we shared the side of the road

When you live on the side of the road, you see all the shit people throw out of their cars. There are water bottles, soda bottles, piss bottles, empty cigarette packs, wadded-up napkins, plastic bags, tampon applicators, splintered plastic cups, pulverized Styrofoam, a hundred bajillion cigarette butts, beer cans, plastic liquor bottles for brands I’d never heard of (Sobieski? Rebel Yell?), and wrappers for every kind of processed food imaginable. The unofficial sponsor of roadside litter is indisputably fast food restaurants.

What truer advertisement than a greasy McDonald’s bag full of trash on the side of the road?

Sometimes there were mysteries: a single shoe, a vacuum cleaner, a white teddy bear with a red bow tie.

And then, of course, there was the roadkill. Nothing reminds you of the fragility of life — there on the side of the road, as you pedal your bicycle while two-ton death machines shoot past you at 45 miles per hour — than the corpses of those who weren’t so lucky.

The Cherokee would pray for forgiveness after killing an animal. Deer were a staple of their diet, and every part of the animal was a resource: hides for clothing and drum heads, bones for weapons, hooves for glue.

Today, we leave them on the side of the road to decay.

I saw a fawn that looked like it was sleeping. It must have been hit, I realized, by one of the cars that had just passed me.

Another time I heard a far-off buzz like radio static and smelled something like shit and garbage water and rotten food. As I got closer, the picture came into focus: a fog of flies settled over the bloated, putrid corpse of a deer. I retched and tried to hold my breath as I passed. Have you ever tried to hold your breath while pedaling a 70-pound touring bike?

There was a completely desiccated deer, leather stretched tight over bared teeth. And the one that had been cleaved clean in two. I saw the back half first; the front was easily 100 feet down the road. Her eyes were open.

There were raccoons and possums that died snarling, and frogs flat as chewing gum, and turkey vultures gathered around the rotting corpse of a cat; they floated indignantly into the air at my approach. I saw something pulverized beyond recognition, like vomit splattered across the road.

I saw fretful sparrow hopping around the motionless body of its partner, urgently chirping as if to say, “Wake up, please, oh please wake up.”

The saddest to me were turtles, their shells shattered like ceramic bowls of stew dropped on a stone floor. It’s not fair, I thought, glaring at a car that passed me with barely two feet of clearance. They can’t help that they’re small and slow.

the storm

In my dream, there were birds flapping against my face. I swatted back at them, but they wouldn’t quit. In the background, the roar of a gas station hand dryer.

My body came to life before my brain caught up. I swiped at the air and blinked hard and saw wings and yellow nylon pummeling my face. ??? was as close as my brain could come to a coherent thought.

The birds faded from view, my brain organized itself into some semblance of consciousness, and I came to the realization that my tent had collapsed. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was moving — shuddering and wriggling like a cat trying to escape a hug.

I grabbed hold of the wall and held it still enough to peer through the bug netting, and that’s when the pieces clicked into place: A massive cloudbank was charging over the lake, and the trees were bowed over in the roaring wind. I scrambled out of my tent with one blind thought: RAINFLY.

The air was chaotic and charged, whipping my dress around my legs, twigs and rocks biting into my bare feet. It felt like riding in a car on the interstate with all the windows down. Panicked, still a quarter-asleep, I tried to wrestle my rainfly into place, but the wind kept tearing it out of my hands and flattening my tent. With a lot of cursing, I managed to secure the fly, replace the stakes that got ripped out, and then dive back inside — more to support the structure than to take shelter.

But then a thought came to mind: Is it safe to be right next to a lake in a lightning storm?

Google’s response was, “haha no.”

I shot out of my tent like it was on fire and crashed through the bushes toward… I have no idea where. I was barefoot; I wasn’t even wearing a bra. And then, finally, my logical brain woke up enough to take the steering wheel. 

“What are you doing,” she said flatly. “Girl, you have a bicycle, remember?”

“Oh, dope.”

So I put on my shoes, dragged some driftwood and rocks over the top of my tent and yelled, “GOOD LUCK, TENT!” over the shrieking wind, and then unlocked Lucky and chased my headlight into the wild night. I headed for a stand of trees — maybe I could hunker in there, wait out the worst of it, and then go back for my tent once it was over.

And then I saw it: Shelter! Salvation!

An outhouse! 

I careened over and tried the door — it was open! — and turned on the light. The floor was concrete but clean. No spiders, no bugs, and the toilet even had a lid. As far as outhouses go, this was a palace. I gave a cheer of victory, leaned Lucky against the wall, put down the lid and had a seat.

After a moment, I thought, “Sleeping pad’d be pretty nice right about now.”

And so I rode like a madwoman back into the wild, windy night, rolled tent, pad, and sleeping bag together into a big sloppy burrito that I stuffed into a pannier, and then tore back just as fast as I could, cackling and breathless with the exhilaration of it all.

As soon as I set up my sleeping arrangement, the storm hit.

You know how you count the seconds between the thunder and the lightning, and that tells you how far away the lightning is? There was no counting on that night; they were linked like zipper teeth. And me cheering from my bed on the outhouse floor. 

Before this trip, I probably couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I’d be grateful — profoundly so — to sleep in an outhouse. But that night, I was giddy. There’s a special kind of relief that comes from knowing you’ve hit bottom. I mean, this was undoubtedly the worst place I was going to sleep all trip. And if I was this happy to be in the worst place… I could handle anything that might come my way.

In a world underwater, I had found an air bubble. A safe, dry place to sleep.

leaving chicago

I cried openly on a boulder on the side of a crowded bike path while eating two cinnamon-chip scones.

As you can imagine, absolutely no one acknowledged me. People in the city are good at pretending they don’t see a giant woman with tears rolling out from her sunglasses eating two cinnamon-chip scones. Maybe they assumed I knew what I was doing, that I had this situation under control.  

Or maybe I was a ghost! 

I had absolutely nothing under control. My life was a swirling vortex. I had spent the last hour trying to leave the city, but I kept getting lost and ending up in the same place, a quarter-mile from Olive Oil’s house. It felt like a maddening dream.

I felt so lonely.

I had to say goodbye to a friend, and I wasn’t going to see another one until Montana. I met a person who felt connected to the same reality as me, and then I had to say goodbye to him too. I had checked my email and saw the name Ben Sagres, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the message, because the sight of his name made me feel like I’d chugged a pitcher of icewater. The worst part was how familiar it felt. This was how I felt all the time when we were still talking, I realized with shock. How had I managed to convince myself that this was okay?  

I slumped and sighed and let the tears crawl down my cheeks. Gazed over at Lucky, my sole companion. I felt like an animal at the zoo. My every action was public, and no one knew my name.

But.

I eventually found my way out of the city. The skyscrapers shrunk to suburbs that sank into unburnished land. I rode past tall grass and chain-link fences, through soft drifts of cottonwood fluff, to a town called Zion. The bike path dwindled to dirt and finally led me to a lonely little scrap of beach with smooth stones the color of olive oil and Himalayan sea salt, beneath a sunset like weak herbal tea.

I locked my bike, set up my tent, and crawled inside. Sighed. I’m sad. I recognize and honor that. And I told myself the ups and downs are two sides of the same coin. Trust the setbacks, ride them out. Without loneliness, friendship wouldn’t mean a thing.

Is it hard to ride your bike across the country?

Nights like this one, little man. Nights like this one.

how to live your dream

1.  Dream. Dream wildly. Think of a dozen different dreams you’d like to live[1].

2. Now pick one. Any one will do.

3. Research what you need to do to accomplish it. (There is always a way.)

4. Tell everyone you know[2] that you’re going to live your dream. That way, if you back out, you’ll look like a total asshole.

5. Take the first step. Now you’re in it.

6. There will be hurdles. Bound over them, over every single one of them, just as high as you can, with the biggest smile on your face, and say, “Thank you! What else would you like me to do?”

7. In time, you will look around and realize you are living your dream.  

This will change your life. If you’re living your dream, then it stands to reason that your life is a dream.  

It’s not a metaphor. Your life is a lucid dream that you are free to shape and explore in any way you like. And once you’ve lived one dream, the others don’t seem as far out of reach. 

So you live another. And another. And sure, not every dream is how you’d envisioned it, and your plans fall apart, but that’s how dreaming works. 

Pretty soon, you can’t imagine why you’d do anything else. Life is short, after all. But life is also long. How many dreams can you stitch into it? Why not make it as many as you can? Wouldn’t it be nice, as you pass from this world to the next, to look back on a patchwork of purpose and passion?

How does that make your inner child feel[3]?

[1] Not sure how to dream? Think about what excites or interests you — juggling, skydiving, love, politics — and try the inner child/deathbed test:

Ask your inner child if they want to do XYZ. If they get excited, do it. Or picture yourself on your deathbed, saying, “I wish I’d done XYZ.” If it rings true, do it.

[2] Here’s where the Dream-Killers are gonna tell you all the reasons why you can’t live your dream. They’ll tell you all the reasons you can’t do it, all the ways you’ll fail, all the horrible things that will happen to you if you try. Listen to them and smile. They don’t know it, but their words are the most powerful dream fuel that exists. 

[3] Mine is so excited that her fingers are dancing.

ghost stories

The first thing I saw when I pulled up to Wayne’s house was Hummer with Trump 2020 bumper sticker. It may surprise you to learn that I, a woman with a shaved head who is riding a bike across the country to try to convince an Ivy League school to give a full scholarship to an African Muslim, disagree with Trump’s politics.

But contrary to popular belief, liberals and conservatives can get along! Thanks to my many years of hitchhiking[1], I’ve developed a strategy for exactly this sort of situation: Be their friend. Friendship starts with common ground, which in our case was alcohol and ghosts.  

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I demanded.

He laughed. “Not really.”

“Wait — no or not really?”

“Well…”

“DID YOU SEE A GHOST?”

“… I’m a logical man. I’m analytical. I need the facts.”

“Dude, of course. Everyone knows ghosts aren’t real.” I paused to take a long sip of the anise wine. “Oh my god, did you really make this?”

“I did!”

“This is the most delicious wine in the universe.”

“You think so?”

I nodded. “Where was I?”

“Logically, we know that ghosts aren’t real.”

“Exactly. But there are things in life that we can’t explain.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“So with that being said… dude, my house growing up was totally haunted.”

And then I launched into my favorite ghost story:

Jill and I were young when this happened — as in, not only were our parents still married, we also still had cows[2]. Mom and Dad were off doing barn chores, and we were deep in a game of Crash Test Dummies, which largely consisted of running face-first into the wall. We were gearing up for another round when we heard the unmistakable sound of plates shattering in the kitchen. It sounded like a shelf must have given out. We both looked at each other — we both heard it — and then wordlessly ran to the kitchen. 

Not a dish out of place.  

“That’s a good one!” said Wayne. His cat Lea, half-blind with a single long snaggle tooth, jumped up in his lap.

“So even though we’re both rational adults and we know they’re totally not real… have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked. “Besides this bottle of anise wine, I mean?”

“Wanna open another?”

“Do I?!”

After perusing the dozens of bottles in his cellar, I decided on the cherry-rhubarb. And then he told me his tale:

He was in the bathroom at work. It was small, just a urinal and a single stall, so he checked under the partition to make sure he wasn’t interrupting someone taking a dump. Coast clear.

“So I whip out Little Wayne—” (this gets a laugh) “and I start doing my thing, and then I hear a grunting noise in the toilet stall like someone’s taking a shit.”

He figured whoever was in there must have had their feet up... but when he glances through the crack in the partition, the stall is empty.

“DID YOU RUN AWAY??”

“No, but I’m just sorta confused, you know? I wasn’t scared, I was just baffled. And then, while I had soap on my hands, I heard clearly the rustling of a newspaper.”

“WHAT.”

“My mind is going through loops, and it’s overwhelming. So I ran out of the bathroom. And I never went in again. Six months later, I found out that a guy had a heart attack on that toilet and died.”

“WHOA!”

We were up past midnight, and the strong coffee and Puerto Rican pancakes he made for breakfast the next day took only the barest edge off my hangover. But I left his house smiling. A headache is a small price to pay for the knowledge that even in these contentious times, ghosts are more powerful than conflicting political beliefs.  

And everyone knows ghosts aren’t even real!

[1] It’s the safest way to travel in Malawi, and the easiest way to get to town when you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, and a perfectly acceptable mode of transportation in wild Alaska. 

[2] Our parents split up when I was 9 and Jill was 7. They haven’t spoken in 20 years, and our mom now freely admits she fucking hated farming.

the greatest day

When I was a kid, my mom used to wake up hours before everyone else, to sketch at the dining room table, this great round slanted hunk of wood with legs that ended in lion paws. We’d find her hunched over the table, drinking coffee (2% milk and Sweet’n’Low), with the red-and-white deer blanket draped over her shoulders, working on some minute detail in a drawing of a house. A brick, a stone in the walkway, a windowpane: The manmade elements were always painstakingly detailed, but the plants were carefree smudges.

And my dad. Boots squeaking in the snow through the frozen darkness of a pre-dawn Vermont winter morn that swallows and dulls the edges of the roaring dragon that is his truck. Harmonicas and construction plans scattered across the dashboard, dry heat spilling from dusty vents, a jug of half-frozen spring water at my feet. Coffee hot off the percolator steaming like a genie from a plastic mug; the crackle of AM radio. My father wedges himself behind the wheel and puts the truck in gear. He lights a Camel cigarette. 

As a kid, I didn’t understand why my parents liked the morning. It felt awful to be awake that early, like drowning in brownie batter. But now I understand. It is a sacred time of day. Pure potential. Anything could happen. Why, it could even be the greatest day of your life.

So I leave the hostel early, and follow my front wheel back down for one last look at Niagara. There’s no sound beyond the whirring of my bike tires and the silver notes of birdsong and the continual rumble of the falls. An occasional car passes, its taillights burning red holes in the dim. I give them a soft smile of recognition, maybe a little wave. This is an exclusive club we’re in, after all. Crepuscular. “Can ya believe how early I gotta get up?”

The falls were no less majestic in the light of the sunrise, with just a few scattered tourists, early birds like me. I stood and drank them in again. “Love Letters to God” was pleasantly stuck in my head.

Love letters to god / I wonder if she reads them / or if the get lost / in the stars / the stars / in the stars

Upriver, there were signs explicitly forbidding people from entering the water. On principle, I walked past them and dipped my feet in. My humble feet, which have touched so much earth and carried me so far. I felt connected to this river, this great mother.

And biked on to Buffalo in peace.

Morning’s sacred stillness lasts until it ends, and the world begins to stir and stretch and wiggle its fingers and toes. Heading west, the sunrise is behind me, so I read it secondhand: the sky gradually lightening to violet to baby blue to pallid white and eventually back again to blue. This is when the cars appear, the cavalry, the people going to work. I don’t smile and wave at these cars. I feel self-conscious around them. I’m a child playing a game, not taking life seriously. They’re irritated that have to go to work, choking on brownie batter, so I stay out of their way. Instead, I share a smile with the new infant day.

“It happens this way,” I think. “Don’t take it personally. They don’t know how special you are. They don’t know that today could be the greatest day of their life.”

*

And the award for worst drivers in America goes to… Buffalo! Congratulations, Buffalo. Do you have a few words? Perhaps you could share the secret to your success?

“What an unexpected honor! Well you know, the secret is that our drivers have an open animosity toward cyclists. Not the outta-my-way rudeness of Baltimore, not the distracted indifference of Bostonians. We simply view bikers as a nuisance, and we use intimidation to drive them out of our city — pun intended!”

The cars were hostile, but the people were kind. I rested on a bench on the side of a river, among the folks with fishing poles sitting on lawn chairs and coolers. Two guys eyed me from a distance. They had tattoos on their faces and piercings in their noses and lips and ears. I returned their gaze, gave a little smile, and they rose and swaggered up to me… and offered me a smallmouth bass.

“Do you want this fish?”

In the early morning, the day is pure potential. But as the sun rises and dries up the dew

and bakes the hills around you, it begins to take form. Often, it’s not the greatest day of your life. You might get lost, drivers might be rude, it might be cold, your ass might hurt. Ain’t that just the worst? It’s bad enough to be in pain without the indignity of it being your ass. Of course, your shoulders also hurt. Your spine is stiff, from your sacrum to your skull.

It’s okay if you have to sit somewhere and sigh or cry or curse. Phone a friend, someone you trust enough to complain. My friend Mr. Tamani always used to say, “A problem shared is half-solved.” But I hope you can remember that every gravel driveway has a few pretty stones.

You might see a nice view, or sunlight illuminating the leaves of a tree overhead (that always gets me, every time). You might have a funny interaction with another person. Some thuggy-looking guys might offer you a smallmouth bass. Your favorite song, a satisfying cup of coffee, a tacky statue of a dinosaur, the feeling of triumph of climbing a hill, the downhill slope, spotting a heron, taking a good picture, yelling out into the nothingness because you can, successfully peeing on the side of the road without being seen. If you look for the good, you’ll find it.

Midday never lasts forever. The sun slides downward, the light deepens to gold, the sky ceases to burn, the shadows lengthen. I like to see the cars coming home from work. I hope the people driving them have something nice to look forward to. Someone they love, or a good meal. Maybe a bike ride? It makes me happy to see the people, finally free.

That night, I camped on a little bluff in a park overlooking Lake Erie. Not the stealthiest spot, but no one bothered me. There were four little kids playing in the water below, and one of them yelled up at me, "You wanna come down and feel the water??" 
"Is it warm?" 
"No, it's COOOOOOOOLD!"

“I’ll pass,” I laughed.

The sky was a muted sapphire, the water was wrinkled silk, the waves were rhythmic as a heartbeat. I scrunched my bare toes in the dirt, allowing a few mosquitos to bite me, because mosquitoes gotta eat too. Did you know it’s only female mosquitoes that bite? They need blood to produce eggs. Thinking about mosquitoes as fellow ladies dealing with their pain-in-the-ass reproductive systems makes me like them a lot better.

So it wasn’t the greatest day of your life.

Or hell, maybe it was.

Because it was a day in your life. And that’s all our life is, is days. And just because one happened to have a little more happiness or a little more screaming curses in it than the others doesn’t make it better or worse. You were alive.

Maybe when you die, you miss the feeling of mosquito bites, and sunburn, and thirst. I bet you remember the hard times fondly, and fonder still the relief that follows. I bet you miss the feeling of air in your lungs.

How lucky we are, to breathe.

These were my thoughts as I gazed at the sunset smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell until the shadow of night swallowed it up. Stars like Christmas lights, stars like mica, stars like trumpets, stars like swans. There’s nothing to be afraid of here in the dark, as you crawl into your tent. You’re just on the side of the earth that’s turned away from the sun. You’re safe in the world’s great shadow. And it’s time to sleep, because tomorrow is a new day. And as your dreams wrap long fingers around your mind, a tiny star comes to light inside you, burning with the excitement that you’re only one sleep away from the next morning,

and that sacred quiet,

that seed of potential,

that today could just be

the greatest day of your life.

niagara

After three days and 200 miles without a shower, I raced thunderstorms and a caffeine crash to Niagara Falls and won. The night before, I was a homeless vagrant facing off against a wild animal at 2 a.m. Today, I was just another tourist.

I almost didn’t make it. The bike path was a race outta hell, and I followed blind instinct along the surface streets of Niagara Falls. No time to dawdle and check the map — the hostel check-in closed at 7, and at the rate I was going, I was going to make it there at 6:58.

I careened around a corner and down a quiet, shady side street, and there it was. I leaned my bike against the railing and dashed up the steps and knocked on the door. 6:58 on the dot. The hostel owner greeted me with crossed arms and a scowl. He was one of those guys who would NOT have let me check in at 7:01. The type who looks at the world as if it were trying to impress him, and failing.

But it didn’t matter, because here I was at Niagara Falls. A place I had wanted to visit for… well, all of five hours. Just a funny way to motivate myself to do some miles. Even though I grew up in the Northeast, this was a tourist attraction that had managed to escape me. Turns out to see it, I had to bike all the way from south of the Mason-Dixon line.  

I navigated the circus of tacky attractions and followed a path that deposited me upriver of the falls. The water rushed excitedly like a crowd flowing into a concert venue, pulled by the insistence of gravity, tumbling and crashing into rocks. The air vibrated with the sound of rushing water. The sheer kinetic energy was infectious; I walked fast like I was trying to catch a plane.

Oh, and the sky! One half was covered in a thick, dark cloudbank that ended in a smooth line, and the other half glowed incandescent orange. I walked amidst tourists speaking Hindi, Mandarin, English, Spanish, French, German, beneath this surrealist’s sky. In my excitement, I loved each and every one of them. We were all sharing this enchanted moment, creating it in our overlapping consciousness.

And then I saw it—

the precipitous drop.

Precipitous is really the only word to describe it. 635,000 gallons per second spilling down a chasm the height of the Arc de Triomphe. Did people really go over this in barrels? I loved them too. There in the air suffused with saffron, I loved the falls and everyone around me and the power and majesty of this moment. The flashing neon lights, the tacky tourist traps — they were endearing in their insignificance compared to this, the very presence of god.

Like a mosquito biting the Buddha.

How very human, I thought. How charmingly, quixotically human. Making money on the banks of creation. Imagine how this place must have looked before. “WE WERE HERE TOO!” those neon lights screamed. I pitied them, for missing the point, but I forgave them too.

 My ego consumed in the crashing power of water.

the serial killer

Beneath the wan remnants of a pancake-batter sunset, in a patch of woods behind a little league field in Greece Canal Park, our intrepid heroine pushes her bike along a muddy trail and through a miasma of mosquitoes. She has long since given up the dream of an Instagram campsite; like a lonely barfly at last call, she’ll take what she can get. Is that a reasonably flat spot? Hey there good-lookin’, wanna have a sleepover?

I lean my bike against a tree, do a backbend, and turn off my Strava. Time to kick back and relax. And by that I mean… laboriously construct my shelter for the evening!

After laying the ground cloth, staking the tent, feeding the poles through the guides, strapping on the rainfly, locking up my bike, inflating my sleeping pad, laying out my sleeping bag, brushing my teeth, changing out of my bike shorts, and killing all the mosquitoes[1] that had gotten into my tent, I finally lay down… and there’s a rock digging into my spine.

But it’s dark, and I don’t feel like undoing all my hard work and shifting it two inches to the left only to find a root poking me in the kidney and 20 more mosquitoes in my tent. This, I decide, is an opportunity to practice acceptance[2].

I watch an episode of “Breaking Bad” on my phone — because there’s nothing like watching an hour of gratuitous violence[3], alone and in a strange place at night, to help a gal unwind after a 60-mile bike ride. With visions of drug crimes dancing through my head (and a pointy rock dancing between my thoracic vertebrae) I fall into a restless sleep…

…and wake up at 2 a.m. to the sound of a dentist’s drill outside my tent.

Eyes pop open. Silence. What was that noise? Maybe it was just a— 

Rhnnnnnnnnn! 

Nope, I’m definitely not dreaming, and that was definitely closer than before. I turn on my flashlight, and the serial killer bounds crashingly through the underbrush. 

I lay there, barely breathing, frozen and alert, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Fiddlehead pipes up: what if there’s someone crazy outside my tent who wants to hurt me?

There isn’t, Maple says firmly. I’m sure it’s just an animal, and I don’t think there are bears around here, so we’re good.

And then a third, unfamiliar voice: If you had let a guy come with you on this trip, he could be handling this right now.

RHNNNNNNNN! 

Ahh fuck.

I get out of my tent, wave my flashlight around, and yell, “I MEAN YOU NO HARM. JUST LET ME SLEEP!' I bend down and grope around until I find a big stick, and then spear it into the muddy ground outside my tent. To use as a weapon, I guess?

RNNNNNNNNN! 

Okay, now this is just getting annoying. “GO AWAY!” I yell, and then under my breath: “God, take a hint!”

Silence. I think we’re okay. I crawl back into my tent, now filled with mosquitoes, and text my dad and a friend. I try to relax, but my brain is caught in a tug-of-war between Sleep and Fear. Every time it looks like Sleep is going to win, Fear jerks the rope, and my eyes pop open.

The next morning, I emerge from my tent smeared with mud, dead mosquitoes, and my own blood, and a text from my dad explaining that, “raccoons make all kinds of noises.”

[1] I normally try not to kill bugs, but these guys had it coming.

[2] In other words, I say “fuck it.”

[3] For those who’ve seen the show, it was “Negro y Azul,” with Danny Trejo and the tortoise.

“the computer dog”

read the cardboard lawn sign, and I laughed. What a weird concept for a small business! Like… maybe this guy has a dog, and it’s the mascot for his computer-fixing side hustle? Then I got a little closer and realized it actually said, “The Computer Doc.” 

How funny, I thought. You switch one letter, and the entire meaning changes.

You might think that on a long solo pilgrimage, you experience profound thoughts about, like, god or human nature or something. Sometimes that’s true. But other times, you conduct a comprehensive exploration of all the alphabetic permutations of the phrase “The Computer Dog.”

Highlights:

• the computer fog (it’s a virus)

• the computer hog (he just keeps all the computers that come in)

• the computer hug (for when your computer’s feeling down)

• the computer dom (for when your computer’s feeling horny)

• the computer dot (uh, I believe the term is “pixel”)

Computer dox, that’s malaria medicine for your computer. Computer doy, a holdover from the ’90s, like, computer doy, you don’t know what’s wrong with your computer? Computer doz… puts your computer right to sleep.

Then I glanced up and thought, Hey, a lake!

*

Freedom is skipping stones on a beach while everyone else is at work.

*

I leaned under a birch tree in someone’s front yard. I had no home, so the world was my home. And in that moment, my home was rolling farmland and beech forests, the glittering surface of Owasco Lake, and a cascade of spade-shaped leaves overhead, serrate edges rimmed in golden sunlight.

If gold is valuable because it’s rare, than what about this?

what it’s like to ride in a car with me

“Rob, I get to choose the music.”

“Okay.” Rob has learned to be agreeable when I demand control of the stereo[1].

“It’s Nahko and Medicine for the People. You have to love them.”

“I love them!”

“No sass!” I yell. “Hey, I have a present for you.” I hand him the bracelet I found outside Kim’s Kitchen.

“‘Liberty or Death’?”

“Because your kyiiiiiin is from New Hampshire. Hey Rob, say kin.”

“Kin.”

“No, say it like this: kyiiiiiiiin.”

“Kyiiiiiiiiiin.”

I cackle. “My kyiiiiiin is from New Hampshire too. Live free or die!”

“Live free or die!” 

* 

“HEY ROB wanna play a game I just made up?

“Sure.” Rob has learned to be agreeable when I propose games[2].

“It’s called ROBROBROBROBROB. Here’s how you play, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“ROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROB! Now it’s your turn!”

“BROOKEBROO—”

“NO!”

“What?!”

“You’re doing it wrong! It’s called ROBROBROBROBROB not BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE! Now do it again!”

“ROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROB!!”

“I see you’ve played ROBROBROBROBROB before! Hey Rob!”

“Yes?”

“Wanna play a game I just made up?”

“Is it BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE?”

“HOW DID YOU KNOW?!”

“BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE!”
I screamed and yelled, “ROB LOOK!”  

Time slowed and our jaws dropped as we slid past a sign that said, I shit you not, Brook Road.

“ROB YOU MANIFESTED IT!”

And that, dear friends, is how Rob Campbell became the world champion of BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE.

[1] Even though he has literally the best taste in music in the world.

[2] Even though they inevitably have no rules, no winners, and no point.