Old Men in Camo-Patterned Shirts Demolishing Enchiladas

January 29, 2016

The clear night means another cold-ass morning, but the sun is bright and shining and the sky cloudless. A beautiful day is dawning. We head west through Florida before cutting a couple of miles north to the quiet back roads of Alabama. The houses are small but clean, the yards clear of garbage, the cars still running. The rivers of trash that parallel the pavement are all but gone. It looks and feels like so much of the rest of rural America: simple but healthy and good.

And then we ride back into Alabama. The first house we see – the house that marks the state line – is a total dump of a mobile home. Old tires that used to stand in stacks have toppled and lay in a messy heap at all angles. Dead water heaters mix with traffic cones, radiators, and scores of plastic bags in front of the garage. They fight for space with more than a dozen cars, only three of which look like their engine would turn over. You can't make this stuff up.

But that mobile home turns out to be like some kind of a redneck red herring. Beyond it we pass well-built homes and pastures closed in by wooden fences made with care. There's a brand-new mini-mansion under construction. Dogs still bark and give chase but they're friendlier and less aggressive and one of them's a pure-bred Irish Setter. The trees are older and taller and thicker. And there's a dead boar rotting on the side of the road because no one thought it a good idea to toss it in the back of their truck and take it home for dinner.

It's the same county we left behind yesterday. We're on the same road, in fact. There's still a church at every junction. The garbage has not gone away. It's sunny instead of gray, but that's not enough to explain the change. It's like a different Alabama this morning.

We face steeper hills and stronger headwinds but our spirits are so much higher than yesterday. We ride close to one another and try to decipher the meaning contained within Joanna Newsom song lyrics. We also continue to perfect our technique for repelling dogs. It involves riding straight at them until their look of aggression turns to one of fear and they bolt straight back toward home with this look that's like Whoa, shit, sorry man, I was just playing, why'd you have to get so mad? After a week in the Deep South we're getting damned good at it.

I don't need to look at my cycling computer to know when we're almost to Geneva. The greater numbers of beer cans and coffee cups and Hardee's wrappers tell the story. Small-town diners don't seem to exist out here, so we end up at a Mexican joint again. The inside has the same fake adobe look to it that all of these places are required to have. An old-school country song about d-i-v-o-r-c-e spills out of the speakers and I look around the room at the big round sheriff's deputy powering through a burrito and old men in camo-patterned shirts demolishing enchiladas. Kristen and I talk about how we haven't seen more than one or two proper downtown areas in all the cities and towns we've passed through in the last four-hundred miles. All of the businesses now hang close to the highway. We wonder if it'll be different here.

Our bags look overstuffed as we stand outside the restaurant because the pants and jackets and hats and gloves we've been wearing in some combination for the last week are all off. There are sunglasses on our faces and our fingers are slick with sunscreen. For the first time since about thirty miles from the Atlantic it feels like proper cycle-touring weather. It's a brief distraction from the fact that no, Geneva will not be different from all of those other places. The county courthouse usually stands at the center of towns like this. It's usually the most refined building in town, in the most refined location in town. But here it's at the highway junction across from the Mexican restaurant and the gas station. The houses we ride past are decent but have no great character. Around the town's edges live a couple of closed or dying factories. The Ford dealership has maybe twenty new cars and trucks in stock. Our last view of Geneva is the road going north out of town. It's clogged with chain fast food joints, a chain auto parts store, a chain dollar store, and the biggest chain of all, Walmart.

I want to be positive. I want to see the best in wherever I happen to be, even if the best isn't obvious at first glance. I swear I do. But the best is so hard to come by out here. I ride up behind Kristen as we tackle one of a dozen short little rolling hills on the way out of town.

"That was the most charmless city of 5,000 people I think I've ever seen," I tell her. "I wanted this part of the country to be good and interesting but it just isn't. I can't ever see coming back here."

"I was thinking there'd be some cultural or historical things to grab on to," she says. "But there aren't. It's all in the buildings that are rotting away now."

"Exactly. I don't know what I was thinking. I'd come back to these states but not this far south. All the universities are up north. That's where the quaint towns are. It's like a cultural wasteland down here. I feel like we could have more meaningful interactions even if we were in a country where the people didn't speak English."

"I know. In your other trips it seemed like you talked to people every day. There were all kinds of stories. People here just make some dumb-ass comment and move on."

"It's like most of them are dull and uninterested. It's so strange. We get a lot of waves from drivers going past, but it's like there's nothing behind it. Like it's just a reflex, you know?"

It was so different on our last trip. From Maine to New York to Ohio to Iowa, anywhere we went people came up to us to ask questions or talk. We cracked jokes or learned about the town we were in or thanked people for giving us complicated directions to places we didn't want to go. We shared meals and drinks and talked about traveling. There were other people on bicycles. It was human and real and good for the soul. There's none of that here.

But Kristen and I have one another. That's always a good thing, but in times like this it means even more. At the top of a long hill we stop, park the bikes, and give each other big hugs. We talk about how much we love one another, and how right it feels to be together, and how we'd rather be living out this adventure in all of its good and less-good moments than sitting at home and wishing we were somewhere else. Not a mile farther along we each stand down two huge Rottweilers like it's nothing. Then we realize we're talking a lot more to dogs on this trip than people. Horses stare as we pass but don't say anything, just like their owners would if they were outside. But they aren't. It's the perfect day to be out here and yet we're the only ones. Everyone else is shut up in their homes or offices or cars.

At least the weather and the roads are good; I'll give them that. But I spend a lot of time this afternoon longing for the places we rode this last summer, for the great freedom afforded us by the wide-open spaces of Australia, for the impossible beauty of New Zealand, for the welcoming towns and parks and churches of the TransAmerica Trail. That stuff is the magic of cycle-touring. That's what keeps me coming back and wanting more. That's what makes me feel alive. I don't know what to call this experience we're having now, but magic isn't it.

We end up talking while we ride, about rural poverty, the decline of American manufacturing, job creation, and protective tariffs. We want to believe there's a way to make things better for this part of the country and other areas like it, but the situation seems so dire, and the will to change doesn't seem to exist. Then we talk about our favorite breakfast foods. Then we make fart jokes. It goes like that for hours, riding close to one another and talking and laughing. For all that this trip hasn't been so far, we're still having a great time out here spending our days and nights outside with each other.

We've only been a few miles north of the Florida state line all day, so it makes sense that as the sun nears the horizon we roll into a town named Florala. What we first see when we hit the city limits are no fewer than ten decrepit mobile homes that defy the laws of physics by still standing upright. A couple of them are still lived in. Then we pass a building with a giant tank out front, like the kind America uses for blowing up armored vehicles and small buildings in overseas wars. Well, here comes another crap-ass town, I think to myself and then sigh.

But the town is just a town, no more and no less. We end up at a campground along the shores of Lake Jackson, the only natural lake in all of Alabama. The surface is still and serene. Slashes of pink and orange cut across the sky to the west at sunset. We set up the tent on a finger of dirt and gravel surrounded on three sides by a swamp. Our heads are in Alabama, our feet in Florida.

The constant croaking of frogs in the twilight competes with the sound of after-market truck exhausts whose roars and howls echo out and across the lake all evening long. We're lulled to sleep by the frenzied whopping sound of a circling helicopter. Goodnight Alabama.

Today's ride: 63 miles (101 km)
Total: 454 miles (731 km)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0