7-23-03

Wild day. Today was a wild damn day.

This morning the dogs woke me up really early. Around 5:00AM. I had told the farmer that I’d be getting out early in the morning so I got out of bed somewhere around 6:30, and went out to see what was wrong with the bike. The sun was a bit over the horizon and was stretching long dew soaked shadows over the grass and into the corn fields to the west. I pulled off the rain cover and started poking around in the engine to see if anything obvious would make itself known. After just a couple pokes, I realized that the carburetor had worked its way back from where its connected to the rest of the engine so far that it was about to fall off. I got to work taking it all out and re-connecting it more soundly. It wasn’t particularly hard, but I had to use a broom handle I found in the trailer to really get it right. I tightened everything up again, took out and cleaned the spark plug, and started her up. Sounded just right. I packed up the bike, waved to the dogs and rode out into northern Indiana.

The thing about Indiana and Illinois, and other adjacent states, is that there isn’t a whole lot there in city terms. The following list makes up 90% of what I saw in northern Indiana: Corn, Soybeans, sky, clouds, barns, houses, and tractors. It’s a simple place and riding though makes you feel very small, but important. I would ride and ride and not see a single person for half an hour, easy. Eventually I’d get to a town, population 200. in towns like that, there’s a store, a gas station and 10 houses, then back to corn and soybeans. Unfortunately most of the fields, the really big ones, aren’t little farmers tilling their land and all that, they’re huge companies like iCorn, Dekalb, Pioneer, Croplan, and Golden Harvest. I see whole fields of beautiful corn and then a sign that says “experimental” and I look at the rest of that field out of the corner of my eye, waiting for gigantic corn monsters to come crawling out. Or see a mosquito land on a leaf and the stalk next to it raching over, mash it into a paste and eat it. Ya gotta watch out for that corn, some of it’s mean.

So I rode and rode and eventually got to a town called Lafayette. Nice town, not too small, not too big and pretty authentic. It felt like a town that was excited about itself and where it was going. There were kids hanging around and talking in coffee shops. There were folks buslting about and children playing in sprinklers. There was also lots of public art, in the form of plaster statues of pigs, each one painted or decorated differently. There was one called “hogopolis” and was painted like a monopoly board, but with Lafayette street names. There was another one that had fake dollar bills and pennies glued to it. There was yet another with corn painted all over it. I would say there are about 30 hogs that pepper the town. Odd choice I’d say.

I got some food and rode on out.

On the way out of town, I hit a road that was being repaved. Traffic was backed up a good ways and wasn’t moving at all. It was the only traffic I’d been in this whole trip. I turned off the bike and waited. Eventually our lane got to go and we started moving. There was a huge waste management truck behind me and he started getting antsy about going 25mph, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, there wasn’t a shoulder, and there wasn’t another lane, so he’d have to deal with it. So I rode on as fast as I could until all of a sudden the engine choked and sputtered like it was out of gas, the bike started slowing down but the truck behind me didn’t know what was going on and maintained speed. I tried to break and pulled towards the side of the road, I hit a huge mound of asphalt and the bike bucked hard, I veered off the road to get out of the way of the truck, but the bike jumped over the discarded asphalt and I flew over the handle bars onto the grass.

I got up immediately and checked myself to see if I was ok. All I had was a bruise on the index finger of my left hand, and bit of the shakes.

I brushed off the grass and picked up my bike with the help of one of the highway workers, refilled the tank with gas and got back on the road. Jeesus I almost just hot run over by a truck but instead flipped over the handle bars. Thank god for my awesome Harley Davidson helmet.

Twenty miles later I knew I had to stop. I was having difficulty paying attention, and I felt like every ounce off energy I’d had had spilled away like a dripping faucet, splashing red on the foliage I rode past. I started eyeballing the houses around me and stopped at the first sign of life.

He was a man in his early 50s, very tall and quiet. I told him my situation and he listened, shifting his weight uncomfortably. I found myself answering unvoiced questions, over and over, “If not it’s really fine, I know this is a pretty weird thing to ask,” I said, over and over. “Let me go ask my wife,” he said finally, and walked toward the house.

There were huge sheets of polished granite standing quietly by a large open garage. I looked at my reflection and even in the reflection of a rock I looked like crap. Frankly I felt like crap too; Worn out, jittery, and a little scared still from my fall.

The owner came back over with a little bounce in his step,

“You can put your tent right over there or wherever. My wife’ll make you something to eat if you’re hungry.”

“Oh that’s fantastic, thank you so much. Oh what a relief. Really I can’t thank you enough.”

“No problem, so are you hungry? Want some thing to drink?”

“Oh I’m not that hungry thanks, but I could use a water,” I said

He walked into the barn, and came out a second later with two bottles of cold water.

“Thanks so much, this is fantastic.”

“Will you be alright there on the grass?”

“You kidding me, grass like that? I’ve been waiting to sleep on grass like that my whole life. That’s the king’s grass.” We laughed and relaxed.

I started disassembling my stuff, unpacked the tent, and got more generally situated.

20 minutes later he came back out and invited me up to the house, his wife had fixed me something to eat. I was grinning ear to ear, and I got out with a rumbling stomach and renewed faith in humanity.

We walked over to the back deck, and there, spread out on the patio table, was a tall glass of ice water, two steaks, a baked potato, and a brownie the size of my head. I nearly fell over myself with thank yous.

“Help yourself,” his wife said. “We’ve already eaten,” and set a bottle of steak sauce down in front of me.

Here I am, a total stranger, in the middle of Indiana, on a moped, getting fed TWO steaks and a brownie the size of my head. I confront Thomas Hobbes with this situation and thumb my nose heartily. And this has been the general idea of how people respond! It’s just incredible how good people are, and how much they want to help. I’ll never say that everyone is as good as this, but this whole time, the vast majority of my experience has been that people are so incredibly normal! Normal and Kind! There’s something that happens when you smile at someone and get past ‘hello’, they just open up, and all of a sudden you’re not just a face, you’re a real person, and you’re doing things, and you care about things, and you’re just like them!

I told them stories about my trip, and they laughed, and smiled. I told them everything I could, it was the least I could offer them. We chatted, and I ate for the rest of the hour almost and by the end, I think we both felt better about the world.

Thinking about it now, makes me want to cry, it was so nice. I love people, I really do, and it’s times like this that make that emphasize that emotion so much, and it’s just simple acts of kindness like that, that go beyond what has to be done, that really sink it for me.

Yes indeed, it was quite a day.