Chidboy

February 21, 2016

The morning is quiet and still, warm and humid, the domain of the crickets and the birds and all of their songs. We welcome it with tortillas filled with peanut butter and Thin Mints cookies and the sounds of The Brothers Johnson singing "Get the Funk Outta My Face."

We spend much of the early hours on back roads so far off the beaten path that they're barely a lane wide and have no markers for the lanes, the curves, or the speed limit. Some stretches aren't paved, don't seem like they ever have been, nor like they ever will be. Longhorns graze in fields surrounded by dark, leafless oaks. Those fields are owned by ranchers who drive trucks with mirrors that stick so far out to the sides that the trucks take on the look of a Longhorn when they're headed straight for us. In the spaces where no cattle have grazed for months the grass grows long and extends out between the trees as if it's covering the ground like some vast yellow-green blanket. The chugging of pumpjack engines follows us everywhere. The faint exhaust smell they create hangs in the air.

A thick overcast hangs above us but the clouds hold back their rain. The winds of the day haven't yet clocked in. The ranches are large and there are a lot them, which means we see no towns, no churches, and hardly any houses. In the absence of obvious distractions I fall into the rhythm of cross-country cycling: spitting at road signs, imagining what it would be like to live out here, ignoring my bike computer, stopping at the junction of two minor roads to eat trail mix and drink water that doesn't taste quite right but I drink it because I don't have anything else.

With nothing to keep it leashed my mind wanders. I think about family members I haven't seen in like fourteen years and wonder how they've changed and what their lives look like now. I think about hockey power play strategies and realize there's a strong chance I'll never play that sport again. I think about my dog and sadness fills my head. Then I try to remove the song that's been stuck in my mental music player for hours by singing another out loud to myself, even though it's a strategy that has never before worked. It doesn't work today either.

We've been on the road long enough that now we'll take a leak anywhere passing traffic won't see us. On these farm roads, on this Sunday morning, that means just off the edge of the road for Kristen and on the road itself for me. I take great care to make sure that my panniers don't become pee-niers, then share my new-found pun with Kristen. She isn't all that impressed with it. When we ride by pumpjack she tells me that they look like a hadrosaur and there's no possible way I can disagree. Farther on we pass a machine shop where the sheet metal garage door has been pulled open to the side and the man in the shadows beyond fixes unseen mechanical things with country-western music blasting from old stereo speakers. The only two dogs that chase after us stop as soon as we do and then lose their minds with joy when we scratch their heads and bend down to play with them.

A lot of time and money were invested in this anatomatically correct mailbox topper.

The huge shoulder of U.S. 290 disappears as soon as we hit the edge of town in Giddings, right at the moment we need it most. Instead we roll past the Walmart and Dollar General and Whataburger and gas stations with traffic snarling past with far more anger than late Sunday morning calls for. Relief comes in the form of a Subway. There we eat cheap-ass foot-long sandwiches and drink cheap-ass bottomless iced tea in a place that's so different from the cafes in the small towns we've eaten at so much in rural Texas. Here people stay all alone or in their own little groups. There's no talking to anyone else. Though we're in a place that's home to less than 5,000 people the small-town feel and sense of community doesn't exist like it would if we were at the diner in downtown a mile away.

And so there we are, a dozen of us, all strangers, eating the same sandwiches we could get anywhere in America, chewing and drinking and talking quietly to the sounds of satellite radio with a weak signal, which flips between awful modern country radio and dead-air silence every second and a half. It's not lost on Kristen and me that we're part of the problem. We stopped here instead of riding the extra mile to the diner whose survival depends far more on our business than this place and whose character is unique. But Subway is clean and easy and known, with all the power outlets and free refills and fresh vegetables that go along with that and seem so luxurious on a long trip like this. It's a seductive proposition and we fell for it.

We avoid the nasty U.S. highway and its myriad gas stations and liquor stores by way of back streets. They lead us to an old county road, its surface a canvas splattered with potholes and patches and failing chipseal, all of which are forgiven for the total lack of Burger Kings and Dairy Queens and Taco Bells. As the ranches grew smaller and smaller as we got closer to Giddings, so too do they grow bigger and bigger the farther behind we leave town. We ride easy among the yellow grass and post oaks and curious steers with the time and space and peace of mind to make more tasteless jokes about underwear that has attained human consciousness. Soon I start responding to Kristen not with words but with sounds something like the mooing of an upset cow.

This is our life – our weird, wonderful life.

The air is thick with gnats and thick with humidity. The combination leaves our arms and cheeks and chests dotted with little black carcasses.

"It's about three miles to the chidboy!" I call out to Kristen, who rides fifty feet in front of me.

This needs some explanation. Last summer we were riding bikes through Western Pennsylvania and found ourselves in the small town of Glen Campbell. It was late in the evening and we hadn't come up with anywhere to put up the tent, nor were there any obvious options we could reach before darkness fell. Feeling desperate, we went into a tavern and got some beers and asked to set up the tent behind the building for the night. We were denied, but the bartender said we could camp in the yard of his house instead, and so with daylight almost gone we set out on our last mile of the day. But the directions were vague and soon we had to check the map on one of our phones to make sure we didn't miss our turn.

During this check I noticed a business listed on the map. It had the icon of a mini-mart associated with it and a name: Chidboy Convenience Center. We didn't go there that night, or the following morning, and in fact our route the next day meant we never even rode by it. When I look at that location using Google Maps' street view I'm not sure a building exists there. But that one look at the map was all it took. From that day forward, gas stations were no longer gas stations and mini-marts were no longer mini-marts – they were chidboys, said with a rural-style accent and with the emphasis on the first syllable.

That continues to this day. The word is now so natural to us that most of the time we don't say it with any accent at all. And it has spawned its own category of terms that refer to all the things that gas stations and mini-marts mean to a touring cyclist. Food at these places isn't food; it's chid. We make chid-stops, Kristen drinks chid-coffee, I talk about getting some of that good chid if we're in a long stretch without services. When other options aren't available we settle for a chid-lunch. When my dog Walter was traveling with us he'd get called The Chid-Pup. If we've been to too many chidboys in recent hours or days, it's not uncommon to hear, "I need something more than just chid." And when desperate times call for desperate measures, sometimes we have to rush to the back of the store and take a chid-poop.

Now you know.

Now you can't un-know.

A few miles beyond the chidboy we hang a right and make our way into Buescher State Park. Travel trailers and RVs have been set aside in their own little leper colony, far from the camping loop where there aren't any electrical hookups, just water. This makes us fall in love with the park straight off. We ride among oaks and pines and darting cardinals, past a stone picnic shelter and bathroom block built by CCC workers during the Great Depression, and then push the bikes up a short hill to a small group of sites reached only on foot. A woodpecker goes on about its business as we set up for the night.

With the weekend over and the RVs elsewhere the campground is quiet and sane. It's just a couple of campfires, some tents, people eating dinner and sitting around talking, and enough space in between to hear the night birds chattering to one another. It's what camping in America used to be and what we hope it someday becomes again. That it comes on the heels of an easy fifty-five-mile day of gentle rolling hills and quiet country roads that took us from campsite to campsite makes what was a fine cycle-touring day even finer.

Today's ride: 54 miles (87 km)
Total: 1,494 miles (2,404 km)

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