Crossing the River Jordan

Crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky into Ohio was always going to be the symbolic center of this bike ride for me. This was where the most-documented stories were: where, for example, the woman who inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin crossed over the icy river with her baby, made it up to the top of the hill, where she shivered herself warm by John Rankin’s fireplace.

Front Street in Ripley faces the river. It’s lined with old brick houses. John Rankin lived here before he moved up to the top of the hill, where he kept a lantern lit so fugitives could see the beacon of hope from across the river in the slave state of Kentucky. I was too tired to climb the hill though. Instead, I got a good look at John Parker’s house. Parker was the free Black man who risked everything to cross into Kentucky to guide refugees over. He helped hundreds of fugitives cross over.

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The Kentucky hills had been tough riding for me. Days of winding curves, steep dives following steep rises, which sometimes appeared out of nowhere after a blind curve: a quick, hard, crunching gear change, a long I-think-I-can-think-I-can climb, sweating rivers, finding the right rhythm, just short of breathless, until the top of the 6%, 8%, even sometimes 11% grade arrives, the road levels out, or falls again, and the mind and body celebrates what it just accomplished. It’s the special joy of adventure-suffering: suffering that’s easy to endure because it isn’t tinged with hopelessness or injustice. It feels wrong to talk about in the same breath as the very different struggles that Ripley represents.

I was beyond that after Ripley, into the easy riding. In Milford, I took a day off and grabbed an Uber into Cincinnati for a morning at the Freedom Center Underground Railroad Museum, where I learned which US presidents owned slaves and which didn’t, and where I saw a reconstructed slave jail from Georgetown, Kentucky. And a long list of Underground Railroad conductors. I realized again just how daunting this story was, emotionally, politically, morally.

The next day, on the Little Miami River bike trail, I got into trouble. The long, flat surface felt so liberating after weeks on the Kentucky hills! My legs luxuriated in the easy, fast peddling. At one point near the village of Morrow, I moved to the side of the trail to get out of someone’s way, then leaned to the left to get to the comfortable center– and slid hard on a beautiful little mud slick. I picked myself up and rode an hour to my destination for the night, then walked a couple of miles to an urgent care facility. The verdict was a wrist fracture, and by that time it was clear to me that I won’t be completing the ride this summer.

I’m glad for every minute of the 1,400 miles I traveled this trip. In another newsletter, I’ll tell you about the historical figures I met and learned about while traveling those miles. In the meantime, I’m getting ready for the flight home.