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If "Hindsight is 50/50." An hour later, we arrived in the community of Landis. The early ride had piqued our appetite. "How about if we treat ourselves this morning?" Sharon asked, stopping across from the Landis Hotel. As if in response, before I could protest, an unshaven fellow threw open the Hotel's creaky screen door and yelled to us, "Come on in! The coffee's on." "Our invitation," I said. We leaned our bikes against the building's aging clapboard side and sauntered inside. Old farmers, furrows lining their craggy faces, sat at a window table, slurping black coffee. We nodded 'morning' on our way past, and eased ourselves into a couple of ratty chairs at a table near the back. Farmers' gravelly voices wafted in the restaurant's still air. Like farmers everywhere, they complained non-stop about gas prices, grain prices, farm equipment prices, and, last, but not least, their favourite whipping boy, the uncooperative weather. "It's a farmer's prerogative," Sharon whispered. "When your living depends on the weather, you're allowed to complain about anything and everything." "Yeah," I agreed. "Probably about cyclists, too." (My urban paranoia was showing ... after last night's hostile treatment from the farm wife I wasn't expecting the best from rural folks.) A train rumbled past - so close the building shivered like a 4.5 tremor on the Richter scale. One old-timer turned in his chair and looked our way. "Twenty trains a day," he shouted above the din. The building quit shaking, the rumbling faded, and the farmers resumed their complaining. "Can you believe those grain prices?" one muttered. "Lower per bushel than during the depression." A pockmarked waiter, looking as though he'd had a rough night (not his first by any means), brought glasses of water. He plunked them down, looked us over, scratched his knobby chin, then read our thoughts. "I asked them why they farm then," he said. "They told me, 'Only thing we know how to do.' Complain, I figure, is what they meant. Don't pay no mind - they're like this every day." He shook his head. "I figure someone must be making money though ... all those trainloads of grain going east and west day and night eight days a week." He disappeared into the back. The fellow who invited us in came over and introduced himself. He was Don, the establishment's fine owner. "Happy to see you folks this morning," he drawled. "You should'a been here last night though. Didn't ya know we give free rooms to cyclists?" Sharon and I shook our heads. So close, and yet so far.... We had to learn to ask locals more questions about accommodations. "Where did you stay last night?" "Oh, a little B&B down the way," Sharon said. (Bitter and Bummed-out, I figured was what she imagined the initials to stand for.) Don looked momentarily confused. "Hey," he said, brightening. "A girl stayed here last Tuesday - she was cycling on her own. Did you pass her anywhere on the road?" "Nope," I answered. "If we had, we would have stayed here last night." "Ya," Don continued, ignoring my comment, "she's a little bit of a thing. I tell everyone who comes in here, so they can keep an eye out for her." Someone worried about cyclists? Comforting to know people watched out for us. Maybe rural folks weren't so bad after all. "So," Don said, "what can I do for you this fine morning?" A low growl discharged from Sharon's stomach. "Can we order breakfast?" "Well, my cook's not in yet." Don rubbed his grizzled chin and looked doubtful. "I guess if you pick something not too hard, I can make it for you. He handed us a pair of tattered menus off an adjacent table. "Pancakes?" Sharon ventured. "Nope. Too hard." "How about an omelette?" Don mulled it over a full minute. I thought we had entered a time warp where the fourth dimension had ground to a halt. "Okay," he mused. "I can do an omelette." Half an hour later, the hard-day's night man slapped two white plates in front of us. The accompanying slimy omelettes skittered around our plates, gliding like champion figure skaters. I stabbed mine just before it slid off the rink's edge. "Maybe you should have waited for the cook," the server said. He gave us a misty, little half-grin and departed. Canned mushrooms, so slippery they could have been brown-headed eels, slithered beneath a gooey raft of liquified, processed, simulated cheese slices. "Fresh from their cellophane wrapper," I remarked as the pallid orange scum floated across my plate. Looking at the slop, I seriously considered digging a package of oatmeal from the bottom of my pannier and firing up our trusty stove. "I'm starved," Sharon said. She hoisted her fork and ventured a bite. I waited in anticipation for her proclamation. "This is the most disgusting omelette I've ever tasted," she said, and nearly retched. Since she put it like that, I had to try the stuff. "Sounds like a challenge," I said, loading up a quivering forkful and choking it down. "Goose poop," I winced. "Just out." "Scraped from the bottom of someone's boots," Sharon added. "The regular cook doesn't have anything to worry about." She grimaced and forced another quivering glob of orangey-yellow detritus into her gullet. "Talk about job security." "Never trust a skinny chef." Don sashayed over. "How do you like it?" he asked, smiling. "I made it myself." Don may have been short on culinary skills, but he was long on friendliness. "I've never tasted anything quite like it," Sharon said, diplomatically. "Don't quit your night job," I said, somewhat less tactfully. Honesty was always the best policy, right? Back outside, I discovered my rear tire had suffered a nasty deflating episode. "Will you look at that?" I said, pointing to its airless condition. "That's one flat 'no-flat' tube." While I lifted the back of my bike so I didn't have to remove my rear rack's contents, Sharon extricated the wheel from the chain and rear derailleur. I laid my bike over, located the offending hole and got out the patch kit. "Do you think a patch will hold on a 'no-flat' tube?" Sharon asked, looking doubtful. "Oh, sure," I responded. "It says right on the box: Patches like a regular tube." I rubbed a patch on, reinstalled the wheel, and departed Landis, heading eastward with a brisk tailwind. We coasted along, enjoying the lack of scenery. Then, with usual fickleness, the wind turned on us - with a vengeance. The next half-hour consisted of our heads tucked, staring at our shoelaces. Maybe I should have splurged on fluorescent ones? On the outskirts of Biggar, we raised our heads long enough to read a sign: New York is Big, but this is Biggar. Chuckling at the inhabitants' sense of humour, we struggled 32 kilometres to Purdue, the wind hitting us obliquely off our left shoulders. Stopping at a gas station, we flopped onto a bench. I had just finished inhaling my last swallows of chocolate milk when a whistling sound - reminiscent of a fat porker's final exhale - pierced my tympanic membrane. I gaped repugnantly as the rear of my bike sagged like a boxer who had taken one punch to the head too many. The Landis patch had failed. "How about that?" I said in dismay. "Maybe those 'no-flat' tubes should be named 'no-patch.'" "That's the problem with those," Sharon concurred. "Once they're punctured, they're tossers." Not one to be deterred, I bonded a larger patch right over top of the old one. "Let's see how long this sucker lasts!" By the time we got underway, the wind hit us square in the face. We crept along. Can't get any worse, I thought. Of course it could. It began to rain. Sharon pulled off and scrambled about, grabbing laundry from beneath bungees and stowing the still damp articles inside panniers. (We washed our few articles of clothing wherever we could, and "hung" them on our bicycles, giving us a gypsy caravan appearance. I joked about buying clothes pegs and fastening my garb to my flag pole where they would dry quicker and obtain a daisy fresh airing.) Laundry secured in drier confines, we struck off. Before long, the heavens really opened. Through a grey torrential downpour, I spied a garage. And the door was up! We hustled off the road and scurried into someone's driveway. I ran to the house's door and banged on it. A balding, chin-whiskered fellow, well into middle-age, opened the door. His potbelly protruded, hanging out beneath a moth-eaten T-shirt with the words Fear This nearly worn off. "Can we wait out the storm in your garage?" I stammered. "Certainly," he replied, gawking out at our loaded bikes. "I'll even join you!" The next half-hour was spent with Wendell the Hilarious. His good humour and earthy philosophy infected us. Soon, we were splitting a gut at everything he uttered. "If is a very big word," he said. "If may have only two letters, but it is a much bigger word. Like my Daddy told me: "If the dog hadn't stopped to take a shit, it would have caught the rabbit.'" We nodded solemnly. Ah, there had to be a nugget of wisdom there somewhere, didn't there? Not finding one, I shrugged. At least we were dry. "If don't change nothin'," Wendell continued with his philosophizing. "Couldn't have happened any other way. Meant to be. Just the way it is. No ifs, ands, or buts about it." Our dampened, emotional states lifted as the storm passed to the west. Sharon and I waved so long to Wendell. If it hadn't been for the storm, we never would have met him. He had fed our spirits and given us invaluable advice: "Worrying is wasted energy." |
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