November 5, 2008
the argument, ruminating, this is MY road!, mobile homes, six miles out, rowes
Day Forty Five
"Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." - Mark Twain -
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
- Friedrich Nietzsche -
"When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic."
- Jane Wagner -
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There isn't really anything I want to hear at 6:00 in the morning... maybe the sound of rain lightly tapping on the windows, or my wife shifting comfortably in the bed beside me reminding me of how lucky I am. Maybe.
What I don't want to hear is a screaming argument between a mother and daughter. It was torn straight out of a bad melodrama.
"I KNOW WHAT TIME YOU CAME HOME LAST NIGHT!"
"DON'T TREAT ME LIKE I'M A CHILD!!!!"
I would have preferred the less subtle noise of a headboard rhythmically bumping against the wall and moaning sounds coming from the next room over this cacophony. I tried muffling the sound with a pillow over my head but it didn't work.
Once I realized that there was no going back to sleep I pulled out my map and studied it while my neighbors raged on. Examining the route, I strongly considered getting off the ACA route and making a ["THEN DON'T ACT LIKE A CHILD!"] beeline to Jacksonville. I had already bought my airline ["YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!!"] ticket, and there's a lot of uncertainty when you're riding a bike... bad ["I HATE YOU!!!"] weather, bike problems, illness (speaking of which, Klaus caught a cold and spent three days in DeRidder. He's feeling much better, but not 100%). Doing that would ["ACT LIKE AN ADULT AND I'LL TREAT YOU LIKE ONE!!!!"] mean riding on busier roads and missing out on the coast altogether.
I kept expecting to hear the cliché finale, a plate smashing against a wall, but I never did; only feet stomping out and a door slamming closed. Once the verbal storm ended, I felt like I could think more clearly and decided to stay on the route, at least loosely.
Tonight I'll be camping. If I want to stay in a hotel I'll have to ride 92 miles, but given my rude awakening and accompanying lack of sleep I don't think I'm quite up for it.
When I called the campground in Vancleave I was told the cost for a campsite is $30.00. That seemed pretty steep just for a place to throw a tent on the ground. Then he added, "For another ten bucks you can stay in one of the cabins."
Heading south out of Franklinton, Highway 49 had a nice, wide shoulder....
...until it didn't. The shoulder abruptly disappeared into nothingness.
Unfortunately, the accompanying traffic didn't just vanish. It became so bad that I pedaled on the grass for a bit until I noticed my pace had diminished to a dismal 3 mph, and was getting slower still. After that I alternated between the highway and the grass.
Eventually, there was a sliver of a shoulder, and six miles later I was finally back on the ACA route. Two miles after that I started to feel everything inside me uncoil. I didn't even realize how tense I'd been for the last two days. Now, on a deserted farm road, I felt like I was the only person for miles in either direction, probably because I was the only person for miles in either direction.
It was QUIET again, and it made me appreciate the cartographers and route planners at Adventure Cycling Association. I don't know where they find these roads, but it's apparent they've done some research.
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Now that I didn't have to worry about becoming street pizza I started ruminating. That's what I do when I ride alone... take a thought and chew on it like a cow chews on its cud. I guess you could say my brain is like the first of a cow's four stomachs.
I missed a turn, not because of my brain/cow's stomach, but because the road was unmarked. I had stopped at a corner trying to determine if that was the road where I was supposed to turn. Not seeing any street signs, after a couple of minutes' consideration I went straight. A mile and a half mile later I stopped when I realized I should've turned. There were two indicators telling me I was in the wrong place. The first was that I finally saw a street sign, and it didn't fit the location where I was supposed to be.
The second indicator that I was on the wrong road was the guy about fifty yards in front of me. He was lean, like a starving dog, looking up at the sky, and waving his arms as he stomped in a circle yelling, "This is MY road! This is MY road!" to no one in particular. Or maybe to me. I checked my map again but didn't see anything on there about a crazy guy screaming and gesticulating, so.... clearly, the wrong road.
Crazy guys are nothing new, and seeing him brought back into sharp focus an event from thirty years ago. Before I went back to school in my thirties I worked at the downtown Houston Public Library. Downtown was filled with contrasts: rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy, powerful and powerless. The juxtaposition was never subtle: men and women in thousand dollar suits stepping over a stream of urine finding its way across the sidewalk and into the gutter as a homeless man empties his bladder against a building.
I remember one fellow in particular. He was in his late thirties and I saw him several times on a corner a couple of blocks from the main library. On one occasion, he held a huge black bible aloft in his left hand, a shield magically protecting him against an onslaught of demons descending from the skies. His right hand was clenched around a tiny Swiss Army Knife. He used it for emphasis, both by punching the air and by lacerating his skin. His torso had 25-30 small cuts, each one emphasizing the fact that the combination of mental illness and religion is never good. He yelled at the passersby, none of whom made eye contact as they brushed briskly past him on the crowded sidewalk. He spoke words that would, if only I would listen, transform me from a hellbound sinner to one of God's perfections... only, hopefully, I assume, without the bleeding and all.
I left my reverie and turned my attention back to The Owner Of The Road in front of me. After another minute or so he stopped his gesticulations and I gave him a nod and a thumbs up, then turned around and headed back the way I came.
Not wanting to get lost again, I stopped at the Forest Research Station to verify where I was. There, I learned the reason for the serious lack of signage in the area: the hurricane had blown down a lot of street signs and not all of them have been replaced.
During the past month I've passed hundreds of mobile homes, lined up like broken teeth along the side of the road, and I've made a couple of observations:
1) Mobile homes are not mobile. Once they're planted they stay there permanently... until, as the saying goes, there's a hurricane. Or a divorce.
2) Regardless of how fancy, humble, or trashy the mobile home is, they ALL have a satellite dish.
I could go on and on and on and on.
I've had a strong headwind for so long now I don't even notice it - until I see a flag whipping wildly. The headwind has just become part of my day.
Some pictures along the way.
The section between Perkinston, where I got back on the ACA route, and Vancleave was void of any place to stop for almost forty miles, not even a hole-in-the-wall convenience store at an intersection. Toward the end I was getting pretty tired and hungry. Seven miles before Vancleave I stopped at the Fort Bayou convenience store where I talked to Yvonne for a while, a young bleached blonde, before pedaling into Vancleave.
When I asked her about the best place to eat, she said,
"There's only one place to eat... Six Miles Out."
Unfortunately, there was no speech bubble hovering over her head so I didn't realize that "Six Miles Out" was a proper noun instead of a distance. My face fell.
"Six miles out?"
"Yeah, headin' toward town you take a left at the post office and it's about two blocks down the road."
"But it's six miles out??"
"Yeah."
"How long are the blocks?"
"Just a regular block."
This continued for a few more sentences, and when I finally realized what was going on I felt like I had been in a "Who's on First" skit. I was glad the place wasn't named an Hour and a Half Away. Otherwise, I might not have asked for directions.
When I finally stopped for a very late lunch at 3:00 I was able to get online and check my email.
If you recall, I met Jim and Mary Rowe at the barbecue place in Blanco, Texas. They kindly offered me a place to stay at their home in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. At the time I didn't think I'd be going that far south, but when I looked at the map yesterday I found I would be within 15 miles of their residence so I emailed them. I hadn't heard from them so I was anticipating camping, but when I checked my email I saw that Jim had responded with a cellphone number and a request to give him a call. During our conversation he offered to pick me up on the way home from work since Vancleave is "just a little bit north." (Later I found out where he worked and looked at a map. It was like saying that San Francisco is on the way from Dallas to Chicago, or Madrid is on the way from Rome to Berlin. He was being very generous.) An hour later he pulled up and we loaded my bike and gear into the back of his van.
Jim and Mary live in Ocean Springs. Their house is planted in the middle of the city, but seems like it's out in the country. It was designed by Carroll Ishee, a WW2 Silver Star recipient and ex-lawyer who finally found his calling designing and building houses. Ishee would buy lots that no one else wanted, then construct the house to fit into the land without removing trees or leveling the land. He told prospective buyers that it's "a house you don't have to paint, on a lot you don't have to mow."
With bedroom walls that don't go up to the ceiling and an open floor plan, Ishee's houses have a wide open feeling. Many of the exterior walls are glass, which contributes to the openness.
On the way into town I was given a tour of the area. Jim told me what it’s like to live in “hurricane alley.” People here are a little twitchy during hurricane season. You have to be able to pick up and go at the drop of a hat. When a hurricane threatens to come within striking distance, the Rowes fit plates of corrugated steel over their windows. After a storm the plates tend to stay up for a while (you never know when the next one will come), then slowly come off here and there in a piecemeal fashion.
The fact that New Orleans got all of the press after the storm is somewhat of a sore point among many Mississippians. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, actually made landfall at the border between Louisiana and Mississippi, and it's the area EAST of the eye that receives most of the flood damage. Hurricanes always spin COUNTERclockwise, which means that everything east of the eye gets deluged as the water from the Gulf of Mexico gets picked up and dumped.
New Orleans' flooding occurred after the storm when the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain failed.
Jim explained how the Mississippi coast received the brunt of the storm and parts of it were completely obliterated. During our tour of the area, he pointed out vacant lot after vacant lot where there once had been buildings (sometimes historic old homes). Now there was nothing.
Katrina displaced a large number of people and, shortly after the storm, a large number of mobile homes were brought in and set up. Apparently, there was some type of problem with formaldehyde in them, causing people to get sick. So, they started building "Katrina Cottages."
As you can see, they're about the same size as a mobile home, but not quite the eyesore. Although they were supposed to be temporary some of them are still around.
The area has a fleet of shrimping boats, but Jim lamented that there are fewer and fewer of them each year.
Mary and Irene (Mary's mother) already had plans for the evening so I wasn't able to visit with them for very long. It's Irene's birthday, and she was doing what many 92-year-olds love to do... go gambling. At 92, you can do whatever the hell you want, so she and Mary stayed the night at one of the casinos.
Jim and I spent a pleasant evening talking and eating some great pizza from The Mellow Mushroom.
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distance: 54 miles
average speed: 12.7 mph
maximum speed: 28
time on bike: 4:14:46
cumulative: 2232
Today's ride: 54 miles (87 km)
Total: 2,234 miles (3,595 km)
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Actually, the single-section manufactured homes that you photographed (usually called "single wides" in the vernacular) are fairly easily moved. Typically the wheels and axles are left attached underneath. Often the "hitch" (sometimes called the "tongue", funnily enough) is left attached on the front, as shown in a few of your photos. If not, one can be bolted on easily. I used to do that when I helped in the family mobile home business as a kid.
Multi-section manufactured homes ("double wides") are more difficult to move because the two sections (halves) must be separated, which can be a substantial effort. But it's still done sometimes.
3 months ago