Week 30 - Osceola NF to North Myrtle Beach

Friday night was difficult. I felt achy and sensitive to the bright moonlight, the smell of bug spray drifting on the wind, and the sound of a generator running through the night. I got up to pee just before dawn and saw a fire over at PP's campsite, so I decided I might as well get up. I went over and sat by the fire swatting mosquitoes and listening to stories: piglets from the family hog farm sitting in rocking chairs and watching TV with his sisters, a work crew tossing stunned horseflies up to be caught in midair by dragonflies, riding a go-cart at 68 miles per hour, putting a van in neutral and killing the engine so his buddy could change out the spark plugs in the center-mounted engine as they rolled down the mountain. PP sang me the latest verse he'd written for his epic song "Hillbilly Holiday", which went something like "Pack like a bicyclist, camp like a motorcyclist, drive like a trucker, and then you'll be free". He said after 20-some years the song might be approaching the length of a book, and I said his stories would make a hell of a memoir. "Yeah I could get me a ghostwriter," he said, and I immediately volunteered if we should cross paths again, or if JT could send me recordings to work from. I regretting not recording his stories when I had the change, and resolved to get a recording device, like William Least Heat-Moon used for Blue Highways. Sure, I could use my phone but somehow a little voice recorder seems less obtrusive. PP and JT were heading for Idaho, he via Tennessee and she via Missouri, so perhaps we'll be able to meet again in that area. The sun rose, I listened to a few more stories, packed my camp, said my goodbyes, and hit the road around 9:30.

I savored the last of the Florida roads: the fragrant air wafting from the pine barrens and the damp air emanating from swamps of emerald shade. I stopped for lunch in Jesup, Georgia, at a little Japanese place called Oishi that had a good feel about it. Walking in, the decor was surprisingly tasteful. The chef was in the back and what I assume were his two daughters were working the front. At first I was the only customer, but soon a couple came in, then a good ole boy who was clearly a regular dropped off a couple beers for the chef at the front before sitting down. "I'll take that Black Samurai," he said, "and one of his Kirins. Then maybe I'll get some of those noodles I like." Two local cops came in and sat down, and the good ole boy, on his way to the bathroom, figured out that one of them had helped his elderly mother at one point. My food came out, and maybe it was my week of living on canned beans and such, but it was incredibly delicious. The green tea wasn't a bag but loose leaves in an infuser, and served with a lovely ceramic mug. I basked in the good vibes of the place and the buzz from the dense nutrients of my meal. The good ole boy paid for the cops' meal and determined that the noodles he liked were soba. I asked him what a place like this was doing in a town like Jesup, and he said he had no idea but he was mighty grateful. After finishing the second brewing of the tea, I paid, complemented the chef, and got back on the road.

Punkin was definitely starting to act funny. The most noticeable symptom was that whenever I slowed down quickly, like at a traffic light, the engine would backfire a bit like an out-of-tune Harley. I wondered if I'd made the mix too rich, so I stopped at a gas station, adjusted the carb to be leaner, tightened the chain, and checked the oil. The backfiring seemed slightly better but still noticeable. It wasn't until I got to the edge of the ACE Basin in South Carolina and stopped to check out a nice-looking motel I had thought of staying at that I figured out the problem. I had taken my earplugs out to call the motel owners, and when I started the engine again I could hear that it was making an awful, strident noise. Looking for the cause, I noticed that both nuts holding the exhaust onto the engine had fallen off, and while it was still being held in place by the rear mounting screws, there was a small leak which was bypassing the muffler and making a racket. I immediately shifted my goal to getting to the nearest auto parts store, about 12 miles north on the outskirts of Charleston. The first one I stopped at didn't have what I needed, and when I got to the second one I turned a bit early and wound up in the parking lot of a little restaurant called Harvest Moon. The store had the right parts and I hurried to remove all my luggage, take off the exhaust, and remount it in the last of the fading light. I put three nuts on each stud, jamming them hard against each other to prevent a repeat of the problem. When I got everything back together it was getting dark, and the engine was purring again.

Since I'd already parked at the restaurant, and it smelled good, and I was hungry, I decided to go ahead and get dinner there. It was a southern place and I got another unexpectedly delicious meal, just a vegetable plate with a cornbread muffin, but everything was clearly made with love, skill, and good ingredients, and everyone was friendly. Two teenage boys that were working there went out to look at my bike and we geeked out about old motorcycles. One took a picture for his sister who's also a vintage Honda fan. When I finished, it was fully dark except for the moon, and I had no clue where I was going to stay. I set my sights on a cheap Motel 6 further into Charleston, since that would take me toward my destination. But when I got there and tried to check in, they said they'd just sold out, and that apparently something was going on that night because all the places nearby were booked as well. Feeling the scarcity mindset, I jumped on my phone and booked the first available place I could find, up in North Charleston, even further along my route.

When I got there and went into the lobby, the guy at the desk was on the phone, and I noticed that he was behind a thick glass partition with a stainless steel tray to pass documents in and out. Oh, I thought to myself, they're taking the pandemic really seriously! Then it started to dawn on me that the glass was bulletproof... viruses were not the most relevant danger here. This impression was confirmed as I tried to go up the outdoor stairwell to my room, and had to wait for a drug deal to finish before I could make it past. There was a crowd of people around the stairwell, and a guy said, "No doing drugs on the stairs now, go somewhere else." The stale air in my room had a strange chemical smell with a hint of napthalene, the plastic floor was slippery with grease and smelled like dirty socks, there were holes punched in the wall, and the shower dripped constantly. Out front where I'd parked was a table with people around it playing cards and talking. One of them, named B, an older man with a squint, came over and asked if I was military or had ever been military. When I told him no, he said that was good, the government would chew you up and spit you out, and launched into a long story about how the VA had botched his cataract surgery and ruined the vision in one eye, which caused him to lose his trucker's license. He advised me to lock Punkin to something, so I locked the back wheel to the fence around the dumpster. Another guy at the table spoke up and said I'd better lock it to one of the pillars. So I tried to, but the chain wasn't long enough. He introduced himself as J and said he worked maintenance for the hotel, and I could park Punkin in his room for the night, outside it was likely to get stripped. "They'll take off anything they can," he said, and seeing the chaos going on all around, I couldn't argue. After we'd moved the bike inside, they invited me to sit at their table and hang out. Even though it was now 9:30 and I was pretty tired from riding, they seemed like interesting people so I agreed.

Along with B, the Vietnam vet, and J the maintenance man (nicknamed Gator), I met J's sweet little dog Harley, a large and silent man named W who also lived and worked at the hotel, and W's mom L and girlfriend K. B was crashing in J's room while he waited for his RV to be fixed. J himself had only been there for two weeks, before which he'd been homeless for a while after losing everything to medical debt, and got addicted to meth as a mental escape from the stress of homelessness. He was clean now, and had even successfully resisted a relapse after finding $400 worth of crystal while cleaning out one of the rooms. On the balcony across the way, a woman in her underwear stood in an odd pose, maybe it was advertising. Another woman braided someone's hair while having a shouting fight with a young man. I heard a window get smashed and wondered out loud if it might be mine. "Nah," J said, "you're two doors down from O, he's a big dealer, he won't let no shit go down up there." Things were actually relatively quiet right then, they told me. Sometimes it would suddenly get really crazy: screaming, gunshots, the parking lot filling sometimes with gangsters, sometimes with the whole North Charleston Police Department. "People leave me alone though," J said, "I told them you can hurt me or you can kill me, but you should probably pick option two. I'm not afraid to die, I died a long time ago, now I started living for real."

K was calling the phone company to help J transfer service to a new phone, and J started chatting with the guy on the other end. "I hear chickens in the background, you working from home?" The agent said he was. "Where's home?" The agent said the Phillipines. "Are those chickens I hear in the background?" The agent said yes and apologized. "Nah dude, don't apologize, that's cool as shit. I'm from the country too. That's cool you can stay home and work in your boxers." The phone transfer didn't work, but I savored this surreal globe-spanning dialog as midnight approached. A 22 year old Gujarati kid from Ahmedabad came over to bum a cigarette. "You eat Subway again?" J said. "You're gonna turn into one of them sandwiches." We talked about music, and B joked that with self-driving cars, you could now write a country song where not only does a guy lose his wife and dog, but his truck leaves him too. We talked about religion and spirituality and got into some deep questions surprisingly quickly. I floated the "God is change" idea from Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. We agreed that it was best to face whatever life was dealing out, however uncomfortable. When I finally got into bed it was almost 1:00 in the morning, and the noise outside hadn't died down much. I reflected on the trajectory of the day: I'd ridden nearly 300 miles from an intensely rural world to an intensely urban one, along the way fixing a major mechanical issue, eating two fantastic meals, and meeting some very sweet people in the midst of what seemed like such a hardboiled wasteland. And squalid as this place was, I was surprised not to feel the kind of forlorn lonesome feelings I've had in similar situations in the past. Maybe it was because I had new friends nearby, or maybe something in me was changing. Tired as I was, it took some time to get to sleep.

I woke up at 5:30 on Sunday morning and packed quickly. B was still sleeping on his cot, but J came to the door in boxers and T-shirt and together we maneuvered Punkin outside. I thanked him again, loaded up, and rode away, relieved to have avoided any interactions with organized crime or the law. It was quiet in the predawn darkness, and a fresh breeze blew off the water. A man on a bicycle silently crossed the beam of my headlight, carrying a small bundle of long sword-shaped leaves under one arm. I fought the buffeting wind across a big bridge and rode north on 17. When I saw a brown sign pointing to the water, I turned right. Out on the sound, surrounded by quiet and gray fog and water plants, I breathed the cool clean wind until there was no trace left of the fetid air of that hotel room. The sun was rising, a fisherman slipped his kayak silently out through the reeds, and a solitary goose paddled by. The aluminum signs were riddled with bullet holes and someone had put a love padlock through one of them. Refreshed, I rode up through Francis Marion National Forest and passed the Santee Coastal Reserve again. I'd originally planned to camp there for another week, but some family plans and an approaching cold front made me decide to spend the week back in North Myrtle Beach instead. I stopped in Georgetown for breakfast and hot tea, watching sailboats and listening to the seagulls. Afterwards I needed a rest before I hit the road, so I headed over to East Bay Park and did some reading down by the water. I struck up a conversation with an elderly man who was picking up litter and sorting through the trashcans, covering the fluctuating market value of aluminum, the minimum wage, climate change and its attendant flooding, local history, and the origin of the nearby metal sculpture of a large shrimp with a bellyful of trash and a gut-punched facial expression. The sculpture was intended to deter littering but in his view it hadn't been very effective.

I got back on the road and made one more stop to buy some gear, because at some point on Saturday's epic journey I'd lost a bundle containing my rain pants, a ratty old fleece, a jacket, and a vest. Some of these things had been due for replacement anyway, so it wasn't a huge tragedy. I stopped at the Orvis store in the Market Common development of Myrtle Beach, one of those mixed-use developments that attempts to look like a real downtown but fails by being too perfectly planned. Like the day before, this journey traversed another contrast: from poor-space to rich-space. I got a warm jacket and vest (on sale because of it being spring), and headed for the M-S household in North Myrtle Beach. I rolled the pieces of carpet back out, set up my tent, and slipped back into family life. A refreshing swim in the pond with the two younger boys washed away the road grime, and sitting on the sunny deck left me warm and dry. The M-S family was having their weekly dinner with the grandparents, so I got some Chinese takeout and took it down toward the beach. I was within sight of the ocean when it became clear that a thunderstorm was rolling in, so I ducked under the awning of a closed restaurant and ate my dinner while watching the sky change and the rain come down. When the front had passed, I walked home perfectly dry despite not having packed a raincoat.

After such an action-packed weekend, it was good to have a restful week of napping, eating lots of fruits and veggies, swimming in the pond, and soaking up the sun. There were also lots of great conversations about relationship dynamics, how we find meaning in life, how to walk the middle path between overwork and underwork, Catholic mysticism and sacrifice, the origin of the soul in deep evolutionary time, the likelihood of the singularity, and much more. One morning EM, age six, showed his devotion to Meher Baba by being silent for intervals of five, then ten, then twenty minutes. When his dad and brothers tried to get him to break his silence, he responded with a cherubic smile. Unfortunately for the peace of the household, subsequent attempts to get him to repeat his feat did not succeed. On Friday, LS took me back to the Meher Spiritual Center and we walked around the house where Meher Baba had stayed, which was built in the 1950s from a design which Life Magazine had said was the perfect house. We sat on a bench looking overlooking the pond through sinuous pines, and talked about reincarnation, Baba's encounters with God-drunk masts, and LS's memories of growing up in and around the Center. It was a beautiful fresh sunny spring day to appreciate the landscape, and shifted my mind to spiritual matters. Meher Baba wrote that "true mysticism ... is so practical that it can be lived every moment of life and can be expressed in every-day duties; and its connection with experience is so deep that, in one sense, it is the final understanding of all experience." I feel like this is connected with the essence I've been looking for in Walt Whitman's poetry: the ordinary made luminous by paying attention closely and clearly.

Things I Learned

• PP told me it's very hard to find a hotel that will take cash anymore. His theory was that they assume you'll trash the room and leave and they won't be able to bill you for it, but to me that seems like a perfect use case for insurance. The cynical explanation is that it's an easy way to discriminate against the unbanked, who are actually not such a small group; there are tens of millions of them in the US alone.
• When staying at a multistory motel with a two-wheeled vehicle, it would be smart to request a room on the ground floor.
• When thunderclouds are high enough and there are few obstructions, you can actually match the shapes on the weather radar to the clouds in the sky, like a moving map.
• Black squirrels are actually just a variant of "normal" squirrels, and apparently the gene was passed from fox squirrels to gray squirrels via interbreeding. I saw some black fox squirrels with white noses on a golf course in North Myrtle Beach, and with their hefty build and unfamiliar coloration it took me some time to even figure out what kind of mammal they were.
• Hail forms when there's an updraft in the middle of a thundercloud, which causes droplets to freeze and pick up shells of ice until they become too heavy for the updraft to lift, at which point they start to drop, pick up even more ice on the way down, and fall as hailstones.

Wonderful Things

• Riding down a boring highway and suddenly passing into a shady tunnel of ancient live oaks.
• Crossing a bridge before dawn, sodium vapor lights voluminous in the fog against a steel blue sky.
• Snuggling down into a warm sleeping bag on a cold night.
• The smell of confederate jasmine.