Riding the White Line

An Epilogue

Charlie fixing salmon and long-grain rice, a futile attempt to seem civilized.

October 24, 2007 — FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS

I am returned to Fayetteville, my city of never leave. If I had known how interminably long the bus ride would feel, I would have ridden the bike back. (Sarah, why did you not warn me! Aren’t you done with that essay about Greyhound yet?)

I arrived at the bus station in Fayetteville about 12:30 a.m. and walked up School Avenue, past the Korean fish market, past the Elenita's and the new soul food restaurant, up the hill past the public library, then right on Mountain Street past Uncle Gaylord's restaurant and the site of Sophia Sawyer's school, across the square, down Smoky Row to the alley, northeast past the Morning News office and the First Christian Church, across Dickson Street and into my neighborhood, the historic district where the trees are family and the neighbors know who you are.

To the east, the archer Orion was climbing above Mount Sequoyah, chasing the big bear Ursa Major beyond the western horizon. Straight above, Cassiopeia and the Pleides shined down.

When I first set out on a bicycle ride in 1982, it turned out to be a coming-of-age tour for me: I understood for the first time that I should be a writer; I started corresponding with a woman whom I eventually dated and whose lovely spirit and own impish sense of adventure proved to be an inspiration for the rest of my life; I recognized a wonderful desire to be among friends, family and community; and, I developed a stronger trust in my ability to cope with difficult situations.

I had been in plenty of tough spots before the ride — rising rivers when life was at risk, twisting caves in which all sense of direction seemed lost, and narrow ledges upon which fingers and toes provided the margin between safety and error — but that first bicycle tour brought all manner of surprise, from extreme weather to mechanical breakdowns to bone-weary loneliness.

On this 2007 Tour, I didn’t expect to face those sorts of surprises. I was pretty sure I knew what to expect. I had gear for rain and cold weather, should fall arrive early. I had a better idea of what structural or mechanical problems might occur with the bike and how to fix them. And I was pretty sure I wouldn’t suffer the loneliness I had on previous trips.

Getting text messages, e-mails and online comments on the journal made the riding feel as though I had a whole support crew traveling with me. And in Tupelo, Mississippi, I was out looking for post cards during a break in the rain and happened to look up at the sky at the right moment, and burst out laughing. On a billboard above me was Brenda Blagg's niece, Brandy, hawking some car dealership. Brandy was in the documentary film class I took while working on the master's degree, and her face was a very nice reminder of home. If there were momentary pangs of sadness at being alone, they were no more than what I would have felt had I been sitting alone at my house on a Saturday evening and hearing one of those songs that takes you back to a specific moment in time.

That's not to say I don't miss each and every one of you when you are not near. I do. But knowing that each of you is there, that is a good feeling. The path that we follow through the waking hours and minutes, the one that we follow toward our dreams, toward where the heart says go, that long, narrow road that Basho followed to the far province, it is best traveled with friends. And I have the best friends.

Quarter-Century Remainders

Charlie in the whirlpool at Hilton Garden Inn at Tupelo.

October 21, 2007 — TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI

I've had a dinner of bruschetta, champagne shrimp and a Snickers ice cream bar, a 15-minute soak in the hotel spa, and a long walk-about Tupelo, so now I'm ready to write.

I looked over the collection of stuff tied, tucked and twisted onto my bicycle to see whether I have anything aboard harkening back to the first tour in 1982. I've found four things, believe it or not.

First, the front rack is a hold-over from the original tour and obviously not in the best shape. (See the note about it trying to fall off near Knoxville.) Welded spots on the rear rack doomed it after about 10 years, but the front rack survived, in part because I didn't transfer it to my second bike. I got low-rider racks for it, and they disappeared when the bike got stolen. As I was getting ready for this tour, I got the old front rack off the old bike frame, and it has done relatively well.

Second, there is my Casio watch. I got it in 1981 when I was working down on the Buffalo River. I had never bought a wristwatch before, but I needed to know what our canoe timing was each day so that we could meet our bus pickup on time. I lost it the very first day when I jumped off a boulder into a deep pool and came to the surface without the watch. I figured it was a sign that I shouldn't own a wristwatch. A week later, we stopped at the same swimming hole, and I dove down three times to the bottom of the hole, hoping to spot it. We hadn't had any rain during the intervening week and the water was clear as a bell. Third time down, just as I was running out of breath, I spotted something shiny out of the corner of my eye, and it was the watch, which I grabbed. I took it as a sign that I should have a watch with a better wristband.

Third, there is me. My eyes are still blue and my ears lopey, but the rest of me continues to erode with the runnels of time. That picture of me at the Louisiana Purchase memorial makes me laugh.

My Casio watch and my pink bandana.

Last, I have a pink bandana in my gear bag that looks almost like new. In high school and college, I wore bandanas around my neck almost constantly — on campus, out camping, bicycle touring — and I had more than a dozen colors, from tan to mauve to black and white. However, I had taken a pass on pink bandanas. Someone to whom I was close took note and got me one. Funny, very funny. Over the years, I've ripped through lots of bandanas, using them as pot holders, wrapping my hands in them when I didn't have gloves for rappelling, tying all of Dee Crosby's bandana hats including the Mickey Mouse, and even on occasion using a bandana as a belt to hold up my jeans. The pink bandana, however, I kept safe, close to the heart but far away from the campfire. It and a golden apple and an English one pound coin are the treasures of my life, gifts of sentiment from three friends.

I started thinking about the bandana the last couple of days while riding.

When I first began considering this ride, my thoughts seemed to be less about destination and more about the need to just go out there. The East Coast and Jacksonville came later as I fashioned a tour in my head, but the genesis was simply an inner feeling that I needed to ask myself questions about the future, and a bike tour is great for forcing the questions.

My theory is that a bike tour will break you physically, emotionally and psychologically, and then the answers that come to you will be more honest, clearer, sharper. I've answered most of my questions, and on Saturday when I was riding through Oxford, it dawned on me that I didn't need to ride to Jacksonville. I realized I had passed the point at which any doubts about ability had disappeared. The physical pain of the early days was nearly all gone. The legs were doing great. Minor worries about aloneness had disappeared. I could ride to Jacksonville, and suddenly I didn't need to. Or even want to.

I would rather be home and handing out candy on Halloween night, helping Cheryll with our class's upcoming art show, working on the Fay Jones book or finishing off the attic. There are so many productive things I could be doing rather than bicycling, and so I'm probably headed home tomorrow, Monday.

My only thought of regret is that I don't want to let any of you down. The comments you've added to the posts, the e-mail notes and the text messages you've sent, they make me want to keep going just to continue the conversation.

I remember after one of my early rides, Mike Gauldin told me that he hoped I kept doing crazy things like bicycle trips because he could experience them vicariously through me. It had never occurred to me that anyone would envy me and my bicycling. The tours seemed grueling to me, sometimes very lonely and wayward. Who in their right mind would do this, let alone initiate it? But in his request, I saw that sometimes we feel tied to things that prevent us from going out on the road and throwing caution to the wind. It's a great favor to know someone who is out there. It reminds us that we can go too. Maybe not today, but someday soon.

Thanks for keeping me in your thoughts. I appreciate it more than you know.

The Hound of Yocona

October 21, 2007 — TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI

I followed a backroad nearly the entire way from Oxford to Pontotoc and then Tupelo, lackluster in every visual way from what I've seen of Mississippi so far.

Except for the hound.

Near Yocona, I came out along a flat, straight stretch of road with fields on both sides. Two dogs came barking out of the yard to my right. One was a black lab, loud but a pretender. The other was what might be described as something akin to a white rottweiler, with hair like the bristles of a toothbrush and eyes the color of three-day-old mayonnaise. It had legs as taut as Darren McFadden's, and its mandibles were the size of a cow's.

Usually with malevolent dogs, I try a series of tactics to ward them away. First is to talk to them as they approach. I think some don't recognize that part of this bicycle creature is a human, but some dogs will slow or even stop when they hear a human voice. Depending on how much warning I get, I will also try flight. I've pedaled away from two or three dogs this trip simply by popping into lower gears and increasing my cadence for a burst of speed. When I must, I also engage in "fight" by squirting my water bottle at them, but that means reducing my control over steering and is ill-advised when I don't know what the traffic is like behind me. My last choice is fright. I don't mind pretending to be afraid if it will confuse the dog.

In this case, I didn't have to pretend. The Hound of Yocona circled past the bow of my bike, barking and snarling backward at me even as it kept pace with me, and then it lunged at the port pannier and bit the canvas, and brought the bike down. I didn't go down with bicycle (nautical tradition be damned), but came off the bike and straight at the dog, cussing it like a sailor. That's when the dog realized that the cost-benefit analysis didn't warrant another bite. It backed off, and I gathered the bike up off the deck. No real damage, save a minor hole in the pannier.

No pictures, no video. Sorry, but it's fun to imagine the scene, isn't it?

The Oxford Tale

Watching the Razorbacks run the table at the Ole Miss Coliseum.

October 20, 2007 — OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI

A miserable ride from Sardis Lake into Oxford today. Beautiful weather, although a touch warm, but the main highway running east to Oxford, U.S. 278 also designated State 6, is a four-lane divided highway that has no paved shoulder. None. And there wasn’t too much in the way of roads that paralleled the highway. I ended up riding on sandy, rocky shoulder for more than a dozen miles, but I finally got into Oxford.

Ole Miss cheerleaders in The Grove.

I wandered The Grove for about a half hour, accepting whatever tailgating fare came my way. The Grove is phenomenal. And the Ole Miss campus is much prettier than I remembered, although the last time I was there it was during an ice storm in the middle of winter. I was driving back from New Orleans in the mid-80s, having visited Bill. I stopped into Oxford to get off the icy roads and see Beth Crossley, who found me a couch to sleep on for the night. I think we went down to the square and got something to eat that evening but the rest is a fog.

After the game, I started to head for Pontotoc and Trace State Park, but looked at the map and decided against the idea. I didn't think I had a chance of covering the mileage before dark, so I stayed here in Oxford.

Along with the campus, the downtown square is lovely. I'm not sure I could ever live here though. The people seem so mired in the past that they may never enjoy the present. The playing of Dixie, the Rebel mascot, the Confederate flag and statues of beloved Southern generals are like a bog that may never let this college or community step out of the past. I like history as much as the next person, but I don't pretend to live in it.

Narrow Highways and Friendly Back Roads

Charlie at lower lake of the John W. Kyle State Park near Sardis, Mississippi.

October 19, 2007 — JOHN W. KYLE STATE PARK, MISSISSIPPI

Temperatures dropped slightly from yesterday, and a breeze straight out of the west made the pedaling quick and easy today. My knees are still tender in the mornings but are usually not noticeable by lunch.

I rode into downtown Helena in the morning and stopped at the Delta Cultural Center on Cherry Street to see the displays and historical collections. Most of the displays were about blues musicians who had had their roots in Helena. But there were exhibits about agriculture, steamships and railroad transportation in the Delta too. I wonder whether we’ll revere this music a couple hundred years from now the way that Austrians think of Mozart today. I like to think my ancestors will.

The Hernando de Soto Commemorative Bridge from the Helena side.

The big muddy Mississippi River.

Then I pedaled across the Hernando de Soto Commemorative Bridge, not to be confused with the similarly named bridge at Memphis. In 1991 on the 450th anniversary of Hernando's crossing of the Mississippi River, the Mississippi legislature named the Highway 49 bridge in his honor. The bridge is a long two-lane trestle that stretches over the Mississippi River and looks daunting, but it wasn’t too bad at all. I waited until a long break in the already relatively light traffic, and then pedaled like hell.

Highway 49 on the Mississippi side, however, had no paved shoulder, so it turned out to be more harrowing than the bridge. Eventually, I turned off on a side road near Lula and had little traffic to deal with the rest of the day. The side road led me northerly farther than I had intended, so I knew I had missed a road east, but I trimmed the sails at the next turn and was back on track following Six-Mile Lake Road.

Just after turning off of it onto a lightly traveled state highway, a guy in a big white pickup stopped me to ask the 10 questions. I think he said his name was Nardin, but I may not have heard right. He lived a bit farther up the road and said he had an extra ticket to the Ole Miss-Arkansas game the next day. If I stopped by his house, he would gladly give it to me. I stopped and his wife got me ice water, and we all talked for probably a half hour. If I had sat any longer, I would have started falling asleep, so I made my excuses and hit the road again.

Another hour and a half brought me to Sardis Lake and the John W. Kyle State Park. The lower campground is below the Sardis Lake Dam and borders a smaller lake. Lots of RVs, many with Ole Miss stickers. I fell asleep looking at the first-quarter moon high in the sky, Orion rising in the east and a shooting star that seemed to last forever.

Delta Heritage Trail

The video shows a little bit of a lovely pedestrian and bicycle trail in the making that starts at the Delta Heritage Trail State Park near Helena. Currently, about 15 miles of soft-surface trail are finished between Lexa and Lakeview, Arkansas, along the abandoned Union Pacific railroad spur that ran another 60 miles south almost to McGehee. Plans are to continue rebuilding the trail all the way to end up with about 75 miles of bicycle trail. Again, I borrowed some tunes from Ezra and Keith.

Delta Dog

A headwater swamp and a bicyclist who has seen better days.

October 18, 2007 — HELENA, ARKANSAS

Although the day dawned with some heavy clouds, rain never fell on me today. The clouds broke up by late morning, and I got more sun and heat than I really wanted.

I had meant to follow some back roads over to Marianna and then perhaps follow a secondary road down Crowley's Ridge to Helena that Bill had recommended, but I missed a turn coming out of Brinkley and ended up just following U.S. 49 all the way. It was lightly traveled and had a very wide shoulder nearly the entire distance, so it didn't prove a problem.

The marker at the Louisiana Purchase State Park.

A bit worn but still going.

As a result, though, I got to stop by the Louisiana Purchase State Park and the Delta Heritage Trail State Park to see them. The Louisiana Purchase park marks the spot at which the survey of the Louisiana Purchase began in 1815. There's a big stone marking the spot in the middle of a headwater swamp, and you get to it by walking a quarter-mile-long gang plank. I enjoyed the notes about flora and fauna, but the park has not much more than the big stone.

The Delta Heritage Trail promises to be wonderful, and already has a good start. The Union Pacific donated an abandoned spur line that used to run from Lexa, Arkansas, to near McGehee, Arkansas, for development as a pedestrian trail. About 15 miles are finished from Lexa to Lakeview, Arkansas, into a hard-pack trail. I don't know if they plan to pave it, but I rode about three or four miles of it, and it was nice riding, slower than pavement, but solid enough that yesterday's rains hadn't turned it into slop.

Other than that, the only notable event was getting a chocolate malt at Ray's Dairy Dream just before Helenna. It's always a good trip when you get your first malt before you get your first flat. Knock on wood, no flats yet.

Swimming in the Deep End

October 17, 2007 — Brinkley, Arkansas

There was precious little air in the sky today. It rained, then it poured, then it rained more, and when I didn’t think it could rain any harder, it did. At some point, the weather quit being rain and simply became the medium through which I rode.
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I had always thought of my bike in nautical terms: the front being the bow, the rear the stern; the port side left, the starboard right, the gear behind me being aft, and me sitting amidship, but I never before had to slow down for the "no wake" sections of a highway. Riding always feels a bit like steering a ship. I try to spot debris on the road — screws, nails, bolts, gravel, broken glass, broken-down Lincoln Continentals — 20 or 30 yards out and make very slight course adjustments early. There’s no easy way to make last-minute dodges the way I could if there were no weight on the bike. If I miss seeing something, it usually becomes safer to ride through it rather than scare the hell out of pursuing traffic. (Except for the Lincoln Continentals.)
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Molly texted about tornado watches south of me and that I should find shelter. Thanks Molly. Found what passes for a hotel in Brinkley just before another downpour.
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Bill made it in about an hour later, leaving New Orleans that morning and dodging tornadoes once he got into Arkansas. We got dinner at Gene’s Barbecue, where the Ivory Billed Burger tops the menu. No wonder they're so close to extinction. Bill is pretty sure he saw an ivory-billed woodpecker driving a volkswagen through town. If you haven’t checked out his photo journal, At War with the Oblivious, you should look through sometime. One of my favorites is this picture of a cafe window at sunset with all the reflections and reality and non-reality.

Somehow, neither of us took a picture of either of us eating barbecue. We know what we look like though.

Riding along U.S. 64 near Hartman

Took me awhile to figure out how to save this properly, but it gives you a sense of what about a minute's worth of riding looks like. Thanks to Will and Johnathan for suggestions and advice. I still haven't figured out how to transfer audio properly, so I've borrow a little music from Keith and Ezra.

Little Rockin'

Charlie looking at the Arkansas River at Parma Creek Park.

October 17, 2007 — LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

I left Conway about 10:30 a.m. after waiting for the fog to lift. Then it was a relatively nice, cool ride down to Maumelle with low clouds. At Maumelle, I picked up pedestrian paths and bike routes for several miles and then stopped at a convenience store to ask about how to find the Big Dam Bridge. (No that’s not an epithet. It’s really a big pedestrian bridge over a dam, the Murray Lock and Dam.)

By that time, the  sky had cleared and you could see Pinnacle Mountain upstream across the Arkansas River. As I came down off the bridge on the Little Rock side of the river, a cyclist waved me over to ask where I was going. Turns out we were both at the Chile Pepper on Saturday morning. She, Marianne Park, is a triathlete and was out doing her interval training on Tuesday. She and her husband had both gone to the University of Arkansas and crossed over at least a couple years of my undergraduate days. Wonderful conversation while we rode in toward Camack Village. She had to turn around at some point to collect children from school, and I followed the bike routes on into town and grabbed a room at the Wyndham Hotel on the North Little Rock side of the river.

Despite the late start, I made it over to the Clinton School of Public Service in time to see Ben Beaumont, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. He gave me the tour of the Clinton School and then took me over to the Clinton Presidential Center where I got to see enough to make me want to come back to spend a whole day or weekend exploring. Then, Ben squeezed me onto the visitor list to hear General Wesley Clark this evening. Clark was great, reading a short excerpt from his new book, talking a little about leadership and then taking questions.

I sometimes forget how an American patriot is supposed to sound and what he or she is supposed to say. Cllinton and Clark leave no doubt. I’m not sure I would call Clark eloquent, or at least not in the way that Dale Bumpers could craft oratory. Clark talks in a way that seems smart yet plain and straightforward. It was nice to hear a real person. And at the presidential center, with all the electronic message boards and videos, Clinton’s voice was nearly always within earshot from one direction or another or both. His voice — regardless of whatever he happened to be talking about — has a calming, soothing effect, the kind of sound that you want to hear from the leader of the free world.

Stephen, Charlie and the Jolly Roger at Midtown Billiards.

But, pshaw. After that, I got a dose of real life. I found Stephen Steed down at Midtown Billiards and we rattled back and forth about everyone under the sun with whom we went to college: Paul, Leslie, Tyler, Sheri, Jeff, Mike, Michael, Dr. I, Valerie, Bill, Joy, and a dozen more. Two many beers to remember all the names. Stephen seemed like he was in rare form. Everyone who walked in the door gave him a big hug, including a whole kickball team. Lots of ink and newsprint gone by the way, but life goes on.