Day 10
The Kindness of Strangers
After we get some coffee in the hotel, but before breakfast, it turned out that Ned forgot Olga’s keys in the ignition. The battery is dead and we can’t get going. He’s on the phone with the tow company which say that, yes, they will jump start it, but they can’t charge the battery with a battery tender and the whole thing gets more and more complicated. He goes into the office to see if we can stay in the room till past eleven and wait for those guys, we think about walking to the nearest motor store and get a tender and just do it ourselves, but the front desk lady say it’s about 4 miles long and too much to walk, and maybe someone can give us a jump start with cables.
She starts checking with the people in the hotel to see who’s got cables, and in about 5 minutes, the motorcycle is surrounded with a group of elderly men all trying to solve the problem each with their own advice, equipment, battery stories think both Ned and I were feeling very uncomfortable, he was afraid that he messed up, I was hating the fact all those people were there to help and we both felt sort of silly for not being able to solve it ourselves.
One guy, in shorts and tee-shirt in his 60’s is talking about voltage and Ned open the bike where the battery is and they are all trying to figure it out, eventually the guy say “ I got a voltage measurer in my car, wait a second” He goes and come back with some tools but then they find the place where it’s written that the battery is 12V and that’s good cause it’s like a car.
As he and Ned are working to try and get the battery out or figure out if they actually need to, a skinny boy, maybe 15 or 16 in a black tuxedo is standing there looking a little nervous. The hotel front desk lady who’s sitting on a bench supervising the whole thing, say “I can’t believe he’s so calm” and look at the guy fixing our bike “His son’s getting married today”.
The guy’s getting more tools out of the car and jumper cables “I never got to use those on my car, he say, but I helped a lot of other people” He’s been an engineer for 30 years and in a couple of hours his son, no, not this one, this one’s not even legal yet, they had the rehearsal dinner in the hotel last night, we might have heard all the noise.
Eventually the bike is running and he’s saying goodbye and we wish him a happy wedding and congratulations to his son.
After they leave I don’t feel so bad about them helping us, even if it was an hour and a half before the wedding. That was one of the nicest interactions in this trip. Sometime asking for help is giving others something and not taking something from them. We all got a moment of friendship, he got a story to tell to all the guests in the wedding and we got a story to tell here.
Change in Scenery
We start today’s ride, even though we are both tired from the long ride the day before. The GPS draw a basically straight line heading south-east from Selma to the Shoreline. It’s about 5 hours ride, and though we aren’t quite sure where we are heading, we plan to stop on a hotel in the beach area. It seem like an easy day of riding, but the highway we take is straight and the land is flat and though it is an easy ride, the monotonous of the view makes it feels like it’s very long and very boring, I keep checking my watch and trying to calculate the time we still have to go, I sing songs inside the helmet, I try to put this moment in words, for later or remember the names of the towns we pass, but really, nothing seem to stick in my mind for more than a couple of seconds, then I check the watch again and see that no time at all has passed.
It’s the first time in all this trip that I just want to “get there” already, though I’m not sure where we are going, where “there” is and what we will do when we get there. We stop for gas and water in a gas station, and exchange short and snappy conversation about where to go and what to do next. We are both stressed and tired.
And then, all of a sudden, the view changes and we see more and more huge rivers and lakes. The air smells fresh, and chilly, not cold, just this certain salty openness, instead of the sweet perfumy flowers on the side of the road, or the smell of burnt rubber and deep frying of the freeway. We cross one bridge after another, all over thick brown streams, that reflect the beautiful blue sky perfectly. The houses becomes more and more far removed and disappear entirely as we reach a very odd view of a watery ditch on the road with green grassy edges, and then fields and fields of a light gray grass, almost like whitened driftwood. In the distance there are lakes and trees, growing from within the water and little straight ditched separating different grassy lots.
It’s really beautiful, I feel my heart that was worn down, tired and sore, just a second ago open up, tune into those new cold colors like it would listening to new music or tasting a new kind of flavor.
Driftwood Hotel
We go through a small town called Stacy and then a long bridge that leads to an island called Cedar Island, with houses made out of wood bleached in the sun and rains, a couple of kids ride bicycles and one convenience store, at the end of the island, there’s a nice blue and white hotel called Driftwood. We sit in the restaurant, tired from the long ride and all the new scenery, we eat and have coffee and look at the trip root and check different hotels options in the area. Aside of that one, there’s nothing there, and somehow, though it’s beautiful, neither of us want to stay. It’s so quiet and truly feels like the edge of the world, there’s something very poetic, but also really sad in that spot. As if a chapter is over and it’s time to move on, start reading, or writing, the next one.
We decide to go to the next point on the map and spend the night there. It’s a ferry ride, about 2 and a half hour by boat to Ocracoke Island, a very long and thin strip of land between Cedar Island and the open ocean.
As we wait for the ferry, the sound of the wind and the openness of the shore make me really agoraphobic. I just want to run out of there, and so somewhere closed and hide away from the way the air feels and sound. I go into the gift shop and wonder around for as much as I can, but eventually Ned and I go outside again. The sun is starting to set, it’s about 6:00 and the sky is full of seagulls and swallows and another kind of bird, all fishing and flying. We take pictures, trying to chase and catch the birds in our cameras. After a while I’m feeling a little better. Eventually the ferry gets there. The wind died down entirely, and the water is flat and still, they reflect the clouds, there are about 5 other couples crossing the water with us, all coming aboard with their cars. They take pictures and sit inside. It’s so romantic, that moment, just the calm sea and sun, we sits on the floor of the ferry hold hands and look at the water, both tired but very happy.
Shortly after, as the sun is almost all set and it’s starting to get dark, a guy that works on the ferry comes over and starts talking to us. He tells us about different places he traveled to, about living on Cedar Island, the difference between tornados and water sprouts and hurricanes he has seen and been through. We talk about politics and the army and Israel and the USA and other things. After a lot of days on the bike with very few words, it feels nice to talk a long conversation with someone, we all laugh a lot and he gives us recommendations for the next part of the trip.
It’s very dark in Ocracola when we finally go on shore, it’s more touristic then it looked on the map, and we see some hotels, cruise boats and restaurants around. We miss the turn to the hotel and manage to go past the village and ride in the darkness on this long long straight road that ends up in a barrier and another station of the ferry. An old guard comes out to see what we need there in such a long hour and then, hearing that we got lost, he comes back with a small tourist island map and mark our destination on it. He say “you be careful out there, there are a lot of deer and also, those damn nutrients, every day I see one dead on the side of the road” He talks about how he and his dog go hunting them and dog how the dog catches them and he kills them with a knife. It’s one of those strange movies like situation, and the guy’s so funny we can’t stop laughing at his stories.
“Those park rangers – they sealed the whole area, we can’t go there not because of those birds, but if you ask me” he say “those damn birds are not even native to this part, they don’t even spend the summer here” “If those birds are so extinct like they say, they should just take them somewhere and capture them and breed them” “But we go there anywhere, at maybe one, one thirty at night, me and my dogs, no park rangers then” he laughs.
We ride all the way back to the village where the hotels are and find our room and our keys and go to sleep.
