It's Justice, Texas Style

February 16, 2016

It's so quiet in the woods when I wake up at five that all I hear is the rush of the blood that pumps through my ears. It's so quiet on the road when we start riding at seven that I think I hear a truck approaching but it's just the unobstructed sound of Kristen's tires rolling over the rough black chipseal.

The morning is brisk. We wear jackets and gloves. Smoke from burning stumps hangs motionless over the road and I get a peace sign thrown my way from the female driver of a passing pickup. Kristen rides ahead of me. She's cranking up a hill when she hears dogs barking off to her right. They're behind a fence, but when she looks up she sees a huge hound dog heading her way from the left who isn't. The dog's halfway across the road at this point, charging toward her in silence. By the time Kristen stops, unclips, and stands up the dog is upon her. In an instant it jumps toward Kristen, and before she can do anything it lands with its front paws on her chest. The dog is so huge that the two of them are nose to nose. She has no idea what's about to happen and no way to stop whatever's coming.

But what's coming is that the dog proceeds to lick Kristen in the face for a few seconds before lowering itself back down onto the ground and wandering off into another yard on a new mission of love.

Our bicycled shadows extend for twenty feet off to our right. In the trees a mourning dove sings. Aside from the stretch where we have to crank hard past a pack of literal junkyard dogs almost as mean as bad bad Leroy Brown it's a fine morning to be riding bikes on the farm roads of East Texas.

A wave from the state trooper sitting at a speed trap at the edge of town welcomes us to Groveton. For a town of a thousand people it's alive this morning, with the accusers, the accused, and their respective counsel filling the parking lot and steps and doorways of the county courthouse at ten minutes before nine. From the covered walkway in front of the county clerk's office across the street we watch about ten men and a couple of women pile out of a gray van in black and white striped jumpsuits, like something out of an old-time movie. They're each shackled at the wrists and ankles and they make their way toward the adjacent courthouse under the watchful eyes of a sheriff's deputy with a big tan cowboy hat perched on the top of his head. It's justice, Texas style.

Then it's down a few blocks to the County Seat Cafe, where old men in weathered ball caps complain about the world, talk of things that you wouldn't believe just happened, discuss the deeds of other old men not present to defend themselves, and trade good-natured jabs with all the waitresses. It's one guy telling the story of the home run he hit in the nineteenth inning of a baseball game back when he was twelve years old, which I bet everyone at the table has heard at least five times. It's furious giggling from one and laughing that's more like suppressed snorting from the others. It's slow, measured Texas drawls.

"Here ya go, sugar," the waitress says to Kristen in the middle of all this while handing her all of our water bottles. "I filled em up with ice so they'll stay cold throughout the day for ya."

Kristen goes out by the bikes to start packing up. She ends up gone for like ten minutes because she falls into three separate conversations, one right after the next. While she's occupied I end up talking to the table of old-timers about where we've come from, where we're going, are we taking Interstate 10 the whole way, have I ever been to Klamath Falls, and have I heard of Fort Lawton in Seattle. In addition to all the wishes of good luck and safe travels I get a firm handshake from the man who appears to be the group's ringleader. I don't think I've ever traveled in a part of the country as friendly as where we are now. The drivers have stopped waving at us; it's all two hands on the wheel and eyes forward now. But in exchange we're seeing more of the soul that makes riding through rural America such a treat. It's a trade we're happy to make.

A southwest wind blows warm and dry and the sky is all but cloudless. It has the feel of a fine summer day of the sort we hoped to find out here while so much of America is tucked away indoors for the winter. Along the left side of the road we keep seeing these ten-foot-tall wire fences instead of the normal ones that come up to about chest level. We figure they're deer-proof fences. But soon we realize that we're seeing them at the edge of lands owned by private hunting clubs. They aren't for keeping the deer out, but for keeping the deer that have been brought to the property in. And so the hunting experience seems to goes like this: the deer can't get out, hunters put out this stuff called deer corn to attract them, then the hunters sit around in a raised wooden box until the deer show up, point their rifle downward, and shoot them.

I admit my hunting experience is limited to the video game Duck Hunt on the original Nintendo system. I wasn't all that good at it either. But hunting in this way seems like a bicycle trip where you only ride twenty miles per day, where you never go uphill, where it's always seventy degrees, where the wind is never anything but a tailwind, where you carry none of your own gear, and where all of your meals are prepared for you, but where you are still responsible for spooning the food into your open mouth. I wonder at what point you can still call that kind of hunting a sport.

The roads near Lake Livingston bring heavy traffic and RV parks and a lot of sketchy little bars. We lose count of the number of signs we see for political candidates that go by a nickname – guys like Grover "Tiger" Worsham for County Commissioner in Precinct 1 and Richard "Hummer" Morris for Sheriff. We also see several ads for something called Mr. Skeeter, described as an insect misting system. I think that means your mosquito problems go away in exchange for being coated with a constant stream of birth defect-inducing chemicals all summer long.

The late afternoon finds us where we hoped we'd be, riding down a quiet and mostly empty farm road, past more cattle and goats and horses than cars. It's country of wooden fences and ranchers' names posted on metal arches over their long driveways. We watch the mail get delivered by a black 1987 Chevy pickup that's been converted to right-hand drive and has chrome wheels and a loud aftermarket exhaust. But if there's one thing the rolling pastures and train tracks and yellow Posted signs don't look like it's a national forest. The map makes it look like we're at the northern edge of the broad green expanse of the Sam Houston National Forest but our eyes call its bluff. This is a problem, because that's where we hope to throw up our tent tonight. When we look up more detailed maps we find out that public forest land exists only in small patches of odd little shapes scattered over hundreds of square miles.

Shit.

There's no guarantee that we won't show up to one of those shapes to find it clearcut or surrounded by houses or both.

But luck strikes today. Kristen soon notices that a section of a hundred-mile footpath called the Lone Star Hiking Trail crosses our route half a dozen miles down the road. As long as we can find it we'll have a safe place in the woods to call home.

When we find the trail it is, of course, just beyond a bunch of houses. Evening traffic howls past in periodic rushes. But daylight is failing and there isn't going to be another option. When a gap in the cars appears we go for it. Our shoes and bike tires make a fierce racket crunching over the ocean of dried leaves and branches spread out before us as we push down the trail less than a hundred feet from the back of a mobile home. We're sure someone's inside watching TV or eating dinner or looking up funny cat videos on YouTube. We expect a head with a confused-looking face to pop out the back door at any moment.

It doesn't. And so we push back out of sight and set up the tent with no obstruction but for the spiders.

"Not quite the national forest experience we had in mind, is it?" I say to Kristen. "But hey, we're here"

"And at least we have beer."

"Oh! I totally forgot about that!"

"It's probably still half-cold, too."

It is, just barely.

Nothing is perfect on this night, but then nothing needs to be. We're here and we're together and we're happy. As if to prove the point, there's so much farting inside the tent that even the noise of all the traffic speeding past as seventy can't drown it out. The smell doesn't bother me. Instead I'm focused on the goddamned Gordon Lightfoot song that has become stuck in my head on an endless loop and begin to lose hope that it will leave and return to whatever terrible place from which it came.

Today's ride: 63 miles (101 km)
Total: 1,319 miles (2,123 km)

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