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.