"Poplarville, Mississippi," as Onomatopoeic, Hospitable

Things were smooth. Off a one-day respite in New Orleans, a tune-up and two new tire tubes, I swore my air and energy levels would remain high. But after 2,000-plus miles on the road, both have begun to prove vulnerable.

Highway 10 out of Bogalusa, Louisiana: Pop. Sssss. Replace tube. Ride tentatively for 25 miles, keeping an eye on the back tire to make sure it retains air.

Poplarville, Mississippi: Pass a pickup truck. Pop. Ssss. Replace tube. Check tire. Find gaping hole in both the tire and the tube, the rubbery fibers of the tire fraying outward. Put back on bicycle anyway. Hope.

Begin to ride, trying to make another 20 miles before sundown. Ten feet later: Pop. Ssss. No more new tubes. Patch tire rim. Patch tube. Switch front and back tires. Put wheels back on bike. Mount. Hope.

Half a mile later: Quick leak. Air gone from back tire. Dismount. Sigh heavily. Resolve to stay.

When you and your options are exhausted, this is the routine, if you can call it that: Enter the closest populated establishment and ask those inside for help. Bad days end well when you find it. They get worse when you don't. This day ended well and then some.

The nearest place was a petite fast-food shop that peddles sweet tea to Pearl River Community College students. They go before they dine in the campus cafeteria, where they sit again, and consume again. "That's what we do," one named Orry said. "And not much else."

Indeed. However, tonight was special; the eve of Halloween, the student union was having a carnival. Perhaps I could camp behind the building, they suggested, and so we talked to the head man Stan and he agreed. I dined in the cafeteria. I showered in a dorm room. And I was treated like genuine celebrity. Never have I been so swarmed by people, never have I felt so undeservedly admired.

After all, I'm one of a host of people who ride bicycles from coast to coast. And Poplarville is a stop on a series of maps that many of them use -- I've seen several on this trip alone. I suppose none of them had been (un)lucky enough to find desperation and resulting welcome in "The Hospitality State."

And my, how the interest and the questions came. How old are you? You rode from where? You ain't lying? Show me your bike. What'd your parents say? So lemme get this straight, you just decided one day to ride your bike across the country? How you eat? How old are you again?You're crazy man. Like Forrest Gump on a bike.

You get the point.

Later, Brett from the newspaper is going to interview me; there will thenceforth be evidence that I came to Poplarville, Mississippi, and provided unusual entertainment for the bored "13th-graders" of PRCC. When I'm gone -- after they kindly drive me to New Orleans' French Quarter to experience a presumably wacky Halloween -- I will leave them to their dry county, their 11:30 p.m. curfew, their draconian dormitory policies and their town strip where only a Kangaroo gas station is open during evening hours.

Assuming my tires retain air.

I know not where they will next find entertainment, but I will say this: of whomever is offered their hospitality next, I am already jealous. This is the life.

Some People of Note

Adam

A Vermont native I met in an Austin hostel, Adam would have done Jack Kerouac proud, only Adam didn’t hitchhike across the country fueled by amphetamines and ice cream. He found sustenance in dumpsters, and when he got to San Francisco, he stayed a while, sleeping on the sidewalk.

He had since gotten some money for a reason I can’t remember. He had been using it to travel and eat more conventionally by the time he reached Austin. He flew, he took buses, he dined at bona fide restaurants.

But it seemed as though he preferred not to. Even with money enough to buy his own slice, he acted on the temptation to eat others’ table scraps at a 6th Street pizza joint when they had left. Even with a place to stay, he gladly would’ve settled on a concrete plot.

I was taken rather aback when he first divulged his dumpster-dining days, and I asked him why he chose to sift through garbage for grub, given his lacking necessity to do so. Very clearly, I remember his retort: “You mean you’ve never eaten from a dumpster?” No, Adam, I haven’t.

Jo

When I was in New Mexico, a few miles west of Texas, I met Jo Garrett, a 45-year-old disabled physical therapist from Fort Worth, at a state park where I’d pitched my tent. Together, we were not alone, but apart, we were alone for very different reasons: I, because I thought it would be interesting; she, because most of her friends and family were dead.

What’s worse is how they had died. Her husband in a car crash 20 years ago. Two friends by gunshot wound, one of those a suspected suicide (“I think he had AIDS,” Jo said). Another of AIDS itself. Another of tuberculosis. And other tragedies I can’t remember because I waited too long to record them. Why had such horrific deaths befallen those close to her? Did she carry with her a curse that would lead to my untimely death if I associated with her for too long? She had told me about someone she knew who died on a bicycle from a blow to the head by a truck’s rearview mirror.

Later, on the highway on our way to El Paso, Jo said, “I hate people.” Seems clear why. They were always dying on her.

Garry

I met Garry at the bottom of Emory Pass, an 8,200-foot climb in New Mexico. He was walking his bicycle up a steep grade. He looked back, saw me, and hastily remounted.

“Where you headed?” I asked once I caught up.

“Probably the same place you are, considering we have the same maps,” he observantly replied. “I bet I’m going farther than you, though. I’m going all the way to Florida.”

Smug bastard.

That was Garry’s thing. If he’s not going faster than you, he’s going farther. I reveled in knowing that my destination was the same.

“Actually, I’m going there too,” I said. What I didn’t know was how soon Garry intended to reach it. Already 15 days in by this point, I thought I was making pretty good time, but Garry had only been out eight days since San Diego. The difference was, he was getting up at 4 a.m. and riding about 110 miles every day. He was the tortoise to my hare, and it irked me. But I couldn’t ask why he was doing it. Can any of us really say?

That day, I reached my destination quickly. I traversed the pass and rode nearly 90 miles, arriving at camp with plenty of daylight. About two hours later, dusk settling, I looked out toward the road to see Garry in a reflective vest, still pedaling in his canvas Converse sneakers, inching wormlike ever toward the east coast. My guess is, he’s already there.

Celena

I met Celena of Alberta, Canada, in a laundromat in Wimberley, Texas, a fortuitous meeting given her usual avoidance of town and my usual hobo washings. She took that fatalistically (as is her wont), reason enough to invite me to dinner at her Guatemalan friend Ricardo’s rural home, where I soon found myself among a circle of people who were howling at the moon. That was Celena’s idea, and why wouldn’t the rest acquiesce? They were high.

Celena is beautiful in an organic kind of way. She is 27, a massage therapist and owner of a store full of things that are natural, herbal, holistic, et cetera. Her husband is 44. His name is Mark, but his “natural name” is something else – something that when translated from its tribal language into English means “protector.” Just as Celena assumed I would know what she meant when later she used the word “Chakra,” Mark assumed I’d know what he meant when he said “natural name.” He has hair to below his shoulders and a thick beard, and one winter he lived self-sufficiently on a mountaintop in the Pacific Northwest, his quarters surrounded on all sides by feet and feet of snow. Together he and Celena are building a Texan home. They have a wolf for a pet. His name is “Lenaweh” (sp?), which is Navajo for “arrow.”

“Have you found your essence yet?” Celena asked me on the drive back to camp. Again, I didn’t know what she meant, so I asked her. Also, my current essence was a bit tipsy on pumpkin ale. She offered an incomprehensible explanation. I told her I had not, but that I would try very hard for the remainder of the trip. “Once I find it,” I said, “I will let you know.”

I have no idea what my essence is. I have only about 12 days to find out. If you think you might know my essence or have any leads, please post your ideas as comments here.

David

I mentioned David and Athena on another posting as the Oregonian spouses who kindly picked me up amid a headwind and cannibalistic grasshoppers in Arizona to drive me a ways. I did not mention that David had once been in a wheelchair but had regained his legs (he said) by becoming a strict “raw foodist.”

The concept is really quite simple. He doesn’t eat any foods that aren’t raw. He spent a year living in the desert (first a tent, then a deep hole, once his tent was stolen) eating mesquite beans, cactus fruit, baby tumbleweeds (“the veal of raw foodism”), and the like. Every now and then, he would leave the desert and go into a nearby town where he was known as either the local crazy guy or, to some of the Hispanic population, the curandero, which is essentially a medicine man. In a way he could be seen as Adam’s antithesis – Adam prefers to feast on civilization’s refuse, David on the unused fruits of nature. I haven’t tried either. I doubt I will.

Requiem for a Trans-Texan Journey

I would ride 500 miles, and I would ride 500 more, just to be the man who didn't have to ride through Texas anymore.

On Wednesday, a newfound will to churn infected my legs despite headwind and threateningly overcast skies. I had escaped Texas, and it was good.

Tell someone familiar with its size that you are crossing Texas on a bicycle, and she will scoff, "It seems to take forever just driving the thing." She is right. It takes the average driver about two days.

Still, you begin optimistically. What other choice do you have, with 1,000 miles of one state ahead of you? With disciplined thought, you think, it won’t be so bad. Look at Texas as though it is not one state, but several. There are said to be five terrains of Texas. Whether you see all of them, whatever variations you observe will make Texas seem not like one monotonous chunk, but several areas that will be refreshingly new as you transgress.

And they will be, kind of. But you will always know you are in Texas.

Begin in the northwestern part, and follow the desert until it’s not so deserted, down to Del Rio and east from there. The scenery, as another cyclist tells you, changes dramatically, and seeing other people becomes more common. You are briefly excited. The tumbleweeds cease to tumble and the Davis mountains arise, and you are refreshed by all that seems new.





But you are still in Texas.

Follow the road east through the Hill Country, a terrain fraught with lush maple trees, rolling landscape and varied wildlife. What sorts of surprises might you find over the next hill? you will wonder.




Cruelly, disappointingly, the answer is always more Texas.

Farther east to Austin, which is considered by many conservative Texans to be the state’s Sodom and Gomorrah, a bastion of sin and abhorrent liberalism, you will feel excited about experiencing that which is un-Texan, and in a way, you will be sated.

But it’s still Texas.

Continue east through agricultural flatlands, through pine trees, alongside logging trucks, into swamplands and bayous, and there’s no way this could still be Texas, but it is, and you know it.

You know it because of the constancy of BBQ joints; of the Texas drawl or twang, depending on region; of tough jeans, flannel shirts, cowboy hats and boots; of big oil and big trucks and big cattle and big talk; of nighttime speed limits and desperately clever road signs. (One even played with typography: "LITTERIN IS UNLAWFUL," it read. Note also the absence of the "G" in the first word, to capture the Texas manner.)




Of shameless self-celebration and an over-inflated sense of pride. If pride were an energy source, the world could run on Texas’s outflow of it for millennia. You will meet some incredibly nice people, of all kinds, but you will know they are Texans.

"I’m Jean, and I’m from Houston, Texas," declared one woman I met, as though providing required information at a meet-and-greet. It was her usual style of introduction, I surmised. I did not offer my place of origin outright, as I found it to be excessive. Jean found it necessary.

Every establishment in Texas is the best of its kind. I had the privilege of eating the best Tex-Mex cuisine in Austin, and cheaply.

Outsiders can have a tough time fitting in. One night, I spent an evening with some Texans, trying to shed my Yankee moniker like a fishing net. At a café where I dined, the non-native Texan who owned it had posted a sign that read, "I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could." Was it the only way to ensure a steady local clientele?

If you are like me, you weren’t born in Texas, and you are here, but you’re getting the hell out.

The problem is, the more Texas you see, despite its constantly changing terrain, the more you realize it’s going to be a long time before you're free of it, and the more demoralizing it becomes.

Eventually, on highway 787, you pass by a small church whose gigantic digital sign asks you, "Where will you spend eternity?" Its purpose to exhort you to reform is not served, and that last word holds its place on the sign for an extra second or two, just to make sure you see it. Eternity. And as you ride by, the only answer you can think of is "Texas."

Then you cross the Sabine River, and you get out. To your left as you approach the two-lane bridge, you look back at Texas’s final reminder of its majesty, a thick stone Texas-shaped sign on which "Texas" is imprinted in bold letters.




You reach the other side, and there is a modest green sign that reads "Enter Beauregard Parish." No sign welcomes you to Louisiana.

You are left with the feeling of exit, but only a vague feeling of entry. You are still afflicted by Texas’s resonating vibe, and although you know you’ve left, you wonder, will it ever leave you?

A View from a Bike

Any cyclist can tell you that a motorist’s perception of the road is far different from a cyclist’s. This concept is usually most pronounced when a non-cyclist, asked to explain a certain terrain to a cyclist, describes a road notably different from that which the cyclist perceives when riding it. A road that provides a nice drive for a motorist could evoke effusive cursing from an even-mannered cyclist.

For instance, “flat,” to a motorist, could very well mean flat. But it could also mean rolling gently or ascending slightly. Of course, motorists need not interpret subtlety. Propelled by a slight foot depression, their vehicles barrel onward, allowing no time to regard passing surroundings. But in doing so, drivers not only risk missing roads’ topographical details.

One who pays close attention may discover many things: litter’s inability to degrade; the variegated colorations of urine discarded in plastic bottles; animal carcasses’ insistence on clinging to asphalt (and what road kill! snakes, birds of prey, javelina, coyotes, bobcats, a fish); one man’s refusal to keep his New Balance sneaker on his right foot, leaving it instead in the desert.

The mandate to observe is the joy of touring by bicycle. Apart from those exceptional riding days, when the wind has been at my back and I have pedaled with sustained focus and fervor, out of tune with all but the spinning of my wheels, I have traveled observantly.

I have seen life to excess: Texas maple trees, fresh for autumnal leaf change, appearing to shed their leaves as scads of butterflies flitter from their branches; bulls, protected by fence, jogging alongside me as I pass; even the automobiles seem to have their own vitality, speeding with fierce energy, forceful life.

But, as my touring pace has reminded me, they also bring death.

It’s easy to forget about death’s ever-possible imminence. I can think of few better reminders than the frequent roadside crucifixes that commemorate those killed while driving.




Adopt-a-Highway signs reiterate. The next two miles commemorate the untimely death of (insert name), they say. Killed in a drunken driving accident. Died by going too fast around a curve.

The constancy of such reminders has given me little to be afraid of besides traffic death. I expected so-called bad people would be the most worrisome on the road, based on the suggestions of others. “Carry a firearm,” some would say, or mace, or a good blade. No one’s to be trusted. To date, that has not been the case. If ever I have been afraid, it has been of being sideswiped by a semi, pulverized by a pickup, creamed by a car, or battered by a bus. It has taught me to adhere strictly to my line, a tightrope as far to the right as possible. And at times, it has been good people who have saved me from the road’s treachery.

Once I drive again, I doubt I will retain my cyclist’s perspective, and I will again lose touch with the lesson of mortality etched in the road. I may be more vulnerable as a cyclist, but at least I am more aware.

Whose Views?

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in the following quotations are the singular viewpoints of the individuals who expressed them. My recording them is not an attempt to characterize regions definitively, but simply to note various opinions I've encountered. It is my plan to make this a recurring post format.

"The city that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up."
-40-year-old Mainard/New Mexican, on Silver City, N.M.

"We used to kick sand at the camera crews that came into Laguna -- it's not like the show at all, it's just a chill surfing town, and now these tourists come in looking to see drunk 17-year-old girls act stupid."
-19-year-old SoCal surfer, on MTV's defilement of Laguna Beach

"Everyone else is idiots."
-Old man in cowboy hat, on Austin as Texas's last remaining democratic stronghold

"You know what the cyclists say? It's a touch of heaven."
-Park ranger correctly describing Texas's Davis Mountains, training grounds of Lance Armstrong

"If God were to give the world an enema, he'd give Amarillo, Texas, a long, hard look."
-Man at restaurant in La Mesilla, N.M.

"His wife didn't say she loved him the whole time they lived there."
-Same man, on Farmington, N.M.

A Fortnight in Photos

Today, Saturday, October 7, is the fourteenth day I've spent on the road. I've reached Silver City, New Mexico, which is by a longshot my favorite town thus far. Art galleries line the main drag, Bullard St., people are generally friendly, and even the RV Park in which I am camping seems a quaint, utopian outpost. And last night it rained all night, chilling the town to an authentic autumn cool. Today I'm using a day off to bask in the familiarity of overcast skies and rest before climbing up to 8,200 feet tomorrow.

I must make excuses before I post the all-too-few photos I've taken during the first fortnight. First, I am not a photographer, so instinct does not compel me to snap shots at every opportunity. Second, I find it difficult to convince myself to cease my hard-earned momentum to capture a scene when I am riding.

You will notice that of the people I have written about, there are no pictures. For that, I have no excuse except that it didn't occur to me to photograph them. As the trip progresses, I hope and expect to develop (pun intended) into a more photographically minded person. Until then, and without further ado, this dearth of images is what you get.

Day 1: Dipping the wheel in the Pacific at Santa Monica beach, sopping my right shoe for a wet beginning. An Iraq War veterans memorial set up on the beach emanated the quiet sound of Taps as I and my farewell party marched through a corridor of crosses toward my dire fate, the long road east.

As artillery's muffled boom echoed from a distance and military helicopters flew overhead at Camp Pendleton, a Marine base on the Southern California coast, I stopped to capture this image of barracks and a stationary tank.

This was one of two times during the lost-wallet day that I would pass this sign. I used both directions. This shot captures only a small section of the scenery, but the rest is the same.

From a bridge crossing the Colorado River, this is the closest shot I could get of the small blue sign in the right portion of the image, which welcomed me to Arizona, concluding my first state.

Behind me was a mirror image of this. Past a few miles of desert, the mountains loomed on either side for 25 miles, lining my path down a perfectly straight road to Aguila, Arizona. Signs on the road warn "Watch for Animals Next (x) Miles," and at night the mammals, birds and insects gather like vaqueros at an ranch town's tavern, producing a cacophany of howls, barks and chirps.

My tent-site companion at an RV Park in Superior, Arizona, pausing just long enough for a photo. Moments later he scurried away like moving tree bark.

There was something fishy about the tattooed man in orange who rode on my handlebars.

This historical marker 20 miles east of Safford, Arizona, reads:

"IN MEMORY OF TWO OF THE MANY PIONEERS WHO BROUGHT LAW, ORDER, AND SAFETY TO THE GILA VALLEY. LORENZO AND SETH WRIGHT WERE KILLED 1 MILE NORTH OF THIS SPOT BY INDIANS WHO HAD STOLEN 45 HORSES FROM EARLY SETTLERS. WHILE PURSUING THE INDIANS THEY WERE AMBUSHED DEC. 1, 1885. DEDICATED BY THE MT. GRAHAM AND ST. JOSEPH STAKES OF THE L.D.S. CHURCH, SEPT. 24, 1938."

Barely visible graffiti reads "bull shit." No date accompanies, but I estimate "recent."

Home.

Atop a long climb in the Gila National Forest. To clarify, it does not mean I'm halfway done.

From a different angle.

My first, and I hope last, black widow sighting.

Cannibalistic grasshopper, feasting on its own.

Trust Everyone

During the last two days, the caveat about trusting strangers has been proved meaningless.

Wednesday: A day of riding containing an ascent to nearly 6,000 feet, a flat tire and headwinds climaxes on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, where a cashier in Bylas, Arizona, advises me not to even think about pitching a tent on the side of the road, “not in this town.” Lightning and rain begin, and the wind picks up, blowing sight-obstructing sand into my eyes, one of which has misplaced its contact. I resolve to camp on a roadside despite the cashier’s warnings. Roger Evans sees me churning against the wind and pulls over in a green pickup truck, offering me a lift, which I take 25 miles to Safford, where he and his wife Pam feed me and put me up for the night. They're perhaps the most genuine people I’ve met on this trip.

Thursday: I ride east out of Safford, Arizona, en route to Silver City, New Mexico, which, though I don’t know it at the time, is 111 miles away. With a headwind this vicious, I’d never make it. Apart from pedaling, I busy myself with avoiding a booming population of large, leaping insects (grasshoppers?) that loiter on the highway’s shoulders. (I don’t know the species, but if you think you know insects, here are some behavioral clues that might help you determine: 1. Jumping as high as two or three feet to avoid imminent death by wheel, often landing on their backs. 2. Mating while walking, often into oncoming traffic. 3. Eating their dead.) As I weave in and out of the ubiquitous creatures, sometimes inadvertently crushing those with slow reaction times, tiny, unnoticeable thorns flat my wheel in two places. I find one hole and repair it. I ride two more miles, during which the wheel slowly deflates again. I search for the other hole, becoming increasingly dismayed as I fail to find it.

A small car with two bikes on the back pulls over in front of me, and a twentysomething guy hops out of the passenger side to offer assistance. He finds the hole, I patch it. He’s going to El Paso, an eventual stop on my itinerary. “Are you set on riding that bike all day?” he asks, “or do you want a ride to your next destination?” I say, “Right now I’m pretty set on not riding that bike.” We put the bike on the rack. He (David) and his wife, Athena, drive me to Lordsburg, where I am now, 45 miles southwest of Silver City, typing at a KOA (Kampground of America, for the uninformed). They’re perhaps the most genuine people I’ve met on this trip.

All strangers, all strangely comfortable. I’m either incredibly trusting and lucky or have, in nearly two weeks on the road, begun to develop a fairly accurate quick-judgment character gauge. I’ll assume the latter until I hitch a ride with a serial killer and am discovered weeks later being eaten by grasshoppers on the side of a little-trafficked road.

In Palo Verde, Calif., an honest man is a good man, even if he's a murderer.

"I’ll give it to you straight," began the advice of a whitebeard outside of one of the 236-person town’s two bars. "You’d be better off heading next door for lunch. A burger you’d get here for $7 is only $5 over there." He tipped his hat before he retreated inside. I went next door.

After a decidedly cheap meal, I returned to the shaded picnic table. The liveliest folks in Palo Verde spend their days chattering over beers, cigarettes and the steady din of Nascar engines, emerging from the bars' musty interiors on occasion to absorb some sunlight. It was the emergence of Coon Ass A’Dago (his nickname-sake comes from his Louisianan origin and his Italian heritage) and my subsequent usual trip description that prompted the most startling honesty.

"One piece of advice," he said, gazing fixedly through shaded glasses. "You can’t trust anyone these days. Not more than a few years ago, I would’ve come up behind you and slit your throat without thinking twice."

In my mind, I mounted my bike and fled. In fact, I stayed to listen more.

"When I was your age, I was behind bars," he said. "I done a lotta things I regret. I hurt a lotta people. I seen and done about anything you can think of.

"I’ve taken a life."

He had spent half of his 65 years incarcerated, he said, and he’d shackled up in some of the worst reputed prisons in the country.

When he got out for good, he went to Palo Verde, where for a while he resided in conflict with a man who was warden at a prison where he had been an inmate. They were neighbors, as every resident of Palo Verde is to every other resident.

"About a year after I moved here, I invited the warden to step outside at a Christmas party we were having," Coon Ass said. "When he followed me out, I said, 'I'm an ex-con. I ain't no inmate. We can either be friends or we can kill each other.' Then I extended my hand. He shook it.

"Last year, he come up to me in this bar, and he says, 'Coon Ass, you've been a good friend.'"

So goes his story of redemption after a life poorly spent in crime. His parents were dead by the time he was 13. He wasn't old enough to make good decisions, he said, so he made bad ones, and he thinks about them every day.

"I got out of the penitentiary," he said, "but I'll never be free."

Even so, Coon Ass said he knows he's been forgiven, and he figures if he prays every night and accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior, he'll make it to heaven.

It's the only way he can sleep at all.

A Valuable Lesson

Twenty miles back into the desert during the afternoon’s authoritarian heat last Thursday, too tired to swat flies from my face, I stopped at the Imperial Valley Sand Dunes ranger station to lay my head on some concrete. Minutes later, I reached into one of my bags for my cell phone, hoping to call someone for encouragement. The same pocket contains my wallet. My wallet wasn’t there.

Immediately, I knew I had left it outside of a 7/11 in Brawley, where I had stayed the previous night.

I cursed myself then, and I continued to feel angry and defeated when I turned back to retread my path, retrieve my wallet, and ride in the dark later that night for six miles to find a campground outside of Brawley. At that point, I had ridden more than 40 miles but gotten nowhere.

I asked a Hispanic man on the way where the campground was, and after he told me he said, "Keep your eyes open up there, eh? The crazies come out at night, man. A lotta illegals hide out in those ditches that would love to jack your shit." "Should I go back to Brawley?" I replied, expecting a no answer and then to be mugged. He hesitated for a minute. "Nah, man, just make
sure you stay on that side of the road." I didn’t get mugged.

As I write this post, I am in Arizona and have spent several days riding in the desert. I’ve kept pretty elite company there, and not by choice. Hardly anyone goes into the desert for any other reason than to get out of it. Those who live there are few, and they are out of their minds.

Sprint PCS (my service provider) has no reason to include a population that small in its coverage areas. For one thing, it wouldn’t make good business sense, and for another, people who live in the desert are there to be detached from civilization, anyway.

So when I discovered my wallet was missing, I was lucky to find a radio repair man in the ranger station who had a cell phone with excellent reception. He let me use it to call the 7/11.

The cashier explained on the phone that as I had stupidly ridden away having left my wallet on the sidewalk earlier that day, the Brawley sheriff, a 7/11 regular, had come in not more than a minute later and picked it up. He tried to track me down unsuccessfully.

When I got back to town, all I had to do was go to his office, knock on the door, and get it back.

"You got some kinda ID to prove this wallet is yours?" he said.

Not feeling particularly jocular, I replied, "You have no idea how much I appreciate this; that’s all I have to live for the next two months."

He glanced inside the wallet, confused. "Eleven dollars?"