Over the River…

The conservative thing to do was ride along in the car with my wife and daughter. We were all headed over to “grandmother’s house” 25 miles away to make a traditional fall meal called “pigs in a blanket,” which is essentially meat wrapped in meat.

The recipe was handed down from the German side of my wife’s family, which is actually both sides. That probably accounts for the meat-wrapped-in-meat philosophy. Ever the meat-eaters, good, conservative stock like my wife’s family knows how to fix and eat things that go gravy in your mouth.

Yet the liberal side of me, the crazed Scotsman who loves raw weather and a physical challenge before eating, decided that riding my bike over to Grandmother’s House was the preferable option to riding in the car.

We Scotsman think we have to earn a meal, you see. Which explains why Scotsman are known to have trounced around the Highlands for centuries wearing nothing under their kilts in cold weather. That’s earning a meal right there: just running around fighting off Romans and the English with no underpants is a day’s work for anybody.

“So it’s een me bloodh,” you might say.

The Real Chicago

There was just one obstacle to overcome: The route to Grandmother’s House travels through some of the most dense suburban traffic in the entire Chicago region. There is a rumor that the word Chicago was passed along unchecked from the Native Americans who once lived in the region. The website Early Chicago explains it this way:

• The name Chicago is derived from the local Indian word chicagoua for the native garlic plant (not onion) Allium tricoccum. This garlic (in French:ail sauvage) grew in abundance on the south end of Lake Michigan on the wooded banks of the extensive river system which bore the same name,chicagoua. Father Gravier, a thorough student of the local Miami language, introduced the spelling chicagoua, or chicagou8, in the 1690`s, attempting to express the inflection which the Indians gave to the last syllable of the word. 

Native Garlic? I think not. I think that Native Americans were messing with those Early Chicagoans. Chicago sounds more like “Does your car go” which is a cleaner version of and the slang version which reads, ” ‘Sher car go?” In other words, Native Americans knew 150 years in advance that Chicagoans were doomed to create a transit system that is chokebound as a wild blackberry patch.

Liberal Instincts

Knowing this to be the case, I suppressed my liberal instincts to link together a spider’s web of bike trails to make the journey and instead chose the most conservative and direct route available, aiming for a 4-lane thoroughfare called Army Trail Road. Good Olde American logic told me that since that the military originally conquered the Native Americans in the Midwest, and Army Trail Road was one of the original routes they took, then that must be the clearest route for a cyclist to use in getting to Grandmother’s House.

That’s how we Americans are supposed to think, isn’t it? Rule out the oppositional information and rule in the seemingly distinct, clear path to our objective.

The Army Trail

I embarked at 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, heading north to achieve my initial connection with Army Trail Road, which dead-ends at a north-south road just before a giant hill leading down to the Fox River. Apparently the Army setting out to kill Native Americans just quit at this point in the journey, the river being so wet and all.

Within a mile of starting out, it was my duty to cross that same river approximately 6 miles to the south of my rendevous point with Army Trail Road to the north. Down where I live in Batavia, Illinois, which calls itself the Windmill City because they once manufactured giant prairie windmills and shipped them around the world, the Fox River has been low this year and it might have been possible just a few weeks ago to ride even my road bike across the river bed and never get the bottom bracket wet.

We finally got some rain and thank God the river has risen so that my photo opportunity going “over the river” to Grandma’s House was not ruined by the sight of unsightly mud and rocks, which is what rivers look like when they’re not really wet. Just ask Texas.

And through the woods…

And through the woods

Continuing north, I passed “through the woods” and pretty much completed the obligatory aspects of traveling to Grandmother’s House. It was satisfying to snap that photo and realize that no matter what else I said in this blog, you’d know I was not lying about the title.

The last stretch of northerly road leading to Army Trail Road is far too dangerous for any cyclists to ride. The shoulder is nothing more than a rock-strewn ditch, while the highway curves and leans into hills in a manner that encourages cars to drive even faster than they should. A perfect place for a cyclist to get hit and killed in other words.

So I took Country Club Road instead, a shortcut over to the main stretch of Army Trail. Like it’s name, Country Club Road starts by a golf course and rolls through some expensive real estate where the newest houses are far bigger than the state-of-the-art fire

A mansion the size of a fire station.

station they just built in our formerly industrial town of Batavia. Whether the residents of these houses actually own fire engines is not actually known, since their garage doors are always closed as if nobody lives there, and the rest of the property is often obscured by giant American flags that hang from thick tree limbs 40 feet up in the air.

These are proud, rich Americans for sure. The requisite Romney signs on the lawn reminded me there was an election coming up. And I thanked them out loud, because I’d rather forgotten this was an election year, and one in which we might be picking a President like the prettiest flower from the ugly bouquet of American politics.

Entering Wayne.

Wayne’s World

Finally I reached Army Trail Road, a smooth strip of blacktop that immediately plows through the little town of Wayne, Illinois, which has fought tooth and nail not to be turned into a splatter of suburbia despite multiple attempts to expand Army Trail Road into a four-lane monstrosity that would chew up lawns, pave the front steps of cute little churches and pave over a few of the many sporty dogs that live in that fair community. It is a little horse town, literally, that has kept its quaint little bounty intact. It still even has its old Train Depot, placed by the tracks back when the Chicago Region had its own system of suburban rail transit. Then the car companies bought all the rail companies and tore up the tracks so that citizens could no longer

The ancient train depot.

depend on trolleys and the like to get around. They had to drive, now. And that’s how it’s been since the early 1900s.

The Spanking Machine

Riding a bike east on Army Trail turned out to be something like that game we called Spanking Machine as kids. You know the game; everyone lines up with their legs apart so they can slap the behind of the kid who has to crawl through the line for whatever punishment they deserve.

Because the farther I rode east, the louder and more dangerous the traffic became. Then the road narrowed and finally the once ample shoulder (that I imagined continued for much longer) simply disappeared altogether.

The even stranger aspect of this middle section of the ride was the fact that I was passing through communities that had clearly and absolutely lost their minds in terms of the political election. Candidate signs along the roadway were so thick at times they were placed every 4 feet. Seriously. And their messaging was all over the map, but the Crazy Joe Walsh signs were the funniest.

Candidate Joe Walsh. Photo credit: Daily Herald

Not that Joe Walsh. The Crazy One. 

You know him. He’s a national phenomenon for his wild-eyed Tea Party hatred for anything that spends money, especially government. Well it was ironic that so many of his signs were parked along the road, since the governments at every level; national, state, regional and local, are responsible for spending the money to build roads. So the right (and liberal) thing to do would have been to pull over and knock down all the hypocritical Joe Walsh political signs along the road.

A Wise Wind Blows

Fortunately the stiff north wind across which I was riding had done that duty already. God really is a liberal, you see. Or at least Jesus was. I think they fight about that in heaven, because the God of the Old Testament sure acts a lot like Newt Gingrich or Mitch McConnell. So we may have both a Republican (God) and a Democrat (Jesus) ruling the universe. So they balance each other out, on par. Rumor has it the Holy Spirit is a Libertarian, which explains how the Virgin Birth took place, since Libertarians seem to like to imagine that things really do just happen on their own.

Flipping the vote

Finally it go so tight riding with traffic along Army Trail road that I was faced with a dramatic decision, which was whether to unclip from my pedals when a long flatbed truck stopped in front of me, or else fall over. I chose the latter. But rather than fall unceremoniously on my side, which might have hurt, I concocted this prodigious plan to both unclip and manage to pull my bike up over the curb while I did a reverse somersault into the grass. And damned if it didn’t work perfectly.

To the guys riding by in the SUV, this was more than hilarious. But I did not care if they were laughing because they were not privy to the absolute lack of fear and wild-assed control I felt doing that maneuver. Despite my bike accident 2 months ago, I felt in complete control of my destiny doing that back somersault. That’s what it takes to get along in this world, sometimes. It was the safest, most conservative option given the sudden action of the truck. And pretty nifty if I do say so myself.

The sidewalks

But from there I retreated to the sidewalks. They were relatively smooth, except for the part where they crossed dozens of entryways to strip malls, which took over the formerly lovely passage of Army Trail Road about 15 years ago. Sidewalks also have cracks, and riding a road bike at 20 mph on an open sidewalk sets up a rhythm in those 120psi tires that can jar loose an intestinal blockage if you’re not careful. It’s like getting a colonoscopy for free.

Olde Tymes

I recall a time when Army Trail Road was one of those innocent, untouched semi-country roads where the occasional family-owned gas station still lurked on a corner. Now that’s all gone. And frankly, our family no longer even drives Army Trail Road to get to Grandmother’s House. My pathetic, liberal, sentimental instincts told me it would be alright to come this way, but it wasn’t.

All out of sidewalk. Into the 355 Star Wars Zone.

Adding insult to near-injury, even the sidewalks ran out once the road approached Interstate 355, a 6-lane Mergatroid of a road heading north south. It is the carotid artery of major transportation in the area. But the mile leading up to that road on Army Trail is basically the Wild West. The sidewalks devolve into crushed gravel that on a wet day would suck you and your bike down into Limestone Hell.

I avoided that and glancing back at the traffic roaring up to 355, made quickly off on my Felt 4C to get past the Interstate. Topping 27 miles an hour, it felt like entering a chunk of Suburban Cyberspace. Cars weren’t traveling much faster as they approached the on-ramps and negotiating their entry and exit plans was to become part of an interstellar scene like those flighty urban scenes shown in all the George Lucas Star Wars films. Which by the way is a pretty amazing journey all by itself. Lucas is donated all $4B he’s making by selling his company to Disney, and donating it to education.

Make America safer: Spend 4B$ on Driver’s Ed

So here’s a hint George: Pile a bunch of that money into real driver’s ed courses. And teach the next generation how to drive around cyclists with some respect. Because right now it’s pathetic. Here we are facing a national election and it’s clear people barely understand the basic traffic laws we have on the books, much less the reproductive regulations that will be passed if the most conservative politicians on the planet outside the Taliban get elected and started turning the country into a Theocracy Playground.

Construction zones. Side streets. Finally I made it to Grandmother’s House and paused in the front driveway to take a photo of her beautiful little villa in the woods.

Then I assumed my duties pounding meat with a tenderizer to make it thin as a pig’s skin so that we could wrap it with bacon and eat meat meat meat red meat like Americans do whether they are German or Scottish or vegetarians, who eat the meat of plants, it turns out. Yes, it’s a confusing world, except at Grandmother’s House where the meat was served and the gravy got poured and my daughter’s own Cinnamon Apple Crisp got piled onto a paper plate and

Apple Crisp in preparation.

ingested, tasting just like the Apple Crisp Grandfather used to make. But we lost him to heaven last January so we can only presume he is up there taking God’s side on all things political, because truth be told Grandfather was a Wall Street Journal-reading, Fox News watching, National Review reading conservative with a good head on his shoulders and a heart the size of a small galaxy. God likes those kinds of people just as he loves his liberal sons and daughters, God Bless their bleeding hearts.

It’s always worth a trip to Grandmother’s House, you see. We learn so much about ourselves, and God, and anything else we need to know, if we know where to look.