Cleveland, OH to Ann Arbor, MI (September 8)

Distance covered today: 203 miles

Distance covered total: 898 miles

Estimated mileage remaining: 2,602 miles (74% left to go)

The drive from Cleveland to Ann Arbor would combine the best and worst elements of life on the road.  The day’s highlights included a couple of very worthwhile stops along the way, but those sightseeing detours (coupled with some frustrating navigational hiccups) made an already long and dreary day of scooting even longer.

My nearly twelve-hour day of travel began much the way the previous one had, with rain in the forecast but not yet on the pavement by the time I got up in the morning.  Once again unsure of how long the dry spell would last, I hit the road with a heightened sense of urgency.  Besides the threat of rain, I had some business to tend to before leaving Cleveland.

Scooting the familiar roads of Cleveland felt great.  I was probably experiencing the same excitement that salmon feel when they return to their native waters to spawn.  While I would’ve enjoyed a lengthier stay in town, I still managed to cobble together a pretty thorough drive-by tour of the city in my happy salmon-like state.

First, I cruised through the fun neighborhood of Coventry in Cleveland Heights, past the Garfield Monument at Lake View Cemetery, through Little Italy and University Circle, and down Euclid (essentially Cleveland’s Main Street).  Then I swirled around Public Square in the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers and cruised by The Stadiums Formerly Known As Gund Arena and Jacobs Field before crossing the Carnegie bridge over the Cuyahoga and the Flats and into the happenin’ Ohio City neighborhood on the city’s West Side.  This part of town is home to a bunch of cool restaurants, the West Side Market, Great Lakes Brewing Company, the Barber College (where you can get professional grade haircuts for $4 by barbers-in-training) and also the Ohio City Farm, which was my destination for the morning.  (I realize that all of these names probably don’t mean anything to most of you, but it’s basically a checklist of the places I’d recommend you check out if you’re ever in Cleveland.)

The Ohio City Farm is said to be the largest contiguous urban farm in the country, and is spread across six acres teeming with greenery.  I had arranged a last-minute visit to the farm to meet up with Shawn, my boss from the previous summer when I had interned with the Cleveland Botanical Garden’s urban agriculture program called Green Corps.  Since our time together with Green Corps, Shawn had accepted a new position as a farm manager at the Ohio City site, and showed me around the farm while talking about his new job.

Skyline view from Cleveland's Ohio City Farm.

It’s hard for me to articulate my feelings on the complex subject of urban agriculture, and even harder for me to do so concisely, but let me attempt to scratch the surface anyways.  “Urban ag” is increasingly being touted as a green way for depopulated cities like Cleveland and Detroit to put some of their tens of thousands of vacant lots to use while simultaneously promoting local, healthy eating and even creating some desperately needed jobs.  As someone who studied food and agriculture in college and who also has a strong emotional connection to the city of Cleveland, this concept certainly has a lot of appeal to me, but before large-scale urban ag can make the transition from the drawing board to the streets, there are many questions that need to be addressed (which I’ve outlined in a couple appendices that I wrote as tentative research proposals while at Carleton last year… feel free to read them if you’re interested, via the link at the bottom of this post).

As it exists now, urban ag is a far cry from being a silver bullet for granting self-sufficiency and “food independence” to a city, due to the compromised quality of the soil and due to the fact that places like Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee (where urban ag projects are most prevalent) are covered in snow for five months of the year!  I do think that the movement has a lot of promise though, but primarily as an educational tool that also serves to beautify the inner city and gives the surrounding community a reason to take pride in the health and appearance of their neighborhood.

But for urban ag to truly succeed, it needs to find some way to earn the popular support of inner city residents, many of whom, from my experience, view the movement with disdain and see it as an intrusion of mostly middle-class white people into their neighborhoods.  Borrowing some text from my aforementioned research proposals (again, see link at bottom), urban ag must be able to mesh with the culture of the inner city and cannot be perceived as a corporate intruder within the city limits that exists simply to provide wealthy suburbanites with food.  While vandalism and hostility directed towards urban farms will always exist in some capacity, it is essential that urban farms be recognized as entities that exist primarily to serve the residents of the cities that they occupy and with whom they share space.  If urban ag is going to be intensified in these cities, it is crucial that it retain its grass-roots character and is perceived as something to help the city first and foremost, rather than exploiting available space and having its benefits leached elsewhere.  (I’d like to elaborate further, as this topic is deserving of a book in itself, but for now I’ll resume the story of my day’s travel.)

I'll miss the Seaway Trail and its rich history.

After bidding Shawn and the Cleveland skyline farewell, I continued my westward push along the Seaway Trail, though today did not offer quite as much exposure to the lake.  Eventually I passed through Sandusky and then parted ways with Lake Erie for good, as I dipped south for another run on Highway 20.

I was set to pick up 20 again in a town called Fremont.  All morning I had been bothered by the familiar sound of Fremont, and then finally recalled its significance in a brilliant “Eureka” moment.  As I should’ve known from the start, Fremont, Ohio is home to Spiegel Grove, the estate and burial place of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, our nineteenth president!

If you weren’t aware, I’ve been a big time presidential trivia nerd ever since elementary school, and have made pilgrimages to a number of presidential birthplaces and burial sites over the years.  As a kid I had been to Spiegel Grove, but I was all too eager to pay another visit for a pleasant reprieve from scooting and for a lunch date with Rutherford while chomping down some Cleveland-grown road corn that Shawn had given me as a parting gift.

Rutherford B. Hayes.  Where to begin with his list of historic achievements?  Yes, he’s known by some for being credited with ending Reconstruction, and will be remembered by others for emerging victorious in the hotly disputed election of 1876 despite losing the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden of New York.  But in my humble opinion, I think Rutherford is most distinguished by being the proud bearer of the most robust beard in presidential history.  Abraham Lincoln’s beard gets a lot of hoopla, but with all due respect to Abe, his scruff has got nothin’ on Rutherford’s fine facial follicles.  (I encourage you to look up Rutherford's beard with a Google image search. Not only will you find yourself in the presence of one bad beard, but you’ll also help Rutherford climb out of the cellar as “the least searched for U.S. president” online).

Spiegel Grove, Rutherford Hayes' estate in Fremont, OH.

Anyways, despite Rutherford’s rock-star status, I must admit that I was not drawn to Spiegel Grove by his fame alone, but also for a personal matter.  One of my most cherished possessions is a framed portrait of Rutherford that was the visual and emotional centerpiece of my dorm room, as I think anyone who visited would agree.  But in a horrible football-related accident (committed by a clumsy roommate whose identity will not be revealed), Rutherford’s frame was shattered along with the perpetrator’s hopes of ever having quarterbacking street cred again.  As he had done in Civil War battles before, Rutherford himself emerged OK, albeit with a couple scratches.  While I was in the neighborhood though, I figured it couldn’t hurt to pick up another portrait, just in case his luck runs out in the future.

Initially, I was a bit alarmed that the Spiegel Grove staff would be suspicious of my New York license plate, thinking perhaps that I was a vengeful descendent of Samuel Tilden’s coming to settle the score of a still-simmering feud, 135 years in the making.  But instead, I found the pair of old ladies behind the counter in the gift shop area to be very kind and helpful.  They were the kind of ladies who (due partially to their extremely generous nature and also due to a lack of other stimuli around Spiegel Grove) pounced on any opportunity to help a fellow admirer of Rutherford, and they doggedly placed phone calls and raided stock rooms in search of the portrait I described, which I had not found on my initial recon swoop of the place.  Despite the spirited efforts of those frail old ladies, as Mick Jagger famously crooned, you can’t always get what you want, and I left Spiegel Grove without the portrait I had been looking for (although I did manage to score a couple free Rutherford prints anyways that will make for a fine addition to a mantelpiece or a coveted stocking stuffer).

I also left Spiegel Grove knowing that the remainder of the voyage to Ann Arbor would be a race against the setting sun.  Therefore, it did me no favors to have a navigational mishap before I’d even left Fremont.  On the outskirts of town I found myself helplessly funneled onto a divided highway that scooters were clearly not supposed to be on.  Even if I had ignored the signs condemning the use of such feeble engines on that stretch of road and gutted it out, it would not have been enjoyable to have semi-trucks tearing past me at 70 mph.  So, as my only alternative, I decided to take the encompassing grid of country roads, going north, then west, then north, and so on, until I met up with a more scooter-compatible highway to Toledo.  At first it was kind of fun and exciting to have open farm roads to myself, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly, as it was annoying to have to adopt the “staircase” navigation method, instead of taking the smooth and efficient hypotenuse towards my destination.  Meanwhile, the prospect of having my day end after sundown only increased in likelihood every moment that I spent on country roads and not on my intended path.  My bypass of the scooter-unfriendly corridor was eventually complete, and I was back on a two-lane highway headed towards Toledo. 

Toledo, on this not-so-fine day, looked as though it could have doubled as the capital of Mordor.  With the smoldering spires of its steel mills set against charcoal colored rain clouds, the skyline made for one gloomy sight to behold.  The gloom made me realize that I had not seen the sun since Albany, save for a couple fleeting glimpses around Syracuse.  Since then, gray skies had been a fixture of my days though I had remarkably defied the weather predictions by avoiding rain (even though there was flooding and signs of recent severe weather all throughout Northwest Ohio).

Anywhere seems pure and wholesome after one escapes the smoggy haze enveloping Toledo.

A wrong turn spoiled my bid to minimize my time spent in Toledo, but with the help of some good old-fashioned gas station directions, at last I came to the Michigan border on the northern edge of the city and pulled over for my customary welcome sign photo.  For the second straight day, my ride marked a homecoming of sorts, as Ann Arbor is actually the place of my birth.  I lived there for the first five years of my life while my dad was wrapping up his lengthy stay at the U of M (sincerest apologies to the Minnesotans whom I lived amongst at Carleton, but there really is only one U of M). Unlike Cleveland though, I didn’t live there quite long enough (or rather when I was quite old enough) to develop a truly lasting connection to the place besides the dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum.  Even so, with both sides of my family rooted in the Great Lakes State, I still harbor enough Michigan pride to fill The Big House.

Although happy to be in Michigan, I didn’t have long to revel in the glory of entering a new state as I still had a deceptively long ways to go, with no main road to do it (I was again forced to take some country roads which Google Maps had not indicated would be gravel), and with daylight waning.

Sure enough, as I approached Ann Arbor, nightfall enveloped the farmland around me, and soon I was tasked with handling the last 15-20 miles under cover of darkness.   While “Night Rider” sure has a nice ring to it, thus far I’d been careful to avoid earning the title for a handful of reasons.  Obviously, visibility is at the crux of the issue.  I’ve found protective eyewear to be a pretty essential component to scooting, as I regularly have pebbles are bugs hurled into my face along with the constant gust of a 30 mph headwind.

Unfortunately, in an effort to live frugally, pack lightly, and ride stylishly, I skimped on the clear goggles and am only toting some sunglasses with me.  Whatever that ‘80s ballad says about wearing sunglasses at night, it doesn’t really work while trying to operate a motor vehicle, so I had to pocket the shades for the sake of visibility.  This really wouldn’t have been a huge issue had it not been for a couple unfortunate and unforeseen twists.  First, there is a small airport just south of Ann Arbor that I drove past.  In doing so, my unprotected face was pelted by a veritable hailstorm of bugs, evidently drawn to the area by the landing lights, pointed like beacons to the skies above.  I had hit a fair share of bugs on my trip already, but not in such overwhelming numbers, and not in the absence of protective eyewear to buffer the collision.

The Metro got its first taste of gravel roads today, an indication that my directions led me horribly astray.

But bugs weren’t the only projectiles to collide with my vulnerable visage. After threatening to douse me for two full days, the skies finally brought on the rain.  Most of the populace likely would’ve described the precipitation as an innocent drizzle, but that perspective doesn’t take the night-riding scooterist demographic into account.  Riding at night while trying to decipher unfamiliar street signs is hard enough, and having raindrops hit your eyes in excess of 30 mph doesn’t help.

But no matter how much you’re squinting, it’s impossible to miss Michigan Stadium, which soon materialized before me.  I would’ve stopped for a picture had it not been for the rain, but I figured I could always get one the next morning (little did I know that it would be raining much, much harder then).  Just down the street from the stadium I arrived at the apartment of my friend Geoff, reaching my destination for the night.

It was a joyous occasion to be reunited with Geoff, a former baseball and flag football teammate who had also been one of my companions on my only previous trip to the West, road-tripping from Minnesota to San Francisco after school ended a couple years back.  He informed me that I would be crashing on his newly purchased couch, which he warned was a certified “sleep monster”.  As I would soon discover, the new couch was indeed deserving of its “sleep monster” reputation.  Maybe it’s a sign that I’m becoming a boring adult, but I was excited by the thought of having my own nice couch someday soon.  Throughout my trip, seeing friends with apartments in fun neighborhoods and collapsing on their sleep monster couches has made me realize that I do have some cool things to look forward to in life after Carleton.

And so I had survived a bit of rain and my first night driving ordeal.  More importantly though, I had taken the extra time and gone the extra mile to get the most out of the colorful places I was going through.  Clearly, today shows that I’m still trying to find the right balance between stopping and going.  I’d like to avoid eleven and twelve-hour days if possible, but if that’s what it takes to get the most satisfying experiences out of surrounding communities, then so be it.  After all, one of the main purposes of the trip is to not simply pass through a whole continent’s worth of cities and towns, but to get a small taste of what distinguishes them from the next dot on the map.  All that rhetoric aside though, I do need to reach my next stop for the night, often a difficult and arduous task when on a scooter that creeps along at 30 mph.

The philosophy I’ve been adhering to is, quite simply, one of no regrets.  If I feel as though later I would regret not having stopped at a certain place along the way, then it’s probably a good idea to pull over or even worth going a few miles out of your way.  Such stops make your day interesting and memorable, while also providing a welcome break from scooting. Plus, you never know when you’ll next be leisurely passing through Fremont, OH, or for that matter, if Spiegel Grove will tragically fall victim to one of Samuel J. Tilden’s bitter arsonist descendents.

Shout-outs:

-Geoff for hosting me and hookin’ me up with some of his trademark peanut butter and cheese sandwiches for the road the next day.  Mmmmm!

-Ben and Max, some of the other Carls represented at Google in Ann Arbor.

-Shawn at the Ohio City Farm.  Thanks for the corn!

-Fremont natives I talked to who didn’t know that Rutherford had such dedicated fans that they would ride almost 1,000 miles on a scooter to see Spiegel Grove.

-Old ladies at the Spiegel Grove information and gift shop desk.

Town(s) of the Day:

-Cleveland, OH; Petersburg, MI

Further Reading:

-Urban Ag