Week 2

Week 2

Whatever happened to James and Eric?

It’s difficult to tell…it’s hard to say what they were, some things, or why they were necessary. This is all I can offer.

As we left Pittsburgh, we sped away from security with our numb sense of immunity. So began the long and shifting hallways of country road, the helpless maze and the strangers.

That evening in Ohio we stayed in the park. On a Sunday evening with no money to spend there are no restaurants wherein to spend it, but finally we found a small spaghetti house. My tire had mysteriously collected a staple by the time the meal was over and was flat. An off duty firefighter helped us get down the street to the park. James ran to the police station to let them know that we would be bedding down.

This, I was against, because if they said no we would have to keep riding until we could find somewhere to hide along the road, but if we managed to camp in the dark and no one noticed we could leave leaving until morning. We’d soon discover the importance of clearing our intentions with the police.

James read Chesterton to me as I worked to replace the ruined inner tube. Then we squirreled down into our tents and passed out.

But the human spirit must be nourished, and soon it was morning again and time for play and the small comforts of companionship.

The highway had a large, but filthy shoulder and I took two more flats before lunch. My insecurity came strong as I faced the possibility of changing tires all through October. I felt robbed without knowing the thing taken or the thief taking.

That evening, my knees hurt, but I tried not to worry myself.

“Let’s just stop for the night wherever we can.”

We ended up stopping at a fruit stand that also sold sheds. Russ (who introduced himself as “the gorilla”) and Elaine, the proprietors, gave us playful suggestions and finally Russ agreed to let me record his thoughts about the election. As a former navy man, his frustration with McCain was barely an undertone as he explained that his vote would go to the candidate that best represented an American work ethic. He would himself vote for Barak Obama then, and when asked if his wife would also he playfully replied that, “She’d better or I’ll whoop ‘er”.

They gave us each a beautiful bag of fruit, as well as a load of power bars, Gatorade, and water that they just happened to have stashed in the back. Russ also told us that, though it wasn’t much, we could stay in the sheds for sale out front if we wanted to get in out of the weather for the night. This was the first of many unexpected kindnesses that really made the trip possible in the end. Now able to put aside the chore of setting out tents and unpacking bikes into them, James and I huddled in the shed while we read more of Chesterton, happy in our somewhat clean change of clothes. As we fell asleep the police finally arrived…

They were searching the area, obviously for us, so James and I got out of bed to see what it was all about. They had received a call from a neighbor about a bunch of hooligans messing around the adjacent farm.

“I think they meant us, but we weren’t messing around on the farm…they probably just saw my headlamp when I got up to urinate half an hour ago.”

I’d forgotten to turn the very same headlamp off (as poor blinded James would come to remind me so many times on the trip) and it was shining in the eyes of first one police officer and then another. They ordered me to turn off the light and I apologized and immediately obliged.

So there we were, two cop cruisers, four police men, and a couple of hooligans in the dark.

“Licenses”

In the middle of nowhere, in Coshocton, Ohio, James and I hand over first a Maryland and then a Pennsylvania driver’s license and I wonder if they don’t seem a little fake under the circumstances.

“Where’s your car?” one of the policemen insisted.

“Well, we don’t really have one. See, all of our stuff is in this shed, and Russ “the gorilla” said we could stay here in the shed…we’re bicycle tourists…”

I’ll just give you a minute to consider how exactly that sounds. Suddenly I was worried. What if I am a hooligan I began to wonder. I stole a look at silent James standing there in the super tight “What would Jesus Dewey?” t-shirt he had taken from his sister, the librarian. It features Jesus laboring over a card catalog…and James just barely fit into it. I started to shake my head in disbelief at how this was coming off.

The policeman returns my ridiculous volley: “Where is your car?” The question is both elegant and effortless. “You have it parked back there?” he asks leaning around to peak behind the shed.

“No, let’s see, I’m not sure you understand. I have no car. We came here on bicycles. Our bicycles are in the shed all loaded up. Just look, you’ll see what I mean.”

The cops, becoming antsy, go nowhere near the shed.

“How did you get here?”

My response was absurd, let me say that now, before you read it. I want you, the reader, to know now that I know how silly a response this is, but it is nevertheless what I said.

“I left my house in Columbia, Maryland, came up 32, got on 97…took that to Gettysburg where I took 30, Lincoln Highway…stayed on that over the mountains…I took it all the way to Pittsburgh where I caught up with this guy…we left Pittsburgh yesterday…continued til we hit 22…then 250…got off on 36 and now we’re here.”

There was a moment of silence as the police officers, entertained, returned our licenses.

“Welcome to Coshocton” he finally offered. Then followed the normal barrage of questions about what we would eat and how far we would go each day and what all we carried and whether it were enough to survive.

After they confirmed with Russ and Elaine that we weren’t trespassing, we finally returned to our beds and to our slumbers.

And thus ended the second evening with James.

We rode all the next day on an unmentionable mélange of Dairy Queen milk shakes and egg McMuffins. That evening I interviewed Erica, the manager at the Conways barbeque restaurant where James and I had dinner. According to Erica, Ohio was a big Clinton state and when Obama took the nomination a lot of people got bitter about it. She claimed that a lot of people might have voted for Hillary, but that they’d become angry with Obama for bashing her.

Speaking of eating, I ate two large beef brisket sandwiches, a pulled turkey sandwich, and a basket of french fries. When I finished, Erica brought me one of the more outspoken members of her kitchen staff, Philip, to tell me about his political views. You can hear the conversation I recorded with Philip amongst others by looking through the archive of interviews I’ve included at the top of the blog.

James and I then set off through the night to finish off our requisite hundred miles in the dark. As we rolled to a stop, we looked left and saw the giant old house with its lights on. We were in farm country and there was nothing for it but to ask if we could set up our tents in someone’s yard. James and I made our way to the door and that’s when the german shepherd started barking.

A tired looking fellow came out with a beer and asked what we wanted. As I explained the situation to him, I could sense I was going to get more than I’d bargained for. He told us that we could go camp out in the old haunted barn across the way and just as likely no one would bother us.

Then he saw my flag.

He enthusiastically told me that I was in McCain country and that I would get no other kind of answer out there. He seemed to smell liberal on me though as he became increasingly determined to mention guns and economics in the same sentence. As I attempted retreat into my neutrality, his mother showed up.

This is how we met Mark.

First let me just say this: God bless the wonderful mothers of the world for all their kindness and for the genius that everyone is someone’s son or daughter somewhere. This lovely woman wanted to show us hospitality. She checked with her husband, Mark, and after grabbing us a couple of Pepsis told us that we could stay in the trailer they had behind the barn.

So we spoke with Mark and I interviewed him quickly. After we had gotten all set up in the trailer, Mark who had gone and looked up the blog online came back to the trailer to talk to us more. When he walked in the trailer door with, “so I hear you had a nasty fall in Pittsburgh, huh” I had no idea what was happening, because I hadn’t told him that. This was the first time I had the feeling like what I was doing had some reality outside of my own experience.

Mark sat down and talked over his values with us and how he’d come to them over the course of his life. He explained that he had been a democrat as a young man and it wasn’t until Reagan came along and gave his speech about the city on the hill that he had embraced the Republican Party. Perhaps he saw something of his own self discovery in our project and wanted to encourage it, but whatever the reason, he sat there with us for nearly an hour and spoke openly about his reactions to everything from Bush to the bailout.

The next day was uneventful but for the depths to which we sank. In the afternoon we were getting tired of riding, but with so much left to do before dark I resorted to energy drinks. I had a cherry coke, a snickers, and then a rockstar brand energy beverage. I picked it because it seemed to have the most exploding text and to make the most mention of chemical agents I’d never heard of before. James quietly refused. By the end of that day James repented and made known his firm intention from then on to match me “mind cure for mind cure.”

We found ourselves riding in the dark again, but being nearly out of Ohio we were excited to finish our mileage for the day. After nothing but the onslaught of cars hurtling in the dark for nearly an hour or more, we finally saw a house with the lights on and decided enough was enough.

We wanted showers because we’d not had them since Kate’s house, four days and several hundred miles before. As James pushed his bike up the driveway, I saw it: a smart car. What luck! The proud owners of a smart car were bound to think what James and I were doing was cool. I was convinced by this positively irrefutable evidence that these could not be the surly waitresses and disgruntled convenience store owners with which we’d dealt so much of late. A smart car owner - a phenomenon I’d only ever encountered in Europe where suffering from an impaired aesthetic is a status symbol and all the more so if you can call it environmental - had to embrace our slim margin of resources and alternative form of travel if only because they’re in the ugly boat too. I mean, whether it’s driving a smart car or riding a bike, you aren’t exactly going to win any popularity contests out there on the American highway. Grinning, I promised James we would soon be showering.

They were pleasant people and permitted us to camp in their yard.

And that was it.

I was stupefied. I went to sleep dirty and at a complete loss.

These people, however, were in fact quite wonderful, even if my deranged need for cleanliness had misunderstood all else about them. The next morning they came out with a giant bag of cookies for us and mysteriously offered us the showers we’d wanted so bad the night before. In the early morning, feeling fresh with the whole day ahead of us, I turned down the shower, but could not refuse the money they politely insisted on giving to us. If they get to read this, I’d love for them to know that the cookies were wonderful, and that we are very grateful for their kindness, all jokes about the smart car aside.

Perhaps I will now speak a bit about an idea that began for me that particular morning. I tried to interview these people about who they were going to vote for and why, but it halted short because one of them holds a public office and felt that it could create issues if she were to express her opinions about the political contest. This began to bother me more and more as I thought it over later atop my bicycle. To my personal conviction that people ought to vote based on reasons, I would attach also that they should share that vote and those reasons publically. I’ve been warned that I may not be taken seriously if I suggest this, but I feel quite confident that I’m not much being taken seriously anyway. I may as well then state my case.

One should have to get up on a podium and inform one’s peers how they intend to vote and why, because it is a matter of public consequence that affects them. If one doesn’t have a reason that they are willing to state publically and to later defend, then I don’t think they should be allowed by a public affected in the vote to weigh in on the matter. If someone is going to vote on something that affects me personally, I want to know what their reasons are for voting against my vote when they do. A secret ballot is a way of foregoing any conversation that might occur between dissenting parties, which takes the emphasis off of doing the right thing for the right reasons and examining all the angles of the issue and puts the emphasis instead on establishing and maintaining a majority. Emphasis on winning a cause with a majority of the vote does two things: it removes any incentive the majority might have for trying to reach an understanding with its opposition and, in turn, creates occasion for resentments in the losing minority. Both effects are pejorative to the integrity and reliability of the policies that are to be introduced through the proposed sovereign majority.

But, returning to the narrative, James and I move on, our cookies in tow.

I was going to buy a map in Lynn but the store owner suggested that it might be better for us if he were to just photocopy and give to us the bit of straight shot we needed to get across Indiana.

“Are you sure? I don’t mind paying for the map…”

“Naw, it’s fine. Besides, these things are expensive and you don’t really need a map of Indiana, do ya? You know, back in the day, the maps at the gas stations were free…”

Go figure.

We then crossed Indianapolis. Crossing a major city is an exhausting affair atop a bicycle. It took us the better part of the afternoon to get out the other side. Before we did, we had stopped a half a dozen times to ask for directions, gone into an office building to ask to look up our route on Google maps, and even wandered accidentally onto the interstate.

That evening, with only eighty miles down, my knees were hurting me again badly. Suddenly, there were ropes of light swinging in the dark to our left. I had no idea what it was, but I suggested to James that it was a sign and we went to check it out. A few minutes later we were surrounded in the grove, surrounded by these laughing children swinging their Christmas lights up into the branches. We were informed that this was part of a wedding that was to happen the next day and that they wanted to do it in the dark to make sure it looked right, so they had the entire family out in full force running around decorating the grove.

James and I camped in their orchard under an old apple tree where the apples fell all night startling us until, bit by bit, we fell off and into sleep.

We left early in the morning, extremely enthusiastic to take on the hundred and ten miles that remained between us and my friend Saarah’s apartment in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

At breakfast, while I did my interviews, James put away a heaping order of biscuits and gravy, two eggs, two slices of bacon, and one donut. It was James who overheard between the grunts of his massive food intake our surly waitress comment on how I was bugging her customers. You know, the truth on that point is that asking the first person about who they thought should be president was usually up to me, but after I’d interviewed one there were usually two or three more waiting for a turn to have their say. James finished his ridiculous feast and we left.

Seventy miles into the cornfielded flats of Illinois, the urge to lunch would be ignored no longer as we scoured the horizon for something, anything to eat. Eventually, we came to the tiny town of Hume. Hume deserves a special mention as the unlikely setting for one of the classiest acts of kindness we received on the whole trip. The little deli at the back of town was hardly more than a convenience store with a toaster, and we walked in wondering if there would be enough food inside for us to quench the needs of the hours yet to ride. We ordered our sandwiches and drowned our sorrows with quarts of milk telling the proprietor with no shortage of enthusiasm exactly how happy her food was making us. Then Francis, the sneaky little old lady who had been wandering around the store since we’d come in, went to the register to check out and while she did so, quietly paid for our lunches and left. It was such a darling maneuver and neither James nor I had expected it when we told to put away our wallets at the end of the meal. James and I left Francis, who was by all appearances well into her seventies, a thank you note with some little drawings of us after our happy meal.

Style points, Francis, style points to you.

We then finished the hundred and ten miles we’d set out to ride that day and arrived at last at the doorstep of my sweet sisterly Saarah. We took our first day of rest there and Saarah nursed us back to health. And now, Saarah, let’s see, since Middlebury you’ve visited me once in Spain...and then I rode my bike to your house as I so often promised I would…which means we’re even and that it’s now your turn again. It’s your move Malik!!!

And with that, let us conclude the second jaunt of this bizarre holiday.