—Monte Python’s "Life of Brian"

I get a lot of email from people who are not cyclists, who read my RAGBRAI reports without a clue as to what RAGBRAI really is. If you’re a RAGBRAI rider, you obviously already know what RAGBRAI is all about, and could probably stop reading right now. But I’m in a philosophical mood, so bear with me. You may learn something, and by and by I’ll get around to the usual smartass stuff you’ve come to expect from these pages.                                       

RAGBRAI is an acronym for the "Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa." It is, according to its organizer, the Des Moines [Iowa] Register, the "oldest, longest and biggest bicycle ride in the world." It has been held without interruption—through heat waves, droughts, floods, even the Reagan Administration—for the past 30 years, always during the last full week of July, always starting in a town on or near the Missouri River on Iowa’s western border and ending at a town on the Mississippi River, on its verdant eastern shores.

For many riders it’s a kind of rite of passage, perhaps the most difficult physical endeavor of their lifetime. It may not be Mount Everest, and it certainly isn’t the Tour de France (which you couldn’t ride even if you wanted to), but seven days on a bicycle in Iowa, up and down hundreds of hills in 100-plus degree heat or in chilling rains, often with leg-numbing headwinds and sore-and-getting-sorer butts—well, it’s no mean feat.

But "bicycle ride" is hardly an adequate descriptor. I live in Nebraska and we have a cross-state ride, BRAN (Bicycle Ride Across Nebraska), which sports about 600 riders and could be fairly summed up as nothing much more than a long, clubby bicycle ride.

RAGBRAI is something else. "A Rolling Mardi Gras" is a phrase one often hears to describe it, and that, in a few words, comes about as close as you can get. RAGBRAI attracts riders from every state in the Union, plus a dozen or so foreign countries. It has a carnival atmosphere, a celebratory exuberance, an anything-goes/all-rules-are-suspended attitude, a zany, almost out-of-control ambiance, with an energy all its own, fueled with equal parts of sweat and alcohol.

This year (2002, in case you haven’t been paying attention) was the 30th Anniversary of the ride, so it started in 1973, the year after Gerald R. Ford became our first President-by-Default. (Before that, we elected Presidents; now, of course, the Supreme Court appoints them.)

I thought the Tour de France had been going on for something like 99 years; how can RAGBRAI claim to be the oldest ride, anyway?

The Tour is a race, not a ride, so it doesn’t count; besides, you ain’t Lance Armstrong. Apparently, back in 1973 when several Register staffers dreamed up the idea of riding their bicycles across the state, no one had ever before conceived of such a thing. (Most non-cyclists can’t conceive of it now.) All other cross-state bike rides were reputedly modeled on Iowa’s.

I don’t think anyone really knows. Theoretically, you must pay a fee and obtain a pass to do the ride. The Des Moines Register, the ride’s organizer, claims it issues only 8500 passes, but I’ve never heard of anyone being turned down. Thousands ride with no passes at all. I did so myself this year. (Na na-nana na-nah. It is still is a free country—the Bush administration’s efforts notwithstanding.) The real number of riders on any given day probably exceeds 20,000. On the Register’s own RAGBRAI website  numbers as high as 23,000 are cited. And that’s just the riders. Add to that the untold numbers of support people, food and merchandise vendors, groupies, loopies, hangers-on, fallers-off, gawkers, hawkers, squawkers and mockers and it’s as if Napoleon’s army had to come to town on bicycles, trashed the joint, and left the next day—the big difference being that when RAGBRAI leaves, instead of taking all of the money in town with them, the riders leave all of their money behind.

Each year the route is different, but it’s about 500 miles, less a few, by the time you zigzag your way across the state on county roads and minor highways.

It’s complicated. Maybe their auditor is Arthur Andersen. Maybe they’re using fuzzy math or exaggerating or even outright lying. Better not to ask.

Good question. Consider the negatives: The ride is held in late July, when temperatures are likely to soar into triple digits and torrential rains are always a possibility; Iowa is not by any means flat, even if that’s the way they prefer their taxes; Republicans are not known for their ability to get down and party; and Iowa is definitely not sexy—in fact Iowa has more fat people per capita than any other state.

As to this last point, the thoughtful reader may be asking, "Oh, yeah? What makes you such an obesity expert?" Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t just pull this stuff out of my ass, you know. I do my homework. I have my ear to the ground, my finger on the pulse of America, I keep my eyes peeled, I have a nose for news, my toes are always testing the water, my mind is like a steel trap...whatever.

OK, OK—it’s hearsay. My nephew told me. But he’s lived in Iowa for four years, and besides, I did some original research on my own. Sitting in a downtown sidewalk cafe in Des Moines on the way home from this year’s ride, I counted 25 fat ladies passing by my table in a 15 minute period. I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up. I have witnesses. And I’m not talking just overweight here. I’m talking grossly obese.

"And why," I can hear you feminists muttering, "did you count only fat ladies? Why not fat men? Or fat kids? Or fatheads, like yourself?" The answer is simple. Because it’s my survey, and I can count whatever I want. If you want to sit in a sidewalk cafe and count fat men, be my guest. In Iowa you’ll be plenty busy. Let me know what you find out.

But yet (he said, struggling to get back to the original point) Iowa is the perfect setting for an extravaganza such as RAGBRAI. It has just the right infrastructure—thousands of paved county roads; small towns every few miles to break up the ride and bring out the local loonies; a fairly uniform geography, which allows the ride (and the money it generates) to follow a different course each year; enough larger towns, sprinkled more or less evenly over the state, to play overnight host to the multitudinous cast of riders; and an open and friendly population that knows a cash cow when it sees one. And, of course, Iowa got into the game early. They hit the ground pedaling, as it were, and it all just came together for them. Now people from New York come to Iowa. Imagine that!    

Gelette Burgess recognized the huge economic impact of RAGBRAI on Iowa when he wrote:

I’ve never seen a purple cow;

I never hope to see one.

A cash cow’s better anyhow,

And RAGBRAI’s got to be one.

Then there’s the weather. Somebody told me that the heat index on the first day was 110 degrees. Sounds about right. I must have drunk 150 liters of liquid that day, never peed once and was still thirsty the next morning. Then I dived out on the last day when faced with something that no Nebraskan has had to contend with in months: rain. I mean, there was this wet stuff, pouring out of the sky! I thought I had woken up underwater. Had I slept outside that night I might have, but I slept in the high school gym.

And then there was the wind, the relentless wind, always of the head variety. How do they do it? How does the RAGBRAI office always manage to provide a gale force headwind, no matter which direction the ride happens to go? My crack team of researchers and I now believe we have found the answer: they buy weather futures.

Now, wind is in great demand in the Midwest in the summer (tornadoes, storm fronts, political speeches, RAGBRAI reports, etc.), so it makes sense to get into the futures trade, so you can get just the wind you want, when you want it, and in the direction you want it from. RAGBRAI organizers—rich Republicans that they are, cozy in the corridors of corporate power—naturally have this figured out.

And why, you ask, why would the RAGBRAI office want to do this? Why would they want to blow a hot wind in the faces of riders day after day, north, south, east and occasionally even west? Why?

Geez, you are so dumb. They do it to increase beer sales, of course. That, and to tire you out so you won’t raise so much hell in the passthrough and overnight towns.

Yes, I have noticed. Bud and Bud Light. That’s it. The official beers of RAGBRAI. In a few years, mark my words, it’ll be the Anheuser-Busch RAGBRAI.

In Emmetsburg, a town which works up quite a head of foam over its pride in its Irish heritage (you got your shamrock, your Blarney Stone, your wearing o’ the green), I was met with blank stares from behind every bar on main street when I eschewed the Bud/Bud Light dichotomy and asked for a bottle of Guinness. Frankly, I think the Emmetsburgers have lost a wee bit o’ contact with the Old Sod, and I’ll bet there isn’t a person in town under the age of 80 who could find Ireland on a map if they used both hands.

Kybos. There are Kybos everywhere. Everywhere except where you need one.

Oh, I feel one coming on right now, a really self-serving and whiny one to boot, so be prepared.

First of all, a little background. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great egotists of the last, or any other, century once said, "Faced with the choice of a false modesty or a natural arrogance, I choose the latter, and have never regretted it." (Or words to that effect. I have my crack team of researchers tracking down the exact quote right now.)

It always amazes me how far natural arrogance, or narcissism, will take you. At the risk of boring you shitless, I’m going to quote a passage from a study done some years ago called "The Dark Side of Charisma."

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people...and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential.... Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition...when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

I met just such a narcissist this year. I won’t mention his name, but let’s just note that he was from a faraway state, fancied himself quite the writer, and had gotten himself a very nice gig writing a daily column for a big newspaper back home about his (virgin) experiences on RAGBRAI. He made himself quite the celebrity around camp, made fun of the way bikers dressed (though he himself belonged to a subculture whose fashions are notoriously loopy), and was generally long on talk and a short on listening. He was one of those people whose every word carries with it a hidden barb, a demeaning put-down, a dissing tone, concealed, but always there, like a fat rock under your sleeping bag.

But never mind. The naturally arrogant narcissist is always like that. When we tolerate these types, it is usually because, despite their annoying presumption, they really do have something on the ball. Frank Lloyd Wright would be the classic case in point. He was an arrogant asshole, but he was also one of the greatest architects who ever lived. You had to accept the one to get the other.

Right now. I’m sorry. I apologize for that inexcusable outburst. I actually thought the guy was kind of funny at times—like the day he made a hip sartorial statement by wearing not a US Postal biking jersey (nerdy), but a regular US Postal short sleeved shirt (cool and ironic). I would have liked him more, though, had he at least offered me a hit on the joint he was smoking when I ran across him one night between the Ryder trucks. (Not that I would have accepted.) Like the good consensus-builder that I am, I tried to show a genuine interest in his hobby, and asked (ironically) if it was local Iowa ditchweed he was smoking, and he said (without irony, so far as I could tell), no, it was good Mexican pot. Then he took another hit and walked away.

Well, I missed Pat Hazell, that most consummate Iowa bluesman. If he bent a single note on this year’s ride, I never heard of it. And I miss all of the dorky local stuff we used to see, toilet races, geezer bands, all the wacky wonderment that small towns can trot out in such idiosyncratic splendor. The whole ride, like the nation at large, seems to be going Faceless Corporate. Even team busses, those bastions of individual expression, have taken on a monied gloss, with corporate logos exquisitely airbrushed on their sides and clean-cut CEO types lounging in their rooftop martini gardens.

One bus, however, does deserve to be singled out for the "Ralph Cramden Someday, Alice, Pow! Right in the Kisser Award" (so named after Jackie Gleason’s character on "The Honeymooners"). Team Spirits’ bus, small by RAGBRAI standards, but huge on the scale of Rube Goldbergian cockeyedness, sat near my camp one evening in the pleasant light of the westering sun, looking for all the world like something out of a Mad Max movie. When someone stepped out of the bus I half expected to see Terry Gilliam, or at least Mel Gibson, but it just turned out to be a guy from Omaha.

I missed Team Bad Boys, my all-time favorite team. Either they weren’t in attendance or I just didn’t hang around enough naked beer slides to run into them. I also didn’t see (but didn’t particularly miss) the Wisconsin Cheddarheads, but the fetching ladies of Team Dairy-Aire, also of Wisconsin extraction, who used to sport the spiffy motto, "Smell our Dairy-Aire," were sorely missed. Again, maybe I just didn’t see (or smell) them.

There seemed to be an abundance of other things to smell, however, hog farms being high on the scale of redolence. I went into Cedar Rapids one day (not on the official route) and noticed that their motto is "The Town of Five Seasons." Hmmm...five seasons. Let’s see, I can think of only three: Spring, Road Construction, and Christmas. But then I learned that the five "seasons" they were referring to were not seasons at all, but smells. Seems they have five big mills in town, ADM, General Mills, Quaker Oats...I forget the others. These five big mills get to stink up the town on some kind of rotating basis. Monday it’s soybeans, Tuesday they’re toasting oats, Wednesday it’s Sugar Frosted Flakes, and so on. On weekends I don’t know what they do for disagreeable odors.

Maybe everybody wears bad perfume or goes without bathing.

On the other hand, there was some local color this year. I saw a flock of nuns singing somewhere, and a friend found four grandmas in long dresses, tapdancing on their porch. I really liked the merry fat man in bibbers—it must have been on Thursday, in one of the passthough towns—who was pedaling an exercise bike perched on top of a hay wagon, blowing bubbles with a battery-powered gun in one hand, and drinking beer with the other. This was at about 9:00 in the morning. Somebody asked him how long he was going to keep at it, and he said, "I don’t know. I ain’t there yet." Get that man another beer! Bud or Bud Light?

In another passthrough town, Plymouth, I believe, some outfit called the "Bike Ride Garden" was selling personally monogramed bricks. Well, what the hell, it isn’t a particularly hilly day, give me a couple. No, wait, make it three. I’ll just stuff them in the pockets of my jersey. It’s this kind of entrepreneurial spirit that has made America great.

I wonder if they sell futures?

I do applaud the grown-up attitude that most towns (except Charles City) have adopted vis-a-vis alcohol (i.e., Bud and Bud Light) on the streets. Somewhere along the way towns seem to have figured out that there are some battles that just aren’t worth fighting, that maybe, post 9-11, there just might be greater threats to the public welfare than a few thousand bicyclists drinking beer on the street one night every ten years. Hurrah for them! Culturally they’ve made the move from diapers to training pants. Such enlightenment should come to my state. Oy! Fat chance.

There are many strategies. Perhaps the most straightforward, if not the most convenient or comfortable, is to pay the RAGBRAI office for a pass and use their baggage shuttle, which is included in the price. (You have to pay for it, whether you use it or not.) There are a couple of drawbacks, however. One is that you have to load your gear into a semi trailer and when they unload it in the campground you will have to paw through a mountain of bags higher than any hill you’ve had to climb on the bike. And when you get to the final town, on the Mississippi, oops! RAGBRAI doesn’t provide any transportation back to where you started, so now you’re stranded in Bellevue or Muscatine or Dubuque, or wherever.

One of the more popular options seems to be forming up a "team" of your own (or joining an existing one), hiring a Ryder truck and providing your own sag. (SAG, by the way, is reputed to be an acronym for "Support And Gear." My crack team of researchers is currently looking into this.) If you do form up a team, you must think up a team name, a team motto and a team jersey. It is not permitted under the RAGBRAI Ride Right Rules to have a team without a motto—the sillier the better. Example: Team Plywood, "Easy to Lay, Fun to Nail." You get the idea. You get extra points if your team name touts the overconsumption of alcohol (Team Martini, Team Spirits, Team Pharfrumpuken), sex (Team Bare Naked, Team Mornin’ Boner, Team Hard), adolescent or antisocial behavior (Team Bad Boy, Team Angry, Team Evil), or alludes in some way to the difficulties of the ride (Team Butt Ice, Team Diehard, The Whiners). You lose points for lame or stupid names, of which there are a surfeit (Killer Bees, The Cheddarheads, Team Lanning, or my own former Team Harem).

Whether you’re on a team or not, if you have your own sag vehicle, you can arrange (through the Chamber of Commerce of the various overnight towns) to stay in private homes each night. This option provides you with shorter lines at the shower, indoor toilets and, depending on your host’s preferences, maybe a place to sleep indoors as well. Otherwise, you camp in the yard. I’ve had pretty good luck with this method, but there are dangers. One year our host’s grandson was a Peeping Tom and on more than one occasion I’ve stayed with people whose standards of personal hygiene would frighten a pig. At the risk of repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself, here is an updated list of the: 

10. Good sign: Other riders’ vehicles parked in driveway.

Bad sign: Old refrigerators parked in driveway.

9. Good sign: Host has cheerful 19-year-old daughter.

Bad sign: Host has grumpy 79-year-old girlfriend.

8. Good sign: Bike shorts and jerseys on clothesline.

Bad sign: Host has his lace underwear on clothesline.

7. Good sign: Host’s fridge full of beer and pop.

Bad sign: Host’s fridge full of body parts.

6. Good sign: Host greets you at door with beer in hand.

Bad sign: Host greets you at door with himself in hand.

5. Good sign: Dining room table covered with snacks.

Bad sign: Dining room table covered with carburetor parts.

4. Good sign: Host offers to buy dinner.

3. Good sign: Host has giant screen TV.

Bad sign: Host has giant boa constrictor.

2. Good sign: Host has fully equipped laundry facility in basement.

Bad sign: Host has fully equipped crematorium in basement.

1. Good sign: Host has just cleaned the house.

Bad sign: Host has not emptied his colostomy bag in a week.

For the ultimate in bourgeois excess, however, there’s nothing like travelling on RAGBRAI in an 80-foot motorhome to insulate you from reality and allow you to wallow in your accustomed middleclass luxury. I’ve done the ride this way a couple of times myself, and discovered that in spite of my liberal, Marxist values, I can indulge a little indulgence now and then. The motorhome allows us to enjoy all of the rights to which Thomas Jefferson said we were entitled as citizens of a free society: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, air conditioning, primetime TV, clean sheets, Viking range, dishwasher, subsidized gasoline, etc. You can even bring your riding lawnmower, if you want, and your WeedWhacker. An added benefit of the motorhome is that you can run the air conditioner all night long and annoy every lowly tent camper within earshot.

But perhaps the neatest way to travel RAGBRAI, if you can accept the idea that there is something more to communing with Nature than just looking out your kitchen window (i.e., you’ll have to tent camp), is by signing on with a charter outfit. Not only will a charter carry your gear from town to town and find a nice campsite for you each night, but they will bus you to the beginning of the ride and bus you back again when it’s over. Plus, you get amenities like a shady canopy, comfortable chairs, cold beer and pop, campground BBQs, a little live music, and so on, depending on how together your charter has its act. You can find a list of approved charters on the official RAGBRAI website. I recommend Pork Belly Ventures, but there are probably other good ones, too.

The deal is, that after nine RAGBRAIs, I felt like having a failsafe option, a fallback position, a redoubt should retreat become necessary. Besides, both my girlfriend and I forgot to train.

Terribly. I can still barely stand myself. I’ve taken to drinking to ease the pain. My therapist says I my be in recovery for months, even years. (He’s delighted.) I even tried Confession, but then remembered that I wasn’t Catholic. I may have scarred my conscience for life. I’m eating Prozac for breakfast, Zoloft for lunch, Paxil for dinner and Lexapro for a midnight snack.

O Doctor! My Doctor!

(with apologies to Walt Whitman)

O Doctor! My Doctor! Help me please!

I’ve got to find some way to ease

This burning guilt, these shaking knees!

It makes my eyes water,

Has frightened my daughter;

I’m a lamb at the slaughter.

Now, it’s making me sneeze!

O Doctor! My, doctor! You must help me out!

This deepening depression I told you about

Is going to consume me in Freudian doubt!

My heat is all prickly,

My stool looking sickly;

You must do something quickly

With all of your mystical medical clout.

Oh, doctor! My doctor! I’ll do as you say!

I can’t take this torment for even a day;

I’m rueing and stewing and wasting away!

I’ll clean up my act

And own up to the fact

That it’s morals I’ve lacked!

But couldn’t I still drive my car, anyway?

Everything I have written in this report is a lie, including this. I love the Des Moines Register and read it religiously every day. I am a closet conservative and wear argyle socks and women’s underwear. I am not, and never was, an aging liberal hippy dipshit with an attitude problem, so if you’re looking for the source of my antidisestablishmentarian bias you’ll have to look somewhere else. I’m hardly clever enough to pour piss out of a boot, but I’m still smart enough to see that it ain’t a good idea to go to war when your Commander in Chief is dumber than a pile of dirt.

All photographs are used without permission. Sorry. If I made any money off this deal, you could sue me for copyright infringement, but I don’t make a dime, so you’re SOL, too. I gave credit where I knew it. If you find a photo of yours on this site and are seriously offended, let me know and I’ll remove it. Otherwise, thanks.

R. Bruhn’s

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