R

R. Bruhn’s

Best and Worst of RAGBRAI® XXVII, 1999

“It will be long. It will be hard. There will be no withdrawal”

—Team Escape From New York motto

Notice: Rated R by the RAGBRAI office for language, partial nudity and a general, non-PC attitude.

I knew from the moment I got home from the ride this year that I wasn’t going to be able to produce the usual “Best and Worst of RAGBRAI,” so if that’s what you’re expecting, change channels now. It’s not so much that I’ve seen it all already—although I have, and that takes some of the wonderment out of it—but rather it’s that this year it was just too damn hot to see anything. I spent the entire trip, when I wasn’t out on the road roasting like a tortilla chip in hot grease, sitting in camp pouring cold liquids either down my throat or over my head. My whole body is still hot to the touch and my core temperature may take weeks to return to normal, if it ever does. Seven days of such infernal heat has permanently fused every synapse in my brain to its neighbor, so that I am now incapable of individual thoughts (Best of This, Worst of That) and have left only one, gigantic, indivisible thought, spread out across the hemispheres of my brain like an enormous cephalic traffic jam.

I don’t think that I can remember ever experiencing worse weather—by which I mean hotter weather—in my entire life, and I go clear back to antediluvian times. Naturally, when I was growing up there was no such thing as air conditioning—in fact, when I grew up there was no such thing as air; we breathed that primordial atmospheric soup of methane and sulfuric acid. But it was better than this year in Iowa. God, it was hot. I don’t know if you saw the cartoon in the Des Moines Register, but (for once) they had it about right: a guy is running in place in front of a fan which is blowing air on him from a 500° oven; for a real taste of RAGBRAI, the cartoon recommends doing this for about seven hours straight. The best weather occurred Saturday night, after the ride was over, when the temperature finally dropped back to double digits.

Anyway, what I’m proposing is that instead of my usual Best and Worst format, I take you on a little tour of this year’s ride from the comfort of an air conditioned bus, a kind of virtual GreyLine Tour, if you will. You can be the tourist, I’ll be the guide, we’ll both stay cool. Imagine that you’re sitting in the window of the bus—you just sit there and gawk and be quiet and I’ll describe what’s going on outside. And the beauty of this arrangement is, for you, that unlike a real GreyLine Tour, you can just get up and piss the whole thing off anytime you want. Fair enough?

First we will need a bus. I thought about getting a regular GreyLine bus, but that’s too dorky even for this conceit. No, let’s get a regular RAGBRAI team bus, the kind that’s always lolling in the passthrough towns, filled with muscular young men and a passel of nubile young females, all deliciously drunk and half-naked. You can get drunk too, if you want. Go get a couple of six-packs right now. I think that we can use the Team Cucumber bus; they won’t be needing it, since they were permanently banned from RAGBRAI a couple of years ago for some biblical infraction of the Ride Right Rules. The bus is an icky green (I’m sorry) and was manufactured sometime around the Age of Pericles, so it doesn’t really have air conditioning, but we’ll virtually install some quickly. (Zip, zip, there you go, that ought to do it.)

It might help if right now you got up and changed into some tourist-type clothes—you know, a really bad shirt, some mismatched shorts, long black dress socks, dark wingtip shoes, that sort of thing. Sling a camera around your neck while you’re at it. Maybe you can get some good pictures, because I certainly didn’t. I took a camera, but it was so hot that when I got home I discovered all of the film had turned into taffy.

So climb aboard. Be careful not to trip over the flood of empty beer cans cascading down the steps. Try to get a window seat. No, that’s not a corpse in the aisle, it’s just one of the Cucumbers who hasn’t yet awakened from the alcoholic stupor he drank himself into two years ago. Just step over him. And ignore the disgusting puddle of puke on your seat. It’s plastic—I just put it there to add an air of authenticity to the experience. O.K. Pop the top on a cool one and here we go.

I need to begin with a warning—an alert. A Fred Alert. In the bicycling world, a “fred” is basically a clueless nerd who happens to be riding a bicycle. Freds are rampant on RAGBRAI. You yourself may be a fred if your bike or your person features one or more of the following items:

1) A rearview mirror. These come in two types, those mounted at the end of your handlebar, thus unnecessarily increasing both the width of the bike and its wind resistance; and those projecting from the quill of your glasses, thus producing a blind spot in your forward vision and a dandy little sharp object to jam into your eye should you inadvertently do a face plant.

2) Long black dress socks. Much favored in retirement communities across the nation, these are now showing up among cyclists in alarming numbers. Try to pull offenders quietly aside and redirect their consciousness, assuming they have any.

3) A kickstand. Kickstands were added to bicycles, I suspect, in the 1950s, after “The Wild One,” starring Marlon Brando, came out and the whole bike industry (Schwinn) decided that it would be cool if bicycles looked like motorcycles and weighed about as much into the bargain. Motorcycles (Harley-Davidsons) have kickstands because if laid on their side they are too heavy to pick up again without the aid of a gantry crane and because, in any case, in that position all of their vital fluids drain out onto the ground, like a murder victim in Central Park. Bicycles do not need kickstands. Period. Harley-Davidsons look really cool leaning over at a rakish angle on their kickstands. Bicycles just look stupid.

4) A little plastic flag on a long skinny rod. Much favored by the recumbent crowd, which is as good a reason as any I can think of for not sporting one.

5) Any kind of faring. Again, found primarily on recumbents, but occasionally on real bikes as well. Always a bad sign.

6) A sail. This alone will admit you to the Fred Hall of Fame.

7) Bib overalls. You shouldn’t have to think too long about this one.

8) Platform pedals, especially when the part of the foot which is in contact with the pedal is the heel.

9) Recumbency. This is a delicate issue. I have gotten myself in serious trouble with some very dangerous people by bad-mouthing recumbents and by making what seemed to me the innocent and perfectly plausible assertion that recumbent riders were serial killers on a holiday. I based this assertion on

some serious cross-cultural, quantum physics data-based comparative personality disorder studies which I have carefully and exhaustively detailed in earlier editions of my Best and Worst papers (q.v.). Plus, I have a good imagination. But I have been forced to rethink my position on this issue, not only

because of the numerous threats on my life, but because of the simply alarming proliferation of recumbent riders. Even America can’t have that many serial killers. So I guess it’s just a fad, a kind of mainstreaming of white trash culture, like the phenomenon of junior high school kids wearing their

wallets on a chain. Time was when you could predict with near-perfect certainty that anyone with his wallet on a chain was a lowlife scumbag that you wouldn’t want your daughter anywhere near; now they’re being worn by more or less normal suburban kids who will end up in better colleges than

you or I did.

Moving right along, we find what has to be the lamest book title since Glorious Feats of the Polish Army failed to make the New York Times bestseller list. I would be referring to the much touted RAGBRAI: Everybody Pronounces It Wrong, by either Karras or Offenburger, I can never remember which, but it doesn’t really matter. Boy, oh boy, there’s a title that sums things up for you, doesn’t it? Gives you real insight to what the book’s all about? Makes you just want to grab a couple of dozen of them off the shelf and send them to all your friends? Now I know what RAGBRAI is really all about—a bunch of tongue-tied etymologists trying to pronounce their way across Iowa. Imagine this crazy, fun-filled ride! Algona: al-GO-na or AL-gona? Dougherty: DOE-er-ty or DO-er-ty or maybe even (the excitement builds...) doe-ER-ty? And Waucoma, what to do with that? WALK-homa? walk-O-ma? Or could it be one of those off-the-chart pronunciations so common in the Midwest, something like WALKERS-ville? I envision huge pileups on the road, or maybe even deadly waterbottle wars, as road rage reaches the boilover point at the pronunciation of something like “Decorah.” Is it DEC-or-ah or de-COR-ah? Factions form, new alliances are forged among former enemies, whole teams are rent asunder, brother is set against brother, father against son. All hell breaks loose. Legions of bikers stream past the usual oases of beer gardens and Dove Bar stands and Smoothie stops as the argument rages on. DEC-or-ah or de-COR-ah!? De-COR-ah or DEC-or-ah!? Never mind the hills, never mind the wind, don’t even stop for the petulant porcine plainsong of Mr. Pork Chop:

Pork ChooOOooOOooOOooOOooOOoop....!

Just get the hell into town so a local can be found who can settle this seething controversy once and for all! After asking thirteen witless teenagers who can’t even pronounce their own names and aren’t sure which country they live in, a real estate agent named Jim Boomer is found who can swear on a stack of Bibles (which he just happens to have with him) that it’s de-COR-ah. Alas, this satisfies no one and the argument rages on into the night. Now I know what all that yelling and screaming that goes on in the campground until two in the morning is all about. Makes you want to run right out and buy that book, doesn’t it? I wonder how they pronounce Ocheyedan?

As long as I’m on the subject of witlessness, here’s a quote from Bill Bryson’s book The Lost Continent, in which he describes Iowans. Bryson is an Iowan himself, so presumably he knows what he is talking about. He says this: “When I say that they [Iowans] are kind of dopey I mean that they are trusting and amiable and open. They are a tad slow, certainly—when you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression—but it’s not because they’re incapable of high-speed mental activity, it’s only that there’s not much call for it. Their wits are dulled by simple, wholesome faith in God and the soil and their fellow man.” Being from Nebraksa, I won’t tell you what Bryson says about my home state, but as far as Iowa goes, he seems pretty much on the mark.

Whenever I travel to Iowa I try to put Bryson’s Theory to the test. My first opportunity this year came in the shower line at Luther College. The kid selling shower tickets had just ordered a pizza and was busy munching it down when I approached. I said, “Give me one shower ticket and two pieces of pizza.” There were about 10 seconds of silence as the kid looked at me in bewilderment, then down at the pizza, and then said, apologetically, “I only got shower tickets... “ I count this exchange as evidence in favor of Bryson’s Theory.

On the other hand, one seeringly hot evening, as my friend Gary and I were moping listlessly among the food vendors in Decorah (de-COR-ah), desperately trying to find enough oxygen in the humidity-filled air to breath, I impulsively asked a bored and dazed-looking teenaged girl who was selling pop from a giant horse tank which was filled to the brim with ice and water how much it would cost to just lie down in the tank for a while. And without so much as a pause to take a breath or even taking the time to turn and look at me, she said, in a dull and unenthusiastic voice, as if she were asked this question every two minutes, “Go for it.” I score that: Iowan 1, Nebraskan 0, largely because, fearing anaphylactic shock or something, I chickened out and didn’t jump in the tank, but just slinked away down the street, knowing I had been bested. Lesson: never ask anyone, even an Iowan, a stupid question if you are not prepared for the answer. I do that a lot. Maybe I’m an Iowan....

Let me return for a moment to the subject of showers, and let me say this about that: some are better than others, though any shower after riding 80 or 90 miles under a blistering July sun in Iowa is about as welcome an experience as you can have, short of rapture at the moment of the Apocalypse. Clearly the worst one was in Spencer, the first night out. It was so hot that evening that frying an egg on the hood of a car wasn’t even an option: the egg would simply have vaporized upon contact with the metal. The air was so heavy with humidity that people were carrying it around in buckets. Some sort of shower facility seemed to exist near our campground, so I assembled my shower gear and bravely left the shade of the one tree in our campsite and made my way to a low, concrete block building which served no purpose I can imagine, except that it had four showers in it, two for men and two for the ladies. These, I was told, were private showers, shower stalls with doors and everything, so you could shower in complete buck naked seclusion, safe from the wandering eyes of dozens of other showerees, some of who may very well have been of a homosexual persuasion (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and who may very well have been taking erotic pleasure in watching you lather your gonads.

Well, so far, so good, I thought. Oddly, however, the shower line seemed to be forming only at the entrance to the women’s shower. Both men and women queued up there and no one was assembled at the entrance to the men’s shower. I found this especially disconcerting because at various points in the interminable wait in the insufferable heat, a couple of guys who were behind me in line just bolted impatiently for the door of the men’s shower and went right in, undeterred. I watched this in a kind of stupefied amazement, but I was too overheated to make a fuss about it. Finally, I worked my way forward in the line until I was standing right at the door to the women’s shower. I asked the woman who was monitoring the comings and goings there what the deal was with the men’s shower, since people seemed to be jumping line willy-nilly and nobody really seemed to be in charge. She allowed as to how she had absolutely no idea what was going on with the men’s shower, since that wasn’t her job, but that there was some guy down there who was supposed to be metering the men’s line, though he was nowhere to be seen. So being a take-charge kind of guy, I just moseyed down to the men’s door and walked in. I discovered a room about the size of a broom closet, with two showers on one side and a narrow space on the other where you could conveniently dump all of your stuff on the water-soaked floor. The humidity in there made the outdoors seem dry as a desert in the midday sun by comparison. Both showers were occupied, presumably by men furiously washing their gonads in complete privacy. I thought about taking my own shower right there in that narrow little space just by dumping a bucket of supersaturated air over my head, when I was accosted by the maitre-d’hotel, a red-faced fat man in bib overalls, who told me to get the hell out, it wasn’t my turn, and then proceeded to shout obscenities at the two guys who were in the showers, telling them to get their asses out, that they couldn’t be in there all fucking day, that other people were waiting, for Christ’s sake, etc. Then he disappeared again.

I finally did get a shower, washed my privates in private, came back out into the oppressive heat, and walked back to camp, by which time I smelled as bad as I had when I left and immediately needed another shower.

On another evening, maybe it was in Algona—who knows—they had emptied the bus barn, a huge, cavernous structure in which school busses were ordinarily parked, and had plumbed the entire space, something like about four acres, I would guess, with PVC pipe strung up in lines suspended from the ceiling, with shower heads protruding down from the pipes about every four feet or so. There must have be 30 of these lines, each running the entire depth of the building, which means the length of one of those big, whopper school busses, plus a few yards on either end. There had to be 400 naked men in there, all happily showering at once. There was no waiting. Where they got the water pressure for that many shower heads I’ll never know, but I suspect that some local machinery wizard, using only old hay baler parts, had come up with a way to suck water directly out of the air and pipe it into the building. The inside of the building was dark and, needless to say, dank, and there was about 4 inches of water on the floor, so it made me feel a little bit like I was at Auschwitz, but the showers were cold and refreshing, and, like I said, no waiting.

But by far the best showers of the trip were right in my own back yard, so to speak. Pork Belly Ventures, the charter outfit that I was travelling with, had constructed a simple but ingenious little device which I will call a “water table,” because that’s what it was: a little table, maybe two feet by three feet, which had four faucets attached to its sides and was rigged with a garden hose which could be attached to any nearby outdoor supply tap. Two of the faucets had attached to them a short length of garden hose with a bright yellow sprinkler head on the end, the kind of thing you might use to water your flower beds at home. You could put your toiletry items—soap, shampoo, razor, oils, unguents, tampons, etc.—on the top of the table and, voilá! Free showers, right in our campground.

Moreover, free coed showers. Of course, modesty and the Ride Right Rules both dictate that some minimal amount of clothing be worn during this exercise—at least in the unlikely event of sobriety—which takes place in full view of the entire campground and of passersby on the street. But both sexes (yes, I know that it’s a conservative Christian myth that there are only two sexes, but let’s let that slide for the moment) seemed equally capable, from my interested observations, of vigorously laundering their nether parts, even with bike shorts on. Come to think of it, the whole business of crotch-washing, as necessary for proper hygiene as it may be, is a rather undignified-looking operation—not unlike watching a dog lick his privates—crude, but effective. This ritual was then completed with a quick rinse, accomplished by jamming the shower head into your shorts, doing a little plié, like a ballet dancer warming up at the bar, and wincing mightily as the icy water swirled in your pants. RAGBRAI riders, of course, understand this kind of behavior, but when the water table was set up on a street corner in Bellevue, conveniently near a power station which had signs all over the place screaming HIGH VOLTAGE—WARNING—KEEP CLEAR, it became quite an attraction for passing locals, who nearly drove over each other gawking at the spectacle and hoping for a little gratuitous nudity or perhaps a nice electrocution.

If this year’s ride wasn’t good for much of anything else, it certainly was a great year for food. Let me explain right off the bat that I’m a food snob. My idea of a good team would be Team Gourmet, but they’ve never asked me to ride with them. So I’m on my own, and in Iowa, this can be thoroughly depressing. For the first few years I rode RAGBRAI I tended to eat at those church-basement affairs—the Methodist-Episcopals with spaghetti and iceberg lettuce salad, the Episcopal-Methodists with lasagne and iceberg lettuce salad, the Abject Misery Synod Lutherans with ghoulash and iceberg lettuce salad (yes, I know I misspelled goulash; it was a joke, lighten up), the Southern Baptists with CheezeWhiz casserole and iceberg lettuce salad (and a short lecture on the evils of abortion thrown in to boot), and so on. But after a few years of this, it dawned on me that most of the food at these places is just perfectly awful. I hate iceberg lettuce and I hate cheap, greasy hamburger slopped together in some mutant tomato sauce, served with overcooked pasta. The only reason I ate this stuff was because by the time I got into camp, showered, and found a few people to go out to eat with I was so hungry that I could have eaten the tires off the bike. And, in all honesty, I just didn’t know any better. Someone had told me that a gourmet tour of Iowa was a nonstop trip, and like most stuff that people tell me, I dutifully believed it, though it turned out to be false.

It was much the same with those pancakes-for-the-masses places you encounter in the morning. I guess the herd mentality just swept over me and I thought that any place with lines that long must be worth waiting for. But slow down here.... Have you ever stopped to think about what you’re eating in those places? You are what you eat, you know—how could you be anything else? What do you think, new little human body cells are floating around in the air and just attach themselves to you in some spontaneous act of self-rejuvenation? I don’t think so. Put that information into the context of eating at Chris Cakes or The Pancake Man, and you’ve got a real biologic nightmare cooking. What is that strange orange liquid they serve you which has a taste not found in nature? Is that the cheapest, greasiest sausage you’ve ever eaten in your life? Don’t those sodden pancakes lie in your stomach like you’d just ingested a plateful of asphalt?

So none of that for me, thanks, if I can help it. Now there is good food to be had on RAGBRAI, even on the road. Only a pale-faced, sushi-sucking vegetarian (not that there’s anything wrong with that) could find anything to complain about at Mr. Pork Chop’s smoky little stop. He cooks those chops to perfection over a corncob fire, you know. God, to be able to sit down at an actual table with a glass of good wine and some nice sautéd vegetables and sourdough bread and eat a couple of those babies.... And I still love Tender Tom’s turkey breast sandwiches and the real, original Smoothie Guy who puts TWO scoops of strawberries in the blender, and the new (to me, at least) Pastafari folks, who whip up a pretty good penne arribiatta for slightly too much money.

To start things off on the right note, Pork Belly (our charter outfit) threw a free BBQ for us on Monday night in Spencer, and tossed in a campsite concert by Dave Barger and the Jam Masters, a fine little blues trio, for good measure. But the great food news this year, believe it or not, was the restaurants in the overnight towns. I’ve had some dismal experiences in this regard in previous years, so I never get my hopes up, but this year I nailed three good places in a row, each better than the one before. I won’t bore you with too many details because, if you’re like most Americans, you couldn’t give a rat’s ass about food. But on the off chance that you are interested I heartily recommend Sister Sara’s in Algona, which has a nice, quiet, shady little outdoor patio that was delightfully deserted when we were there. Sister Sara’s is also one of those dumbfoundingly diversified small town businesses which combine wildly disparate and unlikely combinations of services under the same roof, and so provided, in a corner of the lounge, a custom picture framing service. Go figure. Unfortunately, I’d left all my unframed posters at home.

Another truly great dining experience can be had at the North Beach Lounge in Clear Lake. The dining room has a huge window, as wide as the building itself, which looks right out on the lake. Very nice. I had a garlic chicken dish, which was superb. My hunch, though, is that you’d be well advised to avoid the seafood, which they offer because there are imbeciles out there who would be fooled into believing that what they see out the window is the sea, but it isn’t, it’s just some big lake in landlocked Iowa, and doesn’t sport so much as a single rock lobster or one lonely school of shrimp. Eat seafood when you’re in Maine, where there really is an ocean nearby. The view out onto the lake was lovely, though—bested only by the view afforded when the barmaid, who was positively drop dead beautiful, leaned over to reveal...well, you know what she leaned over to reveal. And I thought the Hooters girl was supposed to be at the fairgrounds in Waverly.

Then, to top things off, just when I didn’t think it could possibly get any better, it did: in Waverly I discovered Martin’s Brandenburg Restaurant—well, I, and about 500 other people. Waverly is a town of some considerable German heritage, I gathered, since another Martin, famous for dreaming up heresies while seated on the crapper in Wittenberg Castle, has a college there named after him. (That would be Luther College, for those of you who are trying to keep up.) Anyway, Martin’s (the restaurant, not the college) is located on sort of the wrong side of the tracks—wrong side of the river, really—but for once the shuttle bus was able to take us more or less directly there, without dragging us all over town first. I’m truly sorry that those of you accompanying me here on the magic Virtual Bus will not be able to join me in the restaurant, but Martin’s is a very small place and if even one additional person tries to crowd in there I’m sure the air conditioner will simply have a stroke and expire. I’ve seen small restaurants like this before on RAGBRAI, which are used to dealing with, oh, maybe six customers the whole evening long and then suddenly find themselves awash with hundreds of ravenously hungry people lined up for blocks down the street. It usually isn’t a pretty sight, though if you maintain a sense of perspective, it can be awfully amusing, as you watch normally sane restaurant people go absolutely apeshit because they have no clue what to do with so many customers, and besides, they’ve given half the wait staff the night off because they forgot that RAGBRAI was coming.

Nothing like this happened at Martin’s, however. They were overwhelmed, of course, but they dealt with the whole mess calmly and with a great deal of poise, I thought. Martin himself came strolling out into the dining room from time to time, gleaming white in his overheated professional chef’s outfit, including the two-foot tall paper hat which looked like a big fluted Greek column from the Parthenon or somewhere, and chatted amiably with people at their tables. I was pleased to note that our waiter, a big, strapping, blond, Teutonic-looking fellow, seemed not to speak much English (a nice touch of authenticity), because when we ordered he just looked at us uncomprehendingly until I read to him from the menu in German, at which point he brightened considerably and said, “Ah, ja!” Who’d of thunk it? In Waverly, Iowa, a German wetback. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Anyway, I had a stuffed, rolled beef entree with an astonishingly good sauce, a little spatzle on the side and some perfectly cooked mixed fresh veggies and a nice red wine, room temperature, which in this case was about 98 degrees. My only complaint—well, it’s not a complaint, really, it’s just an observation—was the salad, which contained discernible amounts of iceberg lettuce. I know I said earlier that I hate iceberg lettuce, and I do, but I think now that Martin had no choice in the matter. I believe that it’s a law in Iowa that all salads must contain some proportion of iceberg lettuce, just like it’s a law in Nebraska that anywhere outside the city limits of Lincoln or Omaha red wine must go into the refrigerator. There are no exceptions. Violators will be prosecuted. Martin, however, much to his credit, while adhering to the letter of the lettuce law played loose with its spirit and threw into his salad a little radicchio, a little endive, a little frissé. Impish fellow, that Martin.

Lastly, in the food category—and I promise I’ll stop after this and move on to something you can relate to—there was Big Daddy’s Creole, one of the daily food court vendors. If you didn’t try their blackened catfish with creole sauce over dirty rice you missed the Crescent City steamboat, cher. My friend Gary and I grabbed a couple of plates of this delectable grub on a gruesomely hot evening—I think it was Friday in Manchester—and ducked into the air conditioned comfort of a nearby smoking and drinking (in that order) establishment and enjoyed our cayenne-laced comestibles while being bombarded with mindlessly loud and stupid music. As we were leaving and I was thanking the proprietor for letting us bring someone else’s food into his bar, I noticed that an employee was mopping up about an inch of some kind of liquid off the floor. “Sweat?” I asked the barman, who returned a blank, empty stare. Bryson’s Theory confirmed again.

I guess it was a pretty good year for music, too, but as I said at the beginning, I can’t tell you much about it because I seldom left the campground and rarely stopped in the passthrough towns because I wanted to get into camp early and have a heatstroke there, rather than on the road. There were, of course, the usual collection of local geezer bands, those elderly and sometimes not-so-elderly local folks who are just hell-bent on selling you some brand of Christian virtue through the medium of out-of-tune music. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they are so awful they’re amusing, but more often than not, they’re just plain awful. But I heard a group which really wasn’t all that bad, if you ignore the evangelical content, on the first day in one of the passthrough towns, maybe George or Ashton. Naturally, I don’t remember their name.

I should correct myself here; I did stop in some of the passthrough towns on the first day. My girlfriend rode with me that day and we stopped a lot, because she is not only a RAGBRAI virgin, but also new to biking—30 miles being her longest previous trek—and I felt she might enjoy the experience more if she were able to finish the ride on her bike, rather than in the ambulance. Did I mention how hot it was?

Anyway, score one for the geezer bands. In Melvin, also on the first day, we heard a local girl named Denise J. Hansen. “Country Heaven,” her business card said. At first I thought it was a recording and she was just doing lip-sync, then I thought it might be karaoke, which made me want to run away as fast as I could, then finally I realized that this woman could really sing. She had one of those voices that wrap around you like a boa constrictor, only in a nice way. Her voice had power, nuance, little skips and jumps and yelps, warmth, a throaty depth, and a kind of mysterious edge—a simply enthralling voice. And I don’t even particularly like country music. Her business card also had the little tag line, “Something Special—Ask Me!” But I didn’t ask because the card also said she did “Christian” music and I was afraid the “something special” might be a dissertation on Jesus.

My old pal and perennial favorite, bluesman extraordinaire Pat Hazell, was playing in a couple of towns this year, but to show you just how parochial RAGBRAI has become, they had him hidden away in the beer garden of some nameless little bar far away from the downtown, accessible only by a barely functioning shuttle bus service, and didn’t even have him listed among the entertainment options in the town’s RAGBRAI newspaper. Apparently RAGBRAI now favors more local, homegrown acts, like gospel singers and geezer bands. And who knows? Maybe the blues isn’t Republican enough

Speaking of geezer bands, The Rumbles, now freed from their day jobs by the Social Security Administration, drew quite a crowd in, where was it? Algona? (I try to write this stuff down, but this year it was so humid that writing in my little notebook was like trying to write on wet toilet paper, so I just gave up.) You know, one sure way that musicians, like the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys or the Rumbles, could avoid ending up as embarrassing geezer bands is to die young. I’m surprised more of them don’t think of that. Look at Buddy Holly. He played his last concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, climbed into a small, dangerous aircraft and said to himself, “Do I want to end up playing this place 30 years from now on RAGBRAI XXVII, when I’ll have to go back to the dressing room at intermission and re-secure my dentures, or do I just want to check out now, at the height of my fame, and become a rock ‘n roll legend?” And after you’ve seen guys like the Rumbles up close, don’t you think he made the right decision?

I also heard that the Air Force Band was playing one night, but I was too wasted to go see them, even though when I saw them a couple of years ago they had a knockout female vocalist, who could sing, too. Maybe I should have gone. What do you suppose all that humidity would have done to the starch in that Air Force uniform? “Excuse me m’am—I mean Colonel, m’am, sir—but your blouse is, like, all wet and it’s, well, m’am—I mean Colonel, m’am, sir—it’s... Oh, never mind. Do you know any Chubby Checker?”

But you know the music I enjoyed most this year? Of course you don’t; what a stupid question. Let me begin this paragraph over. The music I enjoyed the most this year was played on a tuba. That’s right, a tuba. T-U-B-A. As in oom-pah-pah, except that this wasn’t oom-pah-pah, it was more like the softest and most velvet and most endearing sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m sure many of you who were on the ride this year heard him; his name is Gary McCurdy, the Iowa Tubador. I’m told he plays often in the Old Market in Omaha, but I saw him on a street corner in one of the passthrough towns where I had stopped briefly to soak my head. I tell you, I could have sat there all day and listened to that man. His music was so comforting that it made me want to lie down in a fetal position and suck my thumb. But it was just too damn hot, so I left.

RAGBRAI, as most of you would know, sports groups of riders loosely organized into teams. Teams usually have names—the sillier, the more outrageous or obscure, the better. I sometimes think that the whole reason for forming a team in the first place is so you and your buddies can sit around of an evening and get drunk and think up a team name. Certainly some of the names you see were not conceived by sober people. Thus you have Team Evil and Team Angry, post-Littleton names, I assume; Team Butt Ice; Team Tall Dawg, whose jerseys say “Kwitscher-snivelin,” which I always thought was a team name, but I guess it’s just a motto (“quit your sniveling,” for those of you slow on the uptake). And so on.

One morning I met a comely young woman at some watering hole where I had stopped briefly to flush out my chakras and, as she was wearing a Team Whiner jersey, I asked her some inane question about what it was that was bugging the Whiners that day—hills, wind, heat, pointless questions, whatever. She raised her eyes briefly from the ear of corn she was greedily munching and said, somewhat testily, I thought, “I’m not a Whiner, I’m a tease.” Fine, I thought, so come on to me a little, even if it is just a tease; it’s hot, I’m easy, what else do I have to do? Then I noticed her hat; it said, “Team Teez.” By this time she had returned to swallowing her ear of corn whole, which only increased my interest in the tease thing, but her demeanor otherwise suggested something more like Team Bored Shitless, so I didn’t pursue the matter any further.

I always enjoy seeing that the winsome Wisconsin ladies of Team Dairy-Aire have returned for another sweatfest across Iowa. Their motto is quite fetching as well, “Smell Our Dairy-Aire,” but with all those sticky hours glued to a bike saddle, all that bag balm—well, I don’t think so.

Some teams have—no offense intended here, though I’m sure some will be taken—really stupid names. Take Team Chamois Fanois, for instance. In all the labyrinthine Ride Right Rules of RAGBRAI, isn’t there a subsection somewhere dealing with the linguistic niceties of team names? I mean, I get the orthographical pun here—”chammey fanny”—but it isn’t funny or clever or interesting or anything. It’s just DUH. And that little piece of chamois hanging down like a loincloth over the fanny of each rider just adds to the DUHness. There’s already a chamois in your shorts; do you really need one flapping around on your butt as well? And what of the occasional attractive fanois which is obscured by the chamois? And doesn’t that extra chamois cause one’s fanois to be clamois? A unfortunate double whamois, if you ask me.

On Friday, I saw my perennial favorite team, the Bad Boys, laboring up the hills south of Decorah as if they were trying to pedal steam locomotives up the side of a cliff. Them boys do carry a boatload of stuff on their bikes! I was pleased to note that one of their riders was still carrying the proverbial kitchen sink (the faucets run beer!) and that their wimpy 40-pound Weber BBQ grill had been retired in favor of a much larger and heavier one made from a 55-gallon oil drum, split in half and hinged back together, the kind of grill you usually see at commercial cookouts in supermarket parking lots where bearded guys in bib overalls are feeding hundreds of overweight people. Bad Boy Mike’s coffin-sized styrofoam cooler looked a little worse for the wear, as if he possibly had just returned from the Tour of Kosovo, and it had continued to accumulate stickers and patches and miscellaneous mementi mori from their other far-flung travels—The Tour of Death Valley, The Frostbite Festival Tour of Northern Saskatchewan, the Exploring the Vertical Rock Faces of Utah, the Mostly Underwater Tour of Minnesota, etc.

The Bad Boys even ride the January BRR Tour in Iowa, a sort of Iditerod for bikes, except colder. BRR stands for “Bike Ride to Rippey,” the latter being some little town north of Perry (that puts it right on the map for you, doesn’t it?). Why anyone would do this, I don’t know. The Bad Boys actually invited me to go with them one year on this ride—surprising, because by their standards I am one of those wussy, shaved-leg, mamby-pamby, spandex/lycra-clad cycledorks whom they would otherwise loathe. But it was (no kidding) seven degrees below zero and windier than hell that weekend, and I figured that if experience was any guide, and I showed up in Iowa on a bike, the temperature would surely soar to 110 degrees in the shade, which would cause an equinoctial Armageddon, unhinge the seasons, melt the polar icecaps, inundate major coastal cities and prevent me from ever visiting Charleston, South Carolina. So I didn’t go.

I rode this year as a submarginal part of Team Locomotion, an aptly yclept group, mostly a bunch of Union Pacific railroaders, with more emphasis on the loco and less on the motion. Not that they didn’t ride. They did, some with a great mashing of gears and a frightening, vein-popping reddening of the face, suggesting perhaps the alternative name of Team Heatstroke. But once they hit camp they settled in like a train berthed in the roundhouse and weren’t about to be budged even for the unexpectedly fine food I was finding all over Iowa. Surprised me, ‘cause clearly, them boys like to eat. One time we did manage to go out more or less as a group, but further attempts at foraging en masse simply resulted in three-fourths of them straggling off the back and getting waylaid at some victual vendor along the way—sidetracked, in railroad lingo.

Camping with railroaders is a delight, however, because you get to hear a lot of railroad stories which you would not otherwise get to hear, most of them about accidents involving a decapitation or two. The New York fireman from Team Escape New York, who were camped with us, were able to contribute a couple of chilling tales in this genre, as well. If I learned nothing else on this year’s RAGBRAI, I think that I now understand that, except for those intent on the grizzliest of suicides, stepping into the path of a swiftly moving train is a very bad idea.

On that happy thought, let us move on to the subject of team mottos. Every team needs one, most seem to have one, some even clever, most not. Sadly, Team Locomotion did not have a motto, but I think a good one would have been, “Suicide Made Easy.” Another team’s shirt boasted, “We Are Iowa Waste,” which I gathered was either an advertisement for a sewage disposal service or a more-honest-than-usual self-appraisal. Being a big fan of the ancient Greeks, whose motto was “Know Thyself,” I like to think it was the latter.

I was also bemused, in an enraged sort of way, by the motto on the Steve Forbes For President t-shirt much in evidence on the ride—”Flat Hills, Flat Taxes.” It is impossible to decide which of these twin expressions is more moronic. “Flat Hills,” of course, is a contradiction in terms, which gives it a leg up on any scale of idiocy; “Flat Taxes,” however, belongs on the list of the Five Stupidest Ideas of the Century—the other four being the concealed-carry weapon law, capital punishment, tongue-piercing and Wayne Newton, not necessarily in that order. Actually, in all fairness, the flat tax isn’t that bad an idea if you’re Steve Forbes, or any other well-heeled Republican, as it allows the filthy rich to pay taxes at the same rate as you and I, who are struggling just to afford postage for our kids’ college applications. The miracle is that ordinary working people and farmers—especially farmers—buy into this baloney, hook, line, and sinker. Wasn’t the Freedom to Farm and Get Fucked Act, foisted on farmers by the Republicans, enough? With commodities prices falling and consumer prices rising, doesn’t it occur to anyone that somewhere in the middle someone is making a killing? And that that someone isn’t them? And that outfits like ConAgra and IBP deliver stretch limos full of cash to congressional Republicans? Apparently no one has noticed, especially not in Iowa—a rural state rife with Republicans. Bryson’s Theory again, I guess.

But I digress. The subject at hand was supposed to be mottos, so let me mention just one more. This one is actually more of an acronym than a motto, but what the hell, this isn’t a doctoral dissertation. Team JABB: “Just a Bunch of Bikers.” Pretty undistinguished in and of itself, but what I liked was that each member of the team had displayed on his/her bike a personal geographical descriptor, such as, “JABB Indianapolis” or “JABB Chicago.” My favorite, advertised by a young woman with astonishing naivite or an apparent appetite for anal sex: “JABB Uranus.”

Rumors have been abroad the last few years among riders I have talked to that the RAGBRAI office is trying to dumb down the ride by using a variety of stratagems, including, but not limited to, choosing more and more difficult routes, excommunicating teams of dubious repute, increasing the number of RAGBRAI stormtroopers, and by holding bi-weekly prayer meetings to implore the gods for hotter and more miserable weather. It does seem that someone standing around the water cooler there at the Register office is trying to keep a lid on the partying, possibly in the hope of leaving the beer distributors with something to sell the rest of the year. My own theory is that they are employing that age-old Machiavellian tactic of divide and conquer and make them ride around town in hopelessly slow and unreliable shuttle busses with no air-conditioning and with mean little old lady drivers who are accustomed to ordering bratty elementary school kids around and telling them, and you, to Sit down and shut up and get off when I tell you and not a moment before and no, I’m not going to stop anywhere except the designated stops and nowhere else, period, and please read the sign above the door about what to do in the event of someone else’s body fluids being discharged in your lap.

I hate it when a town breaks up the party by scattering people and events all over the place and leaving no central focal point where things can happen. It was that way in several of the towns this year, and I think it just sucked. That, and the weather. It seems to me that it used to be that nearly everything happened downtown. That’s where all the bands were, where the beer garden was, the food vendors and t-shirt joints and bike shops. Now, things are spread out all over the place—the Hooters girl was on the stage at the fairgrounds, food vendors were in the park, bike shops at the high school, one band was over by the watertower, another at the airport. I read somewhere that it is impossible to start a revolution in a city which lacks a recognizable center, a big place with some symbolic significance where people can gather, like Tiananmen Square or the Berlin Wall. But I guess that the RAGBRAI Politzei are not yet able to afford armored tanks to keep the revelers in line, so they’ve just concentrated their energies on preventing a critical mass of fun to develop. Remember the Good Ol’ Days when they used to provide wacky, wonderful, provocative entertainment right downtown? Waterballoon slingshot contests, toilet races, BMX riders jumping over people lying in the street, Patrick Hazell playing for 3000 people on the square in front of the courthouse at 5 or 6 in the afternoon? Gone, all gone. Or maybe I just missed it. It was ungodly hot, you know.

On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me that the Register continues to bother with RAGBRAI at all. I suppose that the fact that it employs half of the workforce of Iowa and brings in more money than you could rain down upon the state with daily overflights of B-52s dropping clusterbombs of cash may have something to do with it. Still, it has to be an enormous pain in the ass. My hat’s off to the people who organize this thing, the RAGBRAI office, the overnight and passthrough towns, the state cops who stand there at every major intersection directing traffic in blazing heat, wearing those silly hats.

And my special thanks this year to RAGBRAI director Jim Greene, who, at the 59th second of the 59th minute of the 11th hour gave me (well, sold, really) a pass so I could go on the ride with the Pork Belly folks, who won’t haul your stuff unless you’re a Registered Ride Religiously Right Wristbanded Rider. I had a great time. But it was too damn hot.

As always, I must remind you that I remain an aging, liberal, hippy dipshit, which should help you understand my anarchic, antiestablishment attitude. For the humor-impaired, I again offer this suggestion: lighten up. If I’ve insulted anyone—in particular, anyone belonging to the NRA—my sincere apologies. I write—as my precocious 11-year-old daughter puts it—“for effect,” not truth value. Consequently, the truth quotient of these pages isn’t especially high, but probably not worse than that of the ride’s sponsoring newspaper.

One last thing: watch your step when you get off the Virtual Bus. I don’t want you slipping on somebody’s accidental excretion of body fluids and then suing my ass from here to West Virginia. Have a nice day.

R. Bruhn’s

“Best and Worst of RAGBRAI® XXVII”

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