bike trip: 2

In the morning, our kind lady invited us in for coffee and toast. Showers, too. When I came back from mine, she was explaining at the breakfast table that her daughter married an American. She’s a musician, doing well living in Chicago. This summer, her band is opening for The Kills on tour.
We left with a great many thanks and a playful roughhouse farewell to Rammstein. The lady offered a more scenic bike route for us to take. We began biking across a thin ribbon of road between two vast plains of wheat, the morning sun saluting us on our right. We arrived at a propserous forest town, sleeping in the shadow of great tall trees, leaning over a path that descended and descended, letting us ride without pedaling, the breeze streaming and bubbling against our bodies. Two miles without pedaling. I checked over my shoulder to see that Garth was safe and hadn’t fallen over in the swift descent of our ride.
At last, we swerved out of the shadowy forest trail into another bright, sunny plain. In front of us loomed a long stretch of concrete atop staunch concrete pillars. A maroon train whizzed along atop it. It was the Thalys, the high-speed train that travels Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam in four hours. We would arrive in Amsterdam in five more days. The whizzing train faded out over the horizon. We pedaled. It was silent. We pedaled. Heat in our ears. We pedalled.

Our great discovery that afternoon was after an inquisition into a crop we spied all over. In many of the fields we pedaled past; there grew a green plant that looked roughly like a head of lettuce. It apeared not to be lettuce, though. Garth was long curious what grew underneath. At a moment that we had paused to drink water, we found ourselves by this same, unknown crop.
“What do you think it is?” asked Garth.
“One way to find out,” I said. I kneeled down and pulled at the thick base of the leaves. The object underground would not budge easily. I brushed to the side an inch of dirt. I dug up another inch and I could start to wrestle it free. Gently and slowly, I tugged and bent it to the side and pulled and bent it to the side and at last I pulled out a dirt-covered root as big as three potatoes.
“Do you think it’s a beet?” she asked.
“It looks like a beet,” I said.
“Let’s try it,” she said.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a Swiss Army knife, which I had brought to open cans of green beans and bottles of wine and bottles of beer. I swung out a blade and cut a clean piece of white beet for Garth.
“Ooh! It’s so sweet! It’s so good,” she said.
“I cut myself a piece of the hard, white flesh. It felt unripe, like a raw potato. It offered a single taste of sugar.
“Sugar beet, I think,” I said.
“Yeah. It tastes so good, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Oh. I can’t believe that. It tastes so good. It tastes like sugar. Pure sugar taste growing right in this field. Paris, try some,” I said.
“Eww, that’s gross,” he said.
“It’s so good. You have to try it,” I said. I ate another piece and gave another piece to Garth.
“That thing came from the ground,” said Paris.
“It’s good,” I said.
I ate more and more and finally threw it away when there were only little dirt-caked bits left. We rode on. “So good,” I said. “Can you believe it just comes up from the ground like that? Tasting like sugar. It was dirt and now it’s sugar you can eat and it’s good. Just takes sun and water and the dirt… is sugar. Isn’t that amazing?”
“I can’t believe you guys ate that thing right out of the ground,” said Paris. “That’s definite ghetto.”

Later on, we stopped for more food. Garth went into a boulangerie. Paris went into a green grocer’s. He emerged with, among other items, a cucumber.
“Look, guys. I got a cucumber. I’m just gonna put it in my basket, like, hey, look at me, I’m just riding around with a cucumber. Isn’t that so random?” he stated.
Soon after we were on our way again—in a relatively mountainous areas where some moments we had to stand and walk our bikes uphill arriving at a long downhill after which we could coast until the next uphill required our effort—Paris called out, “Guys! Guys! Come here.”
Paris showed us his odometer which read 99.98 kilometers. “Okay. Twenty more meters and we’ve biked one hundred kilometers.” In unison we walked with our bikes and when the digital readout finally marked 100.00 kilometers we all yelled out, “Woo hoo! One hundred kilometers!”
Woo woo! The joyful shouts died down and we got on our bikes and rode.

That night we hunted for a camping spot late, as the setting sun moved closer to its burial. We hunted around a small of six hundred or so with its church at the bottom of a hill and a handful of teenagers bored out of their minds, leaning out their windowsills, waiting. There was no kind stranger to offer shelter this night and we searched for space outside of town, in the fields. We found a gravel path, harmless as anything, leading to a farmer’s field and a forest beyond.
Paris was concerned that somebody would find us. The farmhouse was two hundred yards away. And who knows who might come down this road.
“First thing,” I said, “It’s already nearly 11pm on a Saturday night. I don’t know what farmer checks his fields at this hour, if he isn’t already asleep, and who would get up before seven on a Sunday morning to be sure there’s no trespassers on his property. We don’t got so many choices of where to pitch our tent.”
“Alright, well, I guess it’ll be okay.”
“So what do you guys think of this foresty area—the trees can hide us and all,” I said.
“What does that sign say?” said Paris.
He walked closer to examine a sign nailed to a tree.
“Guys, this is a hunting ground,” he said.
“Okay then. How about that other area we were looking at before,” I said.
We walked back down the trail a hundred yards and made our tents.
“Does anyone want to go see the sunset?” asked Paris.
“Sure,” I said. Garth stayed to brush her teeth.
Paris and I stood where the gravel trail meets the true road. We watched the dark blue consume the last of the red pinks on the horizon. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I resolved in my mind that if Paris sullied this sunset by saying it was gorge, I would allow him the freedom of his own self-expression. But he said nothing. After we turned back for the tents, I nodded my head and said, “Real nice.”

Settled in his tent, Paris called out to Garth and I in ours, “If you guys get scared or lonely, you can come sleep in my tent.”
“Alright,” we said.
I was already in the middle of taking off Garth’s panties.