Biking to the Soo.

Grandpa Ed once told me that when he was a boy, he and his friend -- Don Hamell [Dad? is that his name?] would ride their bikes to the Soo.





My whole life I have been making the trip from Cedarville Michigan to Sault Ste. Marie on M-129.


It is a straight long road that leads from the bottom of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the top. It is perhaps the straightest road I have ever seen. There is one kink in the road just before nine mile road; there is also one very tall hill on the road.

In a hazy memory I remember, as a child, peering over the front seat of the station wagon and being able to see from Pickford to Canada. Two countries! I remember us celebrating aloud in the car. But the same script runs in my memories of Castle Rock as a boy, so if anyone wants to discount the veracity of this sighting, I'll budge...

So really -- one long straight road doesn't seem like a very unusual bike trip does it?

33.19 miles

Grandpa and Don rode their bikes to the Soo usually to see a movie. On some of these trips they would spend the night at the home of a relative or friend. Other times -- they would cycle back home.

What would convince you to ride a bike for 33 miles? The movies?

What movies did they see? He couldn't recall any of them! In 1928, sound-sync movies were a novelty. The chances that they had arrived in Sault Ste. Marie, at the farthest reaches of the Northern Midwest were small. More likely popular movies from the last several years were still being shown. The Gold Rush, Chaplins classic 1925 film must have resonated somewhat with Soo audiences. The Little Tramp is trapped in a wintery cabin in the midst of a great storm. Everyone in the theater would relate to being snowed in -- and my grandfather, having grown up on an Island .... Tumbleweeds was a crowdpleaser. As William S. Hart's final picture -- it was, for many, a kind of summative vision of the genre -- the Western -- that he had largely been responsible for bringing to such prominence in American Cinema.

I have no evidence that my grandfather was a fan of Westerns -- but it would make sense that they would have spoken to him. They were the primary mode of cultural expression through film during his adolescence -- and while he never went to the wide open west, there is a wild open quality about the Les Cheneaux Islands, the woods and bays and inlets where his boyhood was spent.

He told me that on one occasion they made the trek North to go to a revival service. They heard a famous revivalist {Dad do you know his name?}. Grandfather credited that particular revival with being the definitive turning point in his spiritual journey. He also pointed out that his father-in-law from the future, Albert Koskela had "rededicated his life to the Lord" while listening to the same revivalist.

Of course revivalists had gotten a good boost just before my grandfather's adolescence. Billy Sunday had reinvented the art form of preaching into a kind of wild spectacle which included rock-star-style breaking of furniture and theatrical shouting and moving that looked more wild than a circus performance. Billy Sunday was an expert, though, at parlaying a message that met the American audience. Weaving war-time patriotism with old-time religion while demeaning the evils of "booze".

Of course D.L. Moody's conversion-centered revivals had just swept the nation too. So the attendance of a revival service would have been a very normal choice for an adolescent who wanted a reason to ride his bike 33 miles.



Did I mention that it was a gravel road? In fact it may or may not have been a finished straight shot. The road we recognize as M-129 wasn't really fully the route we experience until 1960, long after Dad even started making the regular trip. But the diamond sign above would have been the same one that he biked past at least once on the journey. Those signs have designated Michigan highways since 1918 -- just one year after Grandfather was born.

This is the same grandfather who felled trees long after two hip surgeries, who hewed two mile long roads out of the wild woods and who built a cottage with his own two hands. Maybe the 33 mile bike trips were just a small beginning to his mythic strength...

...the Strongest Man in the World.