I |
I snuck into Harkness and left a copy of the glossary in an obvious place, hoping it would be discovered by someone who would appreciate it.
Back at Weasel House, Rippy was still asleep. I snuck around, recovering paintings that have been at his house since 1995. Then I left town in my faithful Dodge Dart, not saying goodbye to anyone.
R |
The Amish were out in force today. I'm an alien invader in their world. I have technological capabilities they find threatening in their humble little 19th century lives. Lots of people find the Amish wonderfully quaint. I myself have entertained some wonderful recurrent sexual fantasies about lovely Amish girls in their incidentally gothic getups. I can only imagine what fun can be had in the back of one of those buggies. Distraction is no problem; the horse has it all under control and knows the way home. But you know, those damn Amish have too many kids. Overpopulation is a very real problem, and there isn't any more farmland in Ohio. That's why the majority of Amish kids eventually take off for the city and enter into lives of crass hedonism. I just wish they kept dressing the Amish way even in their post-Amish lives. Maybe I'll start dressing that way. It's cool.
There are Amish and there are also oil fields in east-Central Ohio. In the 90s the oil fields have fallen into decline. There were lots more pumps active in the Spring of 1987 when I first rode a bicycle the length of US-250 on my way to West Virginia. I only saw one active pump on this trip. Some things are better left for the Arabs.
It's gradually become my policy to avoid chain restaurants on roadtrips. One does not have an interesting life by habitually heading for the most predictable experiences. I went to a hot-orange-coloured pizza/sub place near the center of Strausburg and got a foot long Italian sub for $4.30. The only other customers present were a very old couple who have no doubt been spending their pensions there for years.
I continued along US-250 all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia. Leaping off the edge of the world from the "Ohio Plateau" (populated by such quaint little towns as Colerain) was always a transcendental experience on a bicycle. In the Punch Buggy Green, and now in the Dodge Dart, the thrill is still there. One moment you're high on some desolate agricultural plateau and then, a few miles of steep downhill later, you're in a bustling riverport.
I continued at high speed down I-70 into Pennsylvania, then down I-79 back into West Virginia, then over the Cumberland Plateau on I-68 into Maryland.
Climbing the Cumberland Plateau on a hot day was an ordeal for the Dart, and I didn't push it when I saw the temperature climb into the danger zone. I added more coolant, but it still had all the coolant from the trip up, and additional quantities did not help. I was dealing with very real mechanical limitations.
Winter on the Cumberland is a long ordeal; the trees are still barren of leaves. The harshness of the climate is demonstrated by dense stands of spruce that push aside the less hardy deciduous trees on the tops of ridges and hills.
I videotaped occasionally, especially when I passed again through Sideling Hill, which is a sort of gateway between my East and my West. Here's a little more about Sideling Hill from "Public Roads Online":
Sideling Hill in western Maryland had been an obstacle to transportation for centuries. Old U.S. Route 40, the modern descendant of the National Road (initiated as a federal project in 1806), executed a treacherous hairpin curve to get around the obstacle. When Maryland officials decided to build an interstate highway through western Maryland to connect I-79 in Fairmont, W.Va., with I-70 and I-81 in Hagerstown, Md., they decided they needed a straightforward crossing of the mountain. To avoid a prohibitively steep grade, they would blast a 116-meter-deep cut into the top of the 536-meter (m) mountain. Doing so required blasting, scraping, and hauling 3.44 million cubic meters of shale, sandstone, and other rock while maintaining traffic on U.S. 40. In addition, stringent erosion and sediment control requirements, aimed at protecting the trout streams that crisscross the route, complicated the task. An article about the cut noted that when the blasters were done, "They had achieved an engineering marvel: a breathtakingly beautiful man-made rock wall, revealing in tilted, multi-colored layers of sedimentary rock 350 million years of geologic history." When I-68 opened in August 1991, it included the Sideling Hill Exhibition and Tourist Information Center, housing geological exhibits. The center includes a fenced walkway onto the Sideling Hill road cut, as well as a fenced pedestrian bridge across I-68.On I-81, I found myself growing sleepy, so I pulled into the Virginia Welcome Center and napped for a time on a picnic table.
When I arrived at my folks' place south of Staunton, they thought I was coming just to see them. They had no idea I'd been to Ohio. I grabbed a few things, including food and beer, and headed back across the Blue Ridge to Charlottesville.
T |
I had a lot of time for a pre-work nap. The sun had just set as I went to sleep.
See a gallery of pictures from the Oberlin trip.