Across the River

Leaving New Orleans felt like treading swamp water. Across the Mississippi, a hundred miles of highway hovered over a bubbling expanse of muck—a soggy blanket stuffed deep into our heaving lungs. It was the kind of sizzling road that burns the sanctity out of life. Every climate-controlled truck slamming past was an excuse for profanity and each mile an obligation. Fresh roadkill began to resemble putrid rotting carcasses. And when we did find sanctuary for the night, blood-sucking swarms conquered our camp.

They sucked us dry, but suffering gives way to the sublime. Finally enveloped by the slow fizz of the Louisiana Gulf, our naked toes massaged its nurturing expanse. Salty air and sloppy spoonfuls of oatmeal circulated our sunburned bodies, waves washing and whispering toward a hazy horizon. Living in the city had torn us away from our source, but it still owns us. It is us, and diving face first into the windswept tide is a sure way to reconnect.

But it was short-lived—Texas greeted us with the punch in the gut that’s made it famous. As we crossed the border, a Texas-sized shoulderless bridge scooped us up and slammed us into 40 miles of human noise, sprawling out into the demonic whirr of an oil industry gone mad. Highways stretched on for an eternity, twisting us to the side of the road over and over again.

Tim was fuming, slamming profanities against his bike in a thin green strip separating highway from strip mall. “Why aren’t you helping me?!” His words shot out like jagged metal.

Ducking behind a map and a mouthful of food, I struggled to trace a path of less resistance—but the map held no answers, only a moment’s distraction.

“Well, that looks like a one-person job…” I reasoned, eyes darting back and forth. “And I’m not gonna put myself in the cross-hairs of this.” I walked over and halfheartedly pulled the frame apart so the wheel could slide back in snugly without taking off a finger.

“What,” he retaliated. “So you just sit there and eat peanut butter cause you don’t wanna deal with my shit?”

A bicycle tour tears people apart in the most beautifully infuriating ways. Life becomes an intimate collaboration, and an intricate web of tension and countertension keeps the balance. When a single spoke snaps, a shock echoes throughout the system, throwing the wheel, its bicycle, its rider, and his companions into disarray. Ancient wounds burst wide open, oozing all over your face and blinding you to the gentle beauty of it all. But as Tim centered his wheel, he centered himself and his surroundings, and we crept back on the road toward that distant, barely visible light.

All this didn’t help our already skewed opinions of Texas. George Bush, Christian hypocrisy, oil drilling, gun hoarding… the entire place seemed painted bloody red to me, growing up in a country epitomized to the world by this state’s most reckless dysfunctions. But the ever-changing landscape of a road trip forces you to confront your most unseen and guarded prejudices.

Our backs to the screaming sprawl, we rode easy as ranches and forest rolled softly by. Dead in the middle of Sam Houston National Forest, our odometer crawled past 2000, and we celebrated appropriately—a pannier makes a fine icebox and even the cheapest sparkling wine dances and giggles after a day of riding. We left the forest the next day well-rested, dehydrated and officially past the halfway point. As the asphalt started heating up, a small sedan veered ahead of us into a gas station. The driver bounced in and out of the store, wound back to overtake us again, and screeched to the shoulder.

“Hey you guys want some gatorade?!” An eager body flailed out onto the street, clutching two bottles of red. No older than 22, he peered at us through thick-rimmed glasses tucked under a little bicycle hat.

“I couldn’t believe… are those guys touring? I thought… I took this same route last year on my bike!” His words trampled one another, a million thoughts congested into a few sounds. “You guys are going into College Station too? I’m visiting some friends that’d probably let you crash.” He jerked and grinned excitedly, fumbling with his pockets. “Let’s just load up your bikes and I’ll drive you in!”

“That would kinda be cheating…” I smiled, looking at the empty powerade bottle in my hand and wiping my lips.

We took Andrew’s number and he sped off, our aching legs slowly pedaling behind. Moments later, my phone vibrated to a slur of landmarks and directions. “Oh, and heads up…” warned the last text. “These guys are really Christian.”

An hour later, the sun cast long and fading shadows across George Bush Drive. It felt like any other college town—a vast campus sprawled out into apartment complexes and strip malls, enthusiastic twenty-somethings smiling through the streets. Turning down a side road, we scoured past rows of fraternity houses before finding our home for the evening.

As we leaned our bikes against a wall in the garage, smiling eyes cautiously scanned us from top to bottom. Our hosts pulled us into the living room with firm handshakes and barraged us with questions about our travels. Seeking hydration, Tim shuffled over to the refrigerator. “You guys have 4 gallons of milk,” he observed with an inquisitive smirk. “Yeah,” confirmed one of the residents. “People here don’t really like to share.”

They seemed nice enough. A bit awkward, rigidly crossing their arms over polo shirts and khakis, but we probably seemed like freaks, standing right in the middle of their home—probably stinking up the place too. Plopping my weathered body on a couch across from the plasma television, I quickly became fixated on a poster—a map of the Earth with the words “Pray for Asia” splayed across the top. A vast rectangle dimmed the area from North Africa to Japan—the 10/40 zone.

“What’s this zone thing all about?” I wondered aloud. “Oh,” replied one of the guys. “Those are the places that haven’t received the gospel yet. I think people there are mostly Muslim.”

I bit my tongue and tried to ignore the statement’s more serious problems. “Well… maybe from Pakistan west, but there isn’t too much Islam from India to Japan…”

“Except for Indonesia,” corrected Andrew. “But that’s not even in the box.”

“Looks like southern Spain made it in,” I remarked.

The irony went undetected. “Yeah,” the resident chuckled, looking right at me. “All of Europe should be in there, really.”

I’ll be blunt—I’m still bitter about my Christian upbringing. It’s one thing to be raised with life as an open question, quite another to have to arrive there yourself. To have a whole slew of answers to the most important problems thrust under you from birth, only to have them crumble to dust in adolescence.

The paradoxes bubbled and brewed in my young mind until it cracked wide open. A God so powerful and capable that he simply willed the world to be. And then he thought it might be nice to have some people running around on it—little imperfect versions of himself. And then he thought, “well, why not make things interesting.”

So he invented evil and programmed us to be tempted by it, cryptically scattering his rules to a select few and leaving the rest in the dark. A stern patriarch of a deity, diligently watching and waiting to mark us good or evil and treat us to an eternity of one of the other. It’s the perfect God for Texas, really. But unlike Texas, God gave up on catastrophic intervention by the end of The Old Testament.

We awoke to the steady sound of the heavens opening up and drenching the Earth—a brief reprise from the drought that nurtured wildfires across eastern Texas. One of the residents nonchalantly walked into the living room, where the three of us were sprawled out on couches. “We’re going to church in about 20 minutes,” he said, pouring a bowl of cereal and walking back into his room.

Sinking deep into complacency, we listened to the soothing rain, thankful for some temporary shelter. Andrew enthusiastically reached into his backpack. “I’m reading this Richard Dawkins book called The Ancestor’s Tale,” he said, smiling intently. “It’s about where people came from, all the way back to the beginning of evolution.”

I pointed at the wall behind him and snickered. “But what about that poster?” A sophisticated family tree stretched above the couch, branching from Adam and Eve all the way out to Exodus. Near the top was the bottleneck where God botched the job and sent a raging flood to exterminate his creation, save for my namesake, his family, and two of every animal.

Our fun was interrupted as one of the residents timidly walked in and buttoned down his church shirt. “Uh…” he muttered, “my roommate’s not comfortable with you guys being here while we’re out.” He quickly broke eye-contact and returned to the bathroom to continue grooming.

Andrew’s eyes focused sharply. “I can’t believe they’re making us leave!”

“Yeah…” I shrugged, “some people aren’t comfortable with strangers in their space…”

“Yeah fine,” he said impatiently. “But then what’s all this about?” His hands flailed up at the posters on the walls. “They’re literally kicking you out into the rain! And to go to church!”

The residents locked the doors and shuttled off to service as we consolidated our things in the garage. “I was into Christianity for a bit,” confessed Andrew, pacing in front of our bikes. “And what I didn’t like was that I was helping people out of obligation, not cause I wanted to.”

“And then you started reading Richard Dawkins,” said Tim.

“Well yeah,” he replied. “I realized none of it really makes any sense. I try a lot of different things to see what’s out there, and there really is a lot of great stuff in Christianity. Like ‘do unto others.’ I mean, that’s why I gave you that gatorade. I was thinkin’ how much I would have liked someone to give me gatorade when I was biking…” He patted his pockets with his hands. “Oh darn,” he cursed. “I left my keys and phone inside. I can’t call them, they’ll be pissed…” He paused to regroup before his face lit up with a mischievous grin. “Do you guys know anything about breaking into houses?”

We circled the perimeter, testing firmly sealed windows and barricaded doors before ending up back in the garage. On the verge of defeat, my gaze drifted up to the ceiling. “Wait… there’s an entrance to the attic right there.”

“Does that go into the house?” Andrew hesitantly pulled down the dusty ladder, disappearing into the darkness above as we waited in exile. Moments later, he triumphantly swung open the door, keys and wallet in hand. “That was so easy! Hold on, I gotta go up and put the panel back.”

He ascended again and before even a minute had passed, we heard anxious words swell up from inside. “Uh… there’s a situation in here, guys.”

We rushed into the dining room where Andrew was pacing back and forth on an injured leg, a jagged piece of drywall in his right hand. He picked up pieces and put them back in their place, only to watch them fall back to the carpet. “What if I just put a dead raccoon on the floor?” he pleaded through guilt-stricken eyes, looking at the crumbling halo in the ceiling above him. “It’ll look like it fell through! You guys know about roadkill, right?”

With no suitable dead animals in sight we quickly discounted the idea. “Oh man, they are going to be so pissed,” he murmured knowingly. “Especially Oli. And the worst thing is it’ll just linger and come out here and there. Wait… I could just say you guys did it!” His eyes momentarily lit up again, grasping for absolution. “Oh wait, then they’ll try to make you pay for it.”

“Wait a minute…” said Tim, furrowing his eyebrows and looking at the confused and frantic fallen angel. “Is this their fault for going to church, or ours for not going?”

The humor of the situation revealed itself, and Andrew accepted his fate. “Oh well,” he conceded. “I better get out of here and wait for the phone call.” As we walked toward the front door, a small vile on the kitchen counter caught Andrew’s eye. “Oh hey look at this!” he said, laughing. “They bought bible oil. Oil that leaked right out of a bible.” Cautiously taking a whiff of the cheap perfume, I took one last look around, smiled, and stepped into the rain.

All our frustrations with Christianity aside, we were given a warm place to stay for the night—many wouldn’t have been so kind. And we were even accessories to some seriously negligent structural havoc. Just the same, the hospitality seemed so…unnatural. As if people were following rules and not their hearts.

It felt a world away from Acadiana, the Cajun stronghold of Louisiana we rode through just a week before. Almost as soon as we rolled in, we were enthusiastically brought to visit grandparents and invited to gumbo parties and seafood boils. We spent a night on the bayou shooting guns, crabbing, eating sausage, and dancing. When we were on the side of the road picking prickly pears, a cop stopped just to let us know we could camp anywhere we like. And after we thanked a couple for feeding us shrimp they caught that morning, the man just shrugged and smiled. “Well that’s what we’re all here for!”

The French-redneck charm sucked us right in and quickly reminded us why we built these bicycles to begin with. The Cajuns, of French lineage, settled in present-day Nova Scotia. But when British Protestants claimed the land for their own, the devout Catholics refused to bow to their invaders and were forced into exile. Searching south for a new place to settle, they tightened their already fierce solidarity with one another. Even as the French language slips from their tongues into their history, they remain deeply rooted in their culture, thrilled to share their world with curious strangers.

Sitting in a cafe in College Park, we continued to watch the rain pour as our hosts worshiped in a nearby building, ignorant to the new skylight in their house. Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, Radical Face, and all the indie staples blew from the speakers, no different from any other hip little college coffee house. But bibles were everywhere. And that vacant Protestant smile.

“Texas A&M ranked 13th highest for students who pray on a regular basis,” said Tim, looking up from his laptop. “And 17th least friendly for LGBT people.”

A thin-mustached barista donning a familiar bike messenger chic approached our table gently. “Your brother told me you’re riding cross-country making films,” he said to me. “I’m camping out in backyards all semester to save on rent. You’re welcome to join us tonight if you’re still in town.”

Riding out that day would have been a wet ordeal, and he spoke through the honest tone of an offer with no strings attached. Just as we began to vent about the alienation we’d been feeling, he continued talking. “At three o’clock I’m helping with a potluck at my church, and I would love to take you guys…”

We didn’t go. Just miles away was a free meal and the warm, nonjudgmental company of the first Christian bohemians I’d ever met—seemingly the perfect opportunity to confront our demons. But unable to swallow our pride, we spent the day riding around town poking our heads into grocery store dumpsters. We found nothing.

As night fell, we rode to the backyard where the Christian campers were staying and set up. They returned from their potluck and told us their story, eagerly listening to ours. In their last year of college, they’d realized that so much of the material luxury they’d been surrounded with was actually holding them down, distancing them from their God and salvation. So they committed themselves to austerity, untraining the more destructive cycles of consumption that chain people to the material world, using their new-found freedom to spread the word of Jesus Christ.

I paused and let the words sink in. I’m always skeptical when I hear ‘spread the word of Jesus Christ.’ But what was Jesus if not God’s misunderstood, impoverished, hippie of a son? His entire life has been taken grossly out of context, but these guys standing before us seemed like the real deal, actually looking to that man as a role-model rather than as justification for their sins—little specks of humble compassion in an sea of institutionalized dogma.

We all woke up with the sun, rolling out of our tents and hammocks and meeting eye to eye before sharing breakfast. “It was refreshing to meet you guys,” I said. “I’ve had bad experience with Christianity, but you seem to be in a good place with it.”

“That’s too bad,” replied one of them. “A lot of times it comes off as elitist and judgmental. Even we do it sometimes. I just have to remember that this is about sharing the changes Jesus has made in my own life.”

“Here, take this,” said the other as we packed up our bikes. They handed us a hammock tarp, a fuel canister, and a bag of dehydrated food. I was hesitant to accept the gift, but their eyes were soft and firm, and it was clear that by helping us, they were somehow helping themselves as well.

We began our last day toward Austin inspired by Christians—disciples of Jesus and not of the Church. Rolling deep toward the vibrant bastion of Texas liberalism, the roads were edged with dark brown foliage, a sure sign that summer was finally ready to subside. Before we knew it, we’d be huddled over camp fires and cocooning ourselves in goose down to get through the bitter nights.

But getting closer, the trees revealed themselves as pines—evergreens burnt to a brown and brittle crisp by the wildfires that raged through the summer drought. The dryness had lasted too long for the Earth to endure, and violent flames danced indifferently across the landscape, charring countless layers of life to a quiet, black void.

Was God punishing us for our sins? Was the Earth fighting back? Or was it all just a part of the cycle? Standing in the ash, it didn’t seem to matter too much—such questions have little to offer one and a half million trees blazed clean and sixteen hundred homes scorched to their cold stone foundations.

But people came to help. Gospel-preaching Christians and secular social advocates. Country singers held benefits, government workers fought for aide, and college students organized. Help came from all corners, and in the absence of divine intervention, simple actions spoke much louder than the noisiest words.

So many of us have been burned by religion—but there is shared blood. The culture wars of the United States will continue to be waged, and we all have heroes and prophets who guide us through the darkest threads. Few of them had the chance to exist at the same time. But if Jesus, Martin Luther King, and Muhammad walked into the same room, I doubt we’d see much of a fight.