Nah, Nah, I'm Gettin' Too Deep

February 25, 2016

The sounds of turkeys, coyotes, doves, and cardinals announce the morning. The ride back to the highway takes us past oaks and mesquite and tall yellow grasses and squat little cacti that make it not hard at all to imagine what this corner of the world must have looked like when only native peoples lived and traveled these lands.

Modern times return in the form of Highway 46. The road is full of cars and trucks towing trailers, and semis hauling cargo and hauling ass. Soon we realize why: the area is growing like a Roundup-resistant weed. We stop for a chid-breakfast at a big gas station with thousands of square feet of mini-mart and an attached Subway. It was recently built at a junction that seems like it's in the middle of nothing. The gas pump lanes and parking spots are filled with trucks and vans that have the names and logos of plumbing, HVAC and flooring companies plastered down their sides. They're here to build all of the tract housing developments we've seen advertised on roadside billboards since yesterday afternoon. The working men share floor space with ranchers in big black cowboy hats and the retired men with white hair, unwrinkled blue jeans, and flawless leather boots who come and go by way of new Mercedes-Benz sedans. It's the past, the present, and the future all in one place.

A few blocks down the road we pass the Bergheim General Store. There's one car in the parking lot that belongs to whoever's sitting behind the counter at the silent cash register.

How to sell new homes: build an old-looking windmill that's not connected to anything.

The signs of growth are everywhere. I mean literal signs posted on wooden stilts all alongside the road. They advertise landscape design, lawn care, garage doors, gun safes, septic systems, animal hospitals, people hospitals, cabinets, and hospice care. They talk of a giant feed and outfitting store down the way ("Over 2,000 pairs of boots! Over 1,000 guns!"). There's even sign for a rearranger named Shelby. She'll come to your house, move around the furniture and other stuff that's lying about into some new configuration, and then, well, that's it. That's the service. I had no idea that kind of thing existed but I bet it isn't cheap.

The outer edges of Boerne have way more gyms, gas stations, and dental and orthodontic offices than it seems like a rural Texas town should have. But then we learn that fifteen years ago only about 6,000 people lived here. It was a quiet place with rich German heritage. Now it's home to more than 14,000 people, and that doesn't include all of the new communities built just out of town. Only when I see the sign that says we're thirty miles from San Antonio does it all make sense. Housing has become so expensive in the city and its closer suburbs that people are willing to commute fifty or sixty miles, five days a week, forty-nine weeks a year, in order to live in a home that is both large and affordable.

By noon the cold of the morning is a distant memory. Instead it's clear skies and light winds and seventy degrees, perfect by any possible measure. The hills show us a brand of beauty we haven't seen much of on a trip that's been so very flat. There are a lot of small peaks clustered together, so that when viewed from the side they have the ridged profile of a saw blade or a spine. These groups extend toward the west in uneven layers, each one a little more pale and less defined than the one that came before. The Rockies or the Sierras or the Cascades they aren't, but it's mighty pretty country all the same.

The traffic isn't so perfect. Even though Boerne and I-10 and all of the cities that could be considered suburbs and exurbs of San Antonio are behind us, we're never more than fifteen seconds away from another car or truck or semi. It's all still a mystery to me. The next town down the road is Pipe Creek. It looks like not much more than a name on the map. Bandera is after that and doesn't have even a thousand residents. We pass sprawling hilltop mansions, posh equestrian centers where the horses of wealthy city-livers are stabled, and ranches that extend so far away from the road we can't see where they end, but almost no one seems to be going to or coming from these places. Farther on the road joins with Highway 16, which is wider and busier still, even though it seems an indirect route to anything but small country towns. So continues our Texas Hill Country experience: kind of beautiful, kind of confounding.

A modest gatehouse for a modest new community.

Our presence inspires bitching at the gas station near Pipe Creek where we stop to take a rest. As we eat ice cream and talk to a friendly local guy, a man walks out from the mini-mart and tells us that people inside (and let's be honest, probably him) are complaining about how bicycle riders should be required to have liability insurance just like cars. It's only fair, I'm sure they're saying. All we can do is shake our heads and laugh. It's like they forgot the purpose of insurance: protection for the damage you cause to a person or their property. The number of times a bicycle has damaged a car or injured the driver of a car in a collision is exactly zero. The physics of cars that weigh a ton and bicycles that weigh thirty-three pounds guarantee it. It's so much outrage about a threat that doesn't exist. This remains a common theme in our long, slow, strange ride across this country's southern tier.

We face hills all day, but they're never so long or so steep that our bodies feel worn down or our minds reach the point where they start to become unhinged. We feel good as we roll into Bandera, population 957. For a town that seems so small I'm amazed at what I see in front of me at the gas station. It's high school-age kids driving Porsche SUVs and expensive Ram trucks. It's a man who looks like he works a high-level job at a regional bank or car dealership, with his starched white shirt and fine shoes made of alligator skin and smartphone in a holster on his belt. There are Harley bikers out for a day ride, construction workers, a dude in camo pants with a knife in a sheath on his right hip, and hundreds and hundreds of others in an endless stream on the highway beyond. What they're all doing out here in an area where the map would lead me to think not much is going on I can't figure out. It's not even the weekend; it's just some random Thursday.

While Kristen hangs out at the library near the center of town to take care of some work business I head out on foot. I learn that Bandera was founded in 1853. It calls itself the Cowboy Capital of the World. A grand three-story courthouse stands at the center of town, a building that must have seemed like the skyscraper of the Hill Country back when it was built. The center of town has covered sidewalks and buildings with crooked wooden boards as siding to create the look of the Old West. There's a place called The Cowboy Store that sits across Main Street from the American Indian Store. The reader board of a barbecue joint says As seen on the History Channel. There's a historic-looking stone building with a coffee shop downstairs and a Pilates studio above. There are multiple real estate offices, multiple gift shops, multiple antique stores, and at least four places to buy t-shirts or hats or artwork or boots. A man we talked to earlier told us that Bandera hosts an average of 250 events every year and I believe it. A banner hanging across Main Street says that a couple of weeks from now it's the Cowboy Capital Stampede 5K fun run.

Country towns have always been reliant on cities. The grain that's grown, the cattle that are raised, the oil that's pulled from the ground – it's the stuff that makes city life possible. But as the decades have passed, that relationship has changed in places like this, places within a few hours' drive of the city. It's now this direct connection, not a step removed. Towns like this aren't as much about food stock or natural resources, but entertainment, leisure, ways to spend the large amounts of disposable income cities are so good at generating, and a place to build a second home. That's why the roads are filled with the cars of well-off people who live on the hundreds of non-working ranches that stretch away from town in all directions. That's why there are high-quality restaurants and grocery stores and cultural amenities anywhere I look. That's why this place is able to thrive where so many other rural towns sit on the verge of collapse.

The reason is simple: Bandera has what people want now, not what they wanted decades ago. When I look at the town I see a reflection of American life itself: always shifting, never static, charging forward in ways no one living fifty years ago ever could have imagined.

Kristen's phone call runs long and we find ourselves nine or ten miles from the public lands where we plan to camp with less than an hour of daylight to get there. We mash the pedals hard, ready to rise to the challenge. But at the edge of town we see a sign pointing toward a huge city park that says Camping and pull off the highway to go check it out. What we find meets the top three criteria of any good cycle-touring campground: allows tents, cheap, isn't filled with run-down old trailers out of which the sketchy dude that lives there deals meth.

"Seem okay?" I ask Kristen.

"It's like a gift from the angels!"

Moments after we climb off the bikes a golf cart rolls up and stops a few feet away. There's a young guy of maybe twenty-two behind the wheel, leaned back in the seat kind of sideways, very casual. His hair is part blond and part brown. He wears a bright yellow jacket like a bicycle rider would have with shorts and high-top Converse shoes. He has the laid back, stuttered laugh of copious weed smoking. This is Freddie.

He asks where we're going and where we've come from. When we tell him he can hardly believe it.

"Man, you guys are hittin' it hard!" he says with amazement. "I've been doin' this for four years and I only made it here from Tennessee!"

It turns out Freddie travels by bike. Or at least that's how he gets from place to place when it's time to move on. He grew up in an Army family and moved all over the country, but when it came time for him to head out on his own and get a proper job he realized he had no interest in living a normal, settled life. He saw before him work and rent and buying too much stuff and a lack of freedom and decided he couldn't deal. He's been traveling the southeastern part of America more or less ever since.

He's in charge of keeping up the campground area and lives in a small building on the far side of the property, but it's a short term-thing. He wants to head to Colorado soon, then after that on to the West Coast and California. That's where he hopes to get a short-term job working on a container ship that will get him to Japan. Kristen and I have taken some bold risks, but sailing to Japan and setting out on a bike when you don't know the language or the culture is fucking bold. And here's the thing: he's going to have the best time. He's so unassuming and charming, and he'll be such an anomaly over there, that it'll be months of stopping with locals to have his picture taken and getting invited to stay in places no tourist will ever experience.

We all talk with big smiles and nodding heads about how great it feels to give up most of your possessions, set out on adventures where the outcome isn't certain, and try to set up a life where you feel healthy and alive.

"Awwww, see, you guys get it!" He says after we make some wandering point about giving up office jobs and not looking back. "That's so awesome!"

It gets more philosophical after that. It's the kind of conversation you don't normally find yourself a part of out in rural Texas, and one that I don't think will happen again on this trip. It's good for our spirits, good for our souls. But sometimes it gets too extreme even for us.

"Yeah, I really think, sometimes it's like, people make a deal with the devil," Freddie explains "But it manifests itself in a physical way, you know, like – nah, nah, I'm gettin' too deep, I'm confusin' myself!"

That's our time with Freddie in a nutshell. It's an impossibly fun conversation punctuated with so many chattered laughs and grand but loosely connected ideas about the nature of modern life in America. And it's another case of the kind of wonderful serendipity that always seems to happen when we end up some place we never expected to be.

"Well, he's the angel," Kristen says after we part ways with Freddie and get ready to set up in the failing light of the day. She gets no argument from me.

Inside a tent pitched on the concrete floor of a large picnic shelter we sit cross-legged on parallel orange Thermarest air mattresses. Lit by the glow of a suspended bicycle headlight we share a tallboy of Modelo, crackers and cheese, one Gala apple, and a passionate discussion about the state of American politics. A finer end to the day I never could have expected, nor scripted, nor even conceived of. Inside of half an hour the memories of the day's stresses and frustrations and traffic fade to nothing and we collapse into a state of satisfied, giggling happiness. We know the good sleep that comes with a clear mind is soon to follow.

Today's ride: 46 miles (74 km)
Total: 1,665 miles (2,680 km)

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