Klantown, U.S.A.

February 6, 2016

It's another morning of biting cold. The rain fly and all of the flat surfaces on the bikes have a thick layer of frost. Ice chips rustle in the bottom of our water bottles when we give them a shake. I can't feel my fingertips by the time we're done packing the tent. A typical early February night here gets down to about forty degrees. Last night it was twenty-eight.

Because Poplarville is a town of chain stores, the only place open for breakfast that doesn't have a drive-through window and won't cause sudden and severe stomach cramps is Subway. We sit in a narrow booth for more than an hour waiting for feeling to return to our hands and feet. I eat a foot-long meatball marinara sub at 8:30 in the morning, which only a handful of people on Earth can claim. I do this because as far as I can tell it's the warmest item on the menu and warm is the beginning and the end of the story this morning.

To get the full effect of this picture, view it while standing in a walk-in freezer.

When we walk outside again the sharp edge of the dawn has dulled and so we ride. The only way out of town to the west is Highway 26, so Highway 26 it is. But it's an unqualified goddamned son of a bitch bastard. We're not on the thing for even a full mile and we almost watch a lifted Ford truck run head-first into oncoming traffic because he couldn't wait six seconds before going around us. There's nowhere the driver could be going on Saturday morning that's so important; college football season ended weeks ago. For a long time we've believed that the speed and protective shield that cars provide come with the price of taking away a person's sense of humanity and decency toward others while they're behind the wheel. That theory is on full display today.

It's with relief and joy that we say fuck you to the highway and escape down a long series of winding back roads named after old white men that died decades ago. Instead of whining superchargers and exhaust pipes so big you could stick an adult's head into them it's pastures with free-roaming horses and ponies and donkeys and pigs. We stop to feed carrots to the ones who are brave enough to join us at the fence line. Later, when Kristen's farther ahead, I talk to the cows that stare at me from a distant field. When they don't respond I moo instead but it doesn't have any effect, so I move on to training my ears to focus on the birdsong.

"Stay warm, guys!" yells a tall younger man with a wave of his long right arm as we clank and clatter past his front yard. The surfaces are rough and often potholed away from the highway but we go ten minutes in between passing cars and no one's in any great rush. Trees grow over the road from both sides, the heat of the sun has wiped away the memory of the morning's eyeball-hurting cold, and a gentle wind pushes us westward. When I'm at home and working and living a more settled life my mind wanders toward thoughts of bicycle touring almost as a reflex. And when it does, it's visions of peaceful countryside like this that most often fill my head.

A stop sign with a bunch of swastikas scribbled on it in white ink marks our return to Highway 26 and our exit from Mississippi. In addition to the traffic we also have to contend with fat, wide rumble strips that sound like gunfire and feel like working a jackhammer when we ride over them. They sit on the white line because there's not even three inches of shoulder to work with. We have to turn off the road and into the shoulder a dozen times in last three miles leading to the bridge over the Pearl River and into Louisiana. It's a harsh sendoff from a state that was otherwise so good to us.

Our route through Bogalusa is blocked by a Mardi Gras parade. Because it's supposed to start only a few minutes later, we lay the bikes down and stand on a little rise above a street corner to watch. Soon hundreds of Harleys start to pass by in front of us, all revving their engines with such force that I feel it in my chest. In the crowd around us I notice most adults drinking beers, but always half-hidden in foam koozies. Across the way an old man has a conversation with his droopy-eared Bloodhound while country music twangs out from the cheap speakers of a battered old pickup with its doors hanging open. There's a folding chair for every man, woman, and child.

But we're at the ass-end of the parade route and half an hour after the motorcycles have passed we haven't seen even one marching band or float or waving politician. With the short amount of daylight in these winter days always in the back of our minds we decide to keep moving. But we can't; we're trapped by the parade route, which turns out to be miles long and blocks the main highway into and out of town. And so we do an end-around through the north side of Bogalusa. It's here, in the span of less than ten blocks, that the makeup of the place changes entirely. Where before most everyone was white, now we're the only white faces. It's that same de facto segregation we saw back in Georgia and Alabama all over again. And in this moment it becomes clear that the dark, hateful history of Bogalusa isn't some long-forgotten artifact of the past, but rather the groundwork that supports its present-day structure.

The short version of that history goes like this: back in the 1960s Bogalusa was believed to have the highest per capita Ku Klux Klan membership in America. Their presence was so profound that the city was called Klantown, U.S.A. by some. The Klan performed public demonstrations and cross-burnings, threw tear gas canisters at groups of black residents, beat up black civil rights marchers, and chased blacks out of the city park with clubs and belts. Activists were shot and injured and in some cases killed. The first two black sheriff's deputies in the parish were shot by the Klan, one fatally, but the crime was never solved. Klansmen were officials in the local government, including the city attorney. The situation was so toxic and violent that the federal government had to intervene.

And the madness wasn't limited to the sixties. When the KKK opened a new office in town in 1976 – an event that included the burning of a cross – the mayor was the person who performed the ceremonial ribbon cutting. The city still doesn't have a single historic marker recognizing the events or achievements of the civil rights era, and its public high school had separate proms for black and white students until just two years ago. Black community members who stand up and make their voice heard in local politics find rocks thrown through their windows and death threats in their voicemail boxes. And the hatred exists at an even more basic level than that. Back where we watched the parade, Kristen noticed how there was a young white guy sitting in the back of a truck across from us – a truck with the crosses and stars of the Confederate flag flying in the back – who would stare down every black person who walked past him on the street.

We ride the potholed back roads of Bogalusa with everyone else who's trying to figure out a way around the parade. It's a lot of tired homes, some mid-day public drunkenness, and many people on foot because they've got no car. The Adventure Cycling Association's Southern Tier route goes through this city, but it's safe to say it doesn't go here. We might be the first touring cyclists ever to ride down these particular streets.

With everyone who lives in the area sitting around in Bogalusa waiting for the parade to show up, we escape to the empty country roads of rural Louisiana. The constant rolling hills of Mississippi vanish for awhile, but once we're beyond the river plain they return, laid out before us in straight lines of even humps like the spine of Ogopogo. It's in this transition that we trade the small farms for the huge monoculture pine forests planted into being by some huge timber company.

We ride close and talk while pedaling. Kristen's cycle-touring game has become so strong that in the middle of a long conversation about New Orleans she all of a sudden stops, waits for the roar from an oncoming car to pass, and then picks right back up in the middle of the sentence where she left off. Her sense of knowing the right moment to dive off into the grass at the edge of the road when cars approach us from different directions at the same time has become just as well refined. Kristen is one of the good ones and I'm so happy she's on my team.

We go from skinny woods to big country homes, then to tidy small-town streets and signs urging voters to re-elect Jimbo Stevenson, Assessor. In Franklinton we ride to the police station, not because we're lost or hurt or just had a run-in with one of those crazy lifted trucks, but because they host cycle-tourists. In the lobby we speak to the dispatchers with a thick layer of dark bulletproof glass in between us, then a few minutes later meet a kind officer named James. The first thing he asks for are our IDs, which he takes and then disappears for a few minutes. Somehow our outstanding warrants for lewd conduct and public urination fly below the radar, and soon we're being shown the bathrooms and showers and given access to the break room where we can cook and eat and charge electronics. We set up the tent in the grass lawn behind the building, not far from an armored black vehicle the size of a motorhome that's used to disperse rioters.

We're pecking away at our computers in the break room after dark when a man appears at one of the outside-facing doors. He punches numbers into the keypad of the lock to try and get in, but after five tries it still isn't working. Being a kind person, Kristen gets up and walks over to the door and lets him in from inside. He's an officer getting ready to start his shift.

"Whoa, I'm pretty sure that's a breach of security protocol," I tell her.

Strictly speaking it is. But then again, we're in Franklinton. It's the Saturday night before Mardi Gras and the duty officers still don't have much to do. If the guy had wanted to get in without our help, all he would have had to do was go around back and walk in the door that was left unlocked so that we can come and go as we need. The urban crime environment this place is not.

It's unclear when it switches from interview to interrogation.

Later in the evening one of the dispatchers comes into the break room. When she mentions how cold it's going to be overnight and asks if we'd rather sleep inside, Kristen can't say yes fast enough. This is how we end up falling asleep in an interrogation room with a sign on the door that reads Cyclist Sleeping, so that we aren't woken up in the middle of the night by an accused criminal being sat down at the chair and desk that stand next to our sleeping bag.

Today's ride: 55 miles (89 km)
Total: 827 miles (1,331 km)

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