Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (22 page)

“Hi, I’m Chris Hursh with WKRC--TV Channel 12 in Cincinnati. Could we come out and interview you? We’d like to get it on this evening’s news.”

In the backroom of the parts store, with the receiver to my face, I was still awe-struck that I got a phone call. “How did you find me?”

The newsman chuckled. “I’ve had a lady tracking you all day.”

Cincinnati grew up in a basin on the river. It’s where the Miami and Little Miami rivers run into the Ohio. A semi-circle of ridges and hills encompass the north side of the basin. Most of Cincinnati’s residential neighborhoods and suburbs were up in those hills. Downtown is in the bottom of the basin.

Our route into town was Highway 50, which paralleled the river with railroad tracks between us and it. The closer to the city, the heavier and more rapid the traffic. Highway 50–a.k.a. River Road–was hard to walk on. Sometimes we had a shoulder, but most of the time we didn’t. In some places it was a four lane, in others it was not. Almost all of it was pot-holed with wide spots of crumbled pavement. None of that deterred the speed of the traffic. Front-end alignment had to be big business in that part of town.

The farther we went, the more big trucks we saw. And it seemed like there was always a train on our right. On the other side of the tracks, perched along the river, were miles of giant oil and chemical tanks behind rusted chain-link fences. We passed several manmade mountains of coal, and a couple of times we saw huge white piles that looked like salt. The
acrid smell of industry, with a hint of sulfur, was the predominate bouquet of that neighborhood. And the reds of rust, with the yellows and blues of corrosion tinted everything made out of steel.

In the middle of all that industry, we pulled onto a wide dirt area beside the highway. It was lunch time. Patricia opened the kitchen compartment on the cart and began to make sandwiches, while I sat on Della’s bucket and held her rope. She was grazing on a small clump of grass, when a mid-1980s brown Pontiac pulled in next to us with four young black men in it. The car had a few spots where it had been painted primer gray, and the right front hub cap was missing. From the front passenger seat, a guy with sunglasses and dread-locks leaned out the window and said, “Say Man, what ‘ch you doin?”

I held up Della’s rope so they could see it. “I’m holding onto my ass!”

The car was silent as they looked around at each other. Then the one who asked the question looked back out the window, pointed toward Della and blurted out, “I got it!” A huge grin was on his face as he mimicked my grip on Della’s rope. “He’s holding his ass!”

Instantly, they all burst into laughter. The Pontiac was rollicking as high fives made their way around the inside of the car. With a chuckle still in his voice, he leaned back out the window. “No, really man, what ‘ch you and your woman doin’?”

“Right now we’re walking to the coast of Maine.”

“For real? You’re walking all the way to the coast?”

“Sure am.”

“So, you walkin’ for cancer, or Jesus or something like that?”

“Oh, you want to know what our cause is?”

“Yeah man. What’s your cause? Why you doing this?”

I stood up from the bucket and walked over to them. “Be-
cause
we damn well want to do it. We’re just taking our time to see America. That’s all there is to it.”

A wide grin bloomed on his face. He took off his sun glasses, and a sparkle danced in his brown eyes as he extended his up-turned palm toward me. “Wow! Now, that’s really bad man. I mean,
really
bad!”

Everyone in the Pontiac nodded and grinned as other hands emerged from the windows. When their car started to pull back into traffic, the one in the front seat leaned out and yelled. “Hey dude, you’re in The Queen City now. Welcome to Cincinnati!”

Longfellow was the first to call Cincinnati, “The Queen City”.

Further in town, Highway 50 took us through a neighborhood with narrow row-houses and old skinny buildings. Some of the houses were in good repair, but most were not. A lot of the buildings were empty with broken windows and graffiti. Weeds grew out of cracks in the buildings, sidewalks and curbs. It seemed like anywhere there was a crack, mother nature was trying her best to take over. Some sidewalks had chunks of concrete and bricks laying on them that had fallen from building facades And there were bits of glass glistening everywhere.

“Hey! I want to pet your donkey!”

It was a little white girl. She was four or five years old, jumping up and down and screaming at us from across the highway. A young black boy, probably a sixth grader, ran up and stopped behind her. He had the whine of the ghetto in his voice when he yelled, “Hey, mister! Wait up!”

Behind them were at least half a dozen more kids. All colors and sizes, running and screaming. I yelled at them from across the street, “Wait! We’ll come over there.”

The older kids kept the little ones from darting out into the traffic. By the time we got across the four lanes, the group had grown to fifteen–including a couple of young mothers with babies in their arms. When we pulled across the highway onto their street, the kids surged toward us jumping up and down and screaming. I held my hand up and roared, “Whoa! Stop right there.”

They did. I had their attention. Loudly and slowly I said, “You will all get a chance to say hello to Della. But you can’t jump or scream. That will scare her and make her jump and she could land on you.”

They all said at the same time, “Oh.” Then in unison they took a few steps back, as the oldest boy said, “Oh man, that would kill you!”

An older girl, who was holding the hand of one of the smaller ones said, “Baby Girl, if she stepped on you, there’d be nothin’ left!”

Finally I got them to calm down. Then Patricia started escorting the little kids up to Della–a couple at a time. Each one of them squealed when her big mule nose first got close to their little faces. But within moments, all of them had relaxed and were giggling when she breathed on them. They all fell in love with Della.

“What’s she eat?”

“She loves ice cream.”

“Naw man, for real?”

“Yeah, she does. But she likes hay and grass and stuff like that, too.”

Within moments kids were pulling weeds out of those urban cracks and feeding them to Della. After about twenty minutes, I said, “We need to get going. We’ve got a lot of miles to walk before we stop for the night.”

“Dude, you can stay at my house,” the sixth grader said. “People crash there all the time.”

While we walked on Central Avenue toward the heart of the city, it was obvious Cincinnati knew who we were. Every couple of minutes from the windows of passing cars, or from people on the sidewalks, we heard “I saw you on TV the other night.” or “Read about you in the paper this morning.” And there were a few who yelled, “Hi Della!”

A block before we turned off Central, a man walked out the side door of an Italian restaurant with a handful of long carrots. They were scrubbed clean, with the lacy green tops still attached. Patricia was in the cart running the brake. When he handed them to her, he said, with an exuberant Italian accent, “I saved these for Della. I read about you’s in the paper this morning. I knew you’s come by here. God bless!”

On Fourth Street, we turned toward Fountain Square. Jim Macke, who owned the Cinderella carriage in Madison, picked up passengers for his Cincinnati carriages in the square. He told me when we got downtown to look for him there first.

In the middle of the square was the Tyler Davidson Fountain. Dedicated in 1871, it was a huge bronze sculpture more than forty feet high. On top of it was a woman with outstretched arms. From her hands water rained down on numerous bronze figures who were using or looking for water. They ranged from a fireman on a burning roof, to a boy strapping on ice skates.

It was mid-Saturday afternoon as we walked toward the fountain. Traffic swirled all around us, with cars, buses, taxis and delivery trucks jockeying for position. All around us was the unrelenting racket of revving motors, squealing brakes and intermittent horns. But above all that, was the sound of the water falling from the bronze woman’s hands. It made the other urban noise much more palatable.

While we made our way through the chaos, Della was a princess. She just plodded along and responded to my every request. When we started into Fountain Square, the road surface went from pavement to metal grating. As we approached it, I began to get nervous. I hadn’t walked Della across anything like that before. What if it freaked her out and she wouldn’t walk across it? But she didn’t even hesitate. With her shoes clicking across the steel grating, she acted like she had done it every day of her life.

Then suddenly, something exploded under us. A huge blast of steam rushed up through the grates and enveloped Della and me. We both lunged forward to get out of the steam. But as soon as we were out of it, Della immediately went back to plodding along.

When I tied her to a street sign in front of the Westin Hotel, it only took a moment for a small crowd to gather around. Some of them knew about us, and those who didn’t were soon filled in by those who had read the story in that morning’s paper. Among them was a young woman who asked us to autograph the article.

Patricia stayed with Della and the crowd, while I went in the Westin to find a phone to call Jim Macke. It took about twenty minutes to track him down and get directions to his carriage barn. When I walked out the hotel door, I discovered Della had done her part to beautify downtown Cincinnati. She’d nipped off a limb from the young urban tree in front of her. Part of it hung out the side of her mouth as she chewed. And behind her was a perfectly stacked pile of dark green mule turds.

Up to now, I haven’t said anything about the poop aspect of traveling with a mule. We had a scoop shovel and a leaf rake to take care of it. But rarely did she do it while she was in the harness. In front of the Cincinnati Westin was the first time. What a classy girl!

We spent three nights at Jim Macke’s farm across the river in Kentucky. On Sunday he showed Patricia and me around Cincinnati in his BMW. Monday we toured the city on our bicycles. Then Tuesday we hitched up Della and were back on the road.