moved to Grand Street in the late ‘90s, following my parents’ reverse-retiring here from Staten Island. In the past couple of years, they both passed away. During my mom’s last days, I put work on hold. After she passed I realized, with sadness fermenting into renewed inspiration, that now was the time: take a break, pick up and leave home, and see some of the country…by bicycle.
I had never toured by bicycle alone before. When you do this traveling by bicycle, you can't bring too much of home with you—every ounce has to be dragged up the sides of mountains by the power of your own legs. The comfort of home is as left behind as it can possibly be. Pulling a fifty pound trailer from town to town on 2-lane highways is a lot different than hopping on a bike to get to work in midtown. Still, I expected the physical challenge, and tried to train for it by riding a bike up New York’s own Bear Mountain a month before I left. What I couldn't train for, and what I couldn’t have possibly expected, was the challenge of a day-to-day routine involving nothing familiar. A different bed every night, towns I've never been to, food that was slightly alien…it all added up to a vast place that was not home. I wasn't in Kansas anymore—I was actually in Kansas.
It took a loaf of bread in Ordway, Colorado, to make me realize that I missed the Lower East Side. After hitting the local library for internet access, I ventured into the only grocery in this small town to stock up on the fuel of a bike tour—lunch meats, bananas, sports drinks, chocolate, peanut butter, and bread. In the bread aisle, alongside the Wonder and various square loaves, was a plastic-bagged oval loaf with "JEWISH RYE" across its front. I may have doubled the Jewish population of Ordway that day. My parents and I have gotten rye bread countless times from Moishe's on Grand Street, but never thought of it as specifically "Jewish"—Eastern European, maybe, Lower East Side, definitely, but "Jewish?” Is there any other kind of rye? Perhaps Presbyterian? That rye made me feel far from home.
As I rolled through the wonderful, straight flatness of Kansas, train tracks and the odd train kept me company. The tiny train bridges that allowed streams and creeks to cross were showing their age in their cement faces—some from the ‘20s, most from the ‘30s with "WPA" on them. The only other significant structures on the otherwise blank horizon were towering grain silos spaced every five miles or so (and at times I could see six silos fading into the distance). These had the word "CO-OP" on their sides, and most had been built in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I live in Hillman, a co-op built in the ‘40s, and here in the heart of Kansas were co-ops built at the same time. These co-ops collectivized the economic power of local farmers and offered orderly access points to cargo trains. Just as the Jewish Rye of Colorado made the Lower East Side seem so far away, the farm co-ops of Kansas made it seem a little closer.
Pedaling through the large-for-Kansas city of Newton (population 12,000), I saw a low-slung modern building with the large word "SHALOM" on a sign in front. Could it be? I am not a religious person, but my parents made sure I knew who I was when I was growing up, and I am Jewish. I made a b-line to the building, thinking of what I would say to the people I would find there—I would never think to barge into the shul across the street from my own apartment, and here I was preparing to explain my Jewish identity to complete strangers…Then I saw under the Shalom sign the words "Mennonite Temple." From what I saw in town, the Mennonites looked similar in dress to the Amish—and, perhaps, not all that unlike the hasidim on the Lower East Side. It took a rye bread to make me feel Jewish in a very Christian place, but it took a Mennonite temple to make me think that perhaps I should invest a bit more in my Jewish identity when I get back home and start planning a family.
Bagels are a universal travesty in all the hotel breakfasts I encountered across the country, but it was in Missouri that I found a "Kosher pickle," sold in an individual baggy. Opening it, the oddly yellow brine spilled out and stained the sides of the sink. One bite and I was an extra thousand miles away from Essex Street. I live in a place with arguably the best pickles and bagels in the world, and here I am hunched over a hotel sink with yellow-stained hands and a limp, mushy pickle.
After a few months on the road, I hopped on a train in Illinois—it was too long to be away from home, from the place and people I love. On Delancey Street, just around the corner from my home, the city had just painted shared-road symbols for bicycles in the middle of the road. On the other corner from my house, bike lanes have emerged up and down Grand Street. Other than pickles, bagels, rye bread, pizza, and my fianc?, our city acknowledging cyclists on the street literally outside my windows as legitimate traffic was the best welcome-home I could of hoped for. My parents are gone, but I'm still very much here.
Noah Wildman
