I have been a huge fan of the Duck
Creek Parkway Bike Trail since I first discovered it in 1979 shortly after my
parents moved to Davenport. I had just graduated from high school and gone off
to college, my sister had recently married, and my father took a job in
Davenport, so our family was striving with layers of change and transition.
On the day of this discovery, I was
at my parents’ new house while on spring break from my first year of college. I
remember the day clearly. I did not know anyone but my parents and was bored in
a strange house and a strange new city. It was an early spring day, the air hugging
the remainder of the bitterness of winter, the warm rays of the sun bearing the
promise of summer, a day caught between seasons. I was young and restless,
hungry for what I thought was adventure and new discoveries, my spirit revved
up on the fumes of higher education, stuck in a house that didn’t feel like
home, cooling my jets.
So I hopped on my old childhood
bike that managed to make the move to Davenport and headed south on Marquette
Street toward the downtown of an alien city. Having grown up in Waverly, Iowa,
a small rural town, this city seemed formidable. I had no idea where these two
wheels might take me, but I was ready to find out.
Marquette Street in Davenport is a
major thoroughfare for traffic traveling north and south. Where the streets of
Waverly were wide and easily accessible for bicyclists, this street was barely
wide enough for its four lanes of traffic. I soon became concerned as cars
passed by me uncomfortably close, or slowing down to wait for an opportunity to
weave a wide arc around this intruder on two wheels. It became abundantly clear
that Marquette Street was not a friend of two-wheeled foreigners; rural
transplants who do not know the purpose of a street or their own place in its
non-pedestrian community.
Imagine my relief when about a mile
down this inhospitable strip of pavement, I spied a green sign with the words
“Bike Path” in white letters. A double-sided arrow told me I could turn right
or left to enter the bike path. To the right I saw a ballpark and to the left a
grove of trees. I stopped and carefully checked the traffic before crossing the
street to the left, leaving the angry intersection to its four-wheeled friends.
Good riddance.
I peddled to the left where the
path was swallowed up by the dense woods. I entered the new world, leaving the
traffic sounds in the distance. I was whizzing through speckled beams of light
as the sun shone through tiny new leaves on the tops of the trees. I was riding
parallel to a creek, barely thawed and waking from its wintered frost. It
curved and flowed gently, glinting in the afternoon light. My eyes took in the
sights; my nose took in the smell of damp ground, new growth; my ears took in
the songs of the native birds, happy to be free of frigid winds; my soul heaved
a deep sigh. I suddenly realized that I was not yearning for newness and
adventure, but for home. The home of my soul was on the banks of the river,
quiet, dark, peaceful. I had spent the
better part of the past year in the newness of a college campus: new room, new
people, new knowledge, and plenty of new choices. Some of these choices I
navigated well, but not all. This new
city was not home. What I needed most was a return to the familiar, tranquil, pastoral,
transcendent. I was grateful and exhilarated to have stumbled upon it by
accident….or was it?
