Radio Free North Hollywood

June 17th — I crossed the Texas-Oklahoma line about ten o’clock this morning. I’m in Boise City, Oklahoma, and it’s very OK. Here are some interesting Boise City/Cimmaron County facts:

-This is the only county in the US without a stoplight.
-The reason Oklahoma has this stupid panhandle is because Texas was a slave state during the Civil War, and no place above the Mason-Dixon line could be slave. So they cut off this 36 by 168 mile strip, and nobody wanted it for several years. They called it “No-Man’s Land” and apparently all sorts of violent shit went down here.
-on July 5, 1943, the Air Force accidentally bombed the courthouse. Oops!

Yesterday was Bloomsday, a good day for wandering aimlessly from one panhandle to another. I left Dumas (pronounced Doom-iss, not Duma or Dumbass) and rode north, not very far, to a town called Stratford. There I ate hamburgers and goofed off. I did some serious looking at issue one of the comic I’ve been working on for roughly forever, and I think I discovered the problem. The problem is that it isn’t very good. Actually, it’s awful. I had a really clear idea what I wanted when I thumbnailed it, but as I drew it totally lost track of what I’m trying to do.

This isn’t entirely my fault, because I used this comic to learn, and I learned so fast that the early pages bear no resemblance to the later pages. I’m a far, far better artist now than I was six months ago. I’m still not good, but I’ve taken a quantum leap. That’s entirely due to e4e and ASG.

All well and good, but the pages I’ve got up for e4e might as well be thrown away. Thre are about six coherent pages in the whole thing, and two of them are by Zach. Issue one was supposed to be entirely about landscape. So why are there practically no backgrounds in the whole thing? And what is everybody doing standing so close to the camera? I really need to just tear it apart and do it again. Which is what I’ve been doing. I’ve also taken George and Philip’s advice and began to script the whole story, beginning to end, in words alone. It’s a great tool to achieve some form of coherence.

But enough of that. On with the interesting bicycling stuff.

Woke up in Dumas yesterday, as I believe I mentioned. I must have rode north to Stratford, although I don’t remember that at all. But I remember Stratford, and I know I didn’t get a ride, so I must have got there somehow. After about day three on the bicycle all days start to blend, you see. I stopped in Stratford and ate a really good hamburger. Vegetarianism has gone entirely out the window.

I left Stratford for Kerrick at about 6PM, determined to get out of Texas that night. Well, about ten miles south of the border I caught up with that huge UFO-shaped cloud I was talking about on Tuesday.

The sky above me was deep grey and the wind stopped dead.

Uh-oh, I said, and got out my video camera. It’s really hard to judge distance out here, because it’s perfectly flat and you can see all the way to the horizon in every direction. I’ve had more than one experience when I watched a thunderstorm pass me, convinced it was going to hit, but it never got closer than ten miles. But I had a really bad feeling about this one, and I wanted there to be a record in case I got killed.

It was really pretty, lightning and seventeen different types of clouds, all of them grey to black.

I was bound and determined to get to Kerrick, so I rode on.

I made another two miles when the wind backed up, from the north to the south now. I could see an abandoned farmhouse just a mile ahead of me, but the wind was so strong that I literally could not make it. There were huge clouds of dust cutting south, and as I watched I saw them make a sudden right, cut across the highway, and start to make a circle around me.

Now I had a -really- bad feeling about this.

I turned around and started pedaling south. Then I stopped pedalling and went even faster. The wind like as to picked me up — I must have been going twenty to thirty, and I wasn’t moving my feet. Tumbleweed was coming from all over to ambush me, smacking into the tires and going SPWANNGG away. The dust storm built into a tower many stories high. I wanted to get off this road -now.- I went right to get to a farmhouse I saw off County Road H, stumbled through the gate, and ran around yelling “Hello! Hello?”

Nobody was there. There was a big brown spot where a mobile home used to be, a cinder-block barn open to the south, and a bunch of dilapidated chicken coops. There weren’t even any animals there, except the occasional rabbit and some of those yellow birds with the split tails. I found junk mail and old newspapers blowing around the yard and some ET movie cards. The mail was all to Floyd and Mrs. Floyd Ellison, and all dated from 1988 to 1990. I mean, nobody was there. The wind was blowing like hell, the temperature dropped to the 50s, and there was no way to make it to town or -anywhere.- I realised I was about to spend my first night outside.

I made myself a nest in the barn and watched the rain come in. It was too dark to read by eight o’clock, nothing to do but watch the lightning and listen to the rain. Some pigeons came in to share the barn with me. It was extremely spooky and extremely cold. I put on every item of clothing I have (thermal underwear, corduroy, two pairs of shorts and two shirts, a long-sleeve shirt, and a pair of socks) and I was still cold. I wrapped my feet up in a plastic garbage bag and put three towels over myself as the closest thing I had to a blanket and fell asleep.

After all that I managed not to be -too- cold during the night. If things got much worse I would have started a fire, but considering I was in a wood-roofed barn, and I did not own that barn, I held off on that and made it OK. It was very dark and scary, and I was really spooked at first. But it would have taken an extremely motivated serial killer to get at me through that storm, and I would have heard him splucking through the mud anyway. So I slept and I slept pretty well.

I woke up in the morning, blissfully unmurdered, and put all my stuff back on the bike. I took my sandals off to hike the half-mile through the mud, and then I was back on the highway. Stopped in Kerrick for some coffee (I don’t usually drink coffee, but it was cold and coffee is hot) and resumed the road. Travelled through some of the flattest land I’ve ever seen. The wind isn’t exactly on my side but at least it isn’t against me.

Now I’ve got 90+ miles to go to the next big town, which is not very big. This is through some of the nothing-est nothing in America, and I’m glad I’ve got plenty of food and water. I’ve also got the compass Philip gave me, duct-taped to the handlebars. It’s come in handy many, many times.

Sorry to say, I almost certainly will not be biking all the way to California. If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken the southern route through Albuquerque and gone up the San Fernando Valley. Now I’m up near the Westerlies, which are nearly constant winds going west to east across the Great Basin and Colorado. Going up a mountain would be challenging enough without a twenty-mile wind in my face. When you’re in a bicycle, you take the windspeed and add it to your pedalling speed and get what you’re really going. Or, in this case, subtract. I’d be pedalling twenty-five miles an hour for an actual speed of five miles an hour. Up a mountain.

Not likely.

So I’m gonna meet my friends Bill and Melissa in Estes Park, and then catch a ride to Alturas CA. After that I’ll go to San Diego, Austin, or Kentucky, depending on what I feel like doing. When you start any trip the fun is in the travel, but the comes a point where the fun wears off and you just want to get where you’re going. I’m not to that point yet, but I will be someday.

Not soon, though. I’ve got at least four hundred miles of fun left. Texas didn’t want to let me go without a fight, but I finally got out. Now let’s see what’s next….

June 15th. Now I’m in Amarillo, Texas. How, you may wonder, did I cover the two hundred and forty miles from Wichita Falls to Amarillo in just two days? Simple. I cheated.

I lazed around Midwestern University all day yesterday, goofing off on the internet and living the simple life. Watched Slacker, got really homesick. Half that movie musta been shot on the Drag. Took a nap, read a book, wrote a little. Took another nap. Went to the cafeteria and pigged out on ziti. Took another nap. Checked my email. Took another nap. By this point it was 3 AM, and I was just about motivated enough to go. So I checked my email again. Now it was 4 AM. According to facade.com, my physical biorhythms were at their absolute nadir this morning. Now, I don’t know from biorhythms so that may be absolute bollocks, but it sure felt that way. I rode to the edge of town, ate some donuts at the Ramada Inn, and about 6AM I actually got on 287 heading west.

I quickly realised that the stretch of 287 from Wichita Falls to Amarillo -sucks.- It’s a major trucker route, and even though the road is nice and smooth (except for all the retreads thrown at the side of the road), I quickly tired of diesel fumes.

A small airplane had crashed in a field by the side of the road, sometime during the night, and I got there about five minutes ahead of the FAA investigators. I thought that was neat and I took some pictures of it. But the road kept getting more crowded and louder as the sun came up, and I decided to try hitch-biking. My first ride, a a pickup truck piloted by one Ed Stevens, took me ten miles and dropped me off. Then my second ride came along — Jan and Stanley Weinstein, cool cats from Albuquerque. We coaxed my bike onto their bike rack and rode to Amarillo. So I made two hundred miles before 10:30 in the morning, a trip that was originally going to take me three days.

We talked as we went, and I took yet another nap. It takes about four naps to equal one night of sleep, by the way. Stanley’s some kind of nonprofit poobah and bicycling nut, and they had a lot of interesting things to say. Some of the nicest people I’ve met on this trip. We had lunch at the truck stop and I was on my way.

To the library, where I am right now. Surfing the internet and doing essentially nothing. To misquote Rimbaud,

“Lazy than a toad, I have seen the world.”

Ed Fitzgerald said that about me once, and believe me, Ed knows from lazy.

Now it’s only eighty miles until I reach Texas escape velocity. It might rain on me, it might not, but the wind is right, the sun’s not too hot, and I’ve got nothing better to do.

Sundey June 13th, and I’m in Possum Kingdom. I don’t know what this place is or even really where it is, but it’s weird. I’m on top of this mountain between Ft. Worth and Abeline, and I’m completely surrounded by the richest people I’ve seen for a long time. This place is like Bohemian Grove or something.

To sum up, I left Comanche yesterday noon and went north to De Leon, where I hung out at the Blue Moon Cafe, which is an awesome place. It’s like an old-style saloon or a barn or something, with a tiny little restaurant huddled in one corner and the rest of the room like an empty cathedral. Ended up yabbering about education theory and the WTC with this elementary school teacher named Max. Fun. Back on the road! This road was a little tough, but very pretty.

I haven’t been bothering to recount to y’all the natural splendors of the things that I’ve seen, because I have a video camera for that. You can see the tapes when I get home. It goes without saying that all this shit is very pretty, very pretty. I also have one notebook I’m using for story ideas (knocked out another couple pages yesterday, and I’m working on my idea for the Dr. Strange/A-Team thing, which involves walking upside down on clouds and Rubio’s hella cool drawings of guys with swords fighting giants), and another notebook for amusing observations along the way, for example:

The wind’s usually going about nine miles an hour from the south or southwest. Sometimes I’m travelling so perfectly in tune with the wind that I can hit my cigarette lighter and keep it going, perfectly steady, for minutes at a time. Zipping down the road with a lit cigarette lighter is very neat. I bet it would look cool on film, too.

Why do I call it a cigarette lighter? You and I both know I don’t use it for cigarettes.

I’m really using this forum as a combination diary, list of people I meet, and list of things I eat. I ate so friggin’ good yesterday.

Made it to Strawn, and here’s where the story gets interesting. I ate this awesome cheeseburger, but that’s not the interesting part. No, the interesting part is that Strawn, Texas, population 749, has the Texas champion six-man football team, and Saturday was their homecoming. So there were parades and all sorts of nonsense. I got there @ 6 pm, watched the hometown hoo-ha for a little while, and figured I didn’t really want to see the dance, but I did want to hang out with a bunch of drunk farmgirls. So my brilliant plan was, I’d ride about thirty miles north to this lake I saw on the map, Possum Kingdom.

My theory was, if there’s a place called Possum Kingdom, it’s gonna be inhabited only by people named Bubba and Luanne. I’d find a campfire on the beach, eat some catfish, and chill.

Rode north, and it was hilly and difficult. I found a CD by the side of the road and I plan to listen to it sometime. Took some nice pictures, saw all sorts of roadkill. Where 16 hits 180 I saw an entire dead cow in the ditch, two vultures picking at it in no hurry. I guess the rotting gives it a little flavor. I love Texas.

My first clue that my plan was not going according to plan was some bullshit construction on 16. There was about five miles of absolutely pointless gravel, and then a four-lane highway of surpassing straightness and niceness. There was a Whataburger.

(short digression — I have not seen a Taco Bell for seven days, yet I still see Taco Bell cups on the side of the road. wtf?)

Everything was under construction by something called “Echo Productions.” Then I started to pass gated communities. Meanwhile, all these incredibly rich and sporty little cars and giant honkin’ SUVs with big blue halogen headlights were passing me at a zillion miles an hour. What, I say, what is the meaning of this? Who wants to live in a gated community called Possum Kingdom?

I hit the Brazos River and realised things were not what they seem. I’d been passed by so many white Porches and GMC Jimmys I knew something was up (this was the point that I called Zach at, by the way). There were also bugs the size of biplanes divebombing me, so stopping was not an option. I soldiered on to the top of the mountain. It was then I noticed that clouds had appeared from nowhere, lightning was striking all around me, and it definitely looked like it was about to pelt big heavy raindrops down upon my poor honky ass. I flagged down a Hummer and said,

“I have two questions. Who are all these rich people and why are they driving so fast, and is it going to rain on me?”

Technically three questions, so he countered by answering only one of them.

“Yes, it’s gonna pour. There’s a town about four miles that way, if you can make it.”

Dark as hell, but I made it. (I have an interesting side about dark American highways, too. Later). I hit town and the first thing I saw was four cops arresting two teenagers. Possum Kingdom is not kind to underage drinkers. I distracted the officers and made them deal with me for a couple minutes, trying to find an all-night anything in this town, which there ain’t.

Turns out Possum Kingdom’s a resort for the rich folk of Dallas and Fort Worth. Nice place, too. Anyway, the cops got sick of hasslin’ with me and told me to go hang out at this bar called the Winds, which I did. I talked to the manager, Scott, who’d done some long-distance bicycling of his own, and he was cool as -hell.- He let me hang out inside as that thunder kept creeping closer and closer. I was chillin’ with these sixty-year-old lawyers who were having some kind of class reunion when the Weather Channel said there were going to be winds up to 60mph.

Whoops!

I videotaped this part. Me and all the staff rushed outside and cleared the patio in a big hurry, and I brought my bicycle inside to wait out the storm. I was hanging with the bartender, this cool cat named Tank, and he got me some of the dankest mashed potatoes I ever did eat from the kitchen. They had little bits of new potatoes in them and stuff. I normally -hate- mashed potatoes, but these were deeply awesome. The rain came and went. I was talking to this supercool waitress named Antonina. She was from the Ukraine, and at first I thought she said her name was Andonina. She has this awesome accent. We really hit it off and talked through the whole storm, and when it was over and time for Scott to kick everybody out, she said I could crash on her couch.

I’d like to point out at this time that I have not been roughing it at ALL. I pulled out of Austin last Sunday, and I’ve slept in a bed every night since then. People are really interested and friendly when they find out I’m dumb enough to ride my bike across America in the summer, and there have been no end of offers of good places to stay and good things to eat. I have more money now than I did when the trip started, too. America is a very nice place.

Back to the story. My bike looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame right now — I have some serious junk in the trunk. So there was no way to disassemble it and toss it in Antonina’s car — I said I’d follow her home. A fifteen minute drive — how hard could it be? Well, eight miles in the dark over unfamiliar roads that are WET, it was very difficult indeed. I’ve never followed a car with a bike before, and it’s not easy. She’d drive about three miles, stop, park, wait for me, and ten minutes later I’d catch up, and we did this over and over again until we got back to her place, a cabin on the YMCA ranch on PK Lake. This was exhilarating but extremely nervewracking. I love my bicycle and I love to do incredibly stupid and dangerous things with my bicycle, but this was dumb even by my standards. But it worked, so who’s complaining.

We stayed up until three talking about America and the Ukraine. She’d never even -heard- of Ronald Reagan — had no idea who he was — which makes me feel so very good. After all, if that Reagan jackass really did win the cold war like they’s tryin’ to pretend, seems like somebody who grew up in the soviet bloc (and was actually there for the Chernobyl incident!) would have heard of him or something, right? But she h’ain’t. Which goes to show that the neocons are FULL of it. She was also talking about learning to drive in the Ukraine, which is apparently no mean trick. They don’t seem to have that American work ethic over there.

This was, by the way, one of the only nice things I said about America all night. We are fat lazy wasteful swine, totally delusional, starting wars for no apparent reason, but at least we pull the crap off of the road after it rains.

In the Ukraine, when a big tree branch falls in the road, it isn’t your job to move it so you just adapt. You learn to drive around it. Antonina was telling me that the maintenance workers would open up a manhole, work for a little while, and when their shift was up they’d just walk off and leave the manhole open. Wasn’t their job to close it. People would walk along and fall right into it, but that was their problem. The power and the water would go out randomly, a couple times a week, for no good reason. If there’s a pothole in the road they don’t fix it, they put up a sign that says “Pothole” and leave it there for years.

(when Antonina says ‘pothole’ it sounds like ‘butthole,’ which is very charming)

Now, in the last three days I’ve ridden at least 60 miles at night. Pitch black night where I literally could not see ten feet in front of me. I could do this because I know in America the roads are clean and clear. If there’s something in the middle of the road, it hasn’t been there for very long. I didn’t see a single pothole in two hundred miles of Highway 16, much less a big sign that said “Pothole,” or a historical marker that says “this pothole has been here since 1986.” And that’s a damn good thing. The odds of me riding my bike into an open manhole cover are slim to none. God bless America.

Here are two other very good things about America:

1) People are so damn nice you can’t believe it. I know that I’ve kinda got that deck stacked in my favor — I am very aware that I am white and male and semi-cute, and therefore traditionally and through no fault of my own the theoretical inheritor of this whole mess. To be honest, that makes me feel very guilty sometimes. And I really look forward to the day when a black man, or a woman, or anybody who damn well feels like it can ride their bikes across the continent with $30 in their pocket and not think twice about it. And I think that day is almost here, if it’s not already. So that’s ANOTHER really good thing about America.

2) (technically 3 but who’s counting). Antonina didn’t know who President Reagan was. I mean, I didn’t really know who the president of the Ukraine was, but i know who Vladimir Putin is. As Americans we’re sorta accustomed to thinking we know nothing about the world, but if you turn on the news it’s nothing BUT world news. I know all about Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel and Poland and so on and so forth…a lot of the people I’ve met from other countries say, no, they pay no attention to world news at all. They say Americans are some of the best informed people they’ve ever met. I think that’s pretty cool. Americans honestly do care about the rest of the world, though we’ve got a fucked up way of showing it sometimes.

Then it was 3AM and we went to sleep. It was totally innocent, by the way. Sorry to disappoint you, faithful reader, but it wasn’t like that.

I had these weird dreams about a book with a curse on it and my dead friend Matt Stacy and mysterious forces stealing my wallet — I think I use dreams to express the anxiety that I don’t feel during the day. My bike’s sitting outside this real estate office right now, totally unlocked and unwatched, and I know for a fact that nobody’s gonna steal with it or mess with it one little bit. I don’t worry because there’s no reason to worry. But I still have this center of my brain that’s used for worrying, and it needs to worry, because if it doesn’t it feels useless. So the worry center waits until I go to sleep and then springs all these horrible visions of theft and high-speed accidents and shit like that. I really don’t mind. It’s just the way things are.

Woke up, ate some raisin bran, went swimming in PK Lake, and now here I am. I went ninety-odd miles yesterday, and I’m 250 away from Austin. I think it’s time for me to coast down the backside of this mountain and hie myself yonder to Wichita Falls, where I’ll figure out what happens next.

This message is entirely too long. Sorry about that. But it was a very interesting day.

Have fun, you hungover bastards! I’ll see y’all soon.

Well, me and my velocipede have set out on our long, slow crawl across the west. I’ve made it to Llano, Texas. If you were to consult Mapquest, you’d see that Llano, Texas, is not very far away from Austin at all. See, it’s like this:

I stuck around to shoot that biker rally, and left Austin Sunday morning. I went out to my friend Melissa’s ranch, on 1323 near Sandy (in the middle of the hill country), and had possibly the best going-away party ever. I can’t really go into it here, but suffice to say it was illegal, immoral, and absolutely great! Thanks Melissa, Fuzzy, and Evelyn! Anyway, so there I was at the ranch, and I still had a bit of work to do on my bike before I could leave, so everybody went back to Austin and left me there about ten on Monday. I futzed around, ate some freezer waffles that were at least as old as God, and finally got on the road about noon on Monday.

About one o’clock on Monday I sprung a bungee cord and had to go back. I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to bring my sleeping bag on this trip. Not a major problem — I’ve done big trips without a sleeping bag before. I repacked and reoriented and was just about to leave when it started raining.

It rained all night.

Tuesday it rained all day.

Wednesday it rained all day and now the creek was so high I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to. I ate rice and pancakes and watched the damnable endless Reagan funeral on TV. There were no books in the cabin, except two Patricia Cornwell mysteries that I finished on Tuesday, a field guide to reptiles, and a field guide to mushrooms. I sat on the porch and watched the deer and turkeys go by.

Today I woke up and the weather was perfect. I got everything together, cleaned up the house, and finally left for real this time. It took me an hour just to get down the damn gravel road and cross all the creeks, but then I was out on 1323 and it was smooth sailing. I cruised past all the cattle ranches and into Gillespie County, where I made my first important discovery of this trip:

Wet sheep smell far, far worse than wet cows.

Jesus. A mile of sheep ranches and I couldn’t roll my windows up or turn on the air conditioning or even speed up to get out of it. An unforgettable odor, and this is coming from someone who just spent a weekend at a biker rally. Gaagh! It sort of reminded me of canned sardines, though I can’t say why.

Then it was over and back on to the beautiful day. I cruised off 1323 and onto Highway 16, where I am right now. If anyone else ever wants to ride a bike across Texas, Highway 16 is -perfect.- Great shoulder, gently rolling hills, a bit of traffic but not too much. No sheep ranches. Perfect.

So now, five days into my big trip, and I’m only 73 miles away from Austin. Well, that’s bicycles for you. I’m staying on 16 North, to Wichita Falls at least. This road is perfect for bicycles, and I’ll ride it until it stops. I rode 40 miles today, averaging about 16 miles an hour (but that’s because I’m pushing myself), and I’ll try to do at least that many more before night falls.

Andalay!