47 – I Don't Know How Much Farther We Could Sink - Travels with Walter

July 15, 2015

47 – I Don't Know How Much Farther We Could Sink

The change arrives just after the sun comes up. I walk across the highway to the giant Kroger grocery store and wander through the empty aisles until I find the section with baby food. I grab two small glass jars of chicken and brown rice and two of something called vegetable turkey dinner. Then I head over near the pharmacy and pick up a wide-tipped syringe. Back in the room, baby food gets sucked up into the syringe. Kristen holds Walter's body and I lean back his head and open his jaw half an inch with my fingers. In goes a short shot of the yellowed food. And then we wait to see what happens.

We expect failure. Most everything we've done in the last week for Walter has failed. But to our delight and amazement he swallows the food without complaint, then licks the end of the syringe like he wants more. In that moment, the hope for his health that had started to fade returns. We fill him up with a couple of ounces of food in this way, and then he walks over to the corner, plops down, and falls into a deep sleep. We let him rest in peace in that way for the next few hours.

We debate about whether or not we should keep going. We'd like to let Walter sleep all day. But with cooler weather having moved in, the humidity having faded, and knowing that a week off the road waits for him just a hundred miles away, it makes more sense to press on. It's the best of a bunch of bad options.

One steep hill goes up away from the river plain and onto a plateau. It only rises a few hundred feet, but the locals jump on the chance to place signs in front of their homes with elevated-sounding names like Woodland Heights. Beyond it's the Illinois we've come to love riding through, with the empty grid of country roads, the lazy loops and chugging engine of a yellow crop-dusting airplane, and all that corn laid out in precise rows. It's the kind of place most cycle-tourists speed through on their way to somewhere else, but we both agree that there's a lot about this sort of riding that we'll miss when the Midwest falls behind us.

We just sell this kind of stuff in gas stations in America.

We stop in Princeville to feed Walter more liquid food, to give him more water, and to let him lay down in the shade and fall asleep. The good weather, a faint tailwind, and another motel already booked down the road mean there's no reason to rush, no reason to stress. We hang out in the park for more than an hour, with the sounds of dueling lawn mowers and passing freight trains fighting for our attention. We know it's noon when the town's air raid siren goes off.

That Walter eats, drinks, pees, and poops in the same half-hour span lifts our mood by leaps and bounds. On the long straight road that follows we spend less time worrying about our little passenger and more debating how much of my naked body the housekeeper saw this morning when she barged through the door of our motel room without a single knock. We quote Bette Midler and Paula Abdul songs in serious voices, then talk about the ways Walter is like the character of Winston in Orwell's "1984." When I ride on my own I sing the same Sufjan Stevens song out loud to myself half a dozen times. It all reflects how Walter isn't just a pet but a family member. As he goes, so go the rest of us.

I can't get over the day's wonderful weather. It's warm and kind of overcast and we no longer sweat like we're riding through the jungles of Southeast Asia. We couldn't have created anything better even if we had the power. Although we don't pass many houses, near most of them there's someone out in the yard mowing or gardening or fixing a water pipe that they put off working on for a week because it's been too hot. We get a lot of waves from passing drivers, from the subtle raise of one finger all the way up to waving wrists. But the best comes when we end up on an unpaved road, where a thirteen-year-old boy on a dirt bike flies toward us. As he draws even, his left index finger and thumb extend out like the shape of a gun, and with this kind of slow and casual cool he wags his wrist once in our direction. Then he disappears behind us in a cloud of pale brown dust.

In Williamsfield, which refers to itself as Billtown.

Farther on, dogs run out toward us barking, but when they reach us they wag their tails and lick my hand and let me pet their head. They're content just to have someone new to pay attention to them. On a day when the news runs through its routine of hysterics about a proposed nuclear weapons deal with Iran, the economic bailout of Greece, and the merits of candidates for a presidential election that's more than fifteen months away, we're just out here, riding bikes, worried about our sick dog but otherwise happy with the simple joys that rural Illinois brings us.

After a long stop at the city park in Knoxville we head out in the cool of an overcast evening on a one-lane country road that wanders past small farms and huge fields of corn. It drops steep down toward every stream, runs flat for eight feet, and then rises steep back up the other side. The road takes us most of the way to Galesburg. Kristen tells me that the city has a beautiful downtown and restored train depot and college campus. I believe her, but other than riding a few blocks along the edge of the college that's not what we see.

Instead we roll up to our motel to find children running around shirtless and shoeless out front, with no parents in sight. There's a cracked pane of glass in one of the entry doors. The grass outside gets cut but not that often. The hallways get vacuumed but not that often. It's the kind of place where migrant workers and their families are packed five or six to a room and the stagnant air in the stairwell is heavy with the smell of cigarette smoke. I get to know the stairwell in detail, because tonight I have the privilege of lugging my cargo bike up six flights of stairs to our room. We passed a public housing complex a couple of blocks before rolling up to the motel, and the only real difference between the two is that the public housing building was round instead of rectangle-shaped. It's like an urban version of the trailer park-type campgrounds we always seem to find ourselves in. It's the final stop on our tour of the cheap motels of Mid-Illinois and for that I'm thankful. I don't know how much farther we could sink.

In the cool of an air-conditioned room that smells less of cigarette smoke than the stairwell, Kristen uses the syringe to make sure Walter gets water and I use it to make sure he gets some kind of food in his system. Through the wall behind us comes the dull hum and squeak of two elevators rising and falling. Through the screen that opens out onto a sad little deck we hear the clank and clatter of thousands of freight train wheels on steel rails and the deep throb of four or five locomotives hard at work. The AC unit lets out a constant low chug and sounds like a water tap that's been left in the open position. The rest of the space around us fills with a quiet, still sadness. There are a lot of places I imagined we might end up sleeping on our cross-country adventure. This place, in this city, under these conditions, was never one of them.

Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 1,933 miles (3,111 km)

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