FLCC> It ain't Ithaca

[Jack Rueckheim]

Every once in a while I get induced to make the 500 mile trek to Bay City,
Michigan, quintessential Midwest city and growing-up place of my wife and
still home to her mother and sister.  I usually throw my bike in the car
even though this area does not offer what most of us would consider prime
road riding.  

 

The first thing I see outside Friday morning is a guy with a couple hundred
feet of hose attached to a tank truck-he is fogging the trees in my
mother-in-law's back yard with who knows what.  She lives in a kind of
senior citizens' subdivision where things like landscaping and lawn mowing
are taken care of by people with more able bodies. Maybe his body is not
more able for long-he is wearing no respiratory protective equipment.  A
couple of hours later, while on my bike, I see bean and sugar beet fields
receiving the same kind of treatment.  Then I see a guy with a tanker truck
hooked up to a bigger tank that probably contains fertilizer or pesticide or
herbicide or some concoction of the three that miraculously knows which
plant to nourish and which plants to obliterate while obliterating every
nearby member of the animal kingdom.  This guy has no protective equipment.


 

Now, I know that these chemicals are used everywhere-even here in Ithaca,
but it seems to me that Michigan is the chemical capital of the country.
This is an area of large scale bean, beat, corn, and "honeyrock"
(cantaloupe) production and use of chemicals seems especially pervasive.
You can smell them as you ride or drive through the countryside.  The
connection to cycling is this-I don't know if I should be riding there.  Or
if I am, I'm not sure if I should be breathing deeply.  

 

All that aside, this is one of the few places I've been where I can take off
on a 50-mile loop and not even think about bringing a map-even though I am
not really familiar with the roads.  These roads are laid out in a grid,
with about one mile between the intersections, with almost numbing
regularity.  Great leaps of imagination have not been used in naming these
roads-8-Mile, 9-Mile, Garfield (how in hell did that get in there?),
11-Mile, and so on.  These roads generally run straight as an arrow, either
due north/south or east/west.  A couple of times I ran into curves (gasp!)
but the roads quickly straightened themselves out again lest they intersect
another road at an angle other than 90 degrees.  

 

I think I climbed three hills.  These occurred where the roads I was on
over-passed Interstate 75.  Maybe I had 60 feet of climbing in 50 miles.
Like I said, it ain't Ithaca.

 

Jack

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