The Spokesrider

These photos are an interruption in the series of photos from the August 28 ride.   This cemetery is a mile northeast of Martin in Allegan County, Michigan.   This afternoon I rode here to look for a different gravestone than the one pictured.   I eventually found it (and found it before the rest of the afternoon [...]

The Prairie Home cemetery in Richland is only ten miles from home.    I hadn’t been there since a long-ago Memorial Day when one of my kids was in high school band, well before I started the Spokesrider project.  (Gull Lake High School is almost next door.) I expected to find that some of the 52 [...]

It took me a while to find these photos, but an article by Mark T. Mitchell over at Front Porch Republic (Farmers Ditch Tractors for…Oxen?) reminded me that on one of my rides past the Tillers International site north of Scotts MI, I had seen oxen at work.   A New York Times article (On Small [...]

This photo may have been taken on U Drive in Schoolcraft Township, Kalamazoo County, just west of the place where the road curves to go around the lowland around Gourdneck Lake.   I say “may” because it was taken in May 2007, before I had a GPS to keep track of where I had been.   I [...]

I live on the north side of the Kalamazoo River, but most of my riding destinations are on the south where there were settlers at the time of the Black Hawk war. The places to cross the river are limited, but one of those I use most frequently is on the east side of Galesburg. [...]

No Dig, No Fly, No Go : How Maps Restrict and Control. That’s the title of a new book by Mark Monmonier that I’ve just barely started to read. The introductory paragraph made me think (in a contrary way) of the leftmost of the two points circled in white on the above Royce Map of [...]

A couple of times when I’ve seen a deer up ahead a ways looking back toward me, I’ve tried staring straight back, not blinking and not changing my cadence, to see how close I could get. Then when I got very close I thought how this may not be so good because I don’t know [...]