Find the Goodness in Your Heart

February 20, 2016

All the champagne, the food, and the general overwhelming senses of happiness and joy mean we sleep in and then grab-ass around our big, clean, religious-slash-Texas-A&M-themed room until morning threatens to become afternoon. It's so much lazy goodness.

"Let me look at my laptop and see," Kristen says in response to some question.

"Don't you mean our laptop?"

Later: "Do you want some of this orange?"

"Don't you mean some of our orange?"

And then: "If you don't want that breakfast casserole I'm gonna have it."

"Don't you mean our breakfast casserole?"

A lifetime of stupid jokes stands before us.

After shipping all of the good-looking clothes and shoes of yesterday to the West Coast we start to make our escape back to the country. We wind through the side streets of Bryan and College Station, but I only half-notice the cracks in the pavement and the cul-de-sacs and the massive apartment complexes used to house all those Aggies. Even though the wedding ceremony took all of like seven minutes yesterday, even though we're continuing on like we always have with the cycling and camping, and even though we're still sharing the road with lifted trucks that rev their engines when they draw even with us like a bunch of assholes, I feel changed. I can't find the words to explain what that change feels like. There's nothing in my experience I can compare it to. I wouldn't have figured a man-made social construct could do that. I never thought that a couple of legal documents filed in a state where we don't live and won't often return would create that kind of effect. Yet here I am, different than before, a husband with a wife.

Kristen's feeling it, too.

"I just love you so much," she tells me as we're stopped beside the road. "I feel so happy. It's like I'm hungover on joy."

She pauses for half a second, but before I can respond she says, "Okay, I'll stop talking about it. I'll just be thinking about it all the time!"

Kristen's default state is smiling happiness and yet I've never seen her so smiling or so happy as I have the past few days. It's every bit as wonderful as a joyous life-changing event should be.

It's overcast with light rain and strong winds in our face but it doesn't matter. We leave College Station without being swallowed up by a T.G.I. Fridays, becoming impossibly lost in a Kohl's parking lot, or receiving a traumatic brain injury after being run over by a college student texting at the wheel. Then it's back to the west with so much of Texas ready to unfold before us. We cross above the rippled, muddy, browner-than-brown waters of the Brazos River with the slow, rhythmic, endless nodding of black steel oil pumpjacks scattered across the valley floor beyond.

When the trees near the road drop away we lose our shield from the wind and our speed falls to nine then eight then seven. The tendons in my knees start to hurt from pushing too hard, because I always push too hard when faced with a strong headwind. In my mirror I see a bicycle approaching from behind. I also see that it's being followed by a black pickup truck. As I'm trying to figure out what kind of cycling could require such immediate support, the guy on the bike draws even with us. He's on a triathlon bike, his forearms resting on the aero bars. I glance to my left and raise my left hand and say hey, but it's like waving at a ghost. He continues on, never breaking cadence or unlocking his eyes from strip of shoulder ahead of him. I make an audible laugh before he's out of earshot because I'm so shocked.

"Man, he didn't even look at us," I say to Kristen a few moments later. "Nothing at all. Just eyes straight ahead like we didn't exist."

"Maybe he's riding for the Social Anxiety Disorder Fund."

"It's like he's some kind of bicycle-riding humanoid robot that hasn't yet had emotion programmed into it."

I swear I don't want to keep making fun of road cyclists, but they give me so much material I just can't ignore.

Now that we're in Texas, anytime we find something with Texas in the name we leave it out when saying it. Here we have a Big Cinnamon Roll and some Style Sweet Tea.

We leave the busy, noisy highway and pedal into the small town of Snook. We coast into the parking lot of a big country store that's doing so well it operates out of a near-new building. Unlike the Dollar General stores we've seen so much of, this place has a large covered patio out front with benches and tables and chairs that encourage people to linger and talk. At the far end of the patio a young girl in a brown vest stands behind a plastic folding table selling Girl Scout cookies. As if this store wasn't already the greatest. I walk over and buy one box of Thin Mints for me and another of Samoas for Kristen. When the mom asks where we're going and I say California the girl springs to life.

"California!" she cries out as she runs out from behind the table. "Take me to Hollywood!"

I end up talking to them for at least fifteen minutes. Mom thinks what we're doing is great. She wants to get a bike and throw a trailer on it and go on short rides with her daughter, but her husband's not really into the idea. When I tell her about Warm Showers gets she excited and tells me she wants to sign up. As all of this goes on the girl closes cookie sales left and right, with the aggressive nature and won't-take-no attitude of a born saleswoman and someone who will thrive after the apocalypse. At some point I mention that we spent three months in Australia last year. This causes her to light up again, and run around to the front of the table again, and tell me how much she wants to go there and did I see any dingos and what about kangaroos.

On the other side of the patio Kristen eats said Samoas. A man in a baseball cap and blue jeans walks up and grabs a few bags of ice out of the cooler that stands next to the table.

"Must be goin' on a long bike ride," he says in a matter-of-fact way, with his arms half in the freezer.

"Yup, heading to California."

He stops what he's doing and turns around.

"Yer shittin' me."

When we come back together our conversation makes its way toward what's been the biggest running joke of the last several days. It's my impression of what thong underwear would say as it's being put on, if it were sentient, and if it could talk, and if it spoke with a high-pitched voice – something along the lines of, Oh no, please, please madam I beg of you, no, no, please, find the goodness in your heart, no, no, please, plea-mmmmfffffff.

At the edge of town we return to the farm roads that represent so much of what it's like to ride bicycles across this state. It's tight-wound rolls of hay and dogs watching the world pass from beneath the chassis of Ford F-150 pickup trucks. The pines that have been almost constant since the day we left the Atlantic have at last faded away. Now in the gaps between the pastures it's all manner of oaks, some covered in a soft blanket of green, others the rough brown of bark and nothing else. My legs feel old and creaky after just two days away from the road.

Standing at the edge of the road, taking notes about the inner monologues of women's underwear.

Rounding a bend we see a field where a couple of Longhorn cattle have taken a break from chewing grass as they try to make sense of us.

"Zat ees so Texas!" I call out to Kristen with a Norwegian accent.

There are two reasons for this. One, Longhorn cattle are this iconic kind of animal so many people associate with Texas. But I say it with the accent because that's a phrase people in Norway sometimes use to describe things that are crazy or unexpected. It's so Texas that they say that.

Throughout the afternoon we pass by massive ranches with equally massive front gates and signs. They have names like Triple J and Workman and Wolf Creek. The wealth that comes with these places is subtle but obvious. Many of the men behind the wheels of the trucks that pass us wear cowboy hats, but then why wouldn't they, because they are in fact actual cowboys. Above it's venues of vultures, watching us from high in the tree branches, ready to turn us into dinner if somehow we should expire on or near the shoulder of Farm to Market Road 1361.

Beyond Somerville we ride alongside a lake that the Army Corps of Engineers have harnessed into a reservoir. It's all fishing boats and campgrounds and, for some reason, biker bars. Along the way we talk with reverence about all we experienced yesterday, about how if we had the chance to go back and change anything we wouldn't. I don't know how many people can say that of their wedding day. It's all so endearing and precious that if an innocent bystander happened to overhear us they would become a puking bystander.

The country's coolest high school football stadium, in Somerville.

The next few days have us riding between a series of parks with camping spaced forty or fifty miles apart. In ranching country where most landowners are armed and not above unloading on trespassers this is a great thing. But when we roll up to entrance of the park where we plan to sleep tonight the man shuffling around near the gatehouse tells is it's closed.

"Been that way since it flooded, since last May," he says. "Almost a year. Government won't put in the money. Just gotta put in the breakers but they won't do it."

And that's the state of camping in America in 2016. If you can't have electricity at every site then what's the point of even opening the campground.

We backtrack two miles to another park. Every site is full. Well, all fifty or sixty sites with power. Just one of the five tent sites is filled. What a nation of candy-asses we have become.

By the light of the moon we enjoy a dinner of rice and beans and cheese, Girl Scout cookies, and some Shiner Bock. It's a fine dinner. Maybe the finest dinner. Around us it's the sounds of Saturday night camping: barking dogs, drunken laughter, campfires that look more like structure fires, people driving to the bathroom instead of walking, and now that we've come far enough west, rapid-fire Spanish. Our tent is dark and quiet. A giddy happiness surrounds us.

Today's ride: 47 miles (76 km)
Total: 1,440 miles (2,317 km)

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