Lowell

N42° 37.753' W71° 17.812'
For the second night in a row, I am going to sleep literally drenched in sweat. It's not that I'm complaining, I just want to point it out. Because later, when you find my dessicated corpse, you will know that it was because I sweat out my blood in the night.
Last night I slept in the Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsborough state forest. I rolled though a pretentious middle-class neighborhood to get there, struggling hard with every hill. I was racing the sun. There were pleasant-looking people out in the oppressive heat walking their pleasant-looking dogs, and here I come, chugging along like a freight train from wherever it is they manufacture sweat, and carrying a surplus of baggage, throwing off my cargo with wild abandon. I got some strange looks. Finally, I crawled past a barrier designed to let bikes through, but keep cars out. My contraption landing somewhere between, I struggled. I bounced along until I found a likely spot, pulled out my hammock, and collapsed into it.
If there had been even the hint of a breeze, I swear I would have slept like a king, but instead I spent eight miserable hours evaporating. I awoke at ten to brush my teeth: still wet. I awoke at two to use the restroom: still wet. I awoke at six thirty and realized that I was dry. I gave a great hoot until I felt the clothes I had laid out on my bike: sodden.
That was when my mania took over.
In my youth, my family played a game, sometimes, called left-right left-right. It's played in the car, so you can get places faster. The rules are simple: you get a turn to call a turn. The driver has to take the next paved road in that direction. Once, we found a farm selling home-made applesauce by playing the left-right game. Once, I took a first date and played the game after our bowling match. We found a tremendous tunnel running through one of the Smokies. And once, I was chased by a Tennessee homeowner who had a paved driveway with a street sign and a strict no-trespassing policy. Incompatible. But through all these adventures and despite never having GPS, I've never gotten lost while playing. I don't know if that's because you just don't play long enough to get lost, if the driver has an excellent sense of direction, or because perhaps the three kids in the back of the van are trying to coordinate their choices to end up at Dairy Queen. Regardless.
This morning, I played left-right left-right unintentionally. See, Google has instilled in me a false sense that I know things. I looked at the map and thought: simple enough. I just have to ride a while, turn left at the first major crossroads, and go straight through three more. I'll be out in a jiffy. I took the right. I arrived at a T. There should not have been a T. Where did this come from? Was this placed here last night, or did some gremlin steal the remainder of the trail? I turned as best I could, hoping against hope to be right. I passed two bogs and three mountain bike jumps. I knocked my bike over two fallen logs and a rough-built bridge. I was off the pedals more often than I was on. I made this sequence of turns, if you're wondering. Right left right left left right. At least, that's what I remember. I just kept hearing in the direction I knew to be Lowell and I prayed. The bugs tried to enter my brain through my ears. The trail tried to knock me off the bike. The bike chattered and chirped with a tremendous racket. I began to fear that my mother would open her tracking app three days from now and find me still within the Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsborough state forest. That's when, from seemingly nowhere, a path appeared in front of me. A final right, three hundred yards of smooth pavement, and I was in the parking lot headed out. I stopped to gape at the map. There was a handicapped-accessible pathway that paralleled my tortuous corkscrew.

When I got to Lowell, my hour in the woods had not been spent in vain. I arrived fifteen minutes after the welcome center opened. I bought my parks pass—the first I've ever owned—and a passbook to stamp the marker of my having been and conquered. I rode a trolley. I toured a mill. I watched for fifteen minutes as Mike ran an assortment of power looms. He handed me the hammer arm and made sure I saw the rounded bottom, the leather return strap (a spring was a no-go; apparently metal doesn't play well with wood in this application), the shape of the hammer head that cupped the point of the shuttle. One hundred fifty to two hundred passes a minute, the shuttle makes. Unbelievable. I got to make a little cloth with a push-pull loom. I got to read about a girl whose hand got torn off in a power cotton carding machine. I got to hear a thousand times the interpretive historians' boundless optimism for the future of Lowell. I got to spend most of the day off the bike and in air-conditioning. This was a good idea, today being somewhere approaching 95° with tremendous humidity.
And I learned something new and different. Lowell was Jack Kerouac's hometown. It's the center of a third of his books and the jumping-off point for On The Road. How inconvenient and utterly fitting that my own travelogue start in Kerouac's back yard. But you know, I really don't know how I feel about the Beat movement. I know how much I dislike all the young people I've met who do like it.

I rode to the river for a swim, then south to the cemetery I've had my eye on: it's very near the Adventist Church, and that will be useful in the morning. Lowell Cemetery is big. Probably as big as the Moberly municipal cemetery (the largest [needlessly so] cemetery I've ever explored). I lazily cycled into it despite a warning on the gate that they don't allow bicycles. I figure if it's my only form of transportation and they allow cars, it's only fair. Pretty soon, I had a place to stash my bike, a place picked out for my hammock, and a place to charge my phone. The last was near a new construction: curved walls with receptacles for ashes, and a simple columned dome. O.C. Whipple Columbarium and Remembrance Garden. I kicked back. I had a banana with peanut butter for supper. I soaked my shirt a few times in the sprinklers, just to get cool. I almost fell asleep when I saw a thin, gracefully greying man in a blue shirt walking purposefully towards me.
I sat up. "I can't find a registry of this cemetery," I said, hoping he was an employee.
"Go to the website," he fired back, spontaneously, almost wearily.
"All I can find is a list of veterans. Do you know if there's a general list?"
"Oh, no. Not yet." He sat down next to me as if to start a conversation. So I told him where I'm going, how I'm going, and where I started.
"Oh, wow!" This was his common response. I heard it a lot. Michael, as it turns out, is the manager of the cemetery. He told me that there would be a security guard who would come by in an hour. I don't know if he knew I intended to stay the night, but by my equipment, he couldn't have had a more well-informed guess. I diverted. I told him I hadn't found any names I recognize just by walking around.
"Have you seen the Lion?"
"I guess not. Would I recognize it if I saw it?"
"Yes! It's twenty tons of Parisian marble. It cost twenty thousand dollars in 1880, and I would guess that's a lot more now. It belongs to Dr. Ayer—that's why it's called the Ayer Lion—he was a patent medicine man, and he was also the man who discovered scratch-and-sniff, you know, the advertisements. One day, his advertisements, he knocked them over? And they fell into his cologne vat, and he pulled them out and smelled them. He was like 'Send them!' " At this, Michael throws his hand out as if giving the adverts to a messenger.
Michael tells me about a few other notable monuments: a chair that stone cutters come from all over to see, and a hypothetical Salem witch. I stand up to go see them, and he offers to drive me there. "I'm going that way. I'd love to show you!"
At this point, we've already shook goodbye, a clasp that goes on just five seconds too long for my taste. But what the heck.
We see the Ayer Lion. All I can think of is the concrete lion in Lion's Beuth park in Moberly. This one is much prettier. We walk to the chair. It's certainly a chair. "I think they had the artist put a book in it so people wouldn't sit. You know, he used to come home every day and read a book, so I guess his wife thought it was a perfect idea."
We walk to the Bonney memorial. Michael explains her: "She's supposedly a witch who was killed in the Salem witch trials, but . . . she died something like 300 years after. That doesn't stop people. There are all sorts of folks who think she'll come back and kill all the descendants of the family that accused her." I'm as skeptical as he is. "She has a drape, a dress? It's down, exposing one breast. The story goes that when the dress falls to her waist, she'll awake. And the Lion will crumble to dust and suddenly he'll come to life too. If you Google it, you'll find all sorts of stuff. Bonney Lowell witch." We walk to the base of the memorial. She does seem to have a precarious hold on her garment, and I'm almost expecting it to fall now, but of course: it's bronze.
Michael continues. "People leave all sorts of stuff here. We try to plant geraniums. People pull them up. Once, I found a tacky tacky plastic potted plant and I picked it up to throw it away, and under? A card. All in Spanish. So I take it to Gloria, one of our groundskeepers, and she starts to cry, and I say 'Oh, Gloria!' " At this, he reaches out to stop me, turns to face me. His eyes are telling a funny story, but his voice is intense. "It was a woman who was asking the witch to help her son. He was with the wrong crowd. Into drugs. It's crazy what people believe." We're at the statue's base now. He reaches out. "Let's see what Bonney has for us today. A little mask-face. See? Quarters. Dimes."
"Can I have it? The totem?" I'm not superstitious, I just like kitschy remembrances.
"Oh, sure. Maybe Bonney will watch you on your ride, give you luck." He says this with a laugh.
We part ways, and I'm thinking about Jack Kerouac.

The people who believe in the witch are patently wrong, to my eyes. But to them, she can stop a cell phone, and her dress fell a quarter of an inch last year. By the same token, anybody my age who is "moved" by On The Road is a poseur, a show-off. But there are people who read it and love it. I get exposed to these people on the Internet (Google makes me think I know things, remember?) and they've got the wide-eyed wonder of an evangelist. I sort of understood why, listening to Kerouac himself read an excerpt about a jazz band and a treble horn man and the pressing urgency of the wah wah awayaaaah sound he made.
What are my predilections but a transparent fiasco to someone else? If I feel I can see through the beliefs of someone else like "Oh, that thing you love is just popular; you're just bandwagoning, you're just using it to send a message about who you'd like to be, you don't really feel that way," what are they thinking about my passions? Is it the same story from a different angle? Do we all believe in the witch? Does she just have a different name on all our lips?

Anyway, I have a journey like Kerouac and a mask from the witch, so who's to say I'm not part of those groups to begin with?