7. So This is Madison

So this is Madison….

I walked across the Mississippi River into Wisconsin on Wednesday. We’d camped along its banks in Winona MN the night before. What with the Ryder trucks transporting things on the Big Ride and the name of the town, there were way too many “Winona Ryder” jokes, all precisely the same, but then again, we don’t have all that much variety in terms of things to do, think…

Relatively small river there, the Mississippi, but big beautiful cliffs and mosquitoes the size of finches. It was in Winona that I realized that even though I’d heard about it in the news — floods, etc. etc. etc. and studied my geography, I’d never come to grips with the Mississippi being a northern river. It has always been The Big Southern River that divided my home state of Arkansas from everything east; the most northernness I’d ever given it was Missouri with Huck and Tom and that scary arch in St. Louis. Being on the Mississippi up north, seeing it described on a sign coming into La Crosse as “Wisconsin’s West Coast” gave me one of those “ah ha’s” that you get when you realize that you’re always looking at things through your own eyes.

It was sort of like when I was finally in South America a few years ago and had to look at the world from that perspective.

It was on the banks of the Mississippi in Winona that I got sent to the hospital. On my way to take a shower, I stopped by the medic tent to perhaps get a lozenge for my sore throat. As usual, I over explained:

“My throat’s sore. But I don’t think it’s swollen or anything,” I said.

The head nurse looked me in the eye, pressed her fingers to the glands in my neck.

“Your glands are really swollen,” she said.

“But I don’t feel bad,” I said.

She picked up her walkie talkie. “Crisis Control, come take a woman to the hospital,” she said.

A red Explorer drove across the grass. I crawled in the back seat. Joined Rick the driver (taking two weeks away from his printing business in Kansas City) and a young woman rider named Amy with an infected cut on her arm. Went to the sparkling new hospital in Winona where all the personnel were really nice and they apologized in the emergency room for what they thought might be a twenty minute wait!!!!!

Had a strep test. Came back negative. Doctor put me on antibiotics though and now almost three days later, I’m 90% okay. Can swallow without wishing I wasn’t (or is it “weren’t”?), sneeze without ripping my throat out.

One of the nicest parts of this whole hospital evening was missing dinner back at camp. Rick takes us to the Lakeview Drive In, which really WAS a drive in, and we had really good burgers and fries and they had homemade root beer (like liver, something I wish I liked) from trays hanging on the windows put there by earnest and healthy-looking young women who were embarrassed by the size of the tips we left.

We rode down the eastern bottom of Minnesota on the western banks of the Mississippi the next day until we crossed over into Wisconsin. That’s when I walked across the Mississippi. Thank goodness, we had to “ride” in a pedestrian lane on the bridge because being so afraid of heights, I had to walk, and it’s easier, when there are others doing the same thing. At one point, I got another woman to walk her bike just a few feet in front of me; it’s easier when I can see someone close by.

Wisconsin is a gem. The prettiest, most “country road” riding has been through Wisconsin. Full of Amish or Mennonite farm families selling quilts and jams and cookies but Never on Sunday says their signs. Under one set of great shade trees, the whole family except the wife and mother who was of course inside baking her brains out sold us fresh donuts and cookies. I got the husband and father to go inside and get me a glass of milk. Gave him 50 cents for it. Could have died perhaps by non pasteurized milk. It contained everything that came from the cow; it was sort of like a milkshake, and this is from someone who normally drinks skim milk, but boy was it good with those chocolate chip cookies, and besides that, with all my Heifer Project trips, lord knows about the milk and milk products I’ve consumed (and then there were the fried guinea pigs in Ecuador…).

So now, I’m sitting in a laundry in Madison near the campus where the group is officially staying in a dorm but I’m at a nearby Best Western. When I arrived and took a look at the dorm (it’s nice, but…), I decided to stay at the BW only one night, but this morning, when I was padding down the freshly vacuumed carpeted hall, admiring the ice machine and the indoor pool, and speaking quite limited Spanish to the housekeeper who was plying me with fresh towels and generous smiles, I decided to change back to two nights and will go creeping out of the BW before daylight tomorrow to begin the trek to Illinois.

Between that paragraph and this one, I’m back at the BW, clothes laundered and hair trimmed in a salon that doubles as an antiques shop. I’m getting ready to jump on a city bus for an excursion through town. It’s one of the best ways I know to get a feel for a place, and goodness knows, there’s little else one can do for as little as $2.50 (round-trip).

On my stroll to and from the laundry, I was once again aware of feeling a sense of worship. I don’t mean in a going-to-church-going way necessarily although I will admit to this worship feeling sometimes being triggered by the sight of a interesting chapel, a massive church with interesting eaves. Old bricks. I felt it today standing under an arch on campus that was the entrance to Camp Randall, a Civil War gathering point for Union soldiers. Clouds do it (even when I’m not worshipping them for covering the sun). Extreme and long silences do it. Cookies and milk on the side of the road from Amish families with pink cheeked and curly headed children even though you deplore their beliefs and lives do it. And as of last night shortly after checking in here, eating from a giant bag of chips and a jar of hot salsa and drinking a huge Diet Pepsi WHILE IN THE BATHTUB did it. (It’s an odd feeling spilling salsa into the bath water you’re sitting in and wondering what the repercussions might be….)

Speaking of Camp Randall and the Civil War of course reminds me of, of course, Ken Burns, and yesterday, when we rode by the Frank Lloyd Wright visitors center, there it was again, that old “Ken Burns was here, Ken Burns was here” feeling… What shall I do?

What I’m getting ready to say now is so disgusting and troubling that I will make extreme light of it, but there’s an attempt to control the news out of the ride, an attempted “crackdown” on individual web sites, etc. It’s really pretty scary, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out and whether or not GTE, the American Lung Association and Pallota Road Works can spin this thing into oblivion, particularly considering one of the web sites is actually written by a rider who’s an editor of the Cincinnati Post (www.cincypost.com and scroll to the GTE Big Ride location). Another interesting one is www.wheninrom.com/bigride (clever, huh, that wheninrom?). The other day, a woman I know was interviewed for the official web site, but when she said “I haven’t been in any pain,” the “reporter” said he couldn’t use it because it contained a negative word — pain — even though she said she hadn’t had any.

There are such good stories here. And such an attempt to keep them from being told. And such an attempt to control. And spin (and I don’t mean wheels). Truth be told, I think that everyone on this ride wants all three organizations involved to be the best. We all want to be part of something good. And we want to hear the stories. Tell our own. Share others’.

Speaking of news and this has nothing to do with the Big Ride or Madison, my favorite news item of the day from the paper here:

Lexington, KY — On Wednesday, it became legal for Kentucky ministers and church officers to pack heat inside a house of worship, as long as they have a concealed weapons permit.

The change – believed to be one of the only provisions of its kind in the country – came through an amendment passed this year by the Kentucky General Assembly.

“A friend of mine said it, and I’m going to repeat it,” said the Rev. Nancy Jo Kemper, executive of the Kentucky Council of Churches. “Jesus would puke.”

Huh?

The paper also included scary weather maps, showing extreme heat over most of the country (do they really mean 110 in northern California? and no wonder Peg Hughes is talking about cold beer when it’s 115 in Tucson) and what I fear to be a misleading bit of optimism for here and southward tomorrow with partly cloudy skies and highs in the 80s. Talking about weather, Karen Parrella said it beautifully in an e-mail I got yesterday, “… I can’t imagine living where the weather isn’t passionate.” Well Karen, I’ll agree. It’s just that the passion I want from the weather for the next few days is a hug not a squeeze, a balm not a burn, multiple cool breezes.

Pray for mercy.

Okay, it’s time to get on the bus, go find America, worship Wisconsin. I will not buy a cheese head, I will not buy a cheese head, I will not buy a cheese head (of course, there are riders with cheddar heads on their helmets already). There are no restrictions on bad taste as we ride across America.

I will not buy a cheese head, I will not buy a cheese head, I will not buy a cheese head…

——-

So this is Madison #2

The city bus driver invited me to dinner. At his house. Quickly added that it would be with his wife and kids and a visiting French woman chaperoning some students.

At the end of the line way out in Buckeye (far southwest in Madison), I of course was the only person left on the bus, and I walked to the front to inquire if it would be turning around. Since the bus driver had been talking non stop to every passenger, I asked him if he knew everyone on the bus. He said he knew none of them, just liked to talk.

He let me ride back into the center of town for free. But not before he did a little detour and showed me a Prairie Oak tree on the top of a hill.

Then he proceeded to tell me that his father had invented the house trailer back in the 30s but never built but one and it’s still sitting in his mother’s yard. Said people out west would point at it when they rode by and call it “Little House, Little House.”

On the way back into town, he continued to direct comments to me even as other passengers got on. At one point, he enthusiastically pointed out some Ginko (sp?) trees near the Capitol. He never stopped talking. I am absolutely full of stories about Madison and sick about the things I didn’t see, including the arboretum, which supposedly has a great big prairie in it. Of course I’ve seen some prairie recently…

I DID see State Street, which is truly a great street, at least this week. Quite a happening place with a street fair of sorts where tee shirts were going as low as $3. Stood for a long time and listened to a great brass band.

I’m reminded of something else I didn’t see on the Big Ride that some others did: a propane tank in a front yard painted to look like the outside of a watermelon.

And I wish I’d talked longer to the local man who rode up on his bike at some camp in Minnesota and before I knew it, he was telling me that he was going to do for the polka what Riverdance had done for jig dancing. His words. I gave him my business card. Stranger things have happened.

I can’t go on. You must go on. I will go on.  To Illinois. But since I declined the bus driver’s dinner invitation, I’m first going to partake in the Best Western’s Friday night Fish Fry. This will either be really good or really awful. Kinda like the Big Ride.

Night.