Beside the main street on the sidewalk corner in an Ohio country town stood two people, a guy and a girl, tending a booth. “Pull over to drop Obama” was written on their sign. They called out to us and we brushed them off with succinct no thank yous, but were forced to a stop at the red light. The guy jogged up and asked about our trip and then offered us some reading material.
“Oh, uh, that's okay. We have plenty of books, thanks,” I said as the light turned green and we rode to the library.
-
It was filled with air conditioning and soft chairs, but we didn't have much to do and quickly became restless and left the library. Stepping back into the afternoon heat, we found those two people from earlier seated on the wooden bench beside our bikes, sitting, eating, and seemingly resting.
“Oh, boy...” Justin uttered in a sigh as we approached. He grabbed some water bottles and went to fill them. While I waited, out of politeness I broke the silence between us and asked them where they were from. This was a precursor to a conversation more thorough than I could have expected.
They each explained to me in turn. Being the Detroit-based faction of a larger network, they often went out on days like this and set up in the smaller towns, raising awareness for whatever their purpose was. Apparently today they'd chosen the wrong town and had gotten run off from their street corner display.
Justin returned and somehow it became less like carrying on a typical conversation. It was to be expected, though, given the context. Having consciously acknowledged a certain goal they directed their own speech to that determined political end they meant to promote.
We soon diverged into two separate conversations, Justin talking with the guy about American political history. He had introduced himself to us with a handshake as Allen. His penetrating eyes in the shadow of his hat's brim smiled out intensely, his calm evidently stimulated by the discussion. Tiffiny, the girl, and I spoke, seated in the grass in the shade of a tree. Her sunglasses were raised and resting on the top of her brown hair which she'd tied up in the back before sitting down. Our conversation revolved around science, astronomy, evolution, the relevance these things had to their movement, and the philosophy it had sprouted from.
It was strange talking to people with such comprehensive opinions. They'd both done this for years and their practice was evident. Their movement was all encompassing and trying to sift for a clear understanding of exactly what it entailed proved a slow process.
Tiffiny pulled out a book on Johannes Kepler and paged through it, seeking out a specific quote. She read it aloud and when finished her face abruptly lit up.
“Oh, I know! Here, you want to see something cool about how your mind works?” She drew a square on a piece of paper and labeled each of its sides as one unit (try this yourself if you like). I was to take this square, and with only the pen, the paper, and my mind, double its size in a way that was logical and provable. In other words, from this square with the area of one another square would be derived that, without a doubt, had an area of two relative to the original. It took me a while, but eventually, painstakingly, the answer was extracted from some hidden fold in my brain. She explained what she'd meant by it: the human mind has the innate potential to understand and, through reason, find order.
An hour had passed. I, and presumably Justin as well, had been impelled to reevaluate the assumptions we'd made at our brief encounter with them on the street corner. The ride they'd been waiting for, a mini-van, pulled up, parking in front of us, and brought close to the conversations.
“If anything we've talked about has intrigued you, you should come and visit our office.” Tiffiny invited. They were in a part of Detroit that was called Redford, Michigan.
Justin and I crossed the street to an ice cream shop that had long been waiting for us now and each bought a cone, ready for something sweet before navigating some distance at day's end. My head was fully occupied now and happy at finding unexpected pleasantness in the surprise meeting.
I had a surplus to consider as we left, beginning again to glide over the roads between fields. Looking around myself, I couldn't keep from projecting questions onto everything and wondering about the things I'd heard.
Justin's leg didn't seem to be fully healed, and pressing against a rushing wind all morning wore at it quickly. We reached Findlay, Ohio, and stumbled almost immediately upon a donut shop. Justin went in. I found him seated at a small square table in the corner. Both of us were pleased to be at least momentarily removed from the wind's incessant howl. I opened my computer, turned it on, and sat back. The busy highway sound of impending cars, and semis, usually rushing at my side, was pleasantly muffled by the shop window.
We'd primarily come to Findlay to have my bike fixed. It had a laundry list of problems: My left pedal had fallen off once and rarely wanted to spin freely anymore, and its cloth strap that had worked like a belt for my foot was worn into two useless pieces. My tired chain had broken three times, trying repeatedly to throw in the towel. I'd already bought its replacement, but I figured I'd wait to put it on with a fresh set of gears on the back (cassette) just for good measure.
It was one-fifteen in the afternoon when I searched the shop's location. Remembering it was Saturday I checked their website for operating hours and saw with a shock that they would close in forty short minutes.
“We gotta go!” I yelped at Justin, quickly scribbling the directions on a napkin and slapping my computer shut.
Through the traffic lights and weekend busy streets we sped downtown and found the place marked by display bicycles standing in front of the shop. I rolled my bike up onto the sidewalk, laid it against the wall outside, and opened the glass door. Stepping quickly around the lines of bikes in the store, I went up to the desk and first told them about my cassette/chain issue. The owner followed me out to see the gear ratio on the bike.
“I know you guys close at two, and I don't know how long it would take to fix,” I worried out loud.
“Oh, I'm not in a hurry. If it takes a little longer, it takes a little longer,” he said, genuinely. I smiled in relief.
Fortunately they had the part. In fact it had just been put onto one of the employee's bicycles. He voluntarily, even insistently surrendered it, taking the cogs from his wheel and layering them onto mine. “Hey, if I can't go to Alaska”, he said happily, “at least a part of my bike will!”
While he maneuvered those pieces around, the owner scooted about on his four-wheeled stool, picking out new pedals for me from a bin. He wrenched mine out and set to spinning the new ones into place, then seeing my back brake pads began shaking his head. Before I could say anything he'd torn open a box and was replacing them, too.
His hands working, he pointed out to me, “And we don't charge labor on any of this. Not to anybody who's traveling. I did a cross country back in college, so I can sympathize."
With fresh brake pads, cassette, and chain on he started a detailed adjustment of the brakes and gears. By two-twenty all was done. He set the total cost for all the work and parts equal to what he'd paid for the cassette alone, taking no profit whatsoever. What he really wanted in return was pictures of us in Alaska, and maybe a postcard.
While the late afternoon sun crept past a web of clouds we stopped at a gas station to eat. Justin went and laid in the shade of a tree, and I sat down on the curb, dialing the phone number Tiffiny had scrawled on a piece of folded paper for me. She and Allen had told us where they'd generally be over the next few days and offered to pick us up if we were in their area so I figured I'd see what they were up to.
She answered the phone sounding a little surprised at the call. I told her we were in Findlay and she said she needed to find something out about their schedule and would call me right back. I got up and walked over to where Justin was and my phone began to vibrate. Tiffiny now told me they could pick us up tomorrow from wherever we were in the morning. We'd just have to let her know where to go.
-
Into the countryside we rode northward, paralleling the interstate. Again we found ourselves poking like pinpoints above a thinly stretched landscape, following a cardinal direction grid bursting with the green growth of agriculture. Above as we rode, the blurred overcast sky became further defined with gray detail in the waning light of sunset. The fields about us were growing darker every minute and weren't affording the privacy needed for a campsite of any security so, becoming further frustrated, we turned to a road going east. This lane split into two at a township's border. Directly ahead, in the vertex between the two roads laid a small public park. We rolled our bicycles through discretely and found a fairly hidden place on the leeward side of a section of wooden fence where we laid out our tents.
Darkness fell and sleep set on. The park's thick grass was an easy pad, nearly like lying on a feather bed to the tired mind of the traveler. Suddenly a bright light fell on our tents. A policeman peered with his flashlight into my mesh door.
“Hey,” I calmly greeted him.
“Hey, how many of you are there?” His voice betrayed a friendly nature.
“Just two. One in that tent, and then me in here.”
He asked what we were doing and I briefly explained the trip.
“See the problem is the park's closed at sundown,” he told us. “To be honest I don't have a problem with you guys being here, but the mayor does.”
“Well, where are we supposed to go?” I asked earnestly.
He hesitated for a second and then, “I'll be right back.”
Shortly he returned from his car, asked for our Ids, and then drove off, promising us that he'd return them. Justin and I sat down at a picnic table under the park's lone yellow light.
“This is stupid. The mayor has a problem? We're not hurting anybody. I'd just went to sleep, too,” Justin said.
“Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. He's probably talking to the mayor right now.”
A few minutes later the police car headlights were coming down the park's dirt drive. He stopped and called us over to his window from the driver seat and handed back our Ids. “Alright, so you guys are good to go. You can stay the night, but, you know, try to get out early if you can, and don't be up walking around the park or anything. Good luck, guys. And thanks for your cooperation.”
We walked back to our tents, ready to return to sleep.
“But...where do we go?” Justin mocked, “That was good, though.”
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