Um, I Was Jus' Gonna Park There

January 30, 2016

"Okay, here's some of it," says the Huddle House waitress as she brings to our table the first set of plates that hold the hot, steaming, grease-laden food that's about to become our breakfast. The second set arrives a few moments later. The parking lot outside is full and all the vehicles are pickup trucks. Half have license plate covers with the logo for the Alabama Crimson Tide college football team on them and the other half have the Auburn Tigers logo. Their drivers are wedged into the booths all around us, some in groups but never less than two to a table. They're old heavy men with white hair and trucker hats and denim jeans and overalls. They've been wearing the same jackets to Saturday morning breakfast since 1987.

Kristen goes to a Piggly Wiggly to get fresh food and I head next door to the Dollar General for cheap trail mix. When I walk in the door I see a cold case along the near wall with a black and yellow sign above it that says Fresh Food. It seems odd in a store where most things have an expiration date that's four years out, so I walk over to take a look. It turns out it's half-filled with stacks of packaged hot dogs and bacon and bologna. The rest is all processed cheese products, tubes of Pillsbury crescent rolls, margarine, and milk and eggs made in factories at least a thousand miles away. It is by any objective measure anti-fresh. But I'd be willing to bet that for a good number of people who live in this part of America it's about as fresh as it gets.

Beyond town it's one little rolling hill after the next. Goat hills, they call them. We've lost the clear cuts and shitbox mobile homes in favor of pastures and cows. It's all deep blue skies and bright green grass and fresh, cool, clean air, minus the cow farts. We see the first and probably last Bernie Sanders for President signs of the trip. There are four of them in various sizes, all mounted to a set of fence posts along the road.

"You've got to be brave to do that out here," Kristen says.

We cross into the Conecuh National Forest expecting some kind of different landscape, but nothing changes. It's still houses, farms, churches, cemeteries, a red and white metal radio tower that stands a few hundred feet above it all, and of course a gas station.

And of course we stop there.

It's like nothing I've seen before, and I've seen some things as far as rural gas stations go. I count the number of pickup trucks in the small parking lot; there are thirteen of them. While we're standing around eating garbage food and drinking garbage drinks a fourteen-year-old rolls up at high speed on an ATV. It's almost all men at this place, and all but a couple of them are dressed from head to toe in clothes patterned with camouflage. And I mean head to toe: shirts, pants, jackets, hats, boots. A guy walks toward us dressed in this jumpsuit that's like a camo-colored onesie.

It's the weekend and it's hunting season. Even the dog wandering around the parking lot has on a bright orange collar so that he doesn't get shot out there. And speaking of guns, there's enough firepower packed into the vehicles in front of us that if it was five-hundred years earlier these men could have ruled every nation on Earth. There are trailers with built-in metal cages stacked three by two that are filled with dogs used for quail hunting. Extra-tall radio antennas attached to a few of the trucks hit the canopy above the gas pumps with a solid thwap. One of the trucks has a dead deer strung up by its neck in the back to keep the deer from sliding around the bed while the truck is moving. Several of the beer guts can only be described as outrageous.

We're sitting next to our bikes on the far end of the gas station parking lot and watching all of this unfold when an older woman walks toward the truck parked right in front of us. She's white-haired and has the look of someone who's a grandmother many times over. She tries to get in the passenger side of the truck but can't because her husband locked the doors. And she doesn't have a cell phone she can look at either, so there she is, standing ten feet away from us. There's no escaping the situation. She's trapped. And so with nowhere else to go she's forced to make a little small talk.

After a few idle seconds she says, "Nice day iddnit?"

I'm about to say something, but Kristen responds first.

"We're from Washington state," she blurts out.

Awkward pause.

The question wasn't said all that clear, but I understood it. I'm the only one.

To her credit, the woman goes with it.

"Oh ... well then ... yeah ... it's a ... a little different out here I guess," the woman says confused and quietly.

To help ease the awkwardness, I try to fill the void.

"So ... it's hunting season then isn't it?" I ask, even though the answer is all around us.

She gives another look of confusion, along with this pause that lasts only half a second but that says in no uncertain terms, What a damned fool. But to her credit, all she says is, "Yep. Goin' on now til da end udda munt."

Then her husband shows back up and saves us all. I recognize him because he's the man who, thanks to a broken handle and lock, opened the door to the bathroom on me when I was in there a few minutes earlier.

It's just a fine stop all around.

It's unclear which local political office Jesus is running for.

Things get a little more foresty farther on. Like any proper national forest it's all pine trees, spaced close enough to tell that they were planted by the hand of man. Still, the swishing of the breeze through their boughs is one of my favorite sounds, and it's on full display today. The distant pop of gunfire and the barking of excited hunting dogs I enjoy a lot less. The mailboxes and private driveways and abandoned mobile homes scattered about aren't so great either, but the national forest has only been around for seventy years. Some of these properties have probably been owned for a century longer.

We cross into Florida for the third time on this trip and for what I've vowed will be my last time ever on a bicycle. There's so much more of America and the world to see. When we reach Tommie Steele road I tell Kristen that I have an alternate persona that she doesn't know about. In a deep voice I explain that he's a mercenary and his name is Tommy Steel and he's a man who plays by his own rules. It turns out to be a wonderful road, with trees hanging over it from both sides and the mix of yellow leaves and pine needles making it feel like we've been transported into the middle of fall.

It's also on this road that we pass a total turd of a mobile home and a mangy, angry dog shoots across the yard and gives chase. Kristen yells at him and does our secret power move of riding straight at the dog, but it doesn't work. When I approach he leaves her and comes after me, barking and baring teeth. Telling him to go home does nothing. Acting like I'm going to run him over is useless, and after trying it about seven times I give up. I get so furious with the dog that when he gets close again I work up a big ball of spit in my mouth and then launch it at him. And to my surprise it works. When it lands he drops to the ground and tumbles into a low ditch and I have the time and space I need to make a gap so big he can't close it.

Then we go around the next corner and we see a pasture with three ponies standing in it. As we ride by we give voices to them, and man, never in my life have I known such vindictive and foul-mouthed ponies.

This is our life.

We spend much of the afternoon riding through state forest land. We're passed by so many trucks carrying deer and quail hunters that I lose count. There must be hundreds of them out here today. How these guys don't just take each other out in the crossfire instead of the deer I have no idea. The farther we go the more gentle the hills become as we head south and west, away from the Coastal Plain and toward the Gulf of Mexico. It's calm and peaceful and free of all the desperate rural poverty we've seen so much of in the last week. It's great riding, so long as we don't take an errant bullet to the chest.

Along the way we see a cyclist approaching us. He's the first since we pedaled away from the Atlantic Ocean five-hundred miles ago. We've seen kids and teenagers and plenty of people that racked up one too many DUIs and have to use a bike to get around town, but the guy on the Trek cranking past us is none of those things. Yet for as much as he's a cyclist he's also a roadie, so we get a slight head nod and that's all.

But at this point we're used to being given sidelong glances or outright ignored. That's why Kristen's so surprised when a truck approaches her and starts to slow. The window is rolled down and an elbow rests on the sill of the door. She slows, unclips from her pedals, and in her head starts to run over what the conversation that's about the happen might bring.

"Hi!" she says with great enthusiasm as both she and the truck roll to a stop at the same time in front of a pullout alongside the road.

Pause.

"Um, I was jus' gonna park there," responds the man inside with as little emotion as it's possible for a voice to have.

Ah. Moving on.

The sound and smell of the pine trees and the hint of cool that announces the arrival of the evening make it feel more like we're in the high country of Central Oregon than what I expected of the panhandle of Florida, but there's nothing wrong with that. We see fewer cars as the day grows older and hear no gunshots.

Half an hour before sunset we ride down a side road and into a broad expanse of public forest land. Away from the tracks of siped truck tires and the reddish-brown mud puddles we settle in for the night. Not far behind our heads a hundred frogs creak and croak in a grand and complex symphony without an intermission that goes straight into the encore. Darkness brings uncountable numbers of stars and the distant green blips of fireflies. We reflect on a day that felt more like good cycle-touring than the nine that came before. We look forward a night that's more cool than cold. And we hope that good fortune continues to fall our way.

Today's ride: 56 miles (90 km)
Total: 510 miles (821 km)

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