The Solidago Riders are featured in a recent online magazine called Bunyan Velo. The magazine is a compilation of bike adventure stories complied by Lucas Winzenburg, a fellow bike tourist and friend here in Minneapolis. We met Lucas on our Great Lakes tour while pedaling the path alongside Minnesota’s Highway 61, Lake Superior’s spectacularly pebbly North Shore. May the bike adventurists of the world be heard!
Visit bunyanvelo.com, have a look and enjoy!
When you burn a couple thousand calories a day, you easily eat a couple thousand more calories a day and fall into a lovely pattern: bike to eat, eat to bike. We always went for seconds, sometimes thirds. We could finish a whole pie for dessert, an entire box of cookies at lunch, and a new jar of peanut butter every 2 days. We shopped at gas stations, convenience stores, big-box grocery stores, small general stores, farmstands, and co-ops. We picked from roadside crabapple trees and bushes of saskatoons, wild raspberries, and thimbleberries. Through chance, recommendations, and the new friends we met, we think we got an overall good read on what we like to call the “Great Lakes Nomscape.”
The nomscape? A term coined by our urban/geog/food friends, Lily and Nolan, the “nomscape” is basically eating (nom-nom) food in a place (the landscape). You can study it as food geography, or you can experience it by eating different foods in different places and (hopefully) finding the best, hidden food secrets.
Here’s our breakdown of what we think the Great Lakes Nomscape is all about:
1. MEAT. (GAME). Eat a lot of it. Catch it yourself. Take pictures of the animal, and maybe hang the animal on your wall.
Examples:
• Duluth, MN. Host: Pete Young. Snowgoose!
• Marathon, ON. Host: Anthony. Roadkill-rescued Moose Sausage for breakfast (grilled).
• Sault Ste. Marie, ON. Host: Doug and Sharon Cuddy. Moose Lasagna!
2. LAKE FISH. Lake food is far superior to seafood on the Third Coast. Catch it yourself! Smoke it! Grill it! Drink beers with it every Friday at your town’s local Friday Fish Fry.
Examples:
• Duluth, MN. Host: Pete Young. Fresh Lake Trout, Catfish, and Perch (grilled)
• Knife River, MN North Shore. Russ Kendall’s Smoke House. Smoked Salmon
• Grand Marais, MN. The Fisherman’s Picnic!! Featuring fisherman Harley Tofte’s herring catch, served fried with tartar sauce. For Harley’s fish year-round go straight to his shop, Dockside Fish Market, or the neighboring restaurant, Angry Trout Café. (tip: you can order smoked fish from Dockside anywhere in the US!)
3. FARMS, ALWAYS. Go straight to the farm, because you never know what you’ll find at the rural convenience/ gas store. Help with the harvest! Then taste their homemade honey and jams. Support your local farmer and get a CSA share (Community Supported Agriculture)!
Where we stayed:
• Finland, MN: Round River Farm
• Thunder Bay, ON: Belluze Farm
• Port Perry, ON: Lunar Rhythms Gardens
• Wolcott, NY: Wayside Farmstand
• Bear Lake, MI: Ware Organic Farm
• Traverse City, MI: Birch Point Farm
• Petosky, MI: Blackbird Gardens
• Star Prairie, WI: Threshing Table Farm
4. PIES. Look around you! There are wild berries everywhere! Eat them raw, in yogurt, or bake them into PIE!
Recommendation:
• Naples, NY on Canandaigua Lake. Jen’s Grape Pies from the farm-stand. Yep, GRAPE. Give it a try. But be sure they are Jen’s.
5. WILD RICE. Everything is wild – game, fish, berries, and the rice. It tastes better, makes sense, and is healthier.
Our tip: Have it for breakfast with yogurt and blueberries! And maybe with Birch “maple” syrup
Now hopefully you’ve got a good idea of what the Great Lakes Nomscape has to offer and are ready for your own Great Lakes food tour. We highly recommend it (of course we also recommend biking it… it’ll help you eat it all guilt-free and happily).
2 more sections are to come. There’s a lot here to digest, but stay tuned for BEER and RECIPES!
One of you told us, “community is safety,” and we’ve never agreed with something more. Here’s to all of you who made the Road our community, for moose meat, pedaling with us for a mile or a few days, for ice cream and pie, warnings about hills and semi-trucks, showing us what saskatoons are, thumbs-up from your car window, for telling us to tell ourselves I Love You, for your floor and couches and spare beds and hot pink wigs, for hot coffee, stories, and friendship.
Dennis, Terence, Jae, Leif, Marcus, Renee, Kat, Claire, Kenny, Holly, Pete, Deanne, Cindy, Jeff, Lucas, Russ Kindle fishboy, David, Lise, Abby, Sam, Jessa, Lena, George, Harley, Tim, Jean, Kevin, Jody, Lily, Finn, Farmer Don, Pietre’s gang, Canadian geologists, Leo, Mae, Mayor of Schrieber, Anthony, Kevin, Jim, Tim Johnson, Will, Alex, Australian surfers, Sharon, Doug, Kevin, Lance “the witness,” Dave, Kay, Catherine, Amber, Jenny, Jon, Angela, Nick, Mermaid’s Secret crew, Harvest Moonies Grahm, Tina, Germaine, Camille, Paul, Nicole, Griffin, Paul, Jo, Carla, Colin, Alex, Reinhart, Eva, Herb, Brian, Laura, Lauren, Tom, Neil, Mikey, Jacob, Jessica, David and all at Lunar Rhythm, Jan, Alex, Cape Vincent Border Patrol, Murdock’s, Doug, Cathy, Grandma Alice and Wayside Farms, Meg, Steve, Ren, Josie, Cynthia, Cathy, Susan, Brenda, Amanda, Nate, Will, Chris, David, Matt, Swany Jim, Dan, Pete, Campus guys and gals, Matt, Catt Rez, Dunkirk Tim Horton’s regulars, Danny, Diana, Q, Gyspy, Nuva, Dillon, Jackson, Buckeye Neighborhood, Kate, Ben, Wes, Renee, RC, Ester, Warren, Garth, Adam, Al, Connie, Matt, Rich, Judy, Ganders’ folks, Wyandotte Farmers market, The Grind, Pat, Jack, Percy, Elise, Diane, Ernie, Stevie, Brother Jerry, Robbie, Willie, Detroit Bikes, Haily, Shelly, Sharon, Ari, Masha, Sean, Kate and all at Zingerman’s, Bill, Barb, Radio Tek Auto Shop, Jim, Jane, Darren, Rose, Norton and the Muskegon Conservation Club, Jean, Lauren, Joe, Terri, Bernie, Sandee, Knit and Bitch Club, Michelle, Jason, Matt, Chelsea, Ty, John, Vicki, Daisy, Caleb, Mark, Maureen, Mike, Bill, Matt, Lou, Shirley, Rick, Larry, Ginny, Zora, Newt, Andy, Matt, Steve/Turbo and the boys, Terry, Denzo, Pete, April, Billy, Mary and the gang at Silver Lake, Brian, Lexi, Macy, Haley, Steve, Melissa, Jim, Lona’s, Ron White, Cumberland Public Library, Mike, Jody, Claudia, Malcom, Jonas, Davey, Gregor, Phil, Evans, Max, Michael, Holly, Ian, Evan, and the many many more we never learned your name or who we unfortunately forgot or who wished you could have been on the road with us.
It has been a few days since we’ve arrive back in Minnesotaland! It has been magical and wonderful to see familiar faces, visit our favorite restaurants, and bike down newly painted bike boulevards! We never knew how much we appreciated the Greenway until now. But after all, we are in the best biking city in the US. It will not be long before we will layer up with mittens and scarfs and brave the winds and snow of the winter-biking season.
We have been discussing the future of our group and we think it exists! In what form or in what context is to be determined, but we have many ideas and projects we hope to collaborate on (including Solidago Bombago 2012!!). We will update the website and blog when new things arise, be they bicycle trips, art projects, urban farm happenings, etc.
For now, dear readers, we’d like to thank you for staying with us this whole way and invite you to celebrate with us this week! We are having two presentation parties to share photos, stories, and videos.
1. Thursday, October 20, 11:30 am-1 pm, Macalester College (Hall of Fame Room, Leonard Center). Food provided, thanks to MacBike, the Sustainability Office, and WHAM.
2. Saturday, October 22, 4pm, Sunrise Cyclery (on Lake and Bryant in Minneapolis). Potluck style! We’ll bring some grill items, but the more the merrier! In addition to the photos and such, bring a shirt, hat, or anything to screen print the Great Lakes design we brought on our trip.
Hope to see you at one or both!
The sun was rising over our Upper Peninsula campground as we shoveled over salted eggs into our mouths with fingers too numb to move slower. That morning we all loosened our helmets to fit them over our winter hats, buttoned up our down vests and bade farewell to Lake Michigan.
Borgstrom Road, our 3000th mile, a race with a tractor (which we won, of course), Whipporwhill Hill, 2 warming hours in a convenience store, hundreds of U.P. Pride bumper stickers, loaded logging trucks, a broken chain, a wasp sting and miles of Autumn forests later, Rose spotted Lake Superior on the horizon. We careened down that hill ringing our bells and yelling ‘we made it’, dropped our bikes on the sandy shore and ran straight into the water. The feeling was similar to the moment we saw her on the horizon over Duluth three days into our journey. There is an infectious joy that radiates from Lake Superior, which we can now safely say is one of our top five favorite Great Lakes.
The next morning when we rode away from Grand Marais, Michigan, Robin said, ‘That felt like the end of our trip…and this is the Epilogue”. We were pedaling into Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a spectacularly inaccessible park with a 15 mile beach and many more of sandstone cliffs that Superior has been carving into coves for thousands of years. This was the first summer Highway 58 has been completed from the eastern edge of the park to the west. For us and other tourists, this winding path through quiet and colorful U.P. forest was a real treat, but to others the increased traffic had clearly put a wrench into the quiet backwoods lifestyle. ‘OK, I got a couple pedal bikers here, I’ll warn them’, the Park Ranger said. After the completion of the highway, someone had been spreading roofing nails across the highway to cause flats and deter traffic. Sure enough, added to our typical riding anthem of “CAR BACK!, TRUCK UP!, BUMPS!” was “NAILS!”. By the time we made it 30 miles into the park to our campsite we had stopped seven or ten times, collected all the nails we could and Ainsley, insisting we save the nails, was pedaling at least five extra pounds, “What!? These are nice nails!”
The weather gods have been on our side this week. That afternoon in Pictured Rocks, we enjoyed a real beachy day of sand angels, swimming and drinking handfuls of fresh Superior water. Our ride from Pictured Rocks to Marquette was sweaty enough for more than one dip when the highway got close enough to the sandy bays. And in Marquette, we bade farewell to our favorite lake along the pebble filled, cliffy shores at Presque Isle Park.
Thanks to Larry in Christmas, Michigan who treated us to fresh fried eggs, homemade jam and groats while we were on the road. Ginny Killough, a beautiful woman and textile artist extraordinaire, hosted us in Marquette and treated us to a cozy company, a colorful home, a sauna (!), Finnish pancakes and a fresh lake trout dinner. We visited Lakeshore Bikes in Marquette where the owner, Matt, helped us immensely by eliminating all unexplained and unwanted clicks that had been coming from our bikes. Our first day riding away from the Lake landed us at the Silver Lake Campground where we happened upon an annual end-of-season soup cook off, chocolate cakes, and the company of an incredible group of family and friends from Nagaunee, Michigan. Everyone at Silver Lake treated us like long lost friends, Denzo gave us harmonicas and a crash course lesson and Pete, the owner, treated us to breakfast at the diner to propel us to Wisconsin.
We’ve been making our way through the state of beer, cheese and tractors, inching closer to our final destination and the final bit of the Epilogue.
Friends and family! Providing all goes as planned, we will ride into St. Paul this Saturday via Stillwater, The Gateway Trail and then Summit Ave. The tentative arrival time is 4 o’clock on the 15th. Please join us if you’d like! And, call Rose’s phone if you’d like more details (541-760-3051).
Some time ago now, Tressa was reading Herman Melville’s Billy Bud and shared allowed to the other Solidagos this bit before we burrowed into our sleeping bags and bade each other goodnight:
“For who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange begins? Distinctly we see the difference of colors, but where exactly does the one first bledgingly enter the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
Since then, the lot of us have read a bit more literature and biked a good bounty of miles, but our Great Lakes adventure remains the fulcrum for our teetering sanity. What I mean to say is that the five of us have had a whole lot of things to take in, so much in fact, that some days we wonder when we’ve lost it completely.
Like those days when we force ourselves to wake up long before the sun will rise, to sit on a weathered bike seat for 8 plus hours in the hot sun, in the gusty headwind, or in endless rain only to do it all again tomorrow. There are days we wonder why we spend more time looking after our bikes’ styles than we spend on our own appearances. Why we find our panniers filled with rocks, birch bark, and plant identification books even though we are supposed to pedal weightlessly. Why we are accepted into homes of strangers only to part as lifelong friends. There are days we laugh so hard we can barely summit the hills we climb using our 27th lowest gear. Some days we leap into freezing Great Lake baths or pedal 60 miles so we can hike 3 more into gaping sand dunes for sunset. Some days we bike 110 miles, pass over 3 states, or bike from one Great Lake to the next. Some days we realize we’ve biked 3,000 miles far. That was Tuesday. Then we soar down a big hill gravitating to the same lake we started at as people watch and wave and laugh–but we only have eyes for one–Lake Superior, completing our full circle bike tour.
Some strangers we’ve met actually tell us we’re insane from the get go. “3,000 Miles?!” they’d exclaim, “ON YER BIKES?! I’d never do that, you gals must be crazy.” We usually smile, bat our eyes, hand them one of our home-made business cards and pedal off on our merry way, but somewhere down the road I really do wonder where the sane tint ends and the crazy one begins–and whether or not a little insanity, a little extraordinary adventure–may pave new roads for new ideas and new possibilities.
Since we started our now 67 day trek, the Solidago Riders have had a lot of time for conversation and twice as much for imagination. As much as we focus on the road, we also talk with each other about what’s to come in our new lives after college. Robin and Ainsley want to run a backyard bakery when they return–it might be on Fridays. Jacque, Tressa, and I hope to build an Art Shanty this winter using found materials and replaceable magnets. We all want to host our people’s festival, Solidago Bombago, again next summer. We all want to find jobs. Both collectively and as individuals, one thing we’ve gained from our adventure is a desire for imagining ways to improve and support our communities. Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes that “If we accept that society is made and imagined then we can believe that society can be REmade and REimagined.” For our sakes, acknowledging that the problems we face in the world (like wars, economic upheavals, and institutional inequalities) are made, demonstrates how we can all feel empowered to imagine and practice the solutions we hope to discover in our futures.
In our first days of biking, one friend told us that “If you fall in love with the place you live,” then the things you do for your home and your community “will never feel like a sacrifice.” Two months later, this notion has become somewhat of an anthem to us, as friends from around the Great Lakes region give the same advice described in different words. However they put it, such advice always returns to our relationships–how we build connections with each other and our environments.
At the end of some days it may be that our insanity only lies with a thought as to why the pet cactus in Tressa’s handlebar basket incessantly wilts even though she is so determined to love it unconditionally. But other days we bike away from people and places that leave us simultaneously bound to our experience with them and to the road before us. Regardless, we are constantly thinking of our project in means far greater than we expected and hope that the connections made around the Great Lakes can expand the possibilities for re-imagining our communities.
And with all this it may be needless to add that we expect to be home and back in Saint Paul by sometime next week. See you soon, Minnesota!
We know we are a little behind in the posting, but it’s because Michigan has been so much fun, there hasn’t been time to do much but meet great people and pedal in awe of what we see! Here is a point by point of where we’ve been in the mitten of Michigan since the beloved Detroit.
Ann Arbor: home to the University of Michigan, we we charmed by this college town. We spent a good chunk of time at Zingerman’s, a deli/cafe/restaurant/creamery/magic land. We were treated like royalty, mostly because Robin is a cheese celebrity (they sell her family’s sheep cheese!) but also because everyone we met was incredibly friendly. We also spent some time in the A2 firehouse, because our host, Sharon is a firefighter! Sharon is a rowing friend of Rose’s mom, and is a spectacular woman with infinite grit and kindness. Superwoman is not an exaggeration. Thanks again to Elise and friends for a last minute hosting as well!
We biked along a great rails to trails for the next couple days, pit stopping at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, en route to our last great lake! We turned north up the coast of Lake Michigan in South Haven, when we met some more incredible women (not a shortage of these on our trip) at a coffee shop, measured Holland’s dutchness, and were taken in with open arms by Bill and Barbara Coe, parents of our Macalester buddy Martha, in
Grand Haven. They biked with us along the shore the next day and treated us to ice cream before sending us off.
And so began the days of rain and cold weather. We stayed next in North Muskegon, where we were saved from a storm by the Muskegon Conservation Club. Not only did we stay dry, but were fed full of delicious fire-cooked meat and loads of laughter. Thank you Jim, Darren, Jane, and all our many friends there! We will never forget you.
We pedaled the next day to Luddington. On route we had an impromptu lunch with Jean Jackman, our biking sister. At 68 she is a biking machine pedaled across the US a few years ago! go Jean go! Luddington treated us well too, first with a sale at Dairy Queen and then being taken in by Terry and Jo. They are motorcyclists with kindness bursting at their seems. We had a great time hearing their road stories and camping out in their pop up camper!
Our next day took us to Sandee and Bernie at Ware Farms in Bear Lake. Their stories of the farm transformation over the years are incredible and their generosity to us was just as incredible. Once again, we were kept dry and fed, and felt lucky to have met them.
The long-awaited Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park finally became our destination! Recently voted by Good Morning America as the most beautiful place in the nation, we could definitely see why! We had a great sand hike up and down and finally to Lake Michigan, where we took a cold dip. Now we have swam in all five!
On our way to Birchpoint Farms near Traverse City, we stopped in Glen Arbor where we ate ourselves silly with chocolate covered cherries as well as met some great folks from Detroit and a traveling knitting club! Birch point Farms, on the Leelenau Peninsula ( the “pinky”) graciously hosted us for 3 nights (once again, keeping us dry and fed!) Thanks to farmer Michelle and all the friends we met–Jason, Ty, Matt, Chelsea, John, Vicki, Caleb, and Daisy– a million times over! They made us delicious meals, ate our crazy concoctions, let us help harvest, and welcomed us into their community. They are the best! We also had a grand time in T-City with Mark from Michigan Sea Grant, Maureen from the Watershed Project, and Pleasanton Bakery!!
Michigan is beautiful. We have been so happy to spend time here. We are excited to bike in dry weather and be in the Upper Peninsula in a few days. Until then however, we are happy being “trolls” below the bridge. Fall is here and it is awesome. Happy October to all!
We arrived in Detroit after a large birthday breakfast (for Jacque’s 23rd) in Luna Pier, MI and a long stop at the Wyndotte Farmer’s Market, just south of Detroit’s Industrial Corridor, the River Rouge. We then spent 3 full days in the 313, but I’ll start with how we finally left Detroit.
Joining up with Detroit Bike's SouthWest Industrial Tour
At 9 am Sunday morning, we came across a group of 50 Deteroiters on bicycle who were riding through the Industrial streets of the Motor City. The ride was hosted by Detroit Bikes, a project that is part of the larger non-profit, Detroit Synergy, that believes in promoting positive perceptions of Detroit. This was their 2nd annual Industry Bike Tour. We joined the group and rode south along Jefferson Avenue through the old auto plants, steel plants, and made a stop outside the fence of the most contaminated industrial site in America. We were taking in the rusty automotive history that laid the foundation of this city’s economy, architecture, and the vibrant culture that gave rise to Motown. Fifty years later, we joined 50 others to bicycle through the smoke billows and historical steel and auto corridor. As we rode and spoke with people on the ride, we heard echoes of what our new friends, Diane, Pat, Jack, Percy, Elise, Willie, and Brother Jerry had revealed to us in the last 3 days. Despite what the rest of the U.S. may think or hear about Detroit, what we saw and learned is that this city is alive and full of new energy.
Meet Diane: lover of Canning and City Planning!
Diane walked us through the architectural history of the downtown and the “Sugar Hill” District that her firm, Zachary and Associates, are slowly bringing back to life. Diane explained the process of renovating historical buildings that are frequently left as just the exterior frame after enduring fires and being stripped of copper. Yet even past neglect and fires do not justify grazing the historical infrastructure and density of the city, and Diane’s team has proven that the city’s neighborhoods can be rebuilt with what is already here, exemplified by the new mixed-use residential and commercial building on 71 Garfield, and using all solar and geothermal energy to top it off.
The projects and energy we found in Detroit reveal the positivity of committed residents who are rebuilding a more sustainable Detroit for the future. We cannot say it better than the the city’s motto itself, written in 1805 but perhaps even more pertinant now: “We hope for better things. It will rise from the ashes.”
Riding the Dequinder Cut, Detroit's Greenway, with Pat!
Brother Jerry (left) and Wille talking about their roles in the Earthworks farm. Brother Jerry is Minnesota native who now lives in Detroit, loves the energy in the city and is an incredible community leader as the director of the Capucin Soup Kitchen.
Willie Spivey with his personal plot in the Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit. Wille is a leader of the EAT (Earthworks Agricultural Training) program run by Earthworks. The EAT internship is a year long program that Willie completely last year and is now a leader for the new interns.
Solidago Riders in Brightmoore with Elise, a Detroit Loving native of Ann Arbor who works with the Detroit non-profit, Summer in the City. The whole Lorax mural reads, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
We sat under the awning of a vacant grocery store on Ohio Highway 20, sipping dollar coffee and eating canned black beans with tortilla chips. It was still raining. I called our friend-of-a-friend in Cleveland.
“So I’m wondering,” I said, “if highway 20 is a good road to take.”
“Ummm, yeah,” Danny said. “Let me look at a map. Uh, where are you exactly?”
“Highway 20. Geneva, I think.”
“Geneva, uhhh, Geneeeva. Okay, I see it. Yeah, so you’ll be coming through the suburbs for quite a while–you know strip malls, parking lots, that sort of thing. The highway will change names a bit and when it turns to Euclid, that’s pretty much the city of Cleveland. You’ll be able to tell. It will be, you know like the hood or whatever, urban blight as they say, which is 80% of what Cleveland is, so yeah. Then after a while you’ll go under a bridge and it will be a new world like the holy land or something. It will be obvious. That’s University Circle, its got a university and the art museum and a big park with a fountain. There’s a pond with ducks. Then you’ll take a left on Stokes and you’ll go up a big hill, but you’re in the homestretch. Then you’ll take a right past the huge water treatment place, you can’t miss it, and then you’re in the ghetto which is good because it’s where we live. It’s a white house directly across the street from a church.”
Soon past Geneva, the number of Wal-Marts we’d seen in the past month and half tripled. People stare at the spectacle–pig-tails and braids sneaking out from under helmets waiting next to the revving of engines at the stoplights. Still raining but still pedaling, we cheered when a woman rolled down her window to yell “I support what you’re doing!” through the hurried herd of SUVs.
The street began to be flanked by vacant buildings and people waiting at bus stops. We naively traveled through the largest area of foreclosed housing in the country. Still the spectacle.
“Where’re you coming from?” people yelled from corner stores, from their car at stoplights, from the bus stops.
“Minnesota!”
“Are you serious? Minnesota?”
“Yeah!”
“Then where’re you going?”
“Minnesota!”
“Minnesota? Is that where you left your husbands?” We ought to get you five sodas! Way to go!”
We have been a spectacle almost the whole trip being a traveling group of only young women, 80% blonde, with matching bicycles carrying everything but the kitchen sink, pedaling side-by-side with semis. We are used to stares and questions and confusion, but after we left University Circle and headed south and pulled into Danny and Diana’s driveway, our spectacle-ness expanded, not only because we were women and bicyclists, but 100% white.
A trio of young cheerleaders quickly came over to investigate.
“You looking for Diana?” the tallest one asked. She had her hair pulled back into a bun, bangs straight across her forehead.
“Uh, yeah.” They went around back to look for her, said she wasn’t home, and so started entertaining us with football cheers.
We wowed at their synchronized hooting and clapping and repeated splits. In between cheers, their curiousity surfaced.
“What are you doing here?”
“Where did you come from?”
“Why are you so white?”
“You,” they said pointing to Robin, “look like Barbie.”
And so began our stay in Cleveland–the white spectacle in the black neighborhood. We felt awkward in our white legs in spandex. Where had the road brought us?
Our crash course in Cleveland 101, taught to us by biking around, conversations with Danny, Diana, their neighbor Q and other friends, heavily emphasized the city’s segregation. The Cuyahoga River (which has burned multiple times, most recently in 1969, because of industrial pollution sitting in the water) divides Cleveland into the East and West side and it seemed not many Clevelanders crossed over. As common in the Rust Belt region, Cleveland’s population peaked in the 1950s but has been in decline since the post-war industrial boom subsided and white-flight exploded–emptying the city center and prompting suburbanization, widening the economic and geographical differences between black and white. After the more recent economic recession and deindustrialization, Cleveland’s population has continued to wain, and is one of the fastest declining in the country. Around 300,000 people populate the city built for 1,000,000. The sprawled populations, cut into sections by lines of highway, make it easy for segregation to be a daily reality. It’s inconvenient to visit “the other side.”
Though I consider myself an open-minded person, there are very few times in my life where I have been in the racial minority. In my life, I have lived in white-dominated areas and even our college, which may have more diversity than other small colleges, still is very white. On a daily basis, I generally haven’t been stared at, or had people suspicious and confused because I look different. Though unintentional, I– like many Americans–live a life surrounded by people like me because that is just the way it is. It’s a problem, but it’s “the system.” However, that seems an incredible pathetic answer to the lines that divide and plague our country. It is far too easy to ignore my white privilege and isolation. I do not have a hard time with airport security, will not be arrested for not having enough bus fair, will not be started at in wealthy neighborhoods for my skin. Our country and cities and towns are segregated by race, gender, income, culture, religion, etc., etc., etc., and the inequalities are ghastly. These lines are everywhere. Though they lead us no where, we follow them because we are afraid of going anywhere else.
Can we create new ideas to address these stagnant problems? Can we change the system of segregation we so obligingly follow? It was apparent that Danny and Diana though working hard to address these questions and many questions more, are amazingly not afraid to not have the answers. They work humble jobs in order to have enough money and time to focus on the other things, like the garden in their backyard and the vacant lot next door, building community through knowing their neighbors, and running The Possibilitarian Puppet Theater from their basement. The puppet theater puts on circuses, parades, and puppets workshops as a way to voice ideas of change.
Over warm meals, cups of ”Dandy Blend” (our new favorite drink), and crafts, Danny and Diana graciously gave us a wonderful weekend, introducing us to the neighborhood who fed us full stories, questions and laughter. We were also lucky enough to see the inaugural theater show in the Possibilitarian Underground Theater: “In the Belly,” a dynamic and intense performance about the systemic racism of the U.S. prison system by the Insurgent Theater from Columbus, Ohio, where we got the chance to meet more community members and learn about their ideas and questions for a better Cleveland. Where is the line between the impossible and the possible for a person, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, a world? How are ideas created, where do they come from? How can we imagine new ideas that we don’t even know exist?
We’d like to thank Danny, Diana, Baby-to-be, Q, Jackson, Dillon, Gypsy, Nuva, RC, Renee. and all of the Buckeye Neighborhood for a fantastic stay in C-Town that has left us with laughter and questions to keep our minds pedaling even more than our legs.
Here we present a few groups of photos from in and around Lake Erie. From Buffalo, through PA to Cleveland, Toledo and, lastly, to Detroit. The most industrialized Great lake of them all, the most populated, the shallowest, most biologically productive and, for us, the most urban, by far.
