Hoping for a Tail Wind

Mother Nature gives us all she can overnight. In the morning, it’s blue-sky sunny and much cooler and we have a vigorous tailwind. And I have a hotel room front flat.

Patch and repair. Nothing in the tire. I check the back tire and find a piece of stone or bone wedges into a crevice in the tire. I pull it out and proceed to break the valve stem in half when I go to top the tire off. What the fuck. I then find an inch and a half long piece of wire through the tire. What the actual fuck. I fashion a couple tire boots with an older health insurance card. Because the health of American citizens should not be a for profit model. Lastly, I patch Damon’s flat from yesterday as my only spare. Much more field mechanics than I expected so we roll out a bit later than normal.

A right turn back on 61 after 5 miles and it’s clear that this gusty tailwind is likely to take us the entire 70 miles to my most preferred of travel destinations, New Orleans for a much needed day off. Add to that the fact that we’ve got the levee bike paths for half of those miles and I am feeling it. It feels like forever, but only a year and a half ago I was riding this route in the opposite direction — and beginning my 1,500 mile ride home.

Last time I was here the spillway was open, so I had to detour off of the bike trail back to the road. This time the spillway is closed; according to a sign and a barrier, so is the “road”. Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. We get our adventure on and decide to forge ahead. Grass. Mud. Rocks. Flowing water. Sections of the pavement have been washed away but water flowing from the nearby dam, damn. I’m spending too much time carrying my 100 pounds of bike than I care to.

It’s a strange stretch of path along the Mississippi River, mixing nature with massive oil company infrastructure. Pipelines and giant factories everywhere. One after another. I eventually tune them out, which is easy because I’m not sharing the road with vehicular traffic.

After a few relaxing miles, I settle into all the feels only a ride of this magnitude can inspire. The sense of connection with my environment — and my purpose and place within it. The lack of distractions cha cha dancing with the prolonged periods of self reflection spilling into intense clarity. The generosity and hospitality so many have collectively provided me during my riding over the last 15 years of doing this kinda crazy shit. My physical, spiritual and emotional states align as I come into NOLA just in time for rush hour traffic.

Somewhere behind me has caught another flat. I cruise through town to the hotel; he ends up taking an Uber XL. We reunite for the ritualistic calorie binge. We walk through the quarter and eventually get to my spot. My sincerest condolences if you’ve been here but haven’t had Verti Mart’s “All That Jazz” sammich. Or anything on the menu at the back of this cash only bodega corner store. We grab a couple beers in brown paper bags and grab a bench on the river. I absolutely scarf my meal down while Damon is FaceTiming his wife and business partner. I don’t even realize the total wolf job I do. Afterward, I fight off enough of the food coma to drink a curbside Moscow Mule with NOLA native Margeaux, her two pups and her 66 Barracuda. I hit the hotel bed by 9pm and last five minutes. My lights go out with the room lights on.

We take a day off in NOLA. We get wild AF on our day off. I lay in the hotel bed for hours. Damon and I drink coffee, roughly plan out the final leg of the ride to St Augustine, chat about all sorts of stuff. We’re getting crazy in the Big Easy. News talk. Pandemic talk. Racially motivated shootings in Atlanta. I loop back around to the planning portion, scouting for camp sites and warm showers hosts along the route. This one profile from some folks that let you camp under their beach house on the gulf ties a bow on our hit button discussions:

Damon is going on about how amazed he still is that there’s nothing Trump could do to stop his people from groveling to him. How now he’s being labeled a liberally elite New Yorker for encouraging vaccination. I haven’t watched the news in a long time but I can affirm that the Empire State does not want him back. Ultimately, I feel that the right and the left have the same “shouting you down” issues. There’s no civil discourse. A lot of folk’s perspective is limited and their attention span is shit. Damon is adamant that public rhetoric has to be toned down. In the end, I wash my underwear in the hotel sink and that task is perfectly analogous to US government and politics. Sandpaper and Bobbie pop up last second from Jackson Mississippi. We enjoy lunch and drinks in a semi-reopened New Orleans. With this turning up of the relaxation, we feel ready to hit the road outta here tomorrow, focused on completing the final leg to the Atlantic Ocean.

• 

• 

Space and time our way to Perry blessing my morning with coffee, breakfast, road snacks and weather wisdom. Today is the definitely the storm day I’ve had my eye on all week. Four forecasted days of possible storms and today’s seems the potential most severe and most possible. We’ve managed to avoid most of it the last three days, but today seems a more inevitable event is upon us. Perry dismisses the value of the position of local weather forecaster. I pull up the radar map and she’s says we’ve got “the ketchup and mustard”. An obvious reference to the volatility-indicating colors on the map on my phone. Yup. Supposed to start at 2pm. We decide to get as many miles in as we can, a delicate balance of going far but not too far. On bicycles.

Damon and I pack up. Perry comes out to send us off. We share a big ol’ mutually-vaccinated hug. Damn it’s good to hug people again. Regular people. The feels are good. She tells us she looked at the storms and says we’re gonna get wet, but we probably can get to Baton Rouge before it gets dangerous. We head out, hopeful that our local oracle told us what we need to hear.

Five minutes in and I’m convinced this is a bad idea. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Chewy. The wind is directly in our face, somewhere at 20 mph. The clouds are stacked and gray. I keep cutting down the 25 miles to Baton Rouge into small meaningful goals. Rain starts to sprinkle. The wind gusts pick up. The clouds drop and get that hanging look to them. This is too much like a day in Minnesota 11 years ago on my Northern Tier ride that I won’t ever forget. I don’t wanna say tornado but everything smells like tornado. 15 miles in and I tell Damon I don’t feel comfortable riding in this. There’s nothing but trees so we ride on and look for somewhere to go inside. I see cows. I can only think of that cow that gets sucked up into the sky in the movie Twister. I see ditches and I think about how I could dive in there and maybe even hide in a poopy puddled-up sewage pipe if push came to shove. My mind goes over my New York State Academy of Fire Sciences survival training on tying a bowline knot around my waste, just in case I need to tie myself to a tree and hug it for dear life. Then I remember I shipped my paracord home back in Del Rio. Well, fuck.

The sun makes a brief appearance and everything but the wind feels calm for a good ten minutes. A strange irony oozes into my consciousness — this very wind we are fighting and riding directly into could very well be keeping the storms north of us. The steady 20 mph wind is straight off the Gulf of Mexico. I’m no meteorologist, but I’ll take the paycheck even if I’m wrong.

We make Baton Rouge. It feels safer in a city. As if we can’t get struck by lightning right here on the shores of the Mississippi River. The rain let’s up and I get one sole road photo the entire day:

We’ve taken very little breaks thus far but need to get a weather update and a little rest. I stop at a bench and see that the most violent weather has been delayed from about 2pm to 4pm. Damon and I apparently like gambling with our lives, so we head back into the rural bayou for what he will soon refer to as “more final boss shit”. We are the bikepacking Killer Mike and El-P. We don’t run, we ride. No jewels, just storms.

Five miles past LSU and I feel like we’ve made another mistake. We should have stayed in Baton Rouge. The rain comes back around and I’m getting every sort of alert on my watch. Lightning. Thunderstorms. Tornadoes. 30 miles away. 20 miles away. Fuck. We make a left turn off route but toward civilization and a cadre of hotels along my old nemesis Interstate 10. Shelter is ten miles ahead. My watch buzzes. The lightning is ten miles behind me. I’m tired as fuck. I can’t make this sort of drama up, and my hands are white knuckles on my handlebars; realizing I definitely have a fear of tornadoes and the tension of fifty miles under threat of this fear has taken its toll on my stamina as Damon zooms ahead. Lightning has caught up and the dark sky is now flashing around me. That whole phrase “you’re more likely to get struck by lightning” really fucking sucks when you’re in the middle of a storm and there’s a higher than normal chance of actually getting struck by lightning. Two miles to go has never felt so long.

Spoiler: I don’t get struck by lightning or thrown miles across the bayou by a tornado. Dead people don’t blog.

The first hotel out of like 15 in a row is a fancier than a normal one. We take it. The pool is even open but that doesn’t mean shit because the pool is outside and fifteen minutes after check-in the monsoon and light show really commences. Wow. I’m quite happy to be experiencing this awesome demonstration of natural power from my ground floor window. Plus I managed to grab some fantastic jambalaya and an Abita Andygator Doppelbock for this evening’s showing.