Day 35: Amarillo, TX to Stinnett, TX

March 29, 2013

I wake up feeling hungover with a queasy stomach and a dry mouth, trying for a few seconds to remember what happened last night to make me feel this way.

Oh yeah, the steak show. Yeesh.

The ride out of Amarillo brings no surprises. It's the kind of busy roads, average houses, gas stations, machine shops, feed lots, and high-capacity power lines you'd expect to find on the outskirts of a Texas city of 190,000 people. It's a slow, noisy, uninteresting grind. And after ten miles the human elements fall away and leave behind nothing but a busy highway and huge expanses of yellow and green that fade into the gray of the overcast sky at the line of the horizon.

The joke about living in Amarillo and being able to watch your dog run away for a week works if the dog goes west or east or south. It's flat as a tabletop in those directions. But if he heads north, soon he'll run into a long series of rolling hills and soon you'll decide that he's lost and gone forever. With a headwind that blows all morning and into the afternoon, I bang over the hills for hours. For about 20 minutes it's a welcome break from the endless flat of the plains, but then the hills become, well, just more hills. The farther I go, clusters of dead-looking, leafless trees pop up and shuffle in the breeze among the hissing of pipe clusters that have something to do with the natural gas pipelines that are everywhere out here.

The highway drops me off in Fritch, where the side streets that run east-west are paved but the north-south streets are dirt and gravel. It makes for a complicated ride to the pizza place, but I'm long on motivation to get there and load up. North of town I ditch the highway and return to quiet back roads, where the orange-red soil stands in stark contrast to the greens and grays of the hills, and where I pass the first and probably only lake I'll see in West Texas. The clouds stick around but the day warms up, so for the first time in a week I ride in my sleeveless shirt and cruise without too much trouble over the subtle rises and falls of the hills.

In the early evening I roll up to the house of Robert and Jan, who are hosting me for the night. Robert's a tough-looking guy in his 60s, with a healthy Texas twang to his voice, a thick mustache, and a bald head beneath a U.S. Coast Guard hat with the words Semper Paratus embroidered on the bill. He's a Coast Guard combat veteran, used to work as a sheriff's deputy in this county, and in more recent years has been a truck driver. He loves bowling and completing jigsaw puzzles of historic naval battle scenes. And against the stereotype of everything I just wrote, and the fact that I'm in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, Robert's also a touring cyclist.

We talk a lot about bicycles and his adventures and challenges in riding all over the Panhandle. Over spaghetti, salad, smooth imported beer, and rum and Cokes I tell he and Jan about my cross-country travels, and he explains how he wants to ride the Southern Tier route from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida some day. We also talk of his son, Robert Jr., a serious soldier who has done three combat tours with the Army in Iraq and two tours of duty in Afghanistan. When it comes to sacrificing for their country, this family puts most others to shame.

Guns are a central part of Robert's life — more than any person I've ever met. He's a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and the Massachusetts State Rifle and Pistol Association. He carries a gun with him when he tours. For all I know he's packing at the dinner table. So I bring up one of the more controversial issues in America at the moment: gun control. I expect a conversation far different from the West Coast perspective I'm used to. And that's exactly what I get.

Robert and Jan are both very concerned that the government wants to ban all guns in this country, and that eventually the day will come when the Feds try to go door to door to collect all citizens' weapons. That's something they won't stand for. When I ask about the proposed bans on assault weapons, I learn the detailed military definitions of what an assault weapon is, the nuances of which fly right over my head. But in the end, what's said is that high-powered guns like the AR-15 and even the M-16 aren't really assault weapons and shouldn't be regulated as such. Limiting the size of ammunition clips is also a non-starter and a waste of time. Universal background checks are out, too — they make it harder for a guy to sell one of his guns to a buddy.

"So you're not in favor of any kind of changes to the gun laws?" I ask him.

"No, not at all. It's our constitutional rights you're talkin' about."

I'm thousands of miles from home, but I can still hear the sound of my stepmom's head exploding. The liberal Seattle bubble this is not.

Before we leave the table to watch the NCAA basketball tournament, we touch on a number of other highly debated topics: shutting down coal plants, the effects of taking prayer out of public schools, tighter environmental regulations and enforcement by the EPA, the expansion of social programs, and newly developed alternatives to the International Monetary Fund. This family's concerned about all of them.

"Are you worried about where this country's going?" I ask Robert.

"You bet I am. I don't know how you couldn't be."

One of the best things about bicycle touring is its ability to draw back the curtain and give me a look into the worldviews of people I'd never otherwise meet. Robert and Jan are two of those people. It's a fascinating evening with two of the most generous and unique hosts I've ever met, from the time I wheel my bike through the front door until the moment I zonk out on a giant air mattress in a spare bedroom, with cats meowing in the hall and the branches of leafless trees creaking outside in the wind.

Today's ride: 62 miles (100 km)
Total: 1,723 miles (2,773 km)

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