February 3, 2016
Squinting and Unintelligible
I wake up at 4:30 to what looks like someone flashing a light all over the yard and then onto the rain fly of our tent every half a second. But soon I realize that what I'm seeing are flashes of lightning, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, each illuminating the sky and then replaced by another burst of light right after. The thunder rumbles toward us in this low and undefined mass from the line of storms that the weather report says sit seven miles off the western end of the island and charge to the northeast at fifty miles per hour. But where we are it's not raining or all that windy, and all of these factors together seem to my amateur and totally uninformed opinion far enough away not to worry about the arcs of electricity that shoot through the heavens, and anyway I'm still kind of tired, so I roll over and close my eyes again. Someone else snores so loud I can hear them snorting and half-choking in their tent around the corner from us.
But not ten minutes later sheets of rain start to lash down on the wood and metal above our heads. Then the wind kicks up hard from the north and starts blowing the rain sideways across the sky and so it starts to lash into the side of our tent instead. The lightning goes on in the distance but with thick clouds having rolled in on top of us we no longer see most of the flashes.
FLASH-BOOM!
A ball of lightning bursts straight above the house and then without even a quarter-second delay the thunder skips over its usual cracking sound and goes straight for something like a military-grade explosion. It wakes up anyone in the area who might still have been asleep and makes Kristen and me jump up and off our sleeping pads and search for our breath again. In an instant the power and closeness of the storm seems very real and very dangerous.
But the lightning and thunder never get that close again. It's just wind whipping against the tent at twenty or thirty miles per hour and constant heavy rain. I feel the effect of this while packing up the gear just after dawn. When I touch the floor under where I was sleeping it sends out ripples in all directions because there are two or three inches of water beneath us. And it doesn't end there. Kristen rides through a puddle that turns out to be twice as deep as it seemed, soaking her shoes and socks all the way through. Then when she stops to use the bathroom her bike falls over and into another giant puddle. She walks out to find her phone at the bottom of said puddle.
It's a fine morning on the Gulf Coast.
We make it two miles before stopping at a gas station where Paul and Mason and Wayne are drinking coffee and eating crap pastries and waiting around for the last narrow band of rain to blow through. After having seen all of one touring cyclists in the last two weeks we're now part of a big, dirty, damp, Ortlieb'd biker gang that stalks the benches in front of the Dauphin Island Chevron.
But everyone else is eastbound and soon we say our goodbyes and good lucks and be safes and it's just the two of us again. We crank hard over the bridge that takes us across the west end of Mobile Bay despite a fierce headwind that wishes we wouldn't. The shoulder doesn't either; it's a minefield of about two dozen strings of Mardi Gras beads, metal and wood in thirty different forms, a VHS tape, and one of those round tins that used to hold Christmas cookies. We talk about how our day off was just about as great as it could have been. We feel rested and healthy and strong. The good food filled an obvious void. And meeting bicycle riders who have been all over America and the world added still more fuel to the fire of adventure that burns hot within us.
Then we reach the first gas station in the first town back on the Alabama mainland. Sitting on a pair of old metal chairs out front we watch a small, sad parade unfold. Each person who pulls up in their dented car or truck reflects the redneck, white trash, Alabama football logo-wearing stereotype that someone who's not from this part of the country would imagine. Half of them look malnourished and the other half way overweight. The accents are so thick and the words come out so fast that I can only guess at what's being said.
Then a guy who shows up on foot sees the bikes and walks over to us. He's in his fifties with thin white hair and so drunk at 11 a.m. that he's already squinting and unintelligible.
"I founda Trick, a Track, a Trek bike da udder day," he slurs out.
"Yeah, a Trek. I've heard of them," I say.
"Dya know iv issa good bike'r what?"
"It might be. It depends. Some are good and some are just, you know, average."
He looks at me with this angry glare.
"Howda yew know dat?!" he asks with contempt. "Howda yew know anything about bissicles?"
"Because I've been riding that one for like 20,000 miles," I say, pointing over at my bike. In the span of about fifteen seconds that data point has already left his head.
We tell him where we're from and where we're going and he goes off on some half-sensical tangent about a guy he knew who went out to California one time and visited Monterey but ran out of money and had to have his mom send him some more. I want to just end the conversation and turn around and walk away but it's not that simple. He's the kind of guy who gives me the strong feeling that if I say something that offends him he'd take two wobbling steps forward, punch me in the jaw, call me a goddamned son of a bitch and then stumble off.
As soon as he gets distracted by some other colorful thing we swing our right legs over the bikes and keep pushing.
"Well, we're back to it," I say to Kristen.
It's not just mobile homes and cars on blocks out here near the Gulf but also beat-up old fishing boats. Not far from the gas station a guy drives past in a dirty pickup truck wearing a Confederate flag-patterned bandana on his head. Later we see a church reader board where the message reads, Let the God times roll.
Along the way I sing that over-dramatic George Michael song "Careless Whisper" out loud to Kristen, but not the lyrics, just the saxophone part. So there we are, riding through the crap-ass bayous of Alabama and it's all Do do do dooo, Do do do dooo, Do do do dooo do do do, Do do do do duuuuuh, Do do do do do do do do! And so on. This happens at that same time unleashed dogs wander out into the road to bark at us and then almost get hit by speeding cars. It's the soundtrack that pushes us past the dystopian rumble and stink and intricate network of silver pipes of an oil refinery.
The sun breaks free of the clouds in the early afternoon and the winds end up working in our favor. It's left turn go a mile, right turn go a mile, left turn go two miles. And it's out on this grid that we see a tiny black and white lamb, no more than a month old. It stands in the front yard of a piece of shit mobile home, stuck in a wire cage the size of a cardboard box, all by itself, crying and crying and crying for its mother. Across the yard there's a huge rabbit in a similar tiny cage, not crying but still stuck in a life that no reasonable person could look at and think Oh yeah, that's fine. I try to think of one good reason why either of those animals should be there. I can't do it.
Farther on I see a sign posted to a gate in front of another dirty old mobile home. Never mind the dog, beware of owner, it reads. It also has the outline of a hand on a revolver where the barrel of the gun is pointed at whoever's reading the sign. We've come across some variation of this every day. To the people who post them it's half serious and half a joke. But I see these signs and feel only sadness, because what they're really saying is, If you walk down this driveway I might take out my gun and kill you dead and I'm not even going to feel bad about it. It's angry and aggressive and hateful and unnecessary. It's the worst of the fear-induced paranoia toward people we don't know that's so rampant in this country.
But that paranoia is very real all the same. It's one of the reasons we're not stealth camping much. Even if land isn't posted and doesn't have a No Trespassing sign nailed into a nearby tree trunk, who's to know how armed the owner is and how afraid of his fellow Americans he might be. And so rather than push on into country where sleeping places are unknown we stop early at a campground in Grand Bay, which is neither grand nor located on a bay.
It's a dump, the campground. Enough people live there full-time that there's a row of mailboxes near the entrance. In the office we tell a rough-looking one-armed man we're on bikes and looking to set up a tent for the night.
"Yeah, well, I guess, if yew want," he says.
A ringing endorsement.
And then he adds, "Hope yer alright with just the men's bathroom. The women's don't work no more."
Okay, sure, whatever.
When I open the door to the lone functional bathroom a cockroach scurries into the darkness behind the hot water heater. The room itself stinks of bleach mixed with something awful that they tried but failed to cover up with the smell of bleach. There's the start of a hornet's nest in the corner of the ceiling above one of the toilet stalls. When Kristen uses a water spigot near the tent to try and fill up her bottles, both water and a live spider come shooting out. We spend a few moments wondering aloud if there's a dead person in the truck parked across the way. All of this happens maybe a fifth of a mile from Interstate 10, which howls and rushes and rumbles non-stop. If we were in like Laos or Argentina or some seedy area of a major city in Spain these kinds of things would be considered kind of gross but also quirky and cool and adventurous. In America it's just fucking depressing.
And yet none of it keeps us from talking and then laughing out loud like a couple of sugar-high twelve-year-olds all the way from afternoon to evening and well into the night. Tomorrow we cross into Mississippi and continue our vague push to the west. But to be honest, I'm not so sure it matters where we're going anymore, and I mean that in the very best way.
Today's ride: 34 miles (55 km)
Total: 663 miles (1,067 km)
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