Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
foolish and to come in for a cup of tea, which struck me as reasonable. We chatted ami-
ably for ten minutes or so. It was she who pointed me here to Jonas and the inn, and I
left happily fortified as the rain diminished to a drizzle, though by the time I got to the
top of the hill it was pouring again. The last fifteen miles of the day were a chilly bath.
A table of blue-haired ladies was finishing lunch when I parked my bike under the
eaves and walked in, soaked and bedraggled. The bartender and hotel proprietor, a wo-
man about my age wearing a kerchief and an apron, took immediate pity on me, handing
me a towel and letting me wheel my bike through the barroom and up the back stairs.
There I moved into a tiny room with a single bed, a plastic stall shower, and a toaster-
sized black-and-white television with a wire coat hanger serving as the antenna. With
my bike wedged in a corner, there wasn't much space to move around, and by the time
I spread out my wet stuff to dry, hanging my shorts and shirt on the handlebars and my
socks from the knobs on the dresser, it was comical and cozy in equal measure. I took a
hot shower, went down to the bar for a bowl of chili, and then took a nap until it was
almost dark, when I went out for a walk. The air was damp but the sky was clearing, the
gray clouds breaking up as daylight waned.
I followed a road into the woods for about a mile until it opened up into the begin-
nings of a housing development, and it occurred to me that I'd had a terrific day for reas-
ons I couldn't really explain. What came to my mind was a passage I'd written at the end
of my 1993 trip, and when I got back to my room I looked it up. The place had Wi-Fi.
Who would've guessed?
“One thing I learned on my journey is that there are two kinds of people in the
world,” I wrote, “those who instinctively understand the appeal of a trip like mine and
those who never could.”
Then I explained:
In Hardin, Mont., on the Crow Indian reservation, a young guy in a pickup found
out what I was up to and asked, genuinely perplexed: “What would make you want to
do that?” he asked. Some 1,200 miles later, in Odanah, Wis., on another reservation,
another guy in a pickup offered me a ride. It was a kindness. He was going out of his
way. It never occurred to him I might be riding my bike because I wanted to.
A couple of weeks after that, I stopped to visit some cousins near Detroit, people I
hadn't seen since a bar mitzvah more than a year earlier. I told these two stories over a
raucous dinner table, concluding that there was something in Native American culture
that judged me a nut.
“The Indians don't seem to understand,” I said.
“I got news for you,” one of my relatives said. “Neither do the Jews.”
