Notes from The Road

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“Good morning, guys!” Dan, one of the organizers walked in and flipped on the lights. I groaned, rolling onto my stomach and piercing an internal organ or two on the edge of the old army cot. It was just the two of us in the room that night, passed out next to rows of pews packed with bibles and hymnals—the other guests and residents were in more permanent lodgings below. Dan handed us some furniture cleaner and a rag. It was time to scrub down the altar before breakfast.

We rolled into town the day before, shut down by 36 hours of gray skies and rain. Our days were averaging over forty miles and we were ahead of schedule, so we felt little guilt sitting down for a two hour diner breakfast, slurping sixty cent bottomless cups of caffeinated sludge and inhaling homemade biscuits drowning in a sea of sausage gravy.

Everyone seemed to know each other like family, and they quickly connected the loaded road bikes stacked outside to the two scrawny, dirty outsiders. An older man who cycled himself approached us to express admiration, and before long people were yelling from across the room.

“You don’t wanna camp in this weather,” said a heavyset blonde sitting with her family. “Y’all could stay at the church tonight on 4th street. They run a homeless shelter.” She wiped the butter off her baby’s face. “But you gotta go to service at seven.” A hot meal and a roof through the rain sounded great, but it didn’t really seem a viable option. These places, it seemed, weren’t built with people like us in mind.

But we are homeless, if you wanna be honest about it. A few days ago, I strode into a Wendy’s, unshaven and wearing a torn up old Army jacket, digging through garbage cans like a madman looking for paper. “Excuse me, sir!” I froze, flustered by the manager staring at me from behind the counter. “Oh,” I stammered. “We’re camping and just wanted to get some of your waste paper to start a fire with.” She gave me a soft, knowing grin. “Here, take this.” She handed me a packed paper bag. I guess I looked the part, at least enough to earn her sympathy. And a free bag of chili.

So we go through a lot of the motions, but we’re coming at it from a different angle here—hobos by choice. Digital hobos I guess, sleeping under bridges and eating out of dumpsters but pulling cell phones, notebook computers, lenses and microphones out of our sacks when we have something we want to say. We know we can go back to the luxuries of jobs and apartments and beds and cars if we ever want to, a security not afforded to the others at the shelter.

For them, homelessness represents failure—for us, freedom. Over dinner, one man would enthusiastically gush about an apartment he might be moving into and another about how he paid a barber at Wal Mart $5 to shave his head. Our stories were about the fresh rabbit we ate off the side of the road and how beautiful it is to sleep under the stars this time of year. We had been spoiled by lives of availability, and for us eating garbage and sleeping outside meant momentary release from the numbing shackles of affluence.

But the men around us have been broken down by a world they never learned to navigate, and the shelter happily took them in. But at a price, collected by a bittersweet matriarch who calls herself Big Mamma. “People come in here and they may be down but they’re not out,” she affirmed to us in her office, almost as if reading from a teleprompter. “I’ve seen every story walk through these doors. And if you wanna turn to God and build yourself back up, we have a place where it’s possible. But if you’re doing something wrong, if you come in here with alcohol…” she trailed off. “That’s when Big Mamma comes in?” I suggested, shrugging my shoulders. “No,” her eyes focused. “That’s when the police come by and haul you to jail. This is a victim,” she extended her pointer and middle finger down to the ground before flipping them upright, staring deep through my eyes. “V is for victory.”

So here they are, attending mandatory nightly church service in exchange for canned food and a firm cot in a heated holy building they chemically sterilize every day. They’ve given up on earthly salvation, and see solace only in the promise that something better awaits when they die. To finally rest easy in the security and permanence they could never quite achieve amid the imperfect chaos of Earth.

“I wonder if there’s baseball in heaven…” One of the men trailed off on the porch, eyes lost in possibility. “I bet they have the best teams,” chuckled an organizer. “But nobody could every win, that’d be the problem. What’s the score? Oh, it’s fifty nine bajillion to one! Oh! No! I mean it’s a tie. It’s a tie!”

They went on like this. And on and on and on. In heaven you can go fishing whenever you want. Where you can drink milkshakes all day long and never get a stomach ache—it was like listening to kids talk about what they wanted for Christmas. We weren’t looking to prepare for some fantasy-land after death though. We had a milkshake the day before and didn’t care much for baseball. We’re relishing in the imperfections in this world, trying to digest the heaven and hell on Earth before our clocks run out and our energies dissipate throughout the universe.

Wherever we go with these bikes, people ask us. Why are you doing this? Did you just wake up one day and decide to leave everything? Where do you live? Where are you going to live after the trip? Do you have a job? Every question fired at us is met with ambiguous answers and equivocated attitudes. We’re not trying to be difficult. These are just questions we don’t really have answers to ourselves.

People are inspired, confused, curious, and concerned, often all at once. We’ve been preparing for this thing for so long though, it’s life as usual at this point. We’d both been moving around so much for the last few years anyway, and even as teenagers in the Florida suburbs we would read books and watch movies about the lifestyle, fantasizing about one day living on the road ourselves. We weren’t the first and we won’t be the last. We can’t pretend we invented the lifestyle or birthed the ideals, we’re just interpreting the mythology for our own lives, standing on the shoulders of a long lineage of road warriors who laid down the asphalt before we were even born.

In a way, The United States was born on the road. Throughout much of the young country’s history, salvation in the uncertain was exactly the appeal for Europeans looking to uproot themselves and plant seeds in fresh soil. The New World was an open road leading far past the horizon, although paved over those who had lived here for thousands of years.

But as the immigrant country developed at break-neck speed, blank spaces on the map were filled in, unclaimed land became owned, and the American Dream slowly slipped into the realm of myth. Vague but powerful notions of freedom and independence lost their edge, and the Dream became less about courageous discovery and more about comfortable security. It seemed The New Deal put the last nail in the coffin after World War II, when the mass suburbanization of America began. A dream once defined by opportunity in the unexplored came to instead be symbolized by the predictable sterility of the white picket fence.

But cultural DNA isn’t so easily recoded, and droves of the country’s population rejected the new America. Feeling the rumble in the ground, the the Beat Generation sent out massive ripples in the ’50s from New York and San Francisco, helping lay down the conceptual framework for the cultural upheaval that would rattle the bones of the western world just a decade later. Put crudely, the beats reinvented the dream for a country already explored and conquered. Map already filled in? Well then just throw it away and draw up a new one.

Kerouac and his crew made The Road a proper noun, worthy of capitalization just like any city or country and a respectable place to call home. So being homeless became stylish, so long as it was done with a sense of purpose and poetry. They gave us a new way to think about freedom, a mythology that generations of youth have clung to, hoping to find in movement escape from the dull, the stagnant, the mundane. Living life as a rough draft, free from revision. Always changing, always being reborn.

People across the world have since looked to Beat writers for their uniquely inspiring interpretation of The American Dream. In German-speaking countries, they read “Unterwegs.” The practical German mind just couldn’t resist this unfortunate translation of Kerouac’s Seminole piece. Meaning “Underway,” it completely misses the point of “On The Road.” The Road isn’t about passing between two points, as a period of transition or a time of waiting, but about finding meaning in the moment itself, life in the movement, and home in the journey.

And it’s a good thing we were so naively romantic about the whole thing; the first day was brutal. All the literature and film in the world can’t prepare you for climbing a mountain on an old bike in the cold, hauling camping equipment, enough food to last a week, and all the bells and whistles we needed to document the thing. But with each day, we grew a bit stronger and our bikes got a bit lighter as we munched away at the dumpstered food, our bodies converting garbage into bicycle fuel. We dealt with the cold, and the whiskey helped us sleep through the bitter nights.

To all those who called us crazy and those thinking it right now, we didn’t plan on leaving in November. We envisioned starting in early Summer, sweating through t-shirts and swimming in brisk mountain streams. But our work outpaced us, and Asheville demanded much more energy than either of us expected. As luck would have it though, Winter offers all kinds of perks that Summer does not.

Finding a camping spot and privacy wasn’t hard; even the most avid hikers prefer to be indoors at night this time of year. And it’s easier to get food—the season turns the world into your meat-locker. Animals that die on the side of the road remain fresh for days. The same goes for food waste. Restaurants cook more than they sell, and at the end of the day, some place the leftovers in the giant metal refrigerator out back, colloquially known as a “dumpster.” This goes for food that grocery stores throw out as well. Nothing can be more disgusting than a food dumpster in the heat of the Summer. In the Winter though, nature provides all the refrigeration needed to discourage maggots and bacteria.

The crueler side of The Road quickly catches up to you though, and at some point all that idealistic jibber jabber I just rambled on about for two pages has to contend with reality. Like when an angry pickup truck’s blaring horn blows you off the shoulder. Or when you wake up with numb feet and need to sit on the transformer outside a closed mountain inn for an hour. Or when the ‘beautiful vintage red fork’ you used to build your recycled bike turns out to be a cheaply welded antique and collapses under the weight of your own reckless ambition, sending you and your gear to the side of The Road while indifferent cars whiz past.

It was only three days into the journey, and already we needed to be bailed out—but maybe we needed an ego check anyway. Luckily a couple of friends from The Montana House were coming out to camp with us that night and after a local bike shop did all they could to track down a fork that would fit my frame, we hesitantly ended up back in Asheville. It seemed like admitting defeat in a way, and so early in the journey.

But it was the most reasonable solution, and wouldn’t being stubborn and inflexible in our principles be much worse than accepting help from the intimate network of friends we built on the first leg of the journey? After all, this trip is about building sustaining communities, and now that we finally had one in Asheville, it only made sense to fall back on it when we were in trouble. “Just come back here and take care of it,” said Rob on the phone. “Unless you wanna be whiny little bitches about it.”

We ended up back at The Montana House that night, with the roadkill rabbit and fox pelts we skinned out on the parkway as gifts for the people who showed us the ropes. The rabbit was our first attempt and didn’t go so well. I punctured the gut, getting feces and other questionable fluids everywhere, and some hunters we came across at our camp site even cut off and stole the tail while we weren’t looking. So we just had part of the back, but Rob enthusiastically stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet. “Oh, I’m so proud of you boys!” he squealed smugly. “I feel like a mother putting up her kid’s report card.”

We had a day to fix my bike up, making sure the parts were strong enough this time to endure the punishment of The Road. Rob gave me a fork from his old Raleigh, and it fit my Peugeot frame after Matty and I extended the threading and put in a few spacers at The Recyclery. We also picked up some down sleeping bags and grabbed our boots from our sister and brother-in-law’s apartment—somehow we hadn’t fully appreciated what it meant to be starting in November.

Back on The Road, we met more difficulties. One of Tim’s gear change levers broke, and the next day we got separated from each other after reckless miscommunication. Each time The Road tested us though, it offered an elegant solution. A couple who owned a bike shop in Bryson City eagerly helped us fix Tim’s part, not even charging for labor even though the guy had to drive to his house to dig up an old road bike lever. After getting separated, a farmer from Asheville hauled me, my bike, and my gear to where Tim was. It was my first successful hitchhiking experience, and he even went about twenty miles out of his way to get us back together, just because he was so inspired by what we were trying to do.

It was a rough start, a whirlwind of a first week full of progress and setbacks. The mountains, after all, are a place of extremes. The peaks are higher and the valleys lower, but when we hit the foothills in East Tennessee, it all stretched out into a soft, gentle roll, where a whole day would pass while we were just looking forward at that rising and falling horizon. Movement itself became our routine, life our job, and we started to measure distance in days, feeling the Earth move up and down, breathing with us as we carved our wheels across her skin.

As we rode further west, everything changed, the inspiring drama of the mountains replaced by an eerie stillness. Even the sky, sunny and blue in the Appalachians, became encroached in darkness for days, periodically dripping moisture down but barely enough to call rain. Business owners and workers were less friendly and more skeptical, and the highway was littered with broken homes, failed businesses, and signs reminding us of who’s in charge out here. “Vote for Jesus,” one pleaded. “You’ve tried everything else!” We were clearly on our way out of Appalachia, now traversing a quiet, steady stream of hills slowly pulsing with the weakened life-force of a culture in decline.

But there are always profound exceptions to the rule. We were camping on a lake one evening and a pickup truck rolled up, a married couple timidly introducing themselves. “To be honest,” the man said to me through a neatly trimmed goatee, “we were wonderin’… should we or shouldn’t we? We saw y’all riding your bikes back in Sweetwater and then again on the highway. And now here you are right by our house. We were wonderin’ how you even knew about this place. Looks like y’all could use some help… we don’t help people out a lot. It’s true, we want to but we don’t. We figured this would be a good chance. My wife’s makin’ a meal tonight, and we’d love to bring y’all down a plate. And I’ll bring some firewood too. We usually sell it but I’ll give it to y’all. It’s pretty wet out here. And if it was to get really bad, our house is right up the hill and we got a big couch in the living room.”

Southern hospitality at its finest. They stuck around and we talked, exchanging stories and laughter, and they brought their children down to meet us. This whole journey is really renewing our faith in humanity. Having to rely on the kindness of strangers on a daily basis is a humbling experience, and after meeting enough people so eager to help out, it’s hard to stay cynical for too long.

It can all be addictive. The assurance that tomorrow you’ll wake up in a new place, leaving everything from the day behind—both good and bad—is a powerful drug. The Road is more than just paved earth. It’s life unedited. And it’s still very much alive in modern America. Rather than a tangible unknown though, it exists as the underdiscovered corners of our own beings. The concealed insecurities and hidden prejudices that weigh us all down, keeping us from becoming what we can. It’s the promise that even as adults we’re capable of climbing outside of our comfort zone, severing our umbilical chord, and giving birth to a more beautiful version of ourselves.

Life becomes a long and rambling run-on sentence. Forever in motion and zig-zagging past the pitfalls, laying down commas just long enough to gasp for air and then pivoting left or right or bursting back forward and not looking back, finding purity in the process, always peeking just around the next corner, slicing in hyphens to interrupt yourself—no reason, no point, no filed down edges to rest against until the more refined side of you can’t keep up with the wandering beast that you become, dressed in your own drunken ambition and fiending after freedom from place, from time, from the jaded, stagnant, comfortable creature you’ve seen yourself become in the past, so you run until it’s just you dancing with the chaos you suppose you came from—but the mind is quick and it soon constructs yet another veil to make the beauty of chaos seem once again predictable, ordinary, mundane, so you keep moving, dropping down a period only after utter, absolute, and unavoidable… exhaustion.

And then you get right back up and start all over again.

Below are a couple slideshows from the first leg of our trip, from North Carolina to a bit outside Nashville, Tennessee.

Click the image to move through the slideshow.