Otto Arnim for Sheriff

February 26, 2016

The rising sun casts shadows of impossible lengths across the road and the grass and the oaks and the junipers spread out before us. It also starts the long task of taking the chill of the pre-dawn away from toes and fingers and noses that feel like they'd fall off with a stiff bump.

I can tell the ranchers from the country-livers when they drive by. The ranchers don't have cars or SUVs or light trucks, but big full-size rigs that sit a little higher off the ground and are dirtier than the others. And without fail the man behind the wheel has a cowboy hat perched on his head that bumps into the headliner of the truck cab. I decide that if I ever become one of them and have the chance to create my own cattle brand design, I'm going with a capital A that has two short lines coming out of the upper part of the letter's legs, so that it'll look like it has horns.

The hills close in around us and take away our view of the horizon. We ride on a narrow ranch road that winds its way not over the hills but left and right and left and right through the lowest possible gaps between them. Some of the junipers grow just short of the edge of the road. More than once I stop, pinch off a little piece of green from one of their branches, squeeze it in half between my fingers, close my eyes, and then breathe in the strong, sweet smell and let it fill my head. The faint outline of the full moon looks down on all of it through the pale blue sky.

It's a place of fine beauty – beauty that's amplified in the golden light of morning. I feel all at once happy, excited, and content. My mind is clear, my body strong and healthy and alive. I'm so fortunate to have the chance to ride through this country, on this day, at slow speed on a bicycle. In this moment there's nowhere else I'd rather be. And I can't help but shake my head when I realize that if we had hustled out here last night in near-darkness we wouldn't have had the time or attention or light to appreciate any of it.

Tarpley is more like what we expected the towns out here to be: two stores, a post office, a church, no stop lights, not even a stop sign. Beyond it the rattling of our bags from the cracks in the chipsealed shoulder send small herds of deer scattering away from the road, through the tall grasses and gray-brown oaks that stretch out across the toward the hills in the distance. The turns become tighter and the number of houses and cars fall to almost nothing.

Then it appears: the beast. A hill so steep and unflinching it looks like a wall or maybe the on-ramp to heaven. In the almost 1,700 miles of riding it's taken us to get here we haven't seen anything like it and may not again. I lob profanity at the thing for about forty-five seconds but it doesn't do any good. I resign myself to the fact that I'm going to have to ride over it. I zigzag across one lane for awhile, then both lanes, spitting and swearing some more, even though that strategy still seems very much dead on arrival. My thighs burn and ache and shake in ways I didn't think possible. I never stand up on the pedals to climb hills, but for this near-vertical bastard-bitch I do it to try and find every last source of power I can.

It would all be easier if I just shifted down into the small chain ring. But I can't do that – not now, not after having ridden more than halfway across the United States without once using it. We've come to refer to it as The Dream. It's turned into a running joke that gets brought up at the end of every steep climb. Is the dream alive? I never set out with this as a goal. But once I go far enough having done something one way, there's a tendency to want to see how far I can push it. I can't explain where that comes from. It's not like riding 2,000 miles in your bike's two largest chain rings is the kind of thing that will get you laid or even get you a free beer. But now that it's in my head it isn't leaving.

And that's how I end up climbing this hill in the middle of nowhere in Central Texas in a way that makes passing drivers wonder if I have a mental illness.

The sweat built up from the climb mixing with the cool morning air means I freeze balls on the steep descent down the back side of the hill. But it feels like sweet, sweet victory all the same.

We rise and fall with the curves of the land, slow on the uphills but tearing ass like a hound in pursuit when the road trends down. A dozen vultures rip into a freshly dead wild pig that sits in the grass between us and the fence line with such determination that they don't move at all when I roll past. If you put a pizza or a deep-fried PBJ in front of me at this moment I'd have the same unbroken focus. We revel in the peace and quiet and restrained beauty of a landscape that stands among the most satisfying we've yet cycled through. It took awhile to find, but it's everything we hoped we'd experience when we decided to come this way.

It's not quite Utopia. But we keep riding, hang a left on Ranch Road 187, and then we get there: Utopia, Texas, population 227. A fire engine races past me on the way into town. Waiting in line to pay for chid at the gas station an ambulance flies by in the same direction.

"I wonder what happened?" the cashier asks no one specific.

"Truck fell off the lift at the shop down the street," says the young guy behind me, a man with the bold fashion sense to wear basketball shorts and cowboy boots at the same time. "Thing just fell off. Crushed his arm."

"Who was it?"

"Kerry Clausner."

The ambulance hasn't even turned off its siren yet and everyone in the gas station already knows what happened and they don't ask any follow-up questions about the injured man because they know who he is, too. That's small-town life for you. Fifteen minutes later a yellow rescue helicopter appears from the east, its whipping rotor blades shaking the gas station glass. It has the feel of a life-changing day for Kerry Clausner, in a way he and his family never could have imagined when he said goodbye and left for work this morning.

The first time I've ever seen my last name not on a piece of paper or a computer screen.

Beyond Utopia so much changes. Kristen has another work-related call in the early afternoon and needs to make twenty-two more miles to get to good cell service. This means she doesn't have time to wait around while my slow self takes pictures of hay bales and writes detailed notes about profane inner monologues in between the odd stretch of riding a bicycle. And so for the first time ever she leaves town before I do and charges away on her own with me never less than fifteen minutes behind.

Riding alone I head almost due south instead of due west. The road starts to run dead flat for long stretches. And the hills that have been our companions for the past few days appear only to my right or left or behind me, never in the direction I'm heading. The seas of trees have been banished to those distant hillsides, replaced by cattle and little leafless oaks and grassy fields. One of these fields hosts the raging inferno of a managed burn, filling the sky with thick gray smoke and making the left side of my body feel warm when I ride past.

A few miles worth of sneaky-steep short hills conspire to break the pattern, but by the end of them there's no doubt about how much the landscape has changed. The Hill Country is behind us, its ridgelines now so small they're almost too faint to see. In front the vast open spaces of West Texas stretch unbroken toward the horizon.

The flats bring me to Sabinal, where the main street into town is lined with red blue and white Otto Arnim for Sheriff signs and I find Kristen sitting in the pleasing shade of the city park, every bit as safe and beautiful as when I left her. She works, I stuff my face with sandwiches and cookies and iced tea, and a few hours later we leave town together. Everything feels right with the world again.

U.S. Highway 90 charges west with howling fury, so we dive off onto the last back road we'll see for the next 500 miles. It's slower going on the gravel, and not much faster when it turns to pavement with deep cracks and potholes and uncountable patches, but slow never bothered us anyway. We ride side by side with the world around us quiet, save for the wind rushing past our ears and the clank and clatter of our bags against the racks.

Most of the land has been harnessed for the growing of crops or cattle. In the gaps where it hasn't, creosote bushes and mesquite trees dominate the landscape. Birds dart in front of us as they prepare to land on nearby tree branches. A butterfly follows along in my slip stream for a few moments before drunkenly wobbling away in the way that butterflies always seem to drunkenly wobble their way through airborne life. We talk of elementary school friends we haven't seen in twenty years, make Wayne's World references, and, at 4:43 p.m., realize we've been married a week exactly, down to the minute.

Then things get heavy. We start having an existential conversation about life and death, about how one day we're going to be dead, about how one day our parents and friends and everyone we've ever known will be dead. It's too bad Freddie's not around to add his thoughts, because I bet they'd be both sage beyond his years and wildly entertaining. After the ice-cold panic that always comes with thinking about my inevitable death passes, we give thanks that we're out here, searching for and finding adventure, pushing our bodies toward their limits, making the most of the sliver of time we've been given in this life. We've been married for a week and yet we've done and seen so much good stuff in those seven days that looking back it feels at least twice as long. That's happened a lot in the past two years. And knowing that death is forever nipping at our heels inspires us to do what we can to keep that feeling going until the prevailing winds of fortune and time have a chance to shift.

The private jet of some wealthy fifth-generation cattle rancher soars over our heads and touches down at the airport across from the gas station at the edge of town in Uvalde. Half a dozen other jets sit idle on the tarmac, all sleek and white and clean. It's quite the contrast to the run-down homes and shabby-looking public housing complexes that surround us on our ride through a city where almost a third of the 15,000 residents live below the poverty line. With nowhere to camp we grab a motel room on the highway. I walk to the nearby Little Caesars to get pizza, which neither of us are all that excited about, but which we know we need for fuel. Salads and oatmeal aren't enough to get us through the broad expanse of American West that stands before us.

Today's ride: 75 miles (121 km)
Total: 1,740 miles (2,800 km)

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