Two of My Most Favorite Attractive Ladies

April 25, 2017 to April 26, 2017

Colorado is behind us by late morning on Tuesday, and with it the deserts and mountains and canyons of the West. Kansas tries to lure us off the interstate with ads for places like the High Plains Museum, the Shiraz Steakhouse, and seedy sex shops advertised only with large black and yellow signs that read ADULT. None of them can compare to the billboard-sized image of the upper torso of Jesus, pictured standing in a field of golden wheat, holding in his right hand a large stalk of wheat like he's showing it off for all the passing semi-trucks and RVs and SUVs barreling east toward the nearest Arby's.

We're headed for Virginia. There, in Yorktown, where the York River empties out into the Atlantic Ocean, sits the start of the TransAmerica bicycle route. Stretching more than 4,000 miles from coast to coast, it cuts a winding path through the heart of the United States. It's small towns and college towns and ghost towns; the Appalachians and the Ozarks and the Rockies; valleys and plains and high deserts; low country, coal country, farm country.

The TransAmerica will take us through Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. Near the end of it, we plan to break off, head north, and ride until we reach our home in the San Juan Islands of Washington. We'll be on the road for the next three and a half months.

It's a route that's not entirely new to me. When I rode from Florida to Washington six years ago, I spent nearly 2,000 miles on the TransAm before leaving it behind for good in Montana. In a country as vast as the United States, there's a tendency to always look for new roads, new places, new landscapes. Most people wouldn't choose to cover the same territory again, especially at ten miles per hour.

But the TransAm is different. People of all ages and backgrounds and abilities and nationalities have been riding it for more than forty years. It's an invisible network of old country restaurants, weird little gas stations, and tidy town parks where anyone passing through on a bike can pitch a tent and catch some sleep and pedal away the next morning feeling new again. When you meet someone heading the opposite way, you share tips about places to seek out and others to avoid. When you meet someone heading yours, you form a new traveling party. Over the course of days or weeks or months, what were once strange faces become familiar. Then just as quickly, they ride out of your life forever. It's unlike anything else I've ever known.

I think about my TransAm experiences every day of my life. They reflected a slice of America that's fading away, even though I wish it wasn't. They helped show me what I was capable of and what kind of life I wanted to live. It's not overstatement to say that I wouldn't be the person I am today without them. And so it's with joy and wonder and anticipation that I look forward to returning to the route again, this time sharing it all with the woman I love.

Flat plains turn to rolling hills as we charge into the twilight across the middle of Missouri. When the weight of all that driving comes to bear, we pull off the highway and drive a few miles down a side road and end up in a gravel parking lot in the middle of some kind of wildlife refuge. Swinging open the driver's door, I'm met with air that's warm and thick, the buzzing of insects hard at work, the smell of the grass and trees and the underbrush full with life. Midwest spring. The night brings a series of thunderstorms, each full of more aggressive rain and explosions of light than the one that came before. We sleep in the back of the minivan in fits and starts.

We rejoin the interstate again well before dark in the morning, passing through Columbia and St. Louis and crossing into Illinois before most people have walked out their front doors.

For reasons to stupid to explain, we had to change rental cars in Louisville. The second car was a lot smaller.

If we're on a road trip through the south, it's only a matter of time before we end up at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. And so it went today. It's a feast of homestyle cookin': eggs, grits, hash brown casserole, bacon, no fewer than four biscuits with gravy, roast beef with still more gravy, apples, corn, and macaroni and cheese, all washed down with a glass of sweet tea that gets refilled before it even has the chance to drop below half full. It's the height of acceptable, all for twenty bucks. And it's down the hatch in less than fifteen minutes. Our bellies are TransAm-ready.

The day's fading light finds us rolling to a stop in a small town along Interstate 64 in the middle of West Virginia. Standing at the front desk of a budget chain motel to check in, the tall, heavyset young guy in the gray t-shirt on the other side notices my driver's license.

"Washington state, eh? How do ya like it up there? I hear it's real beautiful."

"Yeah, it's great. Although so is West Virginia. I'd never been here before today, but it's really impressive, all the trees and the rivers and the deep valleys and all of that."

He smiles in agreement, then pauses for a beat.

"You know, two of my most favorite attractive ladies are from Washington," he says with a sly little smile and a delicate Appalachian drawl.

I don't know who he's talking about, but this strong feeling that the answer is going to be weird starts to well up inside of me.

"Yeah, who's that?"

"Well, they're kinda famous..." he trails off. "Cathy McMorris-Rodgers and Jamie Herrera-Beutler," he tells me, again with that same sly little smile.

"That second one, I think she's Hispanic," he says with an unnerving mix of exotic wonder and creepiness.

And there you have it, the only twenty-five-year-old dude in the country willing to profess his infatuation with the Republican women from Washington state's U.S. congressional delegation to a person he has known for exactly ninety seconds.

My mind scrambles for words to send to my mouth, but there aren't any. The gaping silence that takes over our conversation in the seconds that follow is broken only by the faint sound of Fox News spilling out the speakers of the television behind me.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	4
Comment on this entry	Comment	0