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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Visions of the Past

Our bikes came to a halt in awe of a field of small yellow flowers laying drenched in the suspended sunlight. We were riding roads unmarked on our map of Ohio. The road system was a grid, so there was no worry of becoming lost. We went west, parallel to the highway – away from all of the traffic and anxiety – riding instead amongst a silence broken only by the subtle wavering hum of wind against the eardrums.

A flurry of red winged blackbirds, nestling quietly in the long grass was roused in a flurry, unintentionally startled by us as we passed. The hills were effectively gone now, the lingering few being inconsequential in the scope of the flat farmland stretching out in all directions. This was the first of the Midwest. A humble farmhouse and its rickety barn, its silos and trucks or tractor adorned the roadside marking each transition from one plot of land to the next, and a dark line of trees stood mediating the boundary between crops. The sky was bright blue overhead.

Ahead of us I saw our road was coming to an end with the next intersection, and we would have to decide between taking the left or the right to find the next street leading west. In our pause Justin pulled out a water bottle to take a swig. I looked down the road to the right and saw two dirty blond heads bobbing up and down, a couple kids on bicycles coming toward us.

The one in front was the smaller, maybe five years old. His face was smudged with dirt and he was draped in a pair of dirty, tattered overalls. He carried a large white jug in his left hand with the few fingers he could spare while gripping onto the handlebars.

His brother followed. He was a bit taller, overalls faded and worn to the same pale blue as his brother's, probably having been handed down from a yet older dirty blond head. The white cloth handlebar tape was mostly stripped from his old orange road bike. His seat was too high and the bicycle was too big so he rode standing erect on its aluminum pedals with his little dusty bare feet.

They rode by slowly, perpendicular to us. Forgetting their bicycles, their destination, forgetting time and place, and forgetting their expressions their identical faces stared back at us as we stood over our bicycles and bags. Mouths open and eyes empty, they struggled alike to register what it was they saw before them. I was equivalently overwhelmed at the sight of their pure, unconscious possession of countryside childhood and waved to them as they passed in front of us. They were pulled suddenly away from their confusion, became suddenly conscious of the clicking from their freewheels and remembered where they were. They both returned to pedaling, and, shyly, they waved back.

When they were a bit down the road Justin looked at me, exasperated, and proclaimed, “I want to be them!"

We followed after, a short way behind. The boys had pulled off and dropped their bikes on the left side of the road. The little one was running, almost dancing, through the wheat field, waving the big white jug side to side in his hand held high toward his father who was stepping down from the lofty seat of a tractor. Once closer, I saw his father prop the little boy up on his shoulders and walk through the field while talking to another man, his son's arms hugging tight the straw hat on his head. The older brother was up in the tractor seat with his hands around the steering wheel. He put out his right hand to us and waved once again, proud of his position and grinning brightly from the honored seat.

Across the horizon in the distance the figure of a horse drew a buggy northward. It turned and began down the road we were on, coming toward us in the left half of its lane. I could distinguish a small brown horse with a loose vertical white stripe along the length of its face leading an uncovered old wooden carriage. In the seat sat three young girls. Holding the horse's leather reins was the oldest, wearing a dress of deep magenta. A thinly striped bonnet covered her dark hair, with its rippled brim shading her brown eyes from the noon sun. Sitting beside her was a slightly younger girl who had two tight, long, brown braids running down the front of her dress from behind each ear. A third littler girl sat at their feet. All three struggled between looking at us and looking anywhere else.

Present day had fallen out from beneath me and I was gone into a time so long passed we couldn't comprehend each other. It was here before me laid out not as a reenactment, but as their approach to reality, the functional past voluntarily lived out in the current. Time seemed to progressively slow in the lessening distance between us. In the moment we passed, they politely waved, their expressions still suspended in indecision, still unsure what to think or how to look. This got the attention of a little sandy blond girl sitting on the back who poked her head up from behind them. This littlest, seeing us as we went by, turned around to face us, then plopped down, her pale blue dress and little feet dangling over the back edge of the carriage. The dreamlike sense of fantasy escaped me in a smile I could no longer contain. She didn't wave, but her unabashed eyes, so full of gravity and insatiable wonder, followed us precisely, and curiously, seeking the timeless comprehension we all were seeking, following our figures at least as long as I could watch them in the distance from the corner of my own wondering eye. The clop-clop of the horses hooves began to slowly fade behind, and a fresh breeze rolled over the fields, bending the strands of wheat. Silence curled up around us once again as the eternal sun slowly drifted through the sky.

Searching for Balance

I was led to the dining room table and Grandma Nancy set a bowl of chili in front of me with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, silverware, a soda pop, and then two slices of pie. I was worn but clean now, and glad to be getting fed full at what was both the end of a long day and the start of my first hiatus.

It can truthfully be said that I have never eaten so well or so much in an equivalent length of time as I did in the following week. The days passed by increments measured in the time between feasts. Mornings began with breakfast toast and cereal tiding us over until the lunch that was planned. In the case that there were no large lunch on a given day we could expect a big supper that night. Not a single day came in which my stomach's limits went untested.

A general listing of the meals and their contents should convey an accurate picture. Excluding snacks, I attempted to keep track, but please forgive me if some stray dishes have escaped the company of their companions here (there were so many!): chili, a buffet in Amish country (bread pudding and plethora other dishes), cheese sampling at a cheese factory, cheese and crackers, hot sausage sandwich and beer at Geisen Haus, Memorial Day fried chicken and jojos, tuna noodle casserole, sausage and sauerkraut, a Sunday morning breakfast buffet (custom omelet, muffins, etc.), family cookout burgers, dogs, deviled eggs and macaroni salad, a dinner buffet, a spice cake, pizza, chips, and pop, and finally the pies! Very berry, peanut butter cream, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, another very berry, and a cherry.

This should speak for itself.

After I'd finished dinner everyone came together in the living room and played cards. Mindy wandered about our feet under the card table while we played, hoping for leftover food scraps and the local weather report and tornado warnings buzzed behind us on the television. The past three nights had brought in cloud cover and sudden, heavy thunderstorms, but tonight I'd sleep in a bed beneath a solid roof safe from the rain and wind.

The next day I helped Justin in the garage to get his bike out of its shipping box and reassembled.

“We'll get you some dignity again, Bullseye,” he said to it soothingly.

The neighbor's dog came charging in. He curiously sniffed about us, looked up, barked once, and returned to sniffing. He appeared to be a mix of beagle and something else, his hunting nature searching for some invisible foe.

The neighbor appeared in the driveway, saw what we were doing and seemed to become excited, “Hey! So you guys must be the ones taking the big trip! That's quite an adventure I'd say. Hey, Calvin, get over here!” he yelled to his dog. He talked to us a minute longer and then returned to the other side of the bushes separating the properties. Calvin followed along at his heels, trying to chew his shoes as he tried to walk.

“Calvin, yep, that's my feet! He doesn't do that to anybody else, you know, just me,” he called back to us from out of sight.

Most of the week was filled with eating or sleeping or in waiting for the one or the other. My poison ivy rash had initially grown worse, primarily on my left foot in which a layer of fluid swelled up beneath the skin (chills run down my neck now just thinking about it). I'll say no more about it other than it went slowly away and scabbed over. Just writing that much about it makes me physically uncomfortable.

Memorial Day afternoon Grandpa pulled the car out of the garage and we all got in to go to Aunt Sandy's cookout. On the drive through town Justin pointed out the restaurants, stores, and other landmarks he recognized as we passed them, paging through fuzzy childhood memories. He confirmed their accuracy against the memory of his grandparents, casting his fragmented stories like lines to fish more full or entirely fresh ones from the depths of his grandparents' combined pond of recollection.

“I remember Lake Mohawk. I used to love it there,” he said. “Of all the places I remember from coming up here as a kid that's the one that stands out most. So many good memories there. Isn't that where we...,” he retreated into the foothills of a story and, as if from a distance, looked up with expectation to his grandparents seated in the front of the car.

We pulled up to the house and the cousins were playing basketball in the driveway. We went in passed the three dogs, and came out on the back porch. It was a warm day with a deep blue sky overhead spread with a few thin, stippling clouds. Grandpa took shelter in the shade of a large tree which hung partly over the porch and the rest of us sat around the glass table. Aunt Sandy and Uncle Gene came out and they all began to talk with each other about the changing times in the way families do, having been known each other through a changing past. Justin's cousin Michelle came out and then people began to swim in the above-ground pool. The water's temperature had just recently begun to reach comfortable levels. Me and Justin were soon in the basement finding out how bad we were at billiards.

At some point during the few hours we played, the fried chicken and jojos (elsewhere known as potato wedges or steak fries) arrived. Being wise to our appetites, everyone had gathered their first plate of food before telling us it was time to eat. Later in the week this happened again, twice, before we learned to not be so easily fooled.

Nine o'clock on Wednesday Grandpa had us help him with the weekly yard work. He putted around the front and back lawns seated on his red riding mower in the morning heat, wearing blue shorts and suspenders, fishers cap propped on top his head, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Justin took the push mower around the smaller spaces and I brushed at the detailed edges with a weed whacker. Afterward he had me climb up onto the roof and pull out clumps of helicopter seeds accumulating in the corners of the gutters. The last task he had for us was to fell a small, bent tree that was starving its neighboring trees for light. The only payment Justin's grandparents asked for the vast amount of food, a week of nights in the warmth of a bed, and our participation in all their kindred kindness and love was a bucket of damp tree seeds, some cut grass, a tree stump, and for us to otherwise rest and be.

Sunday morning they took us out to eat at a breakfast buffet. We all came in and took a seat at one of the tables. Walking by the section next to our table I noticed a very cute girl wearing a bow on the front of her long brown hair serving a table. I got up and filled my plate with eggs and other things, finished and got up for my second and third plate. The guy who had got our order at the entrance when we'd come in approached me directly as I looked over the desserts.

“Hey, man,” he said to me, grasping my attention, “I've got a question for you. You see that girl over there?” He motioned toward the girl with the bow. My wide eyes followed the motion and, seeing her stifling either laughter or embarrassment under a tightly sealed smile, I quickly looked down at the floor and nodded my head. She knew she was being talked about and kept from looking our way. My heartbeat quickened out of uncertainty. He continued, “Well, she's really shy, but she said that you look like you're her type. So I wanted to ask you for her, does she seem like she's your type at all?”

My eyes bounced from the floor, to the food, to him, to the plate I held in front of me.

I was completely overwhelmed, but I managed to tell him, “Well, uh, I'm actually pretty shy, too, but, well, I'm kind in the middle of a trip to Alaska.”

“Oh,” he said a little surprised, “Well, would you be willing to take her number at least?”

I didn't really know what to say given the combination of my complete lack of practice with this kind of thing and the complexity of the circumstances I'd found myself in, but I told him yes.

At the table I sat down, still a little overwhelmed, and tried to describe what had happened. Grandma Nancy began poking fun. Waving her finger at me she said, “You're tanned so your face doesn't show it, but I can tell that you're blushing.”

I did call her. I didn't want to insult her by not calling. In fact we ended up going out for ice cream the day before Justin and I left town. I was ecstatic to meet her, but this is where my writing becomes most difficult. I'm forced now to distinguish what, if anything, should be made public, and what should remain private. Will what I write in any way betray the trust of who I write about? When I meet someone and tell them about this journal, if they find their way into my writing new problems arise. Now I'm writing to you and about you, subject and audience becoming one in the same. This makes things difficult, and how much more so in a girl-guy situation. This search for the precarious balance between trust and honesty pervades every paragraph in my subjective non-fiction.

So we went out and had ice cream. We talked about art and the world and where and how we currently found ourselves. More than anything else, I think, we were each glad to meet someone we'd been intrigued by. The whole event had thrown me off, though. It's amazing how much sway a woman can have, even unintentionally.

She parked her car in front of the house when we'd got back. We walked down the street under the darkening sky just to keep talking a little longer. I could no longer see her face in the absence of sun or street lights, but I could feel her expressions through her emphatic voice, and I thought, “Please, don't stop talking.”

Riding through a small town I stop beside a lonely gas station in the noon heat, crouch down in the shadow at a spigot on the wall and refill my water bottle. A man walking by from his truck slows down next to me. I look up and he points to my bicycle and asks where I'm from and where I'm headed.

“I saw the bike and I thought, 'This guy's gotta be on some kind of trip!'” I answer him and then as he goes he leaves me with his parting words, “Yep, do it while you're young,” and the sentence echoes through me.

Above, a few stars began to show in the night sky. She got back into her car, and said goodbye to me and wished me safety. I quietly said goodnight, turned away, and walked through the darkness down the driveway to the house. Then climbing its steps, I listened as the engine of her car turned over and drove away. I stepped in the door, trading one opportunity for another.

Childhood

Over the green rippling surface of Ohio I rode my bicycle. On my left came a barn, in front of it a plain black carriage sitting with reins resting slack and its attendant horse trotting about with its sisters and brothers in the field behind. At a spigot nearby was a woman in a plain black dress and bonnet, arched over, pumping water into a bucket, ignorant of me as I looked on. I'd entered the Amish country.

Next on the road, in the yard of a white house there sat two small girls beneath a tall old tree, both wearing the same dress and bonnets and little black shoes. They looked up suddenly to me from the grass and were first struck confused, but a broad smile spread across each bright face and they began vigorously waving with wide eyes fixed to me.

From behind the hill in front of me now their father came. He wore a black suit, a flat black hat, was bearded and projected a pleasant sensation, sitting in his carriage with the reins resting in his palms, a slim brown horse pulling him along. His face, too, showed a smile, and he chuckled when he saw me. The wonder his children had experienced in seeing me seemed in him to have been replaced predominantly with amusement, resulting from his benefit of experience.

Their wonder caused me to wonder, to attempt to see through their young eyes. They looked out from the boundary of their lawn onto a road traversed all day by vehicles they don't understand. Having never felt the vibrations of an engine from a passenger seat, having never seen images of the wide world flickering on a television screen or any of the other familiar and ubiquitous experiences the rest of America takes for granted. What must they think of it all?

As a child, I remember, my mother buckled me tightly into a safety seat in the rear of the car. I'd sat, bored and restless, while the mundane land passed by, occupying myself with my little fingers and hands until we pulled into the grocery store parking lot. She let my sister out, then placed her hands beneath my shoulders and lifted me out from the car, standing me on the asphalt. My sister tagged along beside her and I peered around from the shopping cart seat, keeping my fingers grasped around the thin metal bars. We wandered around the store, Mom picked out what we needed and placing it into the cart's basket. Inevitably my sister and I began losing our patience so Mom promised us each a 25 cent fruit roll up if we'd keep ourselves quiet. Back in the car I sat buckled again, now scratching at the edge of the gummy fruit circle and peeling it away from the plastic, poking out the animal shapes in its surface and chewing them one by one.

That memory flashed through my mind. Seemingly trivial, it was something these children couldn't know. They saw world as if separated from it by a pane of glass, but I could see in their eyes there was no loss of childhood. They held the same curiosity and pure amazement now as I'd had years ago. As children looking onto something new a waterfall of intrigue and bewilderment filled them up without them knowing what the difference was between intrigue and bewilderment, nor knowing the other words to comprehend their feelings. I looked now back at them through the eyes of my past to see inside them. There was understanding in the instant our gazes met. I was filled from the same waterfall of feelings and, though I tried, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed, and an simple smile burst onto my own face.

This road I'd taken led me through a line of Amish towns. Mennonites were intermixed, dressing similarly but with distinctly more colorful clothing. Outside every house were hung long lines of clothes drying in the day breeze, dresses and shirts running from little to big, one end to the other. Varieties of bicycles laid on the lawns or rested against a house or barn, and two or three stood outside each workplace and shop. The children were mostly out, the bigger ones working in the yards, littler ones playing.

As I slowly pedaled up one steep hill, a small boy in overalls sitting on a white swaying porch bench peered out at me with wide eyes and gaping mouth from underneath the brim of a straw hat. He sat intensely paralyzed, his stare glued like a magnet to my bicycle.

Every adult waved to me as I passed by, almost all with the same expression of amusement. But eventually I had passed the bounds of their humble land and was put back in modernity and to, what was to me, the repetition of the familiar.

Being so near to my next checkpoint, Justin's grandparents' house, I decided to push through the day and get to Canal Fulton. You may recall, on the night Justin had hurt his leg, we'd both spent the following day and night beside a stream in the forest just off the road. At the time neither of us had considered to look for, or had even known the looks of, poison ivy. Much too late, we both figured out we'd come in contact with it, and in my ignorance until that point I had been scratching wherever I itched. I'd had it for maybe a week now and it continued to spread. I passed the long hours of each night tormented by the intense itch, laying there in my sleeping bag with arms crossed in restraint, mustering all the force of will I could to keep myself from scratching.

What I wanted now more than anything else was a shower and I would ride a hundred miles to have one if that's what it took. So that's exactly what I did. It required nearly the full day, but once the sun had just barely dropped below the treeline I was stopped on a sidewalk corner by the green sign displaying “Canal Fulton Corporation Limit”.

Finding the way between towns is simple if given a map, but the mazes of neighborhoods and townships are a matter completely their own. I called Justin to get more detailed directions to the house. After a little more riding and a few more calls I had found their street. From a distance I saw Justin's silhouette, arms extended, waving me down. I waved back at him and coasted to a stop in the driveway of his grandparents' white house.

Once Justin's parents had picked him up on that cold and bitter day in Crossville, TN, he'd ridden back to home with them in Greenville, SC. In the days that followed he visited the doctor and was subjected to some exams, with the resulting report that his knee should recuperate on its own given adequate rest. With a knee brace on his leg he was sent on his relieved way.

Given this news he had devised a way to reconvene with me and continue the trip. While I was riding through Kentucky he was packing and shipping his bicycle, bags, and belongings to his grandparents and then he paid a bus fare to get himself there as well. He would need a bit more time to recuperate, but I greatly anticipated a break and an opportunity to rid myself of the ivy rash.

I pulled my bicycle into their garage. A group of people, most of them Justin's mother-side extended family, sat in chairs on the back porch talking, the nearest few giving me a wave and friendly comment.

Inside the house I met Justin's grandmother.

“We thought you'd look like some kind of monster, the way Justin made it sound with the poison ivy and all. It's not so bad is it?" She laughed. Their white dog waddled up and began to sniff my ankles, "And that's Mindy. She won't bite or anything. She's a nice dog."

Immediately Justin took me down the basement stairs, pulled a towel out of a cabinet in the bathroom and pointed out the knobs, nozzles, soaps and shampoos of the shower. Finally I set to cleaning off. If that shower had continued for the rest of my life I'd have died happy. But, of course, not wanting to be rude I kept the shower short and went upstairs to formally meet everyone. On the porch I was introduced to the slew of family members who I'd become further acquainted with over the next eight days.

More pictures uploaded to Facebook.

Deliberate Intentions

May 19

On northward approach I went. The highway Gene had suggested kept me flowing on up/down elevations and the repetition of eroded mountains passed the day. A thin blanket of cloud remained in the sky, but it withheld its rain and kept the temperature a bit higher than it had been in days. By nighttime the land had become less extreme in its angles and would go by more smoothly.

May 20

By schedule I figured I'd be leaving Kentucky by tomorrow, but had no intention to rush. As evening began to close the day I stopped at some highway exit restaurants to search out a meal. I leaned my bicycle against a restaurant's stucco wall and sat down to roll a cigarette. A lady in fast food uniform came out and sat on the curb, lit her own cigarette, then cautiously meandered toward me. She asked if I was traveling and I introduced her to the trip. When she'd lived in Florida, she told me, she'd worked at a vegan/vegetarian place and had some friends who'd done something similar. She introduced herself to me as Cheryl.

“I love to meet people like this,” she said with a quiet smile, motioning to my bicycle. “I'm not very talkative, but if I see someone traveling or something I always talk to them and say everything right away, but then...well, what to say now?”

It was a meeting between two shy people who sensed familiarity, but both of us were unaware how to share the dialogue in our minds. Fortunately the most valuable things don't need words to be expressed and I perceived her kind sensitivity intimately in the silence between sentences.

“Hey, are you hungry? I get off in ten minutes and could bring you some food. Are you vegetarian or would anything be okay?” Excitement had entered her soft voice.

Every act of charity I encounter and the qualities of those who choose to provide it overwhelms me more each day. In some things appreciation may diminish with added quantity, but I find the opposite true of freely offered charity. These people themselves are loving kindness manifest, the voluntary instrument of absolute good will. Every altruistic act I've received is carved into me as a testament to the holiness of humanity and by each act this holiness approaches its whole.

God's perfect face shined onto me through her patient inquisitive eyes: seeking, giving, becoming good will. Love, exceeding and bountifully blessing, reflected on me from within the window of her eyes, a pristine symmetry of universal truth was mirrored for an instant in the imperfect person.

Under the changing sky Cheryl soon returned with a feast in a bag. She passed it on to me and, astounded by its weight, I thanked her, looking over it with gaping eyes. Each of us still with so much to say but no way to say it attempted to talk a minute more until her ride had arrived. The sun fell now below the horizon and the glow of evening began to fade. Then, having gotten into the car, waving goodbye they drove away and she was gone.

May 21

Riding through morning I stayed along a highway which looked to stretch flat and long to Kentucky's north border. It was a bright day. I rode on in the little shoulder singing to myself beneath the still blue sky. Surrounding fields dashed with lines of crops and little streams hinted at the Midwestern heartland.

Time passed in a haze of subconscious thought and flowing lands. As the sun crept west I found myself in traffic's evening rush. I listened to each vehicle pass. The pitch of the engine's whine rose steadily behind me, then, passing by, it would descend to become a flat hum in the distance ahead like every driver drawing breath and sighing at the completed day's work. In its wake a fold of unmowed grass bent into the vehicle's vacuum and followed away.

Suddenly I found myself becoming caught up in the rush of traffic. It immediately struck me as strange and unsettling, that I on my bicycle in the midst of a self-proclaimed pilgrimage should fall unconsciously into a repetition of this daily sprint. So I stopped pedaling and sat on the roadside to consider. This strange feeling required that I earnestly pause and deliberate why I was where I was, riding my bicycle.

I set to it:

Desire describes the surface, but what is contained within the desire? Somehow through my experiences I've accumulated this longing, but what are its details and contents?

When I'd completed my first journey it resulted in more than what I could have expected. I had conceived it in a naive desire to travel, but when I'd returned, the way in which I viewed everything had changed. I immediately began planning the next trip. Why had I wanted to travel and why now was I urged to continue? I still hadn't understood what was behind my desire, but I had gained an appreciation for the depth of the question. It is simple to give a lot of superficial answers as to why: a desire for simplicity, perhaps, or a need to slow down, to see the world or even just the country. But these barely capture a shade of it. It runs infinitely deeper into my blood and my build.

Travel itself has always come first with intentions following, attributed later as they seem to fit. I know a definitive reason must exist and from what examinations have proceeded I've managed to sufficiently distinguish what I currently see as my main purpose.

These trips are always hatched upon a feeling of dissonance between me and my surroundings. Erupting from stagnation, I'm repelled by the sterile fragility of apartment buildings and the fabric office partitions. There is something that demanded Thoreau to carve a home from the wood and live among it. That same thing endlessly tugged on Tolstoy, begging him to leave both comfort and family and set foot to path for a life of wandering. It is what whispered like an angel's breath in the ear of John Muir from every rustling leaf and crumbling pebble, his pulse quickening at its beckoning. It haunted Kerouac's steps all the years of his life. It is found equally in our blood and those stretches of land where the absolute satisfaction of every sense lies, that satisfaction most deeply engrained in humanity's heritage. It lies in the natural landscape and in the search for community and parity with it. This place was our home at our dawn and will be our bed in the dusk. It is our mother and sister and daughter, father and brother and son. The intimate love of it is fastened to our deepest body, bone and mind. From the foundations of humankind drifts a stream of profound appreciation for its natural ruggedness in which we matured. It has been hindered by modernity's vain distractions and so now I submerge myself wholly to be baptized in its primitive banks and to look out with renewed perspective from beneath its surface.

In the ignition of time came the unfurling of space and life developed and was gifted unto the primordial wild father, Adam. He was born and he learned for a time and then came his cursed fall in the instant when he became aware, realized, and understood and could comprehend himself. Then he commenced his migrations. His consciousness and migratory pattern is my birthright and inheritance, and I've been gifted and cursed by it and refuse to let it waste.

Through flawed eyes I look out on the sanctified landscape and see: the choir of birds who sing praises on high; the trees, austere monks, perpetually meditating on the cyclical wisdom found in days and seasons; and I look up to our priest, the sun, at his pulpit, the sky, his mere presence exposing to me in daily revelation the vision of God!

Travel is my vehicle for this experience. What could be more desirable to the one who seeks awakening into the rudimentary ends of experience? I find it readily along this black line of asphalt crawling beyond vision and conception, piercing and shattering the horizon's edge. It is no means to an end, but an end in itself. This is why I travel.