Diary July 7-16-2003 & 7-17-03

The last two days have been pure Ohio. Yesterday I got across half of the whole damn state! It took me a week to get across PA, and I’m looking at knocking off Ohio in 3 days! That’s fast for a moped. Ohio hasn’t been nearly as nice of a place as PA as far as im concerned. The people don’t seem nearly as nice the scenery isn’t as diverse, and the parks are sparse and motel-ish.

Yesterday I left Pymunting lake in a great mood. It had been such a nice place to stay, and I caught all those fish! I kept the stick I used as a fishing pole and stuck some little flags on the end, a precaution I’d been meaning to take. I started the day riding hot into Ohio, and started getting bored. So I started doing some mindfulness meditation and I started to really relax. Just lovely. However, Rt 6, which is a “scenic road” that goes straight across the country from NY, sucks the big one. It’s really just the difference between statehighways and country roads, but it’s a huge difference. First of all the road is in terrible disrepair. Big ruts and holes every few fee and I started to really relax. Just lovely. However, Rt 6, which is a “scenic road” that goes straight across the country from NY, sucks the big one. It’s really just the difference between statehighways and country roads, but it’s a huge difference. First of all the road is in terrible disrepair, old cement with big ruts and holes every few feet. Then there were the trucks. Big 16 wheelers that blazed by me and my defenseless moped like we were standing still. Thirdly the other drivers on the road were nasty and rude. They were all in a hurry to get wherever they were going and resented my presence, and that I made them slow down for half a second. And finally it wasn’t even pretty. It went through the digs of Ohio, all the crappy, strip mall infested dirty ugly, heartless parts of the state. Very clearly all of this was on the road to the big city. I didn’t realize however that this was just a crappy road, and instead it seemed like I was in a crappy state. If I hadn’t been meditating this whole time it would have really gotten me down. Instead I was focused on my internal roads, all of which were feeling like they were in good repair, and had plenty of attractive scenery to think about along the way.

For hundreds of miles before I even saw a sign for Cleveland, people were telling me to stay clear of the city. “Crime capital of Ohio,” and all that. by the time I actually got there, my view of the place was pretty well skewed. I pictured little old ladies robbing people while they waited at stop lights. I pictured gang warfare and police standoffs. Thousands of thugs just lying in wait for me. They’d set traps by now. I’ve been posting this all on the internet so they’re anticipating my every move. Once I get to Cleveland they’ll spring their snairs, and ill be done for. It would be a stupid way to end this story “I got shot in Cleveland by blood thirsty criminals.” Not to jinx myself though. It could happen, but they way it got hyped… it seemed like a sure thing that it would. However I decided that it would just be another adventure and that I had to go through one of the biggest cities on the map. Another adventure, I thought to myself.

**** Just as I was typing that last sentence a fellow came over who’d ridden here from grand rapids Michigan on his huge Harley Hog… sucker had a corvette engine in it, weighs 1200 pounds. We chatted for a while, he was a short little guy, 75 years old and more than a few missing teeth. He wore blue jeans and a dark blue t-shirt over his retirement paunch. As we were talking a couple kids came running from the lake screaming and yelling. One was crying and the other was holding his head. “He fell onto the rocks oh my god” a young girl in a black and white dress, could bearly speak though all the tears. a man yelled and started running towards them and grabbed one with a white shirt that was holding his head. The man put his hand over the kid’s forehead and carried him over to the grass. I was watching the whole thing and grabbed my first-aid kit from Mo’s front basket and ran over to where the kid was lying. He had blood all over his face and his left eye was partially closed, I whipped open the first-aid kit and started digging through it. Everything in it just looked like plastic and paper, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I shuffled though all the stuff in the bag feeling like a blind man looking though the mail for a few seconds before I could say to myself ‘ok I can do this, I know what all this stuff is, it’s ok, it’s a good thing you’re here with all this…’ a park ranger happened to be driving by just then and stopped. The father was yabbering like he should be, in mild shock with enough adrenaline in his blood to keep him going for weeks. “it’s alright buddy it’s going to be just fine. It’s not your fault. I ran over here so fast I didn’t even know ifit was my kid. I thought someone had fallen in the lake. It’s alright bud, you’re going to be just fine.” And the boy was talking though his sobs as well “is it bad, am I going to have to get stitches, it hurts, dad I didn’t mean to, we were just going to go fishing. Ahhh it hurts so much.” I handed some gauze to the ranger, who started mopping up the blood. The father had been applying pressure so quickly that the bleeding had almost stopped. He had a gash about an inch long and pretty deep. Not so bad though, he’d be alright. “Do you feel sick or does it just feel like a really bad head ach?” the ranger asked. “Like a bad headache” the boy cried, big sloppy tears dripping down his face. The ranger took some butterfly bandages and the rest of the gauze cleaning things up. It felt good to help, I felt prepared. The mother got there, half hysterical, she’d been getting groceries. “How much blood did you loose, did you black out?” she said. “you can go look, its all on the rocks over there,” he sobbed. The old motorcycle man had come over, nodded to me, and walked away. “good luck,” he said to me with a three toothed grin.

****

I tried to overcome my fears of Cleveland, but I really didn’t want to get robbed and killed. Every muscle in my body was tensed, my knuckles white on the handles. I hit every red light, and pedaled as fast as I could to get going every time. This, coming off of some of the most successful meditation I’d ever done was more than a bit jarring. By the time I gt into the heart of Cleveland all I wanted to do was get the hell out. It was too confusing, too big, too noisy, too intense. The fire pumping through my blood from riding through the ghetto was too much, I needed more trees, more grass, more friendly old people on their porches waving. I just wasn’t ready for it. Riding through like that made me realize a couple things about cities that still feel right. People in cities center themselves around the cities. Everything they know, and everything they do and see is city. Rural areas are just places on the way to other cities. Dead space. White noise. It’s not all their fault either. On the other side, there are the country folk who couldn’t like cities any less. To them, their land and their crops, and their little town is everything. Cities are inhuman, misproprtioned, and dangerious. I was essentially a city dweller before this. I lived in a small town that found a lot of its identity in New York City. But riding on the country roads, and seeing everything from the perspective of country folks, chatting with them, picking up their slang, walking on their streets, sleeping in their woods, makes me see it from that perspective quite intensely. Country living is on the scale of a human, but cities are on the scale of humanity. You become much more aware of ‘the masses’ in the city, big impersonal, swelling, chattering masses of people.

In any case, I pushed on, but a little bitter. There was no reason for me to have been so uptight. I could have been relaxing that whole time, and just seeing the other side of the tracks. But instead I was fixed on the image of the place that people had given me, not the place itself. I’m pretty sure I’ve still never been to Cleveland. I was feeling aggravated and tired and hungry (a brutal combination), so I ate some not great food, rested for a bit, and pushed on through the million miles of Cleveland suburbs. I’d gotten on the road at about 10:30, and by 4:30, I needed to get myself out of this funk. Music to the rescue. I put on my headphones, and sat back as the countryside rolled by.

I rode hard, and then rode harder, focusing on the destination.

By the time I was 2/3 there I looked down and realized I was on my 999^th mile. Booyah!

When that one last mile rolled around I was sky high with excitement. I stopped and took some photos, and I danced around in the street. People honked and I ignored them. “I win! I fuckin win! “ I yelled. “Nothing can stop me now, it’s too late to ruin this! I win, I did it! Mopeds are the bomb, this trip is incredible, I love life!”

I took some more photos and rode on.

I raced the sun, (which is always exciting) and by the time it got really really dark, I was pulling into a campsite half way through Ohio. Oh yeah. Who rocks the wheels? Avery rocks the wheels.

**** note: hearing thunder in the distance, clouds closing in…. gonna be really wet in a couple minutes

The campsite sucked though, it was like a motel with no walls and lots of bugs. Not only that, but the parents there were Horrible. I just can’t tolerate obnoxious abusive parents. I have not figured out any productive way to deal with them though. Its so obvious to me how to behave with kids, that when I see pathetically narcissistic parents destroying generations of children with their petty and ruthless abuse it just makes me so angry! Even though it goes against everything I believe in, I wish I could just beat the crap out of every abusive parent on the face of the earth. Hearing crap like “if you don’t stop crying, something else is going to hurt. Just suck it up. Shut up. Listen to me, I’m your mother, you listen to me. I’ll get dad and he’ll give you a whoopin you won’t forget, stop crying, it’s just a scrape.” I just want to pound those heartless bastards within an inch of their lives. Listening to that crap all night long makes me hate Ohio. I’m looking forward to Michigan, which I feel is less like this for some reason (a completely irrational assumption, but its there non the less).

I got up in the morning and a pair of sweet kids tenting next to me came by and asked a million questions and helped me pack up all my stuff. I hopped on the ped again, and headed on the last leg of the first chapter of my trip. Kalamazoo, here I come.