January 31, 2016
The Five-Dollar Patty Melt Available Now at Whataburger
Good morning. It's 6:15 and the first cracks of gunfire ring out not that far from where we sit eating peanut butter and jelly wraps. Whoever it is they're not hunting, they're just shooting to shoot and...
Bang, bang
Well, I guess we're not gonna hang out here this morning.
That's just how it is in the woods. Last night was weird, too. We didn't hear a single gun blast, but a few trucks passed not that far away in the darkness, and we could hear the deep growling exhaust sounds of others nearby.
Even though most of the people in those trucks are good and decent, we know that a handful aren't. They're the ones that act like they're still in high school, the ones that are aggressive and kind of angry and live for doing dumb stuff on the weekend. We see them in the gas stations and Dollar Generals all the time. They pass us with engines revved and tires howling a dozen times a day. We've known people like them. And when that handful is out in the woods with their buddies after drinking and smoking and shooting all day we know that if they come across our tent they'll screw with us. Because even though we're on public land we're not really on public land. We're on their land. They spend weeks of their lives out here every year. It's where they hunt and drive through the mud and shoot their guns and shoot the shit. In the city they'd be overwhelmed and neutralized, but out here they're in their element, confident and assured. The sight of two bicycles and a tent out here would be like food to a hungry dog.
We know all of this, but it's like we don't really remember it until the wandering headlight beams and the loping sounds of cammed engines appear in the night.
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With our bikes caked in muddy red clay from the road leading out of the woods we push south and west. It's forests and farms, overcast and warm, pleasant. That's not as true of the decaying but lived-in mobile homes and the little clouds of smoke from the garbage fires that burn in their back yards.
Soon we connect with the Blackwater Trail. There are people on bicycles and people on foot, both of which have been a rare sight. In fact, we see more people exercising in eleven minutes on the trail than in the last eleven days put together. It's the first sign that we're leaving rural lands behind for a while. The feeling grows stronger when all the dogs end up behind fences and don't bark when we ride by. Then cars start to pass us at high speed in dangerous places when all they'd have to do is wait a few seconds for a clear opening. I start to see beautiful historic houses that I'd consider living in. The gas stations get bigger and newer. But the transformation isn't complete until I look toward a busy road see a giant billboard advertising Arby's.
I can tell we're almost to the Gulf because the humidity is so high that all the hair on my forearms turns damp.
"I love it!" Kristen says. "Humidity just feels so healthy to me."
"It makes me wonder if I'm about to get malaria."
But in fact it's great to ride in warm weather after all the below- and near-freezing nights and mornings we've had. There's been more than one incident where we tried to have a hug but instead slid off each other because we were covered from neck to ankle in slick waterproof material. Those days are over for a while.
"Oh, you don't have to worry 'bout that," says the woman in the nearest booth as we ride up to the toll plaza for the Garcon Point Bridge and try to put a couple of dollars in the toll box for bike riders. "And if yer tired there's a nice place for ya to sit just around the corner over there."
The bridge stretches for four miles. We ride maybe twenty feet above the water of Pensacola Bay. The surface is broken by lazy little waves and a cool ocean breeze sweeps over us and fills our heads with the smell of salt water and shoreline. The shoulder is wide and the traffic light. I almost can't believe it. These kinds of crossings tend to be full of stress and danger and mental anguish but there's none of that today.
The stress and danger and mental anguish arrive when we reach the other side. We know they're coming when we round a corner and the Wal-Mart comes into view. It's so big that we can't see either end, just its broad, tan, windowless center. We cut across the middle of the parking lot of said Wal-Mart like a couple of assholes in a desperate attempt to reach any kind of store with a bathroom, in order to head off a bodily fluid-related issue that if left unsolved will fall into the category of catastrophic. This leads to near-misses with half a dozen cars whose drivers are also cutting across the middle of the parking lot like a bunch of assholes.
With disaster avoided we head west along a snarling beast of a road where massive billboards advertise tax prep services that will give you a high-interest loan with your federal refund as collateral, plastic surgery that will make you less ugly and more happy, and the five-dollar patty melt available now at Whataburger that will – well, I don't know what that's good for. It's fast food joints and CrossFit gyms and hair salons and car washes, one after the next after the next. It is commerce unabated. It is complete madness. We escape for a few hours inside a Subway, where we share space with an angry-looking pear-shaped man whose cheap gray t-shirt with block letters on the front reads I don't hate you ... but actually, yes, I do.
We aren't more than half a mile on either side of beautiful sandy beaches and crashing waves and soaring seabirds but we don't see any of them and we won't see the Gulf until some time tomorrow. Instead we're swallowed up by traffic that is loud and traffic that is endless, even late on Sunday afternoon.
We cross back over Pensacola Bay toward the mainland, this time on U.S. Highway 98. It's twice as wide and ten times as busy as the bridge that brought us over to the peninsula. It's fast and loud and the shoulder is full of crap: chunks of rubber and metal and wood, Chick-Fil-A cups, Mardi Gras beads, palm fronds, and a million little pieces of broken glass. It's a one-wrong-move-and-you're-done kind of situation. But it could be worse; we could be the guy walking the three miles across. And with the wind at our backs we crank through it at fifteen miles per hour.
The bridge spits us out in Pensacola. It's one of those big American cities where the core is all but impenetrable to bicycles, to the point that riding a giant loop around Pensacola Bay on two massive bridges and a peninsula that's been turned into a giant mini-mall was easier and safer than a straight shot in from the east. But once we reach downtown things turn sane, and soon we roll up to the home of our Warm Showers host. Dan's an interesting guy. He finished college at thirty, sold Xerox machines, became a multi-millionaire from the first dotcom boom, became a ten-thousandaire from the first dotcom bust, then moved to Pensacola several years back to start a new company. Now he's got all sorts of small business interests and lots of free time, which he uses to travel half the year. He's been all over North America but also to more than eighty countries and he's into boats and bikes and motorcycles and camping. Dan's free and happy and it shows. He shares his place with an old deaf cat named Sanchez who's into eating and also laying on the ground with her belly exposed and then trying to scratch the shit out your hand if you get the idea to try and pet her there.
Dan doesn't cycle-tour but still hosts dozens of traveling bikers every year. He didn't even know about Warm Showers until he invited some riders he saw on the street to crash in his backyard and they told him about it. But he's done so many interesting things that it's easy for us to have the first meaningful conversations of this trip. The extreme joy of having all of our clothes clean and dry for the first time in a week and a half is just a bonus.
Today's ride: 54 miles (87 km)
Total: 564 miles (908 km)
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