Chuck

February 11, 2016

We're standing in front of the gas station when I notice a little black dog hovering near the far edge of the highway. Morning traffic has been flying by at high speed for the last hour and not wanting to see another dog get run over by a truck I kneel down and click my tongue and call for him to come over. He does right away. When I reach down to pet him I find that he's so thin I can feel each of his ribs through his skin and fur. He's shaking because all of the fat that could insulate him from the cold is gone. He has a collar but no tag. He seems to me yet another example of someone who wanted a puppy but wasn't willing or equipped to take care of it. Now he's one of the legion of free-roaming Louisiana dogs and probably always will be.

As much as we want to scoop him up and put him in a pannier and take him with us, we can't. If we were traveling in our van we'd welcome him inside and spend a few weeks getting him healthy and then find him a new home, but we aren't. We can't call animal control because we're in the land of the kill shelter. About all we can do is give him so many chunks of soft tortilla covered in peanut butter to help fill his empty belly. Then Kristen picks up the little guy and holds him in her arms until he's warm enough that he stops shaking. He's calm and licks our faces when we get close. His tail wags with more excitement than I would have thought possible given the state he's in. He's twelve pounds of pure charm.

But soon we have to say our goodbyes. We can't save this dog from the seat of a bicycle and we can't stay here at this gas station for the next ten years taking care of him. And so I leave a big pile of tortilla and some smears of peanut butter so that he won't start to follow us and then we get back to riding west on Highway 106. Yet my mind never shifts to the road in front of us; it stays stuck back at the mini-mart. As we're pedaling, the dog picks up a name: Chuck. It's short for Charles. We talk about how he'd snuggle up to us at night in the sleeping bag. He seems like the kind of dog that would be easy to train. He would melt the hearts of people wherever he went. Knowing that none of those things are going to happen for Chuck makes us shake our heads in sadness and say horrible things about the absentee dog owners in frustration and anger.

A long line of green blobs spread out on the map before us toward the north and the west. With them comes the promise of back roads and pine trees and peaceful camping in state parks and on national forest land. We're powerless to resist the pull of any of these things, so our route takes us north and west.

I'm also powerless to resist the pull of the sweet dog that wanders alongside the road between Turkey Creek and Glenmora. He's three times bigger than Chuck and brown and breedless in the way rural dogs get after generations of random mixing. There's no collar around his neck, he's not fixed, and I can see the distinct outline of his rib cage without having to squint. He's calm and submissive and wiggles with joy like he's so, so, so happy to have a taste of the love and affection that's missing from his life. I name this one Max – not short for anything, just Max.

I ride away but he follows. Every time I turn around I see him, coming toward me at somewhere between a walk and a run. Even at ten or eleven miles per hour I can't lose him. Rounding a corner and going out of sight doesn't work either; when I catch up to Kristen a mile down the road we see Max's outline appear from over the hill behind us, loping our way in no great hurry.

When he draws even we kneel down and scratch his ears and rub his belly and pet him on the head and tell him he's a good boy. And that's the hardest part of all of this: he is a good boy. We can just tell. If we could get him back to Portland or Seattle he'd get adopted in a week or two and he'd spend the rest of his life in the warm embrace of a loving, caring family. He'd have all the good food and clean water and regular vet visits he deserves. But instead he's here. By this time next year if he's still alive he'll be father to several more dogs just like him, who will go on to have pups of their own, and so forth. I can't see the cycle ever stopping out here.

We start riding again but Max follows. He's got nothing else going on, nowhere to be, no pack to latch on to, and we showed him more kindness than he's had in a long time. He's content to see where this thing is going. But we know that the farther he follows us on this road the more danger of being run down by a logging truck he's in. When it's clear that he isn't getting tired and isn't stopping on his own we gear up and crank harder and try to build a gap so big that he'll have no choice but to give up. Then a big drop appears around the next corner and we speed down and away at twenty miles per hour and out of Max's life forever. We pedal four miles more before stopping again, just to be sure.

The only restaurant in Glenmora is closed. We go to the other option, a gas station. There's a little cafe attached to the mini-mart. It's called Anna's and the back of one of the cashier's shirts says is the home of the Anna Burger. Clever. The other women behind the counter all have this certain, um, style. It's long hair pressed flat and colored in a most unnatural way and accented with makeup that's thick and bright and shiny. There's also a guy with a little metal can attached to a spray nozzle who wanders the aisles fumigating for bugs. He does it by leaving thin lines of chemicals along the base of the shelves. I notice this moments after ordering lunch from the counter ten feet away.

We talk to a woman who I'm almost sure is Anna. When she finds out how far we've ridden she spends at least five minutes raving about what a feat it is, then offers to pay for our lunch. I tell her I had never been to Louisiana before this trip and that we've enjoyed our time here. It's the land of good people, she says. But not thirty seconds later she looks up at me with concern and says, "But ya gotta carry protection. There are lotsa crazies out there." We talk to five or six other people in the mini-mart and they're all friendly and welcoming in the same way. They wish us nothing but the best. The police officer at the table next to ours jokes about us being the biker gang from Florida and that Kristen's the leader. It's one of the kindest stops we've had on this trip.

And yet each person we talk to finishes their little chunk of the conversation in a similar way. They implore us to be safe and be careful out there. It's have fun but protect yourself; enjoy the country but make sure you're armed. And it's another set of examples of what I've come to call the Great American Dissonance. Most everyone these people know is good, just like most everyone you and I know is good. Yet because TV and websites and social media let us learn of bad things done by other people with overwhelming frequency, and because these bad things are so outrageous and dramatic that they stick in the front of our brains with ease, our own experiences and perceptions end up not holding as much weight. We come to see thieves and rapists and murderers where they don't exist but build up walls to protect ourselves all the same.

We leave town covered in sunscreen with our bare arms exposed to the sun and the heat for the first time in longer than we can remember. Rolling along I think about how thousands of journals about bicycle touring take place in the United States. What they all have in common, besides a tendency to focus on what the author had for breakfast, is that they aren't filled with tales of assault or robbery or escaping an attempted murder by jumping on the bike and riding off into the darkness at eight miles per hour to outrun an insane killer. Negative interactions are few and far between, and most of those involve grumpy old bastards who are surly but harmless. The positive stories outnumber them by at least two-hundred to one. We're so exposed, and yet that exposure leads to so many wonderful things.

The cars are the danger in this part of the country. That's the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. And that story is just as big of a deal for the people not on bikes as it is for us. We pass nine white crosses in the twenty miles after Glenmora, each of which honors someone who died in a car accident. No gun or tazer or bottle of bear spray could have protected those people.

Never forget the deer who gave their lives in the fight for the perpetuation of human slave labor.

When we rest in the shade of a Baptist church awning our winding conversation always find its way back to those two sweet dogs we spent time with this morning. We wish there was a way we could save them. We know we can't. Farther on we're passed by rattly old pickups with bumper stickers in their back windows that read NRA: Stand and Fight. We cross over still, shaded little creeks that mark the dividing line between one parish and the next. The temperature cracks seventy-five degrees but the breeze blowing over our heads has enough power to suck away the excess heat. It might be one of the finest afternoons of the year to be riding across Louisiana on a bicycle.

The tenth memorial cross of the afternoon welcomes us to Pitkin, where we grab cheap pizza and soda in glass bottles. The only other people in the room where we eat are a group of four at a table across the room. They talk about the nuances of both the preparation and taste of deer sausage. Half pork and half venison – if you get good venison – is the key.

With stomachs and greasy fingers we ride off into an evening that's warm and windless and quiet. It feels like summer out West. We talk about how much we love each other and how proud of each other we are. Small cattle ranches start to appear and remind us how the grip of the Deep South is loosening and that a day and a half from now we'll cross into Texas. Then the ranches give way to the thick pine woods of a national forest where we know we'll get to sleep tonight. We're happy and smiling, giddy and laughing, in agreement that this moment is so, so rad.

A hundred singing frogs with quieter backing vocals provided by the more distant crickets welcome us into the forest. It's so quiet and still that even at a normal speaking volume our voices cast echoes that bounce off the narrow trunks of the skinny pines that extend like hands toward the sky in any direction we turn. Above, a sliver of moon. When the last of the light has gone, stars appear as bright and as brilliant as I've ever seen them. They flash and sparkle like hundreds of diamonds over lands where light pollution hardly exists.

Then it gets weird.

We hear a truck approach the on the nearby paved road from the direction we came. It slows. Then it stops a few hundred feet from where we're camped. Then the headlights turn off. Then the engine. In all of these woods, in all of the possible places it could have stopped, it stops right there. We hear the clanking of metal and then it starts: barking, furious and loud and pained, coming from at least four dogs. The calm of the night is gone and in its place is howling and yelping, aggressive and primal. At first we think it's a dog fight. We're prepared for the madness to last a few minutes and then hear the crack of a gunshot. After all the mistreatment of animals we've seen in the last few weeks it would come as no surprise. But the shot never comes. It's something else.

They must be tracking. Coyotes or raccoons, we figure. Soon the barking and howling grow a little more faint as the pack goes north along the road that brought us here and then makes an arc that sends them toward the west and on to the south. Their human isn't with them. He's not crashing through the brush and following the bends of the land. No, once the dogs are far enough away he fires up the engine of his lifted pickup, turns on the bar of lights that illuminates everything in its path, and drives after the source of the sound. Soon we see those lights bouncing off the trees not that far to the west of us as the truck bumps and clanks along a forest service road, the window down and the driver inside hunting by the barest definition of the word.

Fifteen minutes later the dogs approach again. They've doubled back. Their cries grow louder and louder and louder. We know they're after something else, but that doesn't mean that a couple of humans in their path wouldn't distract them. Who knows what a pack of dogs focused on tracking and killing another animal might do in that situation. And so even though we realize how absurd it is, we get out our pedal wrench and tire pump ready for striking heads and a can of sunscreen ready for spraying eyes. Our peaceful night in nature has devolved into sitting still in our tent with makeshift weapons at hand, our stomachs churning, and our assholes clenched tight. We curse the man who has brought all of this upon us.

In the middle of all of this a group of helicopters approach. The whopping of their blades and the howl of their engines grow louder and louder and louder as they head toward us. I remember that we're near the Fort Polk army base, but it's unnerving all the same. Two or three military choppers pass within a quarter mile of us and only a few hundred feet off the ground, and yet we can't see exactly where they are because all of their running lights have been switched off.

The barking continues for the next half hour, louder and softer, louder and softer, until at last it goes away for good.

Just a nice quiet night in the woods.

Today's ride: 56 miles (90 km)
Total: 1,074 miles (1,728 km)

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