What Do You Mean Pretty Sure?

February 14, 2016

I'm up with first of the birds and the first light of the day. The woods and the campground are just as silent as when I left them. So you can imagine my surprise when I walk into the bathroom, head to the far stall, lock the door, sit down, and fifteen seconds later see another set of feet appear in the adjacent stall. And then, silence. Not even the hum of fluorescent lights. It's just me and the pair of black and white Nikes with black pants spilling down over the tops of them. We're locked in a standoff and no one wants to fire the first shot – or fart. For two minutes we squat in stillness. But ever the diplomat, and ever the one whose digestive situation verges on emergent, I break the stalemate.

Moments later a calm sense of order returns to the men's comfort station at South Toledo Bend State Park.

We crank up one short hill, coast down the back side of it, and all of a sudden we're in Texas. We just rode all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to Texas on bicycles carrying everything we need with us. I don't think I'll ever get over how simple but amazing it is to travel this way. Driving 1,200 miles in a car leaves you with greasy skin and tired ankles and Cheetos stains on the mid-section of your shirt. State lines are just something you point at before making an idle comment and breaking wind and moving on. But riding that same distance over three or four weeks makes you feel like some goofy, dirty, but utterly better and more capable version of yourself. The state line crossings still involve idle comments and breaking wind, but the sense of accomplishment that surrounds those things means so much more.

Kindness continues to find us. When the women behind the counter at the gas station learn how far we've come they offer to let us use the bathroom, the one with the big Employees Only sign taped across the door. When Kristen asks if they have coffee she's told no, but the first pot of the morning begins to brew within minutes.

"Good luck on y'all's trip!" one of them calls out to us as she climbs into her truck that's been idling out front for the last ten minutes.

The roads get Texas-sized straight off. My direction card tells me to turn right, then go forty miles until turning again. Soon everything starts to feel like Texas. The speed limit jumps from fifty-five to seventy-five, and in reality it's more like eighty-five. In the parking lot of the Baptist church on this Sunday morning I see just one car but twenty-two pickup trucks and SUVs. Within ten miles a cattle ranch and tanks used to store oil from a nearby well appear at the same time. It's one long rolling hill after the next. When we crest a rise and see flatness and gentle grades extending out in front of us we start singing songs of joy and Kristen rings the bell on her handlebars. Around the next corner the flatness disappears again.

We're way out in the country, to the point that when we reach a highway junction a sign lists the next towns to the left and to the right but nothing straight ahead where we're going. Where we'd expect to find a gas station there's none, just a few piles of dirt at the far edge of the intersection. We cross more natural gas pipelines than we see houses. One of the few signs of activity are the sounds of engines related to oil drilling that chug and drone unseen through the layers of pines down dirt side roads, even though it now costs more to pull the oil out of the ground and process it than it can be sold for.

We stop at the beginning of one of these side roads to grease our chains and get rid of the squeaking that seems so much worse when cranking uphill at like five miles per hour.

"I love how this stuff smells," Kristen says, talking about the Tri-Flow lube.

"Yeah, it makes me want a banana."

A few moments pass.

"Man, let me tell ya, this stuff does not taste as good as it smells," I say after licking my finger to get some of the greasy residue off it. "It's kind of mechanical, I gotta be honest."

We head half a mile down a U.S. highway around mid-day, thinking there's a gas station where we can grab some garbage food and pop a squat. It turns out to be only a liquor store and it's not open, which kills any hope of a Valentine's Day lunch centered around Dos Equis. Instead it's canned tuna fish, canned pineapple, and a Milky Way bar while I look at the two dozen placards posted on the front windows and sliding doors to see if liquor stores are closed altogether on Sundays by law around here. A moment later I realize that half of the signs are written in Spanish. The South is slipping away more and more with each passing day. The Southwest is coming.

We know another lake or reservoir is coming when the traffic triples, when empty canisters of outboard engine motor oil appear in the grass at the edge of the road, and when a medical clinic, law offices, a Dollar General, the Bass Buster Inn and The Dam Liquor Store all of a sudden appear where before it had just been pine trees and pipelines. We grab crackers and cheese, skip out on the live bait and the Canadian Club, and keep cranking under patches of thick gray clouds pushed across the sky by a growing south wind.

A dam that's more than a mile long takes us above the southern end of Lake Sam Rayburn where fishermen, or fisherwomen, or fisherpersons, or whatever they're called, reel and cast from boats and kayaks and dinghies. When the Speed Limit 70 sign appears as the road curves up and away from the lake we make aggressive engine-revving sounds and continue on at like nine miles per hour bordered by the tall pine woods of the Angelina National Forest.

Standing in front of a gas station I watch a truck pull into the parking lot and stop out front, idling. The driver puts all of the truck's windows down, cranks some awful pop metal music up to its highest volume, and then disappears into the mini-mart for the next five minutes. Another truck rumbles to life, and when it reaches the end of the driveway the driver mashes the gas, laying down two strips of rubber and leaving behind a cloud of smoke that hangs in the air long after the snarl of its aftermarket exhaust has faded. It's against this backdrop that Kristen returns from a trip to the portable toilet out back.

"I'm pretty sure someone pooped in the urinal," she says without emotion.

I think about this for half a second, and then I say, "It was probably a guy, I mean guys do all kinds of – wait, what do you mean pretty sure?"

Pause.

"Okay, I'm sure."

Down the road to the west Kristen witnesses an even more difficult achievement. Somewhere out on this tree-lined stretch of Highway 63 she logs her ten-thousandth mile of cycle-touring. It's back-of-the-envelope stuff, but between our one three-day ride in the Portland area, the time we spent in New Zealand and Australia last year, going from Maine to Iowa this past summer, and now from Florida to East Texas, the numbers just about line up here.

"Can you believe it?" I ask her. "Before we left Portland last year you hadn't ridden more than sixteen miles at a time in your life, and that was just because you took a wrong turn."

"Yeah, I had a crappy mountain bike that I rode on sidewalks with no helmet and in flip-flops to go to bars when I lived in South Florida and that was it."

And look at her now, peeing along the roadside whenever there's a quiet moment, riding through snow flurries, understanding the diversity and nuances of gas station food, and calling out Up yer butt! when a car approaches. She's a total pro.

Don't let the smile fool you; she's a cycle-touring beast.

When a Forest Service road appears we turn off the highway and take it. It doesn't take even a quarter of a mile before we find a section of pines with the kind of undergrowth that's simple to walk through but gives thick cover from the lifted trucks that accelerate past under full power, because why buy an eight-thousand-dollar supercharger if you aren't going to floor it any time you turn or come away from a stop. Setting up the tent sends black spiders with bodies the size of a penny scurrying away into gaps in the dried leaves that cover the forest floor. I spot a deer tick walking up Kristen's back toward her shoulder blade, which after flicking away into the leaves I name Goran.

Warmer days mean warmer evenings. We can sit in the tent in shorts and short sleeves and eat and read and write without a hint of a shiver. It's how cycle-touring should feel – like this wonderful outdoor party, not a fight against weather that seems as if it's trying its hardest to drive us away. The clouds of the day clear enough to reveal the crescent moon above. We don't see it, but the light it casts down through the trees creates detailed outlines of the leaves above and spreads them across the rain fly of the tent. With clear minds and warm toes sleep comes easy and early.

Today's ride: 54 miles (87 km)
Total: 1,205 miles (1,939 km)

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