Week 37 - Decatur, Pokagon SP, Nordhouse Dunes

I left Centerville and drove north through Dayton, winding among the ivy-covered hillsides of wealthy neighborhoods, the brickwork of historic downtown, across the Great Miami River (why are so many things around Dayton named Miami?), through neighborhoods with weedy lots and broken windows, the gas stations and strip malls of the outskirts, and finally back into flat farmland. The fields were covered in brown stubble, and the air was filled with the smell of herbicides sprayed from countless tractors. But gradually the land got greener, and I rode through fields of crimson clover with bursts of yellow asters, and glaucous green rye grass with delicate purple tips. There was the smell of manure for miles, and then scatterings of horse droppings on the road told me that I must be entering Amish country. I saw men in hats and suspenders, and women in dresses and kerchiefs operating lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

Just before I got to Decatur Indiana, I passed a barn with "D & A Classic Bikes and Parts" painted on the side in Gothic lettering, and of course I had to stop and see. In the dim interior behind an open garage door, motorcycle parts of all kinds were hanging from hooks, dangling faded paper labels. A man was rummaging through a wooden bin of rear view mirrors, and directed me to the owner, an older man bent like a question mark, who was having a leisurely phone conversation with a neighbor. I looked around the shop while I waited for him to finish, enjoying the spiky visual rhythm of a wall of sprockets, the Seussian exuberance of a line of exhaust systems, and the bulbous ranks of gas tanks in the attic. There were also some vintage bikes in beautiful condition, and when the owner got off the phone I asked him why there were no price tags on them. He told me they were part of his private collection, and that he spent winters restoring them in the little mechanical shop on the other side of a swinging saloon door, with a wood stove hulking in one corner. I asked him if he might have any parts for Punkin, and he said he did have a few I might look at. He led me outside to another dark barn filled with vintage bikes, up a narrow staircase, through a few rooms that looked almost like a museum, and into another attic, where he showed me a wooden box and left me to my own devices. The box was mostly engine parts, and nothing I could use, so I rummaged for a bit and then went back to the museum to look around. He had a bulldozer-yellow 1978 Honda CT90 in perfect condition. There was also a baby-blue 1967 Honda P50 with its unusual hub motor on the back wheel. One room was filled with coffee mills from the 1800s, the kind that have big red cast iron flywheels with swooping spokes. I could easily have spent hours there, but it was a 200 mile day. So I went back down and made a little conversation with the owner and his wife (he'd been running the shop since 1965!), and got back on the road.

Almost immediately I passed a couple on a horse and buggy. What a strange mixture of eras and technologies! In Decatur I got bean chili and salad from a hip barbecue joint, and found a place a few miles out of town to eat it, a rare stand of big trees with purple flowers all across the forest floor. When I got back on the road, Punkin stopped after a few hundred yards, and had me quite worried until I realized that I'd shut the gas valve off while I eating lunch so there wouldn't be a leak if the center stand tipped over on the soft shoulder. As I rode through northern Indiana, I speculated on the unfamiliar features of these roads. Where I grew up the roads wound from place to place, following the landscape and connecting population centers past and present, but here they were all aligned to a grid, presumably because the area had been colonized rationally rather than organically, with surveyors laying down straight lines before many settlers arrived. Since I was going northwest, on back roads, my route seemed like an endless succession of alternating left and right turns. Now and then my road would run into a T intersection and then continue at an offset, and I wondered if this had come about because the perfect grid was frustrated by the curvature of the earth and had to give somewhere. Another mystery was how all the north-south roads seemed to be two lanes of gravel while all the east-west roads were single lanes of asphalt. I noticed that the roads and houses were all slightly raised above the surrounding fields. Was it because they'd been built up or because so much plowed topsoil had been lost to wind, water, and exported crops over the years? Mysteries like these passed for entertainment as I crossed the dead-flat plains, a layer of pale dust gradually coating me and my gear.

Horses were everywhere: grazing in paddocks, a colt running alongside me on the other side of a fence, men and boys driving buggies, gigs, and sulkies, even two children on what appeared to be an engineless go kart fitted with shafts and pulled by a dappled gray. Through it pulsed the lifeblood of the manufactured world: endless rail cars, the tortuous tubing and massive tanks of a chemical plant, a flatbed trailer loaded with three industrial metal lathes. As evening approached, the land began to bunch up into a patchwork of hills and lakes carved out by ancient glaciers, and I arrived at my stopping point in Pokagon State Park. It looked like a very well-developed park with a lot of amenities, but I was just there to crash for the night, so I never even walked out to the lake, but just pitched a tarp against the incoming drizzle and enjoyed a nice shower and shave in the bathroom. While I was showering a raccoon stole a few of my empty leftover containers and some friendly Hoosiers in the campsite across the way thought I'd lost my dinner and offered to feed me, but having already eaten I declined the invitation, strung up my food bag from a tree, and went to bed.

Rain came through in the night but was gone by morning. I got back on the road at 7:30, ate breakfast in a truck stop (the place was called Iron Skillet but the skillet my food was served on was aluminum), and then crossed into Michigan. Here the land was more rolling and wooded. I passed near Battle Creek where my dad grew up, and it could almost have been mistaken for the North Carolina Piedmont, except the pine species were all the kind that tolerate heavy snow. I stopped in Sparta for gas and a simple lunch of baked potato and coleslaw, then proceeded at full throttle up highway 37. I passed a few groups of motorcyclists riding in the opposite direction, and at first chalked it up to it being a nice day to ride, but gradually there were more and more of them until my left arm was almost constantly stuck out in the biker salute. When I came to a shopping center with parking lots full of gleaming chrome, fried food stands, and tents selling patches and leathers, I thought I'd found the source of all the bikers, but when I stopped to talk it turned out this was just a fringe festival, and the main event was the "Blessing of the Bikes" in Baldwin, where it seems that motorcycles get blessed en masse by a priest (and maybe sprinkled with holy water?). The original one was at a Catholic church in 1972, but it's gotten so big that it's now held at the municipal airport. The blessing had already finished, but I didn't feel like I was missing much since Punkin had already been personally blessed by Santa. The density of motorcycles continued to increase, including one yahoo with ape hanger handlebars that gave me a scare by taking a turn too fast and coming well into my lane. At Baldwin every parking spot seemed to be filled with fabulous custom machines in everything from flat black to sparkly metallic purple. I turned west on 10, stopped at a roadside park and chatted with a retired auto plant worker on a Honda cruiser, got groceries in Ludington, and then headed up to Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness Area, which is part of Manistee National Forest.

The parking area was at the end of a 6.5 mile dirt road. I'd had notions of camping near water, but scouting for a site I soon found that the trails were way too steep to carry all my gear that kind of distance, so I found a nice meadow near the parking lot, with a dune on one side and a stand of planted pines on the other. I hauled everything there in three trips and set up camp. Then I walked the short distance to Nordhouse Lake and called my mom while filtering water and watching the birds paddling in the late afternoon sun. The next morning I walked to the lake before breakfast and watched the rising sun reflecting on it. The dunes were really a remarkable landscape. From looking at maps I'd been expecting them to be bare and windswept, but in fact they were mostly forested, with paths running along the ridge lines, sometimes so high they looked out over the canopy on either side. I went on a few long hikes down to Lake Michigan, where the blue water merged with the sky at the faraway horizon. The conifers were the kind that grow in western NC, so the smell and the steep slopes reminded me of the mountains, but the sand and the big water reminded me of the beach. It was like both at the same time!

The place was sparsely populated during the week; I only ever saw a few people pass my campsite. And since the sun didn't set until after 9pm, I had a lot of time to myself to dream and scheme. When I had gotten getting gas in Sparta, I met a guy named AH who told me about Janus Motorcycles, a company in northern Indiana making beautiful classic-inspired bikes. I drooled over their Gryffin 250, and even picked out the options I would want if I got one. But then I got to thinking: if Punkin died, did I really want to upgrade to a fancier motorcycle, or was there some way I could downgrade and tour even slower and simpler? I'd started reading Peace Pilgrim's Book and both her simple lifestyle and her down-to-earth spiritual teachings resonated deeply with me. It would be great to be able to travel on foot and enjoy the flexibility and the exercise, but the problem was the amount of time I'd need to spend on the road. It wouldn't leave me enough time to do my job, which I wasn't ready to give up just yet. Then one of my colleagues, who's blind, mentioned that she can read at over 500 words per minute using text-to-speech, when most sighted readers only manage around 300 or so. I started to wonder if I could learn to use screen reader technology to do my work, and if it could maybe make me more productive rather than less. With a chorded keyboard in one hand, a highly customized mobile phone, and headphones, maybe I could work while walking down the road.

There were so many possibilities. Working while moving would trigger a whole simplicity cascade: I could ditch my chair and laptop, my tent and stove, my toolkit and motorcycle armor, and downsize my solar power system. I could even get by with fewer layers, since walking generates lots of heat, and if it got too cold I could work lying down in my sleeping bag. There would be new travel possibilities: I could work while hiking the Pennines or the Alps, on buses and trains, or even in a pedal-powered kayak. Everything I needed could fit in a backpack or small wagon, which unlike a motorcycle could be taken on most trails and greenways. Over the course of the week I started getting more and more excited about the idea, working out all the software tools I could write and doing some preliminary experiments on my laptop. It seemed within reach, but it would be a lot of work to develop the system and learn the required skills. But definitely worth a shot, and since the additional equipment would be tiny, I could prepare while still touring by motorcycle. I'm calling this new initiative "Project Footwork". I figured I'd ride Punkin as far as possible, but having a plan in case of an unfixable mechanical failure was very comforting, and made me worry a lot less about breaking down.

Things I Learned

• There's a type of restaurant up here called a "family restaurant" which seems to serve simple home-style food in a casual setting. I'll need to eat at a few more to say for sure but so far they seem like a good option for nutrient-dense food, now that barbecue joints are getting scarcer.
• Dispersed camping (i.e. free with no reservations) is allowed in all Michigan state forests. I learned this from an Americorps volunteer taking a few days off to camp, and he also gave me some tips about camping in the Upper Peninsula, saying the best places tended to be near the water, because most of the other undeveloped land is either very dense forest or wetlands.
• The bugs weren't nearly as bad as people had warned me they'd be, although probably it was just lucky timing. In the mornings there were hordes of tiny hopping insects on the ground that covered everything around my tent, but they didn't bite. Other than that I only saw a few mosquitoes, black flies, and lone star ticks, all easily dealt with.

Wonderful Things

• Seeing a porcupine for the first time!
• A singing whippoorwill silhouetted against the night sky.
• Wind-rippled sand in slanting evening light, like a Zen garden.
• Coming back to the parking lot to find a note on Punkin's cargo rack written on a paint chip card (Hancock Gray, Providence Olive, Abingdon Putty), which read: "THANKS FOR SAYING HI AT THE BEACH! It broke up my otherwise lonely backpacking trip. Enjoy the rest of your stay and the U.P.! - Charlotte + Wilbur". Wilbur was a cute little Aussiepoo that I befriended and threw a couple balls for. It's like my friend Jonathan Byrd sings: "Think you got nothin' to give? Look around how people live / Loneliness is poverty / Say hey, say hey to me."