I’ve been riding out to the discount grocery store the next town over. A sentence, I admit, that sounds quite odd, but after you have kids, you need to find practical ways of entertaining yourself. So, I can’t write “I’ve been going to this new bar” or even “I’ve been taking a lot of walks lately”. Today, I woke up at 4am; my daughter couldn’t sleep and I lay on her floor patting her and soothing her. After all, she’s not even three yet. I had a Zoom meeting at 6am. And plenty of classes to plan for next semester. After all that, at the end of the day, when the kids go to sleep, you don’t do anything that’s going to rob you of your own sleep. You do something practical; you take a bike ride to pick up some groceries.
Luckily, it’s an interesting ride this time of year. To avoid the highway that connects these two towns, I have to take a backroute through a part of town called ‘The Bottoms’ which is the flat, treeless expanse that leads up to the ocean. In my heart I call it “los fondos” in Spanish. I’m not sure why. There’s nothing Spanish about the place.
Los fondos are not as scenic as it may sound with ‘ocean’ in the description. They look like flat fields would anywhere else. There’s a bit of salt in the breeze and when the ocean really gets going in the winter, you can occasionally hear it over the relentless wind, but it sounds more like a washing machine or something.
The fondos are downright drab, but the sky is wide, wide open above them and there’s an old trestle bridge that spans the Mad River right before it dumps into the ocean. From the bridge, I’ve seen seals in the river even though it’s probably close to a mile from the mouth where the bridge crosses it. They seem so out of place surrounded by flat grassy fields, munched by cows and low mountains reflected in their shallows, but the seals are not infrequent in the river. Ever curious, they’ll watch you crossing over them, giving the impression that you’re the one out of your element, which, of course, is true.
From here, the route goes over a hill and then into the next town which is what you’d expect of a small town surrounded by such tenacious wilderness: well-forested mountains on one side and crashing ocean surmounted by rhododendron thickets on the other. There are little patches of grayish beach along the river and, on the other side, a long isthmus of sand that recedes as the mouth of the river changes.
The area is pleasant to ride through because there is very little traffic. Sometimes I can make my way through all the fondos without seeing a single car. Of course, it’s very dark and on moonless nights, I’d be lost without a light. I’ve come home with a load of groceries and found myself following a roving pancake-size light all the way through acres of wind-swept darkness back home. It’s a humbling experience and one relevant to what follows.
…
A week before Halloween, I managed to get my daughter to sleep before it was too late and I realized I had time to make it to the grocery store. The ride takes about 40 minutes one way, so there’s a cut-off for when I can leave.
The night was warm with the coming rains and the humidity seemed to keep the wind down. I coasted through the streets of town, and within a few blocks, I was past the point of streetlights—little good they do here. Even downtown, the redwood forests seem to send down an impressive shadow, against which illumination is practically worthless. Here and there are a few dingy globes which serve to brighten nothing save the air and insects immediately about them. All the light is converted into glare in the humidity. There’s more light reflected from the wet streets than actual illumination. Imagine Christmas tree lights garlanded on a dark, damp, shaggy spruce in the middle of a forest at night and you have an idea of what the streetlights look like around here.
There’s always a little wind in the fondos, even when it’s perfectly still in town. All that flat ocean beyond with nothing but a little cusp of dunes to break the unimpeded movement of air all the way from Japan, Taiwan and the Kamchatka. There’s something almost lonesome about the place when the wind isn’t raging, like the movements of a very tired, but indefatigable vagabond. One imagines the smells of hibiscus, kvass, ice and all sorts of strange things as this vagabond wind blows over the wet pasture land.
Ah yes, the pasture. I’d be remiss if I left the cows out, for they are an important presence in the fondos where the ground is too swampy to build, the earth too salty to foster growth, and too valuable to wallow. Everywhere in the bottoms, cows shift in the muck, their hooves pound out of the soft ground. Their quarter-size bovine eyes glow in the range of my bike light like flashes from Charon’s fares, still held in their customary place.
That last one may have been too much, but your imagination can get away from you out here. Also, keep in mind, it was just before Halloween, there are a few pumpkin patches out in the fondos, a corn maze and not a few creaky old farmhouses standing apart from their neighbors, the dilapidated barns.
It’s a great autumn landscape and the broken macadam that wraps the parcels into acreage is often crossed and recrossed by skunks, racoons, foxes and, in one particular area, peacocks. All of them have appeared out-of-the-darkness in the plate-like beam of my bike light and then disappeared back to the dark periphery. Most of the time, I’ve seen them all on a single trip. Raiding the farms for the most part, I imagine, but perhaps also lured by the same restlessness that brought us to the end of the continent. Those skunks and racoons might bump up against the ocean at night and think “now what the hell is this?”
There are owls, too. Great silent shadows, even in the darkness. They’ll fly right over the top of you, encouraging some primal fear to leak from your scalp. It’s like they’re flaunting my inability to have any interaction with them. Something like watching sharks swim through the ocean, unmindful and almost dispassioned by human presence.
I cross the bridge, led to it by a rhododendron tunnel where a bush has trellised a chain link fence and in the wet darkness creates a cave that frames the craggy stanchions of the bridge.
The moon ripples in the river like the stove light’s reflection in a cup of coffee before anyone is awake. The kind of light that disappears when there’s no one to observe it.
After the bridge, I’m in another town, a town with a main street and little else. It’s a wonder a place could be bordered by the ocean and redwood mountains and manage to be this dull, but it is. It’s a place of rugged pickup cruising suburban streets. The kind of weird rural/urban overlap that reminds me a bit of southern Michigan. The kind of place where you see cars with deer tied to the hoods cruising through a factory district in a town of over 100,000.
But McKinleyville is, in reality, an actual rural place belied with a street of car dealerships and fast-food outlets. It’s much smaller than 100,000 souls, the kind of town you see all over California that seems to have been created without a center in mind, the kind of place that went up so quickly there was no nucleus to grow from. One street has stores, all of them new, all of them pre-fab-looking, and, in the root system of streets that feed into this one, there are homes. Living here, I can’t imagine what there would be to do other than drive away from it.
I’m sure I’ve seen McKinleyville in the sun, but there’s some incongruency with the image in my memory and so the default appearance of the place is damp, huddled together under dingy, impenetrable clouds churned out by the mountains. But at night, all towns are gray, and I make my way through the root system to the main street to the grocery store.
Ever since I lost feeling in my arm after carrying groceries over seven miles in my messenger bag, I use a larger, two-strap backpack which serves its purpose quite well with reinforced straps and plenty of padding. I’ve developed a rough idea of what a full bag looks like as individual purchases in a shopping cart, but I usually head home with the bag piled pretty high.
I rode out into the night with a substantial stack of groceries in the roll-down bag, which was now unrolled just about all the way allowing from the ice cream, hummus and other prepared foods I’ve been trying to stop buying but, when confronted with such low, low prices, my resolve weakens and I buy all kinds of stuff I don’t really need which is invariably packaged in plastic.
I’ve got this mountain of stuff lashed to my back, but the bag centers it pretty well and I’m quite conditioned to getting it all back home. The food—if it can be called that—is a source of motivation. When I get home, I’ll be hungry and there will be plenty of options.
But for now, there’s this hill to bomb down and this podcast in my headphones which I’m paying peripheral attention to when a truck goes by and something sails over the top of my head. I feel the wind of it, I feel its force flatten the air that’s moving over me for a moment. It’s a killing sound, that sudden silence, something like the owl flying over. Then, in the wake of the silence, the truck guns it, rips ahead down the wet street.
When you ride through the night, it’s fairly common that people will mess with you, but, luckily, throwing heavy objects at you is less common. I watch the red lights of the truck disappear down the road. There are no obstacles, no stop signs between the truck and the highway onramp about a quarter mile ahead. I’d never catch it, but, quickly, as if to avoid being seen, the truck makes a left into an area, where I can’t remember there being anything but a couple of driveways.
Shit. Are they coming back? Are they turning around?
Unfortunately, being attacked on a bike is something of a crime of opportunity. Bored people who have a hard time recognizing the humanity of others are often driving around both angry and bored and the pathetic figure of someone struggling to rock a narrow two-wheeled machine up a small grade must fill them with some kind of dull ire. They yell. They lay on the horn. They drive as close as possible without hitting you, but they usually keep going. On a dark night, with no other traffic around, when someone turns around to come back, they’ve gone beyond taking advantage of the opportunity and they’re displaying some substantially sociopathic tendencies. Best to get out of the way.
Still, adrenaline kicked in and all I could think was “maybe I can catch up to them before they drive away.” I raced down the hill toward where I’d seen the truck disappear.
Sure enough, the same truck sat there, facing me, idling, lights glaring at me from the base of a driveway. I threw up my arms in the universal “what the fuck?” gesture and stood before the truck. There was no movement. No yelling. No revving. Why had this guy pulled in here? I motioned for someone to get out of the truck. Nothing. A minute passed and it was getting spooky staring down these headlights and this low growling engine. I slowly moved out of the way, realizing that I was blocking the truck’s egress and I didn’t want it to suddenly decide to break for it and run me over.
Yeah, “it”. Looking into the truck’s lights, I was starting to see it in a Stephen King kind of way. Was anyone even in there? What the hell was going on here?
There was more than one house back here and, from another channel of this driveway system, a car came rocking up behind the truck. It crept around it and toward me. I stopped it and went over to the window.
“Who’s in the truck?” I demanded of the sleepy-looking driver.
“Huh?”
“Someone threw something at me. Someone in that truck threw something. Who’s in there?”
“I don’t know, man.” Sleepy answered. “This is a shared driveway.”
I let him drive out, but this emboldened me a little. At least someone else had seen us. At least there were other people around. I put a little more emphasis in it and angerly waved the truck toward me.
There was a lurch as if the driver was visibly hesitating and then the truck slowly rolled toward me. I stayed in front of it, hoping to not be run down, holding my bike out a little like a matador’s cape.
The window came down. Who would it be? Scarface? A burley construction worker? A barrel of a gun? I was thinking these things and, at the same time, still pissed off enough to not be thinking of them. I was totally vulnerable in my indignation. This is an easy place to find yourself on a bike. No one cares about your indignation in the dark, on a country road. The world doesn’t owe you anything but chaos and old night. And, for a moment, I saw that as the window came down.
A face, the green glare of the instrument panel reflected on skin. Smooth skin. Uncertain expression. A kid. A fucking kid!
“Sorry, man. I didn’t throw it. It was my friend. He’s really drunk.”
But rather than raise my indignation, the sight of the kid mollified it. I sighed. “What’s your friend’s name? Is this his house?”
“Yeah. He’s Dylan. I don’t know what he was doing, man”
“You could kill someone throwing things like that.” I sounded like a dad. Hell, I thought, I am a dad! A dad who almost didn’t make it home to his kids because ‘Dylan’ wanted to screw around.
“What did he throw?”
“A water bottle. I think he thought you were a tweaker.”
A tweaker. I’ve got this before. This awful excuse that because you might be a drug addict, homeless, or both, you’re somehow fair game for a braining. It’s the worst thing to say. ‘sorry, man. I didn’t see you as a contributing member of society, so I thought I’d knock ya’ one fer fun.’ Ugh.
“Where’s Dylan? In the house?” I tried not to sound too exasperated.
“He’s calling right now” The kid answered his phone and talked to Dylan who clearly knew I was waiting for him. “Yeah….he’s out he— Yeah. He wants to talk to you. Yeah, dude. Come out.” He hung up. “He’s on his way out.”
When I saw Dylan walking out sheepishly, I stepped aside and let the driver go, thinking, as the car drove off of all that I’d stood in front of it imagining it could be. Imagining, before the window went down all the ways that truck in the dark, headlights blaring, could’ve been my grave or at least my hospital bill.
I talked to Dylan and, eventually his dad a while. The dad was a country guy. Asking me if I wanted to press charges. Someone they both managed to really evade much of an apology. Dylan even offered the tweaker excuse again. “If I’d known you had humanity I never would’ve thrown anything at you,” he seemed to say. “Sorry, humanity is a difficult thing for me to pin down and, sometimes, I just throw things.”
With the dad standing there, I found my remonstrances seemed redundant. I didn’t smell any booze on the kid that his friend said was “really drunk”, but I stood there feeling like a tattletale and started dismissing my complaint before it was even out of my mouth, knocking it down to a “just be careful” which sounded cloying and kind of stupid, but I was tired. Too tired to champion punishment on a grand scale and I bade Dylan and father a good night before riding back toward the ocean shaking my head, riding back to my sleeping house beyond the muddy fields and the little swinging light at the head of my bike like a spotlight being dragged across the crumpled country roads where, luckily, there was almost no traffic at night.
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