Downstream roll
If we were going to die on the bridge, at least we’d go out with the best chicken ever fried in our stomachs.
My research about crossing from Hager Heights into Red Wing, from funky and chunky Wisconsin to gentrified and civilized Minnesota was incomplete. I knew a new bridge was under construction. It was. I thought the current bridge had a shoulder. It didn’t. It was narrow and strewn with debris and replete with hazards.
Our traverse was harrowing. At peak peril -- the moment our chain dropped off the chainring and our pedals spun madly – we were lucky there was not a semi (or a Mini Cooper for that matter) barreling up behind us as I wildly thrashed the handlebars in a desperate attempt to stay upright until I could pull my cleats loose. We walked the rest of the way. I directed the kid up onto a raised curb while I trod in the traffic lane itself. Once to the other side of the river there was construction equipment and slag heaps of material clogging the shoulders with crash-risking drifts of loose dirt followed by a risky merge into a cramped cloverleaf and more lanes choked with machinery, detritus, and orange barrels. We at last rolled free into downtown in a swift transition to a picaresque destination for Twin Citians looking to drop some coin on spa treatments, essential oils, and leather goods.
The St. James Hotel rose up two blocks in. It was great to arrive alive.
Leaving suburban St. Paul was a challenge. We lost a bag and then had it miraculously returned. Shortly afterward we left subdivisions behind and were out in the cornfield country. All along the way, Avery called out each road in the turn-by-turn cue sheet in my back jersey pocket. We diverged from the route with a short backtrack from a full road construction project, but soon crossed the Mississippi at its confluence with the St. Croix at Prescott. Soon thereafter we began the first significant climb, and the first of several walks. Soon enough we were on the ridge, then back down to river’s edge and cruising along the bottom.
We ran out of energy before we ran out of kilometers, but at last the giant rooster looming over Hager Heights came into view and we were devouring fried chicken and sluicing soda. With our blood sugar spiked we rode through the channels, lakes, and meanders of Mississippi, the river, on U.S. Highway 63 – a roadway that a few states south goes right through my one-time haunts of Moberly, Columbia, and West Plains in Missouri – into Red Wing where it intersected with U.S. Highway 61, memorialized in song by Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan and a part of our route the summer previous in Mississippi, the state.
For the night we make do in the opulence of the St. James Hotel. Its layout is odd, and its contents mysterious. The labyrinthine corridors to our room took us by the U.S. Ski Jumping Hall of Fame and Museum. After dinner, we sought and were granted exclusive entrance and allowed a self-guided tour. Before the evening meal, we saw downtown Red Wing and the eponymous bootmaker’s home store, redolent with tanned leather.
At the Red Wing store was a big boot, THE big boot, the BIGGEST boot in the whole, wide world. And you know what they say? That’s right: Big feet.
Our evening winds down with luxury in our laps – Avery declared, swaddled in one of the posh terry cloth robes, he had never been more content than lounging upon his feather-top mattress with our commanding view of the Mississippi River flowing by, rolling as we were ever downstream.