This was the fourth straight day with extreme heat and the worst of the bunch, breaking triple digits. It’s definitely been wearing me down, similar to the stretch through canal country in Illinois. One or two days of high heat, no problem. The cumulative impact of it, though, is more exhausting than the sum of its parts.
Nonetheless, I started the day with a great opening kick to Springfield, getting my first taste of the MoPac Trail that would be my companion through much of the day. Delightfully, it’s unpaved, and early on at least there was enough shade to keep things a few degrees cooler. I had to wait a few minutes in Springfield for the Dollar General to open, as I faced a 21-mile-long stretch until the next town, and the next sure-fire opportunity to refill water. This is a taste of what’s to come–as I continue further west, the amount of towns will decline, and the distances between them will elongate.
The MoPac Trail led me due south, past the partially-broken-down carnival rides and vendor trucks from a just-concluded county fair, and then jolted westward when the Platte River blocked its way. Just east of here, the Platte merges with the Missouri, but Nebraska is Platte Country, and my route across the state will largely parallel the river, as the pioneers did. And indeed, I had the joy of crossing the Platte a few miles later, on the Lied Platte River Bridge. (As an aside, the Lied Family seems to be prominent philanthropists in the Omaha region, though I found it unfortunate that at Creighton the teacher training building is called the Lied Education Center.) At least twice a day, I encounter a place where I would have loved to camp, if the timing had worked out better. And this bridge is the top of the list. It’s pedestrian-only, with no auto traffic close by. I didn’t see another human anywhere in the area, though the heat might have influenced that. There are sheltered enclaves periodically positioned along the bridge, with benches and amazing views. It would have been perfect. But it was approaching noon, water was limited, and it would have been silly to call it a day. In hindsight, maybe I should have.
The MoPac Trail is interrupted soon after crossing the Lied Bridge, forcing bikers and walkers onto roads for a stretch from there to the village of Wabash. And here’s where my stubbornness led me to a mistake. I looked at the gps; there was a clear, direct approach that seemed like far and away the most logical route to follow. And yet, signs for the “bike route” clearly guided cyclists back to the main road. I couldn’t understand it; this would add distance and subject them to increased auto traffic. I followed the gps. Sure enough, the signs were there for a reason; a road that was supposed to exist didn’t. In the end, I don’t know how much distance this cost me. Based on what time I arrived in Elmwood, it was probably a couple miles. Not terrible, But it also meant I was exposed much longer than I would have been, if I’d passed through Wabash and rejoined the MoPac sooner.
Anyway, I survived, and eventually I made it to Elmwood. The town park is incredible–large, lots of sheltered areas with benches, shady patches of grass, bathrooms and water. This is the place I probably should have called it a day. The convenience store in town had seating inside, so I was able to enjoy some cooler air and an ice-cold drink, though sadly I missed out on the salad bar they offered at lunch. Already, though, my determination to push on was resurfacing, in direct proportion to my body temperature’s decline. The MoPac runs directly from Elmwood to Eagle, I thought, just 7.5 miles more. How bad could it be?
As it turns out, shade was at a premium on the trail in this stretch, while the furnace was blasting, the sun increasingly pointed squarely in my face as I marched onward. How easily strength becomes weakness. The stubbornness and persistence that is integral to making this kind of walk, to pushing one onward through the varied challenges that arise along the way, can also become self-punishing, requiring more from oneself than is reasonable, prudent, or beneficial.
I don’t want to overstate things. I was worse off in the walk to Annawan; that remains the only point on this installment of the ADT that I needed to pause and genuinely evaluate the state of my wellbeing. My body continues to hold up remarkably well, and I was able to keep enough fluid in my system to fend off serious dehydration or heat exhaustion. Cosmetically, I looked terrible–salty sweat stains coated my pants and shirt; it even lined the upper portion of my bear, making me quite a sight when I staggered into the Casey’s in Eagle.
But damn, I can’t say I had a good time.
When I departed Elmwood earlier in the day, I looked back over the meager Main Street, taking note of a mural on one building devoted to Bess Streeter Aldrich, an author I had never heard of in a town I was passing too quickly through. Her journey loosely paralleled my own on this walk, as she was born in Cedar Falls before eventually making it to Elmwood (never mind that detour through Utah). Throughout her life as an author, Aldrich was always writing about Elmwood, setting many of her stories there, even if she never used its actual name.
Amazingly, my library had one of her books, A Lantern in Her Hand, so I borrowed it. It was easy to see the real Elmwood in her description of fictional Cedartown: “Cedartown sits beside a great highway which was once a buffalo trail. If you start in one direction on the highway… you will come to the effete east. If you start in the opposite direction… you will come to the distinctive west. Cedartown is neither effete nor distinctive nor is it even particularly pleasing to the passing tourist. It is beautiful only in the eyes of those who live here and in the memories of the Nebraska-born whose dwelling in far places has given them moments of homesickness for the low rolling hills, the swell and dip of the ripening wheat, the fields of sinuously waving corn and the elusively fragrant odor of alfalfa.”
I can be a bit defensive about people who are blithely critical of fast walkers, suggesting that they are rushing and thus missing out on some essential, instructive aspect of the experience. In the end, I don’t think walking 3.5 miles per hour instead of 2.5 is causing me to miss out. Walking is still walking; there’s ample time to take in every vista. That said, I was absolutely rushing today, even if it wasn’t reflected in my pace. It was in my mindset. And that cost me an opportunity to enjoy this walk in the way I might have.
Further reading on Aldrich led me to her reflective essay, “Why I Live in a Small Town.” I was struck by this passage, wherein she grappled with claims that her positive narratives were somehow unrealistic: “Why quarrel with a writer over realism and idealism? After all an author is a glass through which a picture of life is projected. The picture falls upon the pages of the writer’s manuscript according to the mental and emotional contours of that writer. It is useless to try to change those patterns. If one writer does not see life in terms of grime and dirt, adulteries and debaucheries, it does not follow that those sordid things do not exist. If another does not see life in terms of faith and love, sympathy and good deeds, it does not follow that those characteristics do not exist. I grow weary of hearing the sordid spoken of as real life, the wholesome as Pollyanna stuff. I contend that a writer may portray some of the decent things of life around him and reserve the privilege to call that real life too. And if this be literary treason; make the most of it.”
Aldrich has critics. Tom Lynch characterizes Lantern as “a classic expression of settler colonial ideology.” It’s easy to see where he’s coming from in this line, though it might slip past you on first read: “The paved streets of Cedartown lie primly parallel over the obliterated tracks of the buffalo. The substantial buildings of Cedartown stand smartly over the dead ashes of Indian campfires.” The words “primly” and “smartly” are doing a lot of work there, highlighting the imposition of order. Lynch follows up by highlighting how many ways “nothing but prairie” shows up in the narrative, conveying a barrenness, a sense of absence, in the parts of the Midwest untouched by Western civilization.
I’m wary of drawing equivalencies here, but the story of this post seems to be about the prevalence of blind spots. What couldn’t I see or appreciate because I was laboring grimly towards my destination? What couldn’t Aldrich’s urban readers discern in her narratives because of their own cynicism? And what couldn’t Aldrich appreciate because of the cultural biases she brought to the prairie?
