Creating A Bicycle Route System Through SC

My mom was born and raised in Sumter, SC and she would always regale us with stories about riding her bike to school (apparently my uncle would ride the family horse some days and he was not the only one in town to do so.) Since my sister and I were born and raised in New York in the middle of bright lights and big city, we were not really allowed to ride more than a block away from the apartment.

A vision of where we were heading.

We would visit Granddaddy's farm every year and ride bikes up and down the abandoned highway but there was always a distance that we did not want to go.  We would ride up and over the hill near the farm house and kick our feet up as we went down the other side.  When the momentum wore off and we passed the convenience store on the other side where we could buy Mello Yello and chips we could never find in NY, we would stop and stare off into the distance, where the heat waves coming off the pavement would end and the road, the tobacco fields, and the sky all came to a point on the horizon and not really have the desire, just then, to go further.

Somewhere along the line, that changed.  At some point in my teens I opted not to stop and would go further and further and see new houses and places that we did not see when we drove into town.  For some reason, I never asked my mom how far it was to the school until I was old enough to drive.  I think it was the year I graduated high school and after Granddaddy had sold the farm that I thought to hop in the car with mom and see because she had never measured it either.

My mom used to lecture me about missing days from school and she had the perfect standing to do so because by all accounts, she had never missed a single one.  So, one day, after years of visiting that farm in Sumter, SC in my youth and when we knew it would likely be our last time there, Mom and I thought it was as good a time as any to see how far it was from the house to the school.

We hopped in Granddaddy's truck and hit the trip odometer.  The strange thing was that as we rode, she seemed defensive and a little nervous.  I could tell that honestly did not remember.  She said that it would often take her about 45 minutes to ride to school if the weather was nice.  If it was really nice, it would take longer because she would stop to enjoy it.  She told me how Grammy would get mad if it took her any longer than that because she would get scared.  I remember my mom repeating the phrase,"It's right up here." and then we would go a mile or two more and once she swore we had missed the turn.  We drove on with the gravelly road humming beneath the tires, Granddaddy's new Dodge truck seemed out of place, as if we had gone back in time and any minute, my uncle Willard was going to come bounding after us on the family horse, somehow younger and wearing a straw hat that he seemed to have had in every picture I had ever seen of him.

We reached the end of the one tobacco field and just for good measure Mom said, unsurely, 'it's right up here."  There was or had once been a road where I turned.  It was rutted and weeds grew in the middle.  Though it was only just getting to be dusk, the sun was being blocked in part by the branches which were now scratching Granddaddy's new truck.  We knew he wouldn't care and the only ones we had to worry about annoying were the ghosts we were stirring up as we passed.

My mothers memory came back immediately as she told me that there would be a barn up there on the left and up there on the left there was a barn.  It had probably been upright and in use in her day, but now it was a pile of iron gray leaning oak wood.  We kept going.  One last time, she said, "it's right up here." and there it was or what was left of it.  We saw a crumbling little shack that once had, as my mother tells it, a bell, topped by a weather vane, topped by a cross.  This school liked to have its bases covered.  We sat there without a word for a few minutes in the waning light and I glanced at her.  I could tell that she was mentally rebuilding the school and playing in the yard with her friends.

Even though we had driven there, I could tell that she had lost all track of time and distance again just as when she was a child on that bike, before marrying my Dad and watching him go off to Vietnam, and before having two girls who went to school right up the block from our apartment in Jamaica Queens.  She was not in that truck with me.  She was on her bike again.

I glanced down at the odometer and saw that we had come just seven miles.  My mom had ridden her bike seven miles each way to and from school without missing a day and not thought twice about it.  In fact she had enjoyed it.  In fact, missed it.  I hit the odometer button again to clear it and Mom did not even throw a glance in my direction.  She never even asked me how far it was.  It was a mystery that she did not want the answer to.

We made an awkward turn in the high grass of the school yard, hoping that there was nothing  that would lance the tires and went back.  The next morning, we packed all of Granddady's things in Granddaddy's truck and an additional trailer and left the farm in Sumter for good.  My Mom bought a new bike when we got back to New York.  She had a couple of others that were modern and sleek.  They had Bontrager timers and were wrought from carbon fiber or aluminum.  This one was steel.  She told me once that she wished they still made solid tires for adult bikes, because she could never remember changing a tube when she was a kid and I thought she was kidding, but I knew that there was a saved search somewhere on E-bay.

There were times, when I was older and still living in NY when I would stop by the house and hang out for a bit when she was not around.  I would see that bike was gone and part of me would wonder, part of me would worry.  She would always come back of course, hauling that bike in behind her.  I would ask her how far she had gone  and she would always answer that she didn't know and I believed her though it was only a half truth.  It wasn't that she didn't know, it was that she didn't care.

Today I put in an application to begin work on a U.S. Bicycle Route System route through SC.  The roads scream to be ridden safely and we need to discover and reveal a new generation of riders who want to go somewhere and do not care.