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.