News item (bad news, that is):

Just before daylight, a car hit and killed a Clare County man riding a bike on a Wisconsin road.

The accident happened Tuesday near the town of Washington.

18 year-old Chester Coblentz, an Amish man from Clare, and another Amish man were on their way to go hunting when they were hit by a car driven by a Wisconsin man.

Coblentz died at the scene and the other man was taken to a nearby hospital.

Coblentz was in Wisconsin for the wedding of the other man struck in the accident.

1. What are Amish doing in Clare County, Michigan? That’s pretty far north, and not such great agricultural country. A new colony, perhaps?

2. What do Amish people in general think of hunting and guns? I realize they are pacifists, but does that mean most of them are non-hunters, too?

3. I’ve sometimes wondered what they would think of my lighting rig. People who see me riding at night tell me I’m very visible, whether they overtake me from behind or meet me coming. I have a Schmidt SON hub and E6 light from Peter White Cycles. I have one blinky and one solid red battery-powered taillight, and at night I pull on my reflective vest. I’ve never encountered an Amish buggy with this rig at night, though once I rode through Kentucky Amish country up out of the Ohio River valley, past homes lit with propane lamps or whatever it is they were using for light. Well, I take it back. I did encounter one Amish horse-driven outfit that time, too, and had a hard time figuring out what the noise was until I was almost up to it.

I don’t have a photo of my ride through Kentucky Amish country. It was dark, after all. But here is just before I got on the ferry that took me there. It’s at Cave-in-Rock, Illinois.

Staying in the camping cabin wasn’t much like camping, but it was nice.

We cleaned up, but didn’t wash our horse blankets.

However, we needed to do something about our tent situation. Staying in motels all the time would be too expensive. Myra agreed to make a quick run to Clarksburg, TN to see if she could buy another Eureka tent, or maybe even get replacement poles for ours. Or maybe some other cheap tent’s fiberglass poles would fit our tent. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a quick run for her and she didn’t find a decent sporting goods store in all of Clarksburg. I didn’t learn about that until later in the day.

While still at the campground one of the other campers came over and wanted to talk to us about bicycling. He was from Toledo and said he travelled with horses, kayak, and bicycle. He knew of some routes with broad shoulders for riding, but they were out of the way I wanted to go. I asked about Hwy 13. After thinking about it a while, he remembered driving that route. His recollections made it sound promising to me.

Upon leaving, the first order of business was to get back up onto the ridge, where the Trace ran. Except for the one short, steep hill that I had walked, the way into the campground the previous evening had been a quick downhill run of about 5 miles. In bicycling, what goes down must come up, and now was the time.

The ride along the bottom was pleasant.

The climb back up was uneventful, except that I did manage to throw the chain off my small chainring on one downshift. The remainder of the 20-mile ride to the south end of the park was uneventful, too.

I took photos at an old iron furnace from the 1850s. An old historical marker said it had gone out of business due to a slave insurrection and lack of ore. A newer marker said it was mismanagement and an economic recession that did it, as well as a lack of ore. I like it when historical markers disagree like that. It means there is not only a story to learn about, but a meta-story, too.

But not on this trip.

One of the main features along the trace is all the signs to old cemeteries. I assumed that they were cemeteries that had been reloacated when the valleys were flooded. A lot of cemeteries meant there must have been a lot of communities that had been dislocated.

A few days ago I went looking on the web for information about the history of the Land Between the Lakes Recreational Area, and found this wikipedia article which obviously was written by someone with close ties to the area. I detect a tone of bitterness and resentment that you don’t get in most stories of the Tennessee Valley Authority: “All of this came with a large price, human as well as financial. A great number of the area residents resented immensely the condemnation of their lands, especially when it was explained to them that most of the area was not to be flooded but rather to become a park. Some felt that they were being singled out as the mostly-impoverished and poorly educated of society to be taken advantage of by their government. Several even armed themselves with shotguns, determined to stop the condemnation, but beyond perhaps a few punctured tires little actual violence ever occurred.”

I recalled a family vacation to the Mammoth Cave National Park in 1981. We had gone on a boat ride on the river, during the course of which the guide made sure we learned, in addition to information about the natural history, that there had been a lot of resentment on the part of people who lost their farms and homes to the reservoirs. That surprised me. I knew the TVA had been controversial. My hero Barry Goldwater had in his 1964 campaign recommended that it be privatized. But even then, while I agreed with his ideas, it seemed to be water under the bridge. The TVA was 30 years old and the world hadn’t come to an end. So while as a conservative I have sensitive antennae for stories of governments running roughshod over individuals, it was a bit surprising for me to learn in 1981 that the resentments were still fresh in peoples’ minds.

And then in April 2006 to find this Wikipidia article, written by someone who still seems atuned to these resentments. And to learn that the heirs of the property owners are still agitating to get their land back. Wow. That is not your standard, sanitized New Deal that made even Ronald Reagan a cheerleader for FDR.

I went to Jstor to see if there was a literature on this topic. It was interesting and chilling to read some of the articles by sociologists and government planners in the 1930s and 1940s. It must have been something in the air at the time. Stalin had his 5-year plans, and we had this. There was some recognition of the problems of forced re-location, but most of the writers thought the problems could have been handled by better planning. It comes across as condescending arrogance, even while the writers are trying really hard not to be condescending.

What was missing from the literature of the time was any sense of what happened to the affected individuals. There had been interviews with the people who were forced to leave their homes, and compilations of data on changes in land ownership, tenancy, employment, and home ownership. But I wanted to read about people as individuals, not people as collective entities.

After much looking I found two promising references:
All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941. By Melissa Walker (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 341 pp.).

The reviewer says this: “Walker revisits the Tennessee Valley Authority relocation practices, to demonstrate the numerous ways the state transformed East Tennessee. Rather than simply lament the forced relocation of thousands of upcountry farm families, Walker presents a balanced account of the “mixed legacy” of the TVA project and relocation efforts. On one hand, the TVA brought new job opportunities and a better of standard of living to thousands of rural men and women. And, those farm families with some economic foundation were often able to use the proceeds from land sales to reestablish themselves elsewhere on a surer economic footing. However, Walker also notes that poorer families, and especially African American families, faced more difficulty with relocation as the loss of kin and community mutual aid networks undermined one of their most important survival tools.”

Another is this: TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area. By Michael J. McDonald; John Muldowny

The AHA reviewer says this: “Using oral-history techniiques as well as a vast array of documentary evidence and statistics, Michael J McDonald andJohn Muldowny have skillfully and judiciously analyzed these failures. They conclude that even though the numerous long-run benefits can be cited legitimately as a result of TVA operations, there should nevertheless have been a more active and aggressive planning program…[But, G]iven the circumstances described by the authors, it is extremely difficult to imagine how the adverse impact of relocation on the people of the Norris Basin could have been significantly minimized.”

It would be interesting for someone to do a comparative study of the Indian removal projects of the 1830s and the population removals from the Tennessee Valley reservoir areas. They are not the same, of course. The TVA evacuees were treated less brutally. But there are some similarities in the mindset of those who were doing these big projects, and also similarities in the effects on the societies of the dispossed peoples.

Tonight I was telling Myra about some of my web findings. She said the visitor center at the north end of the recreation area told a lot about that — it had exhibits about the relocation of the people. One of the disadvantages of travel by bicycle is I don’t have time to visit all the things she does. I wish I had seen that one.

I stopped at the visitor center on the south end, on my way out, but mostly to look for a good bicycling map for Tennessee. I had heard that such a thing existed. There wasn’t one, though, so I would have to get along with a regular highway map the rest of the day.
(fixed typos, 26-Apr. 30-jul-2007, put photos back)

I gave myself an extra nap after breakfast. I was tired after 165 miles in the first two days.

Even without the nap and subsequent late start, it would be too much to get to Tennessee today. The route to Tennessee would be along the Land Between the Lakes, a national recreational area between the Cumberland and Tennessee River reservoirs. There was a campground on the Kentucky side of the border — the Wrangler’s Campground — which would make for a 60 mile ride.

Myra wondered if that place wasn’t just for horse people. I figured they’d let anyone camp, and whose horses would be there at this time of year, anyway? (We learned the answer later in the day: Lots of people, lots of horses.)

The Land Between the Lakes has a 45-mile north-south road running the length of it called “The Trace”. That would be good for riding. But first I had to ride 30 miles to get there. I also had to cross the Cumberland River. The obvious place looked like it might be on a busy route.

The road out of Marion (US-641) had more truck traffic than I would like, but it was navigable:

The community of Crayne had a post office, so I did a quick stop to ask if there was a ferry across the Cumberland at Dycusberg. If I could go there, it looked like it would take me to back roads that might be more relaxing. I interrupted the postal clerk who was chatting with a customer. No, there was no ferry there. I noted that from the maps it looked like there had been one at one time. “Not in my lifetime,” was the cheerful response.But the good thing was that when I got back on my bike and started riding again, for the first time that day I no longer felt tired.

At Fredonia my route and most of the truck traffic went different ways. The ride to Eddyville was one of the more pleasant segments I had in Kentucky. I stopped to smell the flowers. Well, no, I didn’t smell them. But I saw my first daffodils of the year so had an excuse to take a photo break:

And another:

The route from Eddyville to the beginning of The Trace was on a busy, somewhat boring highway with a wide shoulder. In some places the highway construction idiots had messed up the shoulder with poorly placed rumble strips, but the only real problem was the long bridge across the Cumberland River. The roadway was narrow, with not enough room for trucks plus a bicycle to fit. I waited until there was no traffic behind me for as far as I could see (a mile or so) and then took off. It wasn’t until I was just about to the other side that trucks started to accumulate behind me. One of them felt compelled to blast its horn at me after I was already out of the way, presumably because I had caused it a quarter-second delay.

It had seemed that my shifting hadn’t been working right the past two days, as if the cable was starting to fray already. I had just replaced it and all the housings last fall. (One set of cable housings every 20,000 miles is not too bad, I figured.) And this time I didn’t have a spare with me. So when I got onto the Trace, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bike shop, the Wood-n-Wave. The bike mechanic was a multi-tasker, doing phone calls with a headset while working on bikes and dealing with customers. He and the other person on duty, a woman older than he, helped me find the right cable as well as other odds and ends. She then went to great lengths to try to answer my questions about bike routes through Tennessee. After I reached the south end of this Trace I would need to find my way to the Natchez Trace. She looked on all the maps she had, tried to look up possibilities on the Internet, and made careful color copies of such highway maps that she had. I asked Mr. Multi-Tasker Guy if Highway 13 was any good for bicycling. He didn’t know, so I said I’d go and find out for myself.

The Trace was easy enough riding:

At the 40-mile mark there was a picnic area where I heated water for a cup of soup and coffee. I had not found any good coffee on the road so far on this trip. Even the McDonalds coffee, which sometimes is passable back home, was like watery church-basement coffee in this part of the world. At Eddysville I had bought a cup of gas station coffee which turned out to be rancid — too long since brewing. Usually I would complain politely and wait for them to brew some fresh to replace the undrinkable stuff. But in this case I paid for it and went out and dumped it on the grass, then went over to a small restaurant to buy a cup. But that was the same insipid, watery stuff I had been finding elsewhere. So it had been a long time, but now I finally got a good cup of coffee on the road by brewing it myself. It was a special occasion and I took a photo.

Twenty miles later, when I was almost at the campground, I encountered the steepest hill I had seen on this trip. I got off and walked my bike up. Myra caught me doing it, too. She had driven out with the car to look for me, and that’s where she found me, a couple of miles from the destination.The bad news was she had discovered that we had left our tent poles at home. There were some camping cabins at this campground, but the campground managers claimed there weren’t any that were available. She didn’t quite believe that, and hung around the office, refusing to leave until they finally discovered that there was one available, after all.

Also, she warned me that I would need to walk my bike from the office to our cabin, a distance of about a quarter mile. She assured me they were serious about that rule. When she explained that were a lot of horses and riders there, I could understand why. So when I rode my bike up to the office, I was prepared to be the very spirit of cooperation. I do always try to be careful when I encounter horses while riding. Amish driving horses are used to just about everything, but when their draft horses are pulling a wagon on the road, I do everything I can to avoid causing surprises. I’m even more careful around non-Amish horses, and the riders usually appreciate it.

This was the first evening that I had a little energy left at the end of the day. Maybe this riding-myself-into-shape thing was working. Also, it may have helped that I had done only 61 miles that day.

The first order of business was to cross back to the Illinois side of the Wabash River. The bridge is a toll bridge, and only one lane was open. I asked the toll collector if I could ride across. She didn’t know why not. She also didn’t know what to charge me so she let me go for free. When it was my lane’s turn to go, I let all the other traffic go ahead and then followed behind. I almost kept up, too.

I had hoped to go south on County Road 3, near New Haven, but that road was closed.

But I found another paved road, leading past a place identified on the map as “Cottonwood”.
This photo shows what the road was like:

Pretty bleak, I suppose, but I enjoy riding in places like that. There were a few houses at Cottonwood, if I remember correctly. Then the pavement gave out and I found myself on a couple miles of gravel.

Then there was a little more pavement, and then there was more gravel. Rain was threatening, so I got out my rain gear and reversed direction to take a paved turn I had passed up, in hopes that it would take me to Ridgeway. It did, and I was glad to be on pavement when the rains came.

In Ridgeway I got a bite to eat at a gas station. I suppose I was a conspicuous customer with my ugly yellow rain suit. One outgoing young man (well, younger than me) asked about my bike ride, and was especially interested when I mentioned Tecumseh and history. He knew all about the story I was following. He proceeded to tell me how the state of Illinois had missed out by not turning Shawneetown into a big tourist place, but nobody wanted to build down there because no one could get flood insurance. He identified himself as the local mortician and coroner, which was why he knew all about local history. I have since kicked myself for not asking him what the connection was. It’s all about dead people, maybe?

I took my hamburger back to a booth, next to where the local geezers were sitting around a table. In the old days I suppose they would have been the ones sitting around a pot-bellied stove with a crackerbarrel at hand. They were full of jokes about the windshield wipers on my vehicle. Well, one disadvantage to wearing glasses is the need to keep them clear of rain when riding. It is somewhat of a chore to keep wiping them off with my fingers.

Mr. Coroner had told me that the ferry at Cave-in-Rock ran quite late into the evening — maybe 9 pm or so. This was good news. I didn’t want to ride 20 miles down to the ferry crossing only to find it wasn’t running, which would have meant a 20 mile ride back to Hwy 13 which could take me to the only alternative, the bridge at Shawneetown.

The rain ended, but those last 20 miles were hilly and difficult, as I had expected them to be. There was no more flat prairie. The wind had been against me all day. There was a fair amount of truck traffic, too. I was surprised that so many 18-wheelers would be using the ferry, but I presume they did. There were no other obvious routes they would have taken. By the time I got to the ferry it was quite a bit later in the day than I had expected, and there were no more trucks.

On the crossing I got ready for some night riding. Marion was a dozen miles away, through Kentucky hill country. By the time I started climbing out of the flood plain it was dark. The first few miles of hills were through Amish farm country. This was the first I knew there were any Amish people at all in Kentucky. And even after I knew it, I had trouble figuring out what one oncoming vehicle was — with flashing lights and a strange repetitive sound. Some sort of farm harvest machinery stuck on the road? In spring? No, it was just an Amish buggy. (That’s not the first time I’ve had trouble making sense out of an oncoming Amish vehicle at night.) There was some real climbing to do here, plus twists and turns. I was tired enough that I even got off and walked my bike up part of one hill. Farmhouses along the road were lit with gas or kerosene lights.

And then the motor vehicle traffic picked up to a heavier level than I would have liked, but finally I made it to Marion, where I asked at a gas station where the motels were. There was only one, and it was only a mile further.

It was probably quite the classy place back in the 1950s or 60s. It was long in the tooth by now, and the only heat was a little portable electric heater. I could have collapsed immediately on the bed, but managed to stay awake to go get a fast-food meal first.

Myra had visited Shawneetown, and told how it had changed since the time we saw it in 1971. Most of the buildings were gone except for the bank (which was what Mr. Coroner had been trying to tell me, too.) From her description I could tell she remembered the 1971 visit a lot better than I did, and I had thought I had a vivid memory of it myself.

72.5 miles for the day.