So here we are in St. Louis, sitting in the Lawlors’ lovely home, after all kinds of food and showers and wonderful things. Biking since Cincinnati has been pretty great, at least that’s how I rose-colored-glassesly choose to remember it. Our route took us into Kentucky with occasional dips into Indiana, and our desire to spend all of our money on food and none of it on housing took us to people’s doors to ask them if we could camp in their backyards almost every night. People’s readiness to take us in, combined with their for-serious southern accents, leads me to call this “southern hospitality.” But maybe it’s more in the nature of “rural hospitality” or “people are nice everywhere” hospitality. Unclear. Anyway we’ve seen a good variety of places in Kentucky/Indiana/Southern Illinois, which felt like they were cut from largely the same cloth as a region. We hit Owensboro, KY, the depressed post-industrial city; Louisville, KY, the revitalized downtown with the Kentucky Derby and the real city vibe; Junction, IL, a little residential pocket by State Route 13 without a gas station to its name; Neunert, IL, an even tinier residential pocket along the Mississippi floodplain occupied by maybe 50 people, all of whom seem to know each other intimately, which is being legislated out of existence as the government tries to keep people from building too close to the river; and Carbondale, IL, the hip college town that made us feel exactly like we were at home, which was nice but also, as Rhiannon pointed out, kind of weird. Why should we feel that close to home?
We barely brushed the south, according to the maps, but for a couple of folks who’ve never really been there before it felt like we were in the heart of it. We saw a few characteristic industries (tobacco and coal–although at first we had no idea what tobacco plants were and theorized they might be soybeans…FAIL), saw plenty of gun shops and confederate flags and massive anti-abortion ads and “pregnancy crisis centers,” heard folks saying positive things about Sarah Palin, drank sweet tea, heard the accent (which I know is supposed to be different than a Southeastern accent but honestly I have trouble telling the difference), and definitely encountered the friendly people.
Over the course of riding, we’re often faced with these decisions about our route: to follow the recommended, but perhaps circuitous and hilly, backroads route? or to take the state highway that we can so clearly see? Choosing often comes down to a decision about whether we’re going for the destination or the journey–do we want more pleasant biking along pretty, hilly roads without the fear of death from truckers and road-raging drivers, or do we want to endure some heat islands and some road rage and some really ugly sprawl in exchange for flatter, faster, straighter routes to our destination? The answer turns out to be “it depends,” and that when we don’t have much of a destination to look forward to we’ve tended to go backroads, to follow the impossible curves of the Ohio River rather than cut away from it, to take the steep hills that a state highway would never climb. But we have so little time to spend sitting still, and sometimes we’ve wanted to get to a destination in time to see it a little. You can see a lot from the road, but you don’t get to talk to so many people as when you take the time to sit down somewhere.
Rain is great for that. Yesterday we were going along a coal road full of heavy trucks and steep hills and a tiny shoulder, and it was hellishly rainy, and we both slipped off our bikes at one time or another because the traction was so bad. So needless to say once we arrived in Chester, IL, at 9:30 AM after riding for three hours in the rain, we found ourselves a diner and crashed at a table, looking like drowned rats I’m sure, and ordered plate after plate of food, and in the end got into a conversation with a guy whose name I never got, who I have been referring to alternately as Sarah Palin Man and as Widow Chaser. He initially came to our attention when he was talking with his friend about what an intelligent and competent woman Palin was, and what high approval ratings she had in Alaska, and her good handling of the state’s financial situation, and anyway this whole conversation was going on pretty loudly so without consultation, Rhiannon and I started furiously eavesdropping and eating our toast very quietly. When we actually started having a conversation with him instead of just listening on, he also told as about an instance in which “the people spoke and were heard,” which was in a court decision to strike down a dastardly law requiring motorcycle helmets. He is the Widow Chaser because, totally unbidden and without segue, this reasonable-seeming guy started telling us about his dating problems. As a fifty-something man whose wife had died years earlier, he was having trouble finding a suitable lady friend because there “I can’t just find a good widow–most of the men are still alive at our age” and “I don’t like dealing with divorcees and their issues–some of em have kids, some of em have ex-husbands that they talk to all the time, and I just don’t stand for that.”
This conversation was the conclusive proof that we cannot have a single conversation with an older man on this trip that does not give me deep feelings of distress about gender relations as they currently exist and as they interact with , from the “you are exactly the right height for a women “date rape happens, but we haven’t had a violent crime here in years because it’s hard to rape a little girl if she’s gonna blow your head off!” guy to the “you are a coupla gorgeous babes” guy to the “your legs and butt look really toned!” progressive hippie man in the coffee shop. None of this was even remotely threatening but was just bizarre. To Legs and Butt Dude: you are very nice! But I just met you! There is no reason to compliment parts of my body! Or to kiss me on the head for that matter! Anyway. Hopefully we will come to more conclusive conclusions on gender dynamics than “they are not that great,” perhaps with the aid of some supermarket romance novels. You know–research.
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