~Thorton Wilder
Day 5 of the epic.
I stayed the night in a town called Checotah, Arkansas. I first made the mistake of trying one of those rooms starting at $19.95 a night in Gallup, New Mexico. When I opened the door to that room, my first thought was, “Well, here is where someone stashed a lifetime supply of used cigarette butts.”
It got worse. A storm moved in and I woke up and looked at the door to see a sheet of water moving under the door. I moved every thing up onto something and tried to sleep. That did not work, so I started getting ready to hit the road.
I felt like a little kid, jumping from bed, to bed, to the linoleum bathroom floor, trying not to step on the now-soaked carpet. I have a thing about wall-to-wall carpet anyway… its like socks that people never change. In a public room, its like socks that the under-belly of society has worn, taken off, then you put them on. I am sorry if that disturbs you, but there it is.
In Checotah, I up-scaled. I paid $40 for a room. It smelled vaguely like only 20 years of cigarette butts, the floor was not part of the storm drainage system, and the toilet seat did not slide off the toilet when I used it (that was a shocker at 3 in the morning, let me tell you). I reasoned to myself that this is good… an awful room helps me get up and out in the morning.
I loaded the bike and sat on the curb in the humid morning air waiting for the light of the day, looking east, always looking east. As the sun started to outline the edges of the clouds I felt a renewed desire to be home… not to end the adventure, but to be in the place that I belonged.
As I rode along through Arkansas that morning, I reviewed the lands I had crossed:
- Santa Cruz smelled of sea and wild foods and the people were a weird mix of x-game junkies and gen x granola hippies (this is NOT derogatory… I like it). It had rolling hills and palm trees.
- The valley east of the coast was agrarian and smelled of farming, be that cattle, onions, whatever. The eastern edge had grasslands and rolling hills leading up to the foothills of the Sierras.
- Yosemite was primal, tranquil, majestic and alive. Its breath smelled of eucalyptus, coniferous trees, and water which had beaten its way through the rocky creek bottom.
- Right against Yosemite’s life was Mono Lake and the Nevada Desert, which looks to be the exact opposite of Yosemite. It’s like the mineral and the living fought. Yosemite’s outcome was that life won, but Nevada was clear that mineral was the boss.
- The Nevada desert was a wonder to behold… I imagine it is what I would feel near a volcano: the unfiltered presence of the power of the merciless Earth. A co-worked quoted George Carlin “ The planet… the planet… the planet isn’t going anywhere. We Are!” It seemed true to me, pitted against the planet, we are doomed. In Nevada I knew, if were my bike to fail, I was in real peril, and the earth wouldn't even have to try to destroy me. The planet will be fine, I wouldn't.
- Arizona was a transition. Nevada and the West portion of Arizona looked like God got there in creation and said, “I’ll just finish that later,” and never did. As you head East, sage and cactus appear. The smell of sage is strong in places. Rain is such a rarity; you can smell it for miles and miles.
- New Mexico added grass. There were cattle farms more often, although I cannot imagine a happy cow on that landscape. It smelled of sage and hot hay. It reminded me of the smell in the hayloft in my uncle Ken’s barn in Buck’s County Pennsylvania. The smell there came from the silage of the hay bales buried deep within the pile of hay but now exposed and heated by the air trapped up at the top of the slate-roofed barn. It was strong, and musky, and rich… like nature’s version of espresso.
- Texas added some cedar trees and more cattle, but was very like New Mexico.
- Oklahoma… was hot. Oh my word, hot. The road from Shamrock, Texas to Oklahoma City had a constant, steady, head wind from the Southeast. 3 hours of being beaten by the wind.
- Arkansas got my attention. Oaks and Pines started to reach for each other and canopied the ground. Just East of Little Rock, the basin for the Mississippi begins and the moisture in the air begins to make itself known. I crossed the muddy river and entered Tennessee and the smells were more familiar: deciduous trees, fresh-cut grass. Almost home.
- Mississippi was the same for me as Tennessee. Homey.
- As I entered Alabama, the rain was just on the horizon. As I got close to the clouds and rain, I looked at the tree-covered rolling hills. The rain had just passed through and the mist from the forest floor trailed upwards like cobwebs or cotton boles all pulled apart. They were carried upward by gentle air, but held by the limbs of the trees. I was left with the impression that the mists were the children of the clouds, trying to get into the sky. The aroma of leaf-mulch struck me and I realized I had not smelled the smell in 5 days of travel. I had missed it dearly.
As I thought about all the lands I had passed through: the almost child-like west coast; the hard-working agrarian the San Joaquin Valley east of Santa Cruz; the majesty of the Yosemite area; the brutality of Nevada and the gradual greening as I traveled eastward… it felt like my life.
Think about it.
Santa Cruz - the innocent ignorance of a child; the San Joaquin Valley - the sudden introduction to the work-life which is what school is the harbinger of; Yosemite - the discovery of the wonder of life which is the discovery of first love; Nevada Desert and Death Valley – the betrayal and loss of innocence; The Grand Canyon – perspective of scale which first tells you how really, really small you are, then assures you that huge canyon was made for you; the road from The Grand Canyon to Alabama - the long slow process of healing which doesn’t happen over night but slowly adds life; never really retuning to the innocence, or to the primal power of Yosemite, but is uniquely like the Appalachians, green, but old; lively, but wise.
I was certain of this: we will never remove the experiences of our lives. They are a part of who we are. Those moments do not have to define, nor constrain us, but they do build us into who we are. As such, we must never deny those experiences, or bow to them, but we can remember them, and stand on the shoulders of those moments to look further than we could before.
When I finally rode up to my house, with my family inside, I opened the door un-announced and walked in. There were no more towns to anticipate. No questions of rates, no room assignments, there was no odor of a lifetime supply of cigarette butts to greet me. I needed to ask nothing. The smell of slow cooked chicken and brussel sprouts, and the presence of the people I know and love was there to greet me.
I was home. It was not the innocence of the coast, of the industry of the valley, or the primal power of Yosemite, or the crushing power of the desert, or the realization that the world is quite a bit larger than I am and larger than my problems… it was a perfectly mixed and baked life-cobbler of all those things.
This is the way it is supposed to be.
