The March Hare: Fall 2006 Issue 50

Homecomings • Going Home • Reflections • Nature Corner • Bernadoette • Wordy Gurdy

Bernadoette

By Thomas

Bernadoette is my best friend. She was born in England in the early 70's, has ten speeds, drinks oil and has been dipped in chrome. I was born in Peoria in the late 70's, have only one speed, adore ales and like to dip in the pond. Still, we have much in common, and, most of all, enjoy traveling together.

Many of these great adventures are along the highways and backroads between Dancing Rabbit, in the watershed of the Fabius River, and Pekin, a city along the Illinois River. My job is to perch on Bern's back, where I am graciously allowed, tracing circles with my feet and performing the occasional hand jive. She sees to the finer mechanical details with a confident elegance. So the whole affair is very fun and easy, just like riding a bicycle.

Often, the winds do not agree with our chosen direction of travel. This used to bring me to all sorts of cussing and the screaming of songs, but now I just lower helmet and listen. A rustling from the corn says: soon these fields will be churned upside down and much will be blown away. Some of that fine fertility will be intercepted by cloud fortresses, hovering piles of silver pillow masonry, and the rains will settle it back again to these same lands where, long ago, there was a Bear Paw Sea.

A perfect match: the author and Bernadoette

The trucks make their own breezes. The hurrying wooly caterpillars get tumbled and then squashed. A muffin wrapper, tossed from the roaring cab, sails over the swampy ditch, above the hedgeapple row and lands somewhere out of sight. No doubt, menacing prairie monkeys await there and devour the last greasy crumbs with great relish. Someday, we might get a kiss on the cheeks from that wheel-ed monster named Mack. That is fair enough, as it is his tarry road that bears us. But, Bernadoette would much rather oxidize away, tangled in a juicy patch of brambles, and first, I'd like to learn how to make good boots.

These journeys we make together only grow more pleasing. Recently, Bern unveiled some hidden turbo thrusters just in time to enable a vital hop over a rusting mess of barbed wire that was lurking there on the white line. She keeps to it when I am astray, whether thinking of a forest of chestnuts, or how to make Rutledge and Buffalo directly adjacent. Then my dreamy rummaging consciousness slips back to the present evening. It has grown calmer and there is Bernadoette with a whoosh, a dull metallic whirr and the occasional click. Yellow-tipped mullein stalks sway in a barnyard; they point to a sagging gambrel roof and whisper ancestral stories. We roll on in stillness towards loved ones and the gardens and fires they keep.

A menacing Prairie Monkey

Homecomings • Going Home • Reflections • Nature Corner • Bernadoette • Wordy Gurdy