BikeTwain, Volume III

Hi folks. A couple quick notes. If you’re wondering about the continuing adventures of Patrick Mendy, a quick update: He finished his first semester of college and has just started on his second. He really seems to enjoy school and he’s doing very well. His family’s struggles have been manageable and though there have been a couple medical issues I think they’re all benefiting from having a stable source of nutrition. The only major concern is that, with Patrick in school from 8am until 6pm there’s no time to work and earn money, and I think it bothers him that he has to rely on charity for virtually one hundred percent of his expenses. So we’ve been working on a way for him to get some passive income. To that end we have a project forthcoming I think many of you will find very interesting as it will draw you into his strikingly different world. That’s all I’ll say for now. Stay tuned.

Second, and I bring this up not because I too am desperate for income but because several people have asked, Red Clay Bestiary t-shirts are still available. I have a sad little Etsy store with one product but the product itself is not sad so maybe buy one. My terrible time-blindness has caused me to fall months behind in my project to make additional shirts featuring personalities that inhabit the odd corners of my brain, but who knows, maybe by the time you take a look the Kurt Vonnegut shirt will finally be available.

And now without further doodoo, I give you the third volume of my adventures on the Mississippi.

Here’s a thing, possibly criminal, that I have done. Picture a blazing hot day with a sun like an electric spark, searing everything tender, flora and flesh. Tall pines stand clustered about like a crowd observing a murder, and I’m alone in the center, buck naked, in a state park campground, limboing awkwardly under the only source of running water within my ambit—a spigot mounted atop a steel pipe extending perhaps three feet off the ground. 

All I can say in my defense is that desperate times call for desperate measures. This was more than three quarters through my two thousand plus mile ride down the Great River Road, parallel to the Mississippi River from its wellspring in Minnesota to its vast mouth near New Orleans, and as I moved further and further south as though with the current, the temperatures rose while the shade trees fled the roadside and clumped in small masses far off in the distance across inhospitable, dusty farm fields. I reckoned only one idiot would be foolish enough to pitch a tent in the stifling heat, and since this particular campground was segregated between RVs and primitives such as myself, I reckoned further that I could risk a charge of public indecency in exchange for a chance to wet not just my whistle but the packaging it came in, and so I shed my drawers in the great outdoors, coming through without so much as a steel cuff or a even paper citation.

It was a weird moment but probably not the weirdest in a month that brought weird moments more or less daily. There’s a quantitative and quantitative difference between biking and driving, and not simply because it takes more time to cover the same distance or that there’s no windshield between you and the world. There’s a whole nuther realm, laid atop the one that’s mediated at us in so-called normal life, like those sheets of acetate that they used to put in books like Grey’s Anatomy, wherein the human body is split into layers by means of selective printing on the transparent medium—bones, internal organs, circulatory and endocrine systems, musculature, and epidermis piled up in a sort of biological layer cake. 

The icing on this weirdo cake is kids. Kids, at least the ones not bound by wire umbilicals to video game consoles, inhabit a liminal space between the drifting homeless and psychologically or chemically touched on the one hand and the everyday world of adults replete with ATM cards and Amazon Prime subscriptions on the other. Definitionally they are not drivers, so if you spy a human on a sidewalk in a small midwestern town, there’s an above-average chance it will be a kid. And kids, of course, are like beings from another planet. 

The sun was low in the sky as I approached St. Charles, Missouri, from the Illinois side of the river. There were two ferries not far ahead, though I wasn’t sure which one would be open at this time of day, if either of them. Winding up and down the hills on a narrow country lane I conferred with my mom on the phone. She did internet searches on my behalf, and amid the ruins of several half-built and poorly maintained websites we found enough evidence of continuing operations on the Golden Eagle ferry to risk the sojourn. I reached it with less than an hour of daylight left.

The crossing was fairly remarkable in its own right—the only one of a dozen or more transversals that wasn’t accomplished via leg power, either by pedaling across a long highway bridge in a state of abject terror over the engine sounds nipping at my back or by skipping lightly over the tiny rivulet in Minnesota where the Mississippi River emerges from a small pond like an endless line of clowns clambering out of a tiny car. This time I relaxed at a bulwark, guzzling Gatorade and gazing out over the slow-moving water as the ferry transcribed its strange twisting course to the dock on the far side and just a short ways downriver. The light, which had turned amber almost an hour earlier, glinted from the ripples making the water look like a trove of gold coins. 

But the crossing was short, and inside twenty minutes I was back in the saddle and climbing a set of tight switchbacks up the river bank to the highway. I was fatigued by the time I reached this, a long, razor-straight black line cutting across a cornfield that stretched to the horizon. The sun was gone, however, and the sight of a set of headlights perhaps three miles distant were enough harbingers of the peril I was now in to set my adrenal gland to work. I shot down the highway like a deer, pumping the pedals in a steady sprint as the ruddy light between strips of dark cloud faded to an ever deeper, bloodier tint.

From the point where the ferry road met the highway the distance to the motel was perhaps five miles, which would take me perhaps twenty minutes assuming I could pedal most of it pretty much flat out. I could see cars coming from a significant distance, but I doubted they could see me—I hadn’t planned on any night riding and wasn’t equipped with lights. Fortunately they passed very infrequently, and I would simply clamber off the road every time one came near. 

In this way I proceeded with as much alacrity as my exhausted legs could produce. The darkness had become complete. House lights were few and distant, but I caught a flash on the road ahead that was not a car. It waxed and waned. As I got closer I could see the faint shapes of a half dozen smallish figures on bicycles, riding in little circles and figure-eights in the middle of the highway. One of them had a generator on his wheel which powered a small headlight. He would occasionally accelerate this way or that and all of the riders within the sweep of his flashing beam would appear out of the murk, their bluish-white faces emerging out of the inky night like the prophetic icosahedron inside a Magic Eight Ball. They were probably all around twelve or thirteen years old, just milling around on bikes in the pitch dark in the middle of a two-lane rural highway.

As I approached, still maintaining a grueling pace just at the very edge of my ability, they swung around and vectored in behind me like a cluster of RAF Hurricanes diving after a stricken German bomber. They kept pace with me for a short distance, but they were singularly unmarked by the terror that drove me and so gradually they fell back. One of them spoke. “Are you,” he asked in a sort of wonder, “in a race?”

A race. In total darkness. In the hinterlands of Missouri. On a recumbent bike. With a trailer.

“Kinda, kid.”

Kids: why are they so fucking weird?

Well with children anyway you stand an excellent chance of leaving the encounter with your physical being intact, the odd killer kid notwithstanding. Adults must be treated with caution, and caution is trickier when you’re at street level. In a small town in Minnesota I ran into a man who was so enchanted by my rig he offered to buy me a beer at the nearest watering hole—nearest necessarily because he himself was bike-bound. I hate to say it friends but when you meet an adult male living without an automobile in a small American town, even in so lovely a state as Minnesota, there’s a good chance the choice of transport was selected in service to a legal judgment. I accepted his beer but slowed to a sip when he told me he wasn’t allowed to drive, and when he enthusiastically suggested we go back to his place for bong hits I reckoned it was time to move on. A light touch is rarely rewarded with a story but I wasn’t interested in waking up at noon the next day in a flophouse with a bunch of strangers so onward I went. 

I was always only ever a tourist in this orthogonal world—as long as I kept moving I could come close enough to regret its seediness and desperation safe in the knowledge that at some point I would step off the bike and back into my world of Netflix and gasoline and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream on a Saturday night. And yet some connections, even brief ones, had a purity and delight that brought home the common humanity of myself and my interlocutors, no matter how gritty the abyss in which we passed. 

On the basis of poor information I chose to pass through St. Louis on the east side of the Mississippi. The idea was to seek flatter ground but even though I’ve seen National Lampoon’s Vacation I never quite assembled the words “east” and “St. Louis” in a way that would have properly set off alarm bells. It wasn’t until I was actually pedaling through the decaying neighborhoods that I realized I’d made a mistake. East St. Louis was definitely one of the sketchier areas I’ve biked through in my life but I don’t want to dwell on that. Instead I would like to draw your attention to a spot where the highway passed beneath a grimy overpass. Empty, gutted warehouses with grids of shattered windows overlooked the road, separated by a narrow band of high weeds. As I approached the overpass I saw a very strange site. 

Underneath the bridge were two hard-looking women. Their hair was frazzled and greasy, their skin mottled and wrinkled, their clothing filthy and ragged. They were obviously prostitutes, skimming customers off the effluvia passing beneath the bridge. As I got closer they both spotted me and their mouths opened to show toothless grins. What amazed me was how utterly excited they were to see me, not because they saw dollar signs, but because they saw something outside their daily experience and somehow had retained the capacity for wonder. They cheered as I passed, leaping up and down and pumping their fists in the air. 

In a moment I was gone and they were gone, fading in my rear view mirror, two emaciated figures in the gloom of an overpass in a seedy corner of an unlovely place. I often wonder what became of them. Odds are their story doesn’t end well, but I like to think that they’re still around and that every now and then they think about that strange encounter and that it brings them a smile. God knows we could all use one.