Illinois, Emotional Patterns, and some Random Thoughts
Illinois
I crossed the Mississippi into Illinois on Sunday. I’m just happy to be in a vertical state, one that I can cross in relatively short time. Those horizontal states – especially Wyoming and Nebraska – they took a long time to cross. Today was only my second full day riding in Illinois, and, with any luck (and if the weather holds) I might be able to cross into Indiana tomorrow evening.
Hot and humid today. With the relative humidity high and the dew point even higher, the air is saturated with moisture, and so it feels much hotter. After I arrived in Pontiac, Illinois late this afternoon, the temperature was 94, but, because of the humidity and high dew point, the weather app said it felt like 107. And I rode through that soup. On straight, flat roads (finally). Through the Iowa and Illinois power crop duo – corn and soybeans. From horizon to horizon. Interspersed with what seemed like a city of wind turbines.
Emotional Patterns
For the past week or so of riding, I find myself following an unscripted emotional pattern as the day unfolds.
The beauty and challenge of a bicycling adventure is, as I’ve written, that no day is the same. The road goes ever on, but each turn reveals a new view (even if it does happen to contain a lot of corn). Yesterday was different because I had to delay my departure due to a thunderstorm. It’s pretty amazing that I’ve come over 2,400 miles and there have only been three occasions of wet weather: The mist on the very first day in the Olympic Peninsula, 30 minutes of riding in the rain leaving Ketchum, Idaho, and that scary lightning and hail storm in Wyoming. This morning, as I was getting ready to leave, the radar showed a massive cell approaching, and the skies opened for two solid hours. But the sun was peeking through the clouds at 11, and I was on the road at 11:30. Yet once I turned east on Illinois State Route 17, I was slapped in the face with a headwind and I thought to myself that today would be… one of those days.
But even as each day is its own unique external journey, late in yesterday’s ride I recognized that I have recently developed an internal, emotional routine.
Before the start of each day’s ride, I feel emotionally uneasy, as if something unseen or unspoken is weighing me down. I think the reason is that I’m tired, and what I would really like is more time to sleep. But once I get on the bike and start pedaling, the uneasiness melts away as I get into a rhythm of riding. If the first few miles are easy or have great scenery, I feel much better almost immediately. If it’s a day like yesterday, where I was fighting a headwind from the get-go, then it takes more time. As the morning’s effort starts to take its physical toll, I find that I entertain what I would call are thoughts of light despair. It happens when I am covered in sweat and I look down at my Garmin GPS and see that I’ve only gone only 17 miles or so. A thought pops into my head, “Are you kidding me?!?” or “How long is this going to take??” (This typically happens when I struggle with the wind.) I recognize now (in the cool of the evening) that there’s the possibility that my brain produces this thought because I have not been giving my body enough fluids and food. And even though I have those thoughts and struggle physically against the wind, I keep on pushing. The sun reaches its zenith and only then does the day then really begins to bake… the earth and me. But I keep pushing. Yesterday, as I approached an intersection where I was to turn right (south), directly into the wind, I saw that, as an added bonus, I would have to climb a hill as well. But I pushed ahead, thinking to myself that failure is not an option. Then I chuckled to myself that I am like the little engine that could. Yesterday was yet another day of headwinds with the temperature way over 90, and while exhausted, I turned the emotional tide by repeating the children’s book refrain, “I think I can; I think I can.” And then more miles go by and soon I am no longer as exhausted and, carpe diem, I am enjoying the short downhills at 20 mph with the wind streaming by my ears, and, oh wow, look at that lake, and isn’t this stretch of empty road gorgeous, and the heavy sense of struggle is replaced by euphoria. Yes, it is hard, but I am doing this. Then I will stop for a break before the last six or ten miles, and they are the hardest because, well, it’s been over five hours on the saddle, and my butt hurts, and, to paraphrase my father’s joke, “Bicycle treks are not for sissy boys.”
Random Thoughts While Riding
As I move from west to east, I seem to see fewer pickup trucks on the road.
In Wyoming, when a car or truck would move to the left to give me room, their tires would hit the center-lane rumble strips, and the noise it made sounded like a Wookie clearing his throat.
(Which then made me think that a Wookie’s voice doesn’t have much dynamic range. It’s too bad that George Lucas and company didn’t consult with a linguist or a philologist and create more realistic vocalization sounds for the Wookies, because when you hear that Wookie sound, it could mean:I’m hungry
I’ll rip your face apart if you do that
Han, the power coupling is fried so I’m going to have to re-route power to the auxiliary so we can make the jump to hyperspace.)
Lucy in the Skies with Diamonds
There usually isn’t much culinary variety in small town America.
The neat template of theory usually cannot be applied to the rough and ragged edges of reality.
I see so many white people out here.
When the road starts to climb and I look at the uphill grade percentage on my Garmin, I always call it out in Italian (as in, “cinque per cento”)
Dang, I forgot to apply more sunscreen at the last break.
I notice that as I traveled west to east through Iowa and now Illinois, on the whole, people are less hard edged and much friendlier. I wonder if it has any relationship to the landscape in which they live. The west is more arid and the terrain less forgiving; in Iowa and Illinois, the land is lush and easy to navigate.