Xenia, Ohio to Corwin, Ohio on bike
...so began the fourth annual, the bike trip that traverses small, unseen Ohio towns like Corwin, Spring Valley and Oregonia. As far back as the 17th century one exercise fan wrote, “Oh, how much misery is escaped by frequent and violent agitation of the body!”. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both recognized the mental benefits of exercise and described those who tend to sit around and think all day as likely to be “melancholic”. But to me it was just a great excuse to take a half-day off work, which in itself reverses melancholy. Not to mention the enjoyment derived from the long exposure to sun and other natural phenomenon like snakes, herons, beavers, lily-padded lakes, small waterfalls and strangely attired bikers.
In fairly fast time (unless measured by other bikers, who apparently traveled at a rate of speed that made the tree’s leaves blur), we arrived in the euphoniously named Spring Valley. Oh to live in Spring Valley, where it is eternally spring! It’s a little Mayberry of a town, with a small ice cream & antique shop called the “Spring Valley Mercantile Exchange”. There, behind a counter, a slow-moving man makes the sweets that keep the bikers going. An olde picture in the shop shows the Exchange in feister days, displaying a banner that said: “Spring Valley Against the World!”. One can only imagine what the little Mercantile was fighting for or who won.
We re-entered the bike path under blazing sunshine. The threat of rain appeared a distant bad memory. We continued along towards our goal of Corwin, the half-way point, or mile 14. We rode by a masterwork vista of several farms dotting the landscape and a large white house on the hill looking as pristine as paradise.
We came to a proverbial fork in the road, or at least an animal with a forked tounge. Mary gave a whoop and a yell at a huge lumpy snake in mid-path..Mark could not tell us the type of snake, but it looked like a rattler, for its tail shook and sort of rattled and its head cocked up and menacingly danced from side to side. It might have been a cobra, come to think of it, for it had that sort of look about him. Dangerous as sin. Soon another biker happened by, one dressed in the inexplicable fashion of bikers these days – in a tight suit of loud colors, this time red, white and blue. The biker was stopped dead in his tread when he saw the snake. He confessed his great fear of snakes. Mary, in a nice understatement, said something like, “well I guess you’ll be stuck here”.
Onward we pressed, but Mark noticed a disturbing development. The sky behind us seemed a swollen black and blue, like some sort of horribly disfiguring injury. It looked angry as some sort of huge pus abscess, soon to be drained all over us. We moved on to Corwin, had ice cream & cokes, and waited for the inevitable. Which came in buckets and buckets. And so we were stranded in the small Corwin Peddler for at least an hour and a half.
Our long national nightmare – being trapped with strangers at a claustrophobic shop in Corwin, Ohio - finally ended when I convinced Mom & Mark to take a chance and ride in the slight drizzle. Apparently all the other bikers felt similarly, for they all passed us within a matter of a minute or two never to be seen again.
And so we traveled back through Spring Valley, I noticed confirmation of Tom’s law of inverse patriotism – those who have little show the most, those with grand houses the least. I passed by houses the size of small cabins with big flags and window-sticker red, white & blue’s. I recall that when I drive through some of the poorer neighborhoods in Columbus, there are all sorts of flags & decorations but when I drive by the McMansions, well, flags are more rare. But then there are more pink flamigos in poorer neighborhoods too, so maybe it doesn’t prove anything....
