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.