269 allen chapel road, batesville, AR

...is the end of the line for now. kid pulled out of his driveway in front of me, turning left and blocking most of both lanes. with 75 feet to spare, it wasn't enough. I managed not to hit him, but I went down with the bike. I'm fine thanks to the ridiculous gear I was wearing, but the bike is not. now I get to experience small town arkansas in depth for who knows how long. at least it's county fair weekend. too pissed off / disappointed to continue this, but thanks for reading.

and now for more self-indulgence: the why

but back to festivals...this ride is also about quick glimpses of what makes places local. really quick glimpses, of course, but it's impossible to know a place short of a several months stay, so a day vs a week doesn't make much difference. this past saturday I finally stopped by east dayton's appalachian festival, a one-day only affair I tragically missed in 2008 and 2009 in the annual sprint out of dayton immediately after the summer term ended. and would have missed it this year but for mechanical delays. nearly forgot about it anyway, but there I was running the hard streets of the gem city and stumbled upon it. and jogging through the parking lot of the east dayton community center / jobs center was just about enough. some fried food, some yard-sales-relocated-to-the-festival, and an empty music stage promising some bluegrass gospel. utterly unremarkable, but uniquely there nonetheless. so that's the first reason for this trip...soaking up the local as impenetrable as it has to remain from the outside.

it's about fresh eyes too. wednesday evening I grabbed some bbq brisket from 'smokey joe's' (5th and jefferson on the edge of the oregon district in dayton) -- I know, just before heading into the heart of western bbq country -- and looking out the window I noticed for the first time (?) the quirky y-shaped intersection at 5th and jefferson/patterson and all the modernist forms surrounding it. and then I noticed the soaring parking garage attached to the ramshackle dayton convention center. suspended helical ramps and a stepped-down arrangement of parking levels stacked on top of what used to be the greyhound station. all empty and unexplored by me. finished the brisket and headed across the street for a climb and a view. struck me that I'd never climbed anything in dayton other than the low southern hills, and the only time I'd taken in a view of the city was from the pinnacle of the cemetery next to the UD campus. so the view even five stories up was striking. the same streets on which I've trudged uninspired miles came together for something coherent. I realized that I recognized all the landmarks and topography that I could see, that I've covered a lot despite the desultory running of the past couple of years. realized that I've looked at dayton with my head down, that the lack of connection I have with the city comes not just from spending too much time in cincinnati and never reading the dayton daily news. cincinnati was intelligible from the start because the topography invites pseudo-aerial inspection. none of this is surprising in retrospect, given (for example) that the first thing I do when visiting anyone in the hospital is to inspect the view from the window. as if the typical convalescing person is concerned with the view. but face it, hospital rooms have great big windows often looking out over tree-y neighborhoods. if you get the window bed. (I better get the window bed.) marion's blog-laureate and the ohio scotsman should remember this quirk. anyway, the point is that I need aerials to go along with my on-the-ground mapping. I've experienced dayton in the wrong order...moving there in a snowy winter and living a workaday grind (I'm grossly exaggerating on that score, but teaching at wright state is my first real job, after all) inured me to any but the well-worn tracks to the bus stop, the bank, the coffee shop, the grocery store, and so on. so...getting the hell away from dayton actually does in a way fit in with knowing dayton: seeing brand new places reminds me how to look.

and it's about motion, inertia, miles covered. that much is self-evident, and the pictures will tell that. later I'll write about motion on the bike itself. in short (ha) I'm endlessly frustrated and invigorated at the same time that I'll never see 99% of this planet's surface. that today I'm driving past thousands of personal saturdays that I'll never know. but sensing all that is better than forgetting to consider...

prologue and day one -- dayton to clarksville, TN

after retrieving my bike from the shop just under the wire thursday night I scrambled stuff together to ride toward a thunderstorm in cincinnati. and after rearranging luggage for the third time was underway for real by 10.30am friday from newport, KY. highway miles to get some road between me and home and then into the bluegrass scrubland. abandoned pasture and clearcut forest on the comeback, lush tobacco fields and horse fences. land that is ever so clearly suitable for coal and cash crops and now sometimes goats. and on a mid-july day, lots of swimming cows. 97 degrees had brown and black shapes crowding around and sliding into muddy ponds. the best picture I didn't take (see link at left) was of holsteins submerged in a lividly algae-green pond at the bottom of a woodsy hollow.

towns tidily composed at the center but with a sense of the provisional creeping in just a few blocks out -- no sidewalks, haphazardly named streets. and I was unwittingly on the 'abraham lincoln heritage trail' on US31E -- boyhood homes and birthplaces and museums and the 'Lincoln freeze' dairy bar. (I also noted a place that sold 'multimile tires,' and other that advertised 'soda and heavy explosives.') kids driving off to war wearing desert fatigues in a convoy of deep-emerald humvees. and after 350 miles or so I pulled into the hilly river town of clarskville, where a generous couchsurfing host sent a friend to open up her cottage and introduce me to her fly-chasing cats maya and sophie. and now into the valley of the big muddy and then a long climb into the ozarks -- conway, AR next.