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All of this
must lead
somewhere

April 1, 2013 -- This is all a test, really. I've been back on my bike since the beginning of January, sitting out a bit of wind and a dab of chill and resting and working and not really moving anywhere. But I'm physically better from my crash last summer, mentally beyond it, too. It was traumatic enough to mention it a lot, but enough time has passed to mention it less. So I do.

The problem, then, is that I haven't really added the miles back in. I'm not a racer. I'm not a sprinter or a climber or an especially long rider, but I do like long rides. Only I've just been tooling around town so far this year.

So it seemed like it was time to change that.

When I fell I was taking 30-mile rides as a matter of course. I'd spend a good day stretching that out to 50 or 60 miles and could still actually have some energy for the rest of the day. It was lovely, hungry, sweaty, greasy, free work. Smelling of salt and sunblock and whatever else you have smeared on a bicycle was something you can grow accustomed to. All of those things you learn to like when you're standing under a shade tree.

Only I didn't do any of that in the second half of the year because of my injuries. I complained about it a lot, so that has to count for something.

I've been putting a few 30-milers together lately, but it has felt like I've plateaued. My goal has always been to do century rides and the like, and 30-mile rides only prepare you so much.

What follows is overwriting and pictures and just a proving ground for a new layout. When you spend that much time in the saddle doing rollers you have time to think things through and I spent some time considering how to adapt this code. This is all a test, really.

Those people need to get out of the office more.

Photo: Kenny Smith
Wisteria sinensis

I've produced a paltry 505 miles this year so far, betrayed in February by travel and illness and weird stretches of too-cold weather when those aspects of life weren't pressing. That killed a full month. Now -- this is the way of it for me, I build, I regress for some reason or another -- I'm ready to tap out more miles.

Spring is beautiful. Delayed, hesitant, not even earnestly spring until this week. People are trying to sue rodents for what they saw in how photons bent around him. Those people need to get out of the office more.

  • Cateye odometer
    I broke 2,000 miles on this odometer on this ride, meaning my bicycle and I have covered 3,000 miles together. Not bad for a halting first 18 months in the saddle. Photo: Kenny Smith

They could stand under that wisteria, which is the nicest thing about a gritty little gas station on the backside of a blue collar community. The interstate rumbles right through off to the right. Across the street is an industrial park that was previously a POW camp for Germans captured in North Africa. Just down the street is an elementary school. Down the other fork, the route I'll take today, is a closed factory, one of the former three big players in a working man's town.

The road here is fine. I've just come down a hill and turned at that school to go back up an incline that somehow always gets the best of me. Now, after a banana under the wisteria, I'll take the road to the dead Uniroyal plant. It closed in 2009, a big local victim of the bad economy, killing off about 1,000 jobs after having been a big part of the local economy for almost a half-century.

I noticed today the local steelworkers union building, which is just down the hill from the plant, is also for sale.

It really is a lovely afternoon for a long ride. I can soft pedal this stretch of road to about 28 miles per hour, past the road that I turned off once that led to nothing but miles of gravel, beyond the little bar-and-grill-and-who-knows where I often stop because the shade is nice and it actually presents a good stretch of road for your re-start. Every time I've stopped there I've heard the man who lives in the too-close house next door rumble the walls with a huge cough. I always think of him as I go by there, even if I don't stop, and I wonder how long that plastic yellow sign with "Cocktails" and the outline of a martini glass has been there. I wonder when it stopped feeling out of place.

They have a picket fence, a basketball goal and a great view.

Photo: Kenny Smith
On the way to Salem.

I've come to the end of the road, which means nothing. The road doesn't end, but my time on this one does. I could go another 200 yards and turn to the right and head for home. I could be there in half an hour and call it a 30-mile ride.

I'm about 17 miles into today's adventure right now, and this is the key point.

I could go straight, finally running into a town that isn't a town, a place that wasn't even a place when it was a place. That's in a different county, and I once took a wrong turn down there and found myself in a third county, a place where they still use generations-old road signs. The carbon in my bicycle was the most modern thing on that road that day, and even then I had my doubts.

So I'm turning left, onto another road with which I am familiar, and yet a road I'd probably never take in my car, even if I were going to the same place. It is a nice quiet road for riding a bicycle, though. It gives you the slightest of inclines, almost imperceptible, at the very beginning. You go by two houses and five dogs and then one more house on the right with woods and clear-cut land on the left.

And then the road drops out from beneath you, with a beautiful hill off in the distance, which will be quietly stunning again in another week of leaf growth. Endorphines aside, this might be the tiny stretch of road where I've had my best feeling of freedom on my bike. Something about the unspoiled view of that hill, I think. The road falls to a creek bed, where you take the center line over the bridge because you know it is so smooth you don't even feel the transition.

I saw a snake here once. Today I've been paced by a squirrel and chased off two geese from the shoulder of the road. I do not need to race any snakes.

I don't need to slow down, either. I've had a nice pace going so far today, but the hills back here are hurting just a bit. I've never been much of a climber and I have to save something for the ride home, because I have to do all this again on the way out, past the trailers and the randomly fenced in fallow field, beyond a faded out Alabama mailbox, two gravel roads forking to the left and a glimpse of the backside of a railroad spur.

That's how you know you're on the outskirts of Salem.

Where old never replaces new.

Photo: Kenny Smith
Just up from the brand new post office, the antique shop and an old sign still boasting the future home of a church.

I love old places like that, and this part of the world is full of them. Most of these decaying old structures are evidence of a life that has changed permanently. A falling barn, an old smoke stack, a house turned into a hay storage shed, a house overgrown with nature.

This one gets some attention, as well it should.

Salem isn't so large, even for a wide spot in the road, that this building would go ignored. And it is on one of the three roads that take you to everything that is there, and away to everything that isn't.

There's the old church just off to the side, and that's across the street from a volunteer fire department. Those are both just down from the new post office, which is easily the most modern building around. There's the future home of church on a corner there, but that sign has been promising the new building for at least four years. Just down from that a new barn was built in 2007.

This is the place where even Google Maps is trying to make sense of things. If you go down this street you get a snapshot of 2009. If you go down that street, you're in 2007. Somewhere in between on the map is the house that once stood where the church doesn't. That's the pace of progress here.

But it wasn't always this way.

Settled in 1835, Salem grew up fast and was one of the most thriving places around -- that adverb being relative. There was a fire in 1854 and then the Civil War and things never got back on track after that. Today it has almost as many Facebook likes as it does people, though if you go off on any of the handful of side roads you'll get way out of the actual community, but people still claim it, still think of themselves at least loosely as Salem residents. They still get their mail from that new post office.

It employs about 15 people.

The other big thing here was the Salem-Shotwell Covered Bridge. The only historic covered bridge remaining in southeastern Alabama was destroyed by a tree knocked over in a 2005 storm. It was rebuilt two years later, one town up the road in a park.

Soon after that, in 2009, a tornado brushed through the community, wiping out a church, a mission, several homes and part of a junior high.

They dreamed of mountains and streams.

Photo: Kenny Smith Murals like these you'd never notice in a car, if you ever drove this road.

I'd never noticed this before. Usually I'm preoccupied with the road ahead or trying to figure out what they do with the community center they've got tucked away on one of the side roads. But this house sits just off the corner and is now showing this great little piece of folk art. They dreamed of mountains and streams and livestock. And there's a door right in the middle of all of it. I am intrigued by that door.

Which is good, because wondering about that door took my mind off the pothole filled section of road I covered next. I'd just about rather ride on cobblestones, but at least if you can dodge and weave here there is a patch you can navigate of mostly tolerable asphalt. There was a guy sitting in the cab of his logging truck right there, across from the community center, but I'd yet to see any other people here today.

They are all off at work, I'm sure. Salem sits between three actual towns and most of the nice folks here no doubt commute in, situated far enough away for some quiet and close enough to not dread the drive at quitting time. I rounded a curve, slipped back under the cool canopy of freshly leafing oak trees, and took in the fragrance of nature from the cow pasture that comes right up to the shoulder of the road. And then the asphalt changes. You quickly go from the worst thing you'd conjure for a shocks and struts test to perhaps the nicest piece of blacktop in the county.

All of that serves about nine homes. We're way out now. The houses are fewer, with more land between them. There's one trailer and one house with every tree on the property presently in bloom. I'd just seen my first flowering dogwood of the year and then suddenly there were four more. Everyone has a fence here. Many have gates over the driveway.

The road goes down, down, down and curves and feels like a real ride, until it turns to go back home and I am exposed as a fake rider. I finally see a car, which is perhaps the third one I've ever seen on this fresh blacktop. For a while you can hear the buzzing cars from through the treeline of the US highway off to your left. And then even that disappears. You're left with just the wheel noise and whatever wheezing you make yourself. Going up that last hill I'm wheezing a bit. And I'm wondering: what was painted on that wall before they put in the door to nowhere? And why was that door so important?

"We don't like to do much on Mondays or Tuesdays," the Closed sign said.

Photo: Kenny Smith

After another hill or two the road levels into a left hand curve. You hop two railroad tracks, that have been silently stalking you through the woods this whole time. If you look down the tracks you can almost imagine you can see that railway spur, which is a good five or so miles behind you now. When you bunny hop those tracks you're almost out of road.

  • mural
    Another mural. From a distance I'd thought the Jazz feed sign was a part of the painting. It somehow made more sense that way. Photo: Kenny Smith

This little quiet piece of perfect road runs into the highway, and so you take a look at those bullets of one-ton steel and fiberglass and turn your tiny bike back around to repeat the last several miles.

That's the joy of the bicycle, really. You can't know what is on that road until you go down that road. It would be cheating to ask, unfair to look at a map. Those sensations are never the same anyway.

Back into the section of Salem that is a confluence of a few country roads I've returned to the antique shop. I've shopped here before, years before. I drove to it in my car. A friend of mine bought antique cameras as shelf decorations there.

They've got great signs and too many chairs and some ancient rusty and porcelain bits of most everything.

They also have air conditioning, and drinks, which would be good right about now. Except they are closed. The sign is posted, the flier with phone numbers is hanging on the door. The curtains behind the door are closed. The door looks like it could just be pushed open.

I'm sitting in the shade of the front porch on an oddly laminated, floral and bamboo wicker chair. I finished off my second water bottle and had a little crumbly snack, 70 wholesome calories of a honey waffle concoction that will get me home, which is still 20 miles away. On the table next to me there are four rusty potato grinders.

Hanging from the rafters is an old tandem bike. I remember someone on television saying "If you want to get a divorce the quickest way to do it is to get a tandem bike."

This one had a badly mangled front rim. The right handlebar on the back was sheared away. I choose to think all of this happened without anyone riding the thing. I'm surprised they bothered to raise it off the ground. No one is buying that rolling demand for a tetanus shot.

It'd probably look good on the wall of a Ruby Tuesd -- "Is Mistah Will here?"

It was a young guy in a Eric Dickerson Rams jersey. Haven't seen one of those in a while.

He said he worked for him from time to time, and then walked around the side of the building, where he found a friendly neighbor, or maybe the owner of the eclectic little place.

The Miles Ahead

Photo: Kenny Smith
"Why am I out here doing this? Why is this fun? I'm glad this is fun." The first thought when you glimpse a hill.

I buy a lot of my cycling things used, generally on e-bay. For whatever reason everyone uses that line in their description. "Great for the miles ahead" or "Plenty of life for the miles ahead."

If I ever did anything in that industry that'd be the name of my company: The Miles Ahead. The logo would be a silhouette of the road curving and switching back above you.

Maybe not this road. Not everyone would understand how the clay shapes everything here. It is hard to explain how we're a part of the soil because the soil is in us and we're in the soil. Maybe we're getting away from it these days, but clay doesn't wash out that easily.

He said, ponderously, since he'd been on his bike for two hours by now. Around the 35th mile I was proud of myself. I still felt good. I wasn't tired, but at the same time I didn't have any energy, which was an odd sensation. Poor fueling, then. But I was figuring out how to make this entire page work, so you see, all of this was a good distraction. Because while mile 35 felt good, I was ready to be done around mile 40. This is why I have to add miles back into my "program."

Also, I'd just had the last of my water, and I don't like one of the last four rollers. It is only a 100-foot roller, but I can't figure it out. I could close my eyes and know exactly when I got to the fire hydrant. That's where I run out of gas every time. And then there are still two more little hills to go to get home, which meant 48 miles today. So I'm adding miles again.

As for what's ahead, miles and more miles. The last few minutes of most any ride I'm ready to be doing anything than riding my bicycle. But not too long after that I'm ready to do it all again.

I just have to find more downhill runs.

As for this new format, well this was all a test, really. Next time there might be more media and fewer words. It is an elegant little design, though, that can be used more than once, and I'm building it out that way so I can go back to it from time to time. The next time I use it the topic probably won't be a spring day leaning over handlebars. I did break 3,000 miles today, but that's hardly anything to celebrate.

There are plenty of occasional adventures to highlight in this format, just like there are plenty of miles ahead.