Taking a GAP Year: Steeling Myself

After all the events I had anticipated for the summer were cancelled, I thought about doing a short solo bike tour as maybe being the most responsible, low-impact, low contact way of trying to give myself a bit of mental relief from the daily horror show, My first thought was to return to New York’s Finger Lakes region where Mary and I have had so many fun holidays. But then New York introduced a mandatory quarantine for new arrivals, so on to Plan B (or C, or D, depending on what metric you are applying!). So I opted for a journey that has been in the back of my mind for a while, riding the combined Great Allegheny Passage trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, and then the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal trail from Cumberland to DC. 149 miles on the GAP and 184.5 on the C&O, for a total of 333.5 miles (for all of you with good SAT math scores).

People do both these trails almost as a speed run challenge but I opted for a relaxed approach since the whole goal was to, well, get away and relax. I planned on seven days total riding, three on the GAP and four on the C&O. I’m not going to provide a lot of information about the trails themselves; there are plenty of good sites out there that provide maps, guides, and general advice (see for example the official GAP trail site, and a site devoted to cycling both trails). There are advocates for doing the trails (individually or together) in either direction, but I liked the idea of cycling home. One of the easiest ways of starting the adventure is to take Amtrak to Pittsburgh; in recent years Amtrak has vastly expanded the options for carrying bikes although this is a popular service even in a Pandemic, apparently and you need to plan ahead more than I allowed for! Fortunately, I have a wonderful partner who was happy to drive the four hours from DC to Pittsburgh, spend some time running around the city, and then leave me to make my way home!

The GAP was pieced together over a long period of time; the first section was laid out back in the mid-80s and the trail wasn’t completed until 2013. Utilizing a number of existing trails, the backbone for much of the early section from Pittsburgh is formed by the old Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad; early sections around Pittsburgh and suburbs are mostly paved, but the bulk of the trail is fine crushed limestone.

I haven’t done a lot of solo touring, so I was treating this trip as a learning experience. I packed as lightly as I thought reasonable, given that I was planning to camp most nights. I planned to rely mostly on freeze dried meals, and was hoping to do a bit of a taste test on a number of varieties. Mary and I made our way to Point State Park and before I knew it, Gypsy and I were standing atop the trail’s prominently marked starting point.

No, I didn’t plan on coordinating the Jersey with the bike bags. Sometimes style just happens.

The early part of the trail winds through the Steel Valley on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, following the Monongahela river and the entire area is a study in contrasts. You are biking through contemporary suburbia, complete with malls. Yet all around you are the relics and ruins of the region’s mining and manufacturing industry; signage of points of historical interest along the trail is generally excellent, but reading up the trail guide in advance can also alert you to things that might not be marked on your map. Most interesting to me was the attention paid along the trail to the labor history of the region.

For example, biking through the town of Homestead I swung off the trail to investigate a building called the Pump House:

And in the process learned all about the 1892 Battle of Homestead. Andrew Frick, manager of the Carnegie-owned local steel mill had refused to recognize a workers union and had locked them out. In an attempt to break the union, Frick brought in Pinkertons by barge along the river. Workers, however, opened fire on the barges, including using a Civil War cannon, and a pitched battle ensued. After loss of life on both sides, the strike breakers surrendered. The strike, however, ultimately failed when the state militia was called in. I’d long been familiar with the later (1920) Battle of Matewan and its aftermath, thanks to the superb John Sayles film, but this was another reminder of just how much corporations have depended on keeping US workers divided and un-organized, often at the point of a gun, but also how much we have buried that history, and especially the history of worker resistance to exploitation.

When I was but an intellectual stripling and still learning about US history (and especially doing so from the vantage point of a socialist country) the hostility to unions on the part of the average US citizen mystified me. After all, so much of US culture lionized “the working man,” and populist demagogues routinely claimed to be speaking in the name of the ordinary working man. However, as soon as the “average working man” presumed to get together with other average working men and stand up to the forces of business, these average working men were suddenly evil socialists and anarchists. I found this especially mystifying given the Constitutional protections for speech and the right to assemble.

But then I watched the once powerful unions in New Zealand crumble before the forces of what I would later understand as neo-liberalism. And in the US context, I began to understand what increasingly seemed like the fatal flaw in the Constitution: it’s guarantees of fundamental freedoms are designed only as guarantees in the context of a citizen’s relationship with their government. It is right there in the text of the first amendment: citizen are guaranteed the right to petition the Government for redress of grievances. Which of course does you absolutely no good if your grievances are increasingly being created not by your government but by industries and corporations of a size, power, and reach that the Constitution Framers couldn’t imagine; little protects your right to petition those who are most immediately griefing you. So for most of US history, the government has stood by happily as corporations have ruthlessly exploited workers and bloodily suppressed them when they resisted,

The Battle of Homestead is commemorated in part by a bronze plaque that includes the text of the Declaration of the Strike Committee, and I am kicking myself for not taking a photo of it. You can find the first part of the text quoted in lots of places, including on the Wikipedia page covering the battle. The first part is a ringing endorsement of the workers deep roots in their community, the sweat equity they have invested in the mill, and their right to organize. The bit that is much harder to find–I’ve searched for the original declaration and so far come up empty–is the part that includes a stinging criticism of the creeping power of industrial titans in the US. What struck me was how smart the text was, but also how with no modification it could be describing our own age: it emphasized in particular how companies have perverted the US defense of free speech into a justification to do whatever they want and thereby erode the liberties of others. Welcome to the 2020 boss, same as the 1892 boss.

I’d kept my ride short for the first day (about 36 miles) and I was glad that I did so because there was so much to see, both natural and manmade. At one point on the trail I came round a bend to be greeted by a familiar roar and a rumble, and witnessed above the surrounding trees people practicing some rather extreme social distancing:

Another section featured a couple of quite striking waterfalls. One of them was red, and the other was white, like a little patch of winter in the middle of summer:

However I read later that the red waterfall was actually created by acid run-off from buried mine ruins; I shudder to think what the white stuff actually was.

There are a few free places to camp along the trail, but I wasn’t sure how busy they would be, so I’d made some reservations. However it did seem as if there was plenty of camping capacity and none of the free places I passed was even remotely full. Its hard to say how much the Pandemic has taken a toll on travel along the trail, however. But there is also certainly no shortage of B&B options as well; the towns along the trail seemed to be very much behind seeing the tourist potential of the trail and at most towns there was a list of services posted near the trail, with water and even bike fixit stations at strategic intervals.

I opted to stay at the GAP Trail Campground near West Newton, partly because it was limited in size (only 15 campers) but also because it had amazing amenities for only $20. Some of the best showers I have been in, a covered pavilion with tables and chairs to relax, charging stations, and even hot coffee in the mornings.

The place did however give me my first taste of a rather disturbing trend: Pennsylvanians seem generally convinced that it is the land that Covid forgot. Every business has stuff they advertise on their sites to comply with government regulations, I suspect, but virtually no one seems to follow through on it. Registering for a site earlier in the week I was informed that masks would be required in the campground. But the hosts were there to greet people and weren’t wearing them, not did they don them at any time. True, this doesn’t seem to be just a Pennsylvania problem. I arrived just behind a group of three cyclists, two of least sounded as if they were from Boston. They were friendly guys. . .too friendly. One immediately bowled right up and shook the hands of the campground hosts, and they didn’t bat an eyelid. I just tried to keep as far away from everyone as possible. However, the place was exquisite, with the sites right on the banks of the beautiful Youghiogheny river that was to be my almost constant companion for the next three days.

The first freeze-dried meal evaluation was carried out, and Mountain Hut’s Chicken and Dumplings conspicuously failed the test. Good consistency, filling, but with zero taste–I immediately added “basic spices” to the list I was compiling of “Things I Wish I Had Brought”–and “dumplings” that in fact never quite shed their status as croutons. And so to bed.