Steffen Disbergen
Mat Wenzel
ENC 2135 - 142
20 January 2017
Project 1 - Spoke Folk Genre Interactions
Every summer for the past three years I have been a part of a Christian missionary trip known as “Spoke Folk.” On this trip we perform a shows for the congregations of the churches we are staying at. This church changes every day as we pack up right after the show, end up sleeping on air mattresses in the same church we just performed at, and hit the road the following morning headed to our next church to do it all again, spreading the love of God. What’s unique about our travels though, is the method of transport we use to go from church to church. While our bags and music equipment are loaded into vans and taken to the next church, all the participants get there by biking. This is how the organization got its name “Spoke Folk.”
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I always loved the biking aspect of the trip and always motivate my biking partner of the day to go as fast as they can manage and generally end up being one of the first three groups that arrive at the church. I also prided myself my direction reading ability as I rarely got lost. The key to not getting lost was paying careful attention to the instructions that we were given to us on each bike ride. Unlike traditional instructions where you would expect a map and directions we are only given a sheet of paper with the ride translated to text. This is done using the wonderfully confusing Microsoft software Excel. Each row of the paper will be another direction where each column contains more information for that turn. The first column would contain L/R for a left or right turn, the second states how far the turn is from the previous one, the third shows how long it has been from the beginning of the ride, the next column would tell the the road name to turn on, and finally a column determining whether it is a stop sign (SS) or stop light (SL).
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Over the past two tours, made up of 10 trips each, I had only gone off route once, but it was intentional in order to save time and go to Subway. I held this great record until my third tour. On this tour we had a 90 mile day! This was easily the longest bike ride of the entire trip and many would not be able to finish, I was determined not to be one of those people. I partnered up with the strongest biker I could find and we were off. We looked at the directions and it wasn’t long until we realized we were lost. We had taken off as the first pair with incredible speed so we weren’t confused that no one was behind us, but the roads simply didn’t line up with the instructions, and it had been well over the distance between our next turn that was on the instructions. We stopped and pondered where we could have gone wrong as we only made one turn and were on the correct road, but the next road to turn on could not have been as far as we had biked according to our directions. My partner and I checked our phones to find where we were and the entire time I thought in my head, “I’m clearly not as good a navigator as I thought.” Eventually, we realized that when we turned out of the church we went right instead of left and were now five miles in the wrong direction. By the time we would get back to the church we would have tacked on an additional 10 miles to the already 90 mile bike ride! Now we were worried we wouldn’t be able to finish the ride we had anticipated so much. We didn't want all our efforts to be squandered so we looked at the directions and compared them to Google maps for a few minutes, looking for an intersection point between our new course and the original one. Once we found one it was off to the races. All this trouble was caused by the direction sheet, obviously a very imperative piece of text that would determine the outcome of our trip; and in my case I had made it to the 70 mile lunch stop and decided to eat a burger from Dairy Queen which put me out of biking commission. Perhaps if I hadn’t gotten lost in the beginning I would not have had an extra 10 miles of pain and would have only been 10 miles away from finishing eliminating the need for a lunch stop as there was significantly more nutritious food awaiting us there. My partner and I were not the only ones who had taken a wrong turn on the trip and definitely weren't the last. Future rides on the tour saw many people fall of course, but many found their way back using the same key that led them astray. I took the van to the church along with many of the other bikers who had not finished. At the end of the day only four of about thirty had finished. We had little time to rest from the ride as we needed to immediately set up the equipment for the performance and then we could finally devour the delicious meal the church members had prepared for us. It was well needed and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. While I did not complete that ride, I refrained from getting lost on any other ride that trip showing I had learned my lesson.
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