I like to stop in Centreville, the county seat of St. Joseph County, Michigan. It’s usually a good place for a lunch break, and it’s the right distance from home for one. In 2006 there was a sandwich shop on Main Street that I stopped at a few times. When I’m completely self-contained, I can make myself a cup of coffee at a picnic bench on the courthouse lawn, as I did on this ride in summer 2001.

I hope the sandwich shop is still there. I didn’t make so much as one ride to Centreville this year. The one time I rode to White Pigeon, I had enough time for the luxury of a more circuitous route.

This courthouse is kitty-corner across the street from the building used for court back in the 1830s, where the lawsuit against Patrick Marantette ended up with a judgment against him in 1836. I already blogged about it here.

A couple of days ago, while looking for something on another topic in reel 41 of the records of the “Michigan Superintendency of Indian Affairs and Mackinac Agency, Letters Received,” I stumbled upon another tidbit of information about this incident. It’s a letter from Stevens T. Mason, the territorial governor of Michigan, to Henry Schoolcraft, the Indian Agent, dated December 26, 1836. Schoolcraft had apparently asked him about the Marantette case, and Mason wrote back explaining what it had been about. The new piece of information is that the government defended the suit against Marantette. I had known from reading the journal of the court that Andrew Backus had been an attorney for Marantette, but I had assumed that Marantette stood the cost himself. It turns out this is not so. In this letter Mason informs Schoolcraft that the government hired Backus to defend him, and that Backus was paid $300 for his work. That’s nearly three times of the damages and court costs assessed against Marantette. Nothing new about the ratio of lawyer fees to jury awards, I suppose.

This is a snippet of a Fulton County map I was working on last weekend. For my Black Hawk Slept Here website I want to build a collection of maps showing a) historical sites relating to the Black Hawk war and settlement era, and b) bicycleable routes to these places.

It’s fun working with maps like this, because they bring back memories. I’ll be looking at one little road segment I hadn’t thought about for years, and suddenly I’ll recall what when I had last been there, the view, the temperature, the smells, the part of a book I was listening to at the time, etc. Sometimes I later find out that my recollections were wrong, of course. I tell people I have a very good memory about past events. It’s often a mistaken memory, but it’s a good one.

The yellow-orange lines on the map are bike routes I used in several days of riding in or through Fulton County this year. What it does not show is routes I used back in 2000 and 2001 when I did a couple of solo tours to the area. I can remember some of it, but there were places I saw then that I wasn’t able to find again this year.

This is where I camped on my last trip to Fulton County in August 2001, which was also my last bicycle tour for a couple of years. It’s on Barr Lake in Newcastle Township. I remember listening to the green frogs around the lake, and the very hot weather on the ride to this place, and the very hot weather on my ride to Aubbenaubbee township the next day. Both times I ran out of water out in the country and resorted to begging for some at peoples’ houses.

It was also memorable for being my last tour for a couple of years. Soon after came 9/11 and the news that I had prostate cancer. Last night I looked in on newsgroup alt.support.prostate.cancer and saw that some newly diagnosed and newly treated men are asking about bicycling. Maybe it’s time for me to make an appearance on that group again. I don’t have much to say about treatment options, because the people there are much more knowledgeable than I am and so much has changed since 2001 anyway. But I can talk about bicycling without a prostate.

It wasn’t just recovering from surgery that knocked me out of touring for a couple of years, but it started with that. But the main point is that there can still be bicycle touring after RRP! I’ve been riding 2000 to 5000 miles a year since then. I’m thankful for that, and for undetectable PSAs since then, and for a wife who not only lets me do a lot of bicycle touring, but aids and abets it, too!