The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal. Tom Davies Kevill
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scene that greeted me was bathed in cigarette smoke and the faintly illicit red glow of neon advertising signs, while lively Country and Western music jumped out of a jukebox. A bar stretched the length of a room jam-packed with burly men in the usual faded jeans, cowboy hats and pop shirts. A busy gang of busty barmaids hurried from fridge to fridge, answering the demands of their rowdy customers.
I made my way to the bar and squeezed into a space between some Stetson-wearing ranchers. Behind the bar, surrounding the dusty bottles of Scotch and flavoured brandy, was a display of North Dakota memorabilia. A stuffed bear smoking a cigarette, sets of antlers, stuffed rodents, lost hubcaps, state flags, licence plates, worn-out saddles and prized Walleye fish. The rest of the room was decorated with the Stars and Stripes, posters of girls in hot pants draped over sports cars and flashing beer signs. Stern-faced men played cards at small round tables, players lent on cue sticks by a pool table, flashing video poker machines blinked erratically and a dated jukebox filled the space underneath a large screen showing men doing their best to hang on to crazy horses in a televised rodeo.
‘What’ll it be, sweetheart?’ cooed a barmaid.
‘I’ll get a beer please.’
An ice-covered glass tankard was pulled from a chest freezer and filled with pale fizzy beer. I swigged and took stock of where I was. The whole bar joined in with the chorus of the popular Country and Western classic that was being spun in the jukebox.
‘Save a horse. Ride a cowboy.’
I sat at a table with my rodeo friends, who drank in the same way they rode their horses. Fast, and with total disregard for human safety. Tall story followed tall story, beer followed beer and busty girls in tight jeans and T-shirts tied at their midriff were passed from lap to lap. Perhaps I needed a hat or my jeans weren’t tight enough but I kept getting missed out. It was clear that a cyclist, however far he had come, didn’t cut the mustard.
The evening wore on in a continuing blur. As each drink arrived my determination to quit cycling and ride out on a horse became stronger, and by the time the bottles of blackberry brandy were being shot back I had as good as sold my bike. The problem was that apart from a few salty handfuls of popcorn salvaged from the bar, I had eaten nothing since breakfast. The cowboys were drinking faster and faster and if I was going to make it through the night and become one of them, I needed some ballast. I staggered outside, where my first lungful of fresh air was pure luxury.
As with all good drinking dens, a savvy local had set up a small stand within falling distance of the bar. Under a red umbrella a deep-fat fryer was sending a cloud of steam into the night and a home-made cardboard sign read:
FLEISCHKUECHLE $2
I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the unreadable word.
‘One flyschukehill, please.’
‘Flesh licker. It’s pronounced flesh licker.’
‘One flesh licker, please.’
On a bicycle, moving slowly across the country, I was able to see and taste first hand the culinary effects that migration from Europe had on this country. In the same way that the USA’s fast food favourite, the hamburger, began as the Hamburg sandwich, knocked together by a couple of wily Germans living in New York, here in the less glamorous surroundings of Stanton, North Dakota, I was enjoying a fleischkuechle, a relic left behind by the Black Sea Germans, who after fleeing oppression in Russia in the late nineteenth century began to look to the Americas, where some had already found freedom and land in the 1870s. Continuing through the 1890s and the early 1900s, the Black Sea Germans began to arrive in large numbers in the Dakotas, bringing their wheat-farming skills and culinary traditions to this fertile new land.
‘Fleisch’ meaning meat and ‘kuechle’ meaning little cake, this simple hearty snack was by no means a culinary masterpiece, but it did just the job after an evening of heavy drinking with cowboys, and it no doubt did the same after a hard day farming the fields in the bread basket of America. It turned out to be a folded pastry envelope the size of a pair of Y-fronts, filled with a well-seasoned beef patty. Deep-fried for four or five minutes in a large vat of oil until golden brown, they were left to cool just a little before being handed in a paper napkin to hungry customers. After two fleischkuechles, and suffering from first-degree burns to my mouth, I began to master the art of eating these napalm-filled pockets. One: carefully nibble away the top corner. Two: avoid the jet of hot steam that is blasted into your face. Three: gently squeeze your fleischkuechle a few times, drawing in some cool evening air. Four: nibble a little more from the corner. Five: insert a healthy squirt of tomato ketchup and a few scoops of sliced pickles. Six: devour. I don’t know how many I ate, but for the rest of the night I seemed to commute between the bar and the stand outside. With a little food inside me I was able to keep up with my new fast-living comrades in a frenzy of dancing and drinking until a very large girl bought me a ‘real cowboy’ drink called a rusty nail.
Peeling my face from the dried puddle of drool that had accumulated on the plastic groundsheet of my tent, I enjoyed those fleeting blissful moments of memory loss before the previous night’s excess came rushing home in a crashing headache and a violent wave of nausea. Still fully clothed, I had only made it halfway into my tent and pulling myself to my feet was embarrassed to find a damp patch around my groin. At the age of twenty-seven, I had wet my tent and now I knew I could never be a cowboy. With no other choice, I packed up my bicycle and rode out of town.
The party are in excellent health and spirits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed.
Capt Meriwether Lewis, Fort Mandan, 7 April 1805
In August 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, under the orders of the President, Thomas Jefferson, set out on an expedition to explore the Missouri river and try to establish a river route across the continent. Leaving Pittsburgh, Lewis and Clark led a corps of thirty-three men across America, and by Christmas 1804 were camped in for the long winter at Fort Mandan, a few kilometres outside Stanton. Having to endure skirmishes with natives, starvation, harsh winters and disease Lewis and Clark pushed deeper into what was then Louisiana. At last, finding the navigable waters of the Missouri river, they constructed a fleet of small boats and with the help of local natives followed the Missouri upstream into the ominously named Badlands of North Dakota.
With a terrible hangover, and my spirits low, I left Stanton following in the famous footsteps of Lewis and Clark.
Until now the changes in the landscape of the Midwest had been subtle but, as I entered the dramatic surrounds of the Badlands of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the changes became more dramatic.
‘I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1883 and I could see why. For thousands of years the gentle flow of the Missouri river has carved out vast multicoloured canyons in the otherwise flat surroundings. Peculiar towering structures rise out of the ground as the sun highlights bright layers of sedimentary rocks built up over millions of years. I spent a wet and stormy night here, camped amongst the bison that roamed freely through the parkland. Staring up at the night sky, it was hard to imagine that these few hardy beasts once roamed the prairies in herds so big they would have been visible from space.
At the peak of their existence it is estimated that over sixty million bison, or buffalo as they are more commonly known, roamed the land between Mexico and Canada. As the great herds of buffalo migrated with the seasons, so too did the Native American tribes, such as the Lakota, the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
Considering their dependence on buffalo, it is not surprising that the Native Americans held the animal in the highest regard. Not only did the buffalo provide meat but almost every part of its body could be put to some use. Its hide for clothing and shelter. Its bones for tools and weapons. Its tough stomach as a vessel for carrying water. But the well-balanced relationship between the Native Americans and the buffalo would soon be lost for ever, changed by the introduction of white settlers. After Lewis and Clark, more and more white fortune-hunters began to head west