Firing Invisible Handguns at Invisible Evil Henchmen

February 5, 2016

The calls of red-bellied woodpeckers tell me it's time to poke my head out from the warm den of the sleeping bag and see what's what with the new day. I find that our warm breath has mixed with the frigid air and caused a thin layer of ice to form on the rain fly. It crunches to the touch. Knowing that it's going to melt and start dripping over us and everything we own as soon as the sun hits it gives us motivation to get upright and get cranking.

"I don't know where everybody is," Kristen says, "But I'm glad they're there."

We have the smooth pavement and gentle rolling hills of Southern Mississippi all to ourselves this morning. And with all the non-breathable clothing and the hats and the thick gloves it only takes ten minutes before the effect of the cold goes away. We ride in the sunbeams flanked by deep pine woods. The lines at the edge of the road once painted white have long since faded to a dull gray and the single solid yellow centerline heads toward the same fate. When we hang a left and head west, what little wind there is becomes a tailwind and we crank easy and free. It's a fine, fine morning. We're all smiles and laughter and exuberant I love yous.

We see a few scattered houses and cook oatmeal in front of a church, but most of the time we pedal all alone with our thoughts and the swirling and swooshing of the pines of the national forest. Sometimes in places like these, where the view doesn't change much and there's little to distract us, things start to get weird. This is one of those times.

There's a song called "Into the Fog" by The Budos Band, and it's become kind of the theme song for this trip. It's instrumental and sort of dramatic and also strange, and we've come to think of it as the music that would play during the opening credits for the movie version of this journal. It's a slow-building song, but about a minute into it this sweet guitar riff starts up and the drums kick in and then, boom, trumpets. It's at this point we imagine ourselves being introduced, in the sort of stop-and-freeze method of a seventies TV cop show, where the action on the screen pauses and the titles appear that say, like, Tommy Steel as Jeff Arnim. And so here we are, out in the middle of the woods in rural Mississippi, and we're acting out what would happen in the moments leading up to the frozen shot. We skid sideways to a stop (well, as near as you can on a loaded touring bike) and give an emphatic thumbs-up toward the camera that doesn't exist. I pop wheelies with the front tire maybe an inch off the ground. We stand over the bikes and do a quick turn to the left and act like we're firing invisible handguns at invisible evil henchmen.

Like I said, weird.

Even though Mississippi is by most any measure the poorest state in America it feels much healthier and less desperate than so much of what we saw in Alabama and Georgia. It's in many ways what we hoped we'd find when we decided to come this way. Most of the homes are modest but clean and made of brick, there's a great fondness for No Trespassing signs, and we ride past Southern Baptist churches with Southern-sounding names like Tuxechena. County lines announce themselves with a change in the color of the pavement. And an old man in an old truck honks and waves at us for no reason except to say hey. These things transpire on roads with lazy little rises and lazy little bends with the sun shining bright in a cloudless sky. Our day simple and uncomplicated, just like these country days ought to be.

The back roads shoot us out in the tiny town of McHenry along a busy U.S. highway. By some small miracle the gas station has a restaurant attached to it. It's mostly filled with working men on their lunch break. I'm the only guy under the age of sixty who doesn't have camo on his jacket or hat or both. Even if I wasn't in good shape from riding all of these miles on bicycles I'd still be the lightest man in the room by at least thirty pounds – although in a state where thirty-six percent of the people are obese this isn't some great surprise.

McHenry is the first and only town we'll see until the end of the day and we know it. We load up on pasta, garlic bread, grilled cheese sandwich, hush puppies, and so much water and iced tea.

We need all of it. The map of the road ahead shows at least a dozen streams and creeks crossing its path, every one of which sits at the bottom of a hill. It's one of those roads that goes up and flat and up and flat like a small staircase, drops down in the same way on the back side, and repeats the pattern over and over again. We pass a small church where a few of the members stand outside working on an elaborate Mardi Gras float of green and yellow and purple, then debate the relative merits of which flavor of summertime Popsicle is the best: cherry or orange or grape (Kristen goes with cherry, I say orange). I wonder what kind of crazy backwoods people and torture devices lie at the end of side roads with names like Jub Hickman. The hours pass under the watchful gaze and gently waving arms of a million slender, stoic pine trees.

Climbing up the hundredth little hill of the day I think I see a couple of bicycles coming our way. We've seen so few cyclists out here that part of me thinks it's just an illusion, that I'm imagining Lycra and helmets and clipless pedals that aren't there. But Ron and Sambo are the real deal, a couple of local riders out for the day, getting ready for a ride along the Natchez Trace this spring. I'm surprised enough to see any other riders out here, but to find two of them who will soon be heading out on a 450-mile trip amazes me.

After fifteen minutes of talking and handshakes and good lucks everyone climbs back into their saddle. Behind us a sheriff's deputy pulls into a driveway to turn around. We push away to the west with the sound of Ron's big voice yelling out, "Hey, let's go see if we can draft off this guy!"

By the middle of the afternoon the sun is high in the sky and it's warm and calm and it feels like the ideal day to be out riding bikes. We stop and rest beneath the covered entryway of a small country church and talk with nostalgia and reverence about how we met and all the places we've been and how much we're looking forward to all of the unknowable experiences that the years to come have in store for us. We also talk about those riders who will go like fifteen or twenty miles at a time without stopping, and how much they're missing out on. It's not something we'll ever understand. We stop all the time, and so we've come to know well how these breaks are one of the best parts of cycle-touring. They're this series of wonderful little parties we throw throughout the day, where it's like, hey, we just rode eight miles on these heavy-ass bicycles through the rain or up all these hills or whatever – let's celebrate by eating sugary food and having a fun chat and making bad jokes while passersby slow and stare and try to make sense of us.

As evening draws closer the shadows grow long enough that our heads start to bump into the trunks of the pines closest to the road. We're cruising down an easy grade at about fifteen miles per hour when two dogs come charging out of the yard of a house off to our left. One's an older golden retriever, the other a brown country dog, average in every feature and dimension. They're closest to me but it's like I don't exist; they bolt as fast as they can after Kristen, who's hundreds of feet ahead. They close the gap and draw even with her in seconds, like it's nothing at all. We're always ready for the worst in situations like this, ready to put our bikes between ourselves and the dogs, ready to yell and scream and smack heads with a tire pump or a pedal wrench if needed.

But there's none of that today. Kristen puts down her right hand so that the smaller of the two can sniff it and it's all over. We pick up two new best friends and for the next ten minutes the shoulder of Silver Run Road turns into a giant lovefest, all wagging tails and happy eyes and tongues flying out of dog snouts toward our faces. The brown dog jumps up and hooks her front two legs around one of our arms any time we try to move because she doesn't want us to go. But the sun is setting and we must. When it's time to leave we tell the dogs to go home a couple of times and then they do, without complaint.

Everyone in this picture is so, so happy.

A few miles down the road we approach a house where four dogs run loose in the yard. As soon as they see us they all make a break for the road and start to bark in this terrible off-key chorus. A few seconds later the front door of the house opens and a man with a massive beer gut and a dirty white t-shirt appears from the darkness.

"Yibba nom nur neema nyamma jagga dowgs!" he yells out. "Eet chew nyibba kitcha git nebba neew ya dowgs! Eet chew nyibba kitcha! Geet eer! Geet eer!"

We're still in the Deep South. But hey, at least he called them off. That's progress.

We end up in a campground that flies both the American and Confederate flags. The cornhole boards leaned against the back wall of the office are painted with the Confederate flag pattern as well. Yep, we're still in the Deep South. We take showers but end up colder than when we started because cold air shoots into the bathroom through a huge gap at the bottom of the door. When we get back to the tent there's already frost forming on the rain fly. It's 8 p.m.

But we pile deep into the sleeping bag and hug our way back to semi-warmth. We think back on all of the good things that happened today and listen to so many songs by The Raveonettes: "Uncertain Times" and "Aly, Walk With Me" and "Attack of the Ghost Riders" and "That Great Love Sound." And in so doing a cold little tent staked into the dirt and grass of a low-rent RV park in Poplarville, Mississippi becomes our home. The path it takes to reach this point is never the same from one night to the next, but by the time our phones click off and our heads hit our pillows and we say goodnight and I love you, somehow we always manage to have found it again.

Today's ride: 60 miles (97 km)
Total: 772 miles (1,242 km)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0