Borderline

Franklin, Pennsylvania is an amazing little town. We’ve been here for two days now, and both of them have been memorable. Two days ago we coasted down from the Allegheny National Forest and the Kinzua Reservoir to Warren, PA in sun-drenched 75-degree weather, and we’ve been basking in it ever since. Yesterday, we rode from Warren to Franklin (which is weird to me, given that I knew a kid in grade school named, of course, Warren Franklin… just realizing that now…) and met up half way with Sam Gibb, the pastor of Franklin’s First Presbyterian Church. Sam is about 45-50, I think, and rides about 40-50 miles a day on a ridiculously cool Cervelo bike (the same one that CSC rides). All the girls agree that he possesses a “Paul Newman” look. He kicked all of our asses up some pretty monster (12% grade) hills, and is going to France this summer to ride the Tour de France route with some friends. He’s also a long-time home brewer, loves Phish and all other jam bands, and has a sandwich named after him at the local Subway, where he tries to conduct all of his business during the day. The sandwich is whole wheat with double Monterey Jack cheese, toasted, with all the veggies minus olives and hot peppers, parmesan, garlic salt, oregano, and raspberry vinaigrette. Our vegetarians were, needless to say, rather enthusiastic about the sandwich. I was, and I don’t even like vegetables.

Just kidding.

Basically, I think Pastor Sam’s the man. I gave him some of the amaaaazing Grafton Cheddar we had donated from Wendy Brewer (see pic!) because he’s a vegetarian who loves cheese (needs the protein, obviously) and we talked about Trey Anastasio and different Hop varietals during our group dinner last night (Subway, obviously). And then I told him about Pandora and Wolfgang’s Vault. And for the last two days he’s been fixing/fitting people’s bikes and taking us on rides around the area. And he also let us work on the church’s pseudo-habitat home site in Franklin today because our build day in Youngstown fell through. More on that later…

The moral of all of this description, nay, adulation, is that this trip has really checked my skepticism for organized religion. We keep meeting warm, open, idiosyncratic, hilarious, genuine Pastors, Fathers, Reverends, and churchgoers, and I keep being pleasantly surprised. I know that there are church leaders out there who are dour and pedantic, or stuck in their ways, but we haven’t run into them yet. The closest we came was the priest from Scranton who told us to maintain hope, because it’s what keeps us human. And then told us that the reason he knew that was that, as a Marine in Vietnam, he had to “extract information” from hostages and in order to do that he had to “take away their hope.” It was thanks to this little life experience that he came to understand the value of hope, and he shared this lesson with us at 8am last Sunday, right before our ride.

Even though that speech was a bit, well, off-putting, it was heartfelt, and pretty gnarly. That day I imagined that each hill that day was a hostage and it was my job to “extract information” from it by reaching the top, taking away its hope, and in the process bolstering my own.

Well, not really.

But the fact that this righteous speech was the weirdest thing we’ve heard so far from a church official is a reason for optimism, or hope. Or renewed faith in the institution of religion. I’ve been agnostic for a long time, but only realized that that was the term for it right around the start of college. I don’t need a religious community in order to gain a sense of spirituality, and I don’t need an authority figure to analyze or explain religious texts or dogma on a weekly basis. But over the last coupla weeks (hard to believe two have already gone by!) I’ve lost much of the disdain or mistrust with which I viewed religion before this trip. Except for the evangelicals and most fundamentalists, who still freak me out.



All of that deep stuff aside, Franklin is really nice. And so are Sam and his wife. We lucked out and were given the chance to stay tonight, rather than leaving this morning for Youngstown, because the church here bought a 3-story home and are renovating it, without Habitat’s help, to create more affordable housing in the area. Not that they necessarily need it; the house was had for $12,900 (bargained down from a starting price of $24,000). It was a real junker and needs some work, but it’s a 3-story in a normal part of town. In Brattleboro, it’d probably command $120,000ish, in Providence’s East Side probably twice that. We were supposed to be in Youngstown right now, but the build day tomorrow fell through. They’ve been having trouble pouring their slab, so we would’ve just had a rest day, and many of the riders (all of us) have been grousing about too much Bike-ing and not enough Build-ing in the ol’ Bike & Build equation. So today we got to rip up some shot shingles and tear down attic ceilings and generally create a big mess and cover ourselves in black soot. And Sam treated us to more Subway. And tonight the 21+ crowd got to hang out on Sam's porch and try some of his ridiculously good Pale Ale. And tomorrow we leave bright and early for Youngstown, where we’ll be staying just one night, thankfully.

All in all, I’m in good spirits and in good health, on a beautiful night in a boring laundromat in a quiet town. Doing group laundry SUCKS, but it at least gives me the opportunity to craft an extensive blog entry. Hope you weren’t too bored by this one.

Lots of love from Western PA. We’ll be in Ohio tomorrow!