Cycling Across America #7
Part 7 of the solo cycle across America series from exactly ten years ago. (You can read from the start in Boston)
Ten years ago today I was on the seventh day of the trip, my second rest day, and again cycling to fill in the gap from where I was picked up the previous day to where I was staying. Today’s excerpt is from the audio taped sections of the journal, and was recorded whilst cycling:
August the 8th, on the bicycle in Maryland, in Queen Anne’s County.I’m just going past some kind of water logged bits with quite a few Egrets and a Heron. It’s surrounded by fields of Soya Bean, and in the distance just thick woods.
Another day filling in the gap. I’ve gone back to just south of Millington. And I’m cycling up to Ridgely -about 19-20 miles. As I’m going fourteen, fifteen miles an hour, it’ll take me just over an hour.
Last night was fantastic. Went to the Harris Crab House over the Kent Narrows, right by the Bay Bridge. An inlet in Chesapeake Bay. There was around twenty of us. I had what’s called a Shrimp and Crab Feast.
You break off the two big pincers, then you break a pincer in half at the joint, then you turn it white side up, you get your mallet, your little wooden mallet, and you smash it, and you eat the meat inside as you try and get it out
It’s an incredibly messy way to eat. And the seasoning, which is Pepper stuff and particularly hot, it just goes all over the place. So when you’re smacking with your hammer, that’s jumping up in the air, bits of shell are flying around, bits of meat squelching out. You do that to both pincers. And you break off all the legs. Then you completely open him and you pull the top of the shell off. You see what he’s had for dinner the day before –and you don’t eat that. You pull out his intestines from the other end, you pull your finger right through his bits, through the yukky bits –you don’t eat them. You scrape off his lungs –you don’t eat them either, and you’re left with I suppose like a cage which you just smash in on itself with your fingers, and crunch it into like cavities and there’s loads of meat inside and you just try and get it. Relatively loads, there’s very little. Though to get at the underneath you actually use one of the legs you broke off, and you can hook one of the bits of the underneath of the belly, and that comes right off. That’s how you start getting in at the intestines and what have you. You can eat those things as well.
But as my host said,
–You eat more of the yukky bits when you pay for them by the dozen, but when you’re having a Feast and you can get as many as you can eat, there’s no need to eat the yukky bits. You just eat all the best bits.They all reckon that nobody else in the world, and certainly the States, can cook crabs like they do. And they all do it wrong everywhere else. In other places they just boil them or broil them, and here in Maryland they steam them. And then they season them – pretty hot stuff. So the crabs are green crabs, or you get the blue crabs here as well, until you steam them and they go red, pink, the kind of crab colour we’re used to seeing. You might get the odd wet crab, which means it was at the bottom of the rack. Some water got in there so when you’re attacking it, it might squelch a bit.
Quite late on the waitress came over and said, Has nobody shown you how to do this yet? And she got a plastic knife, and in about five seconds she had it cut up and ready for eating. Which was quite demoralising because it was taking me about twenty minutes a crab. Everybody seemed to have their own way of eating them. –There’s eighty-seven ways to do this. Everyone has their way
I did apologise at one stage.
–I’m sorry guys, but I’ve never eaten with a hammer before.I was chatting with an Irish-American. All four grandparents from home. He’s in the D.E.A. –the Drugs Enforcement Agency, and I told him how much I liked going into Southbridge back in Wilmington and other poor black neighbourhoods. He got a little bit upset, and said that I wouldn’t like it if I became a victim.
He said this morning he was going in and they were going to knock some doors off. They were going into somewhere in Baltimore, into a ‘bad place’ as he saw. They get, I’m not sure, some kind of warrant basically where they knock and if people don’t answer the doors they just knock the doors right off and they go in.
Soya beans and corn. Houses, farms a good bit in off the road. There’s a town coming up ahead. Or a village. If I remember rightly it’s probably Sudlersville. These towns are really only just crossroads, and they might have just one shop. At that shop you’d see a telephone outside and a soda machine, which will do me.
After the meal last night we went across to the bar. Which is all wooden and open, and big fans. At the pub we walked along this little wooden pier. And up where a light was there was fish. Some were a foot long; some were two feet long. All were just jumping. Fish were jumping, as the song says. So I watched them for a while.
–It is Sudlersville, “Welcome to Sudlersville”. That was somebody cheering at me there. It’s quite a nice town. “Sudlersville Middle School”. Good Lord, that was Duran Duran coming out of somebody’s house. The music that is, not the people. “Red lights on Main”. Straight-ahead, 313. Am I going to break the lights? No, I’m not. The place is too nice to break lights. Ah, they’re green anyway.
The bike is so unstable without the bags. I’m just not used to it. The minute I get out of the saddle it has a tendency to wobble seriously. People’s post boxes with Cardinals painted on them. That seems to be fairly common. People like Cardinals all over the country, as far as I can see. At least the Northeast into the South
There’s a ball game on today. On the radio. I asked if was it a big one. It is, kind of. The Orioles are playing. They’re based in Baltimore and they’re chasing one or two teams. Looked like they were going to be good this year, I was told, but not now.
I asked my host if he went. He said he used to but now they’re much too greedy that he doesn’t. He didn’t actually mention the strike as such. He said if he goes now it’ll cost him a hundred dollars. That’s getting in, getting there, hot dogs, the lot. And that’s an awful lot of money he says. He said it used to be going to the game in the Bleacher seats was fifty cents. He says now the Bleacher seats are seven dollars. Which to me sounds okay but I’ve no idea what it means.
“$1,000 fine and 1 point for littering”. “Keep Maryland safe and beautiful”.
I got a friendly wave from a man on his little lawnmower as he went around his garden. You need tractors around here. The gardens are big.
The trees are giving a nice bit of shade. But the heat doesn’t bother me to be honest. Me water’s gone way too warm. Only a half an hour it went that way. That’s despite having tons of ice cubes in there. And there’s a gap. Back into the sun again. There’s a huge big mansion with a tree-lined avenue up to it. Pine trees actually, which stand out here because everything else is deciduous. “Chesapeake Sporting Clay Range – lodging available”.
Soya beans. This is the second crop. I’m told they’ll try and get a third crop in. The winter crop they call it. And try and harvest it before Thanksgiving.
Back into the trees again. It’s nice. No, the heat doesn’t bother me. Perhaps because I can’t afford to let it. It’s going to get so much hotter, everyone keeps telling me.
And today’s 18 miles bring the total cycled on the trip to 457. I’m aiming for Princess Anne tomorrow, eighty miles away.
Read the Next Entry (#8) in My Bicycle Trip Across America
Read from the beginning of the Cycle Across America
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