The Sound and the Fury of Cycling

Mary is an avid reader and has long been part of a local book club. Since we rode today relatively near Oxford, Mississippi, home of this state’s most famous author William Faulkner, I thought it would be fun to form a specialized book club and compare notes about Faulkner novels as we cycled. Yet another good idea that did not pan out. Kevin apparently thought I was joking when I assigned him “Absalom, Absalom!”. Serge made it a full 14 pages into “The Sound and the Fury” before deciding it was unreadable. Here they are furiously pedaling to try and get away from me:

That’s because I read “As I Lay Dying”, which admittedly required more concentration than my morning read of “The Athletic”. Faulkner used 15 different family member narrators to describe the journey of taking the casket of the Bundren family’s matriarch to be buried at her ancestral home.

I thought it would be fun to honor Faulkner by writing a semi-fictional blog post about today’s ride narrated by each of the 13 riders in our group. Even the voice of reason, Mary assured me that this would be a surefire way of reducing blog readership from the tens of tens to the tens of ones. So you’ll have to settle once again for my voice.

Yesterday was an 82.6 mile ride from the capital of Jackson to French Camp, with a population of 256. It was a nice ride with relatively gentle elevation. Here are a few pictures from that ride, which started along the shores of a huge reservoir, then went by a swamp and ended in an extremely remote area:

One of our traditions is to have either ice cream or a beer (preferably both) after a ride. While we arrived in French Camp just before a large rain storm, unfortunately we could not carry out either of our traditions as the few French Camp stores were closed by the time we arrived. Mary and I then stayed in a very nice cabin well-suited to the witness protection program as it was deep in woods. We worried that no one would find our bodies if something bad happened.

But amazingly, Zabar’s apparently has a store in French Camp since this is what awaited us at breakfast:

An unexpected nice touch, but I later realized that bagels and lox is probably not the typical Tour de France breakfast. Today’s ride from French Camp was a little shy of 63 miles and we ended the ride in Tupelo. The scenery was a bit less densely forested than prior days:

That was unfortunate as we had a stiff headwind much of the day without forest to protect us from the winds. There was also a healthy dose of inclines. In a headwind, you end up going far slower than you think you should be going. Or what usually happens is that you have to pedal a lot harder to maintain your normal speed. Either way, a headwind is just annoying and the sounds and fury of a cyclist in a headwind are, once again, not something that is printable in this family friendly blog.

Along the way, I discovered that off-road vehicles, called swamp buggies, are a favorite Mississippi activity. Many, many pick-up trucks towing trailers with very muddy swamp buggies passed us this afternoon. One apparently “coal rolled” me by slowing down and then accelerating so that I got hit with a burst of black tailpipe smoke. Not a problem since I experienced a lot worse cycling in Queens, but this was a ding on the concept of southern hospitality. On the other hand, if the driver thought the joke was on me, the joke was actually on him since he could not enjoy a nice cold beer on a MIssissippi Sunday after a day of off-roading:

Blog reader Jenny texted me one of her favorite songs, “Jackson” by Johnny Cash since we cycled the other day through that city. Jenny, I’m sorry to burst your bubble. Mississippi is a very beautiful state, but Jackson which seemed like strip mall heaven? Johnny Cash was either drinking heavily when he wrote that song or he intended the song as pure satire. Either way, it is a nice song so I’ll go with it as today’s musical coda. And as a bonus for those who are interested, below is an interesting historical tidbit from today’s lunch stop.