Bicycle Sutra
A RAGBRAI Pedaling Companion
We’ve reached the route now and it feels like I’m being dropped off at a raucous, two-wheeled summer camp.
Sara helps me unload my bike, takes my picture, and says “It’s going to be a lot like Willy Wonka, Big Fish, Field of Dreams, and a little Dazed and Confused all combined.”
After providing me the necessary equipment, she has brought me, fittingly, to Orient, Iowa. In my fanny pack, I have $71 in cash, a driver’s license, and an insurance card just so they know who to charge in case they have to scrape parts of me off the highway. I have also brought a disposable camera and a spiral notebook with Garfield on it.
By the end of the week, the cash will be gone several times over and the disposable camera will be filled, its scroll wheel grinding like a crankset with idle pedals. I’m positive that most of the pictures are of county courthouses I could not in good faith identify now, several different slices of Casey’s breakfast pizza, and at least one of a guy who’s riding a penny-farthing across America.
This dispatch, will rely on what Garfield was holding before he and the cover ripped off one afternoon in Albia. He took his own invitation, it seems. Maybe he didn’t like the direction this thing was taking.
Within the first fifteen miles of the ride:
I spot a cartoon cop complete with the requisite mustache walk out from the first rows of a corn field, zipping up his fly.
I hear what feels like a direct omen straight from our patron saint: “Life Is Just A Tire Swing” by Jimmy Buffett.
I eat a porkchop served on a napkin, sans sauce, fished out of a plastic Coleman cooler with a bare hand.
I send out and receive a significant number of rich, backwoods country waves from folks in lawn chairs, sipping from koozies like the folks do back home.
I see a group of young Amish kids, standing really close to an enormous Bose speaker that’s mounted on a bike that’s blasting out Biggie Smalls’ “Juicy.”
For those tuning in outside of Iowa, I’m riding the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. RAGBRAI.
Local legend is that Des Moines Register columnists John Karras and Donald Kaul dared each other to ride their bikes across Iowa and write columns about it. On the day the ride started, Kaul wrote this invitation in the Register: “Today is the day the Great Bike Trip begins. From the Missouri to the Mississippi in six days, or any part thereof. Get your bike out and ride with us for a spell.” There are several photos of him riding with a Snoopy helmet on.
At most, a few hundred joined them at various points on the journey.
51 years later, as many as 25,000 bicyclists will ride this week.
Safe to say the secret’s out, and to hear “Iowa” is to think of American Gothic, Caitlin Clark, and bicycles swerving between cornfields every July. Riders come from all over the world to this, a race without prize, payout, and, some might argue, purpose. I rode for some time with a guy from British Columbia who loved “the premier arena rock tribute band” Hairball back in Knoxville. He says he once rode all the way across Canada, and that he still likes this ride better.
What is RAGBRAI now?
Like all good things, it’s become, at its very worst, an ugly capitalist boondoggle. At face value, RAGBRAI now resembles a brutal mix of traveling frat party, county fair, and rowdy class reunion. To hear it from other Iowans and a few long-time riders that I know, it’s lost its heart, become uber-commercialized, sponsored by Scheels and Celsius, and officially partnered with HotelPlanner.com.
RAGBRAI is probably the last economic asset that the Register owns. Out on the route itself, Burma Shave-style signs litter the countryside, promising everything from pickle juice shots to something called Mango Madness, always just up ahead. I have to tell you that there is no bigger mark alive than some middle-aged dude on a bike out on RAGBRAI. He’s never, in his whole life, been this tired. He’s in Eddyville, Iowa, covered in a thick sap of beer sweat and sunscreen. And tap to pay is enabled on his phone. (Apparently there’s a term for them: MAMIL, or "middle-aged man in Lycra.")
For the record, I’m not immune to the marketing either: I’ve eaten Casey’s pizza twice since the ride concluded Saturday. It’s Monday night, marking five straight days of the greasy, glorious stuff.
Two kids at different houses in Eldon held up poster boards, trying to flag down riders. One said FREE KITTENS. The other said ROCK SALE.
American Gothic indeed.
Still, there remains glimpses, lingering mirages, of Kaul and Karras’ original romantic and surely barroom-fueled scheme. Along the route this week, riders funded coffers for several church bells, little league bases, and wrestling uniforms. On Tuesday alone, riders donated over $50,000 to Greenfield’s relief fund.
RAGBRAI can still feel like that sometimes, a spiritual deep kind of Midwestern pilgrimage: purposeful, meditative, beer-stained. But those moments arrive well outside of each day’s official programming, and on such an individual basis as to sometimes be untranslatable.
I could try to tell you about the hay rake tine I saw sticking up out of the garden, painted like the zinnias that surrounded it. Or what it was like to listen to a dad explain to his young daughter the order and “reason” for each American military action since the second-half of the 20th century. But I’m not able do it. To adequately write whatever that emotion is.
Even when I get those photos back from Walgreens in three weeks, I’m sure they won’t be able to show it either. Not to sound like I’m wearing a “It’s a RAGBRAI thing. You wouldn’t understand” t-shirt or something. I just think I’m beginning to understand why people come out here, year after year, and ride across this silly state in their silly Lycra uniforms.
Riding bikes is by nature a repetitive act. RAGBRAI is repetition made manifest. Total. After a few days it becomes difficult to maintain the proper day’s route on your phone when and if you can get cell service. Checking always late in the day when the wonder has all worn off and the notebook hasn’t appeared for awhile. When it’s quiet on the route and the Bluetooth speakers have all died. When it starts to feel like work and you remember that you’ve taken your vacation time to be right here, doing it.
If you start at the same time every day, you ride with many of the same riders. Most towns have the same food vendors. All day and at night the bands play cover songs, often with comparative setlists. They played what I’d describe as hyper-pop, which is mostly the music found at wedding receptions. What differentiates any of it from day to to day often depends on how much of you is sunburned, and if you had either two or three Busch Lights at the last town.
At some point, it becomes your main objective to create change amongst the static of pedaling and shifting in order to remember something. Some kind of spikes on the graph. At one point, I ride up behind a biker with Sara and announce to her, “Here’s my main man Steve.”
I hadn’t seen him for two days. I’ve never had a main man before.
That’s a little more unrivaled RAGBRAI essence: finishing conversations you started three days and hundreds of miles ago. All because you were next to them outside of Indianola, jamming out to certain Eagles songs together. We definitely had different opinions on “Backing The Blue,” but for a stretch of time, we were moving and communicating as a pair inside a larger collective. We all shared a loosely defined direction, at least for a little while. For stretches, it was intoxicating.
I think I’m imparting a real sense of Blanche DuBois about the whole thing. Something about always depending on the kindness of strangers. But, like all American traditions, there’s a level of pretend that occurs during RAGBRAI. It’s still just Iowa masquerading as a welcoming, supportive place that’s got its shit figured out. For a week, RAGBRAI showcases Iowa, but it is an Iowa in makeup, made up for shadows.
I was reminded of this most when I saw a local at a beer tent in the hills wearing a t-shirt that read “I LIKE DEMOCRATS LIKE THEY LIKE THEIR VOTERS: DEAD. A woman was taking a picture with him. They both were smiling.
They probably consider themselves moderates.
I ride by myself and with Sara and then with a group of her friends who’ve all been doing this for decades, Iowans all. This thing is already on its third or fourth generation of native riders.
The best riding was always with her. On our shared RAGBRAI, Sara serves as historian and regional RAGBRAI celebrity. A lot of the old heads out here know her, even if she hasn’t ridden in a few years. She’s got inside jokes with all the bike mechanics, and they’re a weird lot. At each town, they are approached solemnly, humbly and with reverence, keepers of destiny as they are.
At one point we pass a man taking photos on the side of the road a few miles outside of town. “Hi Sara” he says, after seeing thousands of cyclists already that day. When I catch up enough to ask her who it was, she says “You know, I really don’t know.”
Later, she tells me about Terry before we pass him, who’s got one arm and has been riding this thing since the 80s. When we do, she asks him about his kids, knows their names, where they’re living. It feels very magical in a minor and pure way.
When I rode with her and her friends, I largely just listened. And when I was by myself, I wrote notes with a handwriting I can’t really now read. One is to remind to me to make sure to reference Roland Barthes’ “The Tour de France As Epic” in this essay. How he described the race as a “total, ambiguous myth…at once a myth of expression and a myth of projection, realistic and utopian at the same time.”
I also wrote a note that just says “Croce: Yes.” I think meaning that I approve all Jim Croce songs, (but mainly his character songs,) to listen to while riding a bike.
Here’s a working list of Songs Never Ride Bikes To
Counting Crows- “Round Here”
Billy Joel- “Uptown Girl”
Queen- All of Greatest Hits
Limp Bizkit- “Rollin’” (This culprit had a red Kennedy ‘24 hat strapped beneath his seat.)
I also wrote big egghead things in my notebook like “The bicycle marks one of our last great Kantian inventions, arguably our finest human-powered machine. Aesthetically, it’s one of purer creations, a real populist contraption if there’s ever been one. Even today, nearly everything on it can be altered with an Allen wrench.”
Like I said. It was a lot more fun when I was riding with Sara, in awe, through the hills of southern Iowa.
There were probably benefits of really getting to know your bike before riding RAGBRAI, which featured every conceivable version of pedaled-machine from the last century. Along with the usuals, I also saw a penny-farthing, an elliptical bike, and the cutting edge in e-bike technology.
My bike? Late last year, Sara had found my bike on Facebook Marketplace. The lady said she’d never ridden it. I test rode it in the Coralville Mall parking lot, and paid $250 for it. It’s got a single sticker of sasquatches dancing in a circle, painted like Grateful Dead bears. That’s about all I know about it.
I rode a few relatively harmless loops in the months since, never more than thirty miles and never really getting the shifting right, or the correct placement of my tailbone on the seat. (One of my favorite notes reads: “Leaving Fairfield, two older riders trying to pronounce “perineum.”)
Of course there are folks out here with bikes that cost more than any car I’ve ever owned. They’ve got tracking computers attached to them and are made of exotic alloys. Their owners want you to ask about them. Sometimes when they passed, I stifled the urge to yell, “Nice bike. Is that a Huffy?”
Lord, please save me from the world of expensive bikes.
Time: 4 total days riding.
Distance traveled: just over 300 miles.
Diet: Mostly Casey’s breakfast pizza and tater tots.
Drink: township water from makeshift PVC fountains hooked up to fire hydrants, and Busch Light with Bloody Mary Mix in it.
Towards the end, RAGBRAI gets shifty. Just when you think it's all over, you’re in a genuine pink tile shower from the 50s. Sink’s pink too. Then a stranger is offering you a fresh towel, a word you haven't heard since Tuesday, and making you a spot on the couch. Sportscenter is on. Your parents are in the room next to you. They drove three hours to check this whole RAGBRAI thing out, see how you looked by the fourth day.
The next morning, you are among the last riders out of town with your friends, out on a RAGBRAI of your own making. The six of you wind up drinking clear liquor at a bar in Yarmouth and dissecting the lyrics to Reba McEntire’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Then you’re stopping in several ditches with locals and drinking some pineapple juice and Corona concoction made up by a woman with the nickname “Gremlin.” By midnight, you’re wearing borrowed clothes and shoe-less, wandering around eating a cup full of Fritos and brownies on a farmstead out in Des Moines County.
I think that’s the RAGBRAI Donald Kaul would have wanted for me. For all of us.
Sara and I performed an Irish goodbye and disappeared from that party early. We climbed narrow farmhouse stairs and collapsed on a mattress in the attic.
I looked over at Sara, giggling, and said, “I rode my bike here.”
She giggled too.
“Yeah. You sure did.”
We listened all night as the box fans churned hot air back and forth up there, and when we woke, we talked about our dreams of bicycles.
My partner in life and bicycles,
, just started her own Substack: Public Nuisance. Be sure and subscribe to catch whatever she’s working on next.I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
Each week, a roundup of our work is gracefully collected by
, and published here:
I've been supplicant to Iowa's bike gods five times. My ride is a lot different than yours, but the end result, that feeling of being removed from time and reduced to your own engine, is the same—and it's glorious.