Nicodemus

Sept. 20, Stockton-Plainview, 50 miles, SW-S wind, 80/50—At the top of my list of Kansas destinations was Nicodemus (and here), so I was stunned to find it closed on a normal Wednesday afternoon. I rode around—it didn't take long in a town of 34—until I ran into Fred, Nicodemus's deputy marshal. Fred drove to the National Park Service office and honked his horn until Sherda Williams, superindent of the site, came out. Sherda not only opened the visitor center for me, but graciously showed me around (she said she was tired of visitors stopping only to use the bathrooms). The site had to close two days because she was short-staffed, but a new ranger was coming soon.

When federal troops left the South in 1877, violence and new laws pushed former slaves to move north in mass numbers. Some also went west as pioneers, settling especially in Kansas and Oklahoma. For blacks, Kansas had a golden reputation, a free state won by blood and the home of John Brown.

Of all black settlements in the state only Nicodemus remains, though it barely survived when Union Pacific railroad built to the south. Despite the tiny population (it's hard to make a living out here), Nicodemus has a large number of absentee property owners. The biggest weekend of the year is Homecoming at the end of July, when many hundreds of descendants return to celebrate what used to be Emancipation day.

After Nicodemus I planned to go south to Ellis, but the steady and strong south wind changed my mind. After riding into it to Palco, I had to make a sideways move. Ellis had suddenly become hours away in the wind, and I was losing daylight. I decided to return east to Plainville, arriving with no light to spare.

The wind seems to be more of a factor since southern Nebraska, constantly making me shift plans as the direction moves around the dial from day to day. Some of my wind rides are a simple slog, some high drama, at least for me.

At the Stockton library that morning I'd gotten e-mail from Peter, a young and strong cross-country rider I met in Gothenburg. At the same time I was riding east at 21 mph into Kearney, he was heading into a wall on his way to Boulder, Colo. It was so bad he got a ride into Boulder instead of facing two or three days of suffering. I completely understand his decision.

Lately I'm getting a repeating pattern of three warm and fair days with huge south winds. As windspeeds exceed 20 mph and approach 30, conditions become pretty much unrideable. Then three cool days follow with a big north wind (usually NW). I'm carried along on those days, but the catch is chances of rain and thunderstorms. Today I realized the weather could be a big obstacle between me and Texas.