Cycling Across America #38
Part 38 of the Cycle-Across-America series relayed day by day, exactly ten years after it happened. (Read from the start in Boston)
Ten years ago today I was cycling in Oklahoma and missing the All-Ireland Hurling Final:
8th September, 1996, Sunday, 11.00.p.m -ishSo little traffic. The road (US 59/OK 10) North to Grove was narrow but easy enough. Dropped down to where the Elk River runs into The Grand Lake O The Cherokees. Welcome to Grove. As I crossed the bridge I saw the Cherokee Queen. Seeing a riverboat had me thinking of my sister. I took a picture of the CQII.
With the dark cloud cover it was cool but I treated myself to a pint of milk I didn’t deserve. No need to eat yet, I hoped to make it to Wyandotte, a further nineteen miles along. By the time I crossed the next creek into the Grand Lake - Honey Creek - it was getting very dark and deserted for a resort area.
All day breakfasts were on offer and it was now twelve, so I took the gamble on early food hoping the rain would drop properly now or at least that the clouds would pass. It was run by Native Americans. The waitress was beautiful.
Hot tea was on the menu so I asked for it along with Coke. She looked pained so I said it didn’t matter but she was just thinking it through. No problem. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and the recently converted-to biscuits and gravy. Would I like more tea?
The only other people in there were an Indian family. Parents and six kids. All having a lot of fun. When I went outside I saw their people carrier was full of Indian regalia. Feathered things I didn’t recognise on the dashboard, and the most magnificent costumes hanging up.
The roads here were still up and down-ish. A series of ridges I kept climbing up - not difficult but slow - only to see the next one. The early meal gamble had paid off and the dark clouds had broken up now and mostly passed. That meant the twenty percent chance of a thunderstorm was now unlikely.Watched a turtle try to cross the road and successfully dodge the car following me. Thousands of grasshoppers were constantly crashing into my legs. Other bugs flying alongside me like I’m watching a nature program. Little lizards (3″ - 4″) running off the edge of the road.
Saw a live snake on the road at last. Only a foot long and so thin. Little more than a long colourful worm. Bugs continually cracking off my helmet and pinging off my spokes. And then I saw the most frightening looking creature to date. Six inches long with six legs each about three inches long and a tail like a scorpion but its body and limbs were all very stick-like - almost grass-like albeit yellow/orange grass. I went back and looked again. It stopped crossing the road and faced me. It raised its tail. It may have been harmless but I went around it.
This is the first Sunday in September. I was wondering who was in the All-Ireland Hurling Final today, and hoping it was Wexford and they were winning it. I’ll find out in Kansas City.
Forgot to load up with drinks at Wyandotte and reckoned it might now be fifteen miles ’til I get a chance again. When Highway 10 crossed US 60 what little traffic there was disappeared and the land flattened out a bit. Only two vehicles had gone dangerously close to me so far, one of them forcing me off the road but this was a good day trafficwise.
When the 10 turned from North to West it was heavily trafficked as together with 10C it formed a straight highway from Miami, OK to Missouri. Five miles on I would leave the 10 for the 137 but first I crossed the Spring River over a bridge sloping upwards. There was a sheer forty foot cliff face into the river from the far side and maybe twenty foot on the east side.
There was a gas station at the cross-roads so I got my drinks - 1 litre ice tea and a can of Mountain Dew. When paying, the girl said I was making a liar of her because when I walked in she told her friend I was here for water. I apologised and she invited me to sit down and drink my drinks. I hate water.
There was a horrible Northwest wind now and I had to fight it to get over ten mph. Crossed the I-44 in Quapaw. This was only two and a half miles from the Quapaw Tribal HQ of Oklahoma but I was in real danger of not making Pittsburg even without eating again so no detours were permitted. I was disappointed.
This was also Seneca-Cayuga country of which the grandmother from the restaurant back at the Honey Creek was one. Took Alt US 69 to the state line as it criss-crossed Historic Route 66.
And then I entered my seventeenth state and left behind Oklahoma - which means Red People in Choctaw. Good-bye to the state bird and their scissor-tails as they playfully flutter on telephone wires showing off their orange underneaths.
Baxter Springs, Kansas for food to get me to the end of my day. It was a further twenty seven miles to Pittsburg and now it was after four thirty. In this wind I wouldn’t make it before dark. No shoulder in this state either.
There was actually one motel in Baxter Springs but that would mean tomorrow would have to be eighty miles and I wanted to minimise it to allow more time to talk to people in Elsmore and rest for the attempt at the big trip the next day to Kansas City, Missouri.
Eating a pizza slice in a food store a man told me there was a motel in Columbus. That was only sixteen miles away leaving a sixty mile run into Elsmore. Great. And he gave me directions to go across country avoiding big roads and traffic. It included a couple of miles on Historic Route 66 all to myself.
I messed up his directions but you can’t get lost in Kansas. Roads only go due North, South, East or West. No bends. Clouds rolled in, so donned the lreflective vest for the last five miles. The bike had coped well on the few miles of unpaved road but when the gravel was thick it struggled. Had a look ’round the square and the downtown before checking into the Motel here on US 69.
Put the lights, helmet and vest on for second night in succession to look for food. Gringos was open so I dined in. Two tostadas, a chicken enchilada, rice, and beans. It was empty so one of the workers came over to talk to me. In the first five years of his life he lived in seventeen states - mostly west of the Mississippi. His dad was in the oil business.
Surrounded by thousands and thousands of bugs and a couple of extremely noisy and big crickets, I unlocked my bike and returned. Saw a TV article on Webworms. These were called Bagworms by my Fort Gibson friends.
They’re caterpillars really and the dense silky webs they create in trees, sometimes completely covering them, are ugly. This is not like kudzu which I left back in Helena. The Ridge was where that finished. If the Mississippi River couldn’t stop it, the Eastern flat lands of Arkansas did.
From Elsmore to Kansas City is one hundred and twenty miles, I estimate. To pull that off I’d need no wind like today, and to get up early, which I haven’t managed for weeks.
Loved the buildings in the square here. Interesting colours and arrangement of planes. The land has flattened out a lot but it’ still not like East Arkansas or Maryland. Saw a lot of grass and cattle today. Chased by a three-legged dog too. It didn’t seem fair. On either of us.
The TV said no reason why the Webworms are particularly bad this year - their population growth is a cyclical thing and not weather related. Today was in the low 80’s and an easy seventy-three miles, give or take the wind. You lose the rush when you’re not doing ninety plus miles
Read the Next Entry in my Bicycle Trip Across America
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