It was cold enough today that the snow that fell yesterday didn’t melt. I still thought I could ride my bike home from work, though.
It was dark by the time I left. About a half mile into the ride I noticed that when I put some oomph into the pedals to climb a small hill, that the wheel slipped without making much forward progress. That was something I had never had happen before. At a couple of points I stopped to get off the bike and test the road with my feet for slipperiness. It was hard to tell in the dark (my light goes out when the bike stops moving) but it seemed I could find a reasonably dry path near the center. I proceeded slowly. A couple of miles later I decided that the roads were icy enough to call for a rescue mission. A fall didn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen, as long as no cars were nearby, but I don’t bounce off the road as well as I used to. Myra agreed to meet me where C Avenue crosses Augusta Creek. But then I decided I didn’t even want to coast down the long side of the valley to the creek. I walked my bike much of the way, and it was slippery enough that even walking wasn’t a sure thing. I stayed upright, though.
So tonight I’ll have to settle for mere memories of rides. This photo shows more from September 26. At the point shown here, I was now headed east again — into the wind.
This hillside seemed like a pretty setting, so I stopped for a photo. A black pickup coming toward me seemed to want to stop for something, but kept going because of other traffic. I wondered if it was someone who wanted to yell at me for being on the road, or for not being far enough off of it. I don’t know why I wonder things like that, because usually the people I meet in places like this are friendly and genuinely curious. The ones who are nasty are the rare exceptions. A very few times people have objected to my taking photos. But even then they usually come around once I explain what I’m doing.
If I had been more aware of the terrain, I would have realized (as I do now, thanks to the maps I have handy) that the low ground at the base of the hill is an occasional waterway that leads to Stony Creek to the north (to the left on the photo). If I can trust Eckert’s map to tell me, the 1806 encampment of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had been bounded on the northeast by Stony Creek, on the northwest by the occasional waterway I had photographed a couple miles back, and on the southeast by this one. So there may have been water on three sides, if there had been water flowing in these two now-temporary streams.
One could say there was a missionary center just to the north of this place. Eckert’s book presents the old viewpoint that Tecumseh was the political leader while his brother Tenskwatawa (”The Prophet”) was a religious fraud — a useful idiot at times but perhaps jealous of his brother’s glory. Recent scholarship, e.g. Gregory Dowd’s, “A Spirited Resistance,” takes the religious revival aspect of their movement much more seriously.
I took my photo and moved on. I hadn’t gone far, though, before that black pickup passed me from behind, then pulled into a farm field lane up ahead of me. The driver got out, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination — he really did want to talk to me.
His name was Phil. He wondered what I was photographing. He especially wondered if I was taking a photo of the cross on the hillside. I had to admit I hadn’t noticed it. We chatted for a while. The homestead I had passed was his, and the cross was something he and his wife had put up some years ago as part of their children’s Vacation Bible School. It was now somewhat of a local landmark, even though I hadn’t noticed it. He told me that the bridge I had crossed was due for replacement, and a new historic marker is planned. He offered to send me one of his own photos of the cross, taken in the light from the setting sun. If it hadn’t been getting late I might have gone back for another look and a photo of my own, but I needed to keep going. And later when we got back to our motel, I found the photograph waiting for me in my e-mail. I discovered that the cross can also be seen in my own photo, but Phil’s (below) is a much nicer one.
