It’s been a splendid Sunday. I woke up next to a cornfield in the middle of Ohio, well-rested and only slightly damp with dew.
(I realize there is a big jump from when I was in West Virginia at the Hare Krishna retreat to here, but that’s because I’ve been biking so much, trying to get to Indiana by Wednesday. I’ve got a lot more to say about my stay there, and it’ll be up soon.)
I wanted to go to a Methodist church, but I couldn’t find one that was open. I passed my first one at 10 a.m., but its service was at 9 a.m. I passed my second at 10:30, but its service was at 9:30. The same thing happened at 11. There was no way to win.
But I did talk to a great old man named Harold near the border of Guernsey and Tuscaramas Counties. I had stopped under his tree to eat my breakfast, and he joined me for a chat.
Apparently, Harold loved the outdoors, and has a lot of property to back it up. In addition to the farm in Ohio, he has a plot of land in Buffalo, Wy., a boat in Rhode Island, and another boat somewhere else. He loved to ride motorcycles and explore, and had some stories to tell.
Some were about finding dead bodies in the woods in Wyoming, which were a little to gruesome for me. Some were about motorcycles being hit by cars, which is also not something I needed to hear. But then he told me about a spiritual incident he experienced in Buffalo.
In the middle of winter, Harold was at the top of a hill, surveying the terrain. At the foot, he noticed a man, clad in white, reading a sign about the Conestoga Trail. He went down to see the man, never taking his eyes off of him. But when he reached the bottom, Harold said the man suddenly vanished, and there were no footprints to prove he was ever there.
Harold doesn’t know what it meant. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, “but there are supernatural things out there that we can’t understand. I don’t exactly know what he meant, as that was as spiritual as Harold was willing to get with me.
It was a nice day of biking, with few hills, and I stopped for a hamburger in the evening at Peggy Sue’s Steak and Ribs along Route 206 in the middle of Ohio.
The couple in the booth next to me came over and wished me well. We had only had a few sentences of conversation, but after they left, the waitress informed me that they had bought my burger for me. What a nice surprise!
I then had a big piece of raisin cream pie, one of the house’s specialties. And my nice waitress told me that was on the house, too. Yay!
She said the tip had been taken care of by the couple, but I hid a few bucks under a plate anyways.
As I left the restaurant, I came across some Amish boys playing baseball in a field. They were all wearing their brightly colored undershirts, laughing and creating an orderly ruckus as all of the girls in their bonnets watched mannerly from the sidelines.
It’s always nice biking through Amish country. I think they like that I’m on a bike, not a slave to modern technology. But they always offer a wave and a smile, and don’t try to run me over like the trucks do.
