Sojourns: Volume One--RAGBRAI

(Not much going on in February for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)

Last Summer, from July 19th to the 25th, I pedaled a road bike across the State of Iowa in the world's largest group bike ride. The Register Annual Group Bike Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI, is such an enormous and complex event--especially for non-midwesterners--that it becomes difficult to relate without hyperbole. RAGBRAI is a challenge, a party, a journey, a pilgrimmage, a community fundraiser, an examination of soul, a race, a vacation, a threshold crossing. RAGBRAI asks important questions of us; it demands our focus and attention, for it has stories to tell.

For many, especially Iowans in their twenties, RAGBRAI is a week-long binge during the high point of summer. Roving mobs of young people, in matching inappropriate bike jerseys, guzzle huge amounts of Busch Light at every stop as they drink their way from town to town. These teams have painted school buses parked at each end-of-day party, they holler and carouse into the night, and they pedal in close, drunken groups down the road. Small Iowa villages will transform into MTV's Spring Break (in bike shorts), thanks to these people.

Older midwesterners treat RAGBRAI as a chance to re-affirm their grasp on life. To them, RAGBRAI is an annual gut-check. These people leave early in the morning, travel at a safe pace, and arrive at the host towns with more than enough time to shower and eat a healthy meal. They're doing it, year after year, to separate themselves from the slog of a career. They're doing it to push themselves one more time. They're doing it to be young again--and good for them.

Of course, thousands of other people, from all over the world, descend on Iowa for thousands of other reasons. RAGBRAI is a traveling circus, the most exciting thing in the state all summer. It makes the local news every night, blaring from the televisions in Hivee Supermarket produce sections. Towns petition to get the enormous economic stimulus of hosting a RAGBRAI for the night, or just for having RAGBRAI pass through. Gas stations stock up on Busch Light.

I never filled out an entrance form for RAGBRAI (thousands don't) and never felt part of it, even though I pedaled every mile. I was an unregistered pirate who didn't leave early in the morning, didn't let anyone else haul my stuff, didn't quaff cheap beer, and didn't understand the common decency of the Midwest. I viewed the whole deal with an outsider's eyes, and I had my own reasons to be there. I went to Iowa to see if I could ride that far, and to escape the reality of my dad's death in Oregon a few weeks before.

RAGBRAI had things in store. I finished, on the proud shores of the Mississippi in Burlington, a much different person that when I left Council Bluffs a week before. It is hard to quickly describe that week and its Dante-inspired journeys from the depths of Hell up through Purgatory and finally into Paradise. (That description is apt: about two-thirds of the ride, if not Hell, wasn't much better.) I know I ate a lot of pork chops and slices of pie. I weathered two apocalyptic Midwest thunderstorms. I endured the curious metamorphosis of my buttocks from "normal human" to "baboon." I pedaled past inebriated hordes and over hundreds of hills. I relieved myself in cornfields, avoided naked slip-and-slides, camped in supermarket parking lots, vomited from dehydration, consoled tired bikers, was consoled by tired bikers, had a stranger write the word "virgin" on my calf. I saw lightning bugs for the first time. I saw real-life Amish people and had serious talks with locals about NASCAR. Throughout, thousands and thousands of people in tight black bike shorts, churning and speeding and dancing and laughing and shouting.

When I finished RAGBRAI I kept going. The people I was with were from Wisconsin, and we had another two-and-a-half days' ride. Very quickly, as we crossed the great muddy river and headed into Illinois, the complexion changed. It was quieter. The roads, blocked off to traffic before, were now filled with cars. And one unexpected thing started to happen: passing farm houses, we'd get chased by huge, protective family dogs. Were dogs less friendly in Illinois? No, I soon realized. In Iowa, the dogs were totally worn-out by the time I passed. They couldn't fend off the great migration east.