Welcome To The Tour De Skunk
The Tour de France is through now, so I’ve hired newly unemployed Phil Liggett to announce my bicycle ride.
Departure point: Madrid.
Iowa.
Madrid, Iowa.
I only promised 46-time Tour de France announcer Phil Liggett that we would be “riding through Madrid.” Then I offered to put pegs on my bike for him to stand on while we rode, but he scoffed in that particular, post-Brexit British way.
Instead, I spent the early morning installing a children’s bike seat on my bike. On the drive up here, Phil Liggett rode shotgun and narrated the whole way to this trailhead with a disdainful tone.
“It looks like everyone’s clamored onto the Corn Maze craze here just outside of Madrid. Should see some speed, and a few chases down the stretch,” he says, pompously. “It’s looking like a 22-mile jaunt for The Rider this morning… Wait. 22 miles? That can’t be right.”
He keeps calling me that: “The Rider.” I didn’t even ask him to do it.
At the trailhead, I eat half of an expired weed gummy, still fearful of its potency, its potential for lingering paranoia. Phil Liggett doesn’t deserve any of that. I hop on and vow to take the rest when I’m “halfway,” a place still to be determined. “Probably across the river,” I say across my helicopter microphone to Phil Liggett. He pulls his mic away from his face and tells me roughly that I’m pedaling in the wrong gear.
“The Rider has just taken something now, surely above board. Does that say Mellow Mango?” Phil Liggett asks. “And now we’re off, west towards the Des Moines River and the stone-dead river town of… Woodward.”
Once we clear the abandoned grain elevators, an oriole drones us, flying low above the trail. About a mile out, that pure hog confinement smell hits Phil Liggett flush in the face, paired with a thick wall of buffalo gnats. He’s refused a helmet out here, amongst the corn, and he’s begging our pardon for having trouble talking.
Begging our pardon.
After just eight, humid and struggling miles mostly spent with both of us sweating and listening to a Regan-era live tape of the Grateful Dead, we pull off at the Flat Tire Lounge. It opened just a few minutes ago, right at 10 a.m.
“There must be a mechanical issue here for The Rider,” Phil Liggett says, still sitting in his kid’s seat. “He’s pulling off early. Now he’s parking his bike underneath an awning and pulling out a mangled $20 bill from his basketball shorts. Would you look at this? Could it be? He’s walked inside and ordered himself a grapefruit radler at 10:12 a.m… But is it a tall boy? Yes! He’s drinking a tall boy radler here, folks, and I think he’s losing his advantage among the other riders.”
I look back up the trail we just rode, where a group of county Methodist women are getting their steps in, and a 4-H girl is show-walking her horse through the parking lot.
“You want one?” I ask Phil Liggett.
He’s disappointed in me, clearly, refuses the beer, and doesn’t even acknowledge my kickass combination air drum/lip sync of Journey’s “Faithfully.”
We stay for two. Later, after we finally clear the bridge, we climb the hill and find a tower viewer for Phil Liggett to look through. It doesn’t even require a quarter, and he’s trained it on the bridge hoping for once to call some action. He’s been silent since we got back on the bike.
He finds only a middling pelican through the viewer. Below, a walnut limb jams the channel. He practically shrieks when he sees a cyclist, draws his breath in tight when he sees him in full car mechanic garb, smoking a nearly dead cigarette. He’s got a sticker on his bike that says “Shoulda Bought A Chevy.”
“What in the bloody hell is this place?” he asks. At this point in the ride, 80-year old Phil Liggett’s been reduced to tired cliche.
“Well we used to have a ride around here. We called it the Tour de Skunk. It went over the Skunk River. There was bad bluegrass playing at the end and we roasted a pig,” I say. “It was in August.”
“Well than what’s today been?” he asks.
“Part of it.” I say.
By mid-afternoon, we get back to the town that holds the trailhead. And the Night Hawk Bar & Grill.
We catch the first hours of an Iowa tradition: Walking Taco Night. On arrival, Phil Liggett’s handed a walking taco, wisely choosing a base layer of Cool Ranch over Nacho Cheese. At the end of the topping bar, he starts delivering a recap of the ride, as it occurred, straight-faced to the bartender.
“No shit?” she says. “Like I’ve never gotten gummied up and ridden to Woodward.”
His feelings are hurt, but I walk up to Phil Liggett and hold out a room temperature bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch. I gesture for him to pour it into his Walking Taco bag, and shake it violently.
“Do it,” I say. “Livestrong.”
“Oh go ahead and fuck right off,” he says and takes a bite. By the end of the “taco”, he’s drawing a potential route for the 2024 Tour de Skunk on a recycled napkin. He keeps drawing it too large. I say “No Phil, that’s too far. We’re none of us professionals.”
He’s called now to renegotiate his contract for next year’s coverage of the Tour de France. He says he needs to get to Iowa before the first week in August. The rest of the night, he sips at a Busch Light and watches America’s Got Talent on mute.
I’m starting to think that Phil Liggett’s getting the hang of this bike riding thing.
Avery Gregurich is a writer and a hell of a lawn mower living in Iowa. You can find more of his writing over on his Substack, The Five and Dime.
