US 136 winds its way through the middle of Indiana like an old man on a Sunday stroll; it knows where it’s going, and that it will get there, and doesn’t much care about when. The heavy traffic for which the road was originally built now rides on Interstate 74, which runs on a more or less parallel course from Danville to Indianapolis. 136 goes around and over the hills that I74 blasts right through, and ties together the little towns with which the interstate couldn’t be bothered: Covington and Veedersburg, Hillsboro and Waynetown and Crawfordsville, Mace and New Ross and Jamestown and Lizton and Pittsboro and Brownsburg and Clermont, every five or six miles with homey monotony.
136 is north of the interstate at the Illinois line and stays there for about twelve miles, then ducks under to the south side where it remains all the way to Indy. At the point where the two roads cross, midway between Covington and Veedersburg, there is an overpass– a collection of concrete pylons and pillars and steel beams which is surely one of the less consequential landmarks on the face of the planet.
It’s amazing how cheaply a place can buy a piece of your soul; I have been there twice, and have spent perhaps an hour of my life there, and yet…
If that overpass is haunted at this moment– and I have no doubt that it is– it is my own ghost which inhabits the place. I don’t expect to make anyone understand that; I don’t even pretend to understand it myself. I just know that it is true.
//
As I said, I have been to the overpass twice: both times on a bicycle, both times alone, both times heading east. The first time was at 11:00 AM on the Eighth of September, 1989. I was two hours out of Danville on the last day of a four-day ride, scheduled to make Indianapolis by nightfall. I was still fairly fresh and making good time, generally feeling good about myself, when I looked over my shoulder and saw a thunderstorm bearing down on me. I stopped at the far side of the overpass (where I assumed I’d be out of the rain) and closed up my rain flaps and generally prepared to be wet, and then watched the storm front come through.
I didn’t really have a choice in the matter, though I might have wished otherwise. The rain came in at about forty miles per hour, bringing with it a twenty-degree temperature drop and visibility of less than fifty yards. My bike was leaning against a bridge pylon that was parallel to the course of the storm, and I crouched against the pylon in the wind shadow of the bike in an effort to avoid the worst of it.
It didn’t help; my GLOVES were soaked through in the first minute. After five minutes or so, I grabbed a water bottle and dashed across the road and climbed the embankment on the other side until I was out of the rain; there was no avoiding the wind and the cold. I crouched there with my head against the bottom of the pavement of I74, shivering, for about fifteen minutes while the cloudburst rolled past; a steady rain followed in its wake. I climbed back down the hill and took stock of things.
The visibility wasn’t great, but was good enough to make it unlikely that I would end up as a silhouette on some motorist’s road kill tally sheet. It was still a bit chilly, but I was doing hard work and wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. And then there was the half-inch of standing water on the roadway…
It was obvious that the only sane thing to do was cash in my chips: flag down a passing truck and ride to the nearest town, then hole up in a coffee shop and call for an evacuation. It was also obvious, as I stood there shivering, that I had not the slightest interest in being sane at that moment. I wanted to ride in the rain; I needed to ride in the rain; I had to ride in the rain.
As I turned on my lights and mounted the bike, a voice in the back of my mind kept shouting, “No, no, NO! I’m quitting; I’m taking the bus!” I ignored it and started off down the road with a broad grin on my face. My front wheel threw up a roostertail of water that drenched my left foot on every revolution of the pedal crank, and I kept on grinning; every few minutes that little voice would whimper, “No! I wanna take the BUS!” and I’d giggle. I was cold and wet and tired and sore, grinning like a fool and utterly and absolutely content.
//
Three hundred, fifty-six days and seven hours later I returned and parked my bike in the same spot. I was wearing the same sunglasses, the same gloves, and the same long-suffering Batman T-shirt. The bicycle was different; the previous year’s bike had come to an unpleasant end on the bumper of a car four months earlier. It was 6:00 PM, and I was two days into a three-day reprise of the previous year’s trip.
I had arrived in Danville, the scheduled end of the second day’s ride, at 3:30; at the time, I had eighty miles behind me. The sun wasn’t scheduled to set until 7:30, and I was loath to stop within reach of my first “century ride” when I had four hours of daylight left– so I tossed down a McDonald’s hamburger and charged off into Indiana.
The I74 overpass was in sight when my electronic log turned over 100 miles. When I stopped to rest, it read: seven hours, one minute and twenty-nine seconds; one hundred one point six-nine miles.
There is a peculiar relationship between the knowledge that you can do a difficult thing, and knowing that you have done that same thing; depending on your point of view, there is either no difference, or no resemblance. Of course I could ride one hundred miles in a day– but I had never before invested the hours that the feat required. Knowing you can do a thing is cold knowledge, and has no more to do with the shape of your soul than your height or your weight; the knowledge that you have done a thing is blood warm and oh-so-very sweet, an honor scar on your psyche that nothing can ever take away from you.
So there I was, emotionally supercharged and physically exhausted. Part of my mind kept expecting a brass band to materialize from somewhere, and part of my mind wanted to stand in the middle of the road and howl in triumph.
What I actually did was climb onto one of the pylons and mix a bottle of warm lemonade. Fill the bottle half way; open the can of lemonade and measure out the powder; shake the bottle to mix it; fill the bottle to the top; shake it some more; drink the remaining clear water in the back-up bottle– always moving with the methodical precision which is necessary when you are so tired that your hands shake if you do not concentrate on them.
There was an overwhelming contentment in that interlude, brought on by accomplishment and fatigue and the very transience of the moment, by the fact that I wasn’t really anywhere, that I was only in transit. The road stretched past me to the horizon in both directions, and required me to follow it; there was no rest short of Veedersburg, four miles down the road.
As I gathered my paraphernalia and repacked the bike, I realized that I wasn’t going to stop at Veedersburg, or Hillsboro, or in Waynetown. I had toyed with getting to Crawfordsville, in the cold light of dawn twelve hours earlier, and suddenly that made it necessary that I do the thing in fact. The little voice that I had so blatantly ignored the previous year started pleading, “No, really, Veedersburg will be fine, you’ve done your century, that’s plenty…”
I smiled, and mounted the bike, and cranked off down the road, sure of my place in the universe for at least another twenty-five miles. My mind replayed the poem I had been working on since the ride began the previous day, and I would have smiled again, but did not. There was no one to see it, and I could feel it inside of me… and my face was too tired.
Rocinante
Senor Quijana had a horse
Whose beauty only he could see;
It took him– with some protest–
To things his heart knew had to be.
My horse is made of welded steel
And neither breathes nor eats,
And my heart drives the both of us
Down hard and hostile streets.
We measure miles in injuries
And never ending pain–
Through madness in the throes of which
I am most truly sane.
And grinning death sits waiting
In each car that passes by–
You should never leave your doorstep
If you’re not prepared to die.
Paul Haynie
September, 1990