Leesville, Louisiana

 

My day got off to a great start when my spreading knife turned up as I was breaking camp.  I had conducted an all-out search for it the night before, but it wasn’t to be found.  I had last used it outside a McDonald’s to make a peanut butter sandwich for later in the day while my devices continued to charge inside.  I remembered taking it inside to give it a wash along with a couple other items, but then couldn’t remember if I slotted it back in my handlebar bag where it normally resides or if I had slipped it into one of my front panniers in an open container for easy access for future use.  

When I couldn’t find it in any of those places I feared it might have fallen out of the hole in the bottom of one of my front panniers, or I may have placed it atop my packs over my rear panniers and forgotten about it.  Turns out I put it in my pants pocket after washing it off and there it still was, which I discovered when I slipped them on in the morning.  It wouldn’t have been a great loss if it had disappeared, as I can spread with my spoon and cut items with my sharp knife.  I was as happy to solve the mystery of where it had gone as I was in finding it.

The day continued to go well, especially when I approached the two-mile bridge and causeway over Lake Livingston and there was no sign prohibiting bikes.  My Apple GPS bike route feature gave a different and longer route around the lake making me fear bikes weren’t allowed on the bridge.  Thankfully the only sign prohibiting anything applied to fishing off the bridge.  If the sign had applied to bikes as well I would have just hitched a ride in one of the steady stream of pick-up trucks that predominated on the road leading to the lake, the second largest in the state with a 450-mile coastline, and like most of them, man-made.  The lake is a reservoir for the drinking water of Houston and Galveston, seventy-five miles south.

The last town before the lake was Point Blank, another of the many unique Texas town names such as Uncertain north of there.   It was originally Blanc Point, named by a Frenchwoman in 1850, but was anglicized a few years later.  On my way to Dallas I passed through the small town of Poetry, which had changed its name too from the mundane Turner’s Point, when a resident proposed the change saying the springtime there was like a poem.

Lake Livingston was surrounded by a vast national forest, signaling a most welcome change in topography, making camping considerably easier and more pleasant than it had been for days and days in the wide open, arid spaces of western and central Texas and a lot of Oklahoma.  I no longer had to be nervous about improvising a place to camp, knowing I could camp virtually at will.  The only detriment to the ease of camping was being tempted by the many small dirt roads that disappeared into the forest with the thought of how nice it would be to just go sit in the forest for a few hours or for the rest of the day.  It would initially be nice, but I’d soon want to be on the bike gliding along the road cloaked by forest.  One of the last towns in Texas was Jasper, which calls itself “The Jewel of the Forest.”

Every time a logging truck road past leaving a thick aroma of pine in its wake I wished they weren’t so fast and I wasn’t so slow so there might be the possibility to ride along in its fragrant draft as I’d managed in third world countries where trucks with such loads labor along not much faster than a cyclist.

The loggers without fail give me a wide berth as do the vast majority of vehicles.  Maybe once every three or four days some belligerent bastard passes at speed a few inches away purposefully giving a fright.  It’s hardly an epidemic, but it is  a higher rate than elsewhere.  I’ve been reminded by Diane Jenks on her Outspoken podcast of a couple incidents in Texas in the past few years of a motorist running down cyclists.  She had been following the case of a sixteen-year old in a pickup who mowed down six of them in a bunch, sending four to the hospital.

The Outspoken podcast isn’t in my regular rotation of podcasts when I’m home.  I catch up with it when I’m on tour, and always think I should try to find time for it otherwise, as she has a wide array of interesting and informative guests.  Jenks is a retired bike shop owner in Cleveland.  Her husband is a frame-builder, so many of her guests are frame-builders from all over the US.  They are generally an eccentric and entertaining lot.  

But she goes far afield of mere frame-builders with authors and representatives of all aspects of cycling—event promotors, representatives of bike organizations all over the US (Adventure Cycling, Ride Illinois), the owner of the Israeli Start-Up cycling team, the editor of Rouleur magazine, the man behind the Horton collection of cycling memorabilia, the Washington D.C. representative of People for Bikes.  Her latest was with Don DiCostanzo, the entrepreneur behind the two hundred stores of the Pedego e-bike chain, a guy who got his start in the automotive business and saw an opportunity with e-transport.  

Without a cycling background or consciousness he was oblivious to the “S” trademark of Specialized, its version of Nike’s swoosh.  He had no idea what a store near him was selling that simply identified itself with that “S.”  He cited that as an example of how insular the bike industry is, as if it is a cosy little club, which prevents it from expanding its numbers.  

He’s been teaching a collegiate marketing class for over five years.  He always asks his students to name a bicycle brand.  Few know anything other than Schwinn with eighty per cent of each class without fail offering it as their choice, a brand whose time is long past.  Huffy comes in second with sixteen per cent, a third-rate quality bike scoffed at by any knowing cyclist.  A few students with cycling knowledge will cite Trek or Cannondale or Specialized, brands that would have much more recognition if cycling weren’t such a minor strand of the culture. 

Jenks spices up her interviews with exclamations of “who knew…how cool is that…you think…true that” and ends each show with the wisest of words, “Remember, there’s always time for a ride,” reason enough to listen to her.

As my time in Texas neared it’s conclusion as I approached Louisiana, marshy terrain and bayous began appearing along the road.  When I crossed into Louisiana on a bridge over the Sabine River, I entered a state of parishes rather than counties.  The welcoming sign to the state gave a nod to its French roots with a bilingual greeting.  The first town twenty-seven miles from the border, Leesville,  was a reminder that one was in the former Confederacy. It would be sixty miles more to the Carnegie in Alexandria, one of two I had yet to get to in the state.  Of the nine in the state, six had been in New Orleans, which I had visited on previous visits.  The other had been razed long ago.