Teacher on Two Wheels

Tuesday 11/27/07

For the past few days I’ve been staying in Kingsville, Texas, a quiet town of 25,000 people surrounded on all sides by flat ranchland.  I ended up in Kingsville because I received an email a few weeks ago from a guy named Adam.  He randomly found my website while doing research for an upcoming bike trip he’s planning.  When he asked if I wouldn’t mind stopping by for a day or two to show him my gear and talk bike stuff in exchange for a few hot showers and a bed, I didn’t think twice before accepting.

Adam, a 25-year-old NAVY jet pilot-in-training with eight years of active duty behind him, has a youthful face that is framed with short brown hair.  Thanks to his healthy diet and the gym equipment that takes center stage in his living room like a grand piano, he is in shape and energetic.  He has managed to harness and cultivate a type of curiosity about life that most people lose in adolescence.  This curiosity, when added to the bubbling vat of humility, intellect, compassion, and life hunger that boils away in his soul, gives him an air of innocent maturity, a way of jovial bluntness, of confident inquisitiveness, that leaves you wanting nothing more than to understand him.

Above:  Adam in the best Mexican restaurant in Kingsville, El Tapatio

A native of rural farm country outside of Dallas, Texas with the accent to match, Adam told me about his childhood.  His grandparents raised him and encouraged him to pursue his dreams of becoming a fighter pilot.  The valedictorian of his high school, Adam made his teachers and guidance counselors nearly shriek when he revealed that he would be heading off to the NAVY instead of going to one of the four year in-state colleges that offered him a free ride.  He told me anecdotes about rural living, stories about coyotes (pronounced kye-yotes) sneaking up like cautious burglars to eat food scraps from behind his grandmother’s fence.  His grandfather made his money in the oil industry and now owns a handful of his own oil wells.  His grandmother goes hunting with her girlfriends and turns heads when she does.

“Ya know, I don’t mind Kingsville.  It’s small an all, but I’m used ta this sorta place.  Where I’m from, a Saturday night is basically goin to the Dairy Queen, gettin a cone, and watchin the cars go by.”

I grinned ear to ear when he said that.  

When I told him I needed to pick up ear plugs to help me get better sleep at night because animals like raccoons kept waking me up, he nodded and started laughing.

“Let me guess, you heard somethin like this, right?”  He made a moaning, squealing animal cry.

“Yes!!  That’s it!”

“Yeah, we got real good at makin coon calls, cause to hunt em, you gotta call to em.”

“You used to hunt them?”

“Oh yeah, people eat em, skin em, do all sorts a stuff.  I don’t like the meat though cause it’s greasy, but lots a people like it.  We used ta hunt em with dogs.  You let the dogs loose and the dogs’ll scare em up into the trees.  Once they’re in the trees, you pull the dogs back and make a coon call.  Tha coon’ll think another coon is in distress on tha ground.  It’ll come barreling down that tree trunk like a bat outta hell, ready to help tha other coon.  Once it’s on the ground, you let the dogs loose on him again and they’ll kill him. 

“Really?!  It’ll come down the trunk even though there’s a circle of hunters and dogs waiting for it?”

“Yeah, if you call to it right it will.  It’ll think another coon’s being attacked.  But you gotta be careful, sometimes them things can kill a dog.  I heard of one going at a dog in a river once.  Pulled tha dog’s head under water and drowned tha thing.  They can be nasty, man.”

While staying with Adam I was lucky enough to have a bunch of inspiring conversations with him and his friends.  We talked about things like religion, war, and traveling, and we talked in a way that was so thought-provoking I was left feeling both thankful for and frustrated by language.  On the one hand, words allowed us to vent our thoughts so they could be sucked up by others around us like a silent cloud of gas.  On the other hand, however, words that attempted to capture abstract ideas in the printed casting of their hooked and jagged letter nets, words like ‘faith’, often fell short in creating the uniformity of understanding required to build sound conversational foundations.  Without speakers being able to agree on certain key definitions of words, a frustration settles over a conversation like a wet blanket.

Despite hitting the occasional vernacular roadblock, we talked for hours night after night like we knew both nothing and everything.  We drew new ideas up from the cloudy pools of speculation that welled in-between sentences said with confidence.  We spoke without firing personal accusations or attacks and worked to make our brains function as a single array of mind, one that lusts for inspiration rather than satiation, fresh thought fuel instead of thought regurgitation.  We listened.  We left our brains tired and stretched.

I talked with Adam about his dream of going on a multi-year bicycle trip and how it fit into the rigid and lengthy process of becoming of a jet pilot.  He surprised me when he first admitted that he wouldn’t be completing his flight training.  If he chose to stay in the NAVY to complete his training, he explained, he wouldn’t finish for another eight years.  Starting his trip at the age of 33 or 34, at the start of his career as a full time jet pilot, seemed difficult and unfeasible.  Making things even more complicated is the fact that his grandfather has recently been diagnosed with cancer.  Adam wants to spend more time with him before his health deteriorates any further, and his flight school in Kingsville is eight hours away from his grandfather’s house.  After much thought and deliberation, Adam decided to drop out of the flight program and has requested to be released from active duty.

Above:  Me in front of one of the jets Adam and his friends fly

When he talks about his decision to stop pursuing his dream of becoming a jet pilot, he speaks like a man who has just left his partner and isn’t quite sure he made the best decision.  Seeing my bike equipment and talking to me about my trip, however, seemed to sure up his resolve.  As he asked different questions about my ride, I watched his eyes brighten; his new dream swelled and started nudging aside his dusty old one.

Above:  The bag lunches Adam gives out each Saturday

Adam started making bag lunches for the homeless three months ago.  He read a book that inspired him to do something positive to help others.  Each Saturday, he spends $30-40 on lunch meats, snacks, fruit, and bottles of water.  He prepares 24 bag lunches in the back of his truck after church and then drives down to Corpus Christi.  When he pulls into a parking lot in an area of the city where vacant lots lurk overgrown in the shadows like forgotten secrets, homeless people start floating out from the ether of darkness.  Some smile as they approach his truck, some nervously wave and mumble a hello.  Most recognize Adam and thank him for showing up for yet another Saturday.  After we gave out all the lunches we could and dropped the rest off at a local shelter, we made the long drive back to Kingsville under cloudless, star polka dotted skies.

Above:  Me in front of the cactus in Adam’s backyard