Dagnab, It's Gonna Rain

May 16, 2015 to May 20, 2015

With Kristen's mom and stepdad shrinking smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror, we roll away from the easy comfort and happiness of the house that's been our home and office and bicycle workshop for the last five weeks. Because it's Los Angeles we're trying to leave, we end up stuck in a traffic jam even though it's brunch time on a Saturday.

The sprawl never breaks. Compton, El Monte, West Covina, Fontana, and two dozen cities just like them come and go with nothing to differentiate but green signs with block letters that start with Now Entering. I look around in all directions when we stop for lunch, but I don't see anything that gives a hint of where we are. It's Jamba Juice, Jersey Mike's Subs, Chipotle, Embassy Suites, Target, Best Buy — one after the next after the next, without a single local-owned business to break the pattern. The off ramp we just took could have teleported us to one of 500 similar towns in suburban America and we'd have no idea. The street signs are the only thing that would look different. Two weeks from today we'll be on the road in Maine, heading through Acadia National Park on bicycles, so far away from this soulless place or anything like it. We can't wait.

If you ever wondered what it feels like to drive a 1981 Volkswagen Vanagon, here's what you do: buy a giant sheet of plywood, hold it up in front of you as a knight would his shield, run as fast as you can into gale-force winds, and continue running this way for the next six hours. It's a slow ride. It's slow not only because the thing that its aerodynamics most resemble is a brick, but also because with the beds and sink and fridge and pop-top it weighs somewhere north of a ton. Adding to this is the fact that it's pushed along by an air-cooled motor, just like the kind you'd find in an old-style Volkswagen Beetle. It puts out all of seventy horsepower.

All of this explains why for a long time I resisted taking the van onto interstates. It's made for an era of fifty-five mile per hour speed limits, not seventy-five. But we have a lot of ground to cover, and we're more interested in what lies ahead than in what's outside the window, so I give in and point the van due east on I-10 toward Arizona. What I find surprises me. It ends up feeling a lot like traveling cross-country by bicycle. Because we're going so slow, we never have to worry about passing the cars in front of us. Everyone else is in such a hurry that they've sped by before they even have the chance to flip on their turn signal. It's as if we exist in our own little bubble as the West unfolds before us.

Sunday gives me the chance to mentally relive passing through the town of Globe. It's the place I stayed on my attempted cross-country ride back in 2013 where I tried to fall asleep in my tent in the park but instead experienced the joy of fifteen-year-old kids chucking rocks at it — although on the plus side, no one tried to steal my bike, sell it for scrap metal, and use the profits to buy meth made in someone's bathtub. That's a real concern in a place like Globe. Going through town in the van gives me one more chance to give thanks that I've never in my life had to live there and never in my life will.

Yet for as dire as Globe seems, compared to what's around it the place is thriving. The small towns that exist for a hundred miles in either direction used to be far bigger, but as mining operations shrunk or disappeared the book stores and steakhouses and newspaper offices have closed. Now empty storefronts outnumber the open ones by at least four to one, each town has at least one payday loan joint, and the public bathrooms are tagged with messages so foul and offensive to the soul's well-being that I can't write them down for anyone else to see.

We cross over dozens of mountain ridges throughout the afternoon in a slow van made even slower by the thin air of the high desert. With no air conditioning available to keep us cool, we do what people in cars in past decades used to do: drive with all of the windows open. We go slow enough on the steepest climbs that the windows let in the sounds of birds chirping in the brush that parallels the highway. Yet there's still no time to take pictures or to reflect on what I see because we're always in motion and the chances to stop are few and far between. It's a constant reminder of how I miss the freedom and connection with the world around me that only a bicycle can offer, and how excited I am to spend all summer experiencing exactly that.

Still, we do what we can to try and engineer that connection, because the country we're traveling through is too wonderful to ignore. When we see a road leading off into the Sitgreaves National Forest, we take it. The dirt path leads us to a trailhead that right away leaves us all alone among the sweet smell and quiet whispers of the pine needles, stepping over paw prints left behind by wolves in dirt made soft by last night's thunderstorms.

The pine trees turn shorter and more sparse as Monday grows older until at last they disappear altogether. It's about this time that the driving becomes far tougher, because the beauty of the landscape turns less and less defined. Within a couple of hours we reach the point where we shout out with joy not for mountains or canyons or cliffs but when we see another car headed our way on the stretch of desolate highway that runs from nowhere to nowhere.

We stop for lunch in Mountainair, New Mexico. It's a place where I count more than forty cars passing by, but not one of them is a foreign brand. The most common personal style centers on blue jeans, leather boots, cowboy hats, and half a dozen tattoos of questionable artistic merit. While standing in line at the Family Dollar store, Kristen listens to the man behind her mutter to himself, "Dagnab, it's gonna rain, and I just washed my car!" With our old Volkswagen van and modern clothes and narrow waistlines, we stand out. In terms of culture, I think we're about as far away from Portland or Los Angeles as it's possible to be without leaving America.

Torrential rain takes us through the panhandle of Texas on Tuesday. The skies are so thick and dark and brooding that the semi-trucks are lit up like its nighttime even though it's only ten minutes past noon. The van's wipers fling back and forth across the windshield at their highest possible speed. There's no label on the dashboard for this setting, but it's best described as angry. When the fury fades and the sun returns, we pass the time calling out the dead armadillos that line the shoulder of the freeway, each one laying stiff on its side with legs pointed straight out toward us.

We settle into a KOA campground somewhere in Oklahoma. Within an hour we're surrounded: lightning to the west and lightning to the east. Without a hint of what's coming, a jagged bolt of lightning touches down less than a quarter mile away from where I sit in the back seat of the van, bringing with it an explosion of energy so intense that I jump out of my seat in a warm rush of shock and fear. As the storms grow in strength, wind gusts shove against the broad side of the van with so much force that it bobs back and forth as if it were being pounded by waves. Vibrations driven by the thunder travel across the ground, up through the tires and the suspension, and resonate within the cushion on top of which we sleep.

There's this perfect kind of connection to storms that I feel when I'm in the van. Unlike in a house, the rain and the wind sit only inches away, beyond a thin barrier of windows or sheet metal or fiberglass. I can feel their energy and their character. They come alive. But there's also a sense of comfort that doesn't exist in a tent. In the van I don't have to worry about a torrent of water coming in through the floor or the door flap and soaking everything I own. When the temperature drops I stay warm. And there's no danger of lightning shooting down into the web of metal poles and ending the life of everyone inside in a split second.

The flashes in the sky continue until long after all three of us have fallen asleep.

Eastern Oklahoma blends into Arkansas on Wednesday. The state line sign gives us the only hint that anything has changed. It's a landscape of gentle rolling hills, thick leafy trees, and pasture land dotted with small farms. It's all lush and green and healthy. I'd never before thought about cycling in this part of the country, and yet all of a sudden the only thing I can think about is when I'll have the chance to ride there. It's beautiful. The towns are small and the pace seems slow. It's hilly, but so is just about every other place in the world worth riding through.

But we're not riding here. We're not riding anywhere. What we're doing is making sure that the riding is as difficult as possible once we start pushing away from Maine next week. Even though we both feel out of shape after spending the last two and a half months with friends and family on the West Coast, eating too much food most every day and exercising not at all, we stop for dinner at Cracker Barrel. With only the slightest amount of guilt, down the hatch go eggs and bacon, pancakes with blueberry syrup, buttered rolls, and deep-fried apples. There's only one plus to all of it: I'm not sure there's any place in America that can make you feel better about the way you look than a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Central Arkansas.

We roll into Tennessee at dark. Home for the night becomes a Flying J truck stop half an hour east of Memphis, where a semi rumbles into the parking lot every three minutes. With Walter pressed up against my leg, we fall asleep to a podcast where the even tones of an astronomy professor explain how Earth's seasons work.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0