February 1, 2016
Don't Worry, I'll Distract People With My Rugged Good Looks!
Pensacola is the only city in America to have had five different flags fly over its streets. Spain, France, Britain, the Confederacy, and the United States have all governed this area in the 457 years since Pensacola was founded. You could make a case that most of the city is now ruled by jammed four-lane mini-highways and mile after mile of tired old suburban-type neighborhoods where no one walks or rides bicycles. There's no flag for this sixth regime, but when there is it'll probably include a crushed beer can. It's Foxy Nails and Mr. Teriyaki and billboards advertising personal injury lawyers followed by some homes with bars on the windows and others with old cars and boats on the front lawn that no longer move – although away from the busy roads the riding is peaceful and easy. We say hello to people in their yards and wave to kids waiting for the school bus.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
Somewhere around the massive naval air station and inoffensive suburbs that sit at the western edge of Pensacola we pull off the road, ride down a sidewalk I don't think anyone's ever walked on and sit on a bench I don't think anyone's ever sat on. Kristen has to pee but doesn't want to wait for the next gas station, so she walks off into a patch of woods and palmettos that will some day soon become tract homes.
“Don't worry, I'll distract people with my rugged good looks!” I yell to her as she disappears into the brush.
I catch a few views of the big lagoons that sit between the mainland and the sandy barrier islands beyond, but mostly they're blocked by development: vacation homes, condos, houses bordering on compounds. Each group of them has its own name. These names have had extra and frivolous Es added to certain words to make them seem more upmarket than they are. Most everyone in these Grande Pointes looks retired and half the license plates are from some other colder-weather state. It's not riveting stuff on the best of days, but on a morning like this when I feel slow and weak from not eating enough last night or this morning it's a hollow grind.
A belly full of meat and cheese and veggies and bread helps get me going. So do a few dozen ounces of iced tea. And there aren't many things better for waking yourself up than riding up a steep and narrow bridge with garbage trucks and elderly tourists speeding six feet off to your left at fifty miles per hour.
That bridge takes us to Perdido Key, a barrier island on the Gulf. All of the condos and vacation homes look new and well-built. That's because just about everything else was leveled during Hurricane Ivan twelve years ago. It's like nature tried to tell us, Hey guys, maybe this isn't the best place to live, but we responded by rebuilding in the same place only with walls twice as strong. So many of the condo towers have reflective green glass and bright-colored exteriors and white railings on every balcony that's it's like we're riding past a grand fleet of grounded cruise ships.
We hit the state line and once again return to Alabama. The first three things I see are a liquor store, a Waffle House, and another liquor store. The first person I see is a guy walking his dog without actually walking his dog. He just sits in his golf cart, motoring along in the shoulder of the highway in the direction of oncoming traffic with his dog trotting at the end of the leash attached to his arm. The next is a sixty-year-old woman wearing a skin-tight shirt of bright orange with blue jeans and skanky-looking cowboy boots that come all the way up to her kneecaps, to the point that walking in them is kind of a struggle. To the north it’s rows of condos extending away like mountains beyond mountains. Sweet home Alabama indeed.
Farther on we escape the highways and those unbroken strings of hotels and condos that block any hope of a view of the Gulf. In their place it's a series of paved nature trails and wooden bridges. For five or six miles we ride among native saw palmettos, longleaf pines, Spanish moss, and still marshes. Small birds chirp and dart all around within the trees and broad-winged vultures swing left and right on the breeze in lazy arcs above them. It's what these parts of Alabama and Florida used to look like and what they will look like again in some distant future when all of us and all of our descendants have vanished from Earth. It's the most natural place we've seen so far.
There are also lots of people on foot and still more bikes. Most all of them are the kind of people we never see on the roads and highways. And out here there's the time and space and quiet to say hello, which far more of the women do than the men. As we lean through the gentle turns in the cool of the shade and the breeze I feel the tension built up from battling Pensacola and all of the unflinching highways in and around it leaving my body through my toes and fingertips.
Then the trail spits us out at a massive intersection flanked on all sides by Burger King, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, a cigar shop, a payday loan storefront, and an Arby's. It's the Arby's that always pushes these places over the top. The walkers and bicycle riders and the greetings are gone. For the forty-ninth time in the last couple of days I question why we decided to drop down to the Gulf in the first place. I wonder if the beautiful things that are supposed to be waiting for us down the road will be worth fighting through the shit it takes to get there. It's the same cost-benefit analysis required of riding bicycles along any piece of coastline in this country.
But soon the answers start to show up. Past Arbyville we head west onto a narrowing peninsula where there are only two ways to reach the mainland again: back the way we came or across Mobile Bay on a slow little ferry to Dauphin Island. No one's willing to take the time or pay the money for the ferry when they could just drive, so the farther we go the more the traffic drops away. Then we start to catch flashes of white sand and blue water and colorful waterfront homes built on stilts through gaps in the pine trees that surround the road on both sides. When the trees break, the bay spreads out before me so vast and endless that I can't see other side. It's like a huge inland sea.
There are no fast food joints, no home improvement warehouses, and no gas stations out here. We can just ride. A little tailwind shows up at the same time I drop into one of those sweet, sweet grooves where my legs crank easy and smooth but with power and where the airflow created by my speed keeps me perfectly cool. In time the trees start to thin and it's dunes on either side, dotted with houses built ten or twenty feet in the air to keep them from being washed away by the storm surge of a hurricane. Many are painted in bright yellows or blues, or in pale greens or purples. I've never seen so many homeowners freed from the tyranny of beige. I bet it's a madhouse out here in the summer, but today, on the first day of February, it's so dead and yet so alive.
We make the ferry with fifteen minutes to spare. It could hold maybe thirty cars, but on this late afternoon it's just three trucks and a couple of muddy bicycles. In the calm waters near the end of the peninsula we watch a group of dolphins breach and see pelicans coast just over the water, making subtle left and right corrections but always staying so smooth. The boat does the same, pitching a few degrees back and forth and back and forth on gentle, rolling waves, its diesel engine and prop shaft clanking and clattering like they're trying to break free and shaking the metal deck beneath our feet.
We've had some difficult days with all of the cold weather, the dying towns, the subtle but obvious racial divisions, the condos, the sprawl, and all that gas station food. But we made it through, under our own power and on our own terms. We're by small degrees stronger, wiser, more aware, and also dirtier than when we started riding a couple of weeks ago. I'm proud of all of these things. And I'm happy for this moment, where we're all smiles, light in mind and body, gliding three feet above the salty waters of Mobile Bay toward the west, content to be right where we are.
It's fog, fog, fog, and then the harbor at Dauphin Island appears. Back on land we find the evening air as thick and heavy as the accents of the waitresses at the bar where we end up grabbing dinner. We sit on a sagging old wooden deck above a bay, looking out on fishing boats and blue herons and the car headlights twinkling on the long bridge that two days from now will carry us back to the mainland. The night is calm and still. The mosquitoes are feisty. We feel like celebrating and so we do. It's bottles of Yuengling that sweat through their labels, a crab cake sandwich, fried green tomatoes, a shrimp po' boy, and a slice of chocolate peanut butter pie with an Oreo cookie crust, all delicious and wonderful and perfect.
In the dark we ride to the raised home under which we'll be sleeping for a couple of nights. The owner is a Warm Showers host who isn't here, but who was happy to let us throw up the tent all the same. We've been futzing around in the dark when a bright light attached to a bicycle starts shining into our eyes. A guy is also attached to the bicycle. His name is Paul.
Paul is fifty-one. He's an ex-Marine from Florida who has Marined all over the world and has been on the road on his bike since June, riding to raise money for brain cancer research. Actually, he's been on two bikes. The first was stolen along with all of his gear in Los Angeles, which he reached after riding west across the deserts of Arizona and California in the middle of the summer. Trying to get replacements meant he didn't make it to the Pacific Northwest until December, where it rained all the time and then snowed, as it tends to do there in winter. By way of trains and buses he ended up in the South in January and has been cranking east since.
Because of all the stuff he's had stolen he rides with a collection of locks. He lost his tent hundreds of miles ago and now uses tarps instead. He's mucking around here because he's out of cash and waiting for more to hit his bank account. He's got the voice and manner of someone who's been through some real shit in his life but keeps charging forward at like a hundred miles an hour all the same. He is not part of the Long-Haul-Trucker-and-Ortlieb set. But he's the kind of person whose soul is spoken to by riding long distances at slow speeds on a bike. The road has changed him. Like us, he can never go back to what he was before.
The fog rolls in and surrounds the house soon after we settle in. The faint blip of the foghorn cries out over the rumbling, crashing collisions of the surf and the chirping of crickets. And from the other side of the platform beneath the house the strong smell of weed starts to fill the air.
Today's ride: 61 miles (98 km)
Total: 625 miles (1,006 km)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 2 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |