June 22, 2015
24 – He's Fighting a Demon None of Us Can See
Cheap motels never let me down.
When we open the door to our room and step out onto the balcony we see a thirty-something guy on the far side of the parking lot. He has this metal thing in his hands — a six-foot-long piece of metal or steel. It kind of looks like something a wizard would carry. And he's swinging this shiny-ass rod around in big circles with both hands, swiveling on his toes, jabbing it into the air, and grunting hard like he's fighting a demon none of us can see. At the same time, a woman in her younger twenties walks across the near side of the parking lot. Her belly is round and long and not in a pregnant kind of way, and yet she wears a half-shirt. This she pairs with gray sweatpants. When she reaches the motel building, she disappears into the room at the far end of it where we're almost certain the dude inside has been selling drugs all weekend.
All of this happens in the span of forty-five seconds.
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In the evening we cash in all of the hard work that filled the first half of our day. Even though we're still full on burritos from lunch, and pesto and bread from an early dinner, we decide we've earned ice cream and we'll use whatever technology it takes to find it. With a cone of vanilla soft serve in my hand we walk the streets of downtown Ithaca. We talk about how there's a certain weirdness and seediness and volume of whacked out people that proper college towns have. When school is in session and all of the students are around you don't notice the odd ones so much because they're on the fringes. They're the supporting act. But in the weeks after classes have ended for the summer, most of the kids have gone but the drugged and dazed and lost can't and haven't, and so they take the stage and fill the void. All of which is to say that Ithaca's a strange place to be on a Monday night in late June.
We end up at a kava bar, where we drink overpriced liquid that tastes so much like a ground-up tree branch rolled in dirt that it needs chunks of fresh pineapple as a chaser. For the effort it turns our lips numb and makes the edges of the world the slightest bit softer. Sitting in creaking old wooden chairs painted pink we play two games of Jenga and each win one. Then we look through a "Where's Waldo" book for the first time since I was six years old.
We've been in Ithaca long enough that we know how to get back to the motel even when we walk down side streets we've never before seen. Three days in the same town will do that to you. We pass a wide creek bounded by streets and houses and cars, where ducks stand in the shallows and a couple of teenagers sit on a bench below a nearby ash tree and drink from a couple of tallboys.
We didn't get everything done on our days off that we wanted to. We knew we wouldn't, even before we started. It always goes like that on a bike tour. But it doesn't much matter either. We're clean and healthy and rested and satisfied with all we did do. New York is almost behind us, the deep valleys and steep hills of Pennsylvania loom in front with so much mystery, and we're happy and in love and riding across America on bicycles. It doesn't get much better than that.
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