A day in the life of a cyclist in Finland, installment one: Waking up in my hostel room in Kajaani with washed winter cycling gear hanging over different heating implements throughout the room to dry, I gobble the price-included breakfast and start packing up after a wake-up shower. Hop on the cycle after drinking two bottles of water (they freeze during the day and become undrinkable) and spin around town until I see the signs directing me to the highway. At first a cycle path runs parallel to the highway, and I hoped that it would lead all the way to Iisalmi because it snowed last night and the shoulders are now hard-pressed ice. The kind folks of Kijaani gave me a 10 km lead on the paths before it was time to join the lumbering big rigs, speeding Saabs and responsible Volvos on the highway center lanes. Every ounce of my concentration in the morning is assigned to the task of keeping the bicycle upright, which was not easy on the iced-over roads. The highway isn't too busy, so anytime I hear something automotive approaching from behind I pull off to the shoulder to let it pass. In the afternoon, the roads start to improve, the sun is coming down, and I can now let my mind wander. I think about all the farmland I am passing, which gets me to pondering the American farmer and that little shrimp in my neighborhood with a permanent flat top who moved out of the city and off to a farm in seventh grade never to be heard from again, which gets me to thinking of the difficulties facing the modern American farmer, the difficulties that have always faced the farmer, as in chapter one of Grapes of Wrath ("A forty acre cropper and he aint been dusted or tractored off his land"), which leads me to think of Farm Aid, now I am thinking of John Cougar Meloncamp (whose pet charity was Farm Aid "rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough") and how once they took the Cougar out of John Cougar Melloncamp,rendering him a mere John Melloncamp, his musical epitaph had been written on the wall. I wish I could tell you some more elevated cerebral activity was taking place in these hours, but that was a pretty representative sample of my cycling thought process. (11-19-04)
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On the way to Iisalmi, Finland |
