Borger

[Forgive me.]

There's nothing in the panhandle of Texas, and between the long stretching nothings, there are nothing towns where the library is closed and the service station doesn't have bathrooms because everyone who would conceivably be there is also living in town. I know this and I still take the mile detour around and through Skellytown, hoping for anyplace to pee. My bicycle isn't exactly inconspicuous, but there are no people to see me on it. I ride through the entire town without once seeing anything remotely promising. I'm forced to pee in the open behind the grass in a fencerow just outside of town. I can remember the unfounded fear of it--who was really there to see me? Just the wind and the cloudy sky. I got back on the empty road and rolled onward toward Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument.
Sometimes, on the bicycle, you measure distance differently. I peed once in Skellytown, once in a gully across from some construction workers, and once in an alcove of fence--there's no word I know for this, but if you've ever driven a truck to a field and stopped just off the road to open the cattle gate, you may have stepped where I stopped. I learned to put less and less weight on miles and hours and more and more weight on destinations and having to stop between them. I continued to drink water like it was August in coastal Virginia instead of late October in the sweeping plains. I can't describe the small arroyos specifically, just the the shape of what one should be. I can't describe the vast distances between houses, just how far apart they feel. I can't describe anything I'm passing even as I'm passing it because there is only a constant grinding sound of gears and gravel and a growing urgency to make it to my destination or pee on the way. The map creeps by so slowly that the only highlights anymore are the breaks in the monotony.
I keep gatorade strapped to the top of my front right pannier, and a full Nalgene in both front bags. I have my phone (Philips--it's borrowed) slipped beneath the bungee cord that held my tent and sleeping bag to the top of the front rack. I have a single bike bottle in the single cage on my down tube, and when I empty it, it's easily filled from the Camelbak on top of my back rack. When I stop in places, my kickstand lack pains me and I'm forced to lean the bicycle into a ditch sidewall or a fence or just on the ground.
I'm marking down processes so that you can share in an image of my life, not because they're important to me. I've ridden too long to think about these things now. The reason I keep the gatorade where I do is settled, undebatable. I could explain to you why I keep a recycled bottle out and my nalgenes covered, but theft isn't interesting to me. I could explain to you why I keep sugar out of my bike bottle, but doing dishes isn't interesting to me. I could explain to you why I put it inside the strap on the front right, but would you fall asleep while I explain how to lean down and unclip a drink without losing it rolling down the road, how to pack your underpants so they leave a shelf for you to clip things into? Everything is process on the road, and every process is holy, codified, unchangeable, set into stone by the law of least effort. Once a thing is decided, pruned, modified, it becomes the only way of doing until something simpler and easier appears. Nearly every element of my gear has three or four reasons for being exactly the way it is, and the end result is an undignified pile of garbage strapped precariously to a rapidly-wearing bicycle.
I mark time by stopping to urinate and I don't think about anything on the bicycle because everything has been thought before. Twenty nine miles is gone by late morning, and I see a sight I've seen before and have no memory of: Borger.
On the main street, I pass the county museum and snap-decide to turn back for it once I have lunch. There's no place I'd particularly like to stop, so I just ride to the Lowe's Marketplace, lean my bicycle against a wall, lock it, and wander inside. I buy a can of beans that have jalapeños, a block of pepper jack cheese, and whatever else is normal for me. I've bought these items before, and I'll buy them again: a process that requires no spare emotion or weight. Across the street, a man is selling airbrushed novelty t-shirts in what looks like an old autobody shop. He's aghast at how far I've ridden. He doesn't have anything I can't live without, so I say goodbye and push back to the museum. I eat the beans cold next to the log that used to function as a jail once criminals were chained to it.
What's inside the Hutchinson County Museum is fascinating, and you may just have to believe me. There's a secular shrine to the big oil company that built the town up from nothing. There's a painting of a building in Borger by Thomas Hart Benton, if I remember correctly. There's a dummy wearing an asbestos safety suit to set light to a leak (If you use the proper amount of dynamite, you can cap an oil leak, or so goes the claim).  There's newspapers and advertisements and a whole floor of things I didn't take the time to see. I could explain all these things to you, but explaining museums isn't interesting to me. At this point, what is it? Process? There's no immediacy in what I'm doing here, and while I'm really fascinated, I'm not living an interesting story. I'm antsy. Walking out of the museum onto the tiny and lovely main street, I grimace at the thin, searing fall sunshine. I'm not even done with Borger and I'm riding away from it suddenly.

 


There are family stories about Borger. I've heard its name a hundred times in my youth. I know I've visited it, but I have no ability to remember something from when I was so young. When the Adventist church in Borger replaced its pews, mom and dad bought one and took it with them from Texas to Missouri. It lived for a time under the trailer home that was our temporary house before dad built the real family home. I remember that I could walk under the trailer, slipping through the cladding into the dead, cold underside of the house, and there was a relic of a foreign church. It was a seat where mom would never find me, a place to play with toy cars or to read and avoid chores. Philip and I treated it like a nominal fort for years. I remember dirt and the strange smell of the worms. After that, it was in the attic of the metal building. It marked the barrier between the space where dad put his wood pile, where mom put her boxes of Christmas decorations, and where the kids' space began. Philip and I carved out a small bit of attic to put dumb toys and small treasures, and the pew was the borderline. When I moved into the metal building after college, I managed to pull the pew down from the attic, to clean it and oil it, to return it to a home. I put it in my house and sat on it to tie my shoes (the dog's head always in the way), used it to settle the space beneath a wall of photos, vacuumed under it for years. It's where I sat to write the text that set in motion her return and abandonment. It was a piece of the home I shared with Delight and it was born to my family in Borger, Texas. That church was only just around the corner. I could visit it and see where my favorite piece of furniture of all time used to sit.
I'm riding away instead.
Everything is process at a point. I've not got the time to construct a meaningful relationship with a place I've effectively never been just to feel melancholy about a pew she didn't care about. I stop for a fourth restroom break in a Mexican-food restaurant in town and see some beautiful nurses grabbing lunch on their break. I'll be in Fitch by mid-afternoon. I'm rapidly closing in on the place where I was born. I would apologize for writing a yawning expanse of nothing, but it's close and lovely, in a way, once you know.
That's Texas.