Rack and Tripod

Late Sunday afternoon, in Topeka, Indiana, I took a long lunch break at the park across the road from gas station/Subway where I usually stop when I’m in that town. I even considered taking one of my park bench naps, but in the end decided I could dispense with it.

I took this photo of the back wheel of my bike while sitting there. It shows my camera tripod sticking out of my single rear pannier. I used the tripod quite a bit this time, and it helped that I didn’t have to unbuckle and rebuckle the straps of the pannier each time it wanted it. On the one ride when it rained, I tucked it in properly so it wouldn’t conduct rainwater into the pannier.

Usually Topeka seems like a very Amish town, but there weren’t many buggies on the road here this time. I also didn’t find the hand-lettered “Haw Patch” sign I had seen on my first trip to Topeka, back in 1997. I wrote about it a couple of years later in newsgroup rec.bicycles.rides, and am going to cut and paste it here as a permanent record for myself, at least. It was in a discussion thread now titled “The bicycle as time machine.”

But a bicycle IS a time machine — of sorts. Sometimes while I’m riding, with my head is full of history and old maps, I forget what century I’m in. It is not nearly so possible for this to happen in a car.

Some of the roads out here follow old Indian trails, but don’t follow them exactly. Last November I was trying to get a feel for the type of terrain the trails actually followed. Some of the land surveyors in the 1820s did a good job of marking where the trails crossed the section lines. I took photocopies of their maps with me, and converted their measurements (in units of chains and links) to hundredths of a mile for my cycle computer, and used that to find some actual trail locations. I didn’t get too far with it, and there are a few places where I want to do more of this as soon as the roads are suitable for riding again. But it’s an activity that can get one disoriented as to time.

Two years ago I was riding in LaGrange County, Indiana. Maybe some of the poeple listening in have ridden there. A big weekend ride (“Amishland & Lakes”) is held there every year and takes people to sites of some of the best anecdotes from the Black Hawk war scare, though I’ll bet hardly any of the riders know about that.

Anyhow, I had been studying some of the county histories from the 1870s and 1880s, and had with me old plat maps from the same era. I was looking for a little crossroads hamlet known as Haw Patch. From what I had read, I almost expected to find no more than a handful of log cabins, perhaps with smoke curling out of their chimneys.

When I got to the place, I was surprised (and almost offended) to see how BIG the town was, and how modern. I don’t know the population, but I’d guess it’s no more than 1000. And it is now known as Topeka, not Haw Patch. Not that Topeka is an ordinary American town. It’s a very Amish town, with a lot of Amish businesses and horse drawn buggies, minus the tourist attractions of the more well-known Amish towns in the area.

I had come to see the Haw Patch, though, and not Topeka. I felt like Rip van Winkle. Didn’t anybody here know about Haw Patch? I went looking for some sign of the hamlet I imagined I had known from the 1830s. I went riding up and down the streets, and on the roads outside of town. At one intersection on the edge of town there was a bloated, dead horse that had apparently ended up the loser in a collision with a car. It was Sunday, so I suppose that’s why it had been left there for the time being. (I’m usually in church on Sunday morning, too, but wasn’t on that particular day.) And not far away I found what I was looking for. An Amish home had a sign out front with small, hand-painted letters, advertising its buggy repair business. If memory serves (I have photos somewhere) it was called something like “Haw Patch Buggy Repair.” It comforted me to see it — I knew then that I hadn’t completely lost touch with reality.

It was a strange sensation. Stuff like this happens to me every now and then when I’m out on my history rides.

It happens elsewhere, too. Once I was reading a Cass County MI history from 1875 that was a gold mine of anecdotes from settlement days. I was already quite absorbed in it when I came to a mention of a man, still living, who was said to have lots of stories he liked to tell from the days when he settled there in the 1830s. I thought to myself, When I get back home I’m going to look up his phone number and give him a call! Then I remembered where I was, or should I say, “when” I was.

One downside of this historical bicycling is that I find it necessary to spend a lot of time in libraries and archives, trying to find information to corroborate the stories of the 1830s that weren’t recorded until 40-50 years later. You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how people can get even their own life stories confused after that much time has elapsed. The problem for me is, the time I spend in libraries and archives is time I’m not spending on my bicycle.