RAGBRAI Day 3: So Much Stuff

Ironically, going to Iowa to ride in a big mobile bike party takes a truck, a trailer, and eight tanks of gas. Before leaving home, you acknowledge your anxiety and ambition and you cram all the portables you think you’ll need — mostly food, housing and bedding — into a bike panier and a bin. You truck your gear and your big solar electric recumbent tandem bike to the starting line. Before you abandon the truck, you bequeath it the big sleeve of sardine tins, the extra battery, the shampoo, and a few changes of clothes you’ve removed from your bin. After the first few days of biking, you also shed the big tube of arthritis cream, the bug spray, the 8 X 11” spiral-bound notebook, half the garbage bags, the hand sani, and a half-eaten bag of carrots. But you’re pretty attached to what’s left—the tent, sleeping bag, camp chair, the towel, sunscreen, panty liners and cash. These are the camping accoutrements that make RAGBRAI possible. All 300 people in my camp have more or less the same attachments. Mornings and evenings, we rummage through them, use them, rearrange them.

4:30 AM, July 22, 2025

The monocropping and poisoning of Iowa’s green and fecund breast is a separate, heartbreaking issue. To be warm and open, even to the engineers of this catastrophe, is difficult.

King Corn

Humidity is green

The monocroppers (I guess, including Poet Bioprocessing) are as attached to one sort of economic structure and social scaffolding as I am to another. Hard to compete on this one! After all, I am the one who contravened my principles to drive out here in a motor vehicle. Just as they double-down on their commitment to large-scale, I too have clung to desires that have negative consequences while simultaneously providing the pleasures my more principled beliefs abjure. I too have expressed myself in placards and slogans, like the MAGA folks, at the expense of genuine communication. There’s a lot of signage on RAGBRAI, much of it about Summit Carbon Solutions.

But it’s not just political. Slogans, buttons, and T-shirts can also pre-situate communication in the world of traditional marketing/advertising.

• Build a bloody Mary/ The way you like it best/ up at The Store / and give your butt a rest

• Hands going numb? Chiropractor 5 miles ahead

• Massage > Beer

Other phrases on, for instance, vans, clothes, and tote bags, are intended to build camaraderie or assert identity

• We do this not because it is easy but because we thought it would be easy

• Please dont run me over

• Jesus

• No e-bikes

• Flock of Sutra

• Schorgasm

A SAG car associated with our camp

This T-shirt, though, is my all-time favorite. A little bit Buddhist, a little bit of ‘omg this is a hard ride’, and —incredibly—an actual quote from Joni Ernst about why she feels it’s fine to cut off Medicaid)