He Never Had a Chance

February 10, 2016

We're gone before the dawn. We pack up and ride to the gas station and have coffee and pastries in the faint light of the morning. The sun doesn't inch over the horizon until we're already fifteen minutes north of town. We never start this early without a reason. Today that reason is the Morganza Floodway. It's a stretch of highway that runs on top of this dam-like structure that helps contain the floodwaters of the Mississippi. There's no shoulder, no sidewalk, no escape – just a mile of riding among high-speed traffic with a concrete curb and wall taking away any escape route. We saw how busy the highway was last night. We know morning traffic could be just as thick. We're anxious.

But traffic is light and the few drivers headed our way are patient. What we thought might last for as many as three or four miles ends in only one. We yell for joy and ring the bell on Kristen's handlebar when we reach the end, confident that the worst riding of the day is behind us.

We split from Highway 1 at Bachelor, heading west and north in right-angled steps along bayous and levees. The rich soil and table-like flatness of the Mississippi River plain spread out before us and the waving golden stalks of the sugarcane fields like the ones we saw yesterday return. We stop at an old country store at the junction of two tiny back highways, the kind with a bench and a chair out front, the kind that have all but disappeared because of all the large chain gas stations and the modern practice of always taking the most direct route to wherever you happen to be going. We buy as much as we can from the store, but the half-empty cold cases and the sparse inventory and the expired can of beans tell us it won't much matter in the end.

We ride at an easy ten miles per hour, banging over rough roads that haven't been repaved in decades, where even the patches have patches. One car appears in our mirrors every fifteen minutes or so, then passes with a wide berth and we're alone again. I talk to the cows that stare at us and also to the horses, who then start to gallop toward us in their pastures. Rounding a corner I see three turkey vultures perched on wooden fence posts with their heads up and wings stretched as wide as they'll go, warming their chests in the unblocked heat of the sunlight. My mind is calm and my heart full. Gentle waves of endorphins course through my body and wrap my arms and legs in a layer of hazy softness.

A few miles south of Simmesport I realize that today might be the tenth of February, which if it is, it's kind of a big deal. I pull out my phone and press the big round button near the bottom. The screen lights up and tells me I was right. And so I start pounding the pedals harder to try and catch up with Kristen, who's about half a mile ahead of me.

"Hey! Happy anniversary!" I call out as we draw even.

"Oh my goodness, happy anniversary! It's been a wonderful two years!"

We start to reminisce about the day we met back in Portland, in the middle of a snowstorm, with so much of the city shut down or operating at half speed around us. We remember how at this time last year we were taking a day off in a cramped little motel room next to a roadhouse in Caiguna, Western Australia, out on the vast Nullarbor Plain in hundred-degree heat. But before we can get too sentimental we round a corner and this pack of dogs comes running out of a garage next to the road and beelines it toward us. Well, maybe pack isn't the right word. There are five of them, but they're all terriers, none taller than a foot off the ground. One of them is a tiny little puppy, all soft and round and wiggly. When I lay down the bike and then kneel to pet him he jumps up on the leg of my rain pants, but they're so slick that the pads of his feet have nothing to grip and he slides right off.

A few minutes later a maroon Ford truck rolls up, comes to a sudden stop just past us, then throws it into reverse and backs up slowly. The window comes down and the young woman inside starts saying something about the dogs. It's hard to tell exactly what because she's half yelling with the smoking stub of a cigarette pinched between her teeth. But soon she calls out a couple of names and two of the dogs beat feet over to the truck and hop into the cab through an open door. The puppy belongs to the woman as well, and so I pick the precious little black and white blank slate of a dog up and hand it to the woman through the open window. And then I just sigh. That's how it is out here; so many people put such little effort into raising their dogs that half the time they don't even know where those dogs are.

The bridge over the Atchafalaya River is being painted. With flaggers controlling traffic at both ends we ride up and over all by ourselves. In the Family Dollar store on the other side of the river I overhear the store manager talking to the customer about how it's the best job in town she can get, and how if she works full time she makes like $550 a week. Beyond town we pound out one last ten-mile run on Highway 1. The bikes bang over big cracks and fissures in the road with a constant whump-whump and shudders that jam our wrists and sit bones and cause every pannier to make a racket. I lower my head and crank and count down the miles as cars aggressively overtake each other and visions of that dead dog sliding across the shoulder in front of me fill my mind in a rolling loop of sorrow. Every time I see an unleashed and unfenced dog running toward us I tense up and prepare myself for the fact that I might see that same awful outcome again.

Sweet beats and cringe-inducing lyrics about early twenties relationship angst are the soundtrack for lunch, thanks to Tame Impala. It's all babe I love you and girl I'm sorry and something vapid about being a brand new person but making the same old mistakes. It's the kind of stuff where when you're in college and hear it you think Man, this guy is so cool and he gets it, but when you're older it just makes you laugh and remember how confident and dumb you once were. Then I point out how my extra-long rain pants look like those parachute pants MC Hammer used to wear because they get all bunched up at the bottom. The only thing left to do is to start shimmying sideways the way he did in his music videos. And so I do, with the clips in the soles of my shoes clicking right across the edge of the parking lot next to the handsome little brick Baptist church where we eat crackers and string cheese.

We head south and west in the shadows cast by leafless tree branches on rough backroads and smooth minor highways. They bend left and right and left and right in gentle curves to avoid the low spots where the water runs or stands. The dogs are all too old or too fat or their legs are too short to give chase beyond the head of their driveways, no matter how strong their will. Soon we reach the town of Plaucheville, where most of the headstones of the above-ground graves in the cemeteries bear French last names: Mayeaux, Jeansonne, Lemoine, St. Romaine. We feel the cold snap of the last week dying off, and with each passing hour another layer of clothing or pair of gloves or hat gets peeled away. When we see a guy dominating his yard with a massive riding lawnmower we take it as the first sign of spring.

Afternoon brings tidy homes and healthy-looking towns spaced seven or eight miles apart: Cottonport, then Evergreen, then Bunkie. It makes it feel like we're in the Midwest. Our world becomes one of fallow fields, chirping crickets, still bayous, the smell of just-turned earth, and cracks in the pavement that rattle bike parts and bags and send birds scattering away from the branches of roadside trees.

Once an orphanage, now heavy equipment storage.

There's no obvious reason to stop. The sun is still high in the sky and warm on our faces. We just keep pedaling. When the highways on our route get too busy we break off down side roads, where we say kind things to the dogs that run toward us with tails wagging and awful things to the ones that bark and snarl and growl. In this way the miles start to pile up: fifty then sixty then seventy.

But the farther we go the more the wind grows. Much of the time it's in our faces. Then we run out of side roads and get forced onto shoulderless highways with heavy traffic that has us diving off into the grass and gravel five or six times every mile. Because of all this, we find ourselves ten miles from the state park we hope to camp at as the sun crosses the horizon. No big deal, I think, We've still got time before it gets dark, we just have to keep pedaling. This is true, but soon the river plain ends and we pick up rolling hills. Five miles later it's dark, which again shouldn't be too serious, except something's wrong with Kristen's headlight and it won't turn on. And it's about this time that the minor highway that had for so long been almost empty starts to fill our mirrors with the yellow glow of headlights.

We pull off the road a couple dozen times to let cars pass and stay alive. Each of these trips into gravel and grass made murky by the darkness eats away at our will. Soon it reaches the point that Kristen stops talking altogether and starts to experience low-grade dizziness. I start to vent all of my frustrations about this road and about life in general in some crazy, half-coherent way that involves smacking my handlebars with the palm of my right hand and then growling a little. Then we see a sign telling us that it's another four miles to the park. When we look at our map a moment later we realize that half an hour ago we passed a turnoff to state land where we could have set up the tent in the woods in the last of the day's light. Now we're surrounded by fenced private land. We've ridden seventy-nine miles today and yet we're nowhere. We can't believe it

Just up ahead there's a gas station. We walk in to the sound of Dire Straits singing about money for nothing and your chicks for free pumping out of the sound system. As we buy some garbage food I tell the guy behind the counter what we're doing and ask if we can throw up the tent behind the building for the night. The look that spreads across his face half a second later is much the same as if I had asked him if he enjoys dressing up in women's underwear and the answer was an emphatic no. It's not a question he has ever conceived of answering.

"Why'd ya get here so late?" is the only thing he can think to say in response.

We tell him something about winds and hills and miles and exhaustion, but unless you've traveled by bike none of that stuff makes sense. He doesn't want to help, but it doesn't really matter, because when Kristen wants something she will argue and persuade and bullet point until she gets it. That's on full display tonight. The guy behind the counter doesn't know it, but he never had a chance.

And so instead of ending up among a bunch of RVs or tucked away in some quiet Louisiana woods, we find ourselves next to a crappy mini-mart, less than a hundred feet from the highway, obscured from view only by a ground-level vinyl sign advertising how the Hunt Brothers pizza they sell inside the mini-mart includes all of the toppings you want for free. But we're off the road and safe and we're in the tent and warm. We have a somewhat cold tallboy of Bud Light to share. We have each other. Two years ago we never could have imagined we'd end up in weird scenarios like this on a regular basis, and yet here we are. Now it's hard to imagine our lives unfolding any other way.

Today's ride: 79 miles (127 km)
Total: 1,018 miles (1,638 km)

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