Rushville Revisited
Rushville revisited
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
SOMETIMES IT'S NICE TO BE WRONG. NOT very often, but in this case I don't mind. Readers with vast, all-encompassing memories will recall that a few months ago I wrote a column about being turned down at a motel in Rushville, Illinois, after a long day of touring.
Barb and I soon found a room at another place a few blocks away, but concluded we’d been victims of antimotorcycling bias at the first motel. There was, after all, only one car parked in the lot. And when we . walked by at 10:30 that night there -was still just one car and one lighted room. Same thing the next morning. The place looked empty, but we’d been told there was no vacancy.
This rarely happens nowadays (I remarked in the column), and it seemed like a throwback to the bad old days of the biker image. So long, Rushville.
Not so fast there, buckaroo.
Last week I got a friendly-but-concerned letter from Mrs. Marie Wallace, owner of the Green Gables Motel, the place where we did stay. She told us she’d done some detective work and found that both her motel and the one that turned us away were actually full the night of our stay. A church group had arrived late by bus, filling all the rooms in town.
She felt terrible that we got a negative impression of Rushville, and invited us to return on our next motorcycle trip for room and dinner, on the house. She wanted us to meet the friendly people of Schuyler County and Rushville, “many of whom ride Harleys and are pillars of the community.”
Great. So now I felt terrible. But wait:
Right after that letter arrived, the Mayor of Rushville, Dennis Yates, called me. Seems he’s an avid lifelong motorcyclist with a fine collection of older bikes. He was deeply troubled that a fellow motorcyclist should go away with a bad feeling about his town.
“There are a lot of motorcyclists in the area,” he told me, “and a lot of Cycle World readers. This is the last place in the world that would want to make a touring rider feel unwelcome. We hope you’ll come back again and visit. We like motorcycles in this town.”
Now I felt even worse.
Then Marie Wallace called me long distance, and I learned that the local
judge is a hard-core bike enthusiast, as are the president of the local Economic Development Corporation and his wife. Last year they rode to Daytona, with a dozen other Rushvillites. Most of them also went to Sturgis.
Great. I had slighted the virtual motorcycling epicenter of the Midwest. So I apologized for the misunderstanding and said I would, indeed, come back sometime and give Rushville another try.
I mention this little episode not just to set the record straight, but because it happened at all.
It’s quite amazing to me that two community leaders in a small town would: (a) read a story in a motorcycle magazine; (b) react with concern rather than indifference; and (c) go to so much trouble to extend their hospitality to those of us who arrive at motels each evening with dead bugs on our chins, plastered-down hair and third-degree windburn, gloves and boots reeking of spilled low-lead.
Maybe the old prejudices I grew up with really are, for the most part, dead. Twenty years ago, a motel owner and a mayor in a small town would have been more likely to say, “Good. We ran ’em out of here. Maybe they won’t come back.”
Now they offer room and dinner and a tour of the town.
Naturally, there’s more than just hospitality at stake here; we also have an undeniable element of economics. These are hard times for small towns.
They struggle to attract business, to keep their Main Streets open in the face of malls and discount stores, to provide jobs for their young, who are often drawn away to the big city.
Every dollar and every customer counts in a small town, so the patronage of touring motorcyclists is taken no more lightly than the trade of any other traveler. In short, we count.
But there’s a flipside, too. If small communities need us, we need them even more. There is a symbiotic relationship between motorcycles and the American small town.
For those of us who tour, it would be a sad vacation indeed if we were relegated strictly to the interstates and the franchised motels and restaurants that cluster around the exit ramps. Most of us plan our trips around meandering secondary roads. At the end of the day, we search not for 100-room twostory lodges near the freeway, but for 12-unit mom-and-pop motels where we can park the bike right in front of the door and sit on the porch to admire it as the sun goes down.
Barb and I usually tour without plans or reservations. We ride on backroads until we get tired and then we begin to look for a small town that has both a motel and a real restaurant or cafe. We stop at the first one that does. If the town has a legal outlet for margaritas and an operating movie theater as well, we consider this a Perfect Town, and may stop as early as four in the afternoon, just to take advantage of this rare combination.
On the evening we stopped in Rushville, we’d been through dozens of towns with no motels or restaurants, and it was getting late. Then we hit the outskirts of Rushville and were greeted by the sight of two motels and a friendly looking roadside cafe, and that’s why we stopped.
Now Marie Wallace tells me the town has a movie theater, too. And several other restaurants, as well as bars, ostensibly with margaritas. A Perfect Town. With a mayor and a judge who ride bikes.
We’ll be back through Rushville one of these days, but I don’t think we should accept any free hospitality. We’ll take Marie Wallace and Mayor Yates out to dinner and a movie. The drinks are on us. É3
