Iron Belle: Days 3-6

Recovery

Day 3 June 30, 2025, Miles 52-58

Rochester: After breakfast, it is clear we are not going anywhere today.  We are still sore and exhausted.  We will extend our stay.

A Lyft quickly returns us to our bikes. The now despised Google map with bicycle routes highlighted offers to return us to the Clinton River path.  I find the State of Michigan Iron Belle website and discover the trail is closed.  We would have had another Swamp Debacle had we gone that way. 

Instead, we zip around on paved roads and are back to our hotel just as the skies open.

At the front desk, we are informed that our room is scheduled for maintenance.  We will have to move.  Well, drag.

Until we open the door to the offered room: nearly twice the size with a river view.  We sleep for hours in the big king bed and only rouse ourselves to dinner on the veranda overlooking the stream, where one of the big trees has fallen during the storm.

Thank God we had the sense to stay.

 

We have it figured out… until we don’t.

Day 4, July 1, 2025, Miles 58-72

Lake Orion: The ride along the Paint Creek trail is lovely, but we could hardly move slowly.  I blame sore muscles for the strain I am feeling.  But when the bike does not accelerate down a small hill, I realize the problem is not me. All the jamming and cramming of the bikes has messed up my back brake and it is dragging along the rim.

I release the brake, so now have no back brakes at all.  Thank goodness this is a rails to trails conversion—one of the first in the nation—along the old Michigan Central rail line.  Route markers proudly proclaim 38 miles from its origin adjacent to the restored station. 

Wes is plodding along.  At every intersection, I wait- forever it seems—to see his bright orange shirt telling me he is still on the path.  But oh-so-slowly. 

When we pop out into the hot noon sun and screaming Telegraph Hwy traffic, Wes is panting.  “I can’t go anymore.”   We have only come 9 miles.

“Well, let’s go do our laundry and figure out what to do.”

Wes goes north; I go south.  Frantic phone calls later, “where the hell are you?”

At the somewhat disheveled laundromat, the skinny grey-haired attendant, is pleased to see Heidi and asks us three times to make sure she gets water, but she cannot let her in the facility.  That leaves Wes sitting on a bench outside as the shade slowly leaves and the temperature rises. 

I wash the mud and stains from the swamp debacle and try to find lodging.   Except one Red Roof Inn 3 miles south, the rest are 15 miles south in Auburn Hills.  I make the reservation. 

Wes pleads, can we find someplace to wait out of the sun?  Sure, I will go the Meijers just down the street, replace my sunglasses that the swamp ate, and get Heidi some food.  I leave dog, Wes and bike on a bench to foray to Meijers. 

No sunglasses.  The clerk tells me, “We don’t get all the stuff the big stores have.”  But I do get some food for tonight, return to the bench, where Wes pronounces he cannot possibly ride another 3 miles. 

Ok.  I try the Lyft gambit again.  A ride will come in 30 minutes.  Whoops.  The driver declined.   The app searches and searches for another driver and I see all sorts of cars circling around Auburn Hills.  We wait; it looks.  We eat our dinner sitting on the bench.  We wait some more.

“C’mon Wes” I cajole.  “It’s only 3 miles.  Think of it 16,000 feet.”  Nope.

We wait some more.  It is now five pm, hotter and louder than ever.

“No driver is coming.  We must bike it.”

And we do.  The dog trots alongside me until her tongue hangs out.  But it’s more down than up and we are there before 6.   To our delight, there’s a family friendly bar and grill just next door.

Red Roof Inn (and Suites!) is creepy, well used and none too clean.  In the narrow corridor, we pass numerous rooms that are propped open on the external bolt.  At the very end of the hall, we enter a dank, dark, sweltering room with two queen beds.  Wes immediately turns on the rattling and noisy air-conditioning which spews a pitiful stream of semi-cool air.

Wait.  I requested a king room.  Wes rolls his eyes at me as I announce I am going to see about changing rooms.   The tattooed sports guy at the desk apologizes. “All the king rooms are out of commission cause the motel got hit by lightning, and satellite and media is out.”

Back to the room, a quick hose-off and over to the bar for a quick beer and big salad which our bodies thanks us for.  At the room, I conk out while Wes turns on the television to find out it doesn’t work.  The manager drags another television in from who knows where.  It works until it doesn’t.

I am awakened at 1am by Heidi, who needs to go outside.  The motel is humming with activity.  One mom with three young daughters is cleaning (out?) their room.  There are drinkers lurking on the stairs, noise and hubbub from rooms up and down the halls.  Back in the room, I try to sleep on the hot bed, but cannot. 

I am worried about finding a place to stay for tomorrow in Oxford.  There is nothing.  Expensive bed and breakfasts that don’t take dogs.  A few airbnb’s that are not available.  Not a single commercial chain.

Anxious, I rejoin WarmShowers, a hospitality app for touring bicyclists which provides housing in private residences.  I fill out the tour profile and provide photos of Heidi and Wes and I, hoping to make us look appealing to convivial hosts.  At nearly 2am, I spot a host in Oxford.  Andy KyongHo Chang, who has cycled across Michigan and walked the Camino de Santiago.  This looks promising.

At 2am, I make the request.  Too worried to sleep, I again the dog out at 3am, only to encounter a drunken young couple wobbling down the hall.  When I return with the dog, he is wobbling back down the hall with an ice bucket.  I finally fall asleep around 4am.

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A Touch of Grace

Day 5, July 2, 2025, Miles 72-86

St. Augustine Monastery: Was wakes me at 6, “We have to go before the sun starts beating.”  Bad coffee and the rest of yesterday’s lunch serves as breakfast, and we are out into the cool morning.  Telegraph Road is mercifully quiet as we push our bikes back up to the trail. 

We ride past lakes and ponds on this cool blue morning.  Before long, we join the Polly-Ann, another beautiful rails to trails conversion skirting woods and marsh.  Although Wes is still slow, he is in good spirits.  I wait for him at every crossroads.   He can hardly wait to get a latte in Oxford.  Mr. Coffee has been without his fix since we left Detroit. 

At the coffee shop, I discover there’s a bike shop a few blocks away.  I leave Wes happily nursing his lavender latte while I go to get my brakes fixed.  At Oxford Bikes, I am met by two men, one of whom is tall and athletic, about my age.  I tell him I popped by brakes because they were rubbing.  He sees the brake is not touching the rim, and says straight-faced, “You know they won’t work that way.”

This proves to be the first of constant stream of jokes from Mike, who asserts, “I’m not really here.  This is my day off.”  He’s agog that I am actively on tour and decides to fix the brakes and do a full check without asking us to come back.  He puts my bike, shorn of the trailer and panniers, on a service rack conveniently attached to a tree outside the shop.

Then he starts tsk, tsk, tsking.  “Have you been have trouble with your back derailleur?”

It has been pretty clunky, I admit.

“It shouldn’t even be working.  It’s mis-threaded and the casing is broken.  You’re not leaving this shop like this.”

As we visit and joke, I learn that Mike is a retired computer specialist who had been working on AI since its inception.  He works part-time at the bike shop as a hobby.  We remember the first days of using computers with punch cards and COBOL.  He laughs when I told him about trying to put a graph in my dissertation.  In 1985, that meant specifying connections between individual pixels on the page using commands like DOTAT and LINETO. 

While waiting for the repairs, I check and re-check WarmShowers, growing increasingly anxious.  If this doesn’t turn out, we will be without a bed tonight.  Right as Mike is smoothing and adjusting the gear shift, I get a text from Andy.  We are welcome to come to St. Augustine’s House, three miles east of Oxford.  What a relief!

Finished with his machinations, Mike plops the bike down in front of me, “Tell me if this is gooder.”

It is much gooder.  Smooth shifting, sharp breaking, fun biking.  Huzzah!

Inside the shop, a constant stream of people are buying e-bikes.  (One couple our age bought 100 pound behemoths, more motorbike than bike.  She looked bemused, but her husband insisted.)

I buy new sunglasses to replace the clips lost to the swamp, a bell for Wes’ bike and a brake and derailleur job on the spot.  Mike insists I take extra brake and derailleur cable.  ‘Have you got extra tubes?”  I don’t, but we do have patch kits and we know how to use them.  I do buy an extra tube for Wes’ trailer which seems to have a damaged stem and loses air consistently.  We had great fun pumping the flat tire in the swamp. 

The whole bill is much lower than I expected.  They gave us the “I can’t believe you are going to ride your bike to Iron Mountain” discount.

My bike is spinning beautifully as we head east in the hot afternoon sun.  A couple miles up, I see a young bald eagle standing by the side of the road.  He doesn’t fly off, so I assume he is hurt.  But no.  It tries to get a large rabbit carcass off the ground but cannot do so before I get too close.  He drops it with a squawk and flies off to a nearby tree.  A raven harries him on the way.  I wonder who will get the rabbit prize.

The road soon turns to sandy, steep hills.  So out comes Heidi and we start walking our way to the monastery.  Wes once again is nowhere to be seen.  At one treacherous loose downhill, I wait and wait to warn him.  He is not doing well.  “How far?” 

“Just a bit more than a mile,” I sooth.  3/10 of a mile is just a bit, right?  It certainly sounds better than “slightly less than half-way.”

Along the way, I suddenly recall that our dear friend Sam Castelli used to come to a retreat near Oxford.  In fact, after he died of COVID, that is where his ashes were placed.  Could this be the same place?

St. Augustine is a lush, treed respite.  We lean our bikes on the stone and beam chapel and text Andy.  And wait.  And wait some more.  We have arrived during one of prayer times, an “office” in their parlance.

But all is well.  We are taken to the refectory, where we are placed in two small rooms simply furnished with single beds and a desk.  There is no WIFI.  Nor air conditioning.

Andy has an open round smiling face and buzz cut.  He has been here full-time since 2019 and remembers Sam.  What grace we are here.

We are asked to store our bikes in the pole barn, which is home to a resplendent metallic orange Harley Davidson motorcycle.  Andy laughs, “It’s Bishop Jeffrey’s.”

When we went to the service for the first time, we were stunned at the beautiful—and new-- chapel.  In the choir seats facing each other, 6 men, none of them young.  Andy was the youngest, but closer to 50 than 20.

At Vespers we meet Brother Richard who confirms he knows all the Little Brothers.  I remark that we have known them for 30 years.  He smiles, “I’ve known them for 40!”

Both Brother Richard and Bishop Jeffrey are tiny slender men, no more than 5’7” and maybe 140 pounds.   Wes towers over them.  Brother Richard is probably 70 years old, but his face is unmarked by the deep lines of stress.  He crinkles when he smiles, which he often does.  Bishop Jeffrey looks a bit like a ferret, with a long straight nose, and tiny active hands.  Both are barefoot and wear black Capuchin robes.

On the left of the bishop are two residents, Richard McSherry and our host Andy.

When I ask his name, “Richard McSherry” he says to me, without making eye contact.  Richard McSherry has the thick parted hair of a 1950’s matinee idol.  He is almost always silent, although he reads with passion and beauty, which is a surprise. 

I ask if he is a monk, and he tells me, “Oh no. An Associate.”  He has been here for more than a decade. “Only Brother Richard has been here longer.”

Right before the service begins, I am shocked to be greeted by Billy Mark, who worked for Matrix years ago and who was Kresge Artist the same year I was.  I haven’t seen him in 10 years.  He’s been coming here for years, he tells me.

The service is a series of chanted Psalms, readings and prayers.  The chapel is spare, with open timbers and a 30 foot ceiling.  The windows face the towering trees.  As my mind wanders during the soothing drone of the chant, I find myself staring at the crown of a giant elm tree highlighted in the clerestory windows.

When they sing the Lord, the King, the Most High, I automatically change it to “ The Creating.  (I tried Creator for a while.  Creating is more accurate.  It’s ongoing and encompasses the livingness and dynamism of life around us and beyond us.)

After participating in several offices within the cycle of the day, but not all of them, I have so many questions.

At the open conversation period during dinner, I asked if water from the property if the water goes to the Clinton (i.e. Erie) or the Flint. (Saginaw Bay.)  Brother Richard had never given one thought to that.  “I guess we could try to find out,” he says helpfully.  (Guess I won’t be interviewing him about his personal relationship to his local water.)

We settle in for a pleasant night, but it’s not pleasant for Heidi.  A booming thunderstorm has her running from spot to spot, trying to find some hidey-hole where she feels safe.  I finally put her panting anxious self in an armoire and cover her head.  At last, she sleeps.

While Wes and Heidi gently snore, I plug away on the blog.  I eventually fall asleep on the top of my bed in my non-airconditioned cell, grateful, once again, that grace has touched our trip.

It is beautiful and restful here.  We don’t get it, but somehow it touches us and brings us peace and respite.

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A Day of Reflection

Day 6, July 3, 2025 , Miles 86 and holding

St. Augustine Monastery: We got up early-ish with every intention of cycling away.  Wes is super-anxious about getting out before the sun gets too hot, but I am shilly-shallying, “Why don’t we stay another day.  It’s beautiful here.  I’d like to receive Eucharist at 8:30.”

Wes, shrill, “That’s too late!  Are you trying to torture us?”

At the one spot by the library that has WIFI, I fail to find any lodging in Ortonville, our next destination.  No hotels, motels, no Warmshowers.  I even check Tamarack Recreation Camp and a farm stay.  No, no. and no.  Finally, I find an Airbnb in Ortonville.  It’s available.

Tomorrow.

 There. It’s decided.  One more day at St. Augustine’s…or as I am told, “It is not August- een, that’s a city in Florida.  It’s Augus-tin, named for the Berber saint of the 4^th century.”

So it’s a day of journaling, sleeping and being quiet.

And taking stock.

We are doing ok.  We are still sore from the swamp and it seems that 15-20 miles is about as much as we can do.  Wes is slowly more able to lift that recalcitrant leg over his bike.  But he is slow.  When I am letting Heidi trot with the bike, we are going about 6 miles an hour.   But hey, we are moving.

As our goddaughter said, “Even if you only do five miles, you are still beating those still sitting on the couch.”

I am sitting on my little bed in my little cell.  I’m going to go pray in a few minutes.  We have a place for tomorrow.  I am content.