June 14, 2015
16 – Where the Hell You Been?!
We head back to the road hours after sunrise but still early enough that the sun shines down at shallow angles through the branches of the trees that line the road. When I look into them I don't just see the woods but a complex mix of light and shadow, green and brown, visible and hidden. And no one's around to experience it but the two of us.
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I stop and wait at the top of a hill and let Kristen speed down while I hang back. No wind blows over my ears to muffle the sounds of the world as I watch her shoot off in front of me. All I hear is the chirping of the birds, the howl of bike tires on pavement, and the quiet melody of the Joanna Newsom song she sings, even when she's almost a quarter mile away.
We stop at a park in the small town of Newcomb to fill water bottles and figure out what services might lie ahead. Just before we're about to push on, a case of brochures catches Kristen's eye. One of them is for a restaurant a few miles down the highway and it lists the menu in lurid detail: pancakes, French toast, chicken parm sandwiches, spaghetti and meatballs, fettuccine alfredo, cakes, pies, milkshakes. We're already on the edge of ecstasy when we notice a line at the bottom of the brochure's front cover that in a split second makes everything right with the world: they also have a campground. The perfect place for a day off has found us. We can rest up, clean up, and fill up all in one spot.
Walking to our tent site from the campground office an hour later I start to realize how tired I feel. My legs are heavy, my wrists and palms have dull aches, and my mind doesn't feel as sharp and focused as it could. I need this break.
The hardest we work the rest of the day is when we coast a mile downhill to get dinner. We end up at a bar and grill that's more bar than grill. It lives in what used to be a house, and we enter through what was once the side porch and mud room. There's the constant crack of beer cans opening because they don't have pitchers or anything on tap, but the sound is swallowed up by the NASCAR broadcast that plays unwatched on the blurred big-screen TV behind us. Ancient ads for Coors Light and Budweiser and Labatt Blue hang on most of the wood-paneled walls, but the near corner is set aside for a framed POW-MIA flag the size of a dinner table. A cheap plastic fan jammed into an open window works as the only air conditioning.
It's the kind of place where when one of the regulars walks in, a second regular yells out, "Where the hell you been?!," which the first guy responds to with, "Where the hell you been?!" We're the only ones not sitting at the bar and not wearing a baseball hat. Kristen is the only woman in the place besides the barmaid.
We take in a few cold Bud Lights and Labatt Blues while we wait for our food to show up. When it does, I find my chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks onion rings swimming in their own puddle of grease. It's all so perfect in its simple beauty.
The bar is also the kind of place where everyone says goodbye or take care or have a good one when we walk toward the door to leave, even though none of us talked to each other in the hour that just passed. I'll never grow tired of that.
In the tent I catch up on John Egan's latest wonderful journal, rub Walter's belly and tell him how much I love him, and confuse the sound of insects bumping into the rain fly for actual rain. Not long after dark the showers show up for real and establish themselves as the soundtrack for the rest of the night.
Today's ride: 14 miles (23 km)
Total: 532 miles (856 km)
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