urban bicycle journeys

I have a friend. He has a friend. I have met his friend only once or twice. The friend of the friend has lived almost his entire life in a secondary California city where agriculture is its biggest business. A couple of years ago he and his wife of many years decided they needed a second home somewhere on the “East Coast.” The spot to be chosen could be anywhere in the entire Eastern third of the United States. I had the impression that they are not particularly wealthy but are wealthy enough to afford a second home. They did a lot of research. They finally chose, adamantly and decisively, Mebane NC.

This flummoxed me. Mebane? Chapel Hill NC where Tootie and I have lived for thirty-five years is twenty miles southeast of Mebane NC. In all these years we have observed Mebane NC with mild bemusement, a place we knew about but did not know anyone who lived there. Gradually we heard of a few friends of friends that have moved out near Mebane, looking for somewhere less expensive. Fifteen years ago the downtown of Mebane was mostly empty storefronts. Now it is almost full.

Mebane is part of a strip of industrial and textile mill towns of varying sizes that line I-85 between Durham and Greensboro. From Mebane it is thirty-some miles in one direction to Greensboro and twenty-some miles to Durham in the other. The state owned rail line also follows this strip. The weather at least for one day in late summer was unusually cool and dry. For that one day, why not drive to Mebane, leave the car there, then cycle to Greensboro? I could take the Amtrak for most of the return.

Tootie wanted to use our “good” car that day so I had to drive the “old” car, the 2004 Honda Accord that we had inherited from her late mother. Despite its 194,000 miles and nineteen years in age, it is still going more or less strong. We keep it parked it on the street near our condo building and leave it unused for sometimes weeks at a time. The Honda’s biggest downside is that I have to fold the Bike Friday to fit it in the trunk.

I theorize that the friend of my friend and his wife have chosen Mebane NC because it fills in so many boxes on the checklist of dreams that Americans have when they have the luxury of deciding where they want to live. Mebane is near the hustle and bustle of the Raleigh/Durham area but still apart from it. It has an old school looking downtown, even if almost none of their shopping would actually be done in that downtown. Just on appearances Mebane seems like the quintessential fantasy of a small town, like something from The Music Man.

I parked on the street in downtown Mebane. Mebane still has parking like the fantasy of America is supposed to have, abundantly available and always free.

I had an unscheduled half hour struggle in the normally one minute procedure of unfolding my Bike Friday from the trunk of my car. I will spare my readers the details, but it was a mechanical problem. While wrestling with the bike in front of downtown Mebane’s only real merchandise store, a Dollar General, I noticed a guy in cammo parking a truck with a Chevrolet Confederate sticker. One never sees this kind of sticker in Chapel Hill twenty miles away.

Eventually I did get the bicycle operating properly and I cycled out of town, heading west. It was 9:30 AM.

Mebane had and has several decent sized mills or factories. White Furniture made high-end furniture in Mebane from 1881 to 1993. The former furniture factory has recently been made into apartments.

Since I had barely started I was not ready to stop for coffee but I was mildly hungry and needed to use a bathroom. On Main Street a couple of blocks from where I parked I stopped at Filament Coffee & Tea and bought an expensive but otherwise good $ 4.50 coconut banana pastry, which I ate while cycling.

Out of town I passed what seemed a mile long stretch of several auto junkyards, each hiding behind opaque fences.

In my memories my mother had told me when I was ten years old that Jackie Kennedy was responsible for these fences. Looking it up now I found out that my memory was not quite correct. It was Lady Bird Johnson who lobbied for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 that imposed a national requirement to shield junkyards from view, a requirement that obviously still exists.

I was to pass through a series of mill towns in the thirty-eight miles to Greensboro. Only seven miles west of Mebane is the town of Haw River which sits aside, what else, the Haw River. All its older mills look closed. The largest, the former Cone Mills, is now apartments.

The textile business is down but not out. On the outskirts of Haw River I saw this sock factory looking very much operational. Note that it is in a newer metal building. Maybe those old brick buildings are not practical.

After crossing the Haw River the next town in line, only four miles away, was Graham NC.

Graham is also dotted with mostly empty textile mills. Graham is the county seat but not the largest city of Alamance County. A couple of years ago the right-leaning county sheriff had taken a hard line in confronting left-leaning demonstrators around the courthouse. Just thirty miles away in Durham NC a crowd had just physically torn down a Confederate statue. Here in Graham NC their Confederate statue is now surrounded by a tall fence.

Graham sits adjacent to the largest city in Alamance County, Burlington NC (population 57,000.). Towns now realize that conventional shopping is never going to return to their downtowns and the successful cities and towns have to somehow fill their downtowns with restaurants, coffee shops, antique stores, and hair places. Downtown Burlington has been looking better in recent years.

Two or three years ago my son Jack, who was then about thirty, was looking to buy a house in Durham NC. Competition with other buyers was stiff. I suggested he think about Burlington NC, that I had seen lovely old houses there for much less money. He looked at me like I was crazy. Among his crowd Burlington seemed like the end of the earth. To me those older neighborhoods in Burlington still do look attractive.

Burlington is filled with what seems like dozens of empty textile mills. I was to see more of them on my return later in the day. Just four miles further on my route passed through the town of Elon, home of Elon University. Elon’s Main Street looks fairly typical.

The procession of small towns continued! Gibsonville NC seems a very separate town from Elon but is only three miles further west. Gibsonville has its own Main Street lined with brick buildings, and a mid-century modern post office.

Gibsonville is also filled with brick factory and mill buildings, some in operation, some not. I had bike ridden close to twenty miles so I thought it OK if I stopped for an oat milk latte, one pack sugar in downtown Gibsonville at The Gilded Bean.

It was eighteen miles further to downtown Greensboro. Beyond Gibsonville the landscape opened up and I felt I was out in the countryside.

There are at least a few tobacco farms out here!

As a bicyclist it is intimidating trying to cycle through the suburban retail sprawl that surrounds our cities. Usually once in the street grid of the older inner city the cycling is fine. On the east side of Greensboro I have noticed a pattern that I see in many American cities, although I have been specifically watching this part of Greensboro for over twenty years. The wealthy and White side of Greensboro is north and west of its downtown. The east side I was cycling on has almost no retail sprawl and looks almost exclusively Black. From the east one can bicycle right into the city grid from rural countryside without having to fight the traffic normally associated with retail sprawl. Until I arrived by bicycle into downtown Greensboro there had been almost no commercial establishments of any kind for many miles. Should I call this the collective racism of the market; that builders of retail feel that their White customers will not shop as much in a store where most customers are Black? I do not know.

There were a few busy highways but Chapp Farms Road feeds into McConnell Road. When the narrow country highway grew into a wider city street with curbs and sidewalks it made for more relaxed cycling. Just after this spot a bike lane began. I was about three miles from downtown.

I arrived into downtown Greensboro.

On this particular day I chose not to cycle any further into Greensboro than into downtown. It was almost 2:00 PM and I had not had lunch. I would be taking Amtrak back to Burlington at 3:55 PM. Only a few blocks from the Amtrak station was Natty Greene’s Brewing Company. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer and their version of a reuben sandwich. One choice of side; I took slaw.

Even at 3:00 PM it was quite the scene here in downtown Greensboro; four policemen eating a late lunch, and a woman getting some kind of lemon cocktail.

It only cost six dollars for a ticket bought the same day to take Amtrak the twenty-five miles from Greensboro back to Burlington. Bicycle policy on Amtrak is complicated because there are so many different kinds of train cars. On the state owned North Carolina Piedmont trains it is a snap; bicycles are free and you hand the bicycle up to the guy in the baggage car. At about three-thirty I cycled over from the brewery to the Amtrak station. Greensboro’s station is a nicely renovated former Southern Railway station, although I dislike its intentionally nostalgic references to train travel “back in the day.”

Like most Amtrak locations they do not let you go out to the platform until just before the train arrives. The Greensboro station has underground tunnels under the tracks. My train to Burlington came from Charlotte and goes on to Durham and Raleigh. Amtrak said it was sold out. Seemingly a hundred people were getting on here in Greensboro.

Inside the train it was comfortable and clean. Only a train nerd like me would have known that these are recently re-renovated 1940’s coaches.

About half an hour later I got off the train in Burlington and walked forward to the baggage car to have them hand me my bicycle.

It was still twelve miles further to my car in Mebane NC. Cycling away from the Burlington Amtrak station I passed dead textile mill after dead textile mill. Some have been repurposed. This first one is now a Hispanic church.

A corner of the one above is a Hispanic food company now.

Side issue: in most of North Carolina no one walks to just get somewhere, pretty much never. Why aren’t these people driving cars?

I bicycled back to my car parked on the street in downtown Mebane NC. It was still there.

I was home for dinner that night.