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.

O difficulty, difficulty!

May 12

This date passed quickly, beautiful and uneventful. It began in early waking and preluding coffee upon the rooster's call and quick bustle to pack pre-departure. Jabez led us through the stretch of hills to town telling us each landmark which may have passed our gaze. Night still sat between the hills, but an orange glow began to show behind the eastern treetops.

I peeled the aluminum foil cap from my coffee mug as we went on, tilting my cup to heed the force of turn and slope. My eyes were peeled to the sky as color streamed into all things. I had the benefit of the windows; unfortunate Justin sat in a chair in the back of the van beside the bicycles and bags.

Jabez gave us a choice of where to be dropped off, telling us which roads would lead us where and we decided on the gas station at the intersection of two highways where we would begin to climb north. Once stopped we laid out our things in a wide pile in the parking lot. Jabez departed and we thanked him for everything, with thoughts for Susan following behind.

Quickly I packed my bike together and went on ahead of Justin to try and find some photographs of the Southern countryside in the early morning light. A few minutes down the road I found the field and watched as the sun peaked over the misty slopes and soon Justin caught up, just having filled his water bottles. The day continued slowly at first with frequent stops as the light crept up. Within a few hours Justin and I had agreed to commence our mornings at six daily. The opportunities afforded were too numerous and broad and the dawn-side temperatures too comfortable to pass.

All the day on was simplicity and clear skies, so we went – passed the Tennessee threshold before noon and going easily on to Cleveland. Immediately upon entering the town we came across the wastes left by the tornadoes, those same tornadoes who'd gifted Jabez and Susan with their rooster friend. The gifts here were less pleasant: buildings torn apart from within, each strung together with caution tape borders and a pink X adorning each side. Weeks have passed and nothing'd been done – lasting monuments for a memory slow to fade, but our way went on.

Searched out, found, and stopped in a two-story campus-side library for afternoon siesta, shoes off, writing, reading, or napping in chairs away from the outside peaking sun and asphalt heat.

Afterward time and distance went on without bother. Night came suddenly with the search for a campsite continuing late. In surrender and weariness we came upon a cemetery rising to a hilltop, a long steep drive winding around its left margin. We stopped and pressed our bicycles up the gravel tracks and in conscientiousness, with a bit of hesitation, and full due respect made shelter behind the graves, a morbid bed perhaps, but welcome (so long as we remained undisturbed!) at the close of the day.

May 13

Waking came with dawn and we gathered our things as planned upon the turn of six. We rose with the clouds and went on our way. The sky remained veiled through the rest of the day and color was lost from the dawn. When days are gray it's easy to expect less pleasant things. We went on without much event through the daytime, climbing to the top of a plateau in the mountains as rain began to fall.

Near the end of the day with the sky still a dim gray I rode up a hill and stopped during a small gap in the rain, awaiting Justin behind me. I saw his white helmet appear and noticed he was walking, hauling bicycle alongside. He slowly approached and then he told me he'd almost fallen but had caught himself, planting his right leg into the ground with the result of a jammed-up knee. He could walk with the pain, but pedaling wasn't as simple. The joint shot him with pain if moved it to either side so we sat and rested a while, wondering and weary and unsure of what may follow.

Light began fading away and the sky's shade of gray deepened. There was nothing to do but make camp, so we set off, and with one footstep to my pedal my chain popped a strained link, dragging fallen along the asphalt. The fix was quick, but the insult too obvious to miss. The day pressed me hard, but I didn't know whether to cry out to it, “O difficulty, difficulty!” in laughter or tears.

Two hills later we readied to make quick camp in the woods. A parked car sat in a shoulder-side pull-off from which descended a rugged path down to lower ground running parallel to the road. A short way along the path we found an empty space on even ground next to a shallow trickling stream. Here was where we laid our tents and sat in repose. We filled our lungs with nature air, exhaling temporal worries into a flowing and flowering wilderness night.

May 14

Turning in discomfort through night, my eyes were closed though seeing only occasional brief and fleeting dreamless sleep. The earth's rotation went on slowly and unevenly. I awoke in cycles every time initiated by pitter-patter on the tent top, single raindrops growing and collecting to a reverberant shush until sleep caught me again. The stream behind the tents swelled, its pulse and pace quickening as it fed.

I became sick to my stomach as night faded into day and the uneasiness continued. My alarm sounded at six, but I did not feel like doing anything, now having gained what felt like fever. Justin remained also in his tent, got up a couple times, but we both slept on past afternoon without much change. I had told my parents I would call them the night before, but had had no signal to do so. Justin went searching for one on the road, but acquired nothing. Returning he told me that the car at the base of the path's driver-side window was shattered out and asked me if I'd heard anything in the night. Neither of us remembered it being that way before.

Not until later did we discuss what we might do about the day. My body ached and was heavy and cumbersome having remained in my tent such a period and the air outside was yet colder and uninviting. The rain had been dropping in, on and off throughout the morning, but by late afternoon had been absent a while so with difficulty I got up and walked about. Justin's leg had not improved and I still felt queasy, shivering on my surface while hot inside and retaining a fogginess of mind. Days like this test how much you want what you think you want and make you sick for home and a bed; days like this test fortitude and teach will.

We walked down the road to where my chain had broke and were able to make our calls to the comfortable houses in heat and dry so far away. The sun was setting beyond the trees. Vehicles sped occasionally by as we walked back on the side of the road, and I watched as the waxing gibbous moon grew brighter against a sky shrinking away. We turned back into the forest to find our tents still draped with a cold moisture in the dark.