I am writing this essay more than a decade after I made a camping/biking trip to the Midwest. On that trip, as with similar excursions in 2009 and 2011, I brought my (now ancient) Flip camera with me and captured some video. (The camera was hand-held, hence the shakiness of many of the shots linked in this essay.) In 2014, I was still thinking about movie-making. It had been only six years since my learning experience at the DMAC (Digital Media and Composition) Institute I had attended at Ohio State U.; only three years since my second of two trips to the Pine Creek Trail in north-central Pa.; and just two years since I completed the “Cycling the Pine Creek Trail” interactive essay that resides elsewhere on this site. The year 2014 marked the end of certain aspects of my life – or at least of my professional life. It was my final visit to the Conference of Writing Program Administrators, which at the time I thought would be my final visit to any Writing-Studies-related conference. It was also the end of my full-time teaching career, as I took my retirement that year. So I beg my reader’s indulgence with my dusty memory banks. I did annotate my videos a couple of years ago, but little details have slipped away. For a long while, though, I have felt that I owed it to the time I spent and the video capturing I did to write this piece and post it. I will borrow from that older essay the “act-suffer-learn” rhetorical paradigm; it was useful before, and I had it in mind while traveling from my home in eastern Pennsylvania as far west as central Illinois in July of 2014. Still, this essay is not as academic or intellectual as the previous, which featured that element at the suggestion of Prof. Richard Miller, whose “immersive” fortnight in “Creative Critical Writing” I attended at Rutgers U. in May 2012 (and out of which came the “Cycling the Pine Creek Trail” piece.)
The motivation for a biking/camping trip in eleven years ago was that I did not make a trip to Ireland with Moravian College students in May 2014. Even though my employer would have underwritten many of my expenses for such a trip, it still wasn’t going to be cheap. For various reasons, the trip did not attract enough people (students or otherwise) to make it viable, so, sad to say, I cancelled it. I had not been to Ireland in more than a decade (after making 9-10 trips between 1985 and 2001), and I had not taken students since 1999. A tour of places associated with ancient myths was promising to be the best yet, but I had to put my disappointment behind me and not look too deeply into the failure of this project. Here is my publicity poster for the proposed Ireland trip:
As I was facing retirement from more than 30 years as a college English professor, I thought my days of attending professional conferences were over as of the annual college composition conference in Indianapolis in March. At a meeting at that very conference, however, it was announced that for the annual summer conference of a more specialized professional group (the CWPA), dormitory accommodation at Illinois State U. in Normal, Illinois, would be available at $30 per night. That made the prospect of attending this more within reach.
Figure 1 Giving my rare WPA ballcap to Prof. Michael Day (Northern Ill. U.) at my final CWPA summer meeting.
I was also told on the down-low that even at a relatively late date, I might still get a proposal accepted for a presentation at the CWPA conference. If I were to present, I could get some financial support from my college to attend. I figured that I could get something of an “adventure vacation” out of a trip to Illinois for the conference if I drove there, took my bike, and camped out a couple of nights enroute. (I am, by the way, an old-school tent camper; no rv’s for me!) This would also be relatively inexpensive because no airfare was involved and because campsites typically cost less per night than hotel or motel rooms. The conference fee was high, but it paid for most of the meals during its 3-4 day run, and I had no problem with staying in a spartan college dorm room for three nights. In other years when this conference was sited on or close to a university campus, dorm accommodation had been available, and I took that option for brief stays at the U. of North Carolina-Charlotte, the U. of Delaware, and the U. of Alaska-Anchorage. It was all good enough; I’m not someone who needs a lot of luxury anyway. I did have something related to the conference theme that I could present on, so I wrote that up and submitted it. It was accepted, and I started making plans.
I scouted out rails-to-trails that I might ride on this trip. A trail had to be long enough that I couldn’t ride it round-trip in one day (i.e., 40 miles or longer), it had to be close enough to a state park where I could camp, and, if I wanted to ride the Thursday of the conference (which would kick off with a keynote that evening), an Illinois trail had to be reasonably close to Normal. (hahaha!) I found some likely possibilities in Indiana and Illinois: the Cardinal Greenway Trail in eastern Indiana and and the Rock Island Trail in central Illinois. I was working backwards in that I first identified the RIT because it looked like I could get to Normal with a short drive from the second day’s ride.
I made campground reservations online for two nights each at Indiana and Illinois state parks. Even eastern Indiana was more than a day’s drive from where I live in eastern Pennsylvania, so I arranged to spend a night at the home of my brother Jan in the suburbs south of Pittsburgh. Then I would make it to White River Memorial State Park near Richmond, Indiana, the next day. I’d ride the Cardinal Greenway Trail for two days, then drive further west into Illinois and ride the Rock Island Trail over two days. So: four nights of camping, four days of biking, and four days of conferencing.
But as I thought in more detail about this trip, I realized I might be able to squeeze in rides on two other trails that I would pass enroute to Illinois. One was a portion of the Great Allegheny Passage Trail, which runs more than 150 miles between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh; the other was the Olentangy River Trail in Columbus, Ohio. I’d long wanted to explore the GAPT, if not its entirety then at least part of it, and a glance at a map showed me that I could get to a trailhead off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Somerset, about 60 miles east of my brother’s house in Bethel Park.
So I left home on a Saturday with some time built in to ride at least a little bit of the Laurel Highlands portion of the GAPT before driving on to my brother’s house. Just to be able to say I’d sampled the trail.
So that was one “extra”; as to the Olentangy River Trail, I saw that if I got a decently early start away from my brother Jan’s house on Sunday morning, I could stop off briefly in Columbus, Ohio, ride at least some of that trail, and still get to the park in Indiana before the sun went down. Why did I want to complicate things like this? Well, because I had spent a couple of weeks at the DMAC at Ohio State U. in the summer of 2008, at which time I had brought my bike with me and rode the Olentangy River Trail at least some almost every day I was there.
Thinking I could commute to the OSU campus by bicycle, I had even booked a motel that looked not too far from a trailhead. That plan didn’t last too long. For one thing, it meant riding the couple of miles between the motel and the trailhead through busy city streets; for another, I was still a fairly novice and nervous cyclist in May 2008. Six years and thousands of trail miles later, though, I was feeling nostalgic for my stay in Columbus and remembering some of the scenes of the ORT fondly. (For one thing, the trail went through residential neighborhood streets at one point, a nice middle-class neighborhood in north Columbus. This was unusual in my experience.)
The detour to the GAPT in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania was fun and rewarding. It also demonstrated the act-suffer-learn paradigm of the rhetoric of travel. In my haste to sample some of this trail, I left my camera in my car, which is too bad considering the little adventure I had. Sans video, you will just have to take my word for the veracity of what happened. The trail twice crosses the Casselman River within a short distance, although I didn’t know that when I started riding. I came to the first crossing, which afforded a nice view of the river below and people sunning on a rock ledge and swimming in a deep pool in front of it. At the far end of the bridge there was a tunnel from the old railroad that ran there, but it was barricaded. A sign showed a detour around the hill through which the tunnel went. I rode a couple of miles on the detour, wanting to see the other end of the tunnel. But as I rode, I saw what looked to be a landfill looming to my right on the hill above the tunnel. Disgusting, even though I wasn’t surprised because the mountains of Pennsylvania are pocked with landfills, Pennsylvania being one of the country’s leading trash-importing states. So a bit disillusioned, I turned around and rode back to the bridge. At this point, I took a break and lit a joint. I was being discreet about smoking it: cupping it in my hand which I held close to my body and leaning against the bridge railing. There was no one around except the river swimmers, so I wasn’t worried about someone noticing what I was doing. While I was doing this, though, along the trail came a trio of 20-somethings, two men and a woman. Their bikes were laden with full paniers, and indeed, as they told me later, they were making a multi-day trip on the trail and camping along the way. They passed me heading east but shortly thereafter one of the men turned around and approached me. Our conversation went like this:
Me: Hey. What’s up?
Him: Do you want to smoke?
Me: I am smoking.
Him: I know; that’s why I asked if you wanted to smoke.
Me: But I am smoking!
Him: I mean do you want to smoke weed?
Me: I am smoking weed!
Him: I mean do you want to smoke weed with us?
By this time, his two friends had caught up with him, and I shared my J with them. The other guy produced a bag of pot and a homemade bong. It was a 2-liter soda bottle with about the bottom third cut off. They had a pipe bowl that threaded down over the top of the bottle, which the guy loaded up with weed. The other guy held the bottle with one hand and with the other he shoved what looked like a bread wrapper up inside it close to the top. When the first guy lit off the pipe-load, the second guy slowly drew his hand down through the bottle allowing the bottle to fill with smoke but not leak out. Then the first guy unscrewed the pipe bowl from the top of the bottle and offered it to me to take a hit. It was a lot of smoke, but cool and not harsh at all. And what a hit! No way I could inhale it all, but we passed the bottle around and emptied out its contents. Then the guy set it up again and we all had another round. Turns out these three (or so they told me) had a policy of smoking each day of their trip with someone they found along the trail. Why did they pick me? Maybe because I was wearing this rad piratic cycling jersey.
Whatever, one of them also told me that I had given up too soon on my ride, that if I went back westward another mile or so, I would come around to the other side of the tunnel and an even better view of the river. And no, what I had seen was not a landfill; it was a new cut for a rail line. Indeed, when we all split up and I followed the guy’s advice, I saw how I’d been wrong before, and the view at the second bridge was worth the effort to get to. I had acted by riding that afternoon in the first place and by attracting the notice of the trio of stoners. I suffered (experienced) the interlude with them. And I learned about the second bridge and the non-landfill. This was a great start to my trip despite the fact that I have no video evidence of the day. {I do have an aside, however; after I’d returned home I visited a friend who was also my source for weed. I told him about my encounter with the stoners on the trail, and we had a laugh about it. I told him also that I was planning to write about it, but I was worried about my wife reading my narrative and learning that I had broken a promise not to carry drugs with me. Somehow, I said, I would have to get inventive about this encounter. My friend – Porter is his name – is also a writer, a professional writer. And he stands about 5’4”. He got right up in my face and fairly spat out the words: “Write the truth or write fiction!” I learned something right there!}
I made it to Jan’s house in time for dinner that Saturday night too, so my little indulgence didn’t inconvenience him. The next day, I did set out early as I had hoped to do and headed west toward Columbus, Ohio. I hit Zanesville, Ohio – a town about 50 miles east of Columbus – about noon and found Adornetto’s, a pizza restaurant I remembered from my undergrad days at nearby Muskingum College. (It’s now Muskingum University, but that phrase doesn’t come off my lips very easily.) I ordered a pizza to go and as I waited for it, the after-church crowd began to pack the place. Had I arrived just 15 minutes later than I had, my order would have been backed up in the kitchen. There was a threat of thunderstorms that afternoon, so I wanted to get to the Olentangy River Trail in time to ride before it got too wet to. Did it! I found my way off I-70 to the edge of the Ohio State campus by the river. Parked my car, set up my bike, and hit the trail.
In the six years since I had been to Columbus, the trail had lengthened in my mind. I was figuring on something like 13 miles each way, which I could do in a little over two hours and still get to my campsite in Indiana in time for dinner. Thirteen miles, in reality, was closer to the round-trip distance than to one way, to my surprise. But I enjoyed my hour or so of riding and sweating in the hot and humid Ohio afternoon. Just after I got back to my car, a shower erupted. But I made it to Whitewater Memorial State Park south of Richmond, Indiana, (about 100 miles away) in time to set up camp and cook dinner before dark.
As I was sitting by my campfire later, it began to rain so I hastily threw my food and one box of kitchen gear in my car and covered the rest with a tarp and crawled inside my tent. It rained on and off all night, and in the morning I discovered that I’d had a visitor in spite of the weather. My covered-up stuff had been gone into, and while nothing appeared to have been taken, there was considerable rearranging. A raccoon, of course, which theory was confirmed the next night when the critter showed up again, this time while I was getting my dinner ready. Bold it was, so much so that my shouting at it and clapping my hands did not scare it away. I began chucking rocks at it, and even that didn’t faze the raccoon. I didn’t think I could actually hit it with a rock, but I was beginning to wonder what it would take to drive the creature away when it decided to try its luck at someone else’s campsite. As to the ride on the Cardinal Greenway Trail on Monday, the day after I arrived at the park, it was good, but not great. Sunny day, nice Midwestern farm scenes, and more corn than I thought it was possible to grow.
But it was mostly the same scenery, mile after mile. The part of the trail near Richmond, though, did feature this tunnel that was more like a sewer pipe than a railroad tunnel.
I rode about 20 miles to the north, stopping near the town of Williamsburg before returning.
According to my map, the Cardinal Greenway Trail ran as far as the city of Muncie, and it had been my intention to ride from my Monday ending point north to Muncie on the second day in Indiana. But I decided the Cardinal Greenway had showed me what it had to show and so on Tuesday morning, I broke camp and headed to Illinois. It wound up taking most of the day to drive the nearly 300 miles from the Indiana park to the Illinois park where I’d booked, and so I set up camp, cooked my dinner, sat by the fire, and went to bed. In that order.
I had reserved a campsite at Jubilee College State Park, just west of Peoria and what looked like an hour’s drive from Normal. There was no sign of a college, past or present, from what I could see, but a young man in a store in Peoria told me “Some strange stuff goes on up there.” I heard this when I had a second night to stay there, so I didn’t inquire further. That Tuesday morning, I found the trailhead for the Rock Island Trail in suburban Peoria. It looked like the start of the trail, extending out of a strip mall parking lot. But as I was setting up my bike, I saw cyclists, dressed for trail riding, coming down the street from the other direction. I stopped one of them and asked, and he told me the trail, on the other side of the highway, went to downtown Peoria. I thought I’d check that out, and after some poking around in the neighborhood streets I found the (paved) trail and started riding south. After a couple of miles, though, the trail seemed to end at another highway, so instead of tracing it further I turned around. Soon I noticed that my bike computer was not registering speed or miles traveled. I stopped and made the usual checks, but nothing seemed wrong. Then I realized the problem might well be the battery, which had never been changed. I had become obsessive about miles ridden, and so I wanted to try to replace the battery. At first I thought I’d find a store in some small town along the trail, but that was uncertain. So I decided to put my bike back on the rooftop carrier and drive in search of a chain drugstore or the like where I could buy a new battery. Sure enough, just about half a mile down the highway there was a Walgreen’s. Into the parking lot I pulled, then I thought the Walgreen’s may not have the kind of specialized battery my computer needed. I was prepared to be disappointed and stymied when, exiting my car, I saw a store called “Batteries and Bulbs.” What luck! It was kind of like Radio Shack inside: clean and neat, with three guys in identical red shirts all eager to help the customer. One of them tested my battery, pronounced it dead, and came up with a replacement. He’s the one who told me about the “strange stuff” at the park, but what I thought was strange was the sudden appearance of exactly the kind of store I needed.
Back at the trailhead, I popped the new battery into my computer and was ready to ride. One problem: with the battery removed, the computer had reset to zero and to set it up again I needed to know the right setting based on the width of my tire and the diameter of the wheel. I knew those, but not the computer setting that corresponded to them. So I had to guess, and I hadn’t ridden too far before I realized that the mileage being recorded was not accurate. So I reset the computer again, this time guessing at another setting. This was closer to correct, but still not exact. With one more adjustment, I matched the odometer reading against the mileage markers along the trail and saw that I was close enough to being accurate that it would be good enough for me.
The scenery was not that much different from Indiana, but stretches of the old railbed did run through lines of trees on either side so that I wasn’t looking at corn stalks all day long. Riding along, I was trying to remember the words to Leadbelly’s great song “The Rock Island Line,” but I wasn’t doing too well. At the trail’s information station in the town of Wyoming, though, there was this historical marker that quoted from it. Cool!
Here was another instance of act-suffer-learn playing out. Rather than have my day’s ride – and the rest of the trip – wrecked because the bike computer wasn’t working, I tried to solve the problem. I believed I could solve the problem, and I did. Suffer? A little: I lost about 45 minutes of riding time with my battery search and I had my mind slightly disturbed by the battery store clerk’s remark about the park where I was camping. But it turned out fine. I learned that I could actually solve a problem on the fly (also that I should have had the manual for the computer with me, not sitting at home on my desk; that would have taken the guesswork out of resetting the computer for my wheel and tire.) As someone who is easily frustrated by mechanical problems, I was enjoying the glow of “problem solved” without any cursing or hair-pulling. And as someone who is relentlessly self-critical, it was nice to spend some time in satisfaction of what I had done.
The next day I broke camp and drove north into Stark County and picked up the RIT where I’d left it the day before.
The trail got more scenic as I went north, although it was hazardously pocked with gopher holes. I had to watch the trail surface carefully to avoid hitting one of those holes and crashing. That detracted a bit from my enjoyment of the scenery in east-central Illinois, but it was a nice day and now that I better knew the chorus to “Rock Island Line” I pedaled along singing it to myself.
At about 16 miles from where I’d started, the trail crossed the Spoon River. Then it ended, contrary to my map, with a washout at a creek. There was nothing to do but ride on back to the Spoon River bridge, eat my lunch, and shoot some video. So far, this was the prettiest part of my exploration of the Illinois and Indiana trails. My only regret was not offering a shout-out to Edgar Lee Masters, the author of Spoon River Anthology.
Back at my car, I loaded my bike on the roof and drove southeast to Normal. Checked in at the conference and found the dorm I would stay in for the next three nights. Turns out I was assigned to a suite: three bedrooms and a shared bathroom. OK. I unpacked and went to take a shower. In the bathroom I found a little toilet kit resting on the shelf above the sinks. I assumed it had been left there by another person in the suite, and I felt a feminine vibe from it, perhaps because it was half clear plastic and half orange flower pattern. Still, it could have been anyone’s. Downstairs at the desk, I inquired as to who else was booked into the suite. The clerk showed me the registration list, which showed initials and a surname for suite 16A, where I was also staying. The initials “C.B.” hid the gender of my suitemate, and I did not recognize the surname. Now doubting that the housing bureau at Illinois State U. would mix genders in a suite, I left for the conference’s opening reception still not knowing anything about who I was sharing the suite with except that they had a toilet kit with orange flowers on it. After dinner when I came back to the dorm, I met a woman in the suite. She told me her name was Cynthia, but I could call her Cindy or CB. She presented as a woman and her formal first name and its diminutive said “female.” So there went my assumption about gender segregation. I never had a chance to call her anything, though, because I never saw her again throughout the conference.
Saturday evening at WPA there is an outing sponsored by a textbook publisher. I had some time between when the busses left for the Bloomington Zoo and the close of the last afternoon session, and I had noticed from my sixteenth-floor window cyclists and pedestrians using a marked crossing at a street a block or two away. I checked the local map and saw that there was indeed a trail that ran north-south through Normal and into Bloomington. I figured I had time to get in maybe an hour’s ride and still catch the bus to the outing. So I dressed out, got my bike off my car, and rode off to find the trail, the Constitution Trail, as it is named. Had a pleasant, easy ride on which I also learned that in the early 1850s, Abraham Lincoln was just another lawyer suing a municipality on behalf of a wealthy client. The historical marker says Lincoln “represented the Illinois Central [Railroad} in its successful attempt to avoid paying taxes to McLean County. When Lincoln later took the IC to court to collect his fee, it was said to be the largest yet collected by an American lawyer.”
This day reversed the last two parts of the act-suffer-learn paradigm, sort of. I’d acted on impulse to ride the trail; then I learned something about A. Lincoln’s early professional days. Then I suffered. Riding back to Normal, I took a wrong turn on what turned out to be a network of trails in that city, not the up-and-back-only trail I thought I was riding. Thinking that this ride was challenging the phenomenon that the way back is always shorter than the way out, I churned on with increasing speed and urgency as my time to shower, change, and catch the bus to the outing was getting tighter and tighter. After about 15 minutes of hard riding – at least three miles of trail – I figured out I was way off from where I started. Nothing to do but retrace my ride to where I’d turned wrong and get on back to my car. I did that, but the result was I’d missed the bus to the zoo. I wanted to see it, so I drove my car the couple of miles to Bloomington (home of Illinois Wesleyan College, co-host for the conference). I picked up my box lunch/dinner and ate it seated on a bench across from the bald eagle enclosure. Birds were screaming at each other about something, so they seemed a little less dignified than how they are usually depicted. Some of my conference buddies came along and chastised me for being late. They got on the bus back to Normal and I had to drive myself back. That action did, however, lead me to stroking a ball python in the gift shop; it turned out that I was the only zoo-goer that evening who actually touched a wild animal: act-suffer-learn.
I left Normal, Ill., Sunday morning July 20, heading home. No camping on this leg of the trip: I would spring for a motel somewhere in Ohio, I supposed, and get home Monday. At this point, with the unplanned rides on the GAP and Normal trails, I had ridden close to 75 miles. Good enough, even if I’d found the Midwest trails not as interesting as those near my home. Act-suffer-learn. I did land in a motel near Akron, Ohio, that night as I took I-80 east. Got an early enough start Monday that I was in western Pennsylvania by noon. I thought I might have time for another unplanned ride if I could find a trail not too far off the highway. My Pennsylvania trails guide showed me that the Sandy Creek Trail in Venango County was handy enough to the interstate. Indeed I found the trailhead and followed the trail west.
No stoners along this trail, but the scenery was well worth the detour.
Especially when, returning across a trestle, I came upon a young porcupine that was getting ready to bungie-dive off the bridge. Odd place to see a porcupine, but it was cool to get close to it.
I rode for a little over an hour – about 15 miles – and got back to my car knowing I’d still get back home before dark. Pleased with myself, I bopped along I-80 singing along with my cd-player and basking in the glow of a successful trip all the way around. The basking stopped when cockiness took over. I tried to pass a tractor-trailer at a place where the left lane was narrowing to a close. Bad judgment. The trucker gave me no room and rather than collide with the trailer, I chose to collide with a reflective marker on the left. Not an enormous crash, but enough to tear the trim loose around my left front wheel well and smash in the corner of the front bumper. This was suffering, resulting from my rashness and my adrenaline. What did I learn? Well, the obvious: passing a truck in such circumstances was foolish. But more when I got home. Within minutes of my arrival, somehow, my wife knew something had gone wrong. I knew I’d have to tell her about the mishap, but I wasn’t prepared to tell her right at the moment. But I did. And I suffered the consequences. She ripped me up one side and down the other when I said I had not reported the accident to our insurance company. So I’d committed two bad errors: driving like a fool and then minimizing the incident enough that I never thought I should report it to my insurance. Being the depressed person I am, I plunged into emotional darkness for that night and the next day. Moreover, I had forfeited whatever chance I’d had to share some of my adventures with my wife. Not that she’d be dazzled by my narrative, but still the trip had been fun and successful for the most part. Too bad getting lost on the Normal-Bloomington trail wasn’t the worst of it.
I’ll try to end this on a more positive note – with a video of riding through a tunnel on the Sandy Creek Trail. If you listen carefully, you can hear me observe something about “act-suffer-learn”: that “It’s the surprises that make travel the most fun and interesting.”
Rhetorman 