 My Backyard: Destinations
In 1973, the year I was born, a writer for the Des Moines Register named John Karras and one of the paper’s columnists, Donald Kaul, both cyclists, planned to spend six days riding bicycles across Iowa, stopping in small towns to interview locals and write about it. In July, about six weeks before they set out, Karras published an invitation in the paper explaining the project. “Donald Kaul and I are going to ride from Sioux City to Davenport the week of August 26 and we’d like to have as many of you as are able join us along the way.” About 300 people took them up on their offer. The machines are everywhere—spilling over the cracked sidewalks, choking the wide streets, sprouting like dandelions in the well-manicured fields normally reserved for fairs and football. Next to Stangel Pharmacy on Iowa Street, slick titanium frames with hydraulic disc brakes and self-locking rear suspensions sit next to a jalopy with a metal barbecue smoker mounted on the back. No one uses a lock. The US Postal Team is nowhere to be found. Instead, bikers dance to “Mustang Sally” with cups in hand, sloshing beer on jerseys stretched taut over cornbread bellies. A man with doughy arms and a chin as wide as the sky—a Harley biker type in Lycra rather than leather—stands next to a big-hair biker chick, shocks of her black Tomorrow all of these people will be gone, riding east from Onawa toward the steamboats on the Mississippi River in Clinton, 500-plus miles and seven days away. RAGBRAI is not a race but a leisurely tour de corn. It draws people from as far away as Italy to brave saddle sores, countless pork sandwiches and cheap-beer hangovers to watch the Heartland roll by one pedal stroke at a time. The route changes each year; this time it meanders through small towns like Anamosa, where a movie theater marquee recognizes the “citizen of the day” and past church signs in Rockwell asking God to bless America. Along the way, riders see ladies in cotton dresses and old men in foam trucker hats sitting under elms and oaks to watch and cheer. The locals make a day of it, coolers and all. In Onawa, the party’s hopping, but no more so than at any street festival really. Plus, let’s be honest: How good can the riding be? We’re in Iowa—where the highest point is 1,670 feet. So I have to wonder: Why would so many people spend precious vacation time here, a place where your ham salad might come with baloney? Bon Jovi wails from a set of huge speakers near the beer garden. I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. I’m not feeling like a cowboy. I’m tired and a little nervous about tackling my longest ride ever, so I leave to find the tent by the fairgrounds. The next morning, the air is still and smells like freshly mowed grass. I stuff a map and route description into my handlebar bag. I click into my LeMond and set out on a mission, not to battle L’Alpe d’Huez, but to embrace Americana the beautiful. It’s an unusually mild summer Sunday: Little humidity and no wind. And, on this first day, I’m learning the Iowa-flat-as-a-pancake stereotype is, in fact, very wrong. “Yup, this’ll be a hard day,” says Ron Osborne, as he pedals beside me in a yellow jersey. He comes from his home in southern Illinois nearly every year and rides the whole route. “Keeps me in shape,” he says. Ron has to be pushing 60 years, but you wouldn’t guess it from the steady clip he keeps as we roll into the first stop, Turin, at mile 7. “Save yourself for those hills after lunch. I’d suggest you sit down and enjoy the ride.”
As far as backdrops for bike touring go, Iowa offers a fantastic ride. It’s a big, but empty state, bulging at the side like an elbow thrown from someone stuck in the middle. Which it is, of course: Landlocked with about 56 thousand square miles of rolling fields some 3 million people call home. Look at a map, and you’ll see the open space between ruler-straight roads and 90-degree bends that slice across the state. Ian Frazier writes that the plains are beautiful, “not just in themselves but in the sky, in what you think when you look at them.” You can think very, very far ahead on a bike in Iowa. “I was absolutely astonished at how beautiful the state is from a bike,” Karras, the RAGBRAI founder, told me. Now 75, the former reporter has ridden every RAGBRAI but two. “I have this recurring fear,” he wrote in 1973, “that the nation will someday discover what the rest of us already know—that Iowa is a bicycle rider’s paradise.” When I stop at the top of a hill, the monster roller coaster part, it’s obvious the secret is out. Masses pedal so far ahead they shrink to no bigger than a grain of wheat. Looking back, I see the same thing, except I also spot a car. The hulking block of red metal is stuck like a piece of pork fat in an artery, inching along behind a river of bikers that flow freely around it. The police set roadblocks to keep cars off the route, but some drivers can’t get home otherwise. So they creep along at 13 mph, just like everyone else. “Rider on!” I shout. The river of bikes shifts slightly to the left and I peel into the current. I pedal along gently rolling hills, past a few red barns and white chickens that appear to have walked out of a William Carlos Williams poem. Around 3 p.m., feeling strong and confident that I can indeed ride across this state, I pull into Lake View, a bucolic oasis even in a place as green as Iowa. Old bicycles welded together arc over the road ahead. So many people jam the streets that bikers crash into each other navigating around them. Nearly every church group, 4-H Club and Boy Scout Troop in the area has stuck signs in the grass along the sidewalks to announce fundraisers: everything a biker could need from spaghetti to a shower. We’re camping here tonight, down by the lake under a cottonwood. The great sweaty mass of thousands and I ride under the arc. Kids cheer. Men clap. Ladies blow kisses. I let go of the handlebars, shoot my sun-slathered arms high and stand in the pedals to wallow in my victory. I nearly wreck, but no matter. Mike Dornink will bring no intergalactic fame to Des Moines. He is however captain of a lesser ship, Team S.P.R.A.G.G. The acronym stands for something different each year, though the 24-year-old can’t think of what just yet. He would like to get the words “Budget truck” in there. Last night we were hanging out in the back of one, the big kind, with the door open and the ramp down. Dozens of teams like S.P.R.A.G.G. come to RAGBRAI, each with tricked-out school buses—couches, showers, rooftop patios, decks off the back. Each has its own way to approach the ride. Team Roadkill, I discover, stops to decorate squished critters with beads and stickers. “We actually have two teams,” explains Ben Blake of Team Bad Monkey. The team has a varsity riding squad that does some drinking, and a junior varsity drinking squad that does some riding. Ben tells me Bad Monkey is actually a limited liability corporation with six investors. We step over a few bodies sound asleep in the grass at noon, a cloud of booze lingering over them like Pigpen’s dirt. “JV,” he says. Team S.P.R.A.G.G. can certainly party. Sometimes they head to the beer garden, an area roped off in each town with orange fencing. Team Checker is always there, dancing away in jerseys and tights. It’s a fun scene in an “I Love Butt Rock” kinda way. Before hanging out with Mike, I scoped out the scene in Fort Dodge. “Let’s party!” the lead singer of the band screamed as I arrived. He followed his call to arms with a long pull from a can and a passionate, “Yeah! All right, Fort Dodge!” S.P.R.A.G.G. doesn’t go to the festival every night. They have lots of beer and a beer bong, and a bag of weed but no bong, so people smoke from a beer can. But there’s also Sharin Rello, a quiet 23-year-old from Harleysville, Pennsylvania, writing a seven-part suite. Michael Skinner, a student in Ames, plans to ride the last day on a unicycle. They’re all here because they met on previous RAGBRAIs or are friends of friends or girlfriends of friends. A bike ride across Iowa is also a reunion. “It’s kind of become its own thing,” Capt. Mike says, as we move on to one of two couches in the back. People wander by, say “Hi,” perhaps stop for a brew. “We just keep picking people up along the way. Every year we’ll add a few more riders.” Mike removes a folder filled with photos and schematics of the former S.P.R.A.G.G. rig, his own 1967 Chevy school bus that broke down before the ride began. Mike hitched into Nebraska to find a Budget truck. All the ones in western Iowa were apparently already claimed. “This is so lame,” he moans, glancing around the rental. “What a piece of junk.” For every person who’s part of a team, there are 20 more who come alone or with a small group of friends. They pay to toss their gear on a baggage truck in the morning that meets them in the campgrounds that evening. And creative juices aren’t reserved for organized teams. Today, the antics include a tuba band on bikes and a mostly naked lady pedaling in a G-string on a sheep-fur seat. Some tricks are actually practical, like the family of five pedaling in one big train: Mom and Dad on a tandem pulling two kids on a tandem pulling baby in a trailer. I
’d met Maria and her friends at the 4 Seasons Car wash, an outfit in Lake View on Day 1 that served spaghetti and high-pressure showers. In Eagle Grove, mile 167, I ran into them at a free beer stop. Then twice in Iowa Falls, mile 242, and again in Ackley, mile 254. By the time we hit Marshalltown on Day 4, we were all riding together regularly. Team Tim’s first potential conscripts. Maria can walk down the street and spot another rider she knows from a considerable distance away. This is her eighth RAGBRAI. She first rode it while living in Des Moines, and says she instantly got hooked on the camaraderie and energy. Last night Ken Bean, one of her friends from Boulder, showed me a short video of Maria, a young mom, dancing wildly at a bar and giving onlookers titty-twisters. Every year she leaves her husband and daughter behind for RAGBRAI. “They understand,” she says. Now that I’m with a posse, the ride takes on rhythm and form. Most people generally agree that 1999 was the hardest RAGBRAI. Cyclists battled stifling humidity and daytime temps that never dipped below the high 90s. The pavement got so hot the tar used to fill cracks turned to black goo. About 13,000 people set out on that ride. Only 6,000 finished. The worst we’ve had is light rain. Two days ago, on an 84.1- As the rain came, the route brought us into Newhall, population 1,232, just west of Hiawatha, where Maria’s grandmother, 92-year-old Helen Hansen, lives. We rounded a corner, soaking wet, and there she stood beaming from under an awning. “Come, come,” Helen said, a tiny lady who bounced along like Yoda. “You can dry off back at the house.” I’d just met Maria, but Helen grabbed my hand, called me “sweet,” and away we went. Newhall and the rain are a good two days behind us when sidewalks appear out of the fields, and townsfolk line the streets for miles. Some wave flags, others shout, “Welcome to Clinton!” Kids offer free slices of watermelon and squirt riders with a hose. I feel like a hero. My fellow riders and I have logged at least 2.5 million collective miles pedaling across the state. Not just any state: One so beautiful the sky could swallow you whole, where strangers give you a slice of pie just because they think you’ll like it. Five-hundred and thirty-two of those miles are mine, and I’m damn proud. I stand in the pedals again, this time holding onto the handlebars. Down a hill, and there’s the Mississippi, its broad murky waters But momentum is a biker’s best friend. It shortens the hills, speeds away the flats and drives a wheel over a bump. The hardest thing about stopping is starting. But once you’re rolling and having fun, you don’t want to stop. Even if you hit a river. I drive back to the airport, the first time I’ve been in a car all week. I can barely make out a stalk of corn; the fields go by so fast. It’s strange watching Iowa—slow, sweet, beautiful Iowa—scroll like credits through a windshield. My bike is in the back, the front tire still wet. © Copyright 1999-2006 by Hooked on the Outdoors www.ruhooked.com |
