Rollin’ to the Mighty Mississippi

By Don Morreale

An American Buddhist monk named Ajahn Sumedho was asked by his master to establish a monastery for westerners in Britain . Since Buddhist monks in Thailand must go door to door to beg for their daily sustenance, Sumedho was understandably concerned. “Who will provide us with food?” he asked. “After all, feeding mendicant holy men is not a British custom.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” asked the master, “that there are no kind people in Britain ?”

As it happened, once they were given the opportunity, the local people got right into the spirit of the thing, and today British monks at Chithurst Forest Monastery go door to door and are more than adequately cared for by people who may or may not be Buddhists, but who are nonetheless delighted for the chance to practice kindness and generosity on a daily basis.

I had occasion to think of this story many times in the long hours spent crossing Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri on the second leg of my transcontinental scooter journey this summer. People could not have been kinder to us, or more generous.

I was accompanied on my sojourn by an old Irish buddy, Neil Farrell, whom I had not seen in thirty years, but with whom I have remained in touch. Neil teaches mathematics and economics at a Catholic high school in Dublin . This summer he, wife Ann, and daughter Clara, spent their summer vacation touring Canada and the US . They visited us in Denver in early July, right around the time I had begun my search for someone to drive the support vehicle, a task that promised to be more boring than grueling. My scooter, a motorized standup model called the Mosquito Stinger, can go no faster than 20 mph on level ground, slower uphill, and only moderately faster on steep declines.

Neil, anxious to experience something of rural America , jumped at the chance. This was no small sacrifice on his part, considering that he would have to return a rental car to Toronto , come back to Denver by bus, and then negotiate a postponement of his passage back to Ireland aboard a freighter out of Montreal . This he did with nary a whimper, and on July 25, 2004 , we loaded the truck and drove out to Byers, Colorado , some 50 miles east of Denver on old US Highway 36. (I’d covered the distance from my front porch to Byers the previous weekend, my wife behind me in the truck). It was late morning by the time we set wheels to pavement and tore off eastward, with Anton , Colorado as our first day’s destination.

We zoomed past a herd of buffalo, and began what would amount to a roller coaster ride across the eastern plains. Somewhere around the town of Last Chance , I noticed a shadowy figure on the road ahead. A transcontinental biker, I thought. But as we got closer I realized this was not a guy on a bicycle. This was a guy on a unicycle, out in the middle of nowhere, with a small pack on his back and no support vehicle anywhere in sight.

I pulled up along side him. He stopped. I stopped. Neil stopped. “What the hell are you doing out here?” I said.

“I’m going cross country, San Francisco to New York , raising money for kids with cancer. What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Same thing,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Patrick Thomas. Who are you?”

“Don Morreale…So tell me, uh, Patrick, what’s the hardest part about going coast to coast on a unicycle?”

“To be perfectly honest,” he replied, “my balls are killing me.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “How far can you go in a day on that thing?”

“Anywhere from 30 to 80 miles on a good day. But lately my nuts hurt so bad that I have to get off and walk every three miles. So it’s walk three, ride three, pretty much all day long.”

We traded email addresses and I promised to write to him. (His website, in case you’re interested, is www.pedalthewaves.org.) I couldn’t help but admire the guy for his courage and determination. I also couldn’t help but be thankful to have a scooter under me, not to mention a support vehicle bringing up the rear.

We exceeded our first day’s projected mileage by an additional ten miles, winding up in Cope, Colorado , where we camped for the night in the town’s municipal park. The next day the sky was overcast, the road misty. An itinerant evangelist who had spent the night in his fifth wheel trailer 30 yards from our campsite, came over, introduced himself, asked us about our mission, and offered to beseech the Lord’s blessing upon our enterprise. The three of us joined hands and bowed heads, while the preacher spoke directly to the Lord. “Lord,” he prayed, “these boys are on their way across the country, raisin’ money for a charity called SOS. Now, Lord, I never heard of it, but it sounds like a good work, so we ask you to bless their mission and watch over them as they make their way across the country.”

Prayers over, I started the scooter and gave it a full five minutes to warm up as I donned helmet, earplugs, goggles, gloves and knee pads. I climbed aboard and bumped slowly across the dirt road that lead back out onto Highway 36, hoping to find a café in the town of Joes , about ten miles down the road, mainly so we could say we “ate at Joes.” Unfortunately, there was nowhere to eat in Joes, so we pushed on to Idalia, had an early lunch, and then continued on to the Kansas border, a photo op we took advantage of by snapping each other posing in front of the big blue sign with a sunflower on it. Bye-bye, Colorful Colorado, hello Sunflower State . We got to St. Francis, birthplace of Apollo 17 astronaut Ron Evans, and poked around for a motel room.

I explained our mission to the desk clerk at the Empire Motel, who told me the place was now in receivership, and being run in the interim by employees of the bank that had repossessed it. “Hang on a minute,” said the clerk. “I’ll call the bank and see if we can comp you.”

She spoke to somebody, then put her hand over the receiver and said “Do you have any proof of what you’re doing?”

“Sure,” I said, pulling a brochure and press release from my backpack. “I’ve also got a letter from the charity.”

“This’ll do,” she said. “Bank says to go ahead.” And so it came to pass that we spent our first night in Kansas as guests of the bank, watching the Democratic National Convention on TV in air conditioned splendor.

We had made arrangements through our Denver Rotary sponsor, Russ Gleason, to give a presentation the following day at the Oberlin Rotary’s noon luncheon. Our plan was to leave early, go as far as possible by scooter, then drive the rest of the way into Oberlin in time for lunch. Later in the day we would drive back to our stopping point and finish out the day’s run.

When I was a kid growing up in Colorado Springs , we had a neighbor who used to say, “I drive a Rolls-Canardly…rolls down one hill and can ‘ardly make it up the next. Haw. Haw. Haw.” I hadn’t thought of old Mrs. Miller’s silly little joke in years, but now it came back to me as an apt description of my scooter ride across the Midwest . One of the great misconceptions you hear about Kansas is that it is dead flat. Not true. At least, not in northern Kansas , the terrain of which is just one hill after another. I’d lumber to the top of a gradual incline, which from my vantage point looked like what you might see from the front car of a roller coaster just before you make that first drop. Then, zoom!! Down the hill I’d go, throttling back and letting gravity hurtle me forward at breakneck speed, the wind whistling past my goggles and blowing an invigorating breeze up my shorts. It was exhilarating, a little scary and, let’s be frank, funner than hell.

Unfortunately, the closer we got to Oberlin, the stronger the wind blew; so strong, in fact, that it was pushing me sideways like a sea-going sail canoe without a keel. I had to fight to keep from getting blown off the road, and I was relieved when 11:30 rolled around and Neil tooted, signaling me to pull over and stop. We loaded up and drove the remaining 17 miles into Oberlin in time to make the Rotary luncheon, where we met Lee Gilliam, the club’s president, and sat down to a lovely lunch of chicken cordon bleu over rice.

After lunch, I gave a brief talk about the whys and wherefores of our scooter run. Our goal, I said, was to raise $62,500 for SOS, enough to educate 1000 children in India for a year. After the talk a number of people came up to shake hands, and as we spoke I noticed that they were putting money on the table. By the time it was over, we’d collected $110 for SOS Children’s Villages.

Lee Gilliam introduced us to Gary Anderson, owner of Oberlin’s premier hotel, the Land Mark Inn Bed and Breakfast. “We’ve arranged for a room for you and Neil,” said Gary . The Land Mark, we were soon to discover, is arguably the finest hotel in Northern Kansas , (hell, throw in Eastern Colorado and southern Nebraska while you’re at it,) – a beautifully restored bank building. Our room, on the top floor, was capacious and high-ceilinged, with carved antique beds that you’d swear had been pilfered from the Lincoln Bedroom. Neil, beet red from the bright sunshine and wiped out from his 20 mph crawl across the prairies, did a face plant on one of them and went immediately to sleep. I went across the street to the offices of the Oberlin Herald for an interview, then toured the town, looked at real estate, stopped for an iced tea at a café on 36, and was flummoxed to find that it only cost 50 cents, about what it would have cost in Denver oh, say, back in 1958.

The following day we scootered to Phillipsburg , where Kent Culbertson, president of the newly established Phillipsburg Rotary met us near the courthouse, just as the first sprinkles of an afternoon rain were beginning to fall. We followed him to the Cottonwood Inn, a motel on the east side of town, where once again we were the beneficiaries of the ever hospitable Rotary Club. Our arrangement with Kent was this; we’d get up early in the morning, go as far as we could, then drive back to Phillipsburg to make a presentation at the club’s Thursday luncheon.

The skies were clear as we rode out to a little roadside park that contained a Kansas Historical Marker that was planted on the exact geographical center of the 48 contiguous United States and, consequently, the mid-point of our transcontinental pilgrimage. The spot was unprepossessing, a simple roadside rest stop with grass, trees, and the marker, which was adorned with carved sunflowers and a painted map indicating distances from all points in the US – Denver, New York, San Francisco, Galveston, Miami, and so on. We took pictures of one another standing in front of the monument, before jumping in the truck and charging back the 30 miles to Phillipsburg . Neil, accustomed now to seeing the countryside unfolding at a sedate and stately 20 mph, said the return journey felt like watching a movie played backwards at warp speed.

After a lunch of barbecued beef and coleslaw, I stood up, rattled off the names of 12 western states and then asked if anyone knew what they had in common with the nation of India . “None of ‘em likes Nebraska ,” came the retort from someone in this football addled crowd. (You gotta hand it to the Rotarians, they know how to have a good time.) I forged ahead: “If you tallied up the population of these twelve states, the total would equal the number of orphaned children in the nation of India . The Subcontinent has the highest number of orphans of any country in the world.” I went on to say that my original motivation had come from seeing abandoned, virtually feral children swarming over a pile of garbage in front of a New Delhi restaurant back in 1976. It was, I said, a defining moment in my life, and an image that has stayed with me ever since. Once again, the Rotarians were more than generous, donating $120 in cash to SOS.

After lunch we drove back out to the geographical center of the known universe, and proceeded eastward from there, past our projected stopping place (Courtland,) and on into the picturesque village of Scandia , “Home of the Flying Swedes.” We’d covered 87 miles, our longest distance in one day since the start of the trip. We didn’t know it yet, but we were headed for a whole heap of trouble.

Just outside of Marysville, I heard a whoosh, looked down and saw something spray up from the front tire of my scooter that looked like pea soup. I kept on going a couple of miles, trying to figure it out. Finally I pulled over and looked at the front tire. What I saw made my hair stand up like Don King on a bad hair day. I’d warn a hole clean through both tire and inner tube, a good quarter of an inch in diameter. Miraculously the stop-leak had filled the hole, which explains the pea soup that had spewed out and coated my boots, shins, and the front steering stick of the scooter. Don’t kid yourself, a sudden flat on the front tire of a scooter going 20 to 25 miles per hour should have sent me ass-over-tea kettle onto the highway. Note to self: “Any sign of trouble, first thing you do is PULL THE HELL OVER AND STOP!!!” Note to self #2: Send a letter to the wonderful folks at Stop Leak, thanking them for saving my 57 year old butt with their amazing product. Seal it with one thousand kisses.

Neil was all for fixing the tire right there by the side of the road. But the sun was baking, I was sweating like a hog, and there was no shade or shelter anywhere within five miles of us. Besides, we’d already turned in a respectable 70 miles that day, so why not go in to Marysville, find a motel, look for a park with lots of trees, and do the repair there in the cool cool shade? “Good point,” said Neil.

We found the Marysville Municipal Park -- which had a train track running through the middle of it. There we replaced the front tire and inner tube, working against a soundtrack of freight trains banging and clattering, punctuated by an electronic facsimile of an old fashioned level crossing alarm that went off every time a train rumbled through, which had to have been at least three times in the hour we were there. Marysville, we discovered, is on the Union Pacific’s main freight line between Kansas City and Hastings, Nebraska, and something like 25 trains pass through the park every day.

Neil suggested that I take the scooter for a spin around the park, just to be sure everything was ok before we loaded up again. I pulled the cord, started the motor and found that it was now revving out of control, no matter what I did with the throttle. We monkied with the throttle, tried to loosen the cable, and still the rear tire spun crazily out of control, gouging the ground underneath it. Neil and I looked at each other with that exasperated expression parents get when their colicky baby is pitching a fit.

“I can’t deal with this today,” I said. “Let’s pack it in and maybe see if we can find a lawn mower mechanic or something in the morning.”

As we were loading the scooter into the truck, Neil noticed that the scooter’s rear tire had now gone flat. I attached the footpump and tried to pump some air into it, only to discover that our pump too was now on the fritz. “Unbelievable,” I said. “That about does it for me.”

The next morning over a breakfast of waffles and coffee, I leafed through the local paper and saw an ad for “Les’s Small Engine Repair.” I called the number. “Come on over,” said Les. “We’re the house with the lawn mowers and junk all over the back yard.”

To make a long story short, Les listened to the motor for maybe 15 seconds, said “Something stuck in your carburetor, maybe water or dust or something.” He gunned it a couple of times and the Mosquito settled right down and purred like a little kitty. “Well sir,” said Les, “Whatever it was must’ve shot through, ‘cause she’s running ok now.” Les, like most everyone we met on this trip, refused to take any money. “Aw heck,” he said, “consider it a donation to your charity.” Guys like this restore your faith in American people.

--o0o--

We never actually met Matt Robertson, Secretary of the St. Joseph Missouri Rotary Club, although we did speak to him over the phone. Matt booked us – sight unseen -- into the downtown Holiday Inn. He had to leave on the same day we arrived for a training class in Minneapolis , but he was kind enough to provide us with accommodation, and we were most grateful for his generous hospitality.

We had lunch in the hotel restaurant, Houlihan’s, (or, “Hooligan’s” as we preferred to call it) and then, with still plenty of daylight remaining, took advantage of Sunday’s relatively un-trafficked streets and rode the scooter through town and out onto State Highway 6, the alternative trans-Missouri bike route recommended to us by the state’s Department of Transportation.

Highway 6 had virtually no traffic on it, and besides, it was lush and green and scenic, the hills steeper than in Kansas, and closer together, making my roller coaster ride through them all the more thrilling. In places we saw horse-drawn buggies driven by Amish women in sunbonnets and dresses that touched the ground when they walked. We put on an extra 30 miles that afternoon, drove back to St. Joseph , did our laundry in the hotel laundromat, took a sauna, and soaked for an hour in the hot tub.

The following night found us in Chillicothe , where a friend of a friend, Brynell Sommerville, put us up for the night. Brynell was preparing to go to Russia to teach an English course, but she was home visiting her mom and her beloved basset hound, Bozo, when we caught up with her. Mom made us a lovely French toast supper, and we had a grand time talking foreign travel, Missouri politics, and the little known fact that Chillicothe is the birthplace of sliced bread.

We made it into Kirksville , Missouri just ahead of a major rain storm that lasted all night and most of the next day. That storm created a dilemma for us. Neil, as I mentioned earlier, had rescheduled his return voyage to Ireland aboard a trans-Atlantic freighter out of Montreal . In order to make his ship, he’d have to leave for the east coast by no later than tomorrow morning. This meant that if we didn’t finish today, I’d have to find someone else to accompany me on the last 60 miles into Quincy , Illinois . To further complicate matters, the Quincy Rotary had alerted the press, and several club members were planning to meet us on the Quincy side of the Mississippi River for a photo op. There was nothing for it but to pack it in and drive to Quincy .

There we were greeted by Jeanne Sampson, Secretary of the Quincy Rotary, her husband Red, and Matthew Bergman, the club’s president-elect. We were not, however, met by the press. They’d all gone to Hannibal , 16 miles down the road, where John Kerry and John Edwards were making a campaign stop. We took our own photos, then went to the Sampson’s for a magnificent dinner of grilled pork chops and all the fixin’s. Red and Jeanne have converted what had been a six unit apartment building into their personal residence. The place had a superb view of the Mississippi , of which Red knows a great deal. And no wonder: he’s lived on, fished in, and boated through this mighty stream for most of his adult life.

It was still dark the next morning when I said goodbye to Neil, who had a train to catch by six AM . I spent the rest of the morning phoning around to local churches in search of a sag wagon driver to replace him. Someone suggested I call RSVP, the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program at the Quincy Senior Center . This I did, and within an hour I had a driver in the person of one Marvin Kerber, a retired engineer who spends much of his time drawing plans and supervising construction for the Quincy chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Together we drove out to La Plata , Missouri , and I launched the final 60 miles of my ride to the Mississippi .

I wish I could say that we finished the voyage in grand style, with a triumphal crossing of the Mississippi River , but sadly this was not to be. A couple of miles past La Plata, I started hearing something that sounded like tin cans in a clothes dryer. Next thing I knew, the scooter rolled to a stop in the middle of the road, the motor running just fine, but the sprocket refusing to turn. I later learned that the weld had failed on the bell housing of the scooter’s centrifugal clutch, causing it to part company with the shaft.

Lest you think we are discouraged, let me assure you that we are not. One purpose of our journey, after all, has been to test the Mosquito Stinger against the rigors of a transcontinental crossing. We’ll be back for the grand finale, once we’ve had a chance to correct the problem. That portion of our odyssey will take us from the Mississippi to the Atlantic , and personally, I can’t wait to get started.