High Plains Panhandler

Shiny Ride

Today I was driven around in a Rolls Royce Phantom in Houston, Texas.

A few observations: the hood was as big as my entire car. The doors were heavy, like what you’d expect a bank vault door to feel like. The tires were massive. The leatherseats were large and cushiony, very comfy, and they were surrounded by wood: wood in the doors, wood on the dash, wood on the ceiling.

It sat four of us comfortably. Surprisingly five people would have been tight.

It smelled great.

But it was just a car. A half-million dollar car, but still just a car.

Now I’m convinced I need a leather seat on my bike, just to keep up.

Ride, Forrest, Ride

On my way home from Lubbock the other day, I saw a recumbent bike rider hauling a trailer down the I-27 access road. It’s not every day you see that, so I took the next exit and waited for him so I could see where he was going.

He had a tan, leathery face, with a long, rectangular beard that jutted from his chin like a pharaoh. His right hand was stuffed into his jacket pocket, the other was out, steering his bike. The hood of his jacket was tied tightly around his head. He was moving about a mile an hour, and the trailer behind him was loaded down with spare tires and all sorts of strange and bizarre bundles.

He stopped pedaling (it was a recumbent tricycle, so he had no trouble staying balanced while stopped) and gave me a cold look.

“I have a recumbent bike too,” I said stupidly.

I could tell he absolutely did not care. He just kept staring at me.

“That’s some rig,” I said, looking at his trailer. It was long, like a coffin, and rode on two wheels.

“It’s 500 pounds,” he said, sounding vaguely like what you’d expect an Amish farmer to sound like, “including a propane stove and my tent.”

This intrigued me further. “Where are you going?”

“Oregon,” he said.

“Where are you from?”

“Oregon,” he said again. He paused and then said, “I ain’t got one of them. Never had.” He pointed to my car.

“Oh, not many people have a Prius,” I said, and then I realized he was talking about not having a automobile. He couldn’t care less about the kind.

“I’ve been going for eight years,” he continued, speaking into the wind as I wasn’t there. “I’ve been to South Carolina and all over. I’ve had 25 flat tires.”

And all I could say was, “Well, 25 flats over eight years, that’s not too bad.” If only the powers of division hadn’t eluded me, then I could have really sounded smart.

I didn’t know what else to say, but I knew a storm was approaching from the west, so I wanted to finish up and get on my way.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

He pointed at the ground. “Where ever I stop. I get in my tent when it’s too cold or too rainy. I just unpack right here. I made 12 miles yesterday in the wind. I might make 18 today.”

I took this as my cue that he wanted to get moving, so like an idiot I wished him good luck (good luck! I should have said ‘may the gods of puncture proof tires watch over you,’ but then again, he might have killed me for it - he had that kind of look about him). He started off again, in a low gear, crawling ahead. I waited a minute, and then I drove off, passing him but neither waving nor acknowledging him.

Now I’m on a plane, 36,000 feet up, going 521 miles an hour. It’s -67º F outside. Yet I just caught myself looking down and wondering where this Forrest Gump of bike riders is today, wondering what he’ll do when frightening storms roll off the Rocky Mountains tonight and blanket the high planes in lightning and screaming wind.

I wonder, but I know in a hour I’ll stop wondering and forget about him for a while.

But he’ll still be pedaling. Because that’s what he does.

Peproni Rolls

I drove to Lubbock to attend a lecture by my intellectual property attorney who, as special guest star, flew in from Washington D.C. for the big event. The Prius was getting a decent 54 miles a gallon until the wind started kicking in and I started getting buffeted and knocked around on the freeway overpasses. I had no idea you could have white knuckle driving on a tornado-less flat stretch of road in the Texas Panhandle.

For dinner I thought I’d sneak out and head to Double Dave's, where you can find the most delicious pizza rolls - Double Dave's calls them peproni rolls. (I lived on these in grad school - ah, the days of backpacks lined with aluminum foil and the all-you-can-eat pizza roll buffet!)

I followed my phone’s Google maps directions carefully and finally found myself in the parking lot that was home to Double Dave's, a grocery store, and several other various shops and whatnots. But as I drove past the Double Dave’s window, I saw it was packed with college kids watching a handful of different sports channels on the TVs scattered around the dining room. Then I realized, even though my love of pizza rolls was strong and fierce, Double Dave's that night wasn’t my scene.

I am old now.

So I ended up at Souper Salad, which has a large buffet of all sorts of interesting things, including olives, cottage cheese, and chicken soup. I ate my old person food and read The New Yorker and enjoyed the quiet.

As I was leaving I saw one of the cooks run through the dining room followed by three large dogs. She stopped me and asked if they were my dogs, and I just shook my head, finding the question odd. She said the dogs had come in through the kitchen’s back door, and she wondered who they belonged to.

So they ushered them outside, and the entire staff stood by the front doors, arms crossed, murmuring to themselves about the weird dogs from the alley.

And I left, driving away and wondering if that was really chicken in the soup after all.

The Limo

At dinner one night Alex made the following pronouncement:

“When I grow up, I want to be a limo driver.”

And then he made sure we knew that it wouldn’t just be any kind of limo.

It would also have a pool.

So of course we needed to know more about this pool-carrying limo, and Alex said with a pool he could drive and then swim whenever he wanted. Then he showed us what he meant: he pretended to turn a large steering wheel back and forth in front of him, saying “Drive, drive, drive.” And then slapped his hands together, twisted his body, and dove below the table. “Swim!”

Suzanne told him he just invented a new dance. She called it “The Limo.”

A few weeks later at the Father-Daughter girl scout dance, Megan introduced The Limo to her fellow scouts, and soon the entire dance floor was infected with the eager shouts of “Drive, drive, drive . . . swim! Drive, drive, drive . . . swim!”

It’s obvious Alex doesn’t need to be a limo driver. He needs his own Top 40 dance show.

Dig it!