A bicycle tour opens up a place and time like nothing else can. We become intimately connected to every foot of earth that we cycle over, dropping our sweat on the road. We smell the storms and trees. We hear the children and the birds. Stopping at convenient marts and campgrounds, we are confronted with curious locals anxious to understand what we are doing and why. As we explain our tour, a look of new possibilities comes into their eyes, as if our pursuit of a dream triggers their desires to find their dream.On a bicycle tour, you will see the carcasses of wildlife in intimate ways, ways that make you imagine their sheer terror just before they were maimed by a car or truck. The dead animals might remind you that automobile travel is an act of violence. Why is it that a human body warrants so much respect and ritual but the bodies from the animal world are ignored and allowed to fester on pavement and along asphalt shoulders? I return determined more than ever to do my traveling around Denver by bicycle.
I feel many emotions as I tear down the tandem following a long tour. The first is joy and a sense of pride in the distance traveled and the experiences that colored each mile. This is followed by an intense sadness at ending a period when I was briefly able to unplug from the car, from the paycheck, and from the race. On a bicycle tour, you need not worry at all about what you eat, what time you need to be where, or what to wear.
This was one of the most inspiring and educational bicycle tours of my life. We rode through the heart of coal country, past and present. I will never forget the creases on the faces of the people we met in this region; people who know hardship and struggle more than I ever will. We learned of how a single industry can have a chokehold on a people, how reluctant people are to criticize a company when it signs their paychecks.
Our trip up the C and O canal was memorable. Imagine a flat path
way all the way from DC to Cumberland, Md., lined with stone aqueducts and locks. The hands of the immigrant workers were apparent to me everywhere, in churches and railroad tracks, in coal patches and river towns. Harlan county is a study in social class. Logan county carries the ghosts of revolution. Harper’s Ferry, WV holds the spirit of raci
al equality and Cumberland, Md. the remains of canal diggers. Connellsville, Pa and McKeesport, Pa are the face of today’s economic crisis, downtowns as ghost towns.One more note to make. We stopped for the night toward the end of our tour at a place called Rockwood, Pa. This is a quiet and small town nestled along the banks of the Casselman River in SW Pa. My father has mentioned t
his town to me on several occasions and I was excited that it was a perfectly timed town for us to spend a night in. We stayed at a new hostel, next to the “Mills” restaurant and gift shop and old Opera House. After eating d
inner at the Rock City Café and watching a small bit of game one of the Stanley Cup finals, we had a lovely evening in the hostel and breakfast at the Mills. We then found Stoner’s Furniture Store on main street, a store that my father has sold to for years.Dad has been a kind of furniture broker for well over thirty years. It was always a great source of stress on him and none of his children ever seemed remotely interested in knowing anything about what he does and how he does it. His van was always piled full of fabric samples, enormous binders, and large yellow tablets with his indecipherable handwriting scattered all over the first several pages. When anyone called him about anything work related, he retreated to the back bedroom exuding anxiety. We never asked him about his work and he never talked much about it. When he came home from work, we only hoped that the day wasn’t too rough on him and that he would be in at least neutral spirits.
This is why our short visit to Stoner’s Furniture store in Rockw
ood, Pa was so important to me. I was making contact with a world that defines my father more than anything………..but sadly a world that none of us know anything about. We walked into the store and made our way to the back office, walking past a large showroom of beds, sofas, coffee tables, and recliners. We met a man in his fifties, a store manager, and I uttered the following line for the first time in my life: “Hi, I’m Doug Walsh’s son.” Never before had this simple line rolled off of my tongue. The man immediately knew who I was and called down John Stoner, the longtime owner of the store. John is now in his seventies or eighties, retired, but still spends his days at the store. John emerged with a big smile and introduced us to his two daughters and son-in-law. The three of them now run the store. Through their storie
s and words, I began to see the work that my father has chosen in a new light. He only sells to family owned stores. He only goes to small Appalachian towns. “Simple people” is what he calls his clients, “salt of the earth.”The Stoners’ store is still making it, but barely. The current economic crisis threatens to close their doors just as it has so many of Dad’s long time clients. I watched as John Stoner’s daughter helped a customer, a middle aged man with a camouflage baseball hat, look at sofa models. She was quick when he asked about having “one with the buttons” shipped to Rockwood and she was right on the phone attempting to make it happen. He was the only customer in the store. As John and his son-in-law walked us outside to say goodbye, I was filled with a sense of sadness and pride. The pride was from a newfound appreciation for my father’s work and his legacy. The sadness was the realization that I had all but ignored this for thirty years. I cycled through Appalachia in search of the labor history of coal miners, canal diggers, and railroaders. I found what I was looking for, but the most important labor history that I found along the way is the labor history of my own father. His father and grandfathers were so intent on pushing him up to the white collar world, away from the railroad tracks and steel mills; and he has been so intent on returning to the small towns and simple lifestyle and plain talk and modest dress of Appalachian people.
With my beloved Gabriela, our Appalachian labor tour brings me back to where I started, loading our dismantled tandem bicycle into my fa
ther’s van, setting wheels and aluminum bars on top of the same fabric samples and enormous three ring binders that I never paid any attention to. As I load the bicycle parts into the back of the van, this time I find myself doing so with great care, treating the binders and tablets and fabric samples as archeological findings, and my father’s stories and information as treasures to be captured and preserved. This is the best description of what a bicycle tour will do: take you home again and allow you to experience it for the first time. 
L- Jim, Gabriela, Rosemary and Clark Williams in in Harlan, CO KY. Clark is a retired coal miner with the UMWA. He suffers from black lung and his cousing was killed in a 1970s strike. 
