Along The Way: Part I
I remember that moment. My finger stirring the tiny ocean of dust and tears on the picnic table. Pretending it was quicksand. Something in which to sink. Contemplating whether I’d finish the dirt covered, half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Dinner.
One month of cycling in silence shattered in the span of minutes. The yelling mother, then the old woman, and finally, the sheriff. I shook my clothes and sprinkled the ground with the dirt caught in the creases of my shorts, making me wish I hadn’t bathed in the first place. If one could call that bathing. I peeked at the older woman I’d spoken with minutes before and that mental picture of her standing beside three people under the picnic canopy watching me wasn’t one I’d forget. Our conversation before the officer arrived was brief.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“West.” She shifted her jaw from side to side as if there was more to my one-word response.
“When people reply with a direction over a destination, I’ve come to find that some are more lost than they believe,” the woman said, following my eyes to the parking lot where the patrol car entered. “Maybe you’ll ride with us in the morning,” she predicted, before turning around and walking away.
That’s how it started. The story about the people who changed my life and the day before they met me.
It was early summer of 1999 and late in the evening when the footsteps of these four strangers crossed the cracked sidewalk of Bakersfield’s Main Street in silence. The town’s streetlights ranged from bright to blown, with most somewhere in between, dimmed by time. The blood of immigrants stained the stones beneath their feet. The two-story buildings constructed by those early pioneers stood above. Every one of the small American towns that the four of them cycled through over the past month, from the intersection zip code filling station feed stores to here became home for some. For others, they were a stop along the way.
Nearly 100 miles of cycling that day had paved a path for each to touch memories they wished to relive countless times. However, late into the evening after refueling at a tavern, each person’s steps were guided by memories they were trying to forget.
Camille, who taught me to seek the stories of suppressed voices, was revisited by thoughts that first entered her mind upon reaching eastern Pennsylvania. If her ancestors were part of the slavery migration centuries earlier, would this have been a town where she and her family would be free? Alan, who for endless hours through Kansas taught me about capitalism’s barriers to connecting values and ambition, pondered what he’d be doing at that very second if his wife was still alive. Martin, from whom I learned that any adventure pursued without one’s full heart is only an activity, was starting an imaginary postcard to his estranged older brother, Arthur, a depressed and violent alcoholic back home in their English countryside village. “This small town is the kind of place where I think you’d fit in. A fine jukebox at the local watering hole reminded me of the one you wed coins into at Sully’s,” are the lines he’d write first.
Then there was Bonnie, who over a short time became as much a mystery as an anchor. Her tall frame. Messy, short gray hair. Continual cryptic wisdom balanced with uncanny straightforwardness. Regrettably, it took years to understand her most powerful lesson. How the search is the sacred. And in her footsteps, Bonnie silently talked to God. Confessing that despite a promise to use her first sermon to show others his path of purpose and service, she knew that many in the congregation were vehemently opposed to a woman pastor in the church.
It was early the previous morning outside a cafe when Bonnie met Alan. The lanky, white haired and overly mannered man barely said hello before pointing to his own fully packed bike, excited to finally cross paths with another long distance cyclist. But Alan’s joy only ignited a tempered response from Bonnie and his smile drained. Instantly replaced with a subtle discomfort that comes with being in the presence of someone undeniably comfortable with the unknown.
The older woman wiped the coffee stain off her upper lip and strolled past him. Her eyes slowly moved around his saddle bag panniers. Over the roll of his ground pad. Curious if his tent was spacious or of the bare minimum variety like her own. The man’s eyes danced a similar investigation in rapid speed. Each keenly aware that there’s a lot to be learned about a cyclist from their accessories.
Comforted by the coincidence but less so in their first impressions, Bonnie and Alan started riding together over the Shawnee Hills of southern Illinois. A woman by herself, Alan kept thinking. Married? Children? What is she doing out here? But Alan’s silent questions were stunted by Bonnie’s first and only, delivered softly, but pointedly.
“Why are you here, Alan?”
Alan repeated the question several times to himself, each time simplifying her intention. Bringing it closer to the surface, though strangely understanding what had often taken people meeting Bonnie much longer to learn: she meant exactly what she said. Surprising himself, Alan found words that had evaded him for months. That he was a 62-year-old widower. His wife, Michelle, died in March. Riding alone since he left New York City. Looking for something, but that part unsaid. Bonnie listened to Alan’s revelation, knowing that lonely roads have always been a safe harbor for secrets. A concrete cover of confessions, and no traveler whispers more of them than the long-distance cyclist.
Several hours later the pair passed the vacant lots of a closed factory to the north. To the south, the last independent chicken farmers had been bought out a decade earlier by Purdue, making the small community a relatively new company town. They passed a sign redirecting traffic for the under-enrolled community college in the next county, which remained intermittently cut off due to the slow reconstruction of the bridge destroyed in the flood of ’97, two summers earlier.
At the pavilion where they arrived to camp, Alan and Bonnie met Camille and Martin. Whereas clearer skies may have been all they needed to give each other space, storm clouds kept them and their bikes nestled under the roof of the small gazebo. Alan was perplexed by the lightness of Martin’s bike. His simplistic approach to gear. Camille and Bonnie exchanged pleasantries and sat atop two picnic tables facing each other. Camille wondered if the tall, white-haired man was the woman’s husband, and within minutes the typically-introverted Camille wanted to pour her life story into the older woman who talked like a biblical figure. This woman is on a pilgrimage, Camille thought, and soon the four of them headed to the nearby Main Street for food, not yet sure they’d eat together.
When notes of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” flowed in diminishing waves from the tavern’s propped glass door, only Camille was unfamiliar with the song’s iconic lyrics and melody. She turned around to be certain the two White men who had given her creepy eyes from the bar hadn’t exited. Wondering if it was necessary to identify them this way. Out here they were all White.
“Hey, I’m sorry I asked you all to leave abruptly. I got freaked out back there. The way those guys were looking at me, well, it just…” Camille explained, but she was caringly interrupted by Bonnie’s calming hand.
“Please, heck no. We’re all bone tired, and men in bars can be unnerving. Period.” Her voice soothed each person in different ways, allowing Camille to exhale at least some concern.
Back at the campsite, Alan yawned and turned to his new friends. “It’s long past my bedtime. Tonight was my first time dining or enjoying anything with other people since I left. You all are a wild trip,” he said, though mostly talking to Martin and Camille. “Makes me think how vanilla my life is,” and Alan instantly wished he’d used another word, thinking the flavor referenced his skin color, which he’d become newly aware of around the young, brown-skinned woman. An odd thought, he recognized, for someone from such a diverse city. He walked over to Bonnie whose tent was set beside the lone picnic table. “Thanks. I mean, for asking us to walk into town together. Since leaving home I’ve wondered if other people were doing stuff like this.”
“Alan, this is something I bet you rarely see. Look up,” she said. Bonnie’s hand swiped the sky. “Later this summer, around August, the Perseid meteor shower passes through the path of the Swift-Tuttle Comet. Without moonlight, one can see more than 100 meteors per hour dancing the sky at its peak.” Alan squinted his eyes, wondering if doing so would help him see it then, almost two months before. “But now, the southern sky offers the stunning Scorpius constellation.” Her voice was so calming that Alan almost fell asleep standing beside her. “It never rises much above the eastern horizon,” she explained, pointing to a spot low in the sky. Alan’s untrained eye and poor vision limited him from seeing Bonnie’s declaration of the heavens and instead he thought of the lights on the Empire State Building and in Times Square, his city’s manufactured galaxy of stars.
The New Yorker walked across the damp grass toward his tent and waved to the others, but it went unnoticed, and then Alan laid on his back in the tent and started counting. Twenty-seven was the number he stopped at. He repeated the number silently, curious why he was moving his lips while doing so. Twenty-seven days since he exited his building’s mirrored elevator. He stroked the new white beard guarding his face. It then struck him that he’d been biking the same number of days as years married to Michelle, who never saw her husband’s face in any manner other than cleanly shaven. In his stillness the sounds of crickets, cicadas, and pickup truck engines that surrounded the small provincial park campground played a concert of rural America.
After what felt like a long half-minute Alan caught another rhythm. The slow and sensual moaning from Camille, who’s tent with Martin was thought to be a healthy thirty or forty feet away. Suddenly, the sounds of every insect and engine on the planet disappeared, and albeit unintentionally, all Alan could concentrate on was the slowly increasing pace and depth of the woman’s enjoyment, ranging from chirp like yelps to intermittently deep releasing sighs. Signals to anyone listening, but especially to Martin, that whatever he was doing was working.
Alan studied the ceiling of his tent and specifically the junction of the tent’s internal frame bars. He thought back to the last time he had sex with Michelle, maybe a full year before. It was the afternoon their youngest daughter had returned from college and attended a matinee with friends. During a break between chemo sessions, Michelle wanted to leverage her upbeat energy before it was zapped away again by the poison. But now all Alan could think about is regret. While he’d pushed himself into his frail wife, he’d repeatedly thought about whether his tennis racquet would be restrung before the weekend match at the 73rd St. Y with Jay Anders, the oldest partner at the firm. He now wished it had been slow and sensual love, but it wasn’t, and it hadn’t been for a long time before. And little did Alan know that in those same moments when Michelle’s sustained eye contact signaled complete presence, she wondered if the supermarket shopping list she tossed into the garbage had items written on the other side, as it sometimes did when Rose returned home from school. Alan turned to his side on the thin camping mattress and bumped the tent’s sidewall, sending a splash of dew onto his face. It was morning.
At some point within the first sips of coffee, Bonnie, Camille, Alan, and Martin reflected on similar questions. Were these new people friends or passing strangers connected by an isolated bonding experience the evening before? Would they keep riding together? They were all pedaling west, after all.
The day began with several climbs over the western hills of Mark Twain National Forest. Their legs were strong but each rider was still forming strategies to navigate the pockets of extreme boredom and introspection that accompany long days in the saddle. On one of the larger ascents, Martin and Alan, who were both stronger cyclists than the women pulled ahead. Alan had continually exercised his legs in the small basement gym of his apartment. Martin’s conditioning sustained through his daytime job as a bike messenger where his daily weaving around taxi cabs and New York City traffic was starting to slow with the integration of a new system he’d been hearing more about. The Internet.
Bonnie studied Camille’s perfect cadence from several feet behind while trying to read the stickers covering her bike frame. She was curious about the young woman. Where she was from. What she believed. How it felt to be a young Black woman cycling across the country. Why God had intersected Camille’s journey with her own. With Bonnie, what else would one want to know? The wide shoulder allowed Bonnie to move beside her younger female counterpart.
“How are you feeling this morning, Camille?” she asked and Camille smiled, glad to see Bonnie beside her. Since they’d met the previous evening she’d been astonished by the single, older solo traveler. The knowledge with which she spoke, though Bonnie mostly asked questions and listened. The directness with which she placed her relationship with God on the table, but without the proselytizing that was commonplace among the zealots in Camille’s own family. She’d wondered what led Bonnie here.
“I’m feeling well,” Camille responded. Then she reiterated her gratitude for bringing comfort to an uneasy situation the evening before, a situation Bonnie had all but forgotten. The young woman found a comfort in Bonnie that was new to her. The way she balanced compassion with assertiveness.
“Hey, we never know where these roads lead and when they’ll separate us,” Bonnie said, “so let me get right to it. Camille, tell me about yourself. Who are you? Everything please.”
Who am I, Camille asked herself. Who are you, Camille? she silently repeated, amused by hearing her say her own name, even if only in her head. Although the practice became familiar over the weeks to come as she immersed herself deeper into the wonder and blight of endless days cycling the high prairie, Camille admitted that she’d never consciously had a conversation like this with herself. “That’s a good question. Who am I?” she replied, now out loud. Camille was about to say more but was distracted by the rays of sunlight powering through the clouds. Endless barren miles intersected the long driveways beside her. It was the first time seeing a sky that promised forever since the window of the small bush plane where she’d huddled beside Americans and other Kenyan diplomatic families as they flew over the Serengeti.
Camille accelerated her pedaling, creating the needed distance for what she knew, or feared would come next. She was no longer rolling along the thin concrete stretch through America’s heartland. Camille was back to where her life began in Somalia. Figuratively, and at times literally, trapped within the high cement walls surrounding her parents’ home in Faru Salam, once recognized as Mogadishu’s only upscale neighborhood. Their quarter-acre compound had been a beacon of luxury inside a city stained with colonialism and corruption. Despite her father’s promise of a strict two-year work assignment, they’d stayed nearly four years, and possibly longer had it not been for the Americans. Every day she’d wondered if her short lifetime as a teenager was becoming an eternity.
Within the thick and colorless fortification where every color was a shade of sand, Camille created the colors of the rainbow in her soul. They crept into her thoughts. Then her dreams. In a small notepad she’d kept in the shoebox under her bed with a dozen colored pencils, she’d sketched until the candles burned to darkness every night.
Life beyond those walls felt nonexistent except for the daily transport in a multi-car, bullet-proof caravan to the International British School. A decade later, Camille still wonders what her friends learned in the days following her abrupt departure, when her family was rushed into a van for the thirty-hour drive over two days to Addis Ababa. From Ethiopia they boarded a plane to Nairobi, where the United States hastily established its new Somali diplomatic offices only hours after two American Black Hawk helicopters were shot from the sky.
In the chaos of their last night, when fires lit the streets and chants of “death to America” filled the city’s desert air, Camille forgot to reach under her bed. She prayed in her tears for days and weeks and months that one of the ladies who worked in their house, who showed her endless love, would find her artwork and bring it home to their children. But Camille also knew that once word reached the streets that the women worked for American fixers, no amount of prayer would remove the risk to their lives. Circumstance and fate, a young Camille told herself, though the words’ true meaning were beyond her comprehension. Two days later their compound was burned to the ground by looters and gangs. The women who’d served as Camille’s family’s staff and the box of artwork were unidentified in the ashes.
And to escape that memory, Camille thought about the night before as she squeezed Martin into her. Then to her recollection of how their relationship started on another blank canvas, but this one over two hours as she studied Martin’s body as he modeled for her upper-level figure drawing class at NYU. How her eyes danced over his body alongside twenty or so other aspiring artists as the large man with long dreadlocks built into the crest of his oversized head held motionless on the stool. She remembers looking into the scars that crossed his face for the first time. One horizontal on his chin beneath his lower lip and another vertically ripped into the skin of his right cheek. She remembers wondering where they came from. What kinds of pain made them. His crooked nose worthy of a fairy tale author. Then, hours later, how they formally met in Washington Square Park across the street from the gallery.
Up ahead, the man whose body lived on countless canvases spread his arms outward as he descended the traffic-free mountain road. It’s bliss, Martin thought to himself. His dreadlocks flapped in the wind like a personal freak flag. He was happy to be away from Bonnie and her constant references to God, free from thoughts that crept into his dark. Camille was his shield, but even she was not always strong enough, especially against something she couldn’t know. The memories he’d never share. How his religious childhood left more of an impression of the devil than any saints on his soul, and one evening when he was twelve and alone with one of the church elders, also on his body. Nearly a mile behind Martin at the top of the hill, Alan gripped the handlebars with all his life. The breeze merged with his tears and in that very second, Alan knew that the biggest mountains he’d have to climb weren’t the ones under his wheels.
When Bonnie and Camille arrived at the park, Alan and Martin were already there, sitting in the grass beside their bikes, respectfully arguing with each other.
“A prime example of Reagan economics,” declared Alan, motioning to the park’s plaque honoring the investment of a local philanthropist.
“Declarations of ego and tax evasion,” the Englishman countered. Time would show many traits that drew strangers to Martin, but Alan learned on this first day that deescalation wasn’t one of them.
Bonnie walked to the other end of the camping area, drawn to a scene that was turning into a commotion. A woman holding a baby stomped across the field after yelling at a forlorn looking young man who sat on a picnic table next to a loaded bike. Bonnie’s movement then attracted the attention of Alan, Martin, and Camille, who watched her approach the strange man as they unpacked their gear. Minutes later, the silence that accompanied Bonnie’s return added mystery to the already odd situation.
“What’s his story? Is he on a mission from God, too?” Martin prodded. His gaze turned to the far off fields. They’d been together less than a day, but they already understood that Bonnie was rarely at a loss for words.
“This is why ya gotta stop and go, stop and go, good people,” she finally said, confusing the others more.
As if the yelling wasn’t strange enough, the four cyclists turned in unison as a police car entered the park. “Sheriff” marked the door. Upon stopping, through his window the large officer pointed his plump finger at his culprit, extending and curling it inward several times slowly. The man trudged toward the patrol car, and Camille, Martin, Alan, and Bonnie all silently noted his cut-off jean shorts and cotton Mickey Mouse tee shirt. The exact opposite of their tight spandex shorts and sweat resistant shirts.
“The loud lady says he was dancing naked in the field,” Bonnie explained to her curious peers. “I spoke with the guy, who albeit a bit strange, was kind. He said he took off his shirt. Didn’t mention anything else. He was rinsing off in the field’s sprinkler and moved around to follow the nozzle. He swore he didn’t see anyone around, and definitely not any kids the woman screamed about,” Bonnie said before chuckling to herself.
“What’s so funny?” Martin asked. “Maybe he has God on his side,” Martin sneered under his breath. Bonnie shifted the upper half of her body toward Martin. It wasn’t anger or frustration in her movement. It was compassion, with a growing dose of pity.
“Nope, I’m not sensing he’s actively traveling with the Lord, Martin, but to get him out of this sticky situation, he may have the next best thing.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” asked Camille.
The young man’s balding head and patchy beard bounced up and down, only to be followed by what the four strangers felt was a series of irregular and meaningless arm gestures. The sheriff pointed his finger close to the man’s chest. It bounced several times and then retracted into the car before he abruptly drove off. The downtrodden man stood motionless for several long seconds in a cloud of the parking lot’s dust.
Bonnie brought her hands to her hips and sent what lies in the space between a smile and small laugh into the universe. She stared hard at the man for a long moment. “To get out of messes like that, sometimes you need the Lord, and sometimes you just need a good story.”