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. It’s a quiet crossing where I don’t have to compete with cars entering and leaving I-94. The street shown in the photo is where I turn off of MI-89 to get to the bridge.

This time there was extra water. Not that the river was quite this high, but there was standing water in a lot of places due to the extreme amount of rainfall we’ve had lately. We’ve now (Monday) had two dry days in a row, so maybe things will get back to normal, except that there seems to be an outbreak of Eastern Equine Encephalytis in the area. It’s a mosquito borne disease, and the mosquitos know how to make use of all the standing water. I don’t know if it will affect any bicycle camping plans in the next few weeks.

I was amused by the commercial real estate sign standing in the middle of the pool of water. But while moving in for a photo I was also distracted by a sign behind me.

I did a double-take and then a triple-take. Finally I realized it was not trying to tell us that Galesburg is one of the nations. Short attention span, I guess. I should have read further. But when I did still didn’t quite get the connection between Galesburg being one of the nations, whatever that meant, and Galesburg being a great place to raise kids. Until, that is, I saw that the two phrases are enclosed in a single set of quotation marks: “One of the Nations GREAT PLACES TO RAISE KIDS”

It could also be pointed out that Galesburg apparently is not a great place for kids to learn punctuation, such as how to use an apostrophe to make a noun possessive. (I like an excuse to crank about Galesburg schools even though I know some fine people who attend them. I’m still disgusted with that school district for despoiling the landscape by building its new school at the mouth of what was once one of the prettiest little creek valleys around. It’s now filled up with asphalt parking lots, school buildings, and a housing development next door to it. A favorite scene on my bike rides is no more.)

Galesburg is about 10 miles from home and Mendon is at the 30+ mile mark. I decided to try something new as I neared Mendon — a different route — taking Osgood Road as far as it would go until it turns aside to avoid running into the St. Joseph River. The last few miles are gravel. It was surprising to see all the washing of gravel that had taken place, but the road was already dry enough to be firm except for a couple of spots, like the one in the photo.

There are a lot of gravel washouts even along the paved routes. I imagine it’s going to be expensive to repair them all.

YTD mileage: 1403.0

Oops. I almost forgot that I should have given myself a few more miles from my ride home from work last Thursday night. I waited until a heavy rain ended, and then took off when it looked like the next storm was quite a ways off. But my boss flagged me down and said an alarm had been reported in one of my equipment closets. So I turned around to check it out. That added one mile. But as I departed again I began to realize there must have been a lot of wind with the rain. The further I went along C Avenue the worse it got. For some time I have had my eye on certain trees that I figured would come down on the road in the next big windstorm. (I prefer not to be riding when they come down.) But some of those that were down were big, healthy maple trees that were just uprooted. Maybe a factor is the softness of the ground from all the rain. At one point a power line was down across the road, too, so I turned around and took a different route around to the north. But all the extra time on the road meant the next rain was just starting to catch up with me. Close to home a volunteer fireman was stopping traffic at the intersection to our road, but it was because of downed trees and wires in the direction of my usual commuting route. We compared notes — he wasn’t aware of the downed power lines that had caused me to divert my course — and then I rode the rest of the way home to tell Myra about all my adventures.

Myra wasn’t very interested in my story, though, because she had just got home after being chased by a tornado. She had seen one touch down out by the airport, and drove away from it at right angles to its path. The tornado just touched down briefly, but she didn’t know yet that the worst of it was over. She was trying to get through a driving rain that made visibility difficult, but it eventually let up as she got closer to home. She didn’t think my story was as exciting as hers, and I suppose it wasn’t. But it was all one storm that cut through the area from northwest to southeast. We got several more inches of rain that evening, and then more for the next couple of days, all of this coming on top of other rainstorms that have kept coming, day after day.

I suppose my extra riding didn’t amount to much more than 4 miles, despite how it seemed a big detour at the time. Corrected YTD mileage: 1407.0

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 southern Michigan. Here is how Monmonier starts out:

Boundaries Matter

Maps exert power in two ways: by shaping public opinion and by telling us where we can’t go and what we can’t (or must) do in specific places. This book examines the second type, which I call imperative maps because of their similarity to imperative sentences–the bossy ones that often end in an exclamation point. Whether blatant or subtle, the imperative map is usually intended to stifle movement or to restrict an activity with a spatial dimension.

That’s true. Boundaries do matter — they often tell us where we can’t go. A lot of my bicycle expeditions are to treaty lines on the landscape that once defined where Indians no longer owned land and no longer had the right to travel on it where they pleased. There are a lot of those.

But on a weekend afternoon last October I rode to a place where the exact position of a treaty line didn’t make much difference to anyone. It was the point of the acute angle at the southwest corner of the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw — the southwest corner of the pink area that includes present-day Lansing on the above map.

In the treaty document, the boundary of the ceded land is described as follows:

The Chippewa nation of Indians, in consideration of the stipulations herein made on the part of the United States, do hereby, forever, cede to the United States the land comprehended within the following lines and boundaries: Beginning at a point in the present Indian boundary line, which runs due north from the mouth of the great Auglaize river, six miles south of the place where the base line, so called, intersects the same; thence, west, sixty miles; thence, in a direct line, to the head of Thunder Bay River; . . .

The beginning point is shown by the right-most of the two white circles. The baseline and meridian lines had already been established in 1819, at least on paper. Some parts of them had already been surveyed. The plan for dividing up the land into townships of 6×6 miles had already been established, though it would take several years before government surveyors would get them all marked with stakes in the ground. In specifying that the starting point be six miles south of the base line, and that the boundary proceed straight west for 60 miles, the treaty specified that the cession boundary follow the boundary of townships that were soon to be surveyed. From the point 60 miles west of the meridian, the cession boundary would depart from township boundaries and go on an angle to the north-northwest.

The township boundaries were eventually surveyed, but the line that slants to the northwest was not — at least not in this part of Michigan. Two years later the Potawatomi people would cede most of the remaining land in southwest Michigan (shown in blue-green) and make much of the 1819 boundary irrelevant.

But I wanted to see what was at that point, anyway. Here is some of what I found:

Here I was, at the southwest corner of Richland Township in Kalamazoo County, facing north to take a photo of the intersection that is the southwest corner of that treaty line. The SUV had been following the south boundary of the treaty line. The line to the head of Thunder Bay River goes from the center of the intersection off to the northeast. It is of course unmarked. There never was any reason to mark it.

I’m not very good at reading minds, but my guess is that none of the drivers at this intersection was at that moment thinking about the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw and how this point marked the southwest corner.

Here I’m back on the north side of the intersection, taking a photo of a fire hydrant because there sure wasn’t any mark left by that angling treaty line (somewhere across the road to the left) to photograph It was a boundary that doesn’t matter very much now, and never did.

YTD mileage: 557

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 what direction that deer is going to jump when it bolts. It probably doesn’t know either. Fortunately, each time it bolted away from the road when it finally did.

I’m not quite sure why I’ve done that twice, rather than letting once be enough. But once I get into a staredown match I hate to be the first one to blink.

The second time I did it was on this road, on the first mile of my ride home from work. I was coming from the other direction, and the deer was at the bottom of this hill, on the far side of the little grove of trees on the left.

The photo was taken in November, when we were having some fiber optic cable buried along this road. In the above photo the crew is doing a horizontal bore under the trees. The boring machine itself is shown in another photo.

Even though the weather was exceptionally nice for November, I didn’t get away for any good bicycle rides, largely because I had to stick around and look after this project. But I rode home from work most nights.

I was supposed to be on jury duty the first half of November. I had thought our fiber project would be done by then, or nearly done, and if there were any days I actually had to go down to the Justice Complex I could check in on the project before and after. But when the first week of November came I knew it was not going to work. It was a desperate situation for me. I even thought of just not showing up, like so many people do, but a little googling about it told me there is a risk that there will be an outstanding warrant for your arrest that will come up the next time you’re stopped for a speeding violation, and then you’ll have a big fine to pay. Even though the jury notice gives all sorts of explicit statements as to how the court will not accept requests for deferal at this stage of the process, I threw myself on the mercy of the court on my first day of service and was granted a deferal so I could look after this fiber project. Maybe it helped that I’ve served a couple of times in the past, one of those times having put in a lot of extra days because there were so many no-shows. But now I have to serve the first two weeks of January.

Back to the deer crossing in the photo. Early this spring, on my ride home from work, while the deer were still herded up, i.e. while the mamas hadn’t yet gone their separate ways to give birth, I saw a herd of a couple dozen or more off to my right (way back on the left of the photo. (Our wildlife biologist later told me that this herd can number 50 deer.) Then I came over the little hill and saw the leading edge of the herd getting ready to cross the road at the bottom of the hill in front of me. But the lead deer had stopped with her front feet on the pavement. She wasn’t aware that I was coming so I yelled at her. It startled her so much that she slipped and fell. Then the herd split into three parts, one of them crossing further in front of me, and then re-crossing further down to re-join some of the others. At least some of them did. I couldn’t keep track of where they all were, so I took care not to ride too fast.

This fall, during the fiber project, I came over the same hill (or maybe it was the next one before it) to see a deer standing right in the road, broadside in my lane. I yelled at it, but it didn’t move. I yelled again, and then again, but it still didn’t move. Finally an oncoming car that had come over the next hill honked at it. Then it moved.

These deer sometimes act as if they own the road, and are impatient for cars and bicycles to get off so they can use their property in peace.

Here’s the Spokesrider himself, carrying out the vital function of standing and watching with his hands in his pockets. Yes, it’s dirty work (if you don’t move out of the way in time) but somebody has to do it.

I like roadsides. If I can’t be riding along them, watching machines that can work in them is a good substitute. This machine ploughs the orange innerduct into the ground to a depth of nearly five feet, deep enough so it won’t interfere with farm operations.

This is not an artillery weapon. It’s the horizontal boring machine. The business end is to the lower right. This one makes less of a mess than others that have done work for us, including one I had blogged about a couple of years ago.

The young man using his toenails to keep from falling into this pit is trying to determine where the phone company’s cable really goes, so that our stuff can avoid it.

When I told one of these crews that I like to play in the dirt, the guys told me that they have just the career for me. But watching other people play in the dirt isn’t too bad, either.

I’ve been slow at blogging lately. Not much bikeriding, either. I can think of several excuses, one of which is duties at work. Speaking of which, the above is a photo taken just before riding home from work in early May 2006. I found it while looking for other photos.

When I explain where I work people comment on how it must be nice to work in such a place, next to a lake. I tell them I work in a windowless office.

But my duties do take me outside at times. (I try to let it happen when the weather is nice.) And I get a view like this when I leave work. The ride home isn’t bad, either.

YTD mileage: 2019.5

At this point on Sunday afternoon’s ride, I thought I was approaching the intersection across from which lay Harvey Jones’ farm. I stopped here just in case there wasn’t anything else to take a photo of. But I was off by half a mile, which I came to realize when I stopped to visit at the first farmhouse on the right.

The flowers reminded me of a bad joke that I thought I invented long ago. Twice a year I am reminded of it: Christmas really ought to be in the spring, so we could sing, “While shepherds watched their phlox by night.”

I am not surprised to learn that I am not the only person. Here is Melanie Rochat’s version.

And here are more phlox from Monday’s 74.5 mile ride to Cass County.

Total YTD: 668.5

I wasn’t looking at front porches in particular when I stopped to take a photo of this house. It was on a bike ride I did in April 2006, between Auburn and Tuskegee, Alabama. It looks like it has both a front porch facing the road and a back porch.

This Greek Revival house is in the northeast corner of Kalamazoo County of Michigan. I came across it on a bike ride last month. There is still a front porch that faces the road. But with the front door boarded up, the public space is not as connected to the private space, and is probably not so much used anymore. My impression of Front Porch Republic is that it is trying to re-open those connections, so to speak.

About the same day when I first encountered Front Porch Republic I also encountered yet another type of Front Porch. It’s one for which I don’t have a photo, unfortunately. It’s in Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev’s book about his father, “Nikita Khrushchev : and the creation of a superpower (2000)”. Early in the book he quotes from notes his mother had written about their move to Moscow in the mid 1930s. Nikita Sergeyevich’s parents came to live with them:

Grandmother Kseniya Ivanovna spent most of her time in her room or sitting on a stool on the street near our entrance. There were always people standing around her, and she would talk with them. N.S. didn’t approve of her sitting there, but his mother wouldn’t listen to him.

Sergei Nikitich explains:

Grandmother Kseniya Ivanovna was totally unable to adapt to city life and didn’t want to change her habits. In the village she was used to sitting outside on a zavalinka [mound of earth around peasant homes--Trans.] and spending hours chatting with neighbors, and she continued this in Moscow. But Moscow was not Kalinovka, and in the 1930s a heart-to-heart talk could cost you your life. That was why Father worried.

I get the impression that Front Porch Republic would approve of Kseniya Ivanovna’s behavior, and would like to keep our country from becoming a place where heart-to-heart talks on the front porch could cost you your life. But maybe there is a cost that will have to be borne anyway when we leave our private patios to enter public forums; otherwise we wouldn’t have secluded ourselves in back patios or under anonymous pseudonyms on the internet.

[I've posted this under both pseudonyms: The Reticulator and The Spokesrider]

Tonight I rode home from work the long way, which is a mile or so longer than my usual route.

It’s a route with less traffic than the usual, so I felt free to work on my assignment for the course in Conversational Russian that I’m taking. It’s a non-credit course that meets one night a week, which deprives me of one bike ride a week, too. So an extra mile here and there helps to make up for it.

Our main assignment this week is to learn the song Cheburashka. I recorded the song from this YouTube site to my MP3 player, I printed the lyrics in large characters so I could read it on my handlebar bag. (This is where a route with hardly any traffic comes in handy. I’m kind of slow at reading anything in Cyrillic characters.)

To capture the audio I had used a program called Blaze Media Pro, which I just downloaded and installed last night. So far I like it better than another such program I’ve tried. I will probably pay the $50 so I can use it past the trial period. More Russian songs downloaded to my MP3 player will get me out riding more.

On a quiet route like this one I could try to sing along without fear of anyone laughing at me for singing out of tune or with bad pronunciation. I think my tires were a bit low; in any case it seemed I had to huff and puff more than usual, which meant my attempts at singing along with Gena the crocodile got worse instead of better as I went along.

In class there had been some discussion as to whether the instrument should be translated in English as harmonica, accordion, or what.   I had nothing to contribute on that subject, but when I went home and looked up accordion on Wikipedia I learned that the instrument is a fairly recent invention, if you call the 1820s recent.   (The English subtitles on this particular clip call it a concertina, which is probably right.)

A lot of my history rides have to do with the period between 1812 and 1832,  which was not only an important period in Black Hawk’s life and in settlement era history in southern Michigan, but was also the period when this instrument was invented.   Wikipedia says it quickly spread throughout Europe and got incorporated into folk music traditions.

I guess there’s no rule that says traditions have to go back many centuries in order to be traditions.  Not even in Europe is that a rule.

This rather bleak scene is from my last history ride of 2007. I was reminded of it when riding home from work today, listening to “Demon of the Waters: The true story of the mutiny of the whaleship Globe,” by Gregory Gibson (2003).

I started on the book last week. Then I ran into a young man I’ve known since his T-Ball days, who said he had just returned from spending 6 months on the sailing ship, HMS Bounty. A story with photos is here.

He explained how he was given the opportunity and had a week to get ready and leave. Not everyone in his life appreciated his going away at the time, but I was glad he took the opportunity. I can’t imagine someone in his position passing up something like that.

There is hardly any chance I’ll be able to go on such a voyage myself, but just the same it caused me to pay extra close attention to the story in the book — to the duties of the crew, their equipment, and the spatial arrangement of everything on a whaling ship.

I was listening to the part explaining how the first week for new hands was spent in overcoming seasickness, when the author quoted one of the crew as saying the episode “capped the climax of…”

Well, I don’t remember exactly of what. But that phrase, “capped the climax,” was one I had heard more than once before. It must have been in fairly common use at the time, because that’s the exact phrase that was said to have led to the naming of Climax Prairie in Kalamazoo County. I wrote about it here. The naming of the prairie took place near the location where I took the above photo.

I’ve heard the phrase in a few other places that date to the same period in American history, but this is the first time I captured a use of it in enough detail to explain where I found it. Unfortunately I can’t give the page number, because I was listening to the audio version.

googlemap

Here’s a map showing where the site was in relation to the village of Climax, which got its start sooner after.

Climax, Michigan is on the route for a lot of my rides to Indiana. It’s 13 miles from home, and sometimes I make my first stop of the day here in the town park to make adjustments.

On a very hot Sunday in July 2006, I stopped when traveling in the other direction, on my way home, and took a nap on the picnic bench. It’s something I do every now and then on an all-day ride.

A picnic bench is not comfortable enough to sleep too long. My usual nap is a 20-minute one. It can be quite refreshing.

Today I learned from this Boston Globe article that a 20-minute nap “yields mostly Stage 2 sleep, which enhances alertness and concentration, elevates mood, and sharpens motor skill.”

Vindication, I call it.

This was from my first photo stop on Sunday afternoon’s bike ride, about 12 miles from home. The land for sale is on Climax Prairie in Kalamazoo County. I suppose the scene doesn’t look very interesting, but the place is interesting to me because of a much earlier land sale.

Andrew Hays of Marshall, MI was the first buyer, perhaps in 1832. His big stone house built later in the 1830s still stands in Marshall. He bought a lot of land for investment purposes. He later joked about how during the Black Hawk war, he had gone ahead of some of the other Marshall militia to Schoolcraft, and then when he learned the men weren’t really needed, went on to White Pigeon to buy more land.

I don’t know for sure — it would take some quality time at the National Archives to find out — but this may have been the land he bought on that trip. I can’t recall offhand all the reasons why I think this might be the place, but it’s interesting that the land patent certificate (click on the image below in order to view it at a readable size) shows that the money was paid by Lyman Daniels on his behalf.

Lyman Daniels is in the Black Hawk story. He was on the trail between Schoolcraft and Marshall when news of the war came. And he was captain of a militia company from Schoolcraft.

His militia roster doesn’t list Hays, but Hays was a physician, which may have given him some other status. And in general, it seems the official records for the militia soldiers from Marshall aren’t very complete, anyway.