There are days the bicyclist remembers
for years, almost every detail in them
and each turn of the road.

Consider the forests of Wisconsin.       When the sun rises on a clear day in the northern Wisconsin woodlands, it sometimes has to spar briefly to dispose of the mist that slips and tiptoes its way through the pines and hardwoods and hazlenut bushes. The mist is a die-hard straggler of the northern night. The sun has miles to go and will make short work of it. But for an hour or so their encounter turns the countryside into an other world of shifting gray shapes and pale amber streamers of sun bent by the retreating fog. Motorists tend to grumble when they find themselves snagged by these atmospherics. It costs them time.        Bicyclists want it to last forever. Around a curve in the road in the three-quarter light of the dawn stands a young deer, motionless at the edge of the highway. The bicyclists stop. The fawn is staring at them, but with no disposition to run. If they looked overhead the cyclists would have seen a seagull doing slow acrobatics above the Norways. And suddenly the world, for those few moments, comes to a stop. There is no sound. Not the deer, not the gull, not the humans. The morning is windless, and there are no whispers in the forests. The world is still. And here you have to allow the bicyclists a moment of proprietorship. If you don't ride a bicycle in the early morning in the northwoods, you can't quite experience a discovery like that.      Well, all right, forever sometimes has a short shelf life. For the some 100 riders on our 29th Jaunt With Jim it lasted at least through the 12 miles from Drummond to Mason, a town which bravely asserts its current population as something around 122, but which not so many decades ago was home to thousands, to sawmills and rumbling freight trains carrying millions of board feet of white pine to the lumber yards of America.       And somewhere near the dormant tavern beyond a clump of trees is the surviving manor of a lumber mandarin of those years. It was built by Cass Gilbert who, almost nobody in Mason will hesitate to tell you, also designed the U.S. Supreme Court Building, New York's Woolworth Tower and the State Capitol of Minnesota.       It's something you learn on a bike ride. Today Mason fills a civic category that fits somewhere between a ghost town and what some folks call "the sticks." These are hard and dismissive words. A town like Mason doesn't deserve them. It's something else you learn on a bike ride.  Most people who still live in Mason don't work in Mason. The industrial town of Ashland on Lake Superior is 20 miles up the road and the resort towns of Cable and Hayward support sizeable payrolls to the south. What people who still live in Mason do on a Sunday morning in June is to lay out pounds of carmel rolls and rice crispy bars in the village fire hall and spend an hour telling the captive visitors what a totally amazing place Mason was. How many towns of 122 can you  name that maintains a museum where you can see black and white photos of log stacks four stories high and a switchboard with plugs and sockets where a hundred years ago people called in and asked for "central." She, of course, knew every shred of gossip in town and usually went to her grave  with tight lips and the satisfaction of having saved half the marriages in town and jail terms for the city council.       Today we can call Bangkok by cell phone. In those years they used party lines, and no secrets lasted very long because those were the bumper seasons of eavesdropping.       We hated to leave Mason. You could develop a slow-burn of indignation for the clearcutting frenzies of the timber tycoons of a hundred years ago. But sometimes the lessons of history--when you encounter them in the congenialty of a bike ride--tend to be more absorbing than imflammatory. This, after all, is the history of the extractive industries. Until a few years ago, at least, we tore through our resources prodigally. Most natural resources aren't going to last until the end of time. Most people know that without having to hold conservationist degrees. Most people in political power know that also, but their memories tend to be dulled by the size and source of their campaign contributions.       But a cross-country bike ride is usually no place for the polemics of the electoral process. The other usual suspects of group conversation--the weather, sex, football, the stock market, sex, long term care, the weather and sex--are usually overwhelmed by the traumas and random bliss that color the memories of the bike rides themselves. Bike riders are merciless historians. This is a highly competitive, savage field of scholarship. There are people on this ride who actually went on the Internet to produce the approximate number of Army worms that infested our campground in Hibbing, MN two years ago. Somebody is going to say there was no rainstorm like the one from Cannon Falls to Chaska in 2003, during which one of our riders actually entered a outfitter shop in New Prague to consider buying a pair of fishing waders as a condition of finishing the ride. "Wrong," somebody will say. "The rain was so bad under the statue of Big Herman in New Ulm in the 1980s that it put six inches of water in Donna Ranallo's tent, and she got into a plastic garbage bag to stave off hypothermia, and the tent flap opened and she floated out into the campground."       This is truth. And of the 2003 ride in Wisconsin, somebody might say down the road: "It was uncanny. Everyday sunshine and practically every day a breeze at our backs. It was that way from Spooner to Drummond and then in Bayfield and on Madeline Island and Park Falls and Ladysmith..."       You have to give cyclists a little slack. We did have two hours of rain from Ashland to Hurley. But you had to forget the rain when you remembered the merry entrepreneurs at the Hurricane Hut in Bayfield. The proprietors claimed they had gone on an inventory trip at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans and came back with  garish beads and painted glass necklaces which must have retailed for 10 cents apiece. Word got around. Bicyclists thronged the Hurricane Hut to buy ice cream and the glass beads that went with it as a premium. I'm talking unisex beads. In time the huskiest, beefiest, slickest male bicyclists all ran around wearing beads and glass, and I want to tell you I needed great ingenuity to explain all of this to the cops in Hurley.       And so it went for the week. An idyll on the seat of a bicycle? Almost that. We partnered for our meals with Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and more, and if there was a clan of Holy Rollers en route we might have gone in that direction as well. With the towns' permission we camped in parks and on school grounds and were served by teen-agers in Hayward, Hurley, Spooner and Mellen, by pastors, police, school teachers and choir singers. In Park Falls 20 or 30 of us tripled the audience for the 6:30 showing of "Hollywood Homicide" starring Harrison Ford and Minnesota's Josh Hartnet at the Park Theater and were somewhat startled halfway through the chaos on the screen to see the curtains closing. It was Intermission at the Park! The proprietor-projectionist-popcorn salesman shut down the sights and sounds of culture for 10 minutes to hawk Dots, Snickers and Gatorade.       Life in mid-America. The star had to be Carol Severt, the Mother Hubbard of the Park Falls school system, who runs her kitchen with the benevolent competence and total absence of panic that can only be commanded by a woman who serves 700 kids a day. On our breakfast plates she loaded vast slices of French Toast, sausage and mounds of watermelon and fresh strawberries. For those on the verge of famishment after that, there were muffins, donuts, cookies and corn flakes.       And on the last day, there was a route on County F from Weyerhauser to Hwy. 48 and Birchwood. It wove its way among aromatic spruces and splashes of a brook here and there. It gained altitude, lost it, gained some more, twisted through a stand of larch and then emerged at Birchwood, where at Ed's Pit Stop there were treats of ice cream bars for the arrivals. These were the gift of Vivian Mason, whose late husband, Jack, was one of the most popular of all bicyclists of the northwoods.       I have to say there is absolutely no direct evidence that God is a bicyclist. It is, however, possible--which might explain how the bike route of County F happened to find its way onto the bicyclist's road map.