Just Give Me More Americans Like Jimmy

February 24, 2016

Clear skies and the strong north winds that blew all night make us expect a frigid, biting morning. In the fluorescent glow of the motel room we put on layers of shirts, jackets and pants, and gloves and hats. It's the same ritual we followed all of those mornings across the Deep South. Kristen makes a joke about how when I fart while wearing rain pants they bulge out a little in the back. I know it isn't true. I kind of wish it was.

Broad shoulders, crap-ass gas stations, new retirement homes advertised as retirement villages, and a giant street sign that reads Outlet Malls guide us south and west. But within seven miles of leaving the center of San Marcos we start to see cows again. There hasn't yet been a city in Texas where we couldn't ride seven miles from the center of town and see cows again. There's still enough traffic that without telling it to do so my mind starts to work in what feels like this stripped-down operating mode. I only notice what's in right front of me or whatever object appears in the mirror attached to my helmet. The miles register on my cycling computer but otherwise disappear.

Full power returns on the back roads. It always does. I hear the birds chirping for the first time all morning. I say hello to the gray and black-striped cat that darts startled across my path. I notice the rusting yellow sign that warns of a nearby telephone cable crossing. It's so old it says that if there are any issues with the cable to contact the Bell Telephone System, which you can do by calling the operator at no charge. The back roads also give Kristen and I the time and space to sing a Rod Stewart love song out loud to each other, call-and-response style, each of us singing a verse at a time, in uninspired monotone voices. Then we start slapping each other with our gloves, to the point that I'm worried one of us might inadvertently challenge the other to a duel.

But soon this open space fills with the tract houses and busy roads of New Braunfels. It's a northern suburb of San Antonio and it shows. The traffic becomes so thick and loud that even when we yell at each other we can't hear what's been said. We escape into a large shopping complex where I eat a sub sandwich and drink a gallon of iced tea.

During a commercial break from the country songs that have been playing over the sub shop's speakers I hear a political ad for some representative who's trying to get re-elected. Most of the message is the guy talking about the work he's done securing the border with Mexico, increasing the surveillance powers of the government, boosting the arrests of criminals, and the ever-vague task of fighting terrorism. Having spent a couple of weeks in rural Texas it lines up with what I would have expected to hear. This is a state with a reputation of toughness and self-reliance, but where there also exists the profound desire to feel safe and protected. The ad strikes me as kind of an audible sibling to those aggressive No Trespassing signs we see out in the country, the ones that list all the ways the property owner will murder you if you set foot on the other side of their fence line. The perspective and the means are different but the message is the same: I am strong and I am in control.

With the sidewalk riding behind us and the threat of terrorism having not yet disrupted our ride through rural America we head west and a little north along a farm road lined where stubby clumps of cactus start to appear among the grass and the oaks that extend away from the pavement in low, sparse thickets. Soon those oaks join with a few junipers and pines and start to cover the low rolling hills that appear at the same time the ground beneath our wheels starts to rise more than it falls. At the tops of the hills we see spread out before us an ocean of greens, from pale and almost blue to so deep in tone they're nearly black. On a trip where so much of the landscape has been bent to the will of human hands and commerce it's a dramatic and beautiful shift.

Then we notice the bicycle tire tube and CO2 cartridge left at the side of the road by a jerk of a cyclist who had enough room to carry those things with him on his ride through the hills but somehow ran out of space the moment they became trash. We may be slow, we may be kind of gross, we may sleep in the women's bathroom at state parks, and we may look like two-wheeled versions of a Dust Bowl-era jalopy headed west from Oklahoma, but if there's one thing you'll never see long-haulers like us do it's chuck our garbage out into the world around us. We'll carry empty tallboys dozens of extra miles, no matter how much leftover beer they drip into the bottom our bags. We'll hold onto cheese that intense heat has disintegrated to the point it's more liquid than solid until we can find a place to pitch the plastic wrapping. Kristen felt so bad about the empty can of V8 that fell off her bike in Pennsylvania this summer that, as soon as it happened, she grabbed a handful of brakes while speeding down a hill, pulled into the gravel shoulder, crashed immediately, but still had the presence of mind to crawl out from underneath her bike, walk back up the hill, and grab the can off the ground.

Soon we start to realize that the reason for the broad and unbroken expanses of green around us is that the ranches have been replaced by sprawling hill country estates. Dotted among the hills are massive homes, the sort with six bedrooms and acres of deck space and solar panel arrays of the kind you'd expect to find attached to an elementary school. They're perched on the hilltops, surveying the lands below like grand cowboy castles.

Range Rovers and Volkswagen SUVs and Jeeps that cost seventy grand help get people to these homes. Among the opulence, at the gas station near the highway, we meet Jimmy. He's a modest but kind man of somewhere around fifty who drives a modest but reliable early eighties Toyota hatchback.

"Man, you guys are living the dream, the cross-country dream," he says after I tell him what we're doing. "True freedom. I'm envious."

Then he asks if we're doing okay, but not in the sense of wondering if we've felt in danger out in rural America, just in terms of the wind and the weather. It gives me this warm sense of relief not to have to explain how most everyone we meet is good and how we don't feel like we have anything to fear. I don't find out where Jimmy has traveled, but the positive lift in the way he speaks of what we're doing makes it clear he's had his fair share of adventure. And there's something about the way in which any question I ask of him that can be answered with a yes is answered with a crisp, upbeat, "Yes, sir!" that leaves me totally charmed.

"Enjoy the freedom, enjoy the good weather, and be safe!" he asks of us as he's about to leave. Then he takes our picture. Then we take his. Then he rushes over to his car, grabs a bottle of Big Red soda, and hands it to me. Big hills are coming. He knows.

I don't need more money, or a grand home, or the finest beer money can buy. Just give me more Americans like Jimmy.

To be clear: I only bought the Southern biscuts & gravy-flavored potato chips because Kristen dared me to do it. They were as unsatisfying as you'd imagine.

We pass by the boutiques and posh cafes and sheet metal-sided wine bars of Bulverde. The roadside litter starts to include big green bottles of Pellegrino. Soon two male roadies appear in my mirror. When they draw even I see they're wearing matching Lycra outfits of pink and blue. They ride side by side, so tied up in their conversation that I don't even get a look when they pass me, just a quick "Hey" and a raise of the right forearm. Beyond they crest a hill, with cars piling up behind them, still side by side, still talking, as if they were cranking out fake miles on stationary bikes in the gym instead of pedaling down a fifty-mile-per-hour road connecting two major regional highways. I'm not sure I've ever been so oblivious to danger in my life, except maybe the time when I was walking along the riverfront in Portland, not watching where I was going, and slammed forehead-first into a wide metal light pole that then hummed with a resonant thud.

Where we thought we'd be rolling into Guadalupe River State Park somewhere near death and also somewhere near darkness from all the wind and hills, instead we bang over the cattle guard near the gatehouse with afternoon and evening to spare. We feel proud, strong, accomplished. And then, because this is a state park in Texas, we also feel outrage. Not so much for the fifteen dollars we get charged for the primitive campsite, but for the fact that we have to pay seven bucks each as an entrance fee for what amounts to a two-mile ride to that site. All of the retired people with the hundred-thousand-dollar RVs or truck-and-trailer combinations get in for free.

On the plus side, we once again have an entire camping loop to ourselves. It sits only a few hundred feet from the river, which runs wild but restrained in a constant low rush alongside rippled and vertical rock faces and the gnarled roots of massive trees that have seen flood waters rise and recede for longer than the United States have been the United States. A lone dove calls out from somewhere in the trees behind us.

The cold brought on by the strong north winds sends us into the tent and the sleeping bag before the light of the day has finished its shift change with the dark of the night. From our synthetic halo of warmth we listen to raccoons scuttle through the brush on the rock ledge above our campsite. We debate whether the explosions in the distance are fireworks or semi-automatic gunfire. And in a serious tone of voice I ask Kristen questions like, "Do you wish we listened to more Jimmy Buffett?" All the while the river rushes and rushes and rushes, so smooth, so consistent, so perfect.

Today's ride: 52 miles (84 km)
Total: 1,619 miles (2,606 km)

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