Portland

She's dead.

Maybe it was suicide, I don't know yet. I never got a chance to thank her for what she did. She wouldn't talk to me, or I would have told her that at least one person from her past was able to love whoever it was she had been hiding inside.

She was a nurse.

She loved dancing.

She had real style.

I loved her, but I never got to know who she was. Her story was never about me, after all, and perhaps the greatest regret of my life is that, for a time, I seemed to think it was. Now, my greatest regret may be that I'll never know her at all.

1.866.488.7386

Help exists.

You are loved.

It gets better.

These are too trite by half, but I need you to believe them. 

Alibates

I yawn and gap and stretch, the old aluminized rescue blanket, almost pointless now, crumpled down around the feet of my light summer bag. The sun is peeking over the edge of my hammock, which is strung up underneath a picnic shelter at the Sanford-Yake campground in Lake Meredith National Recreation Area. It wasn't the closest campground to my destination today, but it was the only one with showers. I sigh, deeply, remembering the hot water last night: watching grit run off my lower legs, wringing out my riding bib again and again, turning around a countless number of times to stab the button just to get another fifteen seconds of water. It was a rare comfort to get a shower two days in a row--first at Chris' house in Pampa, and now here. I had slept deeply after watching the sunset (it still rang of the same notes as Foss Lake, a gorgeous western smear of reds and oranges dropping slowly into the opposite shore, lighting the low surface of the water with a hot crimson). In the soft twilight, I had ridden my bicycle to the rangers' information sign to plan my morning. I saw a jackrabbit and a roadrunner. I reveled in the lightness of my bicycle. I made a plan for ten the next morning, the time of the ranger tour at Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, a plan to see something new and unheard of.
And here's the sun, ready for a day of adventure and new experiences. I'm just trapped over the horizon and waiting to find them.
It's nine am.
Panic quickly grips my guts. I thrash viciously at my sleeping bag and tear at the zipper and half-fall out onto the ground. The sun had betrayed me. I spin around and there's all the detritus of my life spread out on the table, the bench, the bike, strung up under the shelter, hanging to dry. Essentially everything I own is out of place and Google assures me I'm fifteen miles from the National Monument. Even if I leave immediately, I have to maintain my fastest average speed (with an unloaded bicycle) just to have a shot at arriving on time, and I'll be making the ride with a full load and no breakfast. So I shut my brain off and package my disappointment to deal with later.
The hammock I strip down into its stuff sack faster than I have ever packed it. I peel open a granola bar and leave it half hanging from my mouth between bites so I can use my hands more efficiently. I strip and slide into my riding bib there on the open plateau, kick into my riding shoes, and shovel everything into my panniers. Even in my haste, I'm true to my programming and everything ends in the bag it lived in. I jog a quick circle around my campsite, and, seeing nothing, I kick off.
My pell-mell pedal back to Fritch is in the metaphorical dark. I don't have cell service here, so I have to remember the turns from yesterday and replicate them in reverse. I hesitate a few times to pull out the phone and catch my breath on the way to the corner of Eagle Boulevard and the 136. It's time for a treacherous phone call.

"Hello, this is Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. How can I help you?"
"Hey, I read the ranger tour of the quarries starts at ten?"
"That's right."
"Ok, I'm wondering when they usually leave?"
"Ten."
"Right, but I'm on a bicycle and about ten miles away, and I don't know if I can get there by ten?" I'm begging without being explicit that they will postpone somehow for me, or give me some good news, or let me off the hook, or--I don't know--offer to pick me up at the road in a truck.
"Do your best. I hope you get here in time."
"Are you--okay. Thanks for the information."

That was it. I hang up, and a cold, hard anxiety settles in my guts. At this point, November fourth, Thanksgiving is three weeks away. I have 1,100 miles, or so, until I got to Philip's house. Do the math with me. That's fifty five miles a day without breaks and, let's be honest, I'm not known for straight lines or efficient routes. I'll inevitably add miles to my trip. If I miss the tour today, there's honestly no way I can add another day and still make it to Philip's in time for the holiday. I'm still ragged-breath shaking from flying down the five mile gravel track, and I snap my shoes in before I truly catch my breath. I'm going to try.
I fly down the road. I'm pedaling as hard as I can maintain, building a constant rush in my ears of the wind whipping past and my building heart rate. I know that for all my effort, I'm probably only maintaining a mile or two per hour more than normal. Every time a pickup passes me, I consider flagging them down to ask for a lift, just to the turn, no more. There's one in the parking lot, should I? Here's one turning onto the road, would they? And yet I pedal on. I have grim determination. I start to soak through my headband, even in the wind. I have to at least try.
I finally arrive at the turn from 136. There's the sign, the long road, and maybe I'm not too late. It's only half past, after all. I just need to arrive. I spin down a little, catching my breath on a long downhill, building strength for a long slope ahead. I grind my teeth, I grind the gravel, I grind my pessimism. I must try to make it in time. This trip is all about seeing things, directing my path however I want, making decisions for me alone. I'm here to accomplish, not to be turned away at the gate. And yet, at the top of the hill, there's just more road. Right turn. Long left-hand sweep. Past a small farm road. Another sign. Down a hill to the only building for miles, and into the empty parking lot.
No--not empty. I arrive, a squeal of tortured brakes, and the wind settles around me. A man wearing ranger khakis is leaning against the side of a big ten-passenger van. He leans toward me, pushes off, and just loud enough to be heard, he says "You're the biker who called?"
"That's me. You all back yet?"
It's 10:50.
"You're the first person who's shown up all day."
"Oh." It was worth trying, suddenly, and I'm shaking a little from the exertion. I can't manage much more than a clean sigh and a slow push towards the bathroom.
"You take your time. Get a drink, cool down. We'll go when you're ready."
"Are you sure?"
"Sure, I'm sure."

I filled up my bottles, listened to the ranger explain hunting restrictions to a man in woodsman orange, and watched an interpretive video about flint napping. When I'm ready, the two interpretive staff walk with me me back out to the van. I get names. Bonnie's going to drive the van (I get the impression she's new, because she's asking questions about everything). George is the man who met me in the parking lot. His walking stick has medallions nailed to it for about a foot at the top, markers of a dozen places he's been. We come up to a gate with four locks attached to it.
"Oh, this is for the companies that were grandfathered in. Most times, you can't get mineral rights to a National Monument, and for good reason, but these folks were here long before we were formalized. Now they've got a claim out here, so they need to get in. Makes things a pain, though."
I spent about thirty or forty seconds trying to reverse-engineer the gate mechanism, which opened no matter which lock was removed, even with three others still attached. I couldn't quite make out what Bonnie was saying, so I scooted forward in the seat.
"How's that?"
"I said we weren't sure anyone was coming today. You're the first person who's shown up."
"Then I wasn't just lucky. I was double lucky."
"I suppose that's so." She laughs. She and George feel to be about fifty each. This is the job they're likely to have when they retire. I'm caught up in wondering how they came to this tiny nowhere to sit and wait for a single cyclist on a Friday morning. George points out the few turns for her to take, and soon we're at a tiny parking area.
"Time was people could just drive up here, but when things were turned into a Monument, the folks up the ladder decided they had better protect it a little more. We were losing an awful lot of rocks from the site."
"Oh. That's no good." I get the feeling that he isn't bluffing. Americans are notorious about taking souvenirs. We walk up a short path, climbing out of the valley and toward the flat plain above, stopping once or twice so George can explain how the natives dug for the flint because the top layers were weather-worn and had too many fractures from water infiltration, repeated freeze/thaw cycles that shattered the rock and made it unsuitable for knives or spearheads. Then he says something that starts to seem incredible.
"When these rocks break from Nature wearing them down, you'll see edges like this." He holds up a relatively round-looking rock. "But any time a human has been involved, uh . . ." he stoops down and picks up a rock right next to his shoe, "you'll see this sort of sharp edge, see? It's distinct." It is. I'm incredulous.
"Every time?"
"It requires force to get flint to snap like that, and the shear of freezing water doesn't act like that. Keep your eyes open, you're likely to see more.

The top layer of the earth up here is a thin topsoil, and below that, a thick, four-foot layer of flint. Below that, more soil and sandy rock that erodes away. The flat prairie on top of the valley is broken by warrens and rivulets made by water wearing away at the earth beneath the flint. And up here, there's a thick gravel underfoot. I'm starting to look with new eyes, and I'm feeling more and more ancient.
George passes a shallow depression in the earth. "Last stop," he says, "and then I'll let you have your own look around. This here is what the quarries look like. All you have to do is dig down to the flint layer that hasn't been exposed to winter weather and you start getting really good flint. You dig and dig, then pound it with something hard and you can pull out the pieces. Anything too small you just toss, but anything that starts to look right, you shape right here into a blank." He pulls a flatish palm-sized rock from his pocket and hands it to me. "That's what you're trying to make. You can take that and fashion any tool you want out of it back at the village, or you can just trade the blank to other groups that need it. And everything that isn't a blank?" He gestures expansively. My breathing is accelerated, and not from biking this time. Essentially every rock underfoot, a thick layer of them, is broken with a sharp edge, the tell-tale mark of human hands. There are snapped bits of debitage making a thick pavement. It would be impossible to put my foot down without stepping on something that was dug out of the ground, broken away and tossed for being the wrong shape.
I'm trying to wrap my head around what I'm seeing. I walk out past four or five more shallow depressions, some marked off, some right near the edge of the short cliff, others more central. At the end of the peninsula in the sky, I look out at the other edges where rocks poked out, where the plain gave way to steep valley walls.
"George?"
"Yeah?"
"How many other sites are there?"
"We've counted a few hundred quarry pits in a few dozen sites, but we find more from time to time. Nobody's done a complete survey."
It's humbling to stand so near to such dedication. I've been to Cahokia to see the mounds, I've seen petroglyphs and ancient paintings, I've climbed in a kiva preserved on a cliff. I've seen the handiwork of an epoch long past. But this was something even older than the ancient marks I had seen before. This was like walking into a man's kitchen thousands of years after he'd passed away so I could rummage through his cabinets to find his spatula. This wasn't one person's art that fate had preserved. This was a thousand families over generations slowly changing the face of the earth with hand tools and dedication. I picked up a rock (any rock), and I touched something dug up and tossed aside. My fingerprints joined the memory of fingerprints that time had worn away long before Cahokia's mounds were piled up, before the Manitou was painted on the Missouri's cliffs, before the kiva was dug--long before the oldest creation of mankind I had yet seen.
I suppose it was nothing, really. But sometimes, life conspires to hand you a truly beautiful experience, one you couldn't create on purpose, and gives you a chance to feel unreasonably sentimental about something that, if you're honest with yourself, is nothing, really. Sometimes, life puts you fifteen or more miles away from where you've got to be and asks you to throw yourself down the road on a ragged bicycle. Sometimes, when you arrive, it's as though the whole world was waiting up for you, as if your panic deserved special recognition,. And sometimes, you see something exclusive, personal, unlikely, something you were a hair's breadth from being blocked from forever. I had such a moment, and it was beautiful.
We rode back. Bonnie was more confident behind the wheel. It took George less time to lock up the gate. I tried to buy some postcards and Bonnie gave me a sticker for my car window, two pencils with the Monument's name, and a chance to rummage through a small box of flakes ("We get rocks from a farmer not far away, and on Wednesdays a man comes in and teaches people how to nap flint. This is rock you can take with you, if you like. Take as much as you want!"). I take a bit for each person in my family, making sure each small rock has a strip or two of the deep red-purple that I loved in the rocks. Before I can profess my undying thanks to Bonnie and George, she says "We're so glad you stopped by." I can't do much better, but I try.

An hour later, I've just gotten back on 136 southbound to Amarillo, and I feel enchanted. I lead a charmed life.
I'm glad. I think I will always, at least, try.

Borger

[Forgive me.]

There's nothing in the panhandle of Texas, and between the long stretching nothings, there are nothing towns where the library is closed and the service station doesn't have bathrooms because everyone who would conceivably be there is also living in town. I know this and I still take the mile detour around and through Skellytown, hoping for anyplace to pee. My bicycle isn't exactly inconspicuous, but there are no people to see me on it. I ride through the entire town without once seeing anything remotely promising. I'm forced to pee in the open behind the grass in a fencerow just outside of town. I can remember the unfounded fear of it--who was really there to see me? Just the wind and the cloudy sky. I got back on the empty road and rolled onward toward Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument.
Sometimes, on the bicycle, you measure distance differently. I peed once in Skellytown, once in a gully across from some construction workers, and once in an alcove of fence--there's no word I know for this, but if you've ever driven a truck to a field and stopped just off the road to open the cattle gate, you may have stepped where I stopped. I learned to put less and less weight on miles and hours and more and more weight on destinations and having to stop between them. I continued to drink water like it was August in coastal Virginia instead of late October in the sweeping plains. I can't describe the small arroyos specifically, just the the shape of what one should be. I can't describe the vast distances between houses, just how far apart they feel. I can't describe anything I'm passing even as I'm passing it because there is only a constant grinding sound of gears and gravel and a growing urgency to make it to my destination or pee on the way. The map creeps by so slowly that the only highlights anymore are the breaks in the monotony.
I keep gatorade strapped to the top of my front right pannier, and a full Nalgene in both front bags. I have my phone (Philips--it's borrowed) slipped beneath the bungee cord that held my tent and sleeping bag to the top of the front rack. I have a single bike bottle in the single cage on my down tube, and when I empty it, it's easily filled from the Camelbak on top of my back rack. When I stop in places, my kickstand lack pains me and I'm forced to lean the bicycle into a ditch sidewall or a fence or just on the ground.
I'm marking down processes so that you can share in an image of my life, not because they're important to me. I've ridden too long to think about these things now. The reason I keep the gatorade where I do is settled, undebatable. I could explain to you why I keep a recycled bottle out and my nalgenes covered, but theft isn't interesting to me. I could explain to you why I keep sugar out of my bike bottle, but doing dishes isn't interesting to me. I could explain to you why I put it inside the strap on the front right, but would you fall asleep while I explain how to lean down and unclip a drink without losing it rolling down the road, how to pack your underpants so they leave a shelf for you to clip things into? Everything is process on the road, and every process is holy, codified, unchangeable, set into stone by the law of least effort. Once a thing is decided, pruned, modified, it becomes the only way of doing until something simpler and easier appears. Nearly every element of my gear has three or four reasons for being exactly the way it is, and the end result is an undignified pile of garbage strapped precariously to a rapidly-wearing bicycle.
I mark time by stopping to urinate and I don't think about anything on the bicycle because everything has been thought before. Twenty nine miles is gone by late morning, and I see a sight I've seen before and have no memory of: Borger.
On the main street, I pass the county museum and snap-decide to turn back for it once I have lunch. There's no place I'd particularly like to stop, so I just ride to the Lowe's Marketplace, lean my bicycle against a wall, lock it, and wander inside. I buy a can of beans that have jalapeños, a block of pepper jack cheese, and whatever else is normal for me. I've bought these items before, and I'll buy them again: a process that requires no spare emotion or weight. Across the street, a man is selling airbrushed novelty t-shirts in what looks like an old autobody shop. He's aghast at how far I've ridden. He doesn't have anything I can't live without, so I say goodbye and push back to the museum. I eat the beans cold next to the log that used to function as a jail once criminals were chained to it.
What's inside the Hutchinson County Museum is fascinating, and you may just have to believe me. There's a secular shrine to the big oil company that built the town up from nothing. There's a painting of a building in Borger by Thomas Hart Benton, if I remember correctly. There's a dummy wearing an asbestos safety suit to set light to a leak (If you use the proper amount of dynamite, you can cap an oil leak, or so goes the claim).  There's newspapers and advertisements and a whole floor of things I didn't take the time to see. I could explain all these things to you, but explaining museums isn't interesting to me. At this point, what is it? Process? There's no immediacy in what I'm doing here, and while I'm really fascinated, I'm not living an interesting story. I'm antsy. Walking out of the museum onto the tiny and lovely main street, I grimace at the thin, searing fall sunshine. I'm not even done with Borger and I'm riding away from it suddenly.

 


There are family stories about Borger. I've heard its name a hundred times in my youth. I know I've visited it, but I have no ability to remember something from when I was so young. When the Adventist church in Borger replaced its pews, mom and dad bought one and took it with them from Texas to Missouri. It lived for a time under the trailer home that was our temporary house before dad built the real family home. I remember that I could walk under the trailer, slipping through the cladding into the dead, cold underside of the house, and there was a relic of a foreign church. It was a seat where mom would never find me, a place to play with toy cars or to read and avoid chores. Philip and I treated it like a nominal fort for years. I remember dirt and the strange smell of the worms. After that, it was in the attic of the metal building. It marked the barrier between the space where dad put his wood pile, where mom put her boxes of Christmas decorations, and where the kids' space began. Philip and I carved out a small bit of attic to put dumb toys and small treasures, and the pew was the borderline. When I moved into the metal building after college, I managed to pull the pew down from the attic, to clean it and oil it, to return it to a home. I put it in my house and sat on it to tie my shoes (the dog's head always in the way), used it to settle the space beneath a wall of photos, vacuumed under it for years. It's where I sat to write the text that set in motion her return and abandonment. It was a piece of the home I shared with Delight and it was born to my family in Borger, Texas. That church was only just around the corner. I could visit it and see where my favorite piece of furniture of all time used to sit.
I'm riding away instead.
Everything is process at a point. I've not got the time to construct a meaningful relationship with a place I've effectively never been just to feel melancholy about a pew she didn't care about. I stop for a fourth restroom break in a Mexican-food restaurant in town and see some beautiful nurses grabbing lunch on their break. I'll be in Fitch by mid-afternoon. I'm rapidly closing in on the place where I was born. I would apologize for writing a yawning expanse of nothing, but it's close and lovely, in a way, once you know.
That's Texas.

White City

N 42.4344° W 122.1828°

None of the dog collars at the White City Goodwill are old enough. I'm trying to finish an art project for my sister's birthday three months late, and none of the collars or belts match the pictures I found at the antique store in Tulsa. To my right, a woman makes brief eye contact and returns to looking at the books.

I stop, and look again. She's thin and grey-haired, but her hair has a youthful cut. Her skin is too smooth, I think. I'm stuck trying to figure her out. Snatch another glance. Her arms and shoulders are too young. I'm trying to not be rude. I hate staring at people; it makes me feel gross. But I keep snatching glances. Her hair is definitely grey, but she's definitely too young for it. She's wearing an unflattering brown t-shirt dress, but that wouldn't tell me anything. The long tribal tattoo showing between her shoulder blades at the scoop of the dress, however, does.

I leave. She's still there, in the back of my mind, though. My mind is vacillating. Should I talk to her? What would I say? I circle the whole store. I haven't talked to a woman--not as a single man--for years. If I ever had game, I don't have it now. I walk back over, see she's still looking at books. Anybody who is that dedicated to finding a book can't be a bad person. Right?

"Hey, just curious--"

"Oh!" She turns to face me. She has a nose that is just at the juncture between large and too large. She has soft blue eyes. She looks thirty, and she's beautiful.

"Did you choose grey hair, or did it choose you?" What an awkward opening salvo. She repositions, laughs, and touches her hair.

"It just happened this way, actually."

"I would--"

"It's genetic; my mother went grey the same way, so I was doomed, as it turns out."

"I would choose grey over bald in a heart beat."

"Oh, you're not so bald."

"It's coming. I'm just preparing myself."

"They say it's your mother's brother who determines."

"And he's bald as a cue ball."
"Oh no! At least you have all this." She's smiling. It feels like a human conversation. She's not afraid of me.
"I've been planning on shaving my head and keeping the beard." I pull on it, a thing I never understood when I saw men do it, but which has now become an unconscious habit. "I'll probably look like Jebediah from Iron Man. You know, the villain."

"Well, it's better than no hair at all, right?'
"Right. I chose this look because I'm going to be in a play, and I have to look Civil War."

"Very cool!" She turns to a boy who has approached us. He looks seven. It's monday, and I don't know why he isn't in school. 

"Look at his beard!"

I pull the corner of my mustache up and touch my eyebrow like a goof. We all laugh at how long it is. I say goodbye and walk away.

Ten minutes later, I'm back in the parking lot. I charge inside. I walk through the whole store, just to guarantee it. She's gone. There was a ninety percent chance she was with someone, and I lack the courage to find out until it was too late. I don't mind that she's older than I am, probably, or that she has a son, or that I won't be in the same part of the country for the rest of the summer. I don't drink coffee or tea, but I would ask for her number regardless of my dislike of that cliche first meeting. The entire trip home I develop wild fantasy situations in my head for how badly it could have gone. I re-imagine the conversation the way I want again and again. I keep telling myself that anybody that confident and light-hearted is so certainly in a relationship that my chance of even being on her radar was less than one in a thousand. I have to tell myself this because I forgot to look at her hand. I have to tell myself this because the moment I walked away, I wanted to turn back. I have to tell myself this because this is not the first time I have walked away from someone.

I worked with her at Southern. We shared a tiny office space for the employees of the faculty, and we graded papers every Tuesday at the same time. I remember laughing and talking for so long that her boss walked in and gave me the evil eye for about two minutes, just to make sure I would shut up and work for once. She and I clicked, but by the time I realized what was happening, it was April, and I would be gone for the summer. I kept telling myself that I would ask her out for a date in August, first thing.

That final Tuesday, the last time I saw her my sophomore year (there was no way to know that), it was raining. I walked ten minutes away and decided to cut into the woods behind campus. It was so beautiful and quiet, but all I could think about was the off-hand comment she had made: "I don't like rain." She would like this rain, and maybe she would put up with it because of me. I vacillated for those ten minutes and then decided to try my luck. I ran pell-mell back to the office, ducked into the doorway and saw--an empty seat. She always worked later than I did, but today she must have gotten off early. I was going to ask her. I swear it.

I walked back out into that cloudy drizzle and meandered through the woods for an hour before I got too cold to keep going. I was melancholy, and with good reason. I blew it.

That summer, she met someone and they were steady for nearly a year. I moved on with my life and rarely saw her at work. I'm chased by this memory, still. I'm constantly bothered by "what if." This walk in the rain, this empty office, this moment led me to two relationships and an anguished sigh in a Goodwill book section.

I walk from the store into the blaze of an early summer day. It had taken me five minutes to find the courage to talk to her and ten minutes to remember that we would never see each other again unless I did something about it. It will take me years to forget. She is the first person I would have asked on a date since 2012, and it's still because of the first person I would have ever asked on a date.

My thumb touches my ring finger again, where my wedding band used to live. Old habits.

Pampa

I'm with a gay guy in Pampa. Chris has thin hair on top, long, spindly legs, and a sizable stomach. His hands are pale, and he holds them delicately, like an effete caricature in a film. The light drawl in his vowels is paired with a high ceiling to his tone, but he doesn't sound like you're thinking; he's . . . complex. Human. The sibilant stereotypical "s" isn't his style. He's not overtly camp. He's wearing sandals. Chris is the only Couchsurfer in town, and I'm going to stay at his house tonight.

When I arrived at his house, he sauntered out the front door to meet me in house shoes, tank top and shorts. "You're Robby!"
"Yeah, and you must be Chris. Man, I'm so glad you responded. I mean, it's been a long time since I saw a bed. Very cool of you." I pushed my bicycle off the sidewalk and stuck out my hand.
"No problem." We sized each other up. He must not have been surprised at my appearance, because he didn't react. I was wearing my fading poly exercise shirt and the khaki-colored pants I wore every day. One pants leg was held tightly to my ankle by the darts I put in at camp; the other was held down by Jacki's reflective strap. My helmet had pushed my hair into some short waves I accepted because the other option was my natural board-straight straw. My bicycle was still clean, sort of. If only I knew.
"I've just been down to the White Deer Land Trust museum and through the park--nice town! Oh, is there a place to put my bike in back?"
"Of course, yeah, of course. Just come on around here." As he turned on his heel, my eyes followed him to the gate in the fenced backyard. He opened it and waited for me. I smiled, but I was having trouble getting the size of this man. His glasses were too small for his face, I decided. And shorts were decidedly inappropriate for this weather. He continued the conversation while I pulled a few things from my bags. "Did you like the museum?"
"What? Oh, yeah. It was like walking into the nineteen twenties, very cool. And free, too. Probably the best small-town historical society I've seen on my trip." I had seen two.
When we got inside, Chris pushed a cat out of the way with his feet to show me the bathroom. "There are towels in this dresser, so feel free to use one. The shower . . . well, you probably know how to work a shower, right? Anyway, just don't worry about Grunt. She'll meow at the door because she likes to sit here when I shower. And sorry about the mess, too, please. I'm about halfway through moving." I looked around. Between two doorways, there was a sink. Opposite the toilet was a dresser. On top of the dresser, there was a ceramic rabbit, three mis-matched cups, and a vase filled with plastic flowers, surrounded by a handful of pencils, a stack of plates, a salt and pepper shaker set, and a few coins. The sink had a half dozen other cups and a few decorative plates. Stacked cardboard boxes stood sentry beside the doors, and an assortment of dusty magazines held them down. There was enough room to stand and turn in place.
"It's perfect. I've never been more glad to see a shower."
"I'll be out here when you're done! Holler if you need something."
I looked through to the other room, where boxes sloped down from all four walls to meet a mess of cat food both in and near a set of bowls. Chris may have been halfway through moving, for all I know. But Chris' house is not half-moved. I know the same dark impulse that fomented his mess. It ripples through my family, too. I couldn't see the countertops in his kitchen or the floor beside his bed. Nobody normal stacks clean glasses on top of magazines on top of cardboard boxes in their bathroom.
When I got out and got dressed, Chris shouted from the living room. "You hungry?"

That's why I'm at a Mexican restaurant with a gay man. Chris is telling me about coping with his extensive family, all of whom live in Pampa or Amarillo. Everybody knows everybody else. Nobody can keep any secrets. "Do you know that when my Dad died, we found a lot of secrets in his paperwork? I mean, you'd think that when you know a guy for thirty years, you'd know most everything about him. But we found some paperwork he filed--" at this, Chris leans in, conspiratorially, over his enchiladas. "He was going to adopt my cousin for a while. In the paperwork, it came out that my aunt was using heroin when she was pregnant. I mean, we always knew my cousin was strange, but I wouldn't have thought Dad was going to adopt him. He didn't, anyway."
I can't stop Chris. He rattles off stories about his time in Pampa, generalizes about Texans and tourists. "You saw the cotton, right?" I had. "You pick any? Most people pick the whole boll, but that's not the cotton. You probably picked a boll." I had actually taken the wool out of the clasping crispy leaves very carefully, but I couldn't convince Chris. I just laughed and nodded when he repeated himself. "I went to a good Christian college in Mississippi, and let me tell you! . . ." A young couple came in, dressed to impress, North Texas perfection. His cowboy boots didn't have a lick of mud, and his three-sizes too large cowboy hat made his belt buckle look reasonable by contrast. She had her hair up in back, and where it was pulled back I could see her roots beginning to show through the bottle blonde. I pointed them out and Chris looked at me like I was slow. "You said you're from Texas, right?"
"I mean, I was born in Amarillo."
"And you think that hat is big? You haven't seen a big hat." The hat is remarkably big. The brim's wider than the young man's shoulders. "I used to own a hat that big, but I think I lost it to a guy who used to stay at my house. He probably took it when he moved out." I wisely decide to drop the hat. Chris, I am beginning to discover, has something to say on every subject, and his something is always more impressive than your something. I don't mind. It means I can just listen, and I don't have to say squat about my trip.
We pay our separate tabs as if to prove we weren't on a date, and we set off down the road on foot again towards Chris' house.
Chris rattles on. "I used to be in a relationship for a while. There aren't a lot of us up here, you know, so this guy was from out of state, actually, we'd only been dating for a few months, anyway, and one time when I came home from work he was waiting for me with a collar. I was like 'Help, me Lord! What is this?' and he told me he wanted to wear the collar and have me treat him like a dog. He was gonna do his business in the back yard, would you believe it?" I wouldn't, apparently, because Chris continues. "Anyway, I wasn't into that, necessarily, so that relationship didn't last long. Oh, Lord! The things people get up to. There's a whole lot of kink in this world, and you don't know the half of it." We shuffle across the sidewalk and past the Braum's. The wind kicks up the smell of dust and the light fades. We jog across the road and Chris starts laughing at another memory. "I tell you what, sometimes it's the people you don't expect, actually. I told you we were going through my dad's things, right? You remember. He had a great big black dildo in his house! It was the size of my arm--" and so on. I laugh at all the right places and ask small questions when there's space for them. Back in Chris's house, we talk, or rather he talks until he had to leave for work.
"What time are you going to be out in the morning?"
"I think probably with the sun; I've got a long way to go. I'm trying to go to, uh . . ." I pull out my phone. "Alibates National Monument, I think."
"Oh, the Flint Quarries! That's some fantastic country out there. My cousin and I drove through there just last week and we didn't take the main roads and some of the canyons!" He ploughs through that story and one about his first car, which he purchased from his grandmother and promptly wrecked, before he stands up decisively. "Well, you know where the bed is, don't mind Grunt, and have a safe trip if I don't see you in the morning!"
"Oh! Thanks, uh-- thanks for everything, Chris!"
We don't shake hands, we hug. It seems like what we both expected. He slips into his flip flops and goes to unpack boxes all night at Walmart. I sleep on top of his bed in my own sleeping bag. There are Christmas decorations, a case of water, a stack of blankets, picture frames, an old pair of shoes. The only clean space in the room is the path to the bed and the space where his body hits the sheets. It's strange being in Chris' house and not minding. I fall asleep almost instantly.

Awake again.
Nights are too short.
I make oatmeal, just like every morning, with a spoonful of peanut butter, and by the time I've clipped into the bike again, the morning is just turning gray in the east. It's gonna be nice, I think. It's hard to tell; with nothing to slow down the wind, storms blow up awfully quick around here. But Pampa is the last town of any size until Amarillo, and that's still a few days away. I'm getting too cold at night, and I'm tired of shivering. It's been nearly a month since the first freeze in Missouri. My sleeping bag is essentially paper-thin, and the aluminized blanket around it isn't doing anything but holding in the wet. It's time for long johns, and not any terrible cotton ones, either. Cotton holds in moisture. Cotton is death. I'm not interested. I go to a Carhartt shop, I go to an exercise store, and I'm headed to Wal-Mart. The Carhartt shop owner is extremely kind, even running into the back just to see if she has everything, but of ten pairs of long johns, ten are cotton. They're nice, I'll give you. I bet they would keep me warm, but they wouldn't if they were wet, and that's what I'm afraid of. Everything is cotton, either entirely, or mostly. I'm getting to the point where I'm ready to give up, and then Tractor Supply hoves up into sight. I might as well. The sun is already up and I'm tired of wasting time.
In the Tractor Supply, I look mildly lost for ten seconds, long enough for the saleswoman to ask "Can I help you?"
"Yeah, I was looking for some long johns?"
"Sorry?"
"Like . . . long underwear."
"Oh! Just over there," she says, pointing. I smile, and she smiles back. I jog over and find cotton cotton cotton cotton wool. You won't understand this moment unless you bask in it. Empathize with my month-long search, please. I've looked in Joplin, in Tulsa, in Oklahoma City. I had nearly given up hope, gone on Amazon and had something mailed to a post office ahead of me, and I see the wool/poly blend and legitimately shout with excitement.
I almost run with them to the checkout, where a cute girl is running the register.
"I need to thank you," I say to her.
"What? What for?" She smiles, just a little.
"You have no idea the struggle I have had to find non-cotton long johns. And you and this beautiful store have them." I pull the bag to my lips and give it a hearty, comical kiss. "I will be warm forever, now!"
She laughed. It was half nervous, half relief. I don't give two toots if she thinks I'm weird. I just couchsurfed with a gay half-horder and I have long johns. The world can't keep me down.

Shady Cove

I think my journey isn't over, but my book has somehow fallen off.

I'm in Pampa, Texas, and I have so much to say about Chris, but I'll never do him justice. I stayed at his house for one night, and he talked to me for four hours, and what he said has all run together.
I hate leaving things. I was doing so much better when I wrote as I lived. Trying to remember what happened, to reconstruct the feelings I had at the time, is increasingly difficult. And I'm trying to live life again for the first time in a year or so, rather than putting it off. I took the GRE and applied to substitute teach.
But I want to finish. You don't even know about Todd the vagrant who doesn't wear shoes or the single leaf of pot I own. You haven't heard about Walnut Canyon or the worst road on Earth.


There's a lot of story out there, and I lived part of it. I hope I get a chance to share it with you before we both die.

Allison

35°38'54.5"N 100°00'40.4"W

I have camped somewhere perhaps I oughtn't, but I was so exhausted after my sixty-something mile day that I saw a break in the fence and I practically dove for it. The hammock is up, supper is snatches of granola bars and trail mix, and bed is forthcoming.
But through the wind and the crickets, I can hear them. West first, owing to their wildness and frontier essence, East following, because this far into the continent, there's no distinction. Coyotes. They sound different than I expected, even though I've heard them before many times, and often near my own house in Missouri. I expect the low cry of a wolf or a hound, something loud and strong, something I could make with my own voice. What I hear instead is an altogether higher sound; coyotes are sopranos. When one picks up, they all tend to cry out together, giving the pack the sound of a fountain bubbling out across the wide plain. And it's high. They make the top notes of a song from a different world, one altogether foreign and uncomfortable.
The trees that hold me up are scrubby and short. I've had to use branches on their outside edges, and even so, the nylon at my head is rubbing one trunk, at my feet, the other. When the wind gusts, the edge of the hammock catches like a sail and moves, scraping bark and twigs like the bow of a violin, but the music it makes won't soothe me. Mixed with the coyotes, it's a haunting melody.

My watch alarm wakes me at an ungodly dark hour, and I pull down the hammock without a flashlight. Breakfast is two more granola bars. I can't be trusted to light a stove in the dry brush of my camp. The road is empty. On the horizon, far away to the southwest, a line of flickering red lights blink on and off in unison, marking a distant wind farm. Nothing changes for half an hour but the soft quality of the light. My breathing is mechanical. My feet spin at a nearly perfect rhythm dictated by the near-flatness of the road.
Finally, the road comes to a dead T, and my path turns south. That's when I see it: a sunrise to rival my euphoria at Foss. I start to wonder if I'm getting ungodly lucky, or if sunrises and sunsets are just better on the high plains. My mother always said the sky is bigger in Oklahoma and Texas, and I think she meant it as a joke. In Missouri, where I grew up, there's always some kind of tree to block your view, even further north, away from the river, where the land changes ten feet of elevation for every mile you walk. Even there, farmers have fencerows and solitary giants. But here, where trees don't scrape the sky as much as cower from it, there's nothing between the eye and the horizon. The dawn is allowed to stretch, to yawn and gape, to take its time.
Southbound into Allison, Texas, I keep stealing glances at the sunrise on my left. It keeps getting better. By the time I reach town, the colors are starting to become unrealistic. I'm laughing, because nobody would believe the way gold can fade into purple so fast you don't notice the absurdity of the pink between. I drop my postcards and consider leaving town when I see a truck pull up outside what looks for all the world like an unconventional restaurant. There's no "indoors," but there are picnic tables scattered around. There's a sign that says "Open!" and a service window in the side of a small pre-built structure. I make a gamble that nobody will mind if I borrow one end of a picnic table for breakfast.
The woman inside looks out and sees me before I have a chance to ask for permission.
"Hello, there! You look like you've come a long way!"
I take the time to explain my journey while I pull out my breakfast makings. Peanut butter and oatmeal--preferably Raisin, Date, and Walnut--and a stove to boil the water. This is my every day on the trail, partially because the oatmeal is very cheap, and partially because it's a flavor I haven't gotten sick of yet. A thought occurs to me while explaining that I started in Massachusetts. "I'm wondering if you could boil any water for me? It would save me some fuel and work."
"Of course! Is there anything else I could get you? Toast? Eggs? I haven't set up for the day yet, but if you've got some time . . ."
This is the best idea I've heard in a long time. "Yeah, I would love some eggs and toast, are you kidding? I'm not in too big a hurry. I'm just trying to get to Pampa, and it's only, what? Fifty miles away?"
She shakes her head like fifty miles on a bicycle is the craziest thing she's ever heard. Maybe it is. While she runs water to put on her stove, I've got a moment to look around. I've already dropped by the post office. Across the street, there's an old gas pump that looks like it's mainly rust by now. There's a sign for a church across from a separate church. Add twenty houses and that's Allison. The edges of it are extremely well-defined. You would never have to guess at where the town ends and the prairie begins. Looking east again, I see that the sunrise has clambered up over the horizon and begun to stretch itself luxuriously across the sky. The few clouds that streak it only serve to augment a color palette that would drown in pink otherwise. Now there's a flashing of yellow smeared across the underbelly of every purple cloud, and high overhead the pink of the sun is fading into royal blue as the world wakes up. I walk down past a duo of barking dogs to a place where houses and trees don't obscure my vision. For whatever reason, an old friend comes back to me: "I don't know why all these people keep taking photos, taking photos. All the time!"
I ventured an appeasement: "Maybe they want to remember later." We were standing on a bridge overlooking the Neuschwanstein castle. I had already taken a dozen photographs, searching for one I might be able to put on the wall. I had already bought a watercolor from a man who had picked the perfect spot and set up a stool and easel. I was trying to cling to the moment, and when she thought about it, Shaina's nose crunched up with her eyebrows.
"All they will remember later is taking pictures. I think it is better to just look at the thing and to live that moment."
It's hard to say which sight was subjectively better. The sunrise had the ephemeral feel of all atmospheric tableaux, and the castle had an unfinished permanence. Both sights were on the cusp of perfection, but while the sunrise was constantly growing and changing, the castle was captured in a final moment of near-perfection. The first was alive, the second in stasis. It's hard to say which was subjectively better, but I have no photographs of the sunrise that will never again occur. Simultaneously, I could take you directly to my collection of photographs capturing the same view of the castle that you could pay to see today. Maybe Shaina was on to something, but I applied her advice in a topsy-turvy way.
By the time I return to the little Allison Diner, the proprietor isn't the only person there. She sells two pre-made sandwiches to the man in his dually pickup and brings me two cups of boiling water, two slices of toast, and an egg. Fantastic. As she sets down the food, she throws me a pointed question. "You're not going anywhere, are you? I've got to go pick up Lucy and she'd love to meet you."
"Oh, I'm stuck to the bench until the food is all gone, guaranteed."
"Good." Lucy, it turns out, is having car trouble and needs a ride to work. By the time they've made it back, I'm only through with the eggs and toast. Allison is a small town; it isn't far to go. I repeat my story ("From Massachusetts? Holy heck!") to the new arrival, and an older woman pulls up in her Cadillac DeVille to hear the tall tale too ("Where do you sleep? And aren't you afraid on the road?"). Lucy takes a photo of all of us on her phone, to share the moment on Facebook. "Ain't a lot that happens around here. I bet most everybody already knows. Wow! Bicycling across the country. That's crazy." I write down the address for my blog so they can check it out.
Riding out of Allison, the town abruptly disappears and the grass and cows begin again. The distant windmills are no closer than they seemed when I awoke. The wind isn't overwhelming. The day is nice enough I've shed most of my layers already. The sunrise is gone and the sky is a soft blue. There's a gas station with a proper shop and restroom fifteen miles down the road just past where the road I'm on dodges through the nothing town of Briscoe on its way to the smeared out twin towns of Mobeetie and Old Mobeetie. I'm destined to make Pampa by two in the afternoon, but I don't know it now. I don't know that this account won't be written down for another three months and change. I don't know that the sunrise will still rate among the best I've ever seen, and I don't know the regret of looking through the photographs I've got of my trip and only finding that early morning smear at the corner of County Line and 277 where I first turned south and caught a portent of the colors that would develop later. I don't know the regret of forgetting every person's name in Allison. I don't know the regret of finishing my trip.
But I'm only two thirds done. How could I know?