Between his southern accent and gravelly voice, I sometimes had trouble following him and thought he had said early in our conversation that he’d once been a police officer. I asked him about that, but I’d misunderstood. He had investigative experience in the military but had never been a police officer.
“Oh, I couldn’t be a police officer,” he told me. “I understand the Constitution requires due process and a trial by a jury of your peers. But if I came upon a scene with six people dead on the ground and an armed suspect running for his vehicle, I’d kill him right then and there. Not gonna waste one taxpayer cent on that guy. Those people dead on the ground? That’s his judge and jury and they said ‘guilty.’” Louis clearly was a disciple of the Dirty Harry school of law enforcement.
The subject moved on to my trip and Louis seemed charmed by my own mission, to rediscover America with Albie.
“You know,” I said sheepishly, “I’m looking to answer some of the same questions as you, but kind of from a different political point of view.”
Louis grinned wide and kind, straightened up, and leaned back in his chair. “I know,” he said almost wearily, as if to say it was perfectly obvious I was of a different political persuasion. All the time we’d been talking he’d sized me up easily.
As we talked, Louis was waiting for his old laptop to perform a software update and it had been taking hours; he travels without a phone and his three adult children worry about him.
“Where do you go from here?” I asked.
“Northern Maine, then back to Florida,” he replied. “Been on the road since November 2015. Mind if we step outside so I can have a smoke? And I wanna meet that dog you’re traveling with.”
How a man can ride thousands of miles on a bike and smoke is beyond me. In a light-hearted way I suggested he was working at cross-purposes with himself. He laughed. “I know.”
We walked over to my car and I felt a little embarrassed. Here was this tough as nails ex-marine smoking and riding a bike around America and Albie and I were in a BMW convertible on a six-week lark. I was a little mortified.
“You guys,” Louis said smiling and referring to Albie and me, “are just too cute!” The word “cute” and Louis seemed utterly incongruous.
“I’d like to make a contribution to your travels,” I said, motioning toward the words written across the back of his little trailer. He didn’t refuse the ten-dollar bill I extended.
“You have anything to read along the way?” I asked. I’d opened the trunk and pulled out a copy of Rescue Road, the first of two books I’d written about rescue dogs. I’d brought a few copies along to give as gifts and had one copy left. “I know you don’t want to carry more than you have to.” Louis took the book in his large, weathered hands.
“You wrote this?” he asked, surprised. I assured him I had, and that Albie had been my inspiration. He thanked me for the book. And with that we exchanged e-mail addresses, shook hands, and wished each other well.*
Louis’s vision of America and mine coexist, uncomfortably and perhaps impossibly, in the same country. In so many ways, his view of America is incomprehensible to me, the antithesis of all I learned in college and law school, all I have read over decades about American history, and everything I was taught growing up. Much of what he said appalled me, frightened me, and, had I read it on Facebook, would have enraged me. Yet, here in a coffee shop on a cold rainy day in Bismarck we both were able to look beyond the politics and have a civil conversation. He wasn’t out to change my mind nor me his; there was no tension, no anger, and no disrespect. Perhaps it was because we were, for now, both engaged in similar, but hardly identical, journeys of discovery into the country we both loved. I wouldn’t want to live in Louis’s America any more than he would want to live in mine and yet we both do. As ironic as it may be, as long as we live here, I have to live in Louis’s America and he has to live in mine. Though Louis’s politics were anathema to me, I genuinely liked him, and he seemed to genuinely like us, too. Maybe there is hope that despite the widening fractures in our politics, we won’t end up killing each other over it, or perhaps more to the point, Louis won’t end up killing me over it.
As we continued east through the rain and chill to Jamestown, North Dakota, where we would arrive in a couple of hours, I kept thinking of Louis pedaling along at a snail’s pace. It would likely take him a few days to get where we would be in a few hours. You have to admire that kind of grit.
It was sunny but cold when we woke up in Jamestown for what would be our last Saturday on the road. A strong gusty wind swept across the prairie; not the best morning for Albie to stubbornly refuse to do his morning business. The motel was right next to the interstate entrance and when I read the sign, “94 East: Fargo,” home seemed awfully far away. Practically half the United States is farther away from Boston than Fargo is, but few places sound or seem farther away. I wished there were a way to magically transport us home, perhaps a pair of ruby red slippers whose heels I could click together three times.
Before we left Boston, I discovered that according to the tentative schedule I’d outlined we were likely to be in Fargo the same weekend friends from home, John and Myra Anderson, would be visiting John’s sister in Fargo. And so it was that we met at John’s sister’s house where, for the second morning in a row, I enjoyed pancakes. John and Myra were flying home the next morning, which only made the 1,600-odd miles we had yet to travel seem all the more formidable and interminable.
As we rolled through the flats of western Minnesota toward Minneapolis I could sense we were now truly running out of gas, not literally, but figuratively. It seemed unfair to give short shrift to the states of the upper Midwest, but with every mile, home loomed larger and larger. We were just passing through.
We spent the night in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Wisconsin was pretty enough, more eastern than western, well forested with farms nestled among gently rolling hills.
The racism he witnessed in New Orleans in 1960 drained the life out of Steinbeck’s journey with Charley. A different kind of spectacle put the final dagger in ours. Our transit of Wisconsin was marred by an absolutely extravagant amount of roadkill lying along the shoulder of the highway. I don’t know if there’s a national roadkill competition among the states, but Wisconsin has the championship locked up. It was like a macabre zoo for dead and decaying animals: racoons, groundhogs, squirrels, and foxes were standouts in the small animal category; deer had a lock in the large animal division. Many carcasses had clearly been there for weeks or more, decaying grotesquely. We passed several deer whose bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition, or even missing altogether, save for the heads. It was nightmarish and ghoulish and for the life of me I couldn’t fathom why the state of Wisconsin couldn’t do a better job of clearing the death and destruction from the roads. Albie, asleep in the back, was lucky not to share this horror show with me.
At one point we hit traffic and the car ahead of me had a Wisconsin license plate, the kind states charge extra for to fund special programs. It had an image of a wolf and the words “Endangered Resources” along the bottom. Endangered resources? No shit! You people are slaughtering those resources with your cars with what appears to be reckless abandon! If the state of Wisconsin commissioned me, which it most surely won’t, to come up with a new state motto to put on their license plates, it would be: “Wisconsin: America’s Roadkill Capital.”
To try and breathe a little life back into our adventure, we planned to stop in Madison, a city I’d heard so much about but had never seen. People rave about Madison, home of the University of Wisconsin, whose downtown is located on a narrow isthmus about ten blocks wide between two large lakes. I’d seen pictures of people eating under colorful umbrellas at outdoor cafés along the waterfront and college towns tend to be hip, lively places, drawing energy from their youthful populations. Albie and I would, I thought, spend the better part of the day there soaking up the spring sunshine and walking along the lake shore. Except that
the day was cold, gray, and wet and went downhill from there.
An outdoor festival with some excellent bluegrass musicians was in progress in a plaza near the magnificent state Capitol building (this is how it’s done, North Dakota), but it was sparsely attended because of the weather and had the dispiriting feel of people trying to have a better time of it than they were. We walked from the edge of Lake Mendota to the edge of Lake Monona, but our hearts weren’t in it. We got back in the car and headed toward Chicago. Along the way, the carnage that was a prominent feature of Wisconsin highways continued. If we had to look at one more desiccated dear carcass, I thought I’d scream. I ended up screaming.
The highway for about twenty miles on either side of Janesville was under construction, causing a major traffic jam. The road was rough, the weather gloomy, and the driving exhausting. It felt as if the trip had finally, and irrevocably, slipped away from us. It was, for all practical purposes, over.
The journey slipped away for another reason, too. Albie had indulged my late midlife fantasy long enough. The concerns that occasionally gnawed at me about whether this trip was fair to him now stood front and center. We needed to get back to the yard where he could run, untethered to me by his leash, with Salina and Jamba. Between the uncooperative weather and lack of adventure at our recent stops, I knew he needed more stimulation than he was getting. As uncomplaining and agreeable as he’d been I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been a little selfish. As much as I was ready to be back home, I wanted him to be back home even more. I knew exactly what Steinbeck meant, and how he felt, when he wrote about the final leg of his journey with Charley:
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dogleg of Virginia, at four o’clock on a windy afternoon, without warning or goodbye or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. . . . The road became an endless stone ribbon, the hills obstructions, the trees green blurs, the people simply moving figures with heads but no faces. . . . It is very strange. Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, the sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory. After Abingdon—nothing. The way was a gray, timeless, eventless tunnel, but at the end of it was the one shining reality—my own wife, my own house in my own street, my own bed. It was all there, and I lumbered my way toward it.
We hadn’t planned it this way, but I was feeling self-satisfied that we would be going around Chicago on a Sunday. No weekday rush hour traffic to contend with. We had sprung free of the construction traffic in southern Wisconsin, to my considerable relief. But the next hour and then some, as we circumvented the Windy City, was the most harrowing of the entire trip, and that includes the terrifying, nausea-inducing Tail of the Dragon in Tennessee. It was as if we were in a small boat in a gently flowing stream and were suddenly thrust into a raging river. Traffic on the tangle of highways around Chicago, always dividing, merging, looping around, and intersecting, roared along in a manic, wild, reckless, heedless, headlong rush. I’ve never seen people drive with such abandon or with so little regard for their own safety and the safety of others and that’s saying something since we live near Boston. It was utter madness as we were swept along, my hands gripping the wheel and trying to follow the instructions of my GPS through the spaghetti-like tangle. Now, you might think, “Oh, he’s just getting old and more timid behind the wheel,” but I assure you that’s not the case. It was like being in Mad Max for well over the hour-plus it took us to bypass Chicago (we never even glimpsed the skyline).
When we crossed into Indiana I thought the madness would subside, but it didn’t. To add to what was already a dismal day, industrial northern Indiana was ugly (not unlike the industrial wasteland around Newark Airport) and an acrid chemical smell permeated the air. I set the climate control to “recirculate” to keep the fumes at bay. It felt like we’d been surfing class five rapids in our little boat for an eternity. When the mad rush finally subsided east of Gary, we stopped at a rest area so Albie could tend to some business and I could regain my composure. It was still cold, windy, and dank, perfectly miserable weather in a perfectly ugly place.
Albie has an endearing habit when he’s feeling a little unsettled or frightened of lifting both paws up, so I can hold him under his arms or hold both his paws in my hands. It’s his way of making sure I have his full attention. And he did it now, there in the parking lot of the rest area of this godforsaken place.
“We’re gonna be home soon,” I told him. “Promise.”
For the past five weeks I had largely avoided talk of politics, though there were exceptions. Kurtis Walker, the confessed liberal in Okemah, Oklahoma, and Louis, the right-wing cyclist in Bismarck, were two of them. Here, at a rest stop in frigid, industrial northern Indiana, the air smelling of poison, a thick-bodied man, his hair cut in a modified Mohawk and a surly expression on his face got out of a pickup truck. He wore cargo shorts and a dark blue T-shirt. In bold letters across the front it said: “TRUMP: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.” My little respite from the insanity of our times was most definitely over. That T-shirt seemed to sum up perfectly the dismal state of our politics here in a most dismal corner of America. It had been an ugly day in every way, from the decomposing roadkill in Wisconsin to the decomposing state of our politics summed up on a T-shirt.
We spent the night in a motel near the airport in South Bend, Indiana. After a day of harrowing interstate driving I was determined, despite my eagerness to get home, to spend at least part of the next day back on secondary roads and to try and extract some pleasure from the miles that lay ahead.
South Bend is just a few miles south of the Michigan border and Michigan was now the only state in the country I’d never been in. The childlike fascination many of us have with checking off the states was still there, even at age sixty-four, so I was looking forward to completing the quest to set foot in all fifty states. Within ten minutes of leaving the motel, we were in Michigan and turned east on Highway 12, which skirts through farmland just north of the Indiana line. We actually set foot in Michigan when we stopped to gas up the car in the curiously named town of White Pigeon which, I should note because the town does, is home of the Michigan High School Athletic Association Boys Golf State Championship Teams of 2003 and 2014 (Division 4).
In the great interstate roadkill competition, which seems to be dominated by states of the upper Midwest, Michigan was giving Wisconsin a real run for its money (small game division only). I’ll spare you the details save to say that the roadway was littered with small critters who came to their ends under the wheels of cars and trucks. It wasn’t quite as extravagant as the carnage in Wisconsin, but impressive, in a sad way, nevertheless.
At Sturgis, home of the Michigan High School Athletic Association Boys Bowling State Championship Team of 2012, we turned south to reach the great and mighty asphalt river known as Interstate 80. Past Cleveland we again followed secondary roads near the shores of Lake Erie and ended up again on U.S. Route 20, the very same Route 20 we’d been on across Idaho. It was mostly a slog, traffic lights and gas stations and fast-food restaurants, but I resisted the temptation to get back on the interstate. The congestion eased east of Ashtabula and when we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania I couldn’t help but marvel that just two days ago we were in North Dakota and now we were back in the Northeast. Well, technically, perhaps, but the very first house inside the Pennsylvania line was flying a Confederate flag.
That night, in our motel room in Erie, I talked to Albie, but I had more to say than usual. The trip had been dragging for me for the past few days as I am sure it had been for him. As I rubbed his belly and kissed his face I thanked him for being so patient and for being such a good traveler, told him he was a great guy, no, the best guy, and that we really would be home soon, the day after tomorrow, in fact. He listened patiently, as alw
ays, and when I was done he took a deep breath and lay his head on the bed with a sigh.
Our trip, it seemed, was destined to end as it had begun, with persistent, heavy rain. It’s only about a dozen miles from Erie to the New York state line. I toyed with the idea of stopping at Niagara Falls, which I’d never seen, but it would have been utterly pointless as we seemed to be driving through the falls all the way to Buffalo and beyond. It was exhausting because the rain was so heavy it required complete concentration behind the wheel. I had not remembered at the time, but a few months after we had returned home, while perusing parts of Travels with Charley again, I found this:
It rained in New York State, the Empire State, rained cold and Pitiless. . . . Indeed the dismal downpour made my intended visit to Niagara Falls seem redundant.
Though separated by more than five decades, our trip and Steinbeck’s had many parallels.
It was tempting to make a big, final push to get home that night, to put this trip away and tuck ourselves into our own beds. But several weeks earlier, I’d made a promise we had to keep, and so we had miles to go before we could sleep. To keep that promise we went a bit out of our way and spent our last night in the lovely, but wet village of Bennington, Vermont.
* Louis and I stayed in touch by e-mail for a short while. A few weeks after we’d met, and Albie and I were back home, I e-mailed Louis to see where he was. Having driven across the rest of North Dakota and all the way to New England since meeting him I could imagine what a slog he had ahead on a bike. To my surprise he was in Rhode Island of all places and headed to New York City. He’d hitched a ride, with his bike, on a truck and had dispensed with the idea of going to Maine.
SIXTEEN
Coming Home*
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 23