Baltimore to Pittsburgh

There was a little confusion at the morning event in Baltimore because the parking lot reserved for MTTS had to be moved to a larger one.  This happened often; more Minis than ever before were participating this year, and some were joining all along the way.  One estimate was 1,000 cars, but I think it was more likely 1,000 participants and (generally two persons per car) about 500 to 600 Minis.  That is still a considerable traffic control problem, and many more than the tea rooms and distilleries in small towns along the way had anticipated.

So we gathered in a parking lot under the interstate, cars passing by overhead on their early morning commute, waiting for these Baltimore police officers to lead us out of the city on their Harleys.  I spoke to some of them (relating my story about a switchblade in the back of a shuttle bus) but they were noncommittal about the situation and reticent about discussing it.  "It depends on where you are," one of them said, and then started talking to me about Asheville (printed on the front of my running shirt from a race I had completed), which he had visited a few years ago and greatly enjoyed, its distant cool mountains far away from Freddie Gray and the trial and his dangerous career.

We began to notice after the first two or three cities that the crew bus accompanying us changed every day, updating our mileage and color-coding the cities we had visited, so it became a habit to take a photo in every city to track our progress.

Then we were off again and were almost immediately in the Maryland and Pennsylvania countryside, rolling hills and old homes constructed of river rock (next to the rivers) and brick (away from the rivers), that old whitish, faded brick you see in Old Salem.  We decided that we were close enough to Gettysburg for a short visit and we paused to confer with President Lincoln.

The hedgerows where this senseless carnage had taken place so long ago were profuse with beautiful wildflowers, nodding in the morning breeze, and I wondered if they had greeted soldiers in 1863 with this same simple beauty - perhaps a bright flower had been the last sight a dying soldier had seen.  It is a sobering place to visit, but a beautiful one as well.

Farther down the same road is the Flight 93 Memorial, an even more sobering sight to see - the big empty field, the impressive stone wall inscribed with the names of the heroes who had wrested control back from terrorists and ended up crashing in this flowery field.

It is believed that the airplane's intended destination had been the Capitol, where both houses of Congress were in session on that day.  Such beauty all around in these rolling fields!

The flag was at half-mast here and, it seemed, everywhere along our route - the attack in Nice, France, or in Baton Rouge?  One almost loses track.  Perhaps the President should order the flag to be lowered permanently during this summer of senseless violence.  Yes, it is a sobering time! 

There was plenty of flexibility in the route sheets every day, and while we were visiting Gettysburg and the Flight 93 Memorial, others had visited the Jefferson Memorial.  Sue and her daughter (who dressed like identical twins) caught up with us at the end of the day and talked about the geniuses that our Founding Fathers were.  Today's politicians, she said, should be ashamed.  "They are rolling in their graves."  We did not discuss politics openly at these events, but it was a constant backdrop as the campaign for President continued, and these reminders from the honorable and thoughtful men who founded our country, diplomats and philosophers, made me think about what a fragile thing this great experiment is and how short we are falling from our past glory.

Then we crossed the Alleghenies in country that reminded us of the long, winding grades of our own mountains.  The hay bales here were tidy cubes rather than the big sloppy rolls we were used to seeing in our part of the country, and we passed Amish women in long skirts and lacy bonnets selling baked goods by the side of the road.  Bison were grazing in one field amid the power lines.  And barns had been skillfully painted for no purpose other than, it seemed, the satisfaction of the painter (a bit like this blog).

The roads became wider and the traffic heavier, and as we came into Pittsburgh we found ourselves passing over and under a confusion of intersections, and then suddenly crossing on a steel bridge one of the three rivers that meet in this surprisingly graceful and beautiful city (the Monongahela River, the Allegheny River and the Ohio River).  Our event was at an athletic field overlooking the Monongahela, and we stood outside in this unexpected island of calm, high on a rooftop enjoying a cool beverage and (of all things) bison barbeque, gazing out on the many kinds of traffic moving constantly beneath us - boats of every variety, railroads, bicycles.  And Minis.