8 – We're All Sprinting Toward It - Travels with Walter

June 6, 2015

8 – We're All Sprinting Toward It

We push the bikes back toward the road with rain falling hard enough to be heard hitting the boughs far above us but soft enough that it can't break through them and reach our heads. We startle wild turkeys into flight as we continue on the back road we started yesterday. With mortarless stone fences appearing from out of the woods next to it, we figure that the road must be two-hundred or even three-hundred years old. We try to picture what it must have looked like to travel it by foot or by horse back before things like electricity and indoor plumbing and yoga pants existed.

The lawns are a more recent thing. We've learned that one of the universal truths about Maine is that the lawns are massive and the lawns are everywhere. Around here lawnliness is next to godliness, which explains why eight percent of the GDP of Maine involves the sales, maintenance, or fueling of riding lawn mowers.

We head down onto a river plain that reminds us of what it'll look like when we reach the Midwest.

"Oh I can't wait until we're there!" Kristen says. "We can get up early and ride into a small town and both order pancakes and eggs and coffee and it'll all cost like nine dollars total."

But today it's cookies and donuts and cinnamon buns in the town of Richmond. The place sits on the banks of the fast-moving Kennebec River and feels quiet and quaint in the way it seems that all small towns in Maine are required to be. Where the Midwest has grain towers and plowed fields and tractors, here it's old smokestacks built of brick, manicured greens, and sailboats bound to buoys set dead in the middle of the river.

By late morning the chill that's been with us every moment of every day for the last week at last starts to fade. We ride on empty back roads, and for the first time in longer than I can remember I have no idea where we are. That's because we're traveling along a route Kristen planned without any input from me before we left California. And it's wonderful: quiet, no traffic, all back roads and farms and old simple houses with open wooden shutters flanking each window. It makes me feel so proud of Kristen. She hasn't just embraced traveling this way. She also wants to understand the details and nuances for how the parts of cycle-touring fit together and to get better at all of them. It's now her passion as much as mine. Every day I feel more fortunate that our wandering life trajectories somehow brought the two of us together.

Farther on we cross paths with a turtle whose shell is the width of medium-sized pizza and who has parked himself in the far half of the opposite lane. With his long spiked tail and rows of claws and rippled shell he's the most prehistoric-looking thing I've ever seen. Later we pass streets with intense Northeast names like Abbagaddassett and Jon boats done up in camouflage patterns created with great care in spray paint.

Walter gets a treat from the auto mechanic who works next door to the country store in Bowdoinham, then he has his picture taken for the pet photo contest the store is running (first prize: sub sandwiches). At the same time we meet a local guy who's ridden across America twice and later spent four months cycling in Chile and Argentina. He loves traveling by bicycle — the freedom, the adventure, the rhythm of life on the road. We can hear it in his voice. We know the tone and the inflection because they're in our voices too.

"But now I'm engaged and have a respectable-type job," he says with a shrug while looking off to the side in a way that in an instant turns a little disappointed and resigned. "I'm gonna take a trip this year though. Probably nine days."

People walking to their mailbox wave to us when we pass by. When we stop to check our maps to make sure we haven't lost the route, a woman comes out to see where we're headed and ask if we need anything. It's like there's some invisible line that lies five or ten miles west of the coast, and now that we've crossed it everyone has become more pleasant and humble.

Over pizza in Lisbon, Kristen watches an old husband and wife who leave the mini-mart across the street and walk back to their car in the parking lot.

"Did you see that couple over there?" she asks.

"No, I missed them."

"The old man put his key in the lock of the passenger door of their car. He turned it, opened it, and held it for his wife as she got settled. Then he made his own slow way around the front of the car, put the key in the lock on his side, turned it, opened it, and carefully sat down. He lifted his left leg into the car with the help of his hands."

Kristen pauses for a moment. Then she looks at me and says, "We are all heading for that."

"Yeah, and on like a geological time scale we're all sprinting toward it," I say.

And so continue the reminders of what once was: the stone fences, the former touring cyclist, the couple that two years from now might not be able to drive themselves around anymore. All things in life end, and most of them pass at a speed we're not well equipped to gauge until one day we find ourselves looking back from the other side. That's why I make a conscious effort to think about how I'm right where I want to be. Today that means riding out in the country, in sunshine and sixty-five-degree weather, with Kristen right in front of me, stopping at roadside parks to let Walter run around in the grass and flip over on his back and wriggle around out of pure happiness while the shirtless guy across the street blasts Guns N Roses as he repairs the side deck of his house.

The last ten miles of the day are hard-won. We face steep hills and chases from unleashed and unfenced dogs. We try to avoid ending the lives of the hundreds of caterpillar who squirm their way across the shoulder of the highway for reasons we don't understand. We also have to deal with Walter's whining. We dedicate twenty minutes to figuring out if he's hungry, thirsty, anxious, bored, needs to drop a deuce, or if he has some other dog condition that we haven't yet thought of. (Hungry, it turns out. After eating he falls asleep.) All of this happens while banging over rough roads and inching up harsh grades in our lowest gears. Visions of cold beers fill our heads.

We end up at a campground where the term campground is a total lie. A third of the RVs and travel trailers have a permanent awning or deck attached to their side. There's one other tent that we're able to see, and the guy who owns it seems to live there. It's a place of satellite dishes nailed into broad sheets of plywood point toward the southeastern sky, a place where the outermost block of toilets should only be used if your bowels feel like they're seven seconds away from shooting out of your body.

We're in a world of fake plastic geese, blue neon Christmas lights hung with no care at all, massive barbecues and grills, swinging love seats that belong on the front porch of a three-story home, and American flags so large and numerous it takes focused effort not to walk straight into one. The sight of overweight teenagers riding around in golf carts is normal. We estimate that only one of every fifty people we see doesn't live here on some kind of permanent basis. It's a strange scene.

It's also home to the world's saddest hayride. As we clean up our dinner dishes we hear a distant rumbling that seems to be drawing closer. Moments later we watch in stunned silence as about twenty kids and parents hunched on the back of a rusted flatbed trailer move right to left across the driveway in front of us, pulled by a noisy old John Deere tractor with a huge digging implement still attached to the front. Each face wears an expression more underwhelmed than the next. There's not a bale of hay to be seen anywhere.

Today's ride: 55 miles (89 km)
Total: 224 miles (360 km)

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