January 25, 2016
He's the Picture of Contentment
The gunshots end not long after dark. Not one car drives past in the night. Excepting a couple of owls the woods stay quiet and still. Although the short winter days mean that we're done riding by about six, the plus side is that we get nine or ten hours of sleep. We wake up this morning rested and clear of mind and ready to brave the morning cold.
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Kristen shoots off ahead of me when we return to the pavement. This always happens when she knows that a diner breakfast is waiting for us in the next town. I ride half a mile behind, looking out at the blueberry fields and clear cuts and noticing how you can tell where mobile homes used to be because they take only the house itself away. The driveways and clotheslines and piles of garbage are left behind to rot away little by little for the rest of eternity. We crank west on what a big green sign says is the Moogie Lee Highway.
In Lakeland we park the bikes and walk into that Southern institution, the Huddle House restaurant. I order hash browns stuffed with meat and cheese and eggs and covered in gravy from a sweet young woman that defines Southern hospitality. "And if y'all need anythin' else ya just let me know, alright?" she says as she walks away.
Out of the speakers plays some awful modern country song where a young woman with an intense twang in her voice tells a story that goes like this. The woman goes out to the lake to go fishing. But she's not alone; there's a guy with her. He's from the city, which she could tell because he's wearing a v-neck shirt and pink shorts, just like all dudes from the city do. They go out in the boat with their poles and bait, but here's the thing: he has more than just bass on his mind. He slides over and gets closer to her. Then he does what must be like the cardinal sin in fishing: he tries to hold her reeling hand. This makes her really mad. And he's like, It's okay, you're beautiful, I love you, it doesn't get better than this. And she's like, Actually, yeah it could, if you'd shut up and fish. But he doesn't let it go, he's like Captain Casanova. She just wants to fish and this dude isn't letting her, the jerk. In the end she gets so tired of it that she has no other choice but to push him into the lake. It's unsaid in the song, but the subtext is that she did not help him back in the boat but instead retuned to fishing. I mean, fishin'.
When I walk to the bathrooms I notice how they aren't labeled Men and Women but instead have shadowed outlines attached to them. One is of a quarterback throwing a football. The other is a cheerleader jumping in the air with her pom poms held high.
Our world is getting more Southern with each passing day.
While staring out at the highway through the huge plate glass windows of the Huddle House I get the urge to pick up my phone, look up the New York Times, and see what's going on in the country and the world. But just before I hit Enter I stop, close the browser, and turn the screen to black.
I don't want to go there. I want all of me to be as present as possible on this trip. I want to notice the lushness that takes over the landscape when we pass through a wildlife refuge and imagine what all of this part of the world must have looked like a thousand years ago. I want to look out on cotton fields that have been cotton fields since the days of slavery and think about both how far we've come from then and how far we still have to go. I don't want to be checking my email every fifteen minutes or reading about Syria or learning what major assault against the environment has just been committed. That's what my life at home looks like: giving into the pull of what's happening elsewhere so much that most of what's around me blends together into the background. This trip is an escape from all that. In just five days my mind is clearer now than it has been in six months.
In the matter of only a few miles the character of Georgia goes through major changes. The pine tree farms start to go away in favor of the ordered rows of cropland. We see pecan orchards that look skeletal in late January but are still undeniably pecan orchards. Larger and more refined country homes take the place of run down double-wides, and we look across the fields at shacks and barns with sheet metal roofs that look like they've been standing since the nineteenth century. Big John Deere tractors pulling trailers loaded down with hay bales rumble past us. Gas stations appear at every minor crossroads. Sand becomes dirt. Little hills start to appear where before it had been flat.
My fear that we might have passed through some kind of portal by accident goes away when I notice that the shoulder of every road is still dotted with beer bottles and energy drink cans and assorted McDonalds wrappers. Soon they're joined with collard greens that fall from passing trucks that carry them in flatbed trailers where the sides are made of plywood.
The afternoon has us crossing the Withlacoochee River and riding down secluded back roads with names like Shady Grove. We go past little churches, including one with a small cemetery out back. A few green pop-up tents like the kind you'd see at a cookout sit above one plot, ready for a burial that's going to take place tomorrow, just like burials have been taking place there for the last 150 years, minus the pop-up tents. The weather is warm, the pavement smooth, the drivers patient and waving to us as they pass with a subtle lift of their left index finger. Thoughts of the aggressive traffic and awful highways from a few days ago fade from our heads. We remember why coming this way seemed like such a good idea in the first place.
It's like this all afternoon and into the evening. The air turns thick with the smell of cabbages and fields glow yellow with just-flowered rapeseed plants. Our legs get into that groove where the miles start to pile up like it's nothing. When we stop at a gas station and mini-mart at the corner of nothing and nothing, we walk inside to find sitting behind the counter a row of chairs like you'd find in the average American living room. The two guys near the register and the old woman kicked back in one of the chairs ask at least twenty questions about where we're going and how far we ride every day and where do we camp. They're trying to make sense of how such a thing is even possible. We do our best to answer but only understand about half the questions. It's not so much the accent that gets us but the accent combined with a speed of speaking that wouldn't be out of place at an auction.
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This part of the country has a bad reputation about aggressive dogs. And it's deserved; they're everywhere. But today we meet the exception. I ride up to a junction where we're about to turn left and I see Kristen on one side and an old Golden Retriever on the other, sitting, staring, waiting.
"Um, did you know there's a dog over there?" I ask her.
"Yeah, he was walking toward the road and I told him to stay, and he just did."
I stop near the dog and he walks over, tail wagging, looking up at me through droopy eyelids that make him look sleepy, wanting for nothing more in the world than some scratches behind the ears. I barely get the word sit out of my mouth before he does, even though, it's hard for him to do with his weak back legs. When I walk the bike across to Kristen he follows, then steps toward her and leans into her side as she reaches down to rub his head and his chest. In that moment he's the picture of contentment. And unlike all of the other dogs we've met, when it's time for us to go he follows only to the edge of his driveway and then lopes back home.
As we crank out the last few miles toward Reid Bingham State Park on a road of ruddy brown dirt and clay staring into the sun as it hangs above the horizon these overwhelming feelings of lightness and joy start to rush through my body. They've been building all day, but the grateful dog that's now a mile behind us pushes them to a peak. After the heartbreaking end of our last trip I wondered how long it would take for me to get back to a place like this, a place where the joy of the adventure in front of me outweighed the sorrow of what came before. I wondered if I'd get there at all. But I have. And it turns out that the ability to create new and wonderful memories like I am out here comes with great healing power. These memories aren't replacing or somehow overwriting what came before, but rather building back up stores of happiness and resolve that had been so profoundly depleted.
That's where I am right now. It's warm and free and it's beautiful.
Today's ride: 61 miles (98 km)
Total: 224 miles (360 km)
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