I had been to Columbia, the capital city of South Carolina on a couple of occasions, but I had never been all that impressed. I figured I just had not looked at it hard enough.
My newlywed parents and infant older sister had lived for two years 1953-55 in Columbia, where my father had a job teaching Spanish at Columbia College. I was born just a month after they left Columbia for him to go to graduate school in Colorado. (He quit that after two years and we moved back to his hometown of Norfolk/Virginia Beach, where he got into the car business.) Quite a few times during my upbringing Dad had told me about the social life in Columbia at that time, that “people at cocktail parties always ended up talking about The War.” And The War he was referring to was not the recently ended World War Two, it was the Civil War. My late father was from Virginia and my mother is from Texas, so they were both Southerners. Still, I just recently asked Mom about Columbia and she said the same thing, that the young faculty at the college were mostly from somewhere else, and they were all surprised at the amount of conversation about General Sherman.
It seemed the southwest side of Columbia might be interesting. I drove down there four hours from Chapel Hill and parked my car thirty something miles from downtown Columbia, in the twin town of Batesburg-Leesville. There is a Walmart near its downtown where I felt safe leaving my car. I took out the bicycle.
NORTH Carolina has lost a lot of the atmosphere in its small towns because the NCDOT has put four lane highways right through the middle of most of them. South Carolina, on the other hand, has built roads with a more nuanced view. Batesville-Leesburg is nine miles from I-20, but otherwise the town is accessed only by two lane roads. It allows the town to feel more like a town and less like a strip mall. Even the Walmart fronts a two lane highway.
I had just started biking but it was already time for lunch. I had actually been to Batesville-Leesburg on one previous occasion and had had great barbecue at Jackie Hite’s. I was on my way to there when I passed the Inside Out Cafe . It had lots of cars parked outside, always a good sign. I really wanted something healthier than pork fat, so I thought I would give this a try.
The staff of the restaurant could not have been nicer and the chicken salad sandwich was delicious, enlivened with bits of fresh grapes. It was the kind of place women of a certain age would go for lunch. There was a pleasant outdoor patio on the back. Christian images were all over the walls.
The bathroom wallpaper was New York City. It took me a minute to get this, but this is about 9-11, right?
One young woman in particular seemed to be in charge. I heard her say something about having gone to culinary school. She had a T-shirt with this quote on the back.
The front of her shirt was more direct; three icons and the words: PRO-GOD
PRO-LIFE
PRO-GUN
ok…
After lunch I had a nice time watching a freight train pass in front of the restaurant, then climbed back on the bicycle, heading out of town. It would be nineteen miles down the original US-1 to the next, larger town of Lexington.
The bike ride to Lexington was fine, really. I eventually managed to get onto some secondary roads.
Lexington has grown considerably in the past few years, new subdivisions in the growing sprawl around Columbia. I really like a coffee with milk, a latte, in the late afternoon. I found a coffee house just a couple of doors down from the courthouse in downtown Lexington. The coffee was nice, the service professional.
Only after sitting here a while and reading my Kindle did I realize that this coffee house was owned by, or served as an extension of, a particular church. Religious art was on the walls. People at the next table were three women talking to a guy who I realized was a pastor. He had ridden his motorcycle to the coffee house, which was full of people on a Friday afternoon.
It was a pleasant atmosphere, no one bothered me, and after reading for a while I got back on the bike and threaded through miles and miles of Columbia suburbs. I had to go on major roads because all the residential streets were non-connecting. The bicycling was not that pleasant and neither was the scenery, although I did stumble on one nice piece of googie architecture.
In an African-American part of West Columbia I rode by this place, the Best Hash & Rice in S.C. Someone was smoking meat in the parking lot. At four-thirty in the afternoon I just was not hungry.
There was a bike lane on a wide highway, which made it reasonably safe but not pleasant as I saw downtown Columbia in the distance.
I first rode into the Congaree Vista neighborhood, which is a group of recently renovated former warehouses. Like many such areas that are quickly redeveloped all at once, there were a lot of chain restaurants.
Still, there was a brewpub that looked locally owned, and I stopped so I could figure out what to do next. I sat around a bunch of preppy looking young people and enjoyed a pleasant beer. I found a reasonably priced hotel room about a mile away, in the center of the original downtown.
The Sheraton Columbia is in a very narrow seventeen story former bank building from 1913.
The University of South Carolina is a pretty large school, and downtown Columbia now seems to be mostly a college town, with the benefits that brings. One of the 1970’s office high rises has been converted into student housing. Later on that evening I went out, determined to have a seat at a bar and a healthy meal but at a reasonable price. I had felt that on these bike trips I had to quit having $70.00 dinners. Just two blocks down the street, at Main Street Public House I had an $11.00 Margherita pizza and two $6.00 glasses of wine. Everybody was watching college basketball on TV.
I could say that I spent the next day looking around the interesting parts of Columbia, maybe finding Columbia College or my parents old neighborhood, wherever that was. Or maybe exploring early 20th century residential neighborhoods like Shandon. But I did not. Cloudy skies were predicted but the reality was a cold rain. It rained quite hard that morning; when it stopped briefly I had no choice other than to get on the bike and start riding west back toward Batesburg-Leesville. After about six miles the rain started up again and I ducked into a Krispy Kreme doughnut store. I sat there quite a while, eating my doughnut and drinking my decaf coffee, watching the West Columbia world go by.
The rain finally stopped. I headed out. I passed this interesting building.
Yes, I eventually biked back to Batesburg-Leesville, and the Walmart parking lot, and our white Honda. But something happened that bothered me. I have been doing these kinds of bicycle rides since I was about twelve years old, fifty years ago. I have often bicycled in a way that pissed off some motorist, and they would say something. The anger was provoked. But until three weeks ago, 140 miles from here on another ride in Dillon, South Carolina I had hardly ever remembered someone showing unprovoked visceral hatred towards me and my bicycle, whatever that represents. In Dillon, a pickup truck honked at me and some angry words came out of the window, I cannot remember what they were. But I clearly was not stopping traffic; there was no traffic around.
Fast forward three weeks and I was on US1, just a mile or two from Batesburg-Leesville, which had a wide shoulder and I was not slowing down traffic. Two young men in one of those jacked up pickup trucks intentionally roared by me very closely. The man on the passenger side give me a very vigorous and intense one finger salute. I had done nothing to him. Thirty minutes later the same truck roared by me once again, trying to come close and scare me with their loud non-mufflered engine.
As a past middle aged white man with decent social skills, I pretty much can go anywhere and do anything. This gives me a tiny sliver of knowledge of what it is like to be hated for something one has no control over. I feel for those less fortunate than me. I hate to blame this on Trump, but has he somehow inspired people to act on those politically incorrect thoughts that they previously kept bottled up?
