Taken from journal entry for Friday 11/2/07
On Wednesday I met up with Dick and Anita Taylor, long distance cyclists I found through Warmshowers. When I rang Dick to see if it would be OK for me to pay him a visit, he had literally just pulled into his driveway after completing a cross-country bicycle trip with his wife, Anita. Although I only stayed at their house one night, I left feeling as if we had known each other for years.
Above: Dick, Anita, and me in front of a great Mexican restaurant
Dick is a tall man with thousands upon thousands of miles of bicycle touring experience and the calves to prove it. He smiles often, cracks jokes that roll so smoothly off his tongue you know he’s told them before, and has a gentle, warm disposition. Having retired from the Air Force years ago, he now drives trucks when he’s not traveling on his bicycle.
Dick is full of practical advice concerning bike touring and countless other subjects. While I was at his house, he offered to help me in any way he could with planning my route and tuning my bike. The enourmous amount of hospitality stored away inside of him overflows if it isn’t tapped by a guest often enough. Dick could never manage a hotel or hostel because he’d give the world away to every guest he befriended.
Anita is soft-spoken and speaks using concise sentences. She has a warm smile and wears her hair up. I know of no other grandmother who has ridden her bicycle as much as Anita has. The energy that one would expect such riding to generate in a person is stored in the radiance of Anita’s eyes. She taught math for years in Montgomery public schools and now helps manage rental properties with Dick.
In many ways, Anita and Dick seem like they are the perfect team. Anita’s personality perfectly compliments Dick’s (and in turn, Dick literally compliments Anita, frequently calling her Princess and the most beautiful woman). They share similar hobbies and maintain a few rental properties together. With 44 years of marriage behind them, they share a love that both inspires and energizes those around them.
As a navigator for the Air Force, Dick flew in over 80 combat missions. His respect for the organizational beauty of maps and his love for cycling are revealed in the way he stores and collects cycling maps, the way he catalogs the routes of past bike trips on his computer, and the way he cherishes bike trip statistics and the journals of other cyclists as if they were lines of scripture. And in a way, maps and bike journals are his holy texts. His life philosophy is influenced by his cycling.
When I asked Dick how he and Anita dealt with their troublesome tenants (their rental properties in town seem to attract house-destroying, rent-skipping tenants), Dick smiled and shook his head.
“One hill at a time. You can’t let it get to you. Just take it one hill at a time.”
****
I showered, spread out my tent to dry in the yard, and plotted out my route to Houston with Dick on his computer. When our stomachs started rumbling, Anita and Dick told me they wanted to treat me to dinner. I tried to refuse and offered to buy them dinner instead, but they wouldn’t hear it.
Above: A proper feed in Montgomery
Over fajitas and some dish that Dick and Anita order every single time they go to their local Mexican restaurant (the waiters know them by name), we talked about race, education, and briefly, politics. At one point in the meal, Anita tapped me on the shoulder.
“You see that over there?” she asked quietly as she nodded to a black woman snuggling with a white man a few tables away. “Very common these days. You didn’t used to see it, but now it’s fairly common.” Pause. “Our son is married to a black woman, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. What was your first reaction when he told you he was dating a black woman?”
Dick spoke up.
“We didn’t mind. The only thing we were worried about was how some other people down here might treat them. I told him that there might be times when people would confront him because of who he’s dating. So far, I don’t think he’s had any issues. But yeah, we didn’t mind.”
Anita told me about how she used to detest Black History Month when she was teaching. She felt this way not because of what Black History Month stood for but because of what it did to the students. She described students in her all-black public school as being charged with a certain type of energy during Black History Month. It was as if the injustices of slavery, for one month, took priority over every other issue in their lives and dwelling on (and blaming white people for) the racial non-equality they lived with became acceptable. She felt uncomfortable being in the school during this time simply because she was white and, in the eyes of the students, her skin color incriminated her, simply by association, in the race crimes of other whites throughout history.
Anita felt torn. On one hand, she understood the importance of teaching black students about African American history. On the other hand, she saw how that history, when taught in a certain way, could prohibit black students from moving on and overcoming the haunting tragedy of American slavery by encouraging them to dwell on the issue of race. When trying to teach students to be tolerant, to honestly believe that all people have equal worth in this world, how do you also teach them about the value of race without causing them to think that race divides people?
Dick chimed in.
“You know how we can wipe out racism in this country?”
“How?” I asked.
“We need to make a law that prohibits each person from marrying someone of his or her race. Everyone must marry someone of a different race. It’s easy to believe in prejudice if your family and your friends keep to themselves and don’t know people of other races.”
Dick smiled.
“But…the guv’ment ain’t your momma! We can’t expect them to do that.”
Throughout the night, he repeated this line about the government in conversation, almost like he was reassuring himself of it’s validity out loud. Dick doesn’t understand why so many Americans feel entitled to government hand-outs. He, like many people I’ve spoken to in the south on this trip, is perplexed by the unwavering reliance people in his town have on government welfare. When certain families have been relying on welfare for multiple generations, when able-bodied and mentally competent children are led into job-free lives by the plump hand of a steady welfare check, how do you teach people to work hard? Dick brought the conversation back to race.
“One of the problems we have here in Montgomery is that we have local, black politicians who teach black people that feeling a sense of entitlement is OK. They teach black people, many of whom in this town are impoverished, that being compensated for slavery’s ills is still a valid expectation. Money from the government? Fine, take it, the government owes you for slavery. Once one mall is built on the white side of town, black politicians demand that a similar mall be built on the black side to even things out. This sort back-and-forth bickering keeps people focused on race.”
Above: Montgomery’s capital building at night
We left the restaurant, got ice cream specials at the local Dairy Queen, and headed home. My brain, thanks to the night’s conversation, felt as bloated as my stomach. Laying in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about race, about slavery, about how black children in the U.S. are born with this immense load of history heaped upon their shoulders that is hard to cope with.
I think one of the things I enjoy most about traveling is talking to people about things that bounce around their minds with such frequency that they rarely get vented in conversation with friends and family. I doubt Dick and Anita often talk to each other about race, for example. Life’s more trivial and seemingly urgent issues tend to take up conversation time when we talk to people we see on a regular basis.
A stranger, a traveler passing through a place, has a certain license, granted by ignorance, to ask people about local issues and to get them to articulate ideas rarely brought to spoken life. For this I’m thankful.
