Twisting Throttle America by Mike Hyde

Twisting Throttle America by Mike Hyde

Author:Mike Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers


Chapter 19

Indiana–Ohio

Nicknames: The Hoosier State–The Buckeye State

These states: 495 kilometres. Journey to date: 15,380 kilometres.

IRODE ACROSS the Ohio River from Louisville into Indiana. The only thing I really knew about Indiana was the Indy 500, the largest singleday sporting event in the world. My speed increased a fraction just thinking about it As I sped up the I-65 through Clarkville looking for the freeway exit to Charlestown, it briefly crossed my mind to stay on the interstate north and have a look at the Indy 500 track in Indianapolis. But that would entail a 325-kilometre dog-leg, half a day’s extra riding, and I didn’t have that sort of luxury at my fingertips. My path through Indiana to Ohio would be tracking along the northern bank of the wide and slow-moving Ohio River, another of these designated scenic byways, this one surprisingly called the Ohio River Scenic Byway.

I passed a sign welcoming me to the Hoosier state. That’s pronounced ‘hooja’, where the ‘j’ sounds like the ‘j’ of Jean-Claude. It’s not so much how you say that word as where it came from. And the thing is: no one actually knows. But to backtrack. Most states’ residents are named after the actual state name. For example, Californians from California, Texans from Texas, Floridians from Florida, Mississippians from I’m not sure where. These state-to-people relationships are called ‘denonyms’, which are also, of course, people who wear jeans. But in the case of Indiana, they said ‘That’ll be the day we’re gonna be called Indians’, but the denonym ‘Indianian’ was considered too much of a mouthful. Then one day back in the early frontier years, a man named Ezra ‘Indiana’ Jones found a cave with a diamond-encrusted skull guarded by a lost tribe and the Nazis tried to—Sorry, wrong Indiana Jones. Anyway, this Jones coined the term ‘Hoosier’, after the common greeting when you approached someone’s cabin and yelled out ‘Hello, the cabin!’ to avoid being shot. The call would come back from the cabin ‘Who’s here?’, but as there wasn’t a lot to do in cabins in the wilderness other than drink moonshine, the words slurred into ‘Who’sh ‘ere?’, and thus ‘hoosier’ became the accepted denonym for rural Indianaians. This explanation is also found on the internet, so it must be true.

So it was that I found myself hoosing along Highway 56 just past Madison, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze skiffing off the huge Ohio River. Tugs towed massive, flat barges piled with what looked like coal. The Ohio is the largest tributary of the Mississippi, but where I was riding it was nearly a mile wide, and it was hard to look on it as a mere tentacle off another river. I pulled over at a lookout to get a photo of a barge with a smoke-belching factory on the far shore. Down below, kids were splashing around in the shallows of the river and families were messing about in runabouts and kayaks. As I fiddled about with my camera, a man puttered up to me riding a moped with a huge fishing rod tied lengthways.



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