Day 0: 8 Jan, 0.0 miles today, 0.0 miles total, St. Augustine, FL
Met one of Sean Meadow’s college friends and her boyfriend at a restaurant w/ outdoor seating. This is the second time I’ve return to the US during the pandemic (not counting the first time when it was barely a news story), and the culture shock only seems to get worse. From a Mexico where the population took the worldwide spread of a deadly contagion as something worth trying to manage to an America that, well, didn’t, every time we were inside for even a moment I felt near panic. The entire town was packed hip to hip with tourists, only a dozen of which were wearing makes out of the thousands crowded into every public space.
These weren’t the anti-maskers you see on the news, whose cavalier attitude toward Covid was founded as a poorly-chosen new front in the culture war—that was more to be found in the rest of the south. These were people whose determination to ignore an extremely contagious illness was based on the fact that acknowledging it in any way might spoil the good time they’d planned for themselves. It made me wonder if this was most of don’t-give-a-fuck-about-the-pandemics America really looked like: not a lingering Trumpism, per se, just a bunch of very dumb, very selfish idiots.
It is worth noting that as of this writing, the case rate of Covid in Mexico is 12 per 100,000 people. In Florida, the number is 250–over 20 times higher.
In the meantime I am now up to 5 solid days of constantly shitting liquid. I had been keeping a pretty chill attitude about the whole thing up to this evening, but I am starting this bike trip tomorrow morning and I still require quick access to a toilet at a moment’s notice and my butt is getting real chapped by now and I’m just getting super irritable about the whole thing. I ate those shitty tacos 120 hours ago. Why can’t they finally leave me alone?
Day 1: 9 Jan, 37.0 miles today, 37.0 total, Palatka, FL
82 degrees today. Ridiculous January weather even for Florida. Much of todays ride was super exposed, and I definitely felt the weight of the savage sun bearing down on us by the time we made it to the “camp” ground listed on the Bicycle Route Navigator app was an RV trailer park with locked bathroom sporting signs that the facilities were for “tenants use only.” “Tenant” is not the word for people who stay at campgrounds.
The place had a real filthy, meth-addict kind of vibe, and we didn’t explore too deeply into the sea of dilapidated, rusticated recreation vehicles before deciding to move on.
The riding was prodigiously flat, which was nice all things considered. The sections with traffic were harrowing and unpleasant—exactly the sort of thing our parents would hate to know we were actually doing, even though they’d spent their lives doing things exactly as dangerous as this. The shoulders were often filled with the flattens remains of raccoons and foxes, and the sidewalks littered with broken beer bottles—because why recycle the empty bottle for the alcoholic beverage you’ve just polished off in a moving vehicle when you can just give it a good chuck out the window?
Spanish moss grows *everywhere* around here. It’s most common on a particular kind of tree that’s easily recognizable but which I can’t identify on account of I straight don’t know even basic shit about trees, but it’ll grow on anything—houses, fences, power lines. It suggests something predatory about this species, as if it feeds by trapping nutrients from the air like a spider with a web. Do these nutrients come from some inoffensive source, like pollen? Or is it something much more ominous like insects or birds or even squirrels?
We ended up at a hotel. We can’t really afford to do this very frequently, but after the heat, and the lack of a better option, and my desire to be near a toilet as it still frequently feels like an alive and very angry ferret is trying to claw its way out of my belly. I am not yet prepared to try to dig an emergency cat hole in the swamp, in the dark. But tomorrow is another day.
Day 2: 10 Jan, 59.8 miles today, 96.8 total, Gainesville, FL
Really feeling the miles today. Bike paths were lovely, with beautiful swampland on either side; the roads connecting them, though, were awful. Narrow shoulders, fast cars, often two lane roads where the cars had to time passing us against oncoming traffic. Most terrifying of all was a semi with an oversized load that would have hit us if he hadn’t pulled all the way over to the other side of the road (at 50mph+) to get by. I really hope this sort of thing is more of an exception than a rule, but I might have to find a way to make some sort of peace with that nightmare.
We were both toast by the time we hit Gainesville and had to find the house Sean Meadow arranged to stay at. She is not used to biking in cities of any size with cars. I’m thinking how to tell her about the Big 3 without coming off as a patronizing asshole: 1) Be visible 2) Be assertive 3) Always assume the worst of every motorist.
We talked earlier about how people interested in hosting people like us were likely to share our politics, but this family is apparently such a fan of Ted Cruz that they’ve held on to their TC for Prez 2016 lawn sign after all this time. I need to learn how to schmooze better.
It is still so difficult to navigate Covid America…for all of us, I assume, but at least specifically for me. There were no masks in this household, and although Sean Meadow’s and my vaccination status was made plain on the app that brought us to this household, we don’t know the particulars of our host and it feels horrendously difficult to ask. I know people who wouldn’t hesitate to press these people for whatever it was they needed to feel safe, but I suppose we are not those sorts of people. We’re just kind of hoping, though the general vibe I get is that we don’t share the same definition of safe in what has become Omicron’s America. But here we are.
That (admittedly substantial) hurdle aside, the dinner we had that evening was very enjoyable and educational. Our host was extremely generous and welcoming and kind. Over pizza, she and her recently-made Aussie friend gave us endless tips and tricks and hints and hacks for bikepacking our way west, while he regaled us with stories from his travels in far-flung part of the world like Thailand and Iran.
I will admit though that as I am now in my 40s and very much non longer feel anything that I would describe as “young,” it had started to feel stranger and stranger to have others refer to me as such—hexagenarian or not.
Day 3: 11 Jan, 70.1 miles today, 166.9 total, White Springs, FL
40+ miles today on two-lane country roads with no shoulder and a posted speed limit of 55mph (or more?). Having a shoulder to ride on is a dubious luxury, to be sure, since 9 out of the 10 cars that pass you on a road w/o one will execute a full pass, moving all the way into the other lane and giving you a good six to eight feet of clearance. Nobody bothers when you’ve got a shoulder, and you end up maybe two feet away from a steel and plastic box moving at over 60mph that is many, many, many, many times your size and weight and physical ability to endure the g forces of an accident at that speed. The problem of roads w/ no shoulder, though, is that last 1 of 10 cars that doesn’t bother moving all the way over to pass you.
The most frustrating moment today I think was when Sean Meadow and I were making our way around a blind curve when baby-puke tan mini van attempted to pass us. And, like, see, there is a pretty good fucking reason why you don’t try to pass *anyone* on a blind curve: IT IS BECAUSE YOU CANNOT SEE IF ANYONE IS APPROACHING IN THE OTHER LANE, YOU DING-A-LING. I saw the oncoming white sedan before the driver of the van, and so saw what was about to happen in time to avoid it. I believe there are very few motorists in this country who actually want to hit a cyclist, but I think there are a great, great many that would happily sacrifice one’s life before their own—or that frankly would happily sacrifice a cyclist’s life before having to live another day after that point with a dented automobile—and would then merrily blame the accident on the biker, however recklessly they themselves had been driving.
I swerved into shallow, grassy ditch beside the road as the baby-barf tan van swung violently into the lane we’re I’d just been, coming to a stop and giving the driver the finger as Sean Meadow pulled up behind me. A pair of cars behind the van came to a stop, waiting until I waved them ahead.
It’s crazy, the amount of trash that accumulates along the side of a road when no landowner or civic organization in search of a good deed to do is responsible for keeping it clean. It’s fucking depressing. The countryside out here is honestly very pretty—both the native swampland and the cultivated farmland—but both are bordered by a strip on either side of the road of endless bottles, shoes, boxes, wired, and weird twisted bits of metal.
Sean Meadow told me a harrowing story of being attacked by a dog while riding through the countryside. It was a compelling narrative and everything, but the lesson I took from it was a warning that this was a thing that *could* happen, not necessarily a thing that *would* happen. Then, at dinner yesterday, our host’s Aussie friend set down his beer and asked us, “So…what strategy do you have planned for dealing with dogs?” For him, and for our host, it was a given that this was an obstacle of riding on country roads. Mean-tempered dogs were an inevitability.
And, honestly, thank goodness for that man, because today we had not one but two run-ins w/ angry redneck dogs, and his advice paid off beautifully: stop riding, put the bike between yourself and the dog, and speak firmly but calmly to it as you walk your bike away. A riled-up dog will chase down a cyclist and attack her if it can, but they really do come to a dead stop the moment you do, and then just stand at the edge of their territory barking madly at you, but letting you leave.
Today’s dogs were big fuckers, too. The first was a loudmouth German shepherd with a cohort of a half-dozen, even bigger dogs that looked to my untrained eye like mutts. The property containing that clique didn’t even have a fence, and in all honesty I was half-expecting the giant thin mutt dog that was trying desperately to win Sean Meadow’s affection to get hit by a car as we were walking away. The other dogs were a pair of chocolate giants which resembled labs, but, you know, bigger. They squeezed through the giant hollow they’d obviously guy under the gate and came after us. By that point, we were already 65 miles into our days and trying to beat the sunset to our destination, but now we had to stop and walk on account of these aggro dog bully d-bag assholes. I have a lot of sympathy for dogs, as a rule, but it’s harder to find it when you’re exhausted and sore and trying to get off the road before the dark makes it even more dangerous to be on than it already is.
Also, some dogs are just plain shitty dogs, living with just plain shitty people.
Day 4: 12 Jan, 42.5 miles today, 209.4 total, Madison, FL
You can place the people on the start of undertakings such as thru-hiking and cross-country bikepacking into two broad categories: those who know what they’re doing and those who don’t. The latter you can further divide into those who learn and adapt to their circumstance and those who quit because things haven’t turned out to be the way they’d hoped. I’d these, it is my goal to be the former—though this requires a continual inner battle with the part of me that realizes going home and rewatching all of Twin Peaks from the comfort of my parents’ guest bed would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to learn how to navigate the logistics of a long trip on the fly.
The root of the problem is that both Sean Meadow and I looked at this trip from the perspective of experienced thru-hikers—but not, it is important to note, people experienced in the strange art of riding paved public roads from one coast of the United States to another without the benefit of guides or SAG vehicles or anyone else to rely on to find a place to sleep every night. It’s hard now to remember what the hell we thought this was going to be like while we were planning it; only that it was very much not what it turned out to be.
One of the few luxuries of thru-hiking is the wide flexibility you have in finding a place to camp each night. I grant you, I have walked for many nightmarish miles looking only for a flat-ish spot big enough to pitch my tent, but in the end that’s still all you really have to do. And it’s easy to carry that attitude with you into town, since if you can’t find reasonable accommodation there, you can just fuck off back to the trail and camp at the first flat spot you find—usually the trailhead.
Coast-to-coast biking, on the other hand, consists basically of traveling from town to town on roads surrounded on both sides by private property. There is nowhere to stealth camp (that is, camp on a site that is not pre-established and which you will make look like you were never there in the morning) and the paid camp ground, and least so far, have been spaced at incredibly inconvenient intervals. We expected to camp nearly every night, but instead of three nights so far, one was spent in the home of a woman Sean Meadow contacted through the bikepacking app Warm Showers, and two were spent in hotels.
It was in the second hotel that we learned how people actually do this—in two parallel conversations we had with different friends who had also gone bikepacking with a thru-hiking mentality. Some people do pay to stay at hotels every night, or pay nearly as much for campsites surrounded by RVs, but the more common approach for people of our background and, well, class is to yogi patches of grass for tenting from churches and fire stations in whatever town you hope to spend the night.
Yogi’ ing is an art—not one I’m necessarily always comfortable with, though it is an essential part of the transient human’s toolkit. It consists basically of asking people for shit, of being a bum, though there are clever ways to make a non-hiker or biker think they’ve come up with the idea of giving you food or a ride or a place to stay all on their own. Something else it is, is commonplace.
When we got to Madison and found the firehouse, we were lead almost immediately to the patch of grass we were told we could sleep for the night. As the pleasant young man was unlocking the bathroom and pointing out the outlet we could use, he mentioned that bikers stop there “all the time.” And gave us advice on finding camping spots further on. It’s not a secret world, this universe of weird free camp sites in the middle of town, but it’s easy to miss. We’d never seen it, and do we hadn’t been prepared to rely on it. But here we were, ready to move in.
Day 5: 13 Jan, 59.3 miles today, 268.7 total, Tallahassee, FL
I was not mentally, physically, or emotionally prepared for the hills today. In all objective honesty, none of them was particularly terrible, but lord they wiped me out. It didn’t help that the bulk of them came toward the end of the day, in full direct sunlight, and after a stressful stretch on a winding, shoulderless country road that was inexplicably jam-packed with cars desperately trying go 60mph.
We had a brief stop in the morning in Greenville, FL, Ray Charles’s home town. The town commissioned a bronze statue of him which they placed prominently in the park, which I suppose is nice. They also built a replica of his birthplace—the small wood house in which spent the first five years of his life, moving down the street for a couple of years before he lost his sight and went to a special school for the deaf and blind—but they only built it after letting the original fall into such serious disrepair that it was condemned and torn down. The house was fenced off, and though a sign encouraged tourists to call City Hall to arrange for tours, we didn’t make the effort. The neighborhood is in good shape, clean and fairly well maintained, but remains nonetheless clearly an economically disadvantaged area. Sean Meadow offered granola bars to a fellow who appeared homeless in the park before we moved on, and he was only too happy to take her up on it.
The whole thing made me think about the absolute freedom of movement in this country given to us by our light skin. We might get a few weird looks riding our rights through the Q-Anon backwoods—and the gas station pizza cook (yes, the gas station pizza cook) stared at my masked face with literal slack-jawed disbelief when I went inside to buy a diet coke—but on the whole nobody seemed to think twice about us. Our host’s Aussie friend from the another evening spent some time extolling the virtues of getting to know Americans of skin hues other than ours; he also recommended a website on which bike packers could journal about their rides but which I abandoned after finding a cringy entry in which the narrator spent time among “the blacks,” and was ever so surprised how they were basically the same as him, deep down . Bro, how is that not a fucking given? What the fuck did you think black people were like before this?
I guess that does speak to the need a lot of white people have for exposure to peoples of varying shades and backgrounds, but good grief, it isn’t actually any humans responsibility to act as their learning moment. But bigger than that was the sticky problem than it would be much harder for a black couple to do the exact thing Sean Meadow and I were doing. The simple fact of our paleness granted us easy access to a world in which we clearly didn’t fundamentally belong, but through which we could pass with a feeling of relative safety. It is a moral disgrace that this same freedom is not available to every shade of American, let alone every human being, full stop.
Day 6: 14 Jan, 71.3 miles today, 340.0 total, Marianna, FL
My favorite stretches are the lonely, almost forgotten country highways, for the obvious reason that there is hardly any traffic, yes—in tremendous contrast to the clusterfucked nightmare that was leaving Tallahassee this monring—but there is also just a certain vibe you get on those roads that you don’t get anywhere else. They don’t just feel like good places to ride; they feel like good places to be. Maybe not live, exactly, but good to be in those moments, at least. Anyway, those bits are the ones I like the best.
While stopped briefly outside a tiny brick church for a water break in one of these areas, I looked up to see a puppy making his way over to us, head bowed in hopeful submission, his tail wagging so hard he couldn’t walk in a straight line. I tried to shoo him away at first, but was seduced into petting him before I could stop myself. Sean Meadow and I were fretting over what to do about him when a car slowly came down the road with a man riding on the hood, holding on the vehicle with one hand as he held on to a massive, child-sized toy jeep in the other. “What the hell you doing over there?” he yelled at the dog. “Get on back to the yard!” and the little puppy took off for home, tail still wagging furiously. The man acknowledged us briefly, then resumed talking to the dog as it crossed the street. He muttered the whole way into the house, carrying the Big Wheels or whatever it was with him the whole way.
The worst stretches are the major state highways into and out of towns with no shoulder and frequently no sidewalk. The stream of cars is fast fast fast and endless, and all I can ever think for all the stressful, half-panicked miles is what a terrible, ignoble way this will be to die.
Day 7: 15 Jan, 60.6 miles today, 400.6 total, DeFuniak Springs, FL
I have always hated the strips of strip-malls that spring up always on the outskirts of every sort of town or city in America except for the very largest and the very smallest—at least as far as I can remember, anyway. They are identical, interchangeable, indistinguishable, insipid, and uninspired. They are ubiquitous; I’ve seen matching examples in every state I’ve visited. They are ugly, and how I tend to picture my home country as a whole in moments when I’m feeling particularly uncharitable—because they are uniquely and distinctly and unfortunately American. They are the worst we have to offer culturally, ecologically, and architecturally. And they are universally the worst place to ride a bike: no shoulder, trash and debris scattered to the curb, at a minimum four lanes of traffic with every driver in a giant freaking hurry to get through these blighted landscapes as quickly as they possibly can. And the worst thing about this first week on the trip is that almost every day has both begun and ended by traversing one of these god-forsaken corridors.
Anyway.
Apparently Florida has armadillos. I have never seen one in person before, and it would make me so enormously happy to see an alive one, just once. I wonder if they’re nocturnal. Every one I’ve seen so far has been a smashed ruin at the side of the road.
I hadn’t thought much about it beforehand, but biking across America is amazing way to get a really up-close and fragrant view of all the varieties of road kill the country has to offer. Big, bloated adult deer on the grassy shoulder; smaller probably childish deer pancaked into deer-shaped grease stains by hundreds of cars and trucks, with flattened leg bones still somehow in place; foxes, possums, raccoons, rabbits, and cats. I try not to think too hard about how little it would take for any one of these giant vehicles speeding past us to turn either of us into just another forgotten body lying in the sun.
Of all the trash one the roadside though, the one that always gets me are the plump, carefully bundled used diapers. It’s legitimately hard to figure out the parents’ contempt for the environment in which their child has to grow. Every time I see one, I picture the parent giving their child the finger and yelling “fuck you, baby!” as they fling the soiled wad out the window. “You shit in my car, I shit on your future!”
We got our first rain today, which was kind of funny as we left camp late this morning after spending over an hour trying to dry out everything that had gotten soaked overnight from this crazy Florida swampland condensation. But as we pedaled the last few miles into DeFuniak Springs, the drops started coming, soft but steady. Shortly after making it to the firehouse, it started pouring in earnest. We decided to leave the tent in my panier tonight in favor of sleeping on the fire fighters’ covered concrete patio. We’re dry under here, at least, but dang if it isn’t super windy.
