We Just Wanted a Quiet Ride Through the Woods of Louisiana

February 12, 2016

Clouds rolled in overnight. They leave the forest flatter in color and texture and the road damp from the light mist that fell before we woke up. To our left it's national forest land. To the right, a wildlife management area that's also used for large-scale military training exercises. It's flanked by dozens of signs advising people to stay out or risk getting a leg blown off by some unexploded tool of death. The deer have no idea they'd be better off with a helmet and a flak jacket. Farther on we pass by three horses who look to have escaped from a pasture or been abandoned and now live out their days foraging among the pines and machine gun shells.

Then we see signs written both in English and Arabic that point toward gravel side roads. We assume that if we went down these roads we'd find mock villages built in Middle Eastern style that the Army uses both to train and to scare the shit out of troops about to deploy to places like Afghanistan.

Down a hill and around a bend the base of a tree still burns and all of the ground around it has been turned black, either from recent mortar fire or a controlled burn. Out here it's hard to know. Smoke hangs above the road and in the gaps between the trees. The next crest brings the shell of a blown-up Chevy hatchback. Skeletons of burnt-out buildings watch us from a few hundred feet off the road. In the distance, but not all that far in the distance, we hear explosions. If America ever fell into civil war for a second time it would look and smell and sound something like this.

And we thought last night was strange and unnerving.

After eating cold oats at a junction with the sound of automatic weapons popping less than a mile away we press on. Soon a white pickup truck appears in my mirror as it barrels toward us.

"Up yer butt!" I yell out to Kristen with a fast, thick Southern accent.

This sounds terrible. Let me explain. Road cyclists have this thing they say when they're riding in a pack and a car comes up from behind and they want to let their fellow Lance Armstrongs know about it. "Car back!" they'll call out. If it's one of those really intense, tight-ass, rule-following groups then random people in the middle of the pack will start calling out "Car back!" as well. But there's no order or rhythm to it. To passersby they sound like a bunch of sheep bleating a code no one else can understand. You can imagine why we don't want to have anything to do with that silliness.

But we want to be safe. We don't want to get run down by a dump truck just because we don't want the burden of sounding strange. And so we've tried some variations. It started with, "A car approaches from the rear, m'lady (or m'lord)," said in the manner of a refined woman from a wealthy 1920s-era British family, like something out of Downton Abbey. But that's kind of a mouthful and it's hard to make sense of on a noisy road. I could never be sure if a car was coming or if Kristen was requesting I put on a fine suit and come to the dining room for dinner. Other sayings didn't rhyme, and who the hell wants a life-saving saying that doesn't rhyme. It seemed like a lost cause.

And then, earlier this week, it happened. Up yer butt! That's where the car's coming if we're not careful. It's short, effective, unique, accurate. Up yer butt! Perfect.

We pass an automated record firing range and then a machine gun range. They seem like the same thing to me, but there must be some military nuance to it that I don't get. We cross dirt roads that lead out into the rolling hills where Army guys sometimes run maneuvers where they pretend they're killing people or pretend like they're trying not to get killed themselves. More ground-shaking blasts rumble in the distance.

Then we see another sign in English and Arabic that reads Sangari, except this time there's no arrow. Just off the road a few hundred feet ahead, behind a chain-link fence, we see makeshift buildings of wood and brick along what's meant to be a village street. It's the kind of thing the Army uses to simulate ground combat or intelligence-gathering missions overseas. I can't stop staring at it. It's partly out of interest; I know these things exist but I've never seen one before. It also makes me anxious, because I imagine myself as a soldier going through training out here, getting ready to leave the only country I've ever known to go fight the Taliban or ISIS – these enemies that want Americans dead – on the other side of the world. But more than anything I feel sad for the innocent civilians overseas who live in homes like what these structures represent, who will be woken up in the middle of the night with the barrel of a gun pointed at them or their children by someone who wants information they can't provide. War is a terrible but sometimes necessary business. I know that. It's the collateral damage to those who didn't cause the problem and who are powerless to fix it that eats away at me.

Moments later an armored Humvee rolls down the street to check us out. It pauses for a few moments near the fence before disappearing back into the pines.

I can't get over how weird it feels to be seeing all of these things while riding among peaceful forests with the wind rushing through the pine boughs where the crows caw and cast shadows on the pavement when they fly over the road behind me. We had no idea any of this was out here. We just wanted a quiet ride through the woods of Louisiana.

Two miles from leaving this bizarre landscape behind and hooking up with Highway 184 we come to a dead stop. There's a gate in our path that Google Maps forgot to mention and no sign along any of the roads that came before thought to announce. It's locked tight and the gatehouse is empty. Even if there was someone in there they wouldn't be up for letting us through. And so after five or ten minutes of serious cursing and bitching we turn around, defeated. We once again ride past half the stuff we saw this morning, back to the intersection where we had oatmeal an hour and a half earlier, then on through a series of roads we hope won't leave us stranded again.

I wave to a convoy of Humvees and huge trucks all painted tan, but none of the helmeted soldiers wave back. At the top of the next hill a helicopter swoops down and passes a few hundred feet above our heads before landing at one of the training villages nearby. When the trees drop away for a moment I see a huge smoke cloud billowing to the east that wasn't there before. A few miles down the road we pass a sign that reads Range 15 - Grenade Launcher. The gate to it is closed. This explains some of the booms we heard earlier. A dozen more ranges follow, each used for training soldiers how to fire different kinds of weapons designed to tear apart bodies and structures. I wave to a passing truck with the words Range Support plastered to the side, then notice plastic cutouts of gun-toting soldiers stacked in the bed. Unrelated to all of this but just as surreal is the time I blow a snot rocket out of my nostril and straight down onto the top of my right shoe.

The unending series of rolling hills get to us. So does the backtracking that has us cranking out thirty-seven miles but only traveling fifteen or twenty from where we started. It means that our plan of an easy fifty-mile day to a state park campground on the shores of a lake falls to pieces. By the time we reach the ramshackle line of businesses along Highway 10 at the south end of the military base we're tired, hungry, and more than a little surly.

But luck is on our side now. We crest a hill and find Crossfire Pizzeria; a more appropriate name they could not have chosen for this location. The pizza is the best we've had so far, but it's the guy who owns and runs the place that's the real story. He checks up on us multiple times while we're eating, like he does with everyone. But when he finds out where we came from and where we're going, he's first overcome with excitement, then shifts into hyper-powered help mode. He offers the wifi password, asks if we need more food, and when I say that all we need is aluminum foil for the leftovers he runs to the kitchen and returns with an entire roll.

"I'm really glad to see y'all doin' this," he says. "That's awesome!"

We hear some variation on this half a dozen times. When he sees Kristen going to the bathroom with our water bottles in hand he stops her.

"The water here's not so good," he tells her. "We don't even really wanta give it to our animals. Ya can go in the back and fill up. Use as many as ya need."

By as many he means bottles. He gives us several bottles worth of purified water that he'd otherwise sell at a profit. It's beyond generous.

Then he rushes past me. "Red, green, or white?" he yells out.

"What?"

"Red, green, or white? What sticks in yer mind?"

"Umm ... white."

He dashes into the back and returns a moment later with a white Crossfire Pizzaria t-shirt.

"Here, take this," he says. "Just wear it at least once along the way for me. It doesn't matter where."

I tell him I will. I offer to take a picture of me wearing it somewhere out west and then emailing him the picture. He goes and grabs a paper copy of the menu and writes down his wife's email address at the top. It's all great stuff.

But as I'm packing up he mentions that this pizza gig is a short-term thing. What he really wants is to move way out into the country with his wife and cows and chickens and to, in his words, get away from everyone. He says it in a way that sounds less like he loves rural living and more like he doesn't want to deal with people anymore. My heart falters a little. I try not to show it. He seems so kind and earnest and generous. He seems like the kind of person our communities need. And yet the vision he has for himself and his wife is a life spent apart from society at large.

I'm not old enough to know whether this view that America is a rough, dangerous place was common thirty or forty years ago. But if I had to guess I'd say it wasn't. And so I ride away from the pizza place toward the west wondering if it's true that this country has changed for the worse, or if it hasn't changed all that much but so many people think it has. I wonder if we've become more awful as people or just more afraid of one another. I don't know what the answers are. I don't know even know where to start looking.

We leave the highway and head west on Cooper Church Road, where the centerline has faded to the point it's only a suggestion. The sun is warm but the breeze is cool and we ride half in the shadows of the trees that hug the road. The hills aren't even hills, just tiny bumps. And there isn't one hand grenade explosion, not a single barrage of machine gun fire, or even one skinny, neglected dog to cause our hearts to ache. It's a wonderful afternoon.

The greatest No Trespassing sign I've ever seen.

We reach the edge of a large swath of public land and decide we don't feel like going any farther, so we stop. We pull the bikes up a steep embankment, crash through bits of underbrush that clank and snap off the spokes and chain rings and derailleurs, and find a small open patch of earth among skinny little trees trying to reclaim land once laid bare by a clearcut. As the warm of the evening starts to fade toward the cool of night we lay back on the hard ground and eat leftover pizza and drink a couple of beers still cold enough for the sides of their cans to sweat.

So much of bicycle touring is the ability to grind through the tough bits and then build yourself back up on the other side. By the time we left the military training areas behind us this afternoon we were fried. But a few hours of pizza and rest, some quiet roads, a couple of Corona tallboys, and a most excellent hug all but recentered our compasses. The croaking frogs and still woods and the army of stars above our heads take us the rest of the way there.

Today's ride: 50 miles (80 km)
Total: 1,124 miles (1,809 km)

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