Snapshots of a Georgia Bike Ride

This column was published in June 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald

I recently took a week off and flew to Atlanta to visit my brother. I brought my bicycle, and we rode with several friends and 1,600 other cyclists in the annual Bicycle Ride Across Georgia, or BRAG.

Picture roads that run for miles alongside farms and fields, past tiny white country churches, through towns whose names are proudly painted on water towers, towns such as Americus, Cordele, and Baxley.

Picture cyclists riding these roads, quietly crossing Georgia, sleeping in tents on the grounds of high schools and colleges, or staying in hotels, each day rising to pedal east nearly 500 miles in seven days from Columbus to Savannah.

Picture these other snapshots:

A little girl in cornrows waves from her porch as her brother rides his Big Wheel in a dirt yard adjacent to a train track.

A police officer holds off traffic and waves us through a stop sign, smiling when we say thank you.

Acres of unfamiliar, leafy plants turn out to be tobacco.

We ride along rows of peanut crops and see a sign pointing the way to Plains, Jimmy Carter’s hometown. We see Billy Carter’s gas station.

A church group of black youngsters in matching aqua shirts reaches out to us to offer icy water bottles as we near another rural town.

On a downhill, a mother and her 14-year-old son—Chylon and Zac Thatcher—pass us on their tandem bicycle as “Strawberry Fields Forever” flows from a speaker above the rear tire. I tuck in behind them for few miles and sing along.

We wake one morning to heavy rain. The forecast is for thunderstorms. I tell my brother I didn’t fly all the way across the United States to sit in a hotel room. So our team sets out to cover the 78 miles planned for that day, and by mid-morning the rains yield to clear skies.

A dead armadillo, the sixth we’ve seen, lies along the side of the road. We’ll see other dead animals as well: two possums, a rattlesnake, two raccoons, and two hawks.

On Wednesday, the layover day when cyclists may rest or choose to ride one of several loops, we opt to ride the longest route, and nine hours later my odometer—which I reset every morning—ticks to 105 miles.

On another day, at a rest stop with morning temperatures beginning to rise, retired school principal Allyn Bell stands with friends. At 69, Bell has ridden BRAG for the past 16 years.

“I’m not a natural athlete,” he says in a thick southern accent, “but I can easily ride a bicycle 50 or 70 miles a day. I hope to ride each year until I’m at least 80.”

After a day’s ride, Rachel Fulton, a 33-year-old tattoo artist from Columbus, tells me this is her first BRAG. She’s riding with friends and enjoys the challenge. I ask about the tattoo that spills along her shoulder and upper arm, and she tells me it’s an Irish and Celtic theme, a tribute to her heritage. “I may get a tattoo related to cycling if I finish the ride,” she adds, “maybe something like a gear.”

At another rest stop, Alabama residents Ed and Melody Scott give water to their 13-year-old pound puppy, a Corgi Sheltie mix named Sadie. The Scotts tow Sadie in a covered carrier, and when I pass them later she seems content to glide along the many hundred miles.

And then there’s Joe Ninke, whose extended bicycle includes a platform with railings for his 5-year-old yellow lab, Luckie. This is Luckie’s and Joe’s second BRAG.

After each day’s ride, we record our mileage and take afternoon naps in our hotel rooms and call home and watch the Braves and Tiger Woods and the Weather Channel.

In the evenings we play a card game called nine-hole golf with Gene Zurik, Deborah Kalish, Parks Avery, and his daughter Jessy, who just graduated from Georgia State University and will attend law school in the fall. Each day Jessy drives our luggage to the next hotel and checks us in.

Her dad, Parks, has a quick wit and a knack for telling stories. He’s funny and grew up in the south and is an expert at mimicking a Scottish accent.

My brother takes to calling him Angus, after Angus Hisloop, a Scotsman Parks met ten years ago on a business trip to London. Parks and my brother banter with Scottish accents about sporting events and the names of dogs, and as the cards are dealt for another hand, I take a sip of sweet tea and marvel at this snapshot of life deep in rural Georgia.

It’s no wonder Bicycling Magazine named BRAG one of best 50 bike rides in the United States.

Chylon and Zac Thatcher

Joe Ninke and Luckie

Sadie

With Bill, my brother, in a small town called Fitzgerald deep in southern Georgia

Watching TV with Dad

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in 2007 just before Father's Day

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite things to do on a Saturday afternoon was to settle into a comfy chair in the living room and watch a movie on TV with my dad.

The movies were always in black and white because my parents didn’t see any compelling reason to buy a color TV. As long as Walter Cronkite and Ed Sullivan and Sunday football games found their way into our home through the antennae of our Zenith, not even the invention of the remote control could prompt my dad to buy a new TV set.

My sister enjoys telling the story of going off to college and sitting down one evening in a dorm room with friends to watch The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, only to jump up in amazement when Dorothy landed in munchkin land and everything turned to color.

"I had no idea," she said.

Of course, these were the days before VCRs and personal computers. The only cell phone we’d ever seen was in the shoe of Maxwell Smart. So in those years—the early 1970s—my family did things such as go to the library on Thursday evenings, drive out every so often on a Sunday after church to watch planes take off and land at the airport, and gather on occasion in our living room to listen to my dad read a poem by Longfellow or Poe.

I know this sounds nostalgic, but it really was like that.

And then there were those Saturday afternoon movies.

I’m sure my brother and sister occasionally came downstairs or from outside to watch TV with us, but what I mostly remember is just me and my dad watching films where the hero was always fighting some adversary or injustice, films like the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts or the 1940 Henry Fonda classic, The Grapes of Wrath.

Born in 1930, my dad, whose name is Bill, spent his childhood in a rough and blue-collar neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. His mother died when he was three, and his father worked in a steel mill.

After high school, my dad enlisted in the Air Force and then went to college. He became a high school history and English teacher, and later a guidance counselor at a community college.

Not unlike the characters in those movies, my dad emerged a hero for our family, a role model whose choices in life were as instructive as his words.

As a teenager, I remember feeling fortunate that my dad liked watching those movies, as it gave me an excuse to spend time with him.

These memories came back on a recent Saturday afternoon as I sat with my 15-year-old daughter in our living room watching a movie we’d picked up at the video store: the black and white 1962 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.

My daughter, a voracious reader, read the book on her own last year, and will read it again next year as a sophomore. But she hadn’t seen the movie, and I hadn’t seen it in many years.

As we watched Gregory Peck play the father of Scout and Jem, the hero who stands up to social injustice, I thought of my dad, the depression-era boy who finally did buy a new TV with a remote control and now, at 77, watches movies in color with my mom in the same living room in Los Gatos where we all grew up.

I thought of him as I sat with my daughter on that Saturday, our faces turned toward the television on an afternoon that has already begun to fade into a black and white past to which I hope she’ll look back, one day, and remember.