Murrs Across America

Boy Scouts are prepared and expeditious. They start their days early and with great commotion but, if you’re lucky like we were, they also offer you coffee and feed you. Mr. Kennedy, the troop leader, invited us to join them for breakfast and ran me off when I tried to do dishes. The boys were gentlemen, making Mickey Mouse pancakes for the kids, and demonstrating to me their alcohol-burning aluminum can stoves over which they would be cooking their lunch on the trail.

After breakfast, Brady and Jane shot some more cannons on the historic Shilo battlefield, where Brady nearly surrendered to a mountain of ants he disturbed while loading the cannon with FIRE. Fortunately, he only got one bite that I could find and the pirates decidedly lost the May 2010 battle of Shilo.

Our lunch on the trail happened in the town of Crump after some parents at a downtown little league game directed us to the local diner, Na Na’s (long “a”, folks) for a hearty “Plate Lunch”. At this particular diner, a plate lunch consists of meat, three sides, and a roll or cornbread all for $4.95. For the record, I only ate one plate lunch, but considered ordering another because it was so darn good. A kind local, who looked very hot from putting a metal roof on a building, bought our lunch, and a lunching doctor asked us if he could help us in any way.

We biked up from Crump. I’m not even sure we went north or east or west, but we definitely went up. We stopped on what seemed like the rooftop of Tennessee to catch our breath and lay on towels for a while. Turned out our rest stop was a driveway to the new in-ground cabin built by Jim and Teresa, who pulled up in a golf cart just as we were gearing up to leave. They invited us to stay at the cabin, which had a porch with a million-dollar view of the Tombigbee River Valley below. The kids and I explored the house (and tried to figure out how to work the toilet) and Stuart relaxed on the porch…momentarily. A snake slithered up the hill to the house, ignored the pelting of Stuart’s warning rocks, and headed straight for our bikes. Brady was heading out the door about the time Stuart was picking up a stick of lumber to keep the snake away from our gear. Of course Stuart yelled to me to keep the kids inside and he ended up killing the snake. The kids and I watched out the window as he lifted the limp viper and flung him down the side of the hill.

Besides the snake visit, some neighbors drove up to the cabin about the time we were sitting down on the porch to enjoy the view, Shirley’s tamales, and some Spanish rice and nachos. They were very friendly and gave us the idea that a still was rumored to be on the property. We didn’t see it, of course.

Stuart sat up late on the porch, looking out to the stars and a few angry deer surprised him. We enjoyed the space immensely, and the view was green and filling.

Thank you Jim and Teresa!

After rains cleared, we headed out and it started raining. It was refreshing, though, and we needed the motion.

Stuart really exercised his navigational skills as we crossed into Tennessee. Few roads on the route were marked, and they were all rural and uphill. Pushing our bikes up one particularly evil slope, we recorded a 6.1% grade using Stuart’s i-phone. Of course the hills provided plenty of exercise for the kids. We parked at the bottom of one hill and hiked up to an old cemetery. I’ve always liked the quiet feeling and weighty language of cemeteries. Jane fluttered around sounding out names on headstones and I imagined macabre Kindergarten papers peppered with question marks and notes of concern.

A few hills later when we paused to eat some oxygen I threw a graham cracker at Stuart, but missed.

When we pulled up to Shirley’s trailer to inquire about a nearby restaurant and campground we were completely calorie deficient and grouchy. The assembly at Shirley’s said the restaurant was closed, and they didn’t know about the campground, but would we like some BBQ chicken, dried black-eyed peas, and maybe some Coke or Meller Yeller. Jane made fast friends with Shirley’s granddaughter, Allie, who is four, and we thankfully accepted the invitation of our gracious hosts. The family had already eaten, but we all sat on the porch enjoying the evening together and before we left Shirley shared with me her recipe for hot tamales. Eyes a-twinkle, she also filled our cooler with frozen tamales for the road.

We biked another mile to the Shilo battlefield campground, which was a couple of mowed fields surrounded by majestic and mysterious trees and separated by a wet ditch that the children referred to as “the marsh”. Stuart set up camp and my history lesson for the kids morphed into a tour of two imaginary worlds they created on the spot. Jane’s story of Pixi Land, told entirely whilst she was gracefully “flying” with her arms, was pure summertime imagination candy.

Jane was adamant that there were no boys in Pixi land: brothers, silly boys like Matthew, and future husbands like Owen had their own world and could only visit Pixi land by request and upon the stipulation that they first had to go to the market and order wings; also, they couldn’t bring their swords. Despite Jane’s royal decree, the magic spell of our private worlds was broken with the twilight arrival of three (3) troops of boy scouts. We fell asleep as voices cracked and hammers clanged and boys rushed about on the margins of a field made magical by childhood.

Tishamingo has a burgeoning bike club. And because of it’s proximity to the Natchez Trace and the natural beauty (and new road) displayed within the lovely the Tishamingo State Park, it is no wonder that Main Street Cycles has started carrying bicycling gear and that 15-20 people have started meeting weekly for rides.

In related news, I think I sold a Burley today. At the Tishamingo Sunflower market, where we quickly picnicked before racing storms to Iuka, we met Shelly, who circled her minivan back to where we sat to ask us what we thought of the performance of our Burleys. Shelly explained that she and her fifteen year-old son had started biking recently on doctor’s order to help with his heart condition and to reduce his weight, nearly 300 pounds. Since he started biking (with fervor), he has lost thirty pounds, and is feeling better than ever. But Shelly worries about her son biking alone, and she has to hire a babysitter for her one year-old when she rides with him. She’s been researching child carriers on-line but she wasn’t sure she would be able to balance or pull a Burley. I assured her the Burley was easy to pull and holding up just as well on our cross-country trek as it does around town. She’s excited about how a Burley might give her time with her son, and the benefit it will have for his health. I’m excited about these things, too.

We raced storms to Iuka, arriving just as the rain started. We sought shelter on the porch of the local Mexican food restaurant, which was coincidentally next door to The Dollhouse Hair Salon. Three out of four Murrs were due for haircuts, so we waited out the storm and got beautiful.

We biked in the rain to the Victorian Inn where we cleaned up and drafted plans A through F for dinner plans. Fortunately, the rain stopped long enough for us to walk the 1.5 miles back to the Mexican restaurant. A friendly local picked us up and delivered us to the restaurant, but we walked the whole way back to the hotel. Jane was concerned with gathering as many different flower species as possible to create a bouquet for the next guests in our hotel room. I was mostly in awe of the cumulonimbus sunset sky, where every color I’ve ever seen must have originated. As a bonus, there was also a rainbow.

If you like numbers, you’ll get a kick out of this one! Here is a look at our milage and time spent on the bikes to date. The calorie count is pretty ridiculous, considering our computers assume we’re working harder at quicker speeds instead of burning entire cheeseburger meals per minute whilst hauling our loads uphill at 4.5 miles per hour! Note, our average speed to date is a blazing 10.4 mph and our average distance per day is 37.61 miles.

I write by moon, star and firefly light beside the lake at Tishamingo State Park at the end of a satisfying day when the sun felt nourishing and enlightening and made my skin a happy color.

We biked nearly 52 miles today on the Natchez Trace, stopping to play and snack at Twentymile Bottom and Jourdan Creek. I missed my friend Shauna horribly at these and other spots, including Witch Dance and Black Belt: we’ve developed an unparalleled school of interpretive dance for interpretive signs.

I spent the day thinking about motion and soaking in colors. I thought up a few lines of poetry and about some directions to take my work.

I thought of a way friends could join us on our journey without being slowed down by our pace and a way that we might be able to get some support for all our weight for a while: leapfrogging. Say you’re a friend who wants to trek across, I don’t know, maybe North Dakota or Nebraska or the Columbia River Valley. You’ve got this burning desire to do it, but not a whole lot of time, and maybe you’ve not ridden long distances before and you’re a little apprehensive. Perhaps you want to do it solo, perhaps with your buddy, or maybe with your family. Either way, if you drive your vehicle to a spot on our route, we could rally, you could drive 45 miles up the road, ditch the car, then pedal your heart out for the day. We would pick up your car where you ditched it and drive to meet you, enjoy dinner together and sleeps, then repeat the process the next day. This could be a great long weekend adventure, one for the books. You would have to drive a vehicle that could fit in at least two bikes at once, and our Burleys. So far we’ve packed everything into/on a Tahoe and a short bed truck with a toolbox; we are very creative packers. Just an idea, anyway. If you’re interested in working something out, please leave a comment.

We cruised into Tishamingo and raided the Sunflower grocery store. All restaurants were closed for the evening, but we assembled a lovely dinner of rotisserie chicken and ham, spinach salad with cherry tomatoes and kidney beans, pasta salad, and a quart of milk for a tasty pudding desert, all of which we consumed less than twenty minutes after arriving at our campsite.

The simplicity of being able to wash our four dishes, four utensils, our pot, waterbottles, and nearly all of our clothing in the time it takes to set up camp and clean our bodies is brilliant. At home I have a perpetually whirring dishwasher and Mt. Laundry, which is every bit as omnipresent and hulking as my memory of Hemmingway’s Kilimanjaro description. On the road, I lack conveniences and usually stink, but am noticing that all the less yields the aforementioned satisfaction of a day very, very well lived.