My Gay RAGBRAI

By Bob Nelson 

            “Iowa is flat.  Iowa is very flat.  Iowa is as flat as a pancake.  Flat as a pancake, flat as a beggar’s purse,  flat as a 13-year-old’s chest.  Flat, flat, flat, flat, flat.”  That was the refrain I repeated as I chugged up some of Iowa’s Alpine hills, sometimes to myself, sometimes out loud, much to the amusement of riders within earshot.  I even saw a guy stop to take a picture of the view from one long hill, muttering to his buddy, “This is for all the assholes who keep telling me Iowa is flat!”

            True, there were plenty of miles-long flats on the 2004 RAGBRAI route, probably more flats than hills.  But there were some steep, long, sumbitch hills, and one claimed a life on July 25, the first day of the weeklong ride.  Kirk Ullrich, 49, of Davenport, Iowa, lost control of his bike coming down one of the long rollers, went over the handlebars, hit his forehead on the pavement and died two days later.  Apparently Ullrich’s front tire had gotten caught between the concrete slabs used on many of the county roads in rural Iowa; there was an inch-wide gap along the yellow line that “swallowed up” his front tire, a friend told the Des Moines Register, sponsor of the ride.  Though folks have died in almost every one of RAGBRAI’s 32 years, they have usually succumbed to heart attacks, not bike accidents.

            News of the fatality, and several sightings of ambulances racing along back roads to pick up injured cyclists, added a bit of sobriety to the ride.  But not too much.  The ride has a reputation as a Mardi Gras on wheels, and every town along the route (there were 52) closed off its Main Street and set up booths selling food and souvenirs, and, usually, beer.  Lots of beer.  There was nearly a riot when riders discovered they had entered a dry town, and I saw a T-shirt with the slogan, “God wants us to be happy -- He gave us beer.”  True to RAGBRAI spirit, we spotted a South Park-themed t-shirt that commemorated Ullrich’s death:  “RAGBRAI Murdered Kirk!”

            Some background:  The acronym stands for Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, and it is the oldest and largest, though not the longest, multiday bike tour in the nation.  The route changes every year, and this year was 490 mi., though it has been as long as 700 mi.  There were 12,000 cyclists this year, from every state and from a dozen or more foreign countries, some registered with the organizers, some not.  RAGBRAI has a reputation as being a ride where you hang out, see the small towns, meet people, maybe even get loaded.  I heard seasoned riders say that “it’s not in the RAGBRAI spirit” to cruise through a town without stopping for a beer or some food.  So it’s really not just a bike ride – it’s a tour of rural Iowa, and we’re the tourists.

            I had asked LGBT bike clubs around the country to post notices for Team Priscilla, Queen of the Corn, the name we’d come up with for a gay group doing RAGBRAI.  I’d gotten responses from about 20 riders, but only half a dozen actually showed up on the ride:  Sol Myers and Charlie Vanderwarf of Chicago; Gary Lehrer and Quentel Mathis, known as Q, my friends from New York; Drew Marlar from Atlanta and myself.  Gary and Q knew Jack Liike, from Hampton, Va., and Drew met Bryan, who grew up in Chicago but now lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  We were also joined by Rob Biondo, from Chicago’s western suburbs.  Only Charlie, Sol, Gary and Q had ever done the ride before.  We’re hoping to make Team Priscilla a permanent fixture on the multiday bike touring scene, trademark regulators permitting.

            My previous frame of reference for multiday bike rides was the AIDS Rides; I’d done California and two Boston to New Yorks.  You sign up and raise money, and then the ride organizers pretty much deal with all the logistics – they get you a tent, feed you, find you toilets and showers.  RAGBRAI’s sponsor, the Des Moines Register, does none of that.  You pay your $110 registration fee, some of which goes to charity, and what you get for that is a wristband that gives you (small) discounts at RAGBRAI-approved vendors.  If you need a tent, you bring one.  If you need someone to carry your bags and tent from one town to the next, you hire a charter.  My New York friends, Gary and Q, who as of 2004 have now done eight RAGBRAIs, have done every one of them with Lake Country Cyclists, a bike club based in Ankeny, Iowa, about 30 mi. north of Des Moines.  It was reasonable and convenient, and for an extra $40 you could hire the organizer’s teen-age son to set up your tent for you, so it would be cool and dry when you arrived in camp.   You could shower at the Y for $4, or bring a shower bag, fill it from Lake Country’s water truck, set it out in the sun to heat up, which it never seemed to do, and then take a cold shower.

           On the ride, I met Gail, a 35-year-old woman who was a physical therapy student in North Carolina, but was originally from Mountain View, Calif.  She wore a jersey that said “Team Smart Socks,” and told me the team had a motor home where they slept at night, with showers and toilets, and had a cook to prepare food for them.  (Team Priscilla, take note!)  What they did not have, apparently, were Smart Socks, since she wore white cotton socks and said the sponsor had never given them any socks.

            Part of the je-ne-sais-quoi of RAGBRAI is the team names.  Team Road Kill adorned any dead animal they found along the road with rosaries and stickers.  Team Bricky had a bus emblazoned with their motto, “We Lay Anything.”  Team Whiners, from Michigan, had jerseys festooned with pigs that read “Fork More Pork.”  An all-woman team from Wisconsin, Team Dairy Aire, rode with the slogan “Smell My Dairy Aire.”  With competition like this, Lake Country Cyclists sounded positively dorky, and even Team Priscilla less suave than I had imagined.  My favorite team name, bar none, was Team I Don’t Know, What Do You Think?, painted across the side of their bus in bankers script letters a foot high.

            We usually were on the road by 7 a.m., if I rode with Drew, my ride buddy, earlier if I rode with Gary and Q, my New York friends.  The daily rides ranged in distance from 62 to 103 mi., and the scenery was truly spectacular.  No Grand Canyons or Pike’s Peaks or Mount Rushmores, but plenty of rolling hills with silos off in the distance, corn and soybeans ruffled by the breeze.  Green fields of corn and soybeans between two ribbons of water, the Missouri and the Mississippi.   The only disturbing thing about the landscape was seeing pro-Bush campaign signs on people’s lawns, not as infrequently as I would have liked.

            As usual, I had a minor medical crisis during my vacation.  Three days before the ride, I’d started having a toothache, and had discovered a wad of broccolini stuck between two teeth.  Though I’d flossed it out, my right cheek swelled up until I looked like a chipmunk preparing for winter.  So after the plane trip to Des Moines and the bus ride to Onawa, the starting town, I made a beeline for the local hospital emergency room, which in Onawa was at the Burgess Medical Center, a squat brick building with wheelchair ramps on Iowa Ave.  I was greeted within seconds at the reception desk, which in itself was miraculous, given the three-hour wait I’ve endured in New York emergency rooms.  But the point of this anecdote is to tell you that the hospital receptionist picked up one of her phones and said “Steve’s Towing answering service!”

            “Steve’s Towing?” I said, incredulous.  The receptionist explained that since the hospital was the only institution in Monoma County open 24 hours a day, she handled calls for the police, the sheriff, the towing service, the library – any place folks would be likely to call during off hours.  Indeed, she got several calls about an RV that was sidelined with a flat tire in the 15 minutes I waited to see a doctor.  He didn’t find anything unusual, but gave me a prescription for penicillin and told me to knock on the side door of Stadtler’s Pharmacy in town, since they would be closed by this time (6:30 p.m.) on a Saturday.  So I took penicillin for most of the rest of the ride, which made me more regular than I really needed to be.

Because the Missouri was actually nine miles from Onawa, the first town, not everyone dipped their tire in the river at the start, but I took the detour and saw a steady stream of RAGBRAI riders getting that rear tire wet.  The Onawa Fire Department provided a stream of river water down Iowa Ave. for folks who wanted to say they had dipped their tire but didn’t want to make the 18-mi. trip to the river and back.

On the third day, I rode with Bryan and Drew and we all did the optional century, which included a 30-mi. loop that most riders omitted.  As we finished the loop and came into Eagle Grove, Iowa, one of the guys said, “Gee, I could really use a beer after that.”  The other said “O.K., but only if it’s free.”  Sure enough, as we rounded the corner into town, one family had a keg on their front lawn and riders were shouting “FREE BEER!”  So we stopped.  Drew and I each had three 8-oz. glasses of beer, and Bryan had eight – and a bit of a personality change, true to the spirit of RAGBRAI.  In Ackley, Iowa, on the fourth day of the ride, I accompanied Drew into Grumpy’s Bar, which at 8:30 a.m. was packed with cyclists drinking beer and making passes at each other.  Drew had a Bloody Mary, I had a pee, and we were on our way.

            Food was more difficult to find – or perhaps I should say quality food was more difficult to find.  There were roadside vendors who set up every day of the ride and had acquired a reputation for quality:  Mr. Porkchop, Pastafari, Farm Boys Breakfast Burrito, Cup-A-Joe, Gimme a Sammich, Beekman’s Homemade Ice Cream.  These were sophisticated operations that served thousands of cyclists on the fly every day.  Iowa is the nation’s largest producer of pork, so it was no surprise that Mr. Porkchop’s pork chops, though $6 apiece, were double-wide, tender and tasty, smoked over dried corncobs.  “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” Drew said, chomping into a piece of pork, and I promised not to tell his partner.  Pastafari, where you could get a plate of penne arrabiata with zucchini for $6, with salmon for $10, was a joy to watch:  one guy did the penne, one the sauce, one the grilling and somebody else took the money.  I calculated they turned out a meal every 30 seconds, as long as you didn’t order the salmon special, and good food it was.

            Once you were off the road and into the towns, you were at the mercy of the locals, who, despite being in the midst of agricultural paradise, seemed not to know much about preparing vegetables for human consumption.  The only salads I ate were ones that I ordered in restaurants, and no one seemed to have heard that there were varieties of lettuce other than iceberg.  And any other vegetable was canned, except, I will say this, the corn on the cob, which was often roasted, invariably wonderful and sweet as could be.  New way to serve it:  with butter and lime juice.  Fabulous!

            In the overnight towns, there had clearly been more detailed preparations, not just a row of food booths and a beer garden.  Overnight towns on the RAGBRAI route have to apply to get in, and once the RAGBRAI board puts them on the route, they have to set up a committee that handles logistics – where to put 7 or 8,000 tents, how to feed 12,000 cyclists, where the portapotties (called kybos in Iowa, after a now-defunct company that used to supply them) and showers will come from. 

These towns often sent people ahead to the previous overnight town with fliers that had a map of the town and advertised the various dinners that were being prepared – invariably by churches, which seem to be rural Iowa’s only functioning social unit larger than the family.  We had a mediocre, somewhat leathery roast beef at the Methodist in Lake View, a tasty pork loin at the Free Evangelical in Fort Dodge, pretty good scalloped potatoes and ham at the Congregational in Iowa Falls, fried chicken at a restaurant in Marshalltown, because I was too tired to get my butt to the church hall, beef stroganoff at the Catholic in Hiawatha, and a very nice plate of pork loin and beef stew at Maquoketa High School in Maquoketa.

The meals were inexpensive – the most I paid was $7.50 in Maquoketa – but the pork loin at the Free Evangelical came with a price.  We had a nice little group together that evening – Drew, Bryan, Jack, Gary, Q and me..  After we got our food, we repaired to a picnic table, which was already occupied by an older local man.  We had some pleasant conversation with him, but after dinner he pulled out a questionnaire and started asking Bryan some rather pointed questions:  “How many times a week do you go to church?  Why do you go to church?”  And on and on.  It transpired that Bryan was the pastor at a church in Council Bluffs, so the conversation quickly escalated beyond the frequency of church attendance to the question of whether one could attain salvation if s/he did not accept Jesus Christ as her/his personal savior – Bryan taking the pro, the older gentleman the con, side of the argument.  Bryan had been reluctant to disclose his profession, and now I understood why – there are a lot of people in Iowa with firmly held theological beliefs, and engaging them in debate seemed to be a pointless but inevitable exercise one once they learned he was a preacher man.

The campsites were usually big fields out in the open – a ballfield, high school yard or state park..  In Onawa, we were at a county fairgrounds, sandwiched between a horse track and the railroad tracks, with wailing locomotives every three hours.  In Lake View, we were at a state campground on a lake, where I took my bath.  Fort Dodge found us on a grassy lawn outside the high school football stadium, and Iowa Falls found us on a rugby field a good two miles out of town.  In Marshalltown, we camped on the grounds of the Iowa Veterans Home, and had a very institutional breakfast at the canteen there.  In Hiawatha we were on the front lawn of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, and in Maquoketa on the back lawn of Maquoketa High.  In Clinton, we packed up in the parking lot of the Free Lutheran Church, next door to the Y.  To this day, when I see open fields I wonder how many RAGBRAI tents could fit there.

Our little group got together more or less every evening, thanks to Drew, who posted a Team Priscilla notice on the RAGBRAI bulletin board in every overnight town.  Our best turnout was at the Congregational in Iowa Falls:  Bryan, Drew, Jack, Sol and Charlie from Chicago, who were old hands at this multiday touring thing; Bruce, an environmental researcher from Greensboro, North Carolina; and Tawny and Cheryl, the only lesbians I met on the ride, from Lincoln, Nebraska. Gary and Quentel had eaten earlier, but they had met Tawny and Cheryl from previous RAGBRAIs.  Someone else had run into Joe from Omaha, who was riding self-contained without a tent and found building overhangs to stay dry.  His e-mail address was pencilrockets and whoever it was who had met him told me he was very hunky.

There were a lot of tantalizing myths about RAGBRAI.  One was that the really hot, fast, young riders got into the overnight town at 10 a.m., went to a bar, got smashed,  took off all their clothes, poured a case of beer on the floor and engaged in what was called a “beer slide” – sliding through beer naked on the floor.  Sol in particular wanted to find the bars where this was happening, but to my knowledge never did.  Drew had a great story, about showering between 19-year-old twins.  “Gimme a sammich!” he said of the experience.  One myth that Q and I confirmed was that lots of cyclists wear underwear under their bike shorts; if you look closely enough, as we did, you can see the underwear line and even determine if the undies are long or short.  O.K., our research was limited to men, but the result is still amazing:  underwear counters the very reason for wearing bike shorts, which is to eliminate chafing. One guy I asked actually said that he was too modest not to wear underwear under his bike shorts!

The weather was better than we could have imagined.  Iowa was having a cool, wet summer, and the bus ride to Onawa took place in the rain, but the next days were bright, sunny, cool and dry, which made the riding easy and fun.  According to a bank time-and-temperature sign we saw in Onawa, the temperature at 6:30 a.m. was 50 degrees, which was hard to imagine for Iowa in July, but there it was.  Thursday we had some sprinkles in the morning, and then Friday we had about an hour of heavy rain, and it turned cold.  My survival strategy in this situation, since I hadn’t brought any warm waterproof clothing, was to stop, have a Mountain Dew, and let the caffeine propel me forward at a fast enough pace to stay warm.  That worked until we hit a two-mile stretch of what would have been dirt road, but today was mud.  Gary told me that every RAGBRAI he’s done has had stretches of dirt road, but the mud was over the top.  Everyone looked like they had done a particularly nasty mountain bike ride.  Iowans, true to form, set up signs offering the use of their garden hoses to wash off, but I found a fire hydrant that had been converted to water-bottle-refilling duty, and dunked the bike under a five-gallon-a-minute flow. 

Getting myself clean wasn’t as easy, but after the rain stopped, we came to a Main Street that featured a two-foot-deep kiddie pool.  I was riding with Dan from Jacksonville, Fla., that day, a straight guy as far as I knew, and as I was wading around in the pool, he said “Why don’t you just jump in?”  Challenge issued and met:  I dove in and scrubbed myself from head to toe.  I had painted my helmet with blue and silver glitter, which I had thought was waterproof, but of course in the rain it all came streaming down onto my head and shoulders, as if I’d been visited by the RAGBRAI fairy.  Here was an opportunity to clean the glitter off me and the helmet, and I took it.

Drew thought he knew of another gay man on the ride.  On Saturday, July 31, the last day of the ride, Drew was on fire – a triathlete, he had already done a couple of half-Ironman races that year, and he dropped me several times going up the hills.  We made the first stop, Spragueville, just to take a leak and get Drew a cup of coffee.  I’d been in the urinals in a public park for a few minutes, listening to the straight men talk about their horse cocks, and when I came out Drew said, “Turn around.” 

There were teams from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Army Reserves on the ride, all there to recruit soldiers, and one of the flyboys was standing a few yards away with his two companions:  his bike and his dong, which Lycra shorts did absolutely nothing to hide.  He walked by us and I got a good photo of the middle third of his body.  He took his bike out onto the street, and I went up to him and said, “Hey flyboy – photo?”  He consented, so there’s a shot of the three of them together:  flyboy, bike, dong. 

I take lots of photos of attractive men, often at sporting events, such as triathlons, and don’t hang around afterwards; you never know when they might change their minds about having that photo taken.  But this guy wanted to talk – “Where are you from?” the standard RAGBRAI greeting – and we spoke for a couple of minutes about Air Force life, the ride, his home base in Albuquerque, mine in New York.  Then he rode off. 

He was a window into a different life, obviously a very closeted one, since he was in the military, but also a gay life that probably revolved mostly around sex, given the way he advertised his homosexuality.  “He knew what was going on,” Drew told me.  “While you were in the bathroom, he was rearranging that thing eight ways from purgatory.”  To me, it was depressing that a gay man had to live his life that way, but maybe for him it was O.K.  For that matter, you won’t see Bryan’s last name or his denomination in this article, because he’s afraid he would lose his job if his congregation found out he was gay.

Drew waited up for me as we got into Clinton, the last town.  The route weaved its way through downtown, and I couldn’t help thinking of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River,” since I was about to visit the Mississippi for the first time.  I sang a verse or two out loud.  “Body all achin’ and racked with pain” – that certainly described the state of my butt.  There was a park with a boat launch, and riders were going down to the water to dip their tires.  I kicked off my bike shoes and socks – I needed a more direct experience of the Mississippi!  No dirt diving here, but Drew did get a photo of me holding my bike up over my head, knee deep in the Mississippi, in what I like to call the AIDS Ride victory position.  Really, a wonderful moment, though tinged with sorrow, as a great week was coming to an end.

We got back on the bikes and followed the signs to our respective charters, where we would pack up the bikes and get rides to where we were headed.  Drew was going to the Bike World charter, getting on a bus back to Des Moines, and had to be back at work on Monday.  I was getting a ride with Sol and Charlie; Charlie had left his Subaru station wagon, otherwise known as the lesbianmobile, in town, and they were driving back to Chicago that evening.  I would spent a few days with friends in Chicago, then visit my mom near Traverse City, Michigan.  We finally got to the place where the Bike World sign pointed left and the Lake Country Cyclist sign pointed right, and said goodbye, a moment more difficult than all the flat hills in Iowa put together.

If any of you reading this thinks it would be a good idea to do RAGBRAI, you’re absolutely right.  Please do train for it, and make sure your shorts don’t chafe, or else your butt, too, will be all achin’ and racked with pain.  And say hi to Tawny and Cheryl and Sol and Charlie and Joe and Gary and Quentel and any other gay RAGBRAI riders you meet.  And, just once, have a Bloody Mary at 8:30 a.m. and see how it feels to ride your bike the RAGBRAI way.