An Amish afternoon

The day is warmer than expected and for the first time this season I actually feel fast on my bicycle.  Perhaps it’s the shedding of the layers of clothes (I am the Michelin Man sans tires); perhaps all of the training I’m doing is having an effect; or, maybe, warm air is less dense than the frigid 33 degrees and rain I’ve been dealing during this purgatory of a month.  March is purgatory.  I’ve survived the cold brutality of life in an Iowa winter, only to be forced to pay for my sins with cold and rain during an Iowa spring.

Today is a respite.  The sun is up, the wind is under twenty miles an hour, and there are tinges of green in the silver and brown landscape.

My plan is simple; do a hilly loop to Littleport and come back through Garber and Colesburg.  Hills and a bit of distance.  From my house, Highway 3 dips into a canyon for a couple of miles.  This is an old road, built over a creek.  On each side the road does little to scrub the climb’s pitch.  Climbing out is a great warmup, but the descent with cold legs just makes everything a bit colder.  I’m sure I creak and grown like an old floorboard as my speed drops into the low thirties and I pick up the pedalling again on the flat past the park and stand as the pitch arrives.  Walls of limestone on the right, the curving brown of Elk Creek on the left and in a mile the rollers heading west to Edgewood.

Wind is out of the southwest, a bit stiff at 14 or so, but the sun makes up for it.  After Edgewood, it’s a left on Littleport Rd., named after the town cleverly built between the bluffs on the Turkey River.  In 1998 the town was under 23 feet of water.  A friend and I canoed it a few days after the crest.  One clear memory of a dead cow in a tree high above the river. 

The road climbs coyly in a series of false flats, making it’s way to the ridges before the river.  The wind is out of the southwest and I feel a slight push on the slower uphills.  Fields of corn stubble stretch out and roll to the horizons all around me and in some moments I feel my pinpoint of perspective losing itself in the landscape.  A long downhill to the river and town, with a step in between where pedalling is needed again.  I remember the joints on either side of the bridge, the jolting sense memory of my first ride here seven or eight years ago (did I really live here for five years without riding this road?).  And then the river is past, the stinking wrecks of houses underwater ten years ago but still lingering, past, the old church moved high up the bluff, past (but much more slowly; I’m in my lowest gear, standing now) and in too short a time I’m at the turn to Garber.

There isn’t much to recommend the road to Garber here, outside of the slight tailwind.  It’s flat and new, cheaply built homes litter the sides of the road.  Vinyl over plywood, yards filled with recreational toys made of cheap vinyl and plastic.  One place takes the cake.  Behind a modern two story home that would look swell in a suburb of Milwaukee, sits a man in a canoe in a farm pond.  Docked to his left, about 20 feet away, is a pontoon boat.  Ah, the dream.

Elkport also sits in a valley squashed between the bluffs of the Turkey.  It’s twin, Garber, lies to the east a bit and the river runs down the middle.  A road closed sign tells me that I might soon have to add a couple of serious climbs to my ride plan.  Sure enough, the bridge over the Turkey, my path to Colesburg, is completely gone.  In it’s place a pile of wood and concrete and two imposing cranes.  Something is sure going to happen here, but not today, and I turn towards a beautiful hilly climb through Amish country.

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