Late for the Sky

Route 80 is misery. The only good thing about it is you don’t need to think. Just ride. Try to not go too fast. Just find someone doing 80 and stick with them. Once in awhile you’ll fall in with the wrong crowd. You’ll have someone going too slow and someone else going too fast and someone else who is too stubborn to change lanes and there’ll be some dangerous driving. But you try to avoid all that. The very best you can do is empty space, nobody pressing from behind and nobody blocking from in front. Just switch off the central processor. Need gas? There’s a station. Hungry? There’s a Subway. If you’re on 80, riding a bike is like driving a car only less comfortable. Right hand cramping from time to time. Trying to keep the throttle steady. Trying to stay away from everyone. Other than the guy doing 80. Who doesn’t count anymore since you lost fifty miles back when he took one of the Des Moines exits. It doesn’t get good till I’m well west of Des Moines and I take some exit and fill the tank at some gas station and I’m sitting there on the curb eating a Twixt bar and drinking some weak coffee and I decide to take that same road, they call it 71, north till I get to 30, the Old Lincoln Highway, rendered redundant by Route 80, and take that redundant road west. All the way, I think. All the way out to Fort Collins. And why not? I think. And, by the way, I’ll never get on Route 80 again. Not on my bike. And away I go on 71, soft wind on my face, gentle rise and fall, birds milling through the air, crisscrossing the road, and I pass through one burned out redundant little town after another. No diner. No movie theater. No industry. No motel. Ah. America. This is living. As long as I’m passing through.

I pass through all day long. Burned out town. Burned out town. The temperature climbs. From mid sixties in the morning through the seventies and into the upper eighties. Now, as I pull over behind some closed down Nebraska grain elevator on some abandoned rail line and park my bike in the gravel parking lot of some empty Catholic Church with some weed bedraggled cemetery attached and remove my leather jacket and step out of my Kevlar riding pants and take a seat under some oak tree and look around, I notice that the sky is thickening and clotting and there’s a sort of welcome chill in the downdrafts. It’s going to rain. And it’s going to rain hard. My gaze sweeps across the empty church. I’m looking for some portico. Some overhanging eves. I consider the old grain elevator. I consider the bait and tackle gas station. And I decide I’d better get the fuck out of here. Find some place to wait this thing out. Some family diner. Some Italian restaurant. Uh huh. You bet.

Squeezed beneath those clouds like a grape, I ride west on 30 till I hit Central City. A big burned out town. And there is a bar. I pull over and swing my leg over and stand there on the side of the street looking up at that black brew and there’s an old guy crossing the street who eyes me funny. I look up dramatically and make a mysterious gesture with my hands. He shouts something about west. Can’t hear what he says due to my AirPods. They’re very isolating. The old guy walks into the bar. I remove my helmet and AirPods and jacket and follow him inside. It’s Sunday afternoon. There’s a central table where eight or ten women are gathered. The walls are lined with stuffed animals. Elk and deer and other dead things. The old guy is seated at the bar. As I straddle a stool, he stands and circles around behind the bar. Doesn’t say anything. Just stands there giving me the stink eye. “Oh,” I say. “You’re the bar tender.” He remains silent. Expression doesn’t change. I look behind him. “What do we have on tap?” I say. He turns 180 and looks behind himself and then back at me. “Nothing,” he says. I order a Bud Light. He rolls open the hatch on the bottle cooler in front of him, grabs that particular bottle, opens it, sets it in front of me, and walks away. It’s the bare minimum you could ask from a bartender. Good enough.

The television shows the animated rolling tie-dye pattern of green, yellow, orange and red of severe thunderstorms. Yes. And tornado warning. The women at the table are getting rowdy. Maybe it’s the weather. Two or three of them break away and head out the side door. “I gotta see this,” says one. “I gotta see this.” I follow them. Because I want to see this too. I feel invested in the weather.

We step out into a fenced-in patio, I guess you might call it a beer garden, with plastic banners and chairs that are being tossed around by the sudden gusts of suddenly cold wind. The sky is a chocolate milkshake. With stabs of lightning. “Oh fuck,” one of the women, the same one who said, “I gotta see this,” who has a shaven head but for a long braid, and teeth that never had the privilege of braces, is shouting, and pointing toward the center of the milkshake, “my mom lives over there. My mom lives right over there.”

“Have you called her?” I say.
“I did. I called her.”
“She knows she needs to…” I say.
“She does. She knows.” She takes a deep drag on her cigarette.
“Hey, can I buy one of those off you?” I say.
She digs in her purse and opens a pack of cigarettes. I produce a dollar bill.
“No,” she says.
“Those things aren’t free,” I say.
“No,” she says, pushing my hand aside. “Ain’t no way I’m taking that money. Here. Just take one. Just take it.”

It’s her fiftieth birthday. Well. Not today. But tomorrow. That’s why the party. “Happy birthday,” I say. “It’s gonna be my birthday too,” I said. “In a week or so.”
“Jesus,” she says. “My mom lives right over there.”

After I’m back behind the bar, I tell the old man I want to buy the birthday girl’s next beer. He nods. Remains seated. In ten or fifteen minutes, an old woman with giant hooters that stick straight out — must be supported by a bra with trusses and braided steel cable or something — appears behind the bar. She approaches me and asks if I’m all set. “I’m good,” I say. “But the birthday girl over here?” I jab my thumb toward the party table. “I want to buy her a beer.”

Like a good bartender would do, or, as I’m guessing she is, the owner of the place, she walks immediately to the glass door cooler against the wall, beneath the stuffed head of a wild boar, slides it open, grabs a beer, opens it, pushes a slice of lemon into the neck, and delivers it to the birthday girl. There’s a big reaction.

“Awwwweeeiii!” says the birthday girl. “That’s so sweet! Thank you! That’s so sweet!” And then to the table, “I told him it was my birthday.”
“Oh!” says another woman. “That’s sweet!”
“He bought her a birthday beer!” says another woman.
“Well,” I say. “She gave me a cigarette.”
For some reason, the entire table erupts in laughter.
“You gave him a cigarette!” Shouts someone. “Hey! You should come over here and drink with us! You should sit with us!”

I’ve noticed, since I’ve been watching those rolling tie-dye colors on the screen, that the storm has moved past Central City and is on its way eastward. I’ve already stood to fetch my helmet and jacket. “I think the storm’s gone,” I say. The table is quiet. “I’m going to keep going.”

I get a big goodbye from the table. Ride safe. Be safe. Come back. Now that you know everyone. Come back sometime. “We’ll still be here,” shouts someone, laughing. I walk out the front door and look up. The storm is definitely not gone. In fact, the sky, which was not long ago a chocolate milkshake is now India ink. And there is a definite swirl. A coiling. I look to the west, where blue sky shows through, and thin white clouds are racing northward fast. I mean really fast. Toward the swirl. Behind me, a vehicle slows and a window opens. “Hey!” shouts a young woman from the passenger seat of a black pickup. Her boyfriend is driving. “Hey! The dome is open. There’s shelter there! Right back there!” I’m touched. I wave and smile. “Thank you!” I shout.

A short, hefty woman, one of the party women, appears on the sidewalk beside me. “I’d think again,” she said, confidentially.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m thinking again.”

Now the whole table is outside on the sidewalk. Now the hail comes. Big hail. Ping pong balls. Golf balls. Pounding against the tarmac of Route 30. The tank of my bike. We’re protected by an awning. The women of this burned-out big American town are very excited. Whooping. Shouting. “Come on!” One woman shouts. “Come on! Let’s go!” And she turns to me and shouts, “If you’re gonna fuck everything up,” she shouts, “fuck everything up good. Completely fuck everything up! I mean it!” And then, to the storm, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Is that all you got, motherfucker?”

Part 2

At noon, I had breakfast at Village Inn in Sterling, Colorado. I ordered the California Skillet, scrambled eggs over melted Swiss, hollandaise, bacon, spinach, ham, mushrooms, tomatoes, onion, fresh avocado, and potatoes. I also ordered coffee, which came with an entire carafe. I drank one cup, then filled another and wedged it between my thighs in an attempt to warm up.

I’d sworn off Route 80 the previous day, but since the cold front, the air temperature had been between the upper thirties and lower forties. And it hadn’t stopped raining. There was no joy in me. Only a desire to arrive in Fort Collins where my daughter would provide me shelter. So I had returned to 80. That was the fastest route.

Google Maps was the captain now. And the captain informed me, after I pulled on my soaking wet leather jacket and soaking wet riding pants, that I’d next be riding through the Pawnee National Grassland, a straight shot to Fort Collins. I left Sterling with a full stomach and about a third tank of gas. I thought about filling up, but I was too cold. And there must be plenty of gas stations out there. I figured I had 80 miles in that tank. That’d be long enough for my electric jacket liner to warm me up a little before I had to stop again.

Pawnee National Grassland. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. Indian reservation probably. Did they have gas stations in those things? Of course they did. Why wouldn’t they?

There were no burned out towns in the National Grassland. There were burned out homesteads. In between those was prairie. Flat prairie. Windy, flat prairie. At 40 degrees. And hard rain. The warmth from my electric jacket liner was everything. It was delicious to me. Like créme brûlée.

My gas gauge showed the level on an LCD screen in a fanned turkey tail of gray bars. I had three in Sterling. Then, twenty miles in, I had two. Then I had one. Then that one bar began to flash. And the Pawnee National Grassland came on, gray and flat and windy and rainy and cold. What was beginning to worry me was the detour sign. I had passed it, twenty miles back. It came with an arrow pointing to some gravel side road. I didn’t go the way the arrow pointed. I was wondering if the road was in fact closed ahead. If it was, any chance I had in this freezing hell of finding a place to fill up was gone.

I started imagining myself running out of gas out there. In that vast place that so obviously wouldn’t care. I saw myself walking in the rain. No signal. And even if I had a signal, who would I call? I saw myself approaching one of these forbidding burned out homesteads. “Hi. My name is Joe. From Iowa. Yes. I wonder if you could spare some gas. And a gas can. And I wonder, I don’t mean to be any trouble, if you could give me a lift.” I thought of this land. Through millennia. I thought of buffalo. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of dead. Animals and humans. Left to rot. Out here. In this place. That didn’t care. And what would I do without fuel? Without this machine that took me from here to there? What would I do without this credit card? Without this heated jacket liner? What would I do alone without family or friend in this world?

There was a place. So camouflaged by its shabbiness, I passed it by. Circled around and returned. Two gas pumps. Were they operational? Please God. Yes. They were operational. And my card was accepted. And that pink-tinted life-giving liquid surged into my tank.

Once in Fort Collins, I would sacrifice something — some innocent animal. To hell with that innocent animal — to whatever god it is that provides this liquid from the ground. So that I might keep going.