My Grandfather's Shop

My grandfather David has a home jewelry shop, crammed with rough stones, molds, machinery, bits of wax, old coins, bits of maps, hand tools, centuries-old hawaiian prints, old family photos, and jewelry in every stage of production. He's almost 91, and has had a long life of collecting interesting things from faraway places.

When I think of the shop, I smell hot wax, electroplating chemicals, and dust from stonecutting. It's always been a magical place to me, with its mix of art, craft, and ephemeral suggestions of other places and times.

Leaving Brooklyn

The Williamsburg bridge, late September.

Mile 1000

Somewhere in Pennsylvania's mushroom country, the big 1k.

Maryland

Somehow I fell in love, quite unexpectedly, with Maryland. Despite having to emergency camp, in the rain, behind an incomplete subdivision in some irritating richy-richy suburbs of Baltimore, the ride from DC to Philly was lovely. Forest, horse country, old houses, all in a constant soaking rain that created beautiful ground mists.



The Conowingo Dam:

Pardon the Interruption

My posting regularity got sort of interrupted this last month. First I was in DC, then in Philly, DC, Hartford. Spent some time kayaking an underground river, helping friends move, and installing solar panels. Now I'm caught in the vortex of the Obama campaign in Northern Ohio, working 15-hour days with six more to go. I'm just going to throw some scattershot photos and comments as I can.

A FOUR THOUSAND FOOT TUNNEL FOR YOUR BIKE. This is a good thing.

My bivvy along the Potomac.
Harper's Ferry, MD/VA/WV

Over the (sub)continental divide

Got up Saturday morning and headed for the crest of the Alleghenies. Along the way I met Enola, late of Berkeley. She also rode out from Pittsburgh. Except she did it on a beater bike with a crate and a bag of kale, making me feel like quite the wuss for needing all this specialized gear to get my butt up the mountain.

It was nice to have some company on the trail after 10 days of riding solo!
We hit the Continental Divide around noon. My final, symbolic exit from the middle West.

And it was nice to be on a downhill slope for the first time this whole trip, as the trail wended its way down into Maryland.

The view down the mountains into Maryland:
The trail also goes through the Big Savage Tunnel, a 3000' tunnel that goes through the mountain a few miles south of the divide. Yes, a 3000' tunnel just for your bike.


From there it was an easy cruise past the Mason-Dixon line and down into Cumberland, MD.

The NPS visitors' center in Cumberland. ile zero of the Great Allegheny Passage, and mile 184.5 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal:

Fallingwater

I learned by chance that Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house was just three miles off my route. Naturally, my pedalling got interrupted for a morning to go visit. You've no doubt seen this iconic place before (in _North By Northwest_ if nowhere else).



The countryside around is pure Pennsylvania, lovely rolling forests.

The house itself is spectacular. The interiors are well preserved, and the tour guides quite good.

I really felt here, for the first time, how much Wright is a bridge between Morris and Art Nouveau and the International Style. The interior details are a streamlined, functional version of the craftsman organic aesthetic, but the structural aspects look forward to the midcentury modernism of the skyscraper: he uses a central core for utilities, and hangs a bunch of cantilevered reinforced concrete platforms and terraces around it as the main spaces of the house. Very cool to see.

Mile 500

A nice birthday present to myself.

The Great Allegheny Passage

I just spent a week riding through the woods from Pittsburgh to DC (where I'm very happily caffeinating at the moment on coffee from Tryst on 18th Street). It's an amazing ride through beautiful forests, totally car-free for over 300 miles. The first leg is the Great Allegheny Passage, 123 miles from McKeesport, PA to Cumberland, MD. It's on an old railroad grade, about a 1% grade as you go east - so gentle you barely notice it. It follows the Youghiogeny River (or 'the Yock' as Dr. Goff kindly informed me). Surface good, forest beautiful, lots of campsites:

Because it's a railroad grade, there are big bridges and viaducts to ride over, just for hikers and cyclists. Having infrastructure like this, just for bikes, feels like some combination of Christmas, Mardi Gras, and the Fourth of July.


Seriously, that bridge is just for you to ride your bike over.

A rare photo of me, snapped by a friendly utility worker I met as the trail passes through West Newton.
Apparently George Washington ambushed and killed a bunch of French scouts around here in 1754, helping to start the French and Indian war.

Point of Beginning

This was an unexpected but thrilling find, along the Ohio River at the OH/PA border: the point of beginning of the original township/range system devised by Thomas Jefferson for surveying (and settling) the frontier and the west.

The marker. For some reason it is erected 1,050 feet from the original survey point, right at the state line.

This system is why the American landscape from Ohio to the Rockies is rectilinear, with a north-south or east-west road every mile for a thousand miles or more. Creating an all-encompassing system for dividing land made it much easier for the government to establish governmental boundaries and sell land to white settlers headed for the frontier. Though based on the Roman example, the Jeffersonian system is the largest land division system ever enacted, and has profoundly shaped the way American communities function and the way American people relate to the landscape.

Pittsburgh: A Cycling Hell

I like Pittsburgh, don't get me wrong. But I've been amazed on this trip how much a city's accessibility by bike can either warm the heart or create a vast pool of blind hatred. Pittsburgh, unfortunately, is the latter, requiring miles and miles of riding in heavy traffic, or over super steep hills, or both, to get into the fair city.

Welcome to Pennsylvania!

I rode over the hill through some pretty country, but came down to SR 51, which follows the Ohio River into the city. Now, this route is signposted as a 'State Bicycle Route', as you can see above. I'm not sure what genius thought this up, but 51 is engineered as a 4-lane divided highway, complete with rumble strips on the edge. Apparently 'bike-friendly' in this state means 'enjoy riding on the glass and debris-strewn shoulder for 25 miles while the 18-wheelers roll by at 60 mph'.

Amusingly, there are stretches where this road has a posted 35 mph limit, despite being clearly designed for 55 mph+. Note to highway engineers: if you build it, they will speed.

The kicker? 51, still marked as a bike route, merges into an interstate highway bridge with no obvious way of getting your bike off except riding across four lanes of traffic to the opposite sidewalk.

For all that, the approach to the city is beautiful:

To top it all off, I got a flat just a mile and a half from my destination in Shadyside. Harrumph. But it's always really wonderful to see Ashley, who's great company and has fine taste in breakfast joints besides!


Thanks, Ashley!

Scenes from Eastern Ohio

Eastern Ohio (though a bit hilly) is great country for cycling. Some snapshots:

Above: Zoar Village, a former utopian Christian communist settlement.


I feel slightly guilty putting this one up, but not enough to resist:

Mile 400

Pulling out of Mechanicsville.

Storms over Mechanicsville

The night of the 15th found me in Mechanicsville, OH, with the last fingers of Hurricane Ike speeding across the sky. I stopped a guy on a rider mower to ask him for some water, and ended up getting offered a place to stay for the night - Fred, as it turned out, was the assistant chief of the local fire department as well as a fount of knowledge about the township and its history.


It was a stroke of luck, because the wind was picking up and threatened to turn violent as it started getting dark. Fred met me at the fire house and called Glenn, the chief, to get the OK for me to crash in the conference room. A half hour later, the winds were whipping around 60 mph and the calls started coming in from the dispatcher. Volunteers raced up in their pickups, suited up, and rolled out in the fire trucks to deal with downed trees, downed power lines, and fires from the combination of the two. The power went off in the station itself not long after that. It was a blessing to be inside that night - I don't think my tent would have survived long outside.


Chief Glenn, ready to roll out.


Many thanks to the guys (and at least one gal) of the Mechanicsville VFD for their hospitality. Stop on through if you're ever in the area.

Mile 300

Mile 300: Lonesome Lock, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. September 14, 2pm. 

The Bolivarians of Ohio

These days, the closest you get to Bolivarianism in Ohio is probably buying gas at Citgo, owned by Petroleos de Venezuela SA - that is, the country's 'Bolivarian' revolutionary government. The place names of central Ohio, however, are littered with references to the man, from Bolivar Avenue in Cleveland, to a bunch of roads spread across several counties, to a little town named Bolivar down near the interstate (which the local bike shop owner assures me will soon have the only canal towpath trailhead within a mile of an interstate). 

The great thing is that all these places are pronounced to rhyme with 'Oliver', following the delightful midwestern logic of inventing bizarre pronunciations for European names (think of the several 'Milans', for instance, pronounced 'my-lun'). 

My historian's guess is that Bolivar's popularity in Ohio came from the fact that this part of the state was settled by whites in the mid-1820s, just after the revolutions that freed latin America from Spanish rule. Maybe they saw in Simón Bolivar the freedom-loving frontiersman they thought themselves to be; an Andrew Jackson del sur, quisás? I suspect that this was the first, and probably last, latin American revolutionary movement that was widely popular in Ohio.   

Cycling infrstructure... in Cleveland?

Now I was something of a blank slate when it came to Cleveland. I guess I imagined it as something like a smaller version of Detroit, and an equally car-dominated city. Wrong on both counts as it turns out. At least for those travelling from east to west, the city has a great cycling route that stretches at least 10 miles along the lakefront. A few photos:

At the western city limits
The bridge into downtown.
A strange white building between Browns Stadium and the R&R Hall of Fame.
Just past the end of North Marginal Drive.

It's a sweet ride, especially near sunset with the light all golden. You cruise through the western neighborhoods, through a giant park along the water, up through Ohio City, over into downtown, and then past the stadiums onto North Marginal drive, which goes between the freeway and a tiny airport. Around E 60th you start getting exits, just like the cars do! I took the MLK Boulevard underpass, which connects to another nice sidewalk trail up to the Case Western Reserve campus.

The Cleveland Lakefront Bikeway actually changed my views on bike routes. The genius thing about it is that it's only about 25% off-road. But the on-road parts don't have agressive traffic. The key thing is extremely aggressive signage, to the point of having two in one block sometimes. The signs are large, well-placed, and easy to spot: so even when the route meanders through some residential streets in Ohio City and looks like it's going nowhere, you're confident that you're not lost. I hadn't really thought so hard about the signage issue before, but I've become something of a convert.