Not Even in Some Diminished Form

March 3, 2016

I sleep and sleep and sleep. With the early starts, the long distances, and the number of days we've ridden without a break having all built up over the past few weeks, my body jumps at the chance to try and catch up. I reward it with a pair of McDonald's breakfast sandwiches.

When checkout time rolls around we coast into downtown and set up at what was long ago a gas station but has since been transformed into a coffee shop and laundromat. A former sixties motorhome sits out front, itself having been turned into a food truck serving adventurous kinds of hot dogs and burgers. The walls of the coffee shop are covered with local art, flyers announcing rescued animals from shelters who are available for adoption, and posters for upcoming music shows. The drinks and the food are first rate.

The feel of the place is better still. It's this eclectic mix of people young and old, college students and workers, hipsters and locals, tattoos and cowboy hats, English and Spanish. There are four-year-olds writing on the patio with sidewalk chalk, dogs angling for attention, and the man with the white beard who gets his coffee in an old tin cowboy cup. We see lesbian couples and interracial couples for the first time in who knows how long. There's more conversation than pecking into laptops or mobile phones. We get a lot of questions about the bikes and how far we've come.

The old gas station feels creative and interesting and alive. Aside from a surly old guy talking on the phone with his lawyer about a property dispute with his ex-wife everyone seems happy and smiling on what reveals itself to be a hot but pleasant winter's day in the high country of West Texas. As long trains pulled by Union Pacific locomotives pass at speed along the tracks across the street, I feel both good that we're here now and good that we'll be back again some day soon.

But by the middle of the afternoon it's time to get down to business. I ride across town, pick up the rental car, stash my bike in the rental company's office, then for the first time in six weeks get behind the wheel of a car. I head back to the coffee shop, load up Kristen's bike and gear, and we're off.

We wind through valleys and canyons on the slow, scenic route toward the interstate. We stop at a market in Fort Davis where, at the table and chairs near the front door, old men in cowboy hats sit around and talk. One of them has a handgun tucked into a clasped leather holster at his right hip and explains to another how he doesn't ever want his picture taken because they always end up on Facebook. As I stand in line to pay, I think about how we drove here in fifteen minutes from Alpine instead of riding for two hours. It feels like our bikes should be resting against the wall outside, but they aren't. And I realize that without them we're not interesting or different anymore. We're just normal. Maybe we're worse than normal. We're just two more tourists in a rental car.

The road beyond Fort Davis is one of the more beautiful stretches I've ever seen, all winding pavement and canyons and rocky mountaintops, bigger in scale and power than anything we've seen on this trip. And yet in response we keep saying some version of the same thing over and over again: it's so much better to travel through places like this on a bicycle. Changes in the landscape that would have taken half a day to develop at bike speed appear in only a matter of minutes. Weather and elevation and terrain become all but irrelevant. I want to stop and take pictures and write about what the beauty laid out in front of me does to my body and soul but I can't. I'm driving fifty or sixty miles per hour. I can't stop whenever I want. The road demands my attention and everything else has to wait. In a car the intimate connection to the countryside no longer exists, not even in some diminished form.

It's a profound affirmation that we made the right choice to set out on a whim and ride bicycles this winter, even if the journey is ending earlier for Kristen than we hoped, even if at this time next week it will be ending for me too. The dramatic contrast of car versus bicycle reminds us once again how thankful we are for the life we have.

Interstate 10 passes at eighty-five miles per hour. In Van Horn I eat the most awful piece of chicken-fried chicken the world has ever known. It comes with a side of vegetables that look so dire even Kristen won't touch them. Then it's on to an RV park, where an unending procession of motorhomes roll up to the office to check in like cows returning to the barn at milking time. There are too many of them parked in the ordered rows stretching to the south to count. The tents are easier; there are just two of us. Against this backdrop and the cursing that comes with stepping on goddamned goat head thorns we tear apart Kristen's bike, pack it into a too-small box, and talk of what we'll do to ready the bike for future adventures already in the works.

Darkness brings the crunch of tires on gravel, RV headlights shining into the tent, and the idling of diesel engines. Half a mile behind our heads I-10 howls exactly as it did when it sat a half mile behind our heads back in Grand Bay, Alabama three or four weeks ago. We burrow into the sleeping bag for our last night together on the road.

Today's ride: 2 miles (3 km)
Total: 2,027 miles (3,262 km)

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