Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 13 (May 29) – The Mother Road At Last

South vs. North: Mr Armadillo is to Southern roads as Mr Squirrel is to Northern. Too slow to live, too tough to fry. (Cherokee nation… / Cherokee tribe… – Paul Revere & the Raiders 1971, ‘case you don’t recall – has been in my head all day – our neighbor last night was half German, half Cherokee, a ‘breed like Paul New man in Hombre). Of course, Southerners do eat squirrel. (The prosecution rests.)

As the miles go by I occupy what remains of my brain with dumb routines – inventing radio game show explanations for obscure local place and person names: Orvil Loge, for instance (pronunciation??), a gentleman running for office in some county we rode through. Late eighteenth century France was a time of fertile invention for revolutionary Frenchmen who enjoyed messing with their language. One of these, Citoyen Guy de Nomville, decided to take the French for clock, horloge, and for town, ville, and, as a word for ‘town clock,’ condense horloge de ville into one simple word. Hence the now common ‘orvilloge’ for the dial on a village church tower.

I also put in time on Where Every Stranger, the monster play-series/novel in the making, described in an earlier post. As mentioned there, the book consists of five stories, each set at a different period and in a different topography; in each thread, violent crime and its detection are at the center of the tale; the climactic story takes place on a deep space probe where it appears that one of the crew is a killer. This is not the captain’s only problem. She also has to deal with the ship’s cargo. It has begun to leak – into the ship itself. Not badly; a very tiny leak. Almost imperceptible. But the cargo in question, en route to settle a new planet, is human history memorized in its entirety. The other four stories in the book are what is leaking. And not, it seems, at random.

240 good hard-riding miles today, beautiful Oklahoman pastureland (herons overhead) leading to our first miles on magical Route 66 (when I phoned to book our campsite and mentioned our route, I expected to hear, ‘Route what? Ain’t no such road,’) including a 30-foot stretch of the original brick surface, pronounced ‘horrible’ by Joe, followed by our first glimpses of the vastness of the plains. They brought us, just beyond Oklahoma City, to the Old Indian Trading Post campsite. ‘We bring beads, Great Chief.’ ‘Beads! Anal beads?’ ‘Yes Great Chief.’ ‘Come right in.’ (Your pardon, gentles all. A long day’s riding warps the mind.)