5. Moving Slowly in Rapid City

Moving Slowly in Rapid City

The Day after the 4th of July

It’s a hot, dry day in Rapid City. It’s mid-afternoon, and I’m blissfully holed up in a room at the Holiday Inn after a long morning of laundry, conversations with other riders over the sound of the dryer at 6 am; a breakfast on a plate with real silverware in the hotel restaurant; a long wait for a ride to the campground (once again, a flat, sun-baked field adjacent to a middle school, and jeez, am I glad I’m not staying there) to pay off the costs of having my tires replaced and a tune-up performed by technicians from a local bike shop; a ride to yet another bike shop in search of the perfect pump (Eureka! They had one! A Topeak that rides on your bike but stands on the ground while you pump) and some mountain bike shorts to get some air to my continuously burning bum.

The television set is delivering beeps and a crawling bulletin about severe weather to the west of us in Custer where I yesterday had a great bowl of cheddar vegetable soup in a purple building on the town’s main drag. I had yelled to a woman standing with her arms crossed across her chest in front of the Cowboy Motel. “Where’s the best home cooked food in town?”

“Through the light. Two blocks. Purple building. On the right.”

It was really good soup. In a big cup. On a plate. A nice stick of crusty bread. A piece of homemade rhubarb and strawberry pie.

From there, I rode downhill through the Black Hills where three years ago I had wandered and camped among buffalo. I left the park, crossed the cattle guard in the road that’s there to keep the buffalo in their place, and continued downhill toward Rapid City. Zap. Another flat.

The bad news is that I had yet another flat. It took two weeks for me to have one; then in one week I’ve had four. The good news is that it got me a ride into town with my bike (a stroke of luck; usually sagged riders and sagged bikes travel separately, and we always worry about our bikes when they’re not at our sides or parked nearby). I decided not to fix the flat, convincingly convincing myself in the heat of the late afternoon with 20 miles left to go that the problem was with the tire not the tube. And miracle of miracles, a van carrying supplies from a pit stop and a little extra room took mercy on me. Looks like I was right about the tire, and goodness knows I was glad to get to the hotel at 5:30 PM rather than the 7 I had expected. It had been a long day, the first 45 miles of which were uphill big time and into a headwind.

Youth is not always wasted on the young. At one point yesterday morning on a five mile 6% uphill grade against a strong headwind, the woman pedaling with her arms on a recumbent (neck broken in a car accident in 1982) and her niece on a bike attached behind found two young men at their sides. The young men each put an arm on the women’s vehicle and helped propel them up the grade. The whole way.

At one point before our first pit stop, I got off and walked my bike faster (3.1 miles an hour) than I was riding (3.0). From that stop, we had to be escorted in packs of around 50 riders for five miles down and up and down and up on a curvy road with no shoulders (Bill Dale says his motorcycle may never be the same, considering the number of times yesterday it followed people riding at 4 miles per hour for two or three miles).

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Ninety nine bales of hay in the field.

Ninety nine bales of hay.

One gets eaten, the others stay.

Ninety eight bales of hay in the field.

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Not that I’m bored or anything, but there’s a serious amount of time involved in getting from here to there everyday and sometimes, when I’m not huffing uphill, I sing*. And up till now, there’s also been a considerable amount of hay. Although, although, there’s an interesting variety of ways to store hay with, I’d say, less than half in actual bales. I am particularly fond of the large wooden racks (they look like dish drainers) that are used to hold the hay in eastern Washington state. And then there are the rolls. And the mounds, usually with little corrals constructed around them.

(*except for singing, for which exceptions must be made, it’s a good idea to keep your mouth closed when cycling. Two things. It makes your mouth dry, and there’s a good chance something will fly into it. When I’ve made this mistake — or just simply had to sing — and a bug has flown it, I’ve found that I can expel the bug if I act fast and simply blow hard from the back of my throat.)

Speaking of something there’s a whole lot of, like hay, why is it “ammo”? Amm-o. Why not “ammu”?

The other day just outside Gillette, Wyoming, I rode by perhaps the 100th “guns and ammo” shop of the trip. Ka-boom. Ka-boom. I actually ducked on my bike. Looked to the right and saw stacks and stacks and rows and rows of huge tractor tires running in rows alongside the store. Ka-boom. Ka-boom. Somebody was trying out a new gun. Shooting into tractor tires. At 6:30 in the morning for god sakes.

The booms the previous night were from thunder. It was the night of the trip’s longest day. 113 miles of which I had done 70 something before my shoulders, diaper rash, and blazing sun made me give out. Thank goodness I  sagged in. If I hadn’t, I would definitely have been caught in a major storm with hail, not to mention major wind and rain. At 5:30, it was nice in camp with some clouds building in the west. At 7, megaphones announced a major storm and pleas to run to a nearby shelter, a strong-feeling exhibition hall at the fairgrounds. There were perhaps yet a 100 riders still on the road.

By nine, Helmut, the rider who’s an obstetrician from Stamford, CT, was behind a table in his biking shorts handing out Mylar blankets and taking peoples’ temperature. Same for the rider Paula from Seattle, a nurse when she’s home. The storm raged, literally raged. A megaphone announced that the county emergency office had reported funnel clouds in the area. A flash flood warning. Seven or eight hundred people milled around in the hall. Some slept on the concrete floor. One crazy woman from Colorado snuck out the side door and crept to the shower truck and took a shower. I found Winnie from Colchester CT playing bridge. Her tandem mother watched over her shoulder. At 10:30, there was an all clear but continuing driving rain and we were told we could go to our tents if we wished to pick up personal items. I ran to my tent, slipping and sliding in the mud, grabbed my sleeping pad and bag and some long pants and a dry shirt. Slept like a baby the rest of the night on an unfolded folding table flat on the floor with two new acquaintances from L.A. on their own tables to the side.

At night in tents in fields, the snoring sounds like locusts. That night, in the concrete and metal shell of a building, it was altogether something else. Sawing redwoods. Acres of redwoods.

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There are really big pickups out here. Big hunka pickups with men driving them talking on cell phones. Usually a dog standing in the back, wind blowing through its hair, the dog looking really happy. Another thing about dogs, particularly dogs from Wyoming. They bark louder than dogs where I’m from. The bark starts and just keeps going. Nothing to stop it until it gets far away. Baaarrrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Speaking of hunka men, the younger ones are the most likely ones to be found shaving their legs in camp at night. There’re probably more young men shaving their legs on this trip than young women. The young men sit on the ground in front of their tents, spraying shaving cream on their legs, shaving carefully. They claim it’s safer in case of injury (the doctors don’t have to fight through all that hair?); I know it’s primarily that they like the way it looks. Hard greased bodies. I heard a guy from Colorado telling a guy from California that his shaved legs felt great between clean sheets.

Hmmmmmmm.

The other day I came upon some bikers standing by boxes of bottled water sitting at a dirt crossroads. A young woman and two girls stood by, visiting with the riders. They had come to watch us. Talk to us. I asked the oldest little girl where she lived. She said, “Down that road. Everybody knows our house is the one past the bees.”

We know what we know.

There are a helluva lot of bee keepers out here. I’d say at least every ten miles there’s at least one great stack of boxes for bees. There are also some of the prettiest flower gardens I’ve ever seen in my life. Great care goes into these flowers. I like to yell at people working in their gardens. “Beautiful,” I say. “Absolutely gorgeous.” They always smile and wave.

I can’t stop waving at trains. Started in Idaho and worked myself into a frenzy through Montana and in Wyoming. Huge, long trains. On Thursday, I blew a kiss to a conductor and he waved and tooted a big train horn. I burst into tears. What IS this romance with trains? All trains. Coal trains. Empty trains.

For several days now thanks to Meg, I’ve been riding with a sign on the back of my bike reading: “I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on. Signed S.B.” Practically everyone has something to say about it because practically everyone passes me. “Who’s S.B.?” they yell.

I call back, “Samuel Beckett adapted by Sharon Blair.”

One young woman yelled back over her shoulder, “What’d he do?”

“Wrote a lot,” I yelled.

“Oh.”

One man yelled back at me, “I thought he was a couch potato.”

Well, yes. I think it’s fair to say that Beckett was a couch potato.

Tonight here in Rapid City, I’m making some more signs (Meg has suggested an Oscar Wilde, “Anybody can be good in the country” and a Goethe “The deed is everything, its repute nothing,” both of which I’m considering.

I will definitely do one about my birthday next Thursday leading into De Smet, South Dakota. Turns out De Smet was one of the homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and we may be blessed with a pageant. I used to love those Little House on the Prairie books. Sod houses. Hot soup. The family huddled against all odds, the cold trying to push through the cracks.

It’s going to be hotter than Hades tomorrow through the Badlands. How could it be otherwise? I’ve been to the pharmacy and restocked my number 45. Bought more ibuprofen. There’s also the promise of thunderstorms. Bought a lighter weight rain jacket at the bike shop.

The next time you hear from me, I’ll be 53. And proud of it. Glad to be alive and healthy and able to have a choice daily about whether or not to go on.