Solemn Wave Goodbye

Forests gradually shed their density, making way for a different kind of production than the mechanistic manufacture we found in Detroit. As the trees folded away, out came fields of newborn crops, sprouting up in their neatly tucked tilled lines of ripe soil. Justin and I had left the highways and were riding west along the asphalt backstreets invisible to our map. The road bent northward and began winding about, and to our dismay the pavement dissipated into gravel. Afternoon heat was setting on and we stopped to decide if we were lost. I was happy enough still. The temperature continued to climb, but our ride led us along in shelter beneath tunnels of trees. Simple country cabins named by their hand-painted house numbers punctuated the roadsides. For backyard pools there were instead lakes, round and still like flip-top mirrors reflecting a placid blue face.

We followed the gravel road until it spilled onto a two-lane highway. Seeking an escape from the tickling sun, we both sat down in the shade of some roadside trees. I watched the occasional traffic go by. Motorcycles puttered through frequently enough to indicate a town wasn't too far off. Justin looked worn. Draining the last sips of his water supply he said that his knee was being a bother and asked me if I minded staying a while longer. Shaded from the heat, we sat mostly silent for twenty or thirty minutes, absorbing a midday solace.

Stopped to take some photographs as the sun bent behind a tiled horizon of clouds. Laying out a radial hand, the sun's bright fingers climbed through the sky overhead. Justin sat down and made some phone calls home and I went across the street to wait. When he'd finished we kept on, but again after just a couple more miles he pulled off and sat down in a patch of grass by the entrance gate to a neighborhood. I brought my bike up over the curb, laid it down beside his, and sat down to wait for him to rest up.

Justin rubbed his knee and then stared down at the grass, pulling at a few blades with his fingers. “Alright. So, there's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think it's time to tell you,” he started.

“You gonna quit?” I asked. He looked up into my eyes to gauge my expression.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said, lowering his eyes and again pulling out blades of grass. “I've been thinking about it, and I just feel really content with how far I've gone. I mean not a lot of people can really say that they've done what I've done already on this trip, you know?”

“What about your knee? Is it really bad?”

“Yeah. That's part of it, too, but I didn't want to keep complaining about it.”

A car pulled out of the neighborhood entrance and stopped by the curb next to us. A lady got out carrying two sports drinks in her hands and came up to us, “I drove past you two a little ways back and thought to myself 'I bet they could use a cold drink!'”

Smiling brightly she handed us the drinks and then asked where we were both from and where we were going. So many people had asked us these same questions before. The response had nearly become an involuntary recitation, but this time was different. First I told her what we had planned to do when we began the trip and then Justin went on saying to her what he'd just told me. I realized that she was the only person who would ever receive this answer. She'd stumbled into the middle of a situation that held more significance to us than any other since we'd pedaled away from our front doors.

Justin had already figured everything out. We stopped the next day in Jackson, which he knew had both a bus station and a shipping company. In the late afternoon we checked into a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of town. At the desk the lady told us the first floor was full so we unloaded our bikes and pulled everything up the stairs to our room the room in the corner of one of the buildings. Immediately we flopped onto our beds and turned on the TV. Justin walked across the room to the air conditioner and turned the dial to its coldest setting, then took a shower before we began to list every way we needed to celebrate before finally parting ways.

Both of us had been looking forward to being in the heart of Chicago for our first taste of deep-dish pizza, but we found there was a restaurant serving it about five miles away from the hotel. On our bikes, freed now from the weight of our bags, we rushed through the streets as the day began to cool. In the dimly lit restaurant we waited a few minutes before we were seated at a little round table and ordered the four-topping stuffed pizza and beers. Half an hour later when it was cooked and delivered to us, we were overwhelmed with cheese-drenched, golden-baked goodness, more than either of us could ever have hoped for. It was like swimming in savoriness.

A belly full of half a pizza and two beers each made the return ride more difficult, but back in the room we were splayed on our beds again. Justin began making calls to his family to decide what his bus ticket's destination should read. He said he didn't want to return to South Carolina, but his family elsewhere couldn't pick him up if he were arriving in two days. His plans were getting frustrated and so was he.

There were some cigars in our bags that had been designated for smoking at the high summits of each mountain pass we crossed in our adventure. With two of them and a lighter we went downstairs and stepped outside, seeing an orange sun fall toward western America beyond the tips of the pine trees. A group of people were sitting outside their rooms nearby in plastic chairs, drinking, and making a bunch of noise. I sat down on the parking lot curb and lit my cigar, and passed the lighter to Justin. The yellow lamps around the parking lot sprung to life, calling on the company of every gnat and moth to bounce about their tungsten faces. I watched as they gathered and flitted about, trying to imagine the chilly air of an alpine peak. Someone behind us began yelling at his kid.

Justin pressed the end of his just lit cigar into the asphalt. “I don't want to smoke this here. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna go back upstairs. This is just wrong,” he sighed as he stood up, sounding a little disgusted. I soon put mine out and followed his path up.

I awoke, my head resting on a soft pillow, staring up at the white popcorn ceiling from a mattress covered by blanket and sheet after uninterrupted sleep. I didn't want to move. Checkout would be at eleven. Eventually we went out to the lobby for breakfast and got a few bowls of cereal. We were alone in the room and I switched the TV over to cartoons, and then went over to make myself a waffle.

Justin's available time was shrinking. Later he called Michelle, a cousin in Ohio, in a last effort to see if she could get him from the bus station in Akron. She was working until the late afternoon, but said it might just be easier if she drove to Jackson to pick him up with her dad's truck. With these words all of Justin's worries washed away.

After we'd gotten all our things together and triple-checked the room for any left behinds, we returned the room keys and rode downtown to a combined ice cream and donut shop to wait out the evening. Hours passed and outside the sunlight began to fade. With my eyes on the dimming clouds behind the window, I wondered whether I should leave. There was no hotel room for me to return to and we were in a city with no place to camp. As I began to gather my things, Justin saw Michelle drive into the parking lot. He grabbed his phone off the table, jumped up from his chair with an excited smile across his face and rushed outside to greet her. I followed him out.

In four hours Michelle had covered the last couple of weeks of our ride. Justin became effusive with joy at her sight. He was ready to go home. They talked a while and I listened, feeling a little outcast. It already felt like our paths had diverged. Justin peeled all the bags from his bicycle, put them in the rear seats of the truck, and then we loaded both bicycles into the truck bed. Michelle said she'd drive me west of town so I didn't have to search out a place to camp in the dark.

Her engine started with a rumble and we sped off into the street toward the last bits of sun. Beside an open field that lay behind an industrial park we came to a stop and unloaded my bike. Justin and Michelle got out and we exchanged hugs. There wasn't much to say to each other but a simple goodbye for now and a genuine wish of good luck in our separate ways. The time that we had spent traveling through eastern America hadn't been cut short. It had been happily completed. There was nothing to add or take away.

Michelle returned to the truck. Justin raised his hand in a solemn wave and then turned away, stepping into the passenger side door and shutting it behind him. The engine started back up and I watched them drive away slowly down the street and turn.

I pulled my bike into the tall grass and set up my tent. The field waved in the gently rolling wind. I rolled a cigarette and watched the gray sheet of clouds forming above. Only my journey laid ahead.

View trip album #2 on my Facebook.

A Ride to Michigan Pt. 2

Outside at a table, Justin and I sat by a fast-food restaurant on exit 67 after finishing sandwiches and hash browns. I peeled off the lid from my paper cup and softly blew on the coffee, the steam dissipating in the cool morning air. Justin played with the Velcro of his knee-brace, making a slow tearing sound through the outdoor silence. It was six-thirty and Tiffiny and Allen were somewhere on the highway and coming closer. I got out a pamphlet they had given me the other day and began to read its first page.

Justin soon lifted up his head. “I think that's them,” he said with a nod toward a tan van.

He was right. Tiffiny and Allen came out from it and walked over.

“Hey, guys! This is crazy. We were just in Findlay the other day and we came to this same place to eat, too,” Allen said to us wide eyed and beaming. “So how ya been?”

-

With our bicycles' front tires off and bags removed we'd fit everything into the van and set off on the interstate drag to Detroit. We picked up our old conversation as if finding it unbroken just where we'd left it. Towns were flying by us outside the tinted window. I listened to everybody speak, but tried also to focus on the rapidly passing land around us, concentrating in hopes of retaining some mental semblance of the flowing landscape. On a bicycle, changes in the land occur at a crawl. The intimate perception of the earth's subtle transition that a bicycle's pace offers is not only allowed, but is forced on you. Traveling in a car now, it all went by so quickly, allowing little opportunity to sense those less apparent details.

The farther north we came the more industrialized each town grew and the lands in between were more sparse. The interstate rose above the ground, passing over some roads below, and in the distance I saw the spires of Michigan's industry reaching high from the northeast. The colossal forms of mechanical plants and factories always make me feel unsettled. These things cast long shadows, standing tall, man-made with no regard to form, trails of smoke or steam or whatever billowing out from their towering mouths. They are remarkable in power and scale and seeing them looming on the horizon, it is impossible to be unaffected.

Industry shifted to repeating commercial buildings solidly lining every space along the roadsides. Deep city blocks and weekend traffic immediately struck me as foreign surroundings. I hadn't been in a real city for a long time, even if this was only the outskirts of Detroit. The expansive openness of the peripheral lands that we'd been rolling through just the day before had somehow, unconsciously, gotten deep into me. Now confronted by so much business and disorder – buildings lined like bricks in a wall, car streams rushing through grid canals, and thick foot traffic walking the cement slabs – it immediately began to carve against the grain defined in me over the past month.

Tiffiny pulled the van into an alleyway behind a line of small buildings, driving forward about a block before coming to a stop at the door to their office. Allen pushed the buzzer and we followed him inside through a small, dark kitchen area into their meeting room. The area was lit by two lines of fluorescent lights on the ceiling and most of its space was occupied by four collapsible tables which were pressed up against one another to form one large work surface in the middle of the room. On it were strewn folders, papers, posters, pamphlets, and a few stacks of books. There were posters on the off-white walls, but no windows to let in the daylight, more books filling some bookshelves, and a computer and printer sitting in a far corner. Three people sat in the mix of folding and office chairs that lined the table's edges. They all took pause from the paper they were reading and raised their eyes as we entered. Allen introduced us to them and then each of them to us.

Tiffiny and Allen led us into the adjacent room, empty but for four chairs, an unplugged television, and a computer attached to a projector. They brought up their website and played some videos, the first comparing the progression of time to musical harmonies, the second describing of a correlation between the earth's movement through the galactic plane and mass extinctions; the third, a weekly bulletin video from the economist who headed their movement.

Twenty minutes or so after this we'd be reading Phaedo. Allen suggested we go and get some lunch beforehand. It would be a while before we'd get another chance, so Justin and I stepped outside and went to a sub shop at the end of the block. For the first time we had the opportunity to talk to each other alone and so we sat on a bench to eat and discuss our opinions of the videos. With the sound of afternoon traffic sputtering behind us, Justin already began hinting at the question of how long we'd be staying.

Under the artificial light of the big room in the office we took a seat at the table. A guy named Bill passed out the printed and stapled copies of Plato's Phaedo and we waited, primarily in silence, as more people filtered in. When everyone was finally present, Bill assumed direction and spent a few minutes prefacing. “This will be a journey of the mind,” he said before we endeavored into it. He cast parts, and we read the text aloud, pausing at intervals to discuss the points as they came. I looked over fifty pages in and saw Justin was becoming restless, his legs jittering beneath the table. Normally we'd be in the sun's heat, pedaling through plains and open blue space this time of day. Being abruptly confined to a seat so long in the stagnant room felt alien to us both, but at the moment I didn't mind it because of what we were reading. Socrates' immortal death to universalize his beliefs came, giving his humanity for his cause, and following the final passages a solemn silence came upon the company.

In the brief moment we were away from the group, we sat outside in the shade by the door and Justin had me roll him a cigarette. Apparently he was stressing out. We tried to discuss what we thought of what we'd read and the other things we'd heard, but a tide of subtle hostility began to rise between us. Neither of us is the type to argue so we cut our conversation there and stared down at the cement silently dragging on the tobacco.

-

Allen and Tiffiny led us down the street to a bar restaurant afterward. A tall twenty-something kid with glasses named Aaron, who had read his lead role as Socrates most dramatically, joined us. The place was loud and dimly lit, TVs buzzing with the daily business and sports on the walls. Tiffiny ordered two pitchers of amber lager and we each asked the waitress for two of their Sunday chili dog specials. Over the beers and dogs we were pressed back into a lengthy debate of politics. A little league baseball team came in fresh from a game and gathered at a few tables nearby to celebrate their afternoon win. It was weird to see the normal world still operating around us.

Later that evening we were offered couches to sleep on at Aaron's home in the neighborhood behind their office space. His beige living room was adorned with framed Rembrandt and Da Vinci prints. I entered it, refreshed from a brief shower, hoping to find evening peace and solitude or refuge in a lighter conversation, but instead discovered there was no wall separating personal from professional life here. Aaron and Justin were sitting in the living room chairs going back and forth over the legacy of some American presidents, the scrutinizing faces of the equanimous portraits gazing out from the walls.

Aaron grew tired and went off to bed as Tiffiny and a kid named Armando slipped into the room. They picked up the conversation with a mathematical approach, showing us each a geometry puzzle using compasses and pencils while they sipped on their nightcaps.

-

In the morning, back in the office, Aaron began to lead us through another paper. He'd taken the entire day off to go through some more readings with us. Once we'd trudged through the twenty pages me and Justin retreated to a donut shop across the street and quickly came to a consensus.

At the front of their building Justin knocked on the locked door and we tentatively returned to our chairs at the table.

Aaron looked up at us with a smile, his eyes half open over a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “So, I guess you guys want to see some more videos? I've got a few in mind we could watch.”

“Actually, I think it's about time for us to get back to the road,” I told him. “Feels like that time has come.” I perceived in him some disappointment, but he kept it concealed.

“Oh. Well, okay. So, you want to take along some things to read?” I saw Justin roll his eyes for an instant before he caught himself.

-

From his garage we snatched our bicycles and set to wandering through the city streets, reaching out for the unseen Michigan countryside. Riding alongside a stream of bustling vehicles, the familiar expanse of time and contemplation was regained. Retreating into my mind, my body unconsciously pedaling, the cache of information I'd accumulated began to be interpreted with the new found benefit of retrospection.

The rear tire of Justin's bicycle began to lose air after just a few miles. We rolled to a stop on the sidewalk of a residential street corner and laid our bikes down in the grass margin. Across the street a bulldog paced behind a white picket fence, watching us intently and incessantly barking. Sitting on the sidewalk, Justin and I tried to talk through how we considered everything they'd told us, but once again we simply couldn't do it without quickly becoming infected by argument. We never argued like this before. When some difference would come up between us a compromise was easy to come by, but the deep-seated divisive nature of politics proved more contentious. Justin grew frustrated and diverted the blame onto his flat tire. Curtly I demonstrated what he was doing wrong.

-

When the roadsides became shrouded with forest the shadows grew longer and the night came quickly. The forests were thick and swampy, so looking for a place to put our beds out we started down a random dirt road and, fortunately, we soon stumbled upon an open green field. Into layers of red, orange and pink the sun descended. The stars pierced through a mesh sky as I laid down, staring up into the dotted darkness. I found that I couldn't rest without our argument coming to a resolution.

“So, you think the only reason they showed us any kindness was to try and get us to join their movement?” I asked Justin.

“I know you don't want to believe it, but yes. That's what I think. It's just because Tiffiny was a girl so you can't see it, but it was all fake.”

A surprising anger rose up in me, “Shut up. What they're doing is trying to help people. And let's be honest, who are we helping by taking this trip?”

-

I saw that they considered no distinction between showing us all the kindness they had and showing kindness for the benefit of their movement. Their motivation for both were of the same root. They sought to manifest humanity's good. However, their lives were so enveloped by their cause that it was easy to be repelled by their concentrated enthusiasm. They had dedicated themselves so completely to this thing that they seemed to us foreign and strange and we'd felt a distaste for them because of it. They'd lost something of themselves by becoming so deeply submerged. The distaste we felt was not from of any fault of their own, but originated in the shame we felt at the absence of that element in ourselves. Or perhaps it was present, but had simply been given a different label and intention.

I apologized to Justin and we got back to seeking that resolution. The stars rotated about their axis in the black canopy above and I considered the bare sun, hidden somewhere in the west, pulling around the rotating earth. I could look on its perfection tomorrow and be blinded, but no: a plane of perfect white holds no interest for me until it is spoiled by a speck of dust. There is a beauty in humanity's cursed imperfection. Our suffering and blessing are one in the same. But those kids weren't perfect either. We were similar after all. The only difference lied in our methods. They were wholly dedicated to saving the world in what way they saw fit. I was wholly dedicated to feeling its rugged touch on my fingertips while I could and to keep from harming anyone along the way.

Once again: More pictures on Facebook!

Anecdotes and A Ride to Michigan Pt. 1

Little towns soon run together. Riding along some stretched highway, we'd be taken on a brief run through a string of anonymous towns – a simple post office, line of forlorn houses, and the lone restaurant or convenience store resting patiently disheveled on the main corner. Coming out the other side I'd already forgotten the name so proudly and boldly wrapped around the face of the water tower. Those towns that hold fast to memory remain only as the result of some marking event, some spontaneous fortunate or unfortunate circumstance that it affords by lying on our path. The rest drift away in the silent parade, blindly streaming by.

Beside the main street on the sidewalk corner in an Ohio country town stood two people, a guy and a girl, tending a booth. “Pull over to drop Obama” was written on their sign. They called out to us and we brushed them off with succinct no thank yous, but were forced to a stop at the red light. The guy jogged up and asked about our trip and then offered us some reading material.

“Oh, uh, that's okay. We have plenty of books, thanks,” I said as the light turned green and we rode to the library.

-

It was filled with air conditioning and soft chairs, but we didn't have much to do and quickly became restless and left the library. Stepping back into the afternoon heat, we found those two people from earlier seated on the wooden bench beside our bikes, sitting, eating, and seemingly resting.

“Oh, boy...” Justin uttered in a sigh as we approached. He grabbed some water bottles and went to fill them. While I waited, out of politeness I broke the silence between us and asked them where they were from. This was a precursor to a conversation more thorough than I could have expected.

They each explained to me in turn. Being the Detroit-based faction of a larger network, they often went out on days like this and set up in the smaller towns, raising awareness for whatever their purpose was. Apparently today they'd chosen the wrong town and had gotten run off from their street corner display.

Justin returned and somehow it became less like carrying on a typical conversation. It was to be expected, though, given the context. Having consciously acknowledged a certain goal they directed their own speech to that determined political end they meant to promote.

We soon diverged into two separate conversations, Justin talking with the guy about American political history. He had introduced himself to us with a handshake as Allen. His penetrating eyes in the shadow of his hat's brim smiled out intensely, his calm evidently stimulated by the discussion. Tiffiny, the girl, and I spoke, seated in the grass in the shade of a tree. Her sunglasses were raised and resting on the top of her brown hair which she'd tied up in the back before sitting down. Our conversation revolved around science, astronomy, evolution, the relevance these things had to their movement, and the philosophy it had sprouted from.

It was strange talking to people with such comprehensive opinions. They'd both done this for years and their practice was evident. Their movement was all encompassing and trying to sift for a clear understanding of exactly what it entailed proved a slow process.

Tiffiny pulled out a book on Johannes Kepler and paged through it, seeking out a specific quote. She read it aloud and when finished her face abruptly lit up.

“Oh, I know! Here, you want to see something cool about how your mind works?” She drew a square on a piece of paper and labeled each of its sides as one unit (try this yourself if you like). I was to take this square, and with only the pen, the paper, and my mind, double its size in a way that was logical and provable. In other words, from this square with the area of one another square would be derived that, without a doubt, had an area of two relative to the original. It took me a while, but eventually, painstakingly, the answer was extracted from some hidden fold in my brain. She explained what she'd meant by it: the human mind has the innate potential to understand and, through reason, find order.

An hour had passed. I, and presumably Justin as well, had been impelled to reevaluate the assumptions we'd made at our brief encounter with them on the street corner. The ride they'd been waiting for, a mini-van, pulled up, parking in front of us, and brought close to the conversations.

“If anything we've talked about has intrigued you, you should come and visit our office.” Tiffiny invited. They were in a part of Detroit that was called Redford, Michigan.

Justin and I crossed the street to an ice cream shop that had long been waiting for us now and each bought a cone, ready for something sweet before navigating some distance at day's end. My head was fully occupied now and happy at finding unexpected pleasantness in the surprise meeting.

I had a surplus to consider as we left, beginning again to glide over the roads between fields. Looking around myself, I couldn't keep from projecting questions onto everything and wondering about the things I'd heard.

Justin's leg didn't seem to be fully healed, and pressing against a rushing wind all morning wore at it quickly. We reached Findlay, Ohio, and stumbled almost immediately upon a donut shop. Justin went in. I found him seated at a small square table in the corner. Both of us were pleased to be at least momentarily removed from the wind's incessant howl. I opened my computer, turned it on, and sat back. The busy highway sound of impending cars, and semis, usually rushing at my side, was pleasantly muffled by the shop window.

We'd primarily come to Findlay to have my bike fixed. It had a laundry list of problems: My left pedal had fallen off once and rarely wanted to spin freely anymore, and its cloth strap that had worked like a belt for my foot was worn into two useless pieces. My tired chain had broken three times, trying repeatedly to throw in the towel. I'd already bought its replacement, but I figured I'd wait to put it on with a fresh set of gears on the back (cassette) just for good measure.

It was one-fifteen in the afternoon when I searched the shop's location. Remembering it was Saturday I checked their website for operating hours and saw with a shock that they would close in forty short minutes.

“We gotta go!” I yelped at Justin, quickly scribbling the directions on a napkin and slapping my computer shut.

Through the traffic lights and weekend busy streets we sped downtown and found the place marked by display bicycles standing in front of the shop. I rolled my bike up onto the sidewalk, laid it against the wall outside, and opened the glass door. Stepping quickly around the lines of bikes in the store, I went up to the desk and first told them about my cassette/chain issue. The owner followed me out to see the gear ratio on the bike.

“I know you guys close at two, and I don't know how long it would take to fix,” I worried out loud.

“Oh, I'm not in a hurry. If it takes a little longer, it takes a little longer,” he said, genuinely. I smiled in relief.

Fortunately they had the part. In fact it had just been put onto one of the employee's bicycles. He voluntarily, even insistently surrendered it, taking the cogs from his wheel and layering them onto mine. “Hey, if I can't go to Alaska”, he said happily, “at least a part of my bike will!”

While he maneuvered those pieces around, the owner scooted about on his four-wheeled stool, picking out new pedals for me from a bin. He wrenched mine out and set to spinning the new ones into place, then seeing my back brake pads began shaking his head. Before I could say anything he'd torn open a box and was replacing them, too.

His hands working, he pointed out to me, “And we don't charge labor on any of this. Not to anybody who's traveling. I did a cross country back in college, so I can sympathize."

With fresh brake pads, cassette, and chain on he started a detailed adjustment of the brakes and gears. By two-twenty all was done. He set the total cost for all the work and parts equal to what he'd paid for the cassette alone, taking no profit whatsoever. What he really wanted in return was pictures of us in Alaska, and maybe a postcard.

While the late afternoon sun crept past a web of clouds we stopped at a gas station to eat. Justin went and laid in the shade of a tree, and I sat down on the curb, dialing the phone number Tiffiny had scrawled on a piece of folded paper for me. She and Allen had told us where they'd generally be over the next few days and offered to pick us up if we were in their area so I figured I'd see what they were up to.

She answered the phone sounding a little surprised at the call. I told her we were in Findlay and she said she needed to find something out about their schedule and would call me right back. I got up and walked over to where Justin was and my phone began to vibrate. Tiffiny now told me they could pick us up tomorrow from wherever we were in the morning. We'd just have to let her know where to go.

-

Into the countryside we rode northward, paralleling the interstate. Again we found ourselves poking like pinpoints above a thinly stretched landscape, following a cardinal direction grid bursting with the green growth of agriculture. Above as we rode, the blurred overcast sky became further defined with gray detail in the waning light of sunset. The fields about us were growing darker every minute and weren't affording the privacy needed for a campsite of any security so, becoming further frustrated, we turned to a road going east. This lane split into two at a township's border. Directly ahead, in the vertex between the two roads laid a small public park. We rolled our bicycles through discretely and found a fairly hidden place on the leeward side of a section of wooden fence where we laid out our tents.

Darkness fell and sleep set on. The park's thick grass was an easy pad, nearly like lying on a feather bed to the tired mind of the traveler. Suddenly a bright light fell on our tents. A policeman peered with his flashlight into my mesh door.

“Hey,” I calmly greeted him.

“Hey, how many of you are there?” His voice betrayed a friendly nature.

“Just two. One in that tent, and then me in here.”

He asked what we were doing and I briefly explained the trip.

“See the problem is the park's closed at sundown,” he told us. “To be honest I don't have a problem with you guys being here, but the mayor does.”

“Well, where are we supposed to go?” I asked earnestly.

He hesitated for a second and then, “I'll be right back.”

Shortly he returned from his car, asked for our Ids, and then drove off, promising us that he'd return them. Justin and I sat down at a picnic table under the park's lone yellow light.

“This is stupid. The mayor has a problem? We're not hurting anybody. I'd just went to sleep, too,” Justin said.

“Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. He's probably talking to the mayor right now.”

A few minutes later the police car headlights were coming down the park's dirt drive. He stopped and called us over to his window from the driver seat and handed back our Ids. “Alright, so you guys are good to go. You can stay the night, but, you know, try to get out early if you can, and don't be up walking around the park or anything. Good luck, guys. And thanks for your cooperation.”

We walked back to our tents, ready to return to sleep.

“But...where do we go?” Justin mocked, “That was good, though.”

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