Dispatch #3
Wednesday, August 21
Hartford, Wisconsin

Well, not Hartford itself. We are parked in the lot beside St. Olaf Lutheran Church, surrounded be an easy green, horse pastures and stables, a well-mown cemetery, and the grand rolling cornfields, bean fields of Washington county. This is where I spent the night.

So here's an adventure:

The actual distance from Delafield to Hartford is not in itself difficult. My mileage at yesterday's end was 147. And the hills were not unexpected (though I'm hard pressed to find one flat road around here which is neither a rail-road or a U.S. highway). My map, on the other hand, sent me into twists and impossibilities which swallowed me and my time as Grendel swallowed the good and worthy warriors of Hrothgar's Hall.

West and a tad north of Oconomowoc, between North Lake and Pine Lake, just under tiny Cornell Lake, the map directed me down (down) a single lane road called Oakland, woods immediately on both sides of the road and me. I took it at first as a wonderful diversion, cool and quite. The map instructed me to find another such road called (so said the map) Brumdee, which would deliver me to the truer road called Beaver Lake Road.

But Oakland continued down and down. There were some palatial houses tucked away the closer I came to Pine Lake: tennis courts, circular drives, broad lawns in sunlight - and then the woods again. I followed Oakland until it died in the driveway of a white house whose land descended to water. I had seen no sign of a Brumdee.

So I turned back. I found a narrower lane which ascended on the angle of a plane out of O'Hare - which also ended in the circular drive of an expensive habitation, not mine, not of the animals', but of humans hidden away in a golden den. (Or they may have been at another home, some of these places being summer getaways.)

Back and forth I cycled.

Until I heard voices up a little lane. I turned in. Three dogs (brown labs) dashed toward me, barking. A man shouted their names, and they backed away. The man was working on a pickup truck. I could hear the voice of another behind the truck. I called out that I'd be grateful for some directions. I was half way to them when I called that I could use some directional help. Two men raised their heads at once, both men much younger than me, both shaven completely bald, both glittering with rings in their ears and in various other cartilages of their physiognomies.

"No problem, man!"

The one man was brisk and accommodating.

I showed him the map, and he started to laugh. "Can't," he said, and then again he said, "But you can. Yep, you can."

Make the connection from Oakland to Brumdee.

"Look," he said. "Rich folk got tired of traffic making and easy drop from county K to here, so they broke up the road and planted planted trees. C'm on. I'll show you."

Immediately my shining friend turned, wheeled back a huge Harley, barked its deep engine into life, and road down the lane and right on Oakland (if Oakland, indeed, it still was).

Now I tell you the truth: where he stopped to show me my way there was no road. No road at all. But something like a hiking path disappearing upground into the woods.

My bike is laden with paniers on either side of the rear wheel, a case on the rack, another case on my handle-bars. And I myself am no slip of a thing.

A path. Upon which riding was impossible. Up which I saw nothing but a gathering curtain of trees.

"That's her," he said. "Watch for a three-story barn," he said. "Bear left. Can't miss it."

Alone in a deep wood, with none but a bald angel to guide me, I can be a trusting soul. I walked my bike into the woods. Well, he had said it would open up to another road just like this one.

I never found a three-story barn. But one might pass it at ten yards and miss it for the forest. In time I found a road and no markers. I went winding one way (down and frightfully down, for if this wasn't right, I'd be pumping up the road again.)

It wasn't right. It ended (again) among houses set at odd angles to one another. I turned and retraced and went until even the houses ceased to be.

Now, I had an appointment. At one pm I was to meet bikers near "Holy Hill," still at some distance away, and time was being (more than swallowed) digested.

Back I went again to a large white house with one car in the driveway. Do the rich people really want to be left alone? Do they destroy roads for such privacy?

I went to the front door and ran the doorbell and stood well back so that I might seem a threat.

In time an elderly woman came and looked through the windows beside the door's jamb. She raised a single finger and disappeared. Then she returned with a very large key and made that device rattle in the lock until the bolt snapped back and she could open the door. A soft glory of white hair, a steadfast look into my eyes, and a pleasant question: What could she do for me.

My nature is changing. Necessity will change it. In my singularity upon this bicycle, I am growing both bolder and easier in the company of strangers. The genial old, the balded young, bikers more leathered and louder than I am, the financially comfortable and those who cut their eyes at the rich, yes: I can approach them. And whatever their more complex personalities may be, I am granted some simpler part of them right away. And it is as much my personality as theirs (in that particular moment of meeting and speaking and leave-taking again) which can shape the relationship. Necessity will persuade me to speak. Kindness and an easiness with my need will make our speaking good.

But since Necessity is such a shaper of the personal nature and the natures of relationships thereafter, I pray the I am ever wise enough to distinguish between necessities which are common and good and of God and necessities which are born of sin, self-centeredness, false or destructive hungers.

Directions when one is lost. There. Yes. That is a clean necessity and good and it can be holy.

Directions: and anyone who has them and can guide you - anyone, however she or he appears - that one is your heavenly messenger and your angel.

"Brumdee?" my white-haired angel asked, confused. "Brumdee? No, there's no Brumdee here. Tell you what, though. Take this road, my road, that road, right there, in front of my house - see it? Take Brumder that way and you will come to County K."

Brum-der, my Lord, my Lord.

'Twas Brumder all along.

Walt