We rolled west. People chatted us up when we stopped, they waved at us from porches, teenage girls gathered and giggled. Generally it felt safe to lean the bikes against grocery stores and diners and leave them unlocked while we were inside. We were learning to wave too. At first, tentatively, we would lift a hand from the handle bar and give a meager, numb-handed wave not unlike the Harley rider’s power claw. We called it the eco claw. The wave usually came too late in those first days, though, and I’m sure we were trashing etiquette in some way. But we tried. Soon we came to expect the waves and traded them like the currency of the road: intrinsically valueless but essential to community.

Rural America is not defined by its cornfields. Plenty of them buffer the outskirts of Chicago, serving as a neutral background for 24-pump self-serve gas stations and newly built buffet restaurants. The land has been optioned and divided, staked out at lot corners with large placards announcing the future “business park,” Hampton Inn or “country estates starting at $100,000 per 1/3-acre lot.” The corn is just killing time here while the farmers save money to fix up the truck they’ll use to commute to the “light industrial assembly” job they’ll have in a few years. And in a few more years someone will stand in a parking lot and say: “This used to be cornfields as far as the eye could see.” The city pushes all the way to Wisconsin and nobody waves.

In the city there are too many people to wave: it’s a civility lost to inconvenience. Senses grow numb to the movement of neighbors too numerous to know. Past the city, people sit on porches. They have grease under their fingernails, and they watch dark clouds move across the prairie and wonder if a tornado is coming. Today they know who’s been to town in the Dodge, who mended fences, who put up hay. They wave, and if you stop and get a chance to talk, they ask: “Where you headed?”

Mark Blaine (LNF/ UO 2000) is the editor of Forest magazine and author of the book, Whitewater.