Wanderlust

How many homes can one woman have?

May 16, 2007 at 1:36 pm gvblog 7 comments

I’m in Philadelphia, watching the clouds stream in to a gathering storm. It’s uncanny, really, how I’ve managed to time my trip so that I’m not riding whenever it rains.  I spent the last four days sliding down the Delaware River from New York all the way to Philadelphia. Along the way, I passed through countless river towns, met a man I thought only existed in stories, battled fierce headwinds, and revisited my childhood home, the places I spent the first six years of my life.

Last Friday I rode from Ithaca to Binghamton, a relatively short ride. It’s especially short if you get a ride out of Ithaca…apparently Ithaca is in a basin (looking around town confirms this, but I didn’t actually try to ride out) so my first 5 miles of riding out of town would have been up relatively grueling grades.  So I took a bus.  I’ve decided that I get to decide what’s cheating or not, and that’s definitely not.

The ride to Binghamton was relatively uneventful, although I did discover that Broome county is the Carousel Capital of the World. Not kidding. 

On Saturday morning I joined the Delaware River where it carves the boundary between New York and Pennsylvania and hugged its banks for the next three days, until the industrial wastelands of Northern Philadelphia crept up the banks and separated me from the water.  The road, unfortunately, was not actually IN the river, so there were many points where the valley was too narrow to accomodate river and road so the road, being newer and more mobile, climbed over the ridgeline and down the other side. The topography map looked like a seismograph from the 89 earthquake. 

I normally don’t have things like topo maps (or maps in general, for that matter), but the bike map I picked up in Binghamton had the topographic profile of the ride. The reason I don’t like topo maps, I’ve discovered, is that I end up spending most of the ride anticipating the hills or waiting for the hill to end. Thinking to myself "Well, there was one little bump after this big uphill, so I’m probably almost to the top" and then rounding a corner and confronting another huge climb. Topo maps, you see, seem to have scale that is largely in the eye of the beholder.

Saturday I rode 74 miles and ended up in Callicoon, which I’d been told was an adorable town that I should check out. It was threatening rain so I wanted to get my tent up soon. I went into the Eastern hotel and asked the server who bustled in the dim light of the dull mahogany paneled bar if there were any campgrounds around. She directed me four miles back, up a hill, to the town I’d just been in. When I politely declined and asked if there were any campgrounds in town, she said "hold on, let me ask Uncle Joe."

Uncle Joe is the kind of person I really thought only existed in stories. He was the quintessential old-time bartender – a cigar clamped between his fingers, gold pocket watch nestled in the pocket of his waistcoat, which stretched over his rotund belly, silver handlebar mustache perched precariously below dancing blue eyes. He looked at me and said "wuzzat? You need a place to camp?" I explained that I just needed a place to pitch my tent. He suggested a couple places, all of which I declined due to hills, and then chewed on his cigar for a minute. "You got camping stuff and a tent, or what?" I told him I did. "Tell ya what. See that Olympia hotel across the street? There’s a grassy field right behind it, and I own it. You can pitch your tent up there. Anyone gives you any trouble, you just tell them Joe Naughton said it was ok."

The next day I rode down the river and met the first two bike tourists I’d come across – one was riding to Detroit and the other to California. Andrew, who had an awesome doll head mascot and virtually no gear, likes bike touring because he got in a plane crash a few years ago and bike touring is how he keeps in shape.

i mentioned that there are other, less intense methods of working out, but he didn’t seem interested.  

On Monday evening I arrived in Yardley, at the home of the Profy’s, who are family friends from when we lived in Pennsylvania.  As I rode into town, I passed Bowman’s Hill, the park we used to go to, Washington Crossing, and the place we had outdoor game day at my preschool (although I have trouble separating memories from when we lived in Pennsylvania from memories of visiting it as I grew up. The Profys still live next to the house I lived in from the time my parents brought me home from the hospital after my mom gave birth to me until I was three. I, of course, have very few memories of the house, although there were rooms and angles that seemed familiar, windows and doorways that appear in the photo albums of my first years.

The next morning I detoured through Historic Fallsington to see the house I lived in from 3-6, at 112 Main Street. This house I do have distinct memories of, though they are all hazy and disconnected.  Do you remember your first years? I feel like I’ve lost so many of my memories, and it was only recently that I came to make peace with that, to realize that I had to lose some memories to make way for the new ones. 

It got me thinking, though, passing through these towns, that we need way more words in the English language for "home". Because when people ask me where I’m from, what does that mean? Right now I’m from wherever I am on the road, but I am also from San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and Fallsington. Which one of those is the most accurate? What do we really want to know, when we ask where we’re from?

You know, the handy comments section of the blog makes it possible, at least in theory, to answer these questions I ask. I am interested in what you think.   

 

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