Day 12: Bouse, AZ to Salome, AZ

March 6, 2013

I eat breakfast at a restaurant built from an old manufactured home. It's a place that uses paper towels for napkins, has sunflower-pattern tablecloths, and hangs on its walls framed images of nature scenes involving barns and leaves in the fall and cacti and white adobe buildings. Adjacent plaques are inscribed with sayings like, "Young at heart, slightly older in other places."

"Did I tell ya Heather's gettin' married?" the waitress yells out to the cook in the back.

"Oh no ... to that same son of a bitch?"

The locals talk about flipping over their ATVs and driving through barbed wire fences before moving on to the intricate details of packing up and driving from one RV community to the next when the weather gets hot. Later they cover the finer points of crawling around in caves, the mechanics of shooting a cougar with a .45, and people drowning in the Colorado River. With no affect in his voice, one of the guys tells of a woman with long hair who sat near the back of a small boat as it drifted down the river. It worked out fine until her boyfriend started the engine, put it in gear, and the now-spinning propeller sucked in her hair and pulled it — along with a good part of her scalp — down into the muddy water below. It's an intense image, but I keep eating. After 11 straight days of riding, constant hunger is starting to creep in.

It's a beautiful morning. They all seem to be that way out here. But my hands, wrists, shoulders, back, and legs all feel tired and slow and in need of rest after the week-and-a-half march out of California. The next town's just 30-something miles down the road, so I listen to my body and spend the next six hours farting around Bouse, Arizona.

I stop at Ma & Pa's, an indoor and outdoor store/flea market/crapfest. It's the only place in the country where you can buy, in one location, nuts and bolts, a life preserver, fake flowers, incense, a few hundred VHS tapes of awful movies, packages of tight-fitting men's white underwear that are at least 15 years old, instructions for a blender (but not the blender), a couple of shotguns, a dusty tube of sunscreen that expired 11 years ago, and about a thousand other things that in the interest of time and space I won't mention.

Then, as the day heats up, I head to the library. I'm the youngest person there by about 35 years. From the row of computers, a man in a large, white cowboy hat checks Facebook (he has more friends and unread messages than me, by a lot) while giving technical support to the frustrated guy in the bucket hat next to him. After about half an hour, a truism of modern life reveals itself: old people have the most annoying mobile phone ring tones, set them at the loudest volumes, and have the most trouble finding the phone in their purses or pockets when a call comes in. Later on, a 350-pound guy with a sexual predator air about him and Mickey Mouse printed on his t-shirt watches porn on the computer in front of me. The tattooed man a few chairs down from him wears a shirt that reads, "My drinking problem helps to solve your ugly problem."

I load up on supplies at the town's only store before rolling out. Out front, next to the country's smallest laundromat, I sit on a rusty metal folding chair with the word "Mayor" written in all-caps on the back rest in permanent marker. Soon a big, tanned, 60-something guy with light gray hair, a goatee, and an artificial right leg below the knee rolls up on a modern-looking ATV. He asks me to keep an eye on his laundry while he gets change from the store next door.

"Thanks," he says with a voice turned gruff from decades of smoking. "If a motherfucker ain't nailed down they'll take it!"

On his slow walk back from the store, he looks over my bike and my gear.

"Purty hot for ridin' one a those things, innit?"

"Yeah man, that's why I'm hanging out in the shade."

"Shit, I'd be out there butt nekkid if I had to ride that thing today."

After he loads his clothes into the washer, he pulls up a chair across the doorway from me and we get to talking. His name is Tim; he's a local guy who lives in a trailer park a few blocks away. Unlike a lot of people I've seen around Bouse, he lives here full-time — though it didn't happen on purpose. He ended up in town about a dozen years ago after coming out west to visit a friend. As he was about to head back home, his truck broke down. He had enough cash to fix the engine trouble, but when the transmission blew the next day his exit closed. He's been here ever since.

"So what's life like in Bouse?" I ask.

"Eh, can't trust no one," he says with disgust and a shake of the head. "People 'round here'll steal from anyone. Snowbirds got some nice houses 'round here. Leave for the summer, come back in the fall, find a whole buncha stuff's gone. It's worse than that, though. That's only a small part. Mostly they just steal from us, from each other, from the people who live here. We ain't got nothin', but that don't stop 'em."

He takes a breath and looks out across the highway and into the distance.

"I've had it, I tell ya. I sleep with a loaded .38 next to my bed. Come and get it, motherfuckers. They try to be quiet, but I hear 'em sneakin' around outside sometimes. If they ever come through that door, they got some vigilante justice headed at 'em."

A young guy with tattoos up and down both arms speeds past on a Harley as we talk.

"Well, there goes one of our local criminals right now!"

I ask him if the Sheriff's department does anything about the sneaking and the stealing and all of the drinking and drugs and other law-breaking that goes on out here. But I already have a good guess about the answer.

"Sheriff ain't no help. Takes 'em three hours to get out here. Plus, they don't wanna keep the criminals in jail anyway. It's too expensive. That's why I got my .38 and also my 12-gauge. You can do a lotta damage with some a that high-powered buckshot. Come. And. Get it."

This isn't the life I hear about when I talk to friends and family and the people I work with back home. There it's more about job promotions, earning advanced degrees, planning weddings and vacations, and picking trendy-but-not-too-trendy first and middle names for blond-haired, blue-eyed babies. Every now and then a car ends up stolen or someone busts an ankle playing sports.

It's the same country and a world apart.

"Is it really that bad out here?" I ask.

"It's not all bad. Yeah, got some good people out here. It's just that all the assholes outnumber 'em."

"So how do you keep going, keep getting up every morning?"

He laughs for a few seconds. "I'll tell ya how. Three things: my disability check, two Xanax in the morning, and some good weed. Get that Xanax goin' in the morning' and I know I'll be alright."

I don't head south out of Bouse until after 3:00. My body feels better, but the highway hasn't changed. It's the same narrow shoulder, constant traffic, and dozens of semis. I focus on my lane and my mirror, ready to dive off into the gravel beyond the shoulder when cars are about to pass me from opposite directions at the same time — which happens every five minutes. But I don't miss much. I'm still surrounded by a lot of scrubby bushes, the rail line, and power poles. It's a functional, kind of uncomfortable ride. It's the prostate exam of rides.

Ten miles into it a headwind picks up. To carry the analogy forward, that makes the ride like a prostate exam where, halfway through, the doctor gives your balls a solid thwack with the back of his open hand just to make the experience that much more unpleasant.

I think about stopping in Hope, but instead push on in the failing light, up and over a ridge and then down into a valley. A good tailwind sends me on through Harcuvar and into Salome. I see five women at the gas station in Salome, and every one looks like a stripper. Not in a good way, but in the low-end-of-the-stripper-classiness-scale sort of way: hideous tattoos, bad fashion sense, teeth that don't quite line up, a dull stare, and a creepy looking boyfriend with a drug problem lurking behind them or sitting out in the parking lot in a beat-up car.

It's three miles out into the desert to the town's campsite. I ride in the black of night, headlight blazing to make sure I don't slam into a frost heave or squish a rattlesnake. In the dark tent, with the noise of car tires vibrating over a cattle guard in the distance, I try to figure out how best to make the three-day slog through the Phoenix metro area. And soon I realize it'll take more like four or five days. Not because of tough riding to come, but because the tough riding I've already put in is wearing me down. I haven't yet taken a day off, but for the health of my body and my mind the streak is about to end.

Today's ride: 38 miles (61 km)
Total: 520 miles (837 km)

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