Joplin

Danny is calling people. I've given him the numbers from Warmshowers, but he's getting nothing back. I don't blame people. Let's be honest: at five in the afternoon, it's a little late to be calling people asking for a couch for the night.
"Hey, this is Danny, I got your number off Warmshowers. I know it's late, but I was wondering . . . call me back if you can. Thanks." He hangs up. I give him another number.
My plans are fluid. There's an enormous cemetery near the Walmart at the north edge of town. We are, conveniently, at the north edge of town. There's a long park running through town near the Adventist church. That's convenient because it's Friday. I'm not sure I want to ride south only to find the park well-lit, however. And if Danny finds a place, well. What's one more body? Onyx doesn't want to sleep in a cemetery--won't, actually. And I don't think two tents and a hammock will go unnoticed in the park. So unless things happen just so, this may be the last I see of these guys.
"You guys found a place yet?" The mechanic pokes his head around the corner. He's got a goatee that sticks out a few fluffy inches from his face. He's got 10% concern on his face.
"No, nothing." Onyx is calm.
"Well, I just called my girlfriend. If you guys don't hear back from anybody, you can stay at my place."
"Woah, Tim! Thanks." Onyx is great.
"Hey, Tim." I sort of lean around a product display to see him.
"Yeah?"
"Can I show up, too? You got room?"
"Sure, man. No problem."
Oh, I'm excited now. The freeze in Milford has me a little spooked on sleeping outdoors for a bit. I eat at HuHot because I don't want to impose. By the time I'm done and on the way to Tim's, it's dark outside. His street has very few lights on it, and I can't see the house numbers. I walk all the way into someone's back yard before I realize they don't have two garages (Tim's marker for his house) and I silently creep back out again. Finally, I find his house on the corner. Tim answers the door by opening the garage and helping me find a place to lay down my stuff. Onyx is about to do laundry, and I throw my clothes in with his and Danny's. The kitchen is warm and full, and everybody's sitting around the coffee table in the living room, laughing. Danny and Onyx tell me about a camp site in Pennsylvania on the edge of a river where the rocks are red, the water is deep blue, the trees shade the bank, and life is perfect. To them, that's the pinnacle so far of their campsites. I tell them about the summit of Mount Mitchell, about waking up in a cloud, about running down the mountain so fast I barely had to pedal for thirty miles. To me, that's been my zenith. Kayla's an educator. Tim obviously works at a bike shop. I've quit my job. Danny and Onyx saved and scraped to make this trip. It's a lovely evening.
Of course, the other cyclists in the room couldn't leave until they had enough money. But Tim wonders why I'm through so late in the year.
"I worked at summer camp, and I left after I finished."
"Summer camp where?"
"Massachusetts. Near Mount Watatic, if you know it."
"No clue. You know, I used to work at camp."
"Yeah? No way!"
"I was a musician for a long time. I went to school with a music ministry degree; I wanted to be a pastor. Now look at me. I'm not putting it to much use, am I?"
"I graduated with an English degree. You don't see me using it."
"Yeah, well. I worked at camps and churches for so long, but it never really satisfied my craving for creation. I wanted to make my own music, and that's just not the venue for it." By this time, Onyx and Danny are both listening, their side conversation stopped. "I worked in it for a long time, but I was also in bands on the side, you know? For a while, we played this club in town and I managed it during the day. But I quit that job after I got sick of the ghost."
"What? You said ghost?" Onyx asks.
"Yeah, there's a story about some woman who died in the club, a murder. She was killed by the musician and she stayed to haunt his gigs. Now, I don't know if the story is true, but there were some rooms you just didn't go in. Sometimes, when I got there in the afternoon, I could hear bumping and banging upstairs, and I know I was the only one there."
"I don't mess with that stuff, man." I'm serious. "I don't know what's out there, and I would prefer it kept to itself."
Danny looks incredulous that so many people in one room could believe in ghosts. "Are you sure? I think that stuff is more often drugs, you know? I don't think the dead come back."
"No, man. I know what being high feels like. That's not it."
"It doesn't have to be drugs, then. But it's the sort of stuff that sounds crazy when you say it."
"Well, the ghost was calm compared to some stuff that went down in that club. Stupidest thing ever? I had this ex who would just not leave me alone. We're talking she would show up to our gigs and just scream and scream her head off. I don't know if she wanted me back or just wanted to make me suffer? I'm not sure. One time, I've had enough. I text her like 'Don't show up tonight. We're tired of your drunk ass.'
"I bet she stayed."

"You bet she stayed. I left, though. I left. When I got back, she was still there, and the music had stopped and the band was trying to get her off the stage."

"An exorcism."

"But harder to deal with than the ghost!"

The party in the living room fell apart after the stories slowed down. Onyx put my clothes in the wash with his and Danny's. Tim shows me where I'm going to sleep in his study. It's filled with knickknacks and bits. There are twenty 1:12 model and hotwheel vans, the kind that poor bands use to run from gig to gig. He leans his head in long enough to explain: "I love vans, man. I can't help but buy a cool-looking one."

"Oh! These are pretty cool." I don't know what to say. It's not weirder than my quirks.

As I set up and try to settle in, I overhear Danny, Onyx, and Tim on the porch smoking pipes.

It's times like these I don't fit in. I'm used to it. I've been practicing my entire life. I know it's a weird thing to admit, but I used to wet the bed long after it was normal. Try to find the cause, I dare you. Medically, it's a black hole. I've looked, trying to find an explanation for what I was as a kid. All I find is a strong correlation between bed wetting and sadism. All the vastness of science and all it can do for me is make me worry about whether or not I'm a sociopath. When I was a kid, of course, nobody told me this. Mom just dealt with wet sheets by putting a rubber mattress cover under us. Dad dealt with it by telling us that it was more normal than it perhaps is, that he wet the bed into high school, that we would stop soon, and to not worry about it. 

I worried anyway. Isn't that just the lot of children? Powerlessness drives worry. And I had no power over my situation. Wetting the bed wasn't a problem at home because mom had the power and loved me. At camp, it was a different story. And my body didn't take a week off just because I happened to be under the thumb of my peers.

I had some excellent counselors to take care of me my first few years from seven to nine. But at ten? Let's be honest, I don't want to tell the counselor about the diapers tucked into the back of my bag underneath the t-shirt I know not to touch, lest it shift and reveal my shame. 

So I didn't. 

Every night, I would wait utterly as long as possible, a pull-up under my shirt. Just as soon as the counselor was about to lose his patience, I would spring the question.

"Tom?"

"—Oh, my gosh What."

"I need to go."

"Get out, man. You've got two minutes and then I come up there and flush you myself. Hey! I said no talking, guys!"

I'd slip out to the bathhouse every night and wait in the stall for silence and anonymity, slip off my underwear and jump into my oversized diaper. I walked like a cowboy back to the cabin, hoping against hope that other people could hear it crinkle like I could. Inside, I laid perfectly still, drawing no attention, waiting for my watch to wake me before the sun, when I could bury the wet diaper beneath the paper towels in the bathhouse trash can. Again and again, every night, no matter how little I drank, no matter how late I use the restroom, no matter how early I wake up. I still have dreams of using the restroom, dreams that become nightmares in the split second that I realize it's a dream, walking up choked with fear that the bed will be saturated. I still pee twice before I fall asleep, drift to the edge, and slump back to the bathroom a third time, my body unwilling to fall asleep with even a thimbleful inside. I don't know what I'll do when my prostate starts to go in old age. My nights are fine. I sleep like a log. I sleep—but my experience is painted with the brush of memory.

I remember Austin, the biggest boy in the cabin, finding my pull-up in the trash can. How is beyond me: I know we were doing our cabin capers, but he must have tipped the can or dug in with his hands. He was the only one with gloves, and when he picked up my pee-soaked shame, my heart tried to crawl into the back of my brain, using my spine as a ladder. He swung it around his head again and again, taunting the other boys, trying to bully someone into admitting whose it was. At the time, I was sure everyone knew. Note, looking back, I barely remember anything more. I stayed as far from him as possible, made myself small so I wouldn't be a target. Did the other boys laugh? Did they cower with me? Why and how did the episode end? Did the counselor intervene, or did we stop him ourselves? And why—of all conclusions—did I feel so different than everyone else, so alien, so badly misunderstood?

I'm an adult. I've ridden three thousand miles by myself on a bicycle. I choose for myself, fend for myself, rely on no one. And I feel exactly the same ostracization while the other men sit on the porch smoking.

When we all wake up, Tim has made maple syrup bacon for the visitors. I eat two breakfast burritos, but I go without the bacon. I'm still the loner in almost all things. By the time I've wrapped, strapped, and grabbed all my belongings, everyone else is still laughing and talking around the kitchen. I wave goodbye and pedal away to church. I'm used to being different, standing out. Besides. When I think back, really think about it? I want the only one cowering as Austin spun the pull-up above his head. I'm not so different in the end. 

Barton County

N37° 34'43" W094°11'07"

The sound of a spoke snapping can't really be described with letters. Onomatopoeia fails to fully describe the ping and tick tick tick of a newly-broken spoke on a fully loaded bike. I feel like it's because nothing I write down conveys the feeling the sound brings. There are few worse sounds than one that brings a heart-crunching anaerobic wave of fear.

Just outside Appleton City, I pulled to a stop, my tires throwing up little slow-settling clouds of dust. I bend over and run my fingers through the front spokes, rolling the bike forward, so I can feel them all. Intact. I throw my right leg back over the bike and kneel down. There it is: the spoke dangling like a broken arm, flopped out cockeyed, snapped where the spoke meets the wheel rim. I close my eyes and sigh, trying to slow my frantic heartbeat. The only bike shop I know of is in Clinton, miles away backwards, at the end of the Katy Trail. Pulling out my phone after only five miles, I'm forced to look for bike shops forward on my route. I'm derailed. Google shows before me a desert of nothingness for thirty miles, then an oasis in El Dorado Springs.

I tape the spoke to its neighbor and push off.

It's a lot of up and down past hills I've never seen before and long grass prairie purportedly full of boomers--prairie chickens--and I finally roll into El Dorado Springs with a slow leak in my front tire and the constant concern of a surely out-of-shape back wheel. I roll to a stop at the bike shop and just sort of stare at it. It's a motorcycle shop. They sell atvs and lawn mowers and do small engine repair.

I walk inside, sort of vaguely hopeful.

"Hey, this is a weird question, but I have no other options and I hope you can help. I'm on a bike, and I broke a spoke, and I just want some help and tools. Do you have a mechanic who can help?"

"Uhh--" The woman behind the counter sort of looks vaguely in the direction of the man behind the counter. He walks over.

"You just want what?"

"Help and tools. Is there a mechanic in right now?"

"Let me check."

I'm left looking at the Confederate battle flags being marketed as "Patriotic Pins" for seven dollars in the glass case below me.

They won't have a tool to remove a cassette, and I certainly don't have it, and a quick examination reveals its utter necessity. The mechanic they dig up watches as I rip my bags off and flip the bike. I can't take the spoke off unless I pull the whole rear cassette off, and I drive a sliver of metal into my thumb trying to do it manually. He does his best to give me ideas and to help me out, and the folks in the front are concerned for me, but none of it makes even one spit of difference. I turn the bike back right side up and go back to a breakfast and lunch place I passed on the way in. Scooters III, LLC isn't a very big place, and the decor is a mishmash of strange and chauvinist, but there's nothing wrong with their pancakes. I do wonder what happened to Scooters I and II. While inside, I plug my phone in and use it to check for the next bike shop.

It's in Carthage, sixty miles away.

I walk outside Scooters’ to find that the sky had spit on my bike and the five feet around it and nothing else. A few of my saddlebags are open, and I run my hand along the inside edges and find water. The ground has no evidence that anything happened. I entertain, briefly, the idea that someone came out with a sprinkler and sprayed my bike and walked away again.

The next bit of road ahead of me is terrible. The towns are two intersections, four houses, and a church, if I'm lucky. There's no chance of restaurants or gas stations. There's more gravel than pavement, and sometimes more dirt than either. I plan on making thirty more miles today. I turn off my podcast and dream of Carthage.

About four or five hours later, I've finally made Milford. There's a church in Milford, and I have a vague hope that nobody will notice if I use one of their outlets to charge my phone before I go to sleep. It's dying--it started out the day dead in Appleton City--and I'm really only slowing its inevitable return to its preferred state. When I pull up, the place is deserted, and I've only just settled down when a man pulls up to the back in a battered grey pickup truck.

"Good evening!" I pre-empt him.

"Looks like it," he returns. Without much more noise, he unloads a few items and ice chests from the back of his truck. As he walks in and out of the church, it becomes pretty clear that there are more people. I see two women helping him and talking about some upcoming programs. As long as they don't run me off, I'm set. My phone is charging, and I bet it'll get me to Carthage, no problem. The man leaves, so I'm surprised by another voice, mid-toned and kind, calling to me.

"Do you need something?"

"Oh! Uh, no. I'm trying to charge my phone. That's my bike over on the other side of the wall. I'm taking a trip across the country and my phone is dying."

"Wow!" Charles explains that he's the pastor of the church, and three times tells me to let him know if I need anything. Nothing occurs to me. "Well, just knock on that back door there. We'll be here for a bit."

"Thanks."

Two minutes later, I knock on the back door. I poke my head inside. "Uh, Charles told me . . ."

"Come on in! You're biking across the country? That's amazing!"

Martha and her daughter are inside, getting ready for an annual harvest festival. There must be two hundred chairs set up in the entrance hall of the church. I have to wonder where they conjure their parishioners. I stammer out what I need. "I usually make my meals on a camp stove, but I could save a little money and time if I could use your stove in here."

"Of course!"

There's only a little conversation. They're busy, and I let them work. Charles is concerned that I get everything I need. He's insistent that they probably have anything I might ask for. He suggests potatoes, onions, candy corn, toilet paper. I smile and laugh and tell a story about the Katy trail. Charles has to leave before I finish eating, and Martha and her daughter are just wrapping up by the time I wash my pan. I pack everything back onto my bike and I clip in. The temperature is fifty degrees.

Pedaling into the last glow of daylight, I keep my eyes peeled for a place to hang my hammock. There’s a creek I cross, but I’m not comfortable hanging my bed over water. There’s the far end of a huge yard, but that’s obvious trespassing. About a mile and a half from the church, I see a fencerow between fields that extends down to the road. The ditch doesn’t look unscalable, and the trees are old enough that they’ve driven out all the small plants between them. I lay my bike down behind an old fence corner on the east side of the road, pull all my sleeping equipment and my hammock from my bags, and cross back over to the west side of the road. There’s a mass of thorns between me and the trees, but I get through. A few times, I think to myself I’m glad I’m wearing long pants right now. The hammock setup takes some creativity. I end up hooking both ends to the same tree where a huge branch arches gracefully over a clear space on the ground. Climbing into the hammock for the umpteenth time, I tie my shoes together and chuck them over the hammock line. I’ve got a long compression base layer under my pants and three layers of shirts. I’ve got a thin poly head wrap and thin woolen socks. My sleeping bag is tucked inside an aluminized bag, the foot of which is pushed into my thin bicycling jacket and my raincoat. The sleeping bag itself is Coleman brand, rated by Wal-mart for forty degrees, which is, in my experience, utter hogwash, especially by hammocking standards. The first time I hammock camped with Russell, it was a wet forty when we woke up, and I thought I was going to die. I shivered myself awake, but at that time, the survival blanket I had wasn’t a bag shape, so it was just trapping water against me, and I didn’t have a sleeping pad under me. That morning, I called to Russell to establish his condition.Mine was deplorable.

“Hey! Russ!” I tried to be half-quiet. “You awake?”

Russ poked one eye and a nostril above the edge of his Eno and grunted. He fell back asleep almost immediately while I sat and shook with cold. When he woke up, he told me that the temperature, according to the Internet, was forty two degrees. When we went back to the same place, we took hammocks again, but this time we were smarter, perhaps, but definitely wiser. With sleeping pads and much better socks, we weathered another misty forty degree night.

But for all my cold-weather experience, my stay in the fencerow is worse. I wake up three times before one am, when I give up and crawl out of my hammock and put my shoes on so I can relieve myself. When I clamber back into bed, my bag is already clammy and unlikeable. It takes me about a half hour to fall asleep again. Even so, I wake up. I fall asleep. I wake up again, shivering. I spend about ten minutes just kicking my legs and shaking my arms, hoping that the calories don’t run out before the night does. I fall asleep, only to wake up with numb feet. Pulling my knees up, I snake an arm down through the bag and rub my toes. I’ve still got feeling when I touch them, so I’ve not got frostbite. I’m just very cold. I have a thought, then: the back door of the church is open. I know because I used the restroom after the parishioners left. All it would take is for me to put my shoes on, roll up my sleeping bag and grab my mat. I could leave everything else. I could ride the five to ten minutes back to the church, go inside, and set my alarm for early enough that nobody would find me before I left. It would be warm there, and depending on where I slept, maybe even soft. I spend a few minutes shaking in the hammock until the effort wears me out again, and I fall asleep. Every time I wake up, my feet are colder, and I spend less time awake. It just doesn’t matter: numbness is not pain. Besides, I’m tired enough I could probably fall asleep regardless. There’s something very comforting about having warm ears when it’s very very cold around you. With my thin little hat, there isn’t very much guarantee of that, but the hood on my mummy bag still won’t let me down. It’s the sound of the ripstop nylon, I think, on the hair on the side of my head and the soft shift of it as I breathe in and out. It’s a good sound, important too, because it distracts me from how cold my feet are.

When I wake up the final time, sunlight is streaking through the treetops and my sleeping bag is wet with condensation from my breath. I’m able to pack up, but everything is slightly damp. My socks, my shoes, my shirts, my hat. The pale morning holds no warmth. The side of my body in sunlight feels shockingly warmer than the shadowed side. There’s ice on my panniers. It’s the first freezing temperature I’ve seen on the trip, and the last I’ll have until New Mexico at five thousand feet. All this, and my spoke is still broken. It’s forty miles to Carthage, which will put ninety on the rim with that uneven pressure. I hate it.

When I set off for the morning, I’m wearing three shirts, a rain jacket, my long compression underwear under my pants, and my riding bib under everything. Three miles down the road, I remember I have dry socks in my bag. I remember this because even with the pedaling, my feet are starting to sting, and I truly can’t feel anything in a few of my toes. I stuff my feet into shopping bags that I tie around my ankle. This footwear change is accomplished at a stop sign, the bike leaning against my back, about to fall over on my head. Every mile is an exercise in trying to not sweat. I unzip the rain jacket. I lose the shirts one by one. Eventually, my legs are just far too warm, even with the zip-offs removed to make shorts. I find a farmer’s hay bales and strip behind them, finally back at my base-level cycling outfit: riding bib under grey athletic tee and shorts. It’s been two and a half hours since I woke up, and I’m finally warm.

When road signs start giving me directions to things in Carthage, I’m already within city limits. The bridge ahead is out; I’m positive I could ride right across, but I don’t take the risk. I pedal past a line of fifteen cars and trucks filled to bursting with walnuts; they’re waiting to sell. I watch men pouring five-gallon buckets of walnuts into a whirring maw, watch as puree flies out. I roll past a Civil War museum, past a handful of gorgeous churches, down a broad, shady avenue, and pull up outside a bicycle shop, the only one in Carthage, ninety miles from where I broke my spoke. I have a smile on my face. I unclip and lean the bike against a rotten porch pillar, toss my helmet on the handlebars, and step up onto the sagging porch. The door is closed and locked, the floor inside is strewn with bits and boxes, and my mind immediately screams. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, though. I’m very calm. I consider throwing myself through the door to search the floor for pliers and a sprocket chain whip. I consider burning the place to the ground. I consider calling Google and asking for a refund. Instead, I get back on my bike and roll back up the street to the Civil War museum.

It really crushed me, this bike shop being closed. But I knew I was close to Joplin, and my instinct told me that Joplin would have a bike shop. If it didn’t, I would go to city hall and burn the planning commissioner in effigy. Instead, I decide to take whatever small scrap of victory I possibly can. I roll up to the museum, I lock the bike up with my cable lock, and I grab my notebook and a pencil out of my bag. As I stoop to clip my bag closed, I hear the museum doors’ lock. If I’ve ever heard sudden, inexplicable defeat, it’s the sound of a metal bolt being thrown in the way of my casual interest in local histories. It’s a sound to make my blood chill, to chip teeth, to rupture vessels and shake spines. I think the worst thing about the sound of a locking door is that you do have to be so very close to it for the sound to reach you. You must be close enough that it becomes utterly tragic that you weren’t inside in time. I jump up from the bike and skid two lunging steps to the door. The person who locked it isn’t even in sight anymore. The sign on the door says the hours run straight through noon. It’s 11:55. I’m spitting mad.

The next bike shop is in Joplin. That’s not so far away: in fact, I could make it there today. It’s mostly just the principle of the thing. I’ve come three times further than I ever have before on a broken spoke, and I’m worried that the back wheel will be damaged by the time I get it repaired. Flying south out of Carthage, I’m burning through the early afternoon sun, zipping by trees touched by fall, when I see an all-too familiar parking lot looming. Twenty signs and statues with inconceivable teardrop eyes litter the periphery. A handful of cars make the lot look bigger for its emptiness. Well. I wonder if it’s open.

I did visit the Precious Moments chapel that day, but it deserves to be its own story. This one isn’t about locked doors, this story is about what happens next. I’ve just gotten to the bottom of the hill the chapel’s on, and I stop to let a handful of cars pass me. From behind, I hear “Where are you going?” Nobody’s hollered a question from a car before, but there’s a first time for everything. Turning around, I yell back.

“Massachusetts to California!”

There are no cars. They’ve all passed me in clouds of blue smoke. Instead, I’m faced with a guy about my age on a bike about as heavily loaded as my own.

“What!? That’s exactly where we’re going! We’re running Route 66!”

Behind him, toiling along with just as many bags, there’s a second cyclist approaching.

“Woah!” I’m genuinely thrilled. This is the first time since Sarah that I’ve seen a long-distance bike tourer.  “Hey, my name’s Robby.”

“Danny. Good to see somebody else. This is Onyx. We’re headed to a bike shop because I broke two spokes this morning. Plus, Onyx needs some tubes.”

“That’s nuts. I’ve got a broken spoke on my back. I’m going to Bicycle Revolution—are you?”

“Yeah, man! My spokes are on the back!”

Danny and Onyx started in Boston on September 11th and have already caught me. To be fair, I’ve gone out of my way and stayed for a week and a half in Tennessee. But to be fair, they went over the Alleghenies sideways, and I skipped them entirely. Besides starting in the same place and going to the same place and breaking the same things, we don’t have much in common. Their bikes are from Trek, mine’s from Salsa. They’ve got backpacking bags strapped to their rigs, I’ve got front panniers. They’re from Colombia, I’m from Columbia. But we’re all on the road now, and that’s similar enough. It’s four miles to the shop, and we decide to run it together.

I had forgotten how pleasant it is to have someone to talk to. About three days into our time together, I think I wore Sarah out with the once-every-five-minutes conversation while climbing a hill. And, as it turned out, there was a lot to talk about. About two miles in, Onyx’ back tire goes flat, so we stop and I lend him my frame pump to save money on CO2 cartridges. My front tire has been going soft faster and faster—by this time, an hour between hard and squishy—so we talk about tires for a bit while we pump. Compare war stories. Back on the road for fifteen seconds, one left hand turn, and Danny’s front hisses from solid to scraping the rim. We pull over again, and once he has it off, he lifts high above his head the staple that had gone straight through. He shakes it like it’s a vanquished enemy. He slips the tube back on and strains five minutes trying to get the tire back on the rim while Onyx and I talk.

“So, we found this amazing campsite last night. We stayed just off Route 66 in this abandoned building. The roof was gone, but we had our tents set up on the old floor. Just amazing.”

“That’s pretty good. Better than wet grass.”

“Yes, I know! And we saw some horses this morning in the mist: truly amazing.”

“Yeah, man. Well, last night was pretty cold. It was the first time it froze on me this trip, and I was cold because I was in a hammock.”

“A hammock! I couldn’t do that, man.”

Danny burst out. “Why!? Just go back on, you stupid tire. Why is it so tight on here?”

Onyx uses the distraction to find a few granola bars. He throws one to me, too. “Hey, man.” He turns to Danny. “You want a bar? When I get angry, I just take a breath. It helped me this morning with the flat.”

“Yeah, I know.” Danny drops the wheel and tire and goes back to his bag. “I just can’t figure this thing out.”

Eventually, I leave them there, Onyx cool like a smooth river rock, Danny trying to make himself laugh and frequently failing. Danny’s insistent they’re holding me up. I leave my frame pump with them again, because cartridges aren’t cheap.

I hoop and holler when I finally see that bike shop. A hundred ten miles on a broken spoke. Inside, the manager is kind, the mechanics are kind, and I’m able to pull out my patch kit to fix the tube on my front. I don’t know it then, but this first patch is just a harbinger of my rapidly failing front tire. What had started out as a thick layer of puncture-resistant rubber is now a thinning shell of empty promises. It’ll take me another six hundred miles to replace it. I gotta tell you: it’s a very gratifying sound, the hiss of a leaking tube. Even if it means you’ve got to spend some money or time off the road, even if it means the struggle of bags and dirt and time wasted, it’s a perverse sense of victory in a very real defeat. I’m cleverer than a tire! I found your hole and I’ll patch you through sheer ingenuity. Running your ear past a meter of silent looming failure is terrible. I don’t know it yet, but twice to come, I’ll try to patch a tire and spend fifteen minutes looking, feeling, waiting to find the hole. The clean, audible hiss of escaping air is a fixable problem, by contrast. It has a start and end point. It’s easily explained. I’ll take a hiss over the pop! and ting ting ting of a broken spoke any day. I’ll take leaking air over the scrape and thunk of a locking door. I’ll take a flat tire’s rubber sidewall squawk and squeak over the soft smooth shift of sleeping bag on my ears, as one increasingly means cold feet and the other means a concise, effective victory. But as good as it is, nothing beats the sound (humble, simple, effective) of Danny and Onyx walking their bicycles through the door and calling out—

“Hey, man! We’re back. Did you miss us?”

I’m starting to get very tired of being alone.

Appleton City

35.106111, -84.988794

The only open door is on the emergency wing after seven. The sun had just gone down, and the world is still that dusky bright you get for a few minutes in fall. The door slides open to reveal a desk and no chairs. I don’t think the E.R. in Appleton City, Missouri, is very busy. As I step inside, I make sure to smile my biggest, just so maybe the desk nurse won’t think I was injured. 

“Hey! Good evening. This is a weird request, but I’m riding through on a bicycle and I want to watch the presidential debate, hopefully in your waiting room?”

“Oh. I guess . . .” The desk nurse turns to the charge nurse and kind of shrugs. “There’s nobody to bother you, I guess. Yeah, do you know where it is?”

“I think it’s around here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. Let me show you where the remote is so you can figure things out.” She walked me around the corner and pointed out the chairs and the television. “Let us know if you get into trouble with the T.V.”

“Thanks!”

In one pocket, I have runzas from Russell and Amanda, and a pair of underwear in the other pocket so I could trade them for my riding bib in the restroom. I settle in with my phone charging and my feet up to wait for the debate to begin.

Two hours later, the debate has finished and I’m sort of fussing with all the things I’ve spread out on the chair next to me, trying to clean up and sort my pockets. My phone is still charging under the chair, I’ve got my shoes off, and I’m drinking the last of the water in my bottle so I can refill it before I leave, when from around the corner I see a head poking out.

“Who are you waiting on?”

“Oh!” I’m surprised. Nobody has seen me or cared that I’m here since I sat down. “I’m not . . . I just came in to watch the debate. The nurse at the desk said that was okay.”

“Well, we don’t usually have people around at this hour.” As she says it, I feel her invisible hands shooing me out the door.

“I know. Thanks.”

With all my stuff, I stroll out like a ghost. I already have a place to sleep all scoped out. The cemetery is a mile or so outside town, and the trees show up in satellite pictures from Google. I feel like a ninja sometimes when I pick places to stay, and this time is no exception. Even with the lights on my bike, it’s dark on the road. There’s a light every few blocks, big and yellow, hanging over the corner. I roll past a couple churches and a few dogs—dogs who always seem to notice me a little too late, after I’ve already rolled past their house. Down a long, sloping hill, the cemetery opens up in front of me and I roll directly in. Lifting my bicycle and spinning the front tire with my hand, I rev up the dynamo and give myself some light to see the trees by. There are three on my left, close enough together to provide some shelter from sight. They’re evergreens, and if it chooses tonight to open up on me, I think they’ll be dry enough underneath that my things won’t swim. As a precaution, I do put up my rain fly as the wind tears past me. Everything in place, I settle in for the night, the debate already miles away and a thousand items down my priority list.

When I awake, I can hear the crunching of gravel. The sun is throwing lines of light through the trees into the soft cemetery morning, and I know without looking I’m visible. I can feel my racing heartbeat on my shirt. I hadn’t done anything to hide my bicycle’s flag, a bright orange triangle on a stick I bought in Tennessee. Furthermore, looking out from under the rain fly, I can see the front gate of the cemetery clearly. I’m too visible. Shifting to look out at the foot, I can see a truck very slowly pass me and drive on toward the gate. I heave a sigh of relief—maybe he would leave me alone to pack and leave. I grab my phone just to make sure I have it, just in case. I’m glad I had charged it in the hospital. Maybe today won’t be so difficult, and I can finally listen to some podcasts to pass the time. I tap the button to check the weather, and my heart, tired of so many gymnastics, falls into my stomach when I see that I’ve forgotten to put the phone on airplane mode. My only link to the outside world has spent all night scanning an empty cemetery. The battery is almost dead. My head snaps up, and my heart seems to spin a little, down there, in my stomach. The truck’s slowly crunching through the gravel again, just fifteen feet from me. My mouth is cotton dry until he passes me that second time. When he’s a good distance away, I slip out of my bag, throw my shoes on, tear down my hammock, whip up my rainfly, roll my sleeping bag and pack everything back on my bike.

To my north-east, two trucks sit with their drivers-side doors adjacent. To my south, another truck rumbles, parked. And incessantly, my best friend rolls big circles around me, never stopping, and never too close again. I’m doing anything explicitly illegal, so I just make my breakfast and fly through my morning routine. The whole time, my phone is a useless rock in my pocket.

 ---

When I’ve wandered confirmedly in the grey, I have met a lot of people who think the lines of the world are clean and obvious.

The game of left-right, left-right is a stupid way to spend a lovely evening. The rules are simple: each person gets a turn to call the next corner as left or right. Straight is cheating. The road has to be clearly marked with a street sign, or be paved if you have that sort of thing where you live. The goal is unknown. I think that last part is what got us into trouble.

Delight and I liked to wander at night, and once or twice we played the game, just driving. We weren’t quite dating at the time, and if you’ve ever fallen for somebody when the nights are still warm enough that they feel like home, you know it’s impossible to stay inside the house. Or maybe you haven’t fallen in love the right way. I don’t remember if she called the left, or I did, but directly opposite the McDonald SDA church, there’s a driveway with a road sign. Don’t turn on that road. Because we did. I hate this story, because I know I should have seen that it was private, but I didn’t, and it makes me feel stupid. But I remember that it didn’t feel like a driveway; it felt like a road. And it sure went back a thousand miles. There weren’t any turns and the road kind of petered out up the hill.

Delight leaned over the dash to get a better look. “What is that?” she asked. “Is that an RV?”

“I don’t know.” I couldn’t see it very well either, and just in case someone was sleeping there, I didn’t flicker the brights.

“Ok. I’m legit freaked out now. This place is super sketch.”

“Yeah, we can go.”

I slithered a three-point turn out of the Pharisee and rolled back down the hill toward the road. At the bottom of the hill, Delight’s phone rang. Her mom was calling, so we just idled in this guy’s driveway, though I didn’t know it was, for about five minutes.

So much goes into this disaster. The private road, the long sojourn, the wait for the phone call. I could have made a different decision at any point and the homeowner wouldn’t have had time to get on whatever boots he stuffed his feet into. Maybe if Delight had just called right or not answered the phone, he wouldn’t have careened from his driveway just as we left. Maybe if I had pulled over at the church—his headlights were essentially on my bumper—we could have settled it without the police, like humans, and he could have seen my face and soothed his rage. Or maybe I would have been shot.

I drove down the road the only way I knew that would get us back to Ooltewah, north to Lee Highway. He backed off a bit when he realized I wasn’t running, just going the speed limit and driving calmly. I thought things were going to be fine, when, two turns and six and a half miles from Delight’s house, four cops rise up from the earth and wash the night in blues and reds.

The sergeant was the first to interact with me. She rolled up on me with her thumbs through her belt loops and I brought the window down and tried to seem calmer than I was.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?”

“I—actually? No. I have no idea.”

This about broke her.

“You were trespassing on that man’s land!”

“What?” She made as if to say it again, but I cut her off. “No, I was on a road. There was a sign!”

She shook her head and looked about ready to institutionalize me. “That’s his driveway. Listen, do you mind if I get your IDs?”

She was shocked that Delight was “so young—“ 19 at the time, a completely reasonable age for a human to be. She was shocked that I had a hatchet in the trunk, even though I warned her it was in the bucket with my camping gear. She was shocked that she talked the man out of pressing charges, despite her discovery that his only real concern—that we had stolen from him—was baseless. She was shocked that we were from Ooltewah. This I remember clearly, and with bile. “Why,” she exclaimed, “You’re not even from around here!” It’s fourteen and a half miles back to her station. When she let us go, we arrived at Delight’s house fifteen minutes before she could have made it back to her desk.

Yeah. I was in the wrong, technically. But even with the benefit of hindsight, even though I see how obvious it should have been to avoid trespassing, the police sergeant was exceptional. It’s amazing how her superiority blinded her, how her self-righteousness masked her empathy, how her absolute certainty left no grey for me, but drew the world in hard black lines.

I think I just make too many dumb mistakes and walk too many edge cases to get lucky all the time. Sometimes, I camp one too many times in a public cemetery and I finally encounter the gang of upright law-abiders who feel it’s their civic duty to slowly circle my hammock in their trucks until they’re sure I’m not there to exhume any bodies.

Maybe that’s why the debates, the election, the outcome didn’t shock me. I live in a different world than perhaps you live in. Look though I might, I haven’t found a single hard-edged line recently. All the world’s a gradient, and all the men and women who say otherwise look like fools to my eye. The Presidential candidates and the circling vigilantes live in a world of lines to cross, or not cross. I don’t know who’s painting all these boundaries and then trying to kill or maim the people who cross them, and to be honest, I don’t think it matters. All I know is that I’ve been floundering in the tenebrous wastes so long it’s shocking when the red and blue lights illuminate an artificial boundary underfoot.

 ---

I clip my left foot in and wait in the shadow of the triplet trees for my babysitter to turn at the gate, then I’m off, pedaling madly through the brick arch and away, up the long sloping hill to town and freedom, the mist obscuring buildings, lights, and edges, the world a distant murk of grey.

Sedalia

The man at the bike shop said "Back left." And then he made a vague hand motion to go with it. I get the distinct impression that his favorite part of every day is giving people advice. When he asked what kinds of tent I had, he was surprised at my savvy for having a hammock. The surprise quickly faded and he found reason to guide me yet again when he learned I have a Hennessy. I don't remember what brand he has, but he's convinced it's better.
"I like to stretch it out from the trees back there in there back left corner to the fence. They've got nice sturdy fence posts," he assures me. "But they don't like you hanging there. Oh!" He leans in to me again with his elaborate hand gestures. "And when you use the bathroom, use this one, not that one." I nod. I understand from my time playing video games with Curtis that I not a spatial dunce, but the abstract quality of his mime has utterly lost me. "The showers are better there. I don't know about you, but:" I nod, attentively. I am to receive more gems. He lays it on me. "I take my shower after I've done eating, then you can take the dishes in and clean them. There's a little shelf there, and you just lean over and let them out to dry while you finish." The expressive quality of his pantomime does not increase its information-bearing capacity. I ride away from him with very little real information, and promptly do exactly nothing he has advised.
I eat at a Mexican restaurant: the wrong one, actually. I miss the one I aim for by a quarter mile, but they are on the same street on the same side, so I hope I can forgive myself. That takes care of my dishes. I do try to find the back left of the campground, but it's made terribly difficult by two main factors: there are entrances the grounds on three sides, and they're all gated and locked. I check all four sides of the state fair campground and fume. I spew. I chafe. The website said they were open year-round. This is a grand injustice. The mile loop I make of the campground gives me time to work up a real hate. There's a chain link fence the whole distance around, and every so often, a gate. Along nearly the whole perimeter, there is a strand or two of barbed wire at the top. And every gate is utterly locked. Some I could clearly squeeze through or under, but none have a wide enough gap for my bike, and besides? Who needs the indignity? I can just as easily go find a couple trees along the Katy. Probably.

I have never been to the state fairgrounds before. I have driven past plenty of times, bit never had the time or care to go in and look around. I air dry, and I peer out the windows at the tops of buildings. I can see SWINE and EQUESTRIAN and a few spikes and spires sticking up. I grab a quick look at the map posted just outside SWINE. There's an FFA building, 4H, Sheep, Rabbits and something else that I didn't think went with rabbits, a Womans' building, and—you can knock me over with a stiff breeze—"Tunnel to campground." My heart breaks a brief staccato rhythm across my consciousness before I'm on the bike and tearing across the gravel to the tunnel. I'm so close—how could I have missed it!? I breathe a whispered calculation, a bet with myself: "What's the chance it's unlocked? Probably 5% chance." I struggled to keep my optimism in check.
It. Is. Open.
I roll through it into the campgrounds, singing my head off with some fool song, telling about how secretive and clever I feel. I discovered the one and only way in, only to find every electrical post is turned off, every water spigot is dry, and every bathroom is locked. Crushed. Broken. Despondent.

I zip back to the fairgrounds proper. Maybe there was no luck at first, but I hit upon a single bright speck: someone has left the bathroom north of the Swine pavilion unlocked and open. The water works. And, for a reason only the smell of a hog might explain, the bathroom had two showers. I am in business. I am also terrified that someone will come along and lock me into the restroom from the outside, slide the bolt home, and slap through the padlock. Just before I get in the shower, I pull my bike into the doorway, blocking it. Just in case. Things haven't exactly been "Back left," if you know what I mean. But I like the way it's going.

I ride through the fairgrounds as dusk is falling. I climb up into the stands where other people watch horse races, even though I jump a fence to do it. I plug my phone into a socket on the side of the MODOT building. I sleep in Highway Gardens. I discover the year-round section of the campground on the other side of the road of the college. I feel a little stupid, but I camp for free.
Nothing goes to plan. Nothing at all is "back left." I am satisfied.

Sunnydale Academy

I can see that my mother-in-law called. But it's Sabbath afternoon, and I don't want to throw myself into anything that will make me feel bad. My dad left a message, too. But I can't let that call go unanswered—my parents have both been in the hospital too many times in the last months. So I call him back.
"Do you have a minute, son?"
"Yeah, dad."
"How's your Sabbath?"
I feel like he's avoiding something. If he had bad news, he would have said it already. Anyway, I'm fine. He asks after Amanda and Russell, and they're fine. The cats are fine. The kitten is weird, but she's fine regardless. I've left the house to have some quiet, and the wind is flying across the open fields and filling my hammock with leaves, pushing it out to one side like a misshapen kite. One-handed, I shake the leaves out and load myself in.
"What's up, dad? Your message said you had some news?" Regardless, I can't imagine it's good.
"Well, we heard from Linda, you know, your mother-in-law." My breath catches. "Well, she said Delight is going to file papers. She's looking for an address for you so she can initiate a divorce."
There's a long silence on the line, filled by the screaming of the wind in the oak trees above me.
Dad starts talking about something, I'm sure. It's information, or sympathy, or concern, or advice. It's a human connection, but I can't remember it. I hear his low voice, calm like normal, two thousand miles away and right in my ear, trying to make things okay where he can't make things right.  He's my dad. But at a certain point, I don't listen to him anymore.
I didn't think she had it in her. She was always too afraid of change, always too willing to let uncomfortable things fester, always afraid of paperwork. I guess this time, she realized how easy divorce has become. Or maybe the minor inconvenience of putting my name on her taxes is more onerous than the paperwork. Or maybe she found someone. But this last idea dies as it's thought.
"Where did she send it?"
"I'm not sure. I think her mother said the last address she had for you was Curtis. Have you talked to her?"
"No, dad. We don't talk." And that's the truth. The last time was April.
Dad prays with me. I should crave it, but this time, it's just words between me and silence. All I want is the wind.
He hangs up and I briefly battle a desire to throw my phone from me. It belongs to Philip. I put it carefully in the pocket on the ridgeline.
I cry, only for about five minutes, the wind drying the tears off my face. It's more of a betrayal than an injustice. I didn't expect it.

The last time I cried about her was this summer at camp. Things were normal. Nothing was stressful in a new way, or damaging to my self-esteem, but about tween week, I was feeling extremely laggard. Things weren't easy, and I couldn't put my finger on why. So I just kept plugging away, expecting revelations. A full week of feeling like something was wrong and the universe was against me and Friday afternoon came around. You don't know me at camp, probably, so suffice it to say I am in übermensch mode from Friday at noon until Saturday at ten, when the kids go to bed. Every weekend is like throwing myself from a precipitous cliff, and this Friday was no exception. But this time, around one, I walked into the props closet and, without obvious reason or meaning, slow-motion collapsed on the floor and closed the door behind me. I flicked my radio off, and heaved three or four gargantuan sobs.
I don't know what made her come to mind. I couldn't share that secret if I wanted to, but there she was, dominant and oppressive. My whole self fixated on her for two minutes, crashing and letting a handful of tears fall past my ears to the floor. Then I stood up and went on as if the whole weekend was my responsibility and there was only me to do the work. Because, if we're honest, that's approaching true.

I wake up from my nap in the hammock. Dad left me with a single admonishment: be sure to talk about it with Russell and Amanda. That responsibility feels more oppressive than a full weekend at camp. I put it off until the hour I leave, but I follow that fifth commandment. I hate it. Neither of them know what to say. There probably is nothing to say.

I thought she would put it off, that I would get to choose my day. This trip is quickly becoming about losing control, not gaining it.

The Big Muddy

N38° 40.830' W091° 16.927'
There is something entirely inexplicable about rounding a corner and seeing a diamond-shaped hunk of metal and wood screwed to a post and being so elated that you burst into song. Nothing I do or say can possibly communicate to you what a channel marker means after the MR340. Every mark is another mile or two towards your victory, towards proof that you've got more grit than a lesser you.

When Russell and I set out to run the Missouri from Kansas City to St Louis, we knew a little of what we would face. Neither of us are strangers to a paddle, and we work together well as a team, I think. Maybe I grate a little on his nerves, sometimes, but the least he can say is that I make the time fly by. I remember the river, which turn hides a tricky tree, which corner has a good swimming hole. He makes runzas: a sort of dumpling-out-of-broth situation that reminds me of a homemade hot pocket. He keeps the calm. He paddles relentlessly. We make a good team.
We've done thirty miles runs of creeks near the old house on 124. We've spent days together with no other humans in sight, keeping a running tally of the animals we've seen, scudded over, or touched. We've heard the utterly unearthly hum of a swarming beehive filling the air from all directions, coursing through our blood and stopping our breath short. We've seen deer, shocked that we found them so deep in the untrodden paths of earth, jump up and bolt to the bank. We've fallen out, gotten scraped with mud, named unmarked sandbars and slogged through endless gravel bars. The world's longest uninterrupted (an important caveat) river race seemed like the next logical step.

When we passed this particular channel marker, I was asleep in the bottom of the canoe on Russell's mad scientist invention of a pool noodle bed. It will be remembered in the annals of history as one of those discoveries that was only a hair's breadth from a Nobel. If only it were easier to categorize.
I caught a cold on the plane ride to Kansas City, and the combination of camp stress, poor sleep, and an upcoming race converged in my chest as a tightness and a deep muscle ache. By day two, I was downing ibuprofen at the limit on the bottle. By day three, I nearly fell out of the boat somewhere between Washington and Klondike. I slept for thirty miles—a near tenth of our total race—while Russell paddled alone in the gathering, moonless dark.
What comfort must it have been, pulling out the spotlight and raking it across this very spot, only to see the red corners of the diamond shine back brilliantly in the night? What reassurance that his skill is rewarded, that the river is still just exactly where he left it, that the boat is still safe? I don't expect he'll ever be able to fully explain this marker to me, just as I can't explain it to you. I can get close, but you'll never quite know the instantaneous euphoria of rounding a corner and seeing a reminder of the sixtieth hour, the unbidden shout, the heedless song of joy I yelled as I rolled past on my bike.

Cave-in-Rock

N37° 28.029' W088° 09.590'
"So, are you homeless?" His rough voice rings out across the still morning. But he is immediately doubtful of his question. "Or are you traveling?" He eyes my bike over the hood of his truck.
I laugh. "A bit of both, really. I'm traveling across the United States."
"Oh, wow! So, what? You just camp places? Like, is this normal?" He walks around the front of his truck, which is sitting forty feet from my hammock, door ajar, hood unlatched.
I tamp down my curiosity about his situation and answer the questions he has about mine. "Listen, I'm going to make breakfast here in a minute, and you can sit with me and chill."
"Of course, yeah. You want a beer?"
"No, thanks."
"Yeah, man. I'm just sitting down here by the river, drowning my sadness. Drinking in the morning; how sad is that?" I don't comment. He sits down opposite me at the park bench. "So why are you going across the country like this? What's your deal?"
"I got my own sadness, you know? Something like a year ago, my wife left. When she left, I didn't get a say in what happened. She didn't want me anymore, and that was that. I guess this trip is about me being the hero of my own story again, you know? I want to make choices about what happens to me. I want to do something epic to remember that I'm worth something without her."
"That's huge, man. And I'm just down here because of my own relationship. Yeah. My girlfriend—do you know Hog Rock?"
"What?" I've got my stove out, and I'm trying to light it so I can just get my oatmeal. "No, what's that? Hog—?"
"Hog Rock. It's a bike festival just up the road. Me and my girlfriend were there yesterday, and I found her surrounded by dudes, and they're all touching her chest, and I mean, she's got such a hot body I can't blame them, but it made me feel like shit, you know? I thought she was with me, and here she's messing around with these other dudes, drunk and she got all mad at me when I said something."
I'm a little stunned. Delight left, but she didn't cheat on me, not unless she's stranger and more foreign than I thought. This guy's got a terrible morning on his hands. I don't deny: if I drank, this would be a good enough reason.
"So we got in a big fight last night. I drove down here just to clear my head, and now my truck battery died. I gotta wait for a jump, and who knows what she's doing. Maybe she's packed up and ridden her bike all the way home. It's the sort of thing she'd do; she'd ride a few hundred miles just to spite me."
"So, wait." I'm curious now. "You met at this festival?"
"No way, man. We were together for a long time, but we split—I think maybe because of her cancer—and now we're trying it again."
"But you're together? You weren't ambiguous? It's just the two of you?" The water in my pot has started to boil.
"Yeah!"
"Then, she shouldn't have. It's pretty simple to me. If she's messing with other dudes, she's breaking that promise."
"That's what I said! So what should I do?"
It's a strange light that struck the two of us there, filtered through the oaks that line the Ohio, dusted with the haze of the ferry in the background, cutting through the cool morning and heating my shoulders. This fifty-year-old biker just asked advice of a twenty-five-year-old vagrant. "Well, you have got to tell her this. You know; how it feels. Why you think it's wrong. You can't control what she does, but you can watch out for your own back. You've just got to be honest about it." It's old advice, but it seems like the best. Ramona had just three days ago told me that honesty—raw, unfiltered, unapologetic honesty—was the only worthwhile life policy.
"I already told her. That's why I'm down here. I don't know. If you were me, what would you do? If you saw your wife doing this?"
"My wife? I'm not sure we'll ever be together again. I always say 'ex for a reason,' but in your case there's something else, too. You're together for a reason. There's got to be something there worth fighting for. It's not an easy situation."
"So, wait. You don't think you'll get her back? But you're riding all the way to Oregon just to see her, and that won't impress her?"
My oatmeal is cool enough to eat, and the morning is still just chilly enough that the heat of it feels good through the cup. I take a bite and think. "I don't think she cares about grand gestures. And so she won't take me back for this. And if she tried to get back with me? I'm not sure I could be with her. There's no trust there anymore."
"Wait, how old are you?"
"Twenty five."
"Oh my gosh—" he rolls his eyes and his head into a smile. "You're so young. You're talking like this is the last thing that happens to you before you die. You'll find someone. You've got your whole life ahead of you." This rolled-eyes, rolled-head smile becomes my favorite thing about Beau.
He's from St. Charles near St. Louis. He offers me a couch to crash on when I get to Missouri. He shares my enthusiasm for adventure. He has a deep romantic streak he doesn't reveal, but which reveals itself. He has a tiny touch of gravel in his voice, and his face is dominated by his smiles. Before long, somebody drives up and gives him that jump he was needing. By that time, I've eaten and packed, and he's ready to go find Jacki, if she's still at the festival. We shake hands and part ways, one phone number each richer than when we sat down.

When I get to St. Louis, I text Beau.
"Beau! This is Robby, who is biking across the country, chasing his wife. While we were waiting for your truck to get a jump, you offered me a place to stay? I'll be in/around St Charles tomorrow night. Will you be back from Hogrock?"
"Yes I will b. Let me know a round about time you will here."
"Fantastic!"
When I texted again, I was on the southern bridge into St. Charles. He panicked and gave me slightly wrong directions to his house, accompanied by a totally correct address. Jacki forced him to text me correct directions, thinking I had gone astray. When I finally rolled up his drive and knocked on the door, she was astonished to see I was on a bicycle. They both thought this was a riot, and explained twice how Beau had said "He's biking here," and Jacki assumed—well, her four motorcycles speak to her prejudice. She is tiny; Beau wasn't lying. Her short hair didn't shock me; it suits her, or she wears it well, or both. I suppose I had been picturing a woman who didn't mind being butch, but her hair length isn't a choice.
"I've been taking about my cancer. Other people, when they learn about it, they tend to tiptoe around the words like they'll hurt me if they say it. I have cancer! It's not hard to say."
Beau is making pasta ("I hope you'll like it!"), but every now and then he'll drift back over to the table and join the conversation. "My daughter was born with incomplete separation of the fingers on her hand. She takes a different approach to her condition, even though she's had surgeries and she can use the hand. The way she stands and acts, she draws attention away from her hand."
"I didn't even know, for a while! It's basically invisible!" Jacki interrupts. "I mean, she hides it well."
"And on the other end of things," Beau continues, "Jacki doesn't have to hide her hand or her cancer. It's just the life she has, and she's gotten past needing to fit in." I glance down. The disease in her lymphatic system must lead to fluid retention in her arm; her hand is about the size of Beau's. It's subtle. I wouldn't have noticed, but for the two of them drawing attention to it, but I'm not sure I agree 100% with his analysis of the situation. She leaves her hand conspicuously on the table, and to my mind, she's making it nonchalant where she might otherwise prefer to be inconspicuous. I don't look at her hand again. It's not conscious; I just don't.
Jacki apologizes for not being more active in the kitchen. She fell on her shoulder when she was fooling around on a pole dance at Hog Rock. She talks about being drunk enough to buy Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at Walmart. She talks about her trouble holding an apartment because of a thousand conflicting factors, and having to move twice before being able to unpack. She talks about her appointment with the oncologist the next morning. I get the impression that she's coping, but not flourishing. She's not living the life she wants, yet. Maybe the motorcycles are her way of taking hold, just like my bike trip is supposedly about me doing something I want, about me being in charge.
The pasta has chicken and bacon in it, but I eat it anyway. There's no way to explain I'm a vegetarian now. It matters less to me that they know this quirk of me than that I show my gratitude. These two have got garbage they're trying to work out, and they're trying to do it together. I value that.

The next morning, I'm packed to go and I find Jacki in the living room. Beau is gone to work. After I eat a fast breakfast and re-befriend the chihuahua (the terrier needs no such effort), I get my uke because Jacki was interested in hearing me play. She records the song on her phone. "Is it okay? I know Beau would want to hear it. He would want to be here."

Who knows how long I've loved you;
You know I love you still.
Will I wait a lonely lifetime?
If you want me to-- I will.

For if I ever saw you,
I didn't catch your name,
But it never really mattered:
I will always feel the same.

Love you forever and forever.
Love you with all my heart.
Love you whenever we're together;
Love you when we're apart.

And I choke. This isn't the first time I have played this song since she left, and it isn't the last I'll play it, but I can't remember the next verse, the next chord, the song. I'm in my head too much to be in the room. I look up at Jacki.
"I'm sorry. This is a pretty powerful song for me. I played it at our wedding, and the next few lines are the best."
"No, you're fine!"

I strum into the song again, and I pick up where I lost it.

And when at last I find you,
Your song will fill the air—
Sing it loud so I can hear you,
Make it easy to be near you,
For the things you do endear you to me!
Oh, you know I will.
I will . . .

When I first played that song, I was only dating Delight. I had loved it for a long time, but all love songs gain some ephemeral something when you've got someone you think the world of. All songs become about them. Delight, always a polymath, picked up my extra uke and bent to learning this one song. She never learned another, but she did well with this one. I played I Will when I proposed under a spreading oak tree in Red Clay state park, with a small wooden box full of our memories and with The Question written on the inside of the lid. She said yes. I still have that box, somewhere in my piles of boxes. It's stuffed to bursting with letters and memories I couldn't destroy of our time together. I sang I Will at our wedding, too. This was after she had forgotten the fingerings of the chords and probably many of the words, but it had a significance to me that was enough to push me to include it. It's a song I associate with our time falling love, with our happiness, with a hot sunshiny day in late July when we danced and ate peach pie and had all our friends around us. It's a song I associate with the embarrassment and heartbreak of loss, loneliness, and the public-private end to our marriage.
And I played I Will for Jacki in the living room of Beau's home in St. Charles. Now, more than ever, I'm trying to reclaim the words and the meaning, to snatch them from the jaws of my heartbreak and give them new life. There, in the home Jacki calls temporary, a place of their relationship's start and end and start again, a place for trying something crazy with someone else because life is short and feeble and cancer or a collision on a bike may take us at any moment, I played a song about forever.

Sometimes, I wish Delight had found me worthy of forever. Sometimes, I'm glad she recognized that I'm not. Mostly, I wonder if she'll remember this song years from now, if she hears a corner of it floating through closing elevator doors, or a bar or two tinny and small on a sidewalk cafe's veranda, or a cover by a band she's never heard of before in a crowded room full of strangers or friends. I hope she will hold on to some part of it this, my song for her, forever.
You know I will.

Hopkinsville, KY

N36°50.766' W087°29.090'
I drank three glasses of Sprite before my meal arrived. The speakers in the strange double-vaulted ceiling blasted trumpets, and the air conditioning chilled me through my still-wet shirt. Cancun Mexican Restaurant was about two miles out of my way, but it was probably my best option for a sit-down establishment where I could charge my rapidly dwindling battery. Plus, Mexican is almost always kind to a vegetarian, even in the south. When my burrito+quesadilla+chalupa arrived, I tucked in with extreme relish.

My day began in Hendersonville at my Aunt and Uncle's house outside Nashville. Everything was charged up, and I left with an extra jar of peanut butter and three apples (one of these apples led to me biting my lip three times and the third so violently that I swelled and bled, but that was days later). I practically sailed along the rolling country hills towards the Kentucky border. For great stretches of time, I was able to abandon Google maps and just roll peaceably along one road without worrying about turns. I prefer it, actually. I hadn't had such freedom on my whole trip until I hit the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the main concern is going South instead of North and where the next food is coming from. It's so nice to be able to ignore my phone and focus on the squeak of my bike chain and the shudder of the tires on the asphalt. It's freedom to be able to look at the close-cropped corn fields and the yellowing beans, to see the trees on the distance and measure your speed as you close on them. Before I quite knew how far I had gone, I realized I was exhausted.
Stopping at a church parking lot and lying down for a rest, I tried to plan where I would eat. I just fell properly asleep for about two minutes. My shoes chinched down on my feet, my helmet cradling my head as a sub-standard pillow, my shirt evaporating as I slept until the thuddering cacophony of a semi-truck brake basically lifted me back to my feet. I suddenly panicked about where I wanted to eat. Why did I waste so much time asleep?
I checked a map, but things didn't look exceptionally promising. A string of tiny towns lay between me and Hopkinsville, where, my phone promised, there was a lot of food.
On days like this, I achieve ridiculous mileage because I don't pay attention to how far I'm going while I'm doing it. I drove towards a goal I want, like my first 100+ mile day to Collegedale. I just do the miles. Well. Burritos are like Odysseus's sirens after a while.
Despite literally having fallen asleep in the sun outside a church, I rode another twenty miles, capping my day at seventy six at the Cancun Mexican Restaurant. I ate in peace and blaring trumpets. When I finally gathered my things to find a cemetery or a park or a roadside somewhere in the darkness outside, I was stopped at my bike by a man.
"That your bike? Where are you going tonight?" He had fashionable glasses and short greying hair. He looked to be gracefully leaving his forties, and his collared shirt was rolled up at the sleeves.
"Yeah, I'm just going to find some park somewhere. I'm not sure; I haven't checked my phone."
"If you need a place, you could stay with us, my wife and I. We're going to eat, but we'll be right back out. Maybe a half hour."
"Oh, that would be great! I have a hammock, I could even throw up in your back yard."
"You can even stay in a bed, take a shower."
Seventy six miles seemed like an exactly perfect number of miles, all of a sudden.
Eventually, Luke came back out with Ramona, a small woman with well-kept straight blonde hair and a ready smile, and they helped me load my bike into a trailer and drove me the only mildly-cheating thirty miles to their house on the lake. Luke and I gabbered about bikes and falling down and riding back roads for the miles to his house. When I told him about my siblings, he said his son also studied for a doctoral degree in San Bernardino.
"Wait--at Loma Linda?" I asked.
"Yeah. Have you--"
"Are you an Adventist!?"
"Yeah. I'm an Atheist, now."
"That's wild! Never in a hundred years."
We both laughed, me from shock, him from confusion, maybe. Adventists and ex-Adventists don't get on. There's something about having a close-knit community that drives the fringe away. Familiarity breeds contempt and all.
When I dragged my bags into the house, Luke warned me "Hey, my brother-in-law will be in the house. He's doing some work for us and we're letting him stay in the house while he does it.
Joe could not have been more different from Luke and Ramona. I rounded the corner as Luke called out "We have a visitor!" and Joe shifted see me.
He sat, shirtless and bristled in a barstool. Where Ramona was feline, Joe was ursine. Where Luke was refined, Joe was rambunctious.
"Woah!" He roared. "You weren't supposed to bring no giants in here! This guy's seven foot!" He insisted on me standing against the wall and getting measured after I explained I couldn't be more than six foot two and a half. Turns out only one member of their extended family is taller than I am. I think it's the doctor, but I'm not sure, now.
The second point of contention soon exploded. Luke leaned into the admission, almost begging for a reaction. "Joe, you'll never guess: this kid's an Adventist. Struggling." I did admit to that, but I didn't immediately see how that made a difference. It did.
"An Adventist! And seven foot! You should have told me: the cross I built today is only six foot tall. He'll sit on the ground when I hang him on it!"
I've never been threatened with death sooner into a relationship than in my new friendship with Joe. Nor more frequently. I thought when I turned down the gin I had done him a serious hurt. He really wanted to see if he could push me off my pedestal. "You're sure you don't want a shot!?"
"No, I just can't. My family has alcoholism--"
"Well, hell, I'm an alcoholic!" He said it like an invitation, but I laughed like it was a joke. "No shot?"
"Couldn't."
I left Joe at the counter to consider why I didn't like Ellen but still wouldn't drink. Ramona was inside the spare bedroom, changing the sheets. She looked up and smiled when I came in. "Is that a ukulele?" I nodded. "My nieces just came back from Hawaii not long ago with ukeleles. They call them oo-koo-le-le now. I guess Hawaii got into their blood. Do you play?"
We talked a bit about choirs and camp. We found a point of connection in the choral director at Andrews university. And I picked up my uke for the first time since i had torn my fingertips. I played Rocky Raccoon. While I sang, Joe rolled into the doorway, and Ramona fiddled with the sheets.
It's hard to gauge how well they liked it.

When I awoke the next morning, Luke had already gone to work, and Joe was up and rambling through the kitchen with his shirt still off, trying to find some coffee. I scrabbled together some breakfast from what Ramona had said I could eat and what I'd brought with me and returned to my room to throw everything back into my bags. When Ramona finally woke up, I had packed and was ready to go. I joined her and Joe on the porch to say goodbye, but it didn't happen. I didn't leave immediately. I talked with Ramona about why I was on my trip. For what might be the hundredth time, I confided in a complete stranger the terrible trouble with my wife with an intimacy I wouldn't dare use on an acquaintance.
"Ramona, I've been running from this for a long time, now. Maybe I should have divorced her a long time ago, I don't know. I feel like a coward." I felt like Ramona can come at this with exactly the attitude I need her to. She's from the same world as I am: the close-knit conservatism of The Church. She has to understand what it would mean to my relatives and friends if I initiated the divorce. But she's not in that world anymore; she's traded its prejudices for a different set. Ramona may see this the way I need to hear it. I wanted to know if I'm wrong.
"Oh, my gosh, no!" The sunlight slid through the distant treetops on the other side of the lake, and the side of the house where she sat beamed out in reflected glory. "You're doing what's right for you." I can't see how this negates cowardice, though. Because of the sunlight, she's hard to look at. I turn away again. My brain was rumbling with everything I could say about Delight to convince Ramona that we needed to be apart: how she became only self-motivated at the end, how she lost interest in me, found me a bother, thought I was in her way, how she closed up and left our relationship. My brain was rumbling with everything I could say about why I can't divorce my wife: how I feel about promises, how I don't have a biblical release until I know she's with someone else, how I sometimes still negotiate her return in my head.
I've come five hundred miles since I talked to Ramona on the porch on the lake, since Joe shuffled around shirtless, since she said goodbye with a hug that felt more like a mom's than a friend's, since she took a photo and ran up the drive and kept running up the hill to make sure I was safe, to make sure as long as I was in sight of her home, I was one of her boys. It's been five hundred miles and now I can't remember what she said to me. I could make it up, I suppose. Her perspective felt as conflicted as mine, and really all she said of substance was designed to make me feel adequate, safe, alive, alright. I don't want to do her the disservice, though.
I have Luke and Ramona's address. I intend on sending them a letter when this is over. Maybe it's because I would never have met them if I hadn't pushed so far that day, or stayed so long in the restaurant, or put my bike on the north side of the building without hiding it in the bushes, but I think more, somehow, of meeting them. Maybe because a thousand small things would have kept us from each other, I feel an inflated value to our hasty, one-night relationship. Maybe it's because Luke didn't turn away from a stranger. Maybe it's because Ramona, who didn't know me, thought I was valuable. Maybe I'm spinning gold from straw. I don't know.

This post has taken me the longest to write. Make of that what you will.

Hendersonville, TN

"I know two things. First, you're an excellent young man, and life has kicked you pretty hard. You've had a hard disappointment. I don't know, and I don't need to know everything about it to say that for sure. Secondly, you've got a family around you that loves you and they hope for the best for you." My uncle Don sits across the table from me, his plate untouched. His stare is intense. "Listen, I haven't been through what you've been through, Robby. I haven't. But I still know a little of what you're feeling, and I've gotta let you know: if you need anything, anything at all, we're here for you."
I hadn't seen my uncle in more than a year, and he was now trying to remind me why that didn't matter. His left hand is calm, still and quiet, on the table top, and his right circles in the air, emphasizing his point. It's strange, looking at him. He looks like my father, more grizzled but no less gray, beardless and tall. His eyes bore into me. I look away, I can't stand it. I know he's telling the truth, but we've never been close.
"Robby, that room you're in can be yours if you need. I know you're off across the country and all, but if you find yourself back in this area, you can stay in the room while you get your feet. I can get you a job—it won't pay well, but I can get you a construction job tomorrow. You don't have to say anything now, and you don't have to decide now, but I want you to know you've got options."
I nod. I'm not choked up but I feel like it. I turn back to face him. "If there's one thing I've learned in this trip," I begin, voice a little rusty, "It's that I've got people everywhere."
"That's true. Listen, i just need you to know: if you need a place to get your feet under you, just let us know. We're here for you. Maybe I'm preaching too much, man. Just let me know if I need to stop talking."
We continue in this vein for five minutes before aunt Lovell cracks open the bedroom door. It's half ten; I had assumed she was already asleep. Uncle Don jumps up and walks over to her, and I'm left contemplating all he said. It's terribly kind of him to offer, even though we both feel I probably won't need it. He returns and thumps down into the seat again. "Your aunt says I gotta stop preaching. Just remember what I said." He finishes his meal and we talk a bit about a show he's enthralled with called The Last Alaskans. When he goes to bed, he leaves me with a head full of thoughts. Tomorrow, my uncle Dan, who lives thirty minutes up the road, is coming to give me a lift to Grandma's nursing home. Don has already warned me that she's not conversant. I assumed she wouldn't recognize me, but he disabuses me of that thought quickly. "Oh, she'll know you. But she won't have much to say."

The next morning, I sleep in and make a few sandwiches for breakfast while the tiny dogs of the household watch. Tanner is skeletal and prancing, and is forced to wear a sanitary pad under an elbow wrap for his bladder control issues. Sadie Mae is the same breed, but pleasantly fat. She likes to sit on laps like a cat, and she was Grandma's favorite when she lived at Don's for a year or two. By the time afternoon has rolled around, I'm wearing my collared shirt and a clean pair of pants. I don't think Grandma will remember it, but I will. Dan rolls up and smiles at the door. Tanner and Sadie Mae go nuts. Dan is the most soft-spoken of my uncles by far, but even he manages a "Cut it out! It's me, you knuckleheads!"
In the car on the way to Grandma's, he repeats the warning that she's not very talkative. "She can't verbalize what she's trying to say, really, unless it's negative, if she's complaining about how she can't talk. So don't expect a two-way conversation." I'm not.
When we arrive, uncle Dan opens the door and she's already up, trying to get out of bed, which she's not supposed to do on account of her hip. He rushes over and calls the nurse. I stand outside awkwardly as the nurse makes my grandma presentable. When I finally get into the room, she's smiling away and stammering out half-formed sentences. I get the feeling that she knows what she wants to say, but she's like an aphasic. There's no connection from her thoughts to her words unless she's saying something familiar, something she's said a hundred thousand times before, the one phrase she won't lose until the end, I think.
"He's he's he's—a w- w- wonderfu-l boy." She says this as Dan comes in the room and sits near her. She says this when he turns off the t.v. She says this when he's outside the window, filling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds, and she says this when he returns. He's a wonderful boy, isn't he? I remember a year ago, when she still had language, though it was slipping from her like fog burns away in the sun. I remember she would say this whenever she came back from a reverie and saw dad or Dan sitting near her. It's a refrain, a reminder, an apology, a thanks. Now, it's near enough all she says. Once, as she points vaguely at something on the wall or the other side of the room, she stumbles halfway though a sentence, utterly loses the thread of it, and gives up. As she turns away, she says "I can't say it," just as clear as you like. I think it's an old, rutted memory, an automatic response. I'm not sure it's language anymore.
But she smiles.
This is a change from a year ago, when she cried to see us go, though we knew she wouldn't remember why she was sad in the space of an hour, if she was sad at all. My family has always seemed to have a deep pessimistic tendency, and grandma harbored it deepest. As she got older, she complained more and smiled less. This blissful senility, therefore, is a bit of a shock, but I'm not afraid of what it means. I take her hand and look her in the eye when she speaks like I know every word. I talk to her about setting a bear in the Shenandoah National Park, about swimming in the Ocoee, about working at camp. But when my uncle leaves to fill the bird feeder, I turn to a different subject.
"Grandma, I have some news about me. Maybe you remember Delight? She's my wife; you came to our wedding. Anyway, she's in Oregon right now. I don't think she knows where I am." I pause to collect my thoughts, but huge bombs are planted in most of what I intend to say, so I walk past it all. "I don't know what's going to happen to us. We're not very close."
"He's a a a w- wonderful b- boy." She's now looking at my uncle, who smiles and waves as he tips the seeds into the yellow plastic feeder. I let the topic die, and i hold her hand in silence as she stops taking and falls asleep.
I never would give up or trade my uncles, though they're staunch in their views and they tend to talk over each other. I wouldn't give away my family, though I don't see them nearly often enough and I don't really know their lives. It's enough that I have them, somewhere, and they're happy to see me when I do drop in. I have piercing regrets from time to time that perhaps I never built the connections I should. But with or without meaning to, my family has become a nation-wide support network. I have people everywhere, and they're all wonderful boys.

Lookout Mountain

N 35.0135° W 85.3416°
I sat with my Camelbak behind my head, my body cupped in the slant of the rock, twisted at the hips, my legs crossed and crooked. The heat was oppressive. I couldn't stay awake, really: I couldn't. The fellowship meal at the East Ridge Adventist Church had knocked me out. Postprandial.
When I woke up, the back of my shirt was drenched in water that had leaked from my Camelbak's bladder. I hadn't cranked the lid closed. The rubber gasket is failing slowly, and though I guess that's something I could replace, it's something I won't. Not yet. Besides, that way I had a healthy base of wetness to use as a starting point as we hiked up to Point Park from Craven's house on the eastern edge of Lookout Mountain.
If you're savvy like me, you buy an America the Beautiful pass which gets you free parking and entrance at Point Park on the Saturday you arrive and at the lake above Ocoee Dam 1 the Saturday before you leave. If you're savvy like the young adults from East Ridge, you park at Craven's house for free and walk to the top, again: for free. My method would have involved a lot less sweating, anyway. The summit path we walked snaked back and forth up the mountain, twisting over ruts and logs and hillocks. The ridge pushed up into the sky on one side and slid down to the river on the other. My shoes clicked on the occasional rock, and I could feel sweat sliding down my back with the leaked water from my backpack.
"Hey, Curtis."
"Yeah."
"I've been asking people this question and I want to know your answer. If you were ruler of the world, what would be your first three orders of business, and where would you put your secret base?"
"Oh, okay."
"It doesn't have to be secret. Where would you put your base?" For whatever reason, my mind always jumps ahead of me, and I unconsciously assume that to become supreme ruler, you would essentially have to be a supervillain and your base would, therefore, be secret.
"Let me think," Curtis pants out, breath on the edge of ragged.
I ask these sorts of questions a lot. I don't know if mind exercises are just easier, or if they feel fun and that's why they work, but an insane hypothetical tends to draw people out faster than, say, asking about their first breakup or their mom's quilting. It's all harmless, but I can poke at things when it's your fake future we're discussing, and not your real past. I can pull things apart, and you don't get hurt by it. When I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I asked this question of Sarah.
"I would put my base in the Painted Desert." I heard her say she would put her "face" there, and I thought that would be awesome.
"What, like visible from space, or something?"
"No, invisible. I would make it blend with the landscape."
"So you would use native rocks and vegetation, and . . ."
"Yeah, really make it blend in."
I had a picture of an enormous woman's face staring out from the rocks of the high plains at anyone lucky enough to get a hundred kilometers above. I thought this was brilliant, and said so.
"No, my base."
"Oh, that's disappointing."
Sarah said she would change the world's economic incentives to be oriented towards the greater good, not personal gain. "Wealth," she argued, "should not be the major motivator of human actions."
"Okay. But what if my greater good--my personal happiness--is dependent on how fast a car I can drive? And I don't need to go to school for that. Just get me a fast car."
"You have to go to school."
"So who decides what this ultimate good is? Because if it's not me . . ."
"I decide. You go to school."
"Can I still get that fast car, though?"
"It can't be a gas guzzler. Probably a Tesla."
"Okay, you have my vote. I'll take mine now, please."
We did laugh, but I poked the weaknesses in her economic platform a few more times just to see if they poked back. I'm not sure, but I think that might be why we won't be friends forever, why she didn't give me her phone number and I didn't press her for it. Why when I make it to Oakland, I'll ride past the nonprofits and not call to ask if their designer's name is Sarah, just so I can check up on her. I think she could tell I wasn't the sort of person she needed, and all because she was hypothetical ruler of the world for four questions.
I'm still waiting for Curtis' answers, explaining Sarah's. He's ahead of me on the path, so his words are sometimes harder to make out. He only turns around to look at me for half of a sentence or less before the rocks demand his eyesight again.
I don't remember his answers, which annoys me. We talked about diseases and AI and energy independence--he's bullish on nuclear power, like me, but not to the level of Chris Dant--but I can't remember even where he said he would put his (secret) base. It bothers me that I can't remember. But I do remember being utterly comfortable with his answers, with poking holes, with hearing him shore those holes up. I remember revealing my concerns about space travel and hearing him echo it all back to me. (And I think his reflexive first policy decision was "Resign.") But as much as I don't remember exactly what he said, I do remember stopping where an old hotel was built on the edge of the cliff and staring out at the river aghast.
"If I had a time machine, I would come back and stay here," he said.
"Oh, man, I am right there with you. This would be the most boss hotel ever."
On the way back down, I asked Chris Dant the same questions. He was a little more Chris Dant than Curtis was, whose answers were aligned with his sociopolitical beliefs. Chris was infinitely more practical.
"First order of business. Find who your enemies are and eliminate them, because once you've consolidated power you want stability, and you're sure to have enemies."
Woah.
"I would put my base in a mid-sized city, I guess. It would be fun to be in a volcano for some geothermal power, but there's nothing to be gained defensively from that. I would prefer to blend into a city that's small enough to not attract attention to the military installations and not be big enough to be the target of a biological attack." Chris wants to remain in power, because he assumes that his fifth and eighth and fifty seventh policy will be more valuable than his first three. I got to hand it to him: it makes sense, even though it technically doesn't reveal anything new to me about his character and his mode.

Just for the record? Base on the moon. Get to Mars, make all policy decisions by double-blind randomized controlled longitudinal study, establish benevolent, self-improving AI. At that point, the show runs itself.

At the top of the hill, there's a humdinger of a view. I heard a woman say "Oh, of course. I see it looks like a shoe, now." I looked down and finally saw that the bends in the river made Moccasin Bend look like a foolishly obvious name, but I had always assumed it was named that because it was a staging area for the Trail of Tears. It's a shoe. I saw some couples strung up in hammocks together and a film crew shooting b-roll for House Hunters. I climbed down to the shelf below the Ochs museum and saw through the broken glass to the stripped interior layered with construction materials and dust. I got my passport stamps from the guest center (to be taped in, later: nobody said we were going to Point Park, just that we were going to "a place on Lookout Mountain," so I didn't bring it). But I remember the conversations I had that day more than I remember the things I saw. Maybe: because I've seen the things before.
The first time I went up the mountain, I went with Lauren Souza. I don't remember why or what year, but I do remember the sun going down on a constant conversation. In those days, I feared that to be silent was to betray a weakness in your relationship. If you don't have anything to say to a person, you're not as compatible as you think. I've slackened my death-hold on that opinion, but silence is still a bad sign in a friendship I want to develop into love. Delight was silent with me a lot, at the end. It's been a long time since that afternoon on the tip of Chattanooga's pompous park, and a lot has happened. But when I reached out to Lauren, tentatively (she's one of five friends I have left in the area, so why not?), she betrayed no hesitation. Of course we can hang out. Coffee shop, you say? Sure, I'll be there at 10. We talked well, like real friends who haven't seen each other for a while. But we talked more honestly than people in our situation do.
After an hour of sharing out the changes we've made and the places we've been stuck, she walked into a question she didn't know the answer to. She asked about Delight, of course, and much later and much more innocently than I expected. I had pictured this going a lot of ways, but this sideways accident I didn't see coming. I didn't need to tell Lauren, and maybe it would have been best for me if I hadn't. But she was once my friend, too, and I don't have any motives for revealing or hiding my wife. She didn't know what to say, but she sighed and opened up with: "Well, if you've shared, it feels right that I should share." She told me about a trauma she's finally living her way out of. We talked about our own hesitant, abortive relationship, for a brief moment. We were honest about the garbage people we were in the past, and we said how much we hoped for the future. It was weird. It's not what you would expect from a conversation with someone you crushed on so long ago. Maybe it's my own vicious honesty that drew honesty from her. Maybe it's the type of friends we've always been, and other relationships we shared were all just diversions from this one truth.

And maybe, it's just part of being an adult, this being able to talk about things that hurt without fear. Maybe grown-up humans face their problems instead of running from them. But this last idea? It feels like a lie.