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.