for a long time, and then suddenly stopped. Then vehicles started moving on the highway again, and a conversation I'd heard in a convenience store that afternoon came back to me: today was the last day you can hunt deer with dogs, this year. Which also explained the cages I'd been seeing on the backs of pick-up trucks. I remembered reading about hunting with dogs when I was a kid. A group of hunters would get together with their hounds, and then release them, and listen for their baying. Each could tell his own dog's voice, and could tell when a dog, or group of dogs, had game at bay, and they followed the sound into the woods and shot whatever animal the dogs had cornered. I didn't hear anything like that. No baying, no shooting. Maybe they do it differently, now that they use trucks.

Yamassee, SC, population about 900. That figure should have warned me. I counted on the place having an adequate grocery. By that I mean stocked with my staples: oranges, bananas, Spam, trail mix, tuna salad, bagels, milk and beer. I asked a fellow unloading a truck outside an auto parts store if there was a supermarket nearby. He was reluctant to talk to a weird-looking stranger at first, but with some coaxing he suggested I either go back 12 miles to Walterboro, or take the next left, cross the tracks, turn right, and there would be a small store on the left.

I started going the way he said to, but then just to make sure I asked a guy coming away from a house under construction. A big, bearded guy in his late twenties, with a hairlip. "Is there a grocery store near here?" I asked.

"Whatch you huntin?"

"Just some stuff for supper"

"Yeah there's a store down this way. Cross the tracks, turn right, and it's on the left."
The "tracks" was a freight yard with two railways running through it. Across them, on a street that ran parallel to them for 50 yards before recrossing them, was a shack surrounded by a heap of rusting bicycles, and next to the shack a store and a small abandoned warehouse. The store didn't look promising, and lived up to it. I ended up with six slices of salami and a can of chili, which I heated in a microwave at the Best Western in Point South.

October 21

As good a day as yesterday was bad. Cool, sunny weather, light tailwinds, no hills. I'm drying my tent on a fire road in a National Forest, with the intention of pitching it, if nobody objects. So far nobody has taken any interest. I would have gone further back on the fire road, but it is deer season -which lasts in the South until Jan. 1 st.

I'm still trying to allay the anxiety. Belay it. It's hard to do. I curse at drivers who get right behind me and give me a blast on their horn - old women and teenage boys, mostly. I could say they share many characteristics, but that would be counter-productive to what I'm trying to do, which is to cultivate a bountiful heart towards them, and all beings. Thank God for Budweiser.

October 20

Only 52 miles today - brutal headwinds, and high temperatures - and I rode eight hours to do that much. Rested a lot.

South Carolina. I'm camped by the Great Pee Dee River. I've seen live oaks, palmettos, pelicans, and something that looks like prickly pear but is soft, doesn't have spines and can grow to 6' tall. The local pine is longleaf.

I met a couple in their early 60's today who are riding a tandem bike along my route. They started from Bar Harbor on Sept. 2nd. They go faster than I do, but I caught up with them because they spend more time sightseeing than I do. Real nice people, enjoying themselves immensely.

Also met a guy on a motorcycle, who pulled over to talk to me. He has ridden all over North America, north of Mexico on a bicycle. Went through Chester in '86. He was generous with advice. Offered to let me stay at his place, but it was only 2 PM and I could make at least another 25 miles, I thought, so I declined.

October 19

From Pennsylvania south on my route communities, and thinly populated rural areas, support a great number of churches. I'm not keeping count, but I think I pass a church every five miles when I'm riding through farmland, and I'm talking big farms in Virginia and North Carolina, so the rural areas are not as densely populated as they are in Nova Scotia. Fundamentalist Christian, Baptist, Church of God, African Methodist Episcopal, Pentecostal, one huge place called Lives Changed by Christ. On Sunday mornings there is very little traffic, compared to the rest of the week, on these back roads: everybody is either in church or getting ready to go, and they don't have all that far to drive. And every church has a graveyard.

A couple of days ago my ride took me through Camp Lejuene, a huge Marine Corps base. I call it Death Valley: in twenty miles there were no buildings other than a few mock-ups for combat practice, and no side roads except for tanks. Lots of HMVs and APCs on the highway. The only people not in a vehicle were a group of prisoners (Marines) mowing grass. Their guard gave me a wave that did not rise above his waist.

I had ridden about 65 miles that day, when I finally got out of Death Valley My rump, knees, and feet hurt, I was hungry and I wanted a beer. The only commercial campground nearby didn't look very inviting, so after I bought a 22oz bottle of Bud at a convenience store I began looking for a place to pitch my tent. Found one not a hundred yards down the road. It was a church-like wooden structure, painted white, and in good shape, with no cars near it, and an historic marker that said something about some body's meeting place. Behind it, blending into the woods, was a cemetery with a road running through it. There were several patches of graves, each separated from the other by woods or low wild bushes, and each fenced in and well maintained. I kept going back, away from the highway, until there were no more graves and I couldn't be seen.

My tent was still wet from the dew of the morning before and I dried it as best I could by hanging it over one of the fences and meanwhile ate my cold supper, sipping beer, but saving it because I like to have some when I write my daily journal. I got the tent pitched a half hour before sunset, and when I was settling in I knocked the bottle over and spilled about a quarter of the beer. That would have been sadder if I hadn't been in a graveyard. Oscar Begay, the first Navajo I met, always poured a little of his bottle onto the ground, for the old people, the anasazi, to appease them, and made me promise to do the same.

That night, after the helicopters quit flying over the Marine base and they got through their artillery practice, and the traffic on the highway abated, and the local dogs settled down, it was very peaceful.

October 18

I saw a DC3 flying over Wilmington this morning. Sixty-year-old airplanes are at least as rare as sixty-six yea old men touring on bicycles. I saluted my fellow antique.

Took a little tour of downtown Wilmington this morning. It's a nice place, much like downtown Halifax, but there were very few people around. Stopped at the Cape Fear Museum, paid $5 admission, and in five minutes felt I had been ripped off. For instance, they have assembled the fossilized skeleton of a giant sloth, discovered with five others during the excavation for a new building in Wilmington. The exhibit has a two-sentence description of the process of fossilization, without any mention of how long that process takes. Nor was there any mention of the dates in which giant sloths crawled the earth. Six giant sloth carcasses in one site makes me think of human hunters, but that thought is not addressed in the exhibit. In another section there is a display of flint tools found in the Cape Fear region, arranged from earliest to latest, but again without dates.

Paleontologists and Archaeologists had to have worked on those discoveries and displays, and they would have made an attempt to accurately date them. But the museum, in cowardice, ignorance, or shared belief with Creationists, has suppressed that information.

Moving on to more recent times, the museum has a display about the Wilmington Ten, who they say were radicals who blew up Mike's Grocery in 1971. A few photographs and articles from the newspapers at the time. And that is the only display that deals with violence associated with Jim Crow and the struggle against it. No mention of 85 blacks lynched between 1882 and 1962. And as for Mike's Grocery, try this:

Newsweek July 31, 1978, p. 23
THE WILMINGTON TEN. In 1971, Ben Chavis, a field organizer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, went to Wilmington, N. C., to help quell violence resulting from court-ordered school desegregation. During a night of rioting, a white-owned grocery store was burned to the ground. Chavis, eight other black men and one white woman were charged with firebombing the store. In 1972, they were convicted and sentenced to a combined total of 282 years in prison - one of the stiffest sentences ever imposed in North Carolina for arson in which no one died.

In 1976, one of the three young witnesses against them recanted his testimony and the others followed suit. They claimed that they had been coerced and bribed by prosecutors. Civil-rights leaders and politicians requested a new trial or a gubernatorial pardon. But a superior-court judge refused to grant a new trial, and last January, Gov. James Hunt declined to pardon the ten, though he did approve slight reductions in the sentences of the nine still in jail. Since then, one more of the ten has been paroled. The eight remaining are on AI's list.

I shoulda asked for my money back.

October 17

The Econolodge, in Wilmington, is managed by folks from the Subcontinent. The lady who checked me in called the room after I got out of the shower, to suggest that I bring the bicycle into the room, I told her it was dirty, and that I could lock it up outside. She said she would give a rag to clean it with, and that she would feel better if I kept it inside. It is a quiet place, the room is well back from the street, so I think she's overly cautious. For her peace of mind I wiped the bike down and brought it in. Such exchanges have been rare. In fact this is the only such compromise I've made since I left home. I miss them, a little. I feel good about being here. I feel legitimate, almost normal.

On the 13th I kept running across a white van with a luggage container and a bike on the roof and a bike rack on the rear. Sometimes it would overtake me, and others it would pass me going the opposite direction. I waved several times, but never got a visible response from the driver. Because the van and its occupants were obviously following the Adventure Cycling route, I fantasized that they worked for Adventure Cycling, checking out the route, and wouldn't respond because they didn't want to hear my opinion of their product.

I didn't see them the next day, but on the fifteenth the van pulled up as I was waiting for the ferry across the Pamlico river between Bath and Aroura, N.C. I didn't bother to wave this time; I figured after five or six attempts without a response the other day, they weren't interested. But just as I changed my mind, thinking that I didn't need to be a jerk just because they were, a woman, about 50 years old, got out and said, "So, where you headed?"

I turned out that she and her husband are supporting a tour of middle-aged women, from Bar Harbor to somewhere. The women, and the husband of the lady driving the van, showed up on their bikes in a few minutes.

What I learned from them is that I’m doing alright. He calls them killer hills too, and he's ten years younger and on an unloaded bike. I'm moving better than 270 pounds, compared to their 175, and keeping up with them. Not that I would make invidious comparisons.

Wilmington is warm. And pretty, along Market Street from downtown to the motel, near 29th St. Big old brick houses with white columns out front, dating from the mid 1800's, and verdant lawns, trees, and shrubbery. The town has the feel that Austin, Texas, had in the spring of 1969. It smells good too. The digital thermometer outside the Food Lion supermarket read 71F at 2:00 PM. (Food Lion is better, if yuppier is better, than Piggly Wiggly. But the working class, black and white, in North Carolina are loyal to their Piggly Wiggly.)

Things have changed, at least on the surface, if this is the Deep South. In a small café in a small town yesterday two old black ladies having lunch were treated just the same as everyone else, by staff and patrons alike. That's an improvement from 1961.

October 16

Moving right along. This is the fourth night since I left Suffolk. Spent last night in a KOA where I was conned into buying some kind of discount package for $10. But the campground was nice and quiet, the shower was warm, I did my laundry for $3.25, and got a good night's rest.

My sleeping bag and self-inflating air mattress are comfortable, even on hard ground, and warm to at least -5C. I woke to ice in the tent the day before yesterday, in a cornfield near Bath. I'm back in the woods again tonight, fifty miles north of Wilmington, where I intend to stay two days.

Looks like rain. I'm getting more capable, and, occasionally, less homesick.

October 12

Yesterday I was passing through a working class neighborhood, small houses on large lots in a wooded area between large farms, and got chased by dog. I can't outrun the most feeble dog, so this guy, a fair-sized hound pretending to be viscous, pestered me for about 150 meters, with my shouting at him reaching a crescendo. He finally left off without biting me, which is the test of viciousness. I rode another 400 meters or so, and became aware of something a little different in the sound of my passage. I looked around, and a much smaller dog was following me. I told him to go home. He wouldn't. I thought he would get tired and give up in another 400 meters. He didn't.

This was a day of anxiety for me. My maps had indicated country stores, from which I needed to get food and water for the night, but two of them were closed, the day was getting late, and if the third, about ten miles away, was closed I would have to start begging. I had no time for a small, young, friendly, black and white shorthaired attractive dog. I pedaled as fast as I could, convinced he would become exhausted and quit. Three miles later he was still with me, his tongue scraping the pavement.

At last I came up on a man walking a dog with two of his children. I told him what was going on, and asked if he would just keep the dog there until I was well out of sight. He did that, and more. He said he'd take the dog back to the neighborhood where he picked me up, and look for his owners.

I do not have room for a dog on my trailer or my journey. That is kinda sad.

Erin had told me, when I was drying out in Larton, that Virginia got 9 inches of rain during that storm. Which is why the rivers are muddy, and why I rode through two six-inch deep ponds on the highway today. About 11:00 this morning I stopped to talk to a man, in his seventies, who was patching up the water damage at the end of his driveway. His farmhouse was way back off the road. He said that twelve inches of rain fell: he has a gauge that maxes out at six inches, and it filled twice.

I spent two nights in Suffolk, pronounced suffuk, and then rode 66 miles, ending up well into North Carolina. There is birdsong in the air and morninglorys blooming on the roadside. There is a "Gimme gimme gimme" bird. The roads are flat and pedaling is easy, but stores are still scarce between towns. I bought another novel, Ordinary Heros, by Scott Trurow, which I shall read forthwith.

October 10

Woke last night at 11:30, needing to pee, and opened the tent to a mystical moonlit scene. Moonlight on maple leaves. Cool as it was I stood in my shorts and looked long at all of it.

I got up at 7:00. The tent was dry, and I was riding at 8:10. Got to the outskirts of Richmond at noon. Saw a clinic and decided to have the sore on my lip looked at: it still hasn't healed up. The receptionist at the clinic said it would be a forty-five minute wait. I saw a doctor at 3:15, who looked at the lip and wanted to refer me to a dermatologist. I gave her an argument, suggesting it could be a cold sore that got infected. She got another doctor, who said that cold sores don't last that long, and neither does anything else. He was thinking squamous cell cancer, as was the first doctor, and hence the dermatologist. By this time everybody working in the place had asked me if that was my bike outside and was I really riding from Canada to Mexico. The second doctor decided that the best thing would be to get an oral surgeon to do a biopsy of the sore. His secretary phoned six before she found one who would see me that afternoon. They called a cab for me, because the surgeon's office was six mile away. It took until 3:50 to find a cab company that would take a traveler's cheque, Cab got there at 4:30. Metro Taxi, driven by one Cynthia, a lady in a gold lame blouse and black slacks, who had inch-long bright red fingernails and wore mucho junk jewelry. She drove like I did when I was a teenager and got me to the oral surgeon's at 4:45. She didn't have change for $100. She took the traveler's cheque and drove away, to get change, and told me to call when I got out of the office, she'd pick me up.

In the oral surgeon's office everybody wants to know about the bike trip, and especially to doctor himself, who is training for a triathalon. Dr. Adams, a real nice guy. He looked at the sore and said yes, it could be squamous, and if it were anybody else he'd remove it at once. But because it started when I was riding, and because I’m still riding and not treating it and licking my lips, it could also be a cut that won't heal. He told me to treat it with Bacitracin and if it's still there in two weeks see an oral surgeon. He said there was no cause for alarm, that squamous cancers are serious but don't need urgent attention. The receptionist called Cynthia's cell, and Cynthia said she was 15 min away. 25 minutes later I was waiting on the street when the office closed and the receptionist came out. "Still here?" she asked.

"I think I've been ripped off," I said.

"Oh, no," she said, "I don't think so. Want me to go fish her number out of the trash?"

"That would be great."

She went back into the office and came out in a minute. She had called Cynthia again: 3 blocks away she said. The receptionist waited with me, and, lo, Cynthia drove up.
Cynthia is one fine lady. I had told her that I had made a reservation at the Radisson, downtown. "You got to go all the way back to Patient First and then ride your bike all the way back here? How much they charge you?"

"Hundred and nine dollars."

"You can get a room for $45."

"Yeah I got a room for $45 the other night and I still have the smell on my clothes."

"No, you can get a good room for a lot less than that." Still driving like A. J. Foyt she gets on her cell and calls motels. Comes up with the Travel Lodge, $56, and drives a little out of her way to show it to me. She doesn't have the meter on because she's going to charge me the same as the first trip. She told me about all the restaurants in the area, and offered to load the bike and trailer into the cab (they couldn't have fit). God, she's a good woman.

October 8

My sense of illegitimacy partially arises from sneaking into the woods and making a cold camp. I wish I’d asked that park ranger his name. And my depression about this venture partially arises from my sense of illegitimacy. Illegitimacy carries with it the fear of getting caught and punished. Yelled at, beaten up, shot and killed.

Again, I'm in a peaceful, idyllic place. A woods road that hasn't been used much, no ATV tracks, no deep ruts from trucks or tree farmers. Young pine growing here, maybe loblolly, and younger maple. Could be an exercise in sylvaculture. The rain stopped last night and the skies cleared this afternoon. I left the motel at 8:00, had breakfast in Anne's Diner where I met other patrons of the motel, a woman getting a divorce and her boyfriend. They gave me directions to a supermarket, and on the way there I stopped and did my laundry and dried my tent in the parking lot next door while the machines churned. By the time I got groceries and got back on the route it was noon. I rode about 30 miles and stopped at 3:45.

There are happy sights: four black kids, ages six to thirteen, chasing each other gleefully around a house stop their game to wave and say "Hi". A pretty blonde woman in a white blouse and black shorts in her yard with her clone daughters comes to the end of her driveway to watch me ride by. "Don't see many of these," I said, "Do ya?"
"I sure don't," she said, with a big grin.

On these narrow roads cars will often hang back until I wave them around, and then, often, if they are middle-aged and middle-class women (you can tell by the Camrys) they look in their rearview mirrors and give me a wave.

The sun is setting and it's getting colder.

October 7

Rain started shortly after I got into my tent on the night of the 5th and continued all night and all the next morning. I sure can pick 'em. I set up camp near an army base, five miles from Larton., congratulating myself on the money I had saved. Checked into a motel in Larton at 11:00 the next morning, thoroughly soaked. Bought a Washington Post, two bottles of Heineken's and two cans of chili, and did a lot of emailing and transcribing of this journal.

At ten this morning, having been on the road two hours, I pulled into a shopping center looking for a laundromat. There wasn't one, but there was a bike/ski shop, and a compadre there, the owner, replaced my brake pads, cleaned and oiled the chain and gears, tuned the deraileur and put air in the tires. We had a good chat for an hour, and that buoyed my spirits..

I'm in a dumpy, but warm and adequate, motel in Fredericksburg. $42. A drizzly, cold day. I started out on shorts and a T shirt, put on a jacket at 9:30, rain pants at 12:30 and gloves at 3:00. Deer season. Ol' boys in camouflage giving me hard stares in country stores. Not all of them. Near a marine station there was a fifty-five year old guy in a group of four who gave me a friendly nod. The weather is supposed to clear up and get warmer tomorrow. My poor tent is still soaking wet.

Virginia rivers are muddy, and there are lots of water depth markers, but so far no water, on the roads. Glad I'm doing this in the dry season.

October 5

I rode the bike trail through Rock Creek Park this morning. Most of it is in Maryland, but the last four miles or so are through Washington DC. The creek forms a deep ravine, and except for the National Zoo there is nothing except the noise of traffic, and about three large, stately even, viaducts that cross it, that would indicate that one is traversing the capital of the most powerful country ever. I encountered hardly anyone there.

No other cyclists, just a couple of joggers, a group of homeless people, and a parks employee who spoke no English. (I'm still too shy to practice my meager Spanish, but there is a lot of it, spoken and on signs, all along my route.) When I thought I must be as close as I was going to get to the White House, the Capitol, and all that, I rode up out of the ravine onto Avenue P and then onto Connecticut Ave., which becomes 17 th Street. I stopped at a blockade manned by a couple of officers in conversation with another cyclist, to ask directions to the Lincoln Memorial, which is all I really wanted to see. The officer who wasn't dealing with the other cyclist was very friendly, even though the sign on the barricade read something like, "No further progress without valid ID", and he gave me clear directions. I pulled into an adjacent park and called Erin. Told her I was looking at the Washington Monument. She told me to say something for her at the Lincoln Memorial.

All through this trip I have felt as I did thirty-five years ago, when Erin and I and all our friends were ardently opposing the Viet Nam war. I have felt that I don't really belong to this nation, that it is owned by those who would crush all opposition to the agenda of greed they call the American way. That feeling left me at the Lincoln Memorial. There, I owned this country, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., when he gave that beautiful speech, and as did the other visitors with me.

October 4

Baltimore. Terribly uneventful ride and stay. Lots of smart-looking young people around John Hopkins U.

October 2

Not being bale to get to Baltimore today, having taken a wrong turn at Jarretsville, MA, I had to find a place to pitch my tent. I found a god one, on the grassy border of a soybean field, screened from the road by a 200' wide strip of woods. I dried out the tent and ate my supper, and was pitching the tent when two teenagers, one on a dirt bike and the other on an ATV, rode up on the field's perimeter road. They stopped and the kid on the dirt bike questioned my, a little aggressively, about what I was doing, where I had come from, etc. When he was leaving he said, "My Dad own's this field."

I finished pitching the tent, ate an orange, and got my gear off the bike and into the tent, worrying about the kid's dad. I figured the worst that could happen would be that he would show up at 6:00, when the sun would be setting, and tell me to get the hell off his land.

At six I was reading Elmore Leonard, still in my riding clothes, my rear into the tent and my feet on the ground outside, and Dad showed up, driving a new blue Dodge 4x4. I got up to greet him, and he said. Are you OK? Is everything alright?"

We talked for a bit, but he was in a hurry to get somewhere, and when he left he gave me a bottle of water and a Twinkie. "Just clean up after yourself," he said as he drove off. The kids rode by as I was writing this and gave me a wave.

I met two people this morning. I stopped at a crossroads restaurant for breakfast, and a kind, nearly crippled, fifty-five year-old, overweight and snaggle-toothed waitress took a deep interest in my sojourn and safety. So concerned that she warned me not to go into Washington D.C. alone. "It's full of blacks, you know. Nothing but blacks," she said.
An hour later as I was trying to find the entrance to a gas station, I met Ken. I would guess he is Korean or Japanese. The nice Greek lady at the Riverton Hotel told me about him, and she said he was Japanese, but I doubt that she asked or he volunteered. Ken is riding from Boston to Miami, and then is going to L. A. He prefers hotels to motels, and if he is packing a tent it is singularly small. But it could be, because Ken looks pretty agile. One of the reasons I bought the big heavy tent that I'm using is that it is hard for me to squirm around in small spaces. Ken offered to ride with me, but I declined. I would slow him down, embarrassingly. He's a nice guy, and having a good time, and I wish him well.

October 1

An uneventful, boring, Pennsylvania day. The weather is warmer, and that makes the odors of the farm country stronger. Corn and soybeans, dairy and beef cattle. The odor is the same for all of them, and I suspect pesticides and herbicides. There were a few goats. No hex signs on the barns. Plenty of Christians, though. Lots of churches including the LCBC, a huge place that I mistook for a shopping center when I first saw it, half a mile away. Its parking lot was proportionately huge, and full. LCBC stands for Lives Changed by Christ.

The country is fairly flat, and interrupted by merciless hills. I did more than fifty miles, and was headed for a campground (which nobody I asked could say for sure was still open) when I found a good-looking site off the road in a cut for a power line. Never again. Pitching the tent, I could feel the aluminum poles vibrating, with what I think would be induced current.

There are a lot of plants here I've never seen before. I started seeing opossums among the roadkill in New York, and a rattlesnake yesterday. Om mani padme hum.