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| Caprock Canyon State Park, northwest Texas |
Mine was not Diogenes’, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, search for
an honest man; one of my guiding questions was the much less rigorous, “What
makes a good person?” And no, I
didn’t begin with G. E. Moore; it was to be measured in my interactions along
the road as I moved from New Mexico to Texas farm road to county road and small
town to interstate, from local café to a Waffle House, from campground to
campground and the one stay in a motel.
The summary first: in the tens of interactions only one was not generous
in spirit. This is not to say that
the people were all good people (serial killers are often charming), but that
the presentation of the human world across the country was, in total, a
delight.
That delight was conditioned with other qualities of the
interactions: neediness was one, another was the context of the road; another
was the powerful contrast, almost cartoonish, that an old man in high-tech
riding gear (my daughters call me ‘action figure Dad’) on an old BMW motorcycle
made with the typical travelers. I was an open invitation for comments and
questions, was generally non-threatening and easy to treat well.
To dispense with the one ungenerous moment: It was in the
moderately sized town of Mexia, south of Dallas, on the east side of the unofficial
border between west and east Texas – the less generous side of Texas in my
experience anyway. It was also an
experience of no consequence; I was just the only thing available to yell at,
back to the contrast thing. I had
pulled over to look at a map in preparation for finding my way to a nearby
state park. The road signs and the
layout of the roads seemed to be at odds and it was the wrong time of the day
for me to get lost – as much as I enjoyed that experience when fresh. To the local toughs I must have stood
out in the commonplace visuals like the sore thumb. So, the pickup drove by and
an attempted, though incompetent, impoliteness was yelled. Pretty good to be the only bad!
An interaction of a very different sort happened at a 2-pump
gas station, the only one at a crossroads with Florida state road 267 that goes
through the Apalachicola National Forest.
It is from such events that I am trying to divine the state of mind of
my American brothers and sisters.
I had been on the road for about 4 hours after a late start
on the day; it was hot with both temperature and humidity edging toward their
own kind of 100. I pulled up to
the inside of one pump and began my ritual with helmet, gloves, gas cap and
wallet. A biggish pickup pulled
into the pump next to me and the driver was looking at me and smiling the “my
other car’s a Harley” smile. About
the same time a working van pulled into the opposite side of my pump – I didn’t
pay much attention. The driver of
the pickup yelled over the introductory comments and questions. His Harley was in Tyler, Texas, had a
problem with the trailer, and his pickup in Utah or some such; just gassing up
the wife’s truck for a drive to Ohio to visit relatives. He admired my packing, that I could get
a whole house of stuff on the bike.
I assured him that I also had a boat and a garage.
As we were wrapping up our little bit of rapid repartee, I
noticed that a young man, thirtyish, had gotten out of the van and was shyly
working his way around behind the gas pump toward me. I devoted myself to the tank filling and turned to replace
the nozzle. The man was right
there next to the bike. His voice was emotional; “That’s a great ride you have
there,” he said. I replied with
something like, “Sure is. I like it.”
I had clearly not grasped his meaning. And he repeated with
emphasis, “That’s a great ride.” His
voice was a little chocked up and he seemed almost teary. I can’t speak for this specific young
man, but it is my experience that especially in the rural south a country man
can be taken unawares by events; rushing through my mind, ‘Could it be that he
has been thunder-clapped by my apparent freedom? Could it be that he has a
studied knowledge of the motorcycle that he would ride across country if he
could?’ I meet his eyes, “Yes, it
is. I’ll look for you on the road.”
It was all in the emphasis: the ‘you’ was him on his own old BMW that he had built up and
restored. He smiled and I gave the
throttle a little bump so that he could hear the tone of the engine as I rolled
away.
I meet a man in Crestview, Florida as I was loading up the
cycle after my one, less than comfortable, stay in a motel. He came walking over from the other
side of the parking lot throwing ahead of him a pretty standard observation,
“You’re a long way from home.” I
said, “Yeah, five days on the road from New Mexico.” He pointed to his SUV and at his NM plates. Turned out he now lived near Houston,
but had worked for more than 20 years in my town as a guard in the state
prison: we knew some of the same people.
Further, he had been on the road with me from before Mobile and had
first noticed me when caught in a ten mile long Interstate ‘parking lot’
created by the 30 MPH I-10 tunnel there.
I had gotten off the Interstate and roamed the surface streets in a
rough part of town until finding a way around, but that is another story.
He was on his way to visit relatives that he had never met
in a town that he had never been to: DeFuniak Springs (if the casual
conversations are the humanity of the road, its place names are its
poetry).
* * *
Throughout the trip I looked for local cafes and
restaurants, both as an exercise and to stop at for my one sit-down meal a day
(the rest were taken as “road food,” carried in the tank-bag). My prototypes were the ‘Coffee Cup
Café’ from my hometown in Florida, many miles and 50 years away, and a little
12 top in Watonga, Oklahoma, a locals’ place where I always got a pat on the
shoulder and a wish to “ride safe” from some old man who used to ride.
They were all gone. The slightly bigger towns had “evening
restaurants” and specialty lunch places, but not the gathering places where
locals just naturally stopped in on their way from one place to another. I rode through nearly 100 little towns:
the Coffee Cups and the “our town” cafes were gone. Maybe some were hiding out on side streets, but I gave these
as good a look as I could at 25 miles per hour or from the occasional 4-way
stop. No, they were gone.
There should have been two hundred such places and I should
have seen at least 50 of them as inviting. The gas station “convenience store” had taken their place,
along with Sonic, Pizza hut, IHop and such. I went into one Waffle House in north Florida that was all
locals. Except for the machine
stamped interior design and furnishings it was just like the Coffee Cup
Café. What did the mathematician
say in Jurassic Park? “Life will find a way.”
* * *
On one of my forays onto the interstate I felt a side panel
on the motorcycle come loose. I
quickly repositioned my foot and leg to keep it from flying off and found a
reasonably safe place to pull over.
As I rolled to a stop my mind was fixed on holding the panel in place; I
put my other foot down without adjusting to the strange position and the bike promptly
responded to the wild call of gravity and fell over. I was miles from an exit, sort of like being in the middle
of a desert. The other drivers
were like space aliens who couldn’t-wouldn’t recognize me as a life form.
I tried to pick the bike up, which I can do without great
difficulty unloaded; it stayed nailed to the ground. I began to undo bungees and straps when I heard, “Could you
use a hand?” This was an
impossible sound and collection of words and took a moment to process. I looked up; parked a hundred yards
down the shoulder was an 18 wheeler loaded with scrap metal and 30 feet away
walking briskly toward me was a 50 year-old black man with a friendly smile on
his face.
What I think these and many other moments mean will have to
wait for next time.
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