A deep connection, a moment in time on a cross-country bicycle tour
It was early December when I disassembled and packed my touring bicycle and gear in a large cardboard box and flew from my home in southeastern Arizona to San Diego. At the airport, I reassembled the bicycle, packed gear in four panniers, and lashed the tent and sleeping bag to the rear rack. I detoured to the closest saltwater inlet of the Pacific Ocean, ceremoniously dipped my rear wheel, zeroed out my odometer and headed east, bound ultimately for Florida’s Atlantic Coast.
I was a 30-something professional and recreational bicyclist recently liberated from the 8-to-5 world due to a company acquisition. It seemed the right time to pursue a long-held dream of bicycling coast to coast, solo and self-contained.
Often I felt suspended between two lives: the tedious rut I had left behind in all its comfortable familiarity and the uncertainty of what waited beyond the veil. My life was in transition, and the particulars of where I would settle and what direction my life would take loomed large in what I came to envision as a gauzy, almost surrealistic future.
Each night’s lodging was dictated by whatever option presented itself at dusk. The ideal was camping in RV parks, which offered creature comforts and safety. And after 60 miles of solitary pedaling, they offered camaraderie with other campers.
As dusk fell one evening in mid-January, I descended into Langtry in West Texas, hoping for a safe and, if I were lucky, comfortable campsite. The RV park looked appealing, but park managers are sometimes loath to rent spaces to “tenters.” Becoming hopeful, since there appeared to be only one other guest, I coasted to a stop, dismounted, and checked on the softness of the ground. (In the middle of winter, soft ground in Texas is rare. Often trying to pound in tent stakes was a futile effort.)
A man appeared from the sole RV, which turned out to be his home, and offered me a camping spot for a generous $4 for the night.
He was a taciturn, no-nonsense type of man who’d spent a lifetime beating a living from the hardscrabble, dusty towns of West Texas.
He watched with equanimity as I pulled tent, ground cloth, sleeping bag and cooking utensils from my panniers, pitched my tent and started cooking my evening meal. He seemed reluctant to leave. I sensed a certain sadness, a loneliness, a longing for companionship and conversation.
His red hair had faded to white; his freckled hands had the thickened, weather-beaten appearance of a laborer’s lifetime of work. He exuded quiet physical strength even in repose. His desires were simple. He liked to fish and he liked his neighbors sparse, so he had settled quietly in Langtry, a town within comfortable driving distance of a lake in an area where the vegetation would not support cattle, just sheep and goats.
He could build, plumb, and wire a brick structure by hand. He had built and opened a café in town to provide an income for himself and his wife in retirement. Then he built this small RV park, with its concrete pads and hookup obelisks ready to accept umbilical cords from the steel behemoths.
He also built a house, but he preferred the coziness of living in his RV. He had the conveniences he needed and little more: a few plates, pots and pans, a microwave oven, books, a deck of cards. The utilitarian life suited him.
After dinner, he invited me in for coffee. Perhaps like him, I was longing for conversation and companionship after more than two weeks of pedaling through desert landscapes. I accepted.
During our conversation I mentioned that I was curious about all the convenience markets in Texas advertising deer corn. What was deer corn?
It was, he explained with a pained look, a deer treat scattered out at timed intervals by a battery-powered machine to attract deer in a kind of Pavlovian siren song. Softly, he confided, “I never understood it as sport. To me it’s like going out in the back yard and shooting your dog.” It was, I’ve since come to realize, a most uncharacteristic statement from a person living in a land of deer leases.
He pointed to a collection of framed photos atop a bookcase. He was a recent widower. He spoke softly about his wife, how she had been the cook at the café, and about their long life together. I looked at the photos and felt a profound sadness.
We drank some coffee, talked a bit about fishing, about the Pecos River and the wide-open spaces of West Texas in general. In the moment it took to hug each other good night, I felt the depth of loneliness in both our lives: his, the grief from losing the love of a lifetime. There was no awkwardness, just empathy and implicit nonverbal understanding with another lonely human being. That bittersweet moment was sealed as one of the mileposts of my emotional biography.
I returned to my tent and sleeping bag, which for the first time felt as comfortable and safe as my own bed. The next morning, we said our goodbyes, a bit wistfully, it seemed.
His presence still looms large among the people I met along my ride. I wrote him a postcard when I completed the tour and called once or twice. I understand that he has since passed away, but the RV park still caters to travelers.
Since then I have settled in Texas and cobbled together my life beyond the veil, metaphorically still enjoying the expectant surprise of the path my front wheel takes. I wrote to him a few times. Later, I learned that he had passed away. The ache of loneliness I felt then haunts me, but rarely now. Still, there are times when it’s as strong as it was that cold January night in West Texas.
(A version of this essay appeared in State Lines, the magazine of the Houston Chronicle, on September 5, 2004.)
