Others are Still Called Home

January 26, 2016

It's warmer than the last couple of mornings when we get vertical and start to pack up but still damned cold. We only make it about five miles before stopping in Ellenton for something warm to drink. Like so many small towns in rural America, the gas station and mini-mart in Ellenton is the only business that doesn't work on cars. And like so many small towns in rural America it reveals how the character of the workforce out here is changing. Half the signs zip-tied to the front of the gas station advertise beer or cigarettes. The other half are all written in Spanish and pitch services you can use to transfer money to Mexico.

It seems like every house out here comes with a dog. Half of them run free and bark at us or chase us when we pedal past. The other half bark but can't chase because they're in chain-link enclosures or tied to a tree either behind or beside run-down houses or trailers. It looks like that's all there is to their lives: laying down, caged or tied and alone, barking at people and animals they can't touch, only seeing their owners when it's feeding time. They grow old and waste away with no reason or purpose without the love and companionship they've evolved and been bred to need. They're not hunting dogs and they don't seem like family dogs either. It's as if they exist only because of some unwritten rule that if you live out in the country you've got to have a dog, whether you like them and want to take care of them or not.

We see gear related to the University of Georgia Bulldogs all day long out here. It's flags and banners on houses, license plate covers on cars and trucks, and logoed sweaters on overweight men with thick beards. Someone once told me that there are two religions in this state: Southern Baptist and Georgia football. Nothing we've seen out here can prove that untrue. Perhaps related to the first religion are the lawn signs that read Pray For Our Nation that we see at least half a dozen times a day. I'm less sure how to explain the small mobile home with the white flag pole out front where a lone Confederate flag flies, tattered but proud.

Most of the time we stick to winding back roads that take the long way between towns and sometimes avoid towns altogether. They have names like Mac Massey and Bob Sims, which we say with heavy Southern accents. The highways we end up on are three-numbered and sane. And the hills grow a little steeper and a little longer with each successive county through which we pass.

Today we're Team Urinating on Private Property.

We roll into the small town of Doerun at lunch time. It's a bleak scene. The local supermarket closed years ago. So did the hardware store and clothes shop and the thrift store. The restaurant that's supposed to be open until two is closed by half past twelve. But of course the gas stations still thrive, and so with no desire to cook for ourselves and no other hot food options that's where we end up.

Downtown Doerun, Georgia. There are two open businesses shown in this picture.

I watch a severely overweight man in overalls fish through the plastic garbage bins next to the gas pumps for recyclable bottles and cans as we ride up. The first thing I notice when we walk inside is the row of dirty video poker machines lined against the front wall. They're unused at the moment but it's clear that a lot of money has been pissed down that drain over the years. For lunch we order the items we figure will be least likely to cause intestinal distress: grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken strips, french fries. Just after we open up the clamshell styrofoam containers holding our food I look through the window outside and watch a dog wander over, lift his leg on a milk crate that's been chucked off to the side of the store, and scuttle off. A TV attached to a support beam behind us plays soap operas that go unwatched. One of the commercials that airs during a break explains with great excitement how instead of just injecting Botox into your face to make it look less old you can now take it for some class of bladder issues.

It's one of the strangest and most depressing lunch breaks I can remember.

The sign outside referred to this as a mini-restaurant.

This is not country of great beauty out here, at least not in the middle of winter. It's not wealthy country. Its culture isn't the kind upon which high value is placed by our society – and in fact in pop culture this is country that's a joke or a punch line at best, but in most cases just absent from TV and movies and advertisements. Bicycles are only for kids and for drunks with suspended licenses here. Public education is poor. Public health might be worse. It's country where you see a Pepsi vending machine on the tiny front porch of a run-down single-wide and no one thinks much of it. It is not the American dream.

But it's important to me to see places like this. The people who live here are every bit as American as me. The votes they cast for their governors and senators and president count just as much as mine. Like me they have dreams they want to see come true and fears they hope do not. These dreams and fears aren't the same as mine but that doesn't make them less valid. In a time where so much of what's said in America focuses on how we're different, I feel more than ever the need to better understand what these differences look like and to try and figure out if they're real or just imagined.

And then, as if on cue, not ten miles from Doerun derelict homes start to appear everywhere. A lot of them have been abandoned and have started to be reclaimed by both nature and vandals. But others are still called home, despite the sagging porches, weathered siding, cracked windows, tenuous foundations, and yards dotted with old tires and pallets and cars that haven't run for fifteen years. What they all have in common is that they're lived in by black people. Not some of these houses; every last one.

We round a sweeping corner while climbing slow up a hill and see an old woman walking in the same direction we're going but on the opposite side of the road. She's at least eighty years old. She says hello when Kristen passes but nothing to me when I go by a few moments later. A couple hundred feet farther on walks a man who looks mentally ill. He has a scraggly beard, he's dragging a giant stick on the ground behind him, and he's carrying bits of garbage and a pine cone. At one point his pants fall all the way down to his ankles but he keeps walking for another fifty feet before he notices and pulls them up, although he's lucid enough to look away from us as we draw even with him. Like everyone else around here both the woman and the man are black. Our best guess is that the woman is the man's caretaker, maybe his mother or grandmother. She has probably taken care of him since he was a child. They have no car and no one to give them a ride, so they're on foot because that's all there is. The bleakness of the scene makes lunch back in Doerun seem like nothing. We wonder what will become of the man when the woman passes away.

For the second time in as many days Georgia all of a sudden looks like a different place.

Then, in a reverse all-of-a-sudden, things are back to how they were half an hour before: tidy homes, nicer cars, horses munching on grass in wide open pastures. And we press on as we did earlier. It's seventy degrees, warm, and windless. Ladybugs in flight bounce off of our arms and faces. We travel between what seems like nowhere and nowhere on a smooth, flat, empty road.

I've heard people suggest that we're living in a post-racial America, in a society where the discrimination and inequality of the last four-hundred-plus years aren't issues anymore. Others wouldn't go that far, but would point out that things are much better than they were and that the opportunity to create a better life is ready for the taking for anyone who wants to work for it. But in this place of extreme generational poverty, harsh living conditions, weak industry, and segregation that isn't imposed by the force of law but still so clearly exists, I don't see any way those things are true. What traveling through places like this on a bicycle shows is how far from a post-racial America we actually are. When I see things like what we just rode through I can't help but think that we won't get there in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children either.

It starts to get dark and we still don't know where we're going to sleep. There's no state park nearby and when we called the only private campground in the area it went to voicemail. Earlier in the day we passed some churches and volunteer fire stations that we could have thrown up the tent behind if needed, but that was earlier. The last church we saw stood half-burned and ragged. The one we sit behind while cooking dinner has nearby graves dating back more than a hundred years set among mature oaks and skinny pines. But it also has, you know, graves back there. And to make matters worse they're mingled with household garbage and large collections of Clorox bleach bottles that someone dumped after using them to make meth.

We press on. Soon it's dark and our bicycle lights are all ablaze, but nothing reveals itself as the woods and wilds of the morning and afternoon give way to the farms and fences of the Flint River plain. It seems like we're going to have to sleep somewhere either uneasy or illegal or both. Then, while standing over the bikes and feeling bad for ourselves, we get a call back from the campground. They're not closed during the week like we thought, and in fact they'll drive over and let us in whenever we show up. And so begins a four-mile sprint through the pitch-black Georgia night where we mash the pedals with all we've got and stop only when we need to pull off the road and let cars pass.

Our reward is an entire campground left only to us. The place has hot showers, soft grass, a friendly cat, no headstones, and no obvious signs that it has ever been used as a spot for making illegal drugs. It's as if we emerged from the darkness into some wonderful dream.

Today's ride: 64 miles (103 km)
Total: 288 miles (463 km)

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