When Chris Watson and David Knight paused for a pint in Perry last summer during their 3,200-mile, 46-day bicycle ride across the continental U.S., they had just come from the Greene County town of Jefferson, where they met Mike “Banana Man” Knox, a recumbent cyclist from Huxley best known for always wearing a banana costume when he rides his yellow tandem three-wheeler with his wife, Garnet Brodie Knox.
Siren-like, Banana Man sung the praises of RAGBRAI so sweetly that Watson returned again this summer, leaving his home in the Wiltshire city of Salisbury in the west of England and bringing a different cycling partner in the person of his wife, Alison Watson.
The Europeans were promptly press-ganged onto Team Kum & Go and thrown together with Banana Man and Garnet, Steve and Lori Murga of Carlisle and a host of other free-wheeling Kumers & Goers, sharing the amenities of the Team Kum & Go bus and drinking more deeply than last year of the joys of Iowa Nice.
The weeklong trek of 432 miles began in the swine-rich northwest of Iowa and proceeded through many towns with Albionic names that must have brought comfort to the homesick travelers, such as Granville and Sutherland, Dickens and Plover, Wesley and Britt and New Hampton and Ossian.
“Wrecking your liver from river to river” is one of RAGBRAI’s many unofficial slogans, and eating and drinking are paramount parts of the RAGBRAI experience, including this year’s 45th annual bike ride.
The Watsons dined on corn from morn to morn, which they ate with a runcible spoon, according to their unpublished travelogue, in which Alison also recounts being naturally smitten with a pinkish piglet with whom she danced by the light of the moon in the streets of Primghar, Iowa.
Chris is a “property guy” with a top-notch British architecture firm and so is familiar with the Great Wen, but riding the wide open Iowa countryside and seeing our solid Century Farm homesteads and the almost infinite and unbroken fields of corn must have brought to mind the words of his fellow Wiltshire native Richard Jefferies, who wrote in “The Toilers in the Field,” published in 1892:
“The cottages erected by farmers or by landlords are now, one and all, fit and proper habitations for human beings; and I verily believe it would be impossible throughout the length and breadth of Wiltshire to find a single bad cottage on any large estate, so well and so thoroughly have the landed proprietors done their work.”
Watson probably rode with a prayer on his lips for the landed proprietors everywhere and for the legal principle of private property that has made Anglo-American civilization what it is today, although the travelogue is silent on this point, unlike Iowa Congressman Steve King.
In fact, Watson has had a hand in construction and restoration projects involving many of the most iconic buildings in England, including the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, Windsor Castle and the Tate Modern. But the most notable line on his stellar resume is work he did in his own back garden, so to speak, on the most iconic British structure of all: Stonehenge.
Stonehenge itself is managed by English Heritage, with the surrounding land owned by the National Trust, and the rivalry between these two preservers and promoters of Britain’s heritage tourist trade proved fatal to Watson and his team’s vision for the visitors center.
While the vision of Team Kum & Go was perhaps less grandiose, it was probably much more cordial thereby. The Watsons surely thought so, remarking again and again how warm and generous and welcoming and fraternal were all their RAGBRAI friends and the many people they met in Iowa along the way.
Alison said she is determined to come again to Iowa’s vast tracts of well-fed plains, and Chris said he was charmed again this year by the levels and the driftless regions of the Beautiful Land. A confirmed cyclist, he would probably agree wholeheartedly with his Wiltshire countryman Jefferies, who wrote in “The Amateur Poacher” in 1879:
“Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.”
In their transcontinental charity ride of 2016, Knight rode for Pancreatic Cancer UK and Watson for Maggie’s Centres, a charity addressing the psychological and social fallout faced by cancer victims and their loved ones. Chris and Alison sported Maggie’s Centres kit again this year.
The Watsons looked tanned and tired Sunday evening when they checked their bikes and boarded their American Airlines flight to Chicago, with connections to London’s Heathrow Airport. As the Ukanians made their way past Homeland Security, it occurred to us that we had again forgotten to ask their opinion about Brexit. But that’s Iowa. Nice.
