RIP, Darling

"In writing, you must kill your darlings."

--William Faulkner

             I've been working on the final revisions to That Hidden Road, which are due to my publisher by February 1st. This deadline, of course, is not the hard part. The hard part is following Faulkner's sage advice to cut those words, sentences, scenes, and chapters of our writing that we may have great affection for but that don't serve the needs of the story. Thus, I present to you one of my darlings, whose life I snuffed out yesterday. I used a pillow, so there was lots of thrashing around. Also, I wept the entire time. To ease the pain, I've also included some pictures.

"The Gospel According to John from Portland"

Somewhere in the Ozarks I met a biker heading in the opposite direction who told me that if I went through Farmington, Missouri, I had to stop at Al’s Place. The warm rain pelted us as we stood there astride our bikes, so I didn’t get many details about it other than that it was a biker’s hostel. I had forgotten about this conversation until late afternoon several days later, when—racing the rain—I ride into a little town and see painted on the ground the words “Al’s Place TA Trail Inn” along with two white arrows.

These stenciled announcements reappear every couple of blocks, turning me this way and that until I’m near the center of Farmington at the corner of Franklin and Liberty and staring at a two-story limestone and red brick building.

I peer into the windows in front, and all I see is a storeroom stacked with boxes and chairs. In back, though, there’s a black steel staircase leading up to a door. 

I lean Rusty against the stairs and walk up. The door has a keypad lock and a phone number to call, which turns out to be an office at city hall. Once I tell the woman on the other end that I’m a biker, she gives me the code.

Inside is a space that looks like a high-end urban loft. There’s a laundry room, a television area with two big couches, a table and chairs by a full kitchen, a big bathroom, a computer table in back, and several rooms filled with bunkbeds, clean sheets, and towels.

I call “Hello?” but no one responds.

Back downstairs, I detach my two rear panniers, my two front panniers, my rear bag, and my handlebar bag. This doesn’t take nearly as long as it sounds, but carrying them up is a different story. Because of the weight, I make two trips up the stairs and into the first room—the smallest, with only one set of bunk beds. Rusty comes next, hoisted over my shoulder with one hand while I grab the metal railing with the other and negotiate the rain-slick steps.
Once everything is upstairs, I take a closer look around. The bathroom has two showers and two sinks, and like the rest of the place, they’re spotless. Counting up all of the beds in the rooms, I figure that fourteen people can bed down here. More—many more—if some are willing to sleep on the couches or the floors. The computer has internet access, the television has basic cable, and the fridge and cupboards are stocked with pasta, sauce, crackers, drinks, and enough pots, pans, and utensils to cook just about anything.

I take a shower, and by the time I get out, the skies have opened up and the earlier drizzle is now a bona fide downpour. I hear thundercracks, too, and the last place I want to be in an electrical storm is out on the open road with a big hunk of steel between my legs.

On the wall opposite the kitchen is a gigantic frame containing a yellow, red, and blue biking jersey with “Long John Silver’s” emblazoned across the front. Next to this jersey is a sheet of typewritten paper explaining that the “Al” of Al’s Place is Al Dziewa, an avid biker who owned a Long John Silver’s in town. In 2003, just like me, he was diagnosed with cancer, and in 2005, the year I was cancer-free for two years, he died at the age of forty-nine. Some friends on the city council voted to turn this building, a 140-year-old decommissioned county jail, into a biker’s hostel.

           

             I poke around some more and find a sheet on the wall by the door labeled “Al’s Rules.” The only one that gives me pause reads “ABSOLUTELY no bikes upstairs. Please lock your bikes in the storeroom downstairs with the key provided.” To the right is a key attached to a wooden dowel. I glance into my room, where Rusty is propped up against the back wall.

I look out into the rain and tell myself that I’ll lock Rusty up when the rain lifts. I don’t think Al would mind.

***

After the rain stops about an hour later, I don’t move Rusty, but I do walk a few blocks to take a look around Farmington and get something to eat. By the time I get back, two more bikers are there. Alan from New Zealand and John from Portland. Both are riding the TransAmerica Trail, but in opposite directions. After the introductions, Alan goes back to checking his email at the computer down the hall and John joins me by the TV area. He looks to be about fifty, and he’s wrist-deep into a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

“My son tells me I need to eat one of these every couple of days and drink a half gallon of juice every night,” he says.

Over the next hour, I get to hear much more about John’s son and his wealth of knowledge about bike touring. I hear all of his son’s tips about nutrition. I hear all about why his son believes that touring with a trailer—as John is doing—is far superior to touring with panniers. Emboldened by his son’s obvious authority in all matters bicycling, John issues some authoritative statements of his own regarding the importance of sticking exactly to the TA Trail as opposed to “cheating” by finding shortcuts. He also asks me no less than three times what my name is. Now I don’t claim to be a memorable guy, but I’ve never had problems with people forgetting my unusual name. I’m convinced that he’s trying to establish some weird kind of dominance in the conversation.

I turn on the television and find ESPN.

“You’re not going to tell me that you miss TV, are you?”

I just look at him.

“God, getting away from all that has been one of the true blessings of touring. My son told me how much I’d appreciate being out on the road, but I had no idea.”

The SportsCenter guys are sitting down with LeBron James, who plans to announce what team he’ll be playing with next year. “You like basketball, John?”

“Do I like basketball?” he says, looking thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “Now that’s an interesting question…”

He doesn’t say anything else for a good fifteen seconds. I figure that as long as I keep looking at him expectantly, he’s going to keep quiet, so I turn back to the television.

“Well,” he says. “I used to do some IT work for the Blazers, and let’s just say that I had some insights into the sport.”

Or let’s not, I think. Better yet, why don’t you jam some ice cream into your ear? Or does your son not recommend that?

I gesture at the TV.

“Watch,” I say, “they’ll take what should be a five-second statement and stretch it into an hour.”

“Oh, he won’t say anything,” John announces.

“Yeah, it’s a special show for him to make his statement.”

John laughs, shaking his head. “That’s not how it works. The agents are in charge of this whole deal. The fans just eat it up, no offense.”

Before I have a chance to hit John between the eyes with the remote, Alan comes over and sits between us. The talk shifts back to biking, and Alan is more than happy to ask John all sorts of questions about the road ahead. Ten minutes later, when the wire ticker on the bottom of the screen delivers the news that LeBron James will leave Cleveland for Miami, I’m tempted to jump up and shout “Aha!” but by then I’ve resigned myself to the fact that John is a douchey little peckerwood and I hate him.

***

A little later the front door opens and a guy in a suit walks in. He introduces himself as Greg Beavers, a member of the Farmington City Council. He’s one of the guys who helped turn the old prison into Al’s Place, and he likes to stop by to meet the bikers and find out where they’re from. Alan, being from New Zealand, makes Greg’s eyes go wide, at which point John quickly points out that he and Alan are actually biking the same distance.

“So, the only thing we ask is that you keep the bikes downstairs,” Greg says. “I saw someone’s chained to the railing…”

“That’s mine,” Alan says.

“We have a storeroom downstairs,” Greg says, looking at us. “Did you guys find that…?”

Rusty is about twenty feet behind us, behind the closed door of my room. It’s pouring again outside.

“Yeah,” I say. “The key was right over by the front door.”

I’m smiling at Greg, but I can feel John’s eyes on me.

“Yes, I locked my bike down there,” John says. “Is there more than one storage room?” he asks Greg.

“No, why?”

“I thought my bike was the only one down there,” John says, turning to me for an explanation. Greg’s eyes follow his. He doesn’t know what this is all about; he’s just politely following the flow of the conversation.

I should just say that I didn’t see the rule until after I brought my bike up and that it was raining and that I plan to take it down as soon as there’s a break in the weather—all reasonable courses of action—but before I can get any of this out I hear myself say, “Nope, I put it down there when I got here.”

John frowns and tilts his head as if he’s analyzing some evidence that doesn’t quite add up. “Hmmm. Wonder why I didn’t see it.”

“I put in the back corner.” I’m committed now and can’t blink.

Greg’s clearly not interested and wants to get going. “Well, listen…if you guys can think of anything else you might need, let us know.”

Greg takes off, Alan heads back to the computer, and I retreat to my room to get away from John.

***

I leave Al’s Place early the next morning, partly to stay ahead of the rain and partly to avoid having to talk with John again. Unfortunately, he’s eating a bowl of cereal as I walk out of the bathroom. He’s still eating it or maybe another one—as per his son’s recommendation, no doubt—after I get dressed and carry my bags down the stairs. He’s still there when I return and head to my room, and when I come back out with Rusty, he’s standing on the edge of the kitchen, nodding and smiling tightly as he delivers his final judgment.

“I thought so.”

Good News!

Just a quick update that I'm making in part because I have timely news to share and in part because it's been over a month since my last post.

So, the news. I received word just before Thanksgiving that my memoir, That Hidden Road, was accepted for publication by Apprentice House Press, and the fact of all this is still sinking in. AH is a small press that's affiliated with Loyola University in Maryland, and it's a great fit for two main reasons.

First, in the editors' wish list were "travel stories" and "memoirs of personal discovery." Check and check.

Second, AH has a story that really resonates with me. Here's an excerpt from their website:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process.

As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Evaluation & Development, Book Design & Production, and Book Marketing & Promotion.

Therefore, students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.  After students leave the courses, AH professors and AH student staff sustain the on-going operation of the company and market its frontlist and backlist titles.

Though I spend a fair amount of time writing and like doing it (most of the time), I consider myself a teacher first, and the teaching project of which I'm most proud is my college's literary magazine, Bravura, which is a much, much smaller version of what they do at AH.

So I'm looking forward to working with the students and teachers at this press, and I'm looking forward to seeing That Hidden Road in print, which should happen in or around next fall.

Next up is my deadline is February 1, when I need to turn in the final revised manuscript. So, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do...

False Peaks

When I biked across the country, my single worst day came pretty late in the trip. I was crossing from Tennessee into North Carolina on Highway 165, which is known around those parts as the Cherohala Skyway. My new friend Lawson—whom I’d met about a week earlier in Clarksville, Tennessee—told me that it was beautiful country.

And it was. Or I guess it was. It was kind of hard to pay attention because soon after I started out on it, I was climbing.

Obviously, at that point of my journey, I had done my share of climbing with a loaded touring bike. I’d already made it through the Lagunas in southern California, the Rockies in Colorado, and the Ozarks in southern Missouri. But the Appalacians—the mountain range I was crossing here—presented a different problem. Even though they’re not nearly as high as the Rockies, the roads are cut into them much differently—steeper and more winding.

I also had no real idea where I was. My phone read NO SERVICE almost as soon as I started up, and on my map, the road was little more than a squiggle through a big green field. No markers, nothing.

And then there were the motorcycles. Hoards of them passed me in both directions all day long, their motors chopping the air in rising fits until they’d appear either in front or behind me. I came to hate that noise, those thick tires, all that shiny chrome. I came to hate their riders, too, with those ZZ Top beards, leather vests, and thick, hairy forearms.

Okay, I didn’t hate them all. The ones who threw me a peace sign or a thumbs-up or a few quick taps on the horn as they passed, they were all right. But the others had to go. And so did their engines, which did all the work for them.

But the worst part about that day were all of the false peaks. I climbed for six hours, twisting and turning up and up, telling myself as I rounded a bend—panting, sweating, ready to fall over—that this had to be the last one, this had to be the top, the road had to level off here and start to drop.

But no. Each time I would curl around a wall of rock and trees only to find that I was still going up.

This day came back to me two weeks ago, when I met with a surgeon to go over my latest scans. After my fourth and final round of chemo, my doctor scheduled a PET/CT scan. The PET part of things checks for cancerous activity, while the CT would provide a picture of the tumor sites to see how they compared with the scan I had back in October, at the start of it all.

The PET was clear. No real surprise there; my blood had been free of tumor markers since the second round of chemo. The CT, however, was a different story. Not much change from before. The specialists involved—my oncologist, my urologist, and my surgeon—were in accord on two points. First, that the tumors were more than likely benign, and second, that they had to come out. Surgery. A big one, as it turns out.

The procedure is called a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection, or RPLND for short, and I’d been putting it far out of my mind since my initial forays onto the internet back in October. It’s an invasive, complicated, and, yes, risky procedure given the proximity of the tumors to a few important innards, like my aorta.

As my surgeon ran through the finer points—six hours on the table, maybe close to a week in the hospital, a couple of other details that didn’t make it through the blood pounding in my ears—I kept thinking about that road that climbed forever. I felt like I was on it again. Just when I think I’ve crested, just when I think I can start to cruise a little bit, I turn the corner to find another false peak, that there’s still some climbing to do.

It started to feel like too much for me.

And then I remembered how that day on the Cherohala Skyway finished up.

Things came to a head late in the day. I was on hour six of the climb when I saw a little grassy area with a picnic table off to the left. That was it for me. I’d had enough and pulled over to camp for the night.

I leaned my bike against the picnic table and changed out of my soaking jersey. Feeling a  little better, I unhitched the bag containing my tent and sleeping pad from the rear rack and let it drop to the concrete pad with what I thought would be a definitive thump, but it caught the edge of the table and rolled onto the soft grass with hardly a sound. The only place to pitch my tent was on a narrow gash of lawn that almost immediately became forest. A quick rummaging through my handlebar bag revealed the contents of my larder: a few almonds, dried blueberries, and a pouch of tuna.

It was overcast and cool as the day headed into dusk. A blanket of trees defined the contours of the rolling mountains, and pockets of mist were starting to form in some of the indentations. These were the same woods that lay just beyond the picnic table; I could walk into them and within ten feet the road, these tables, and my bike would all disappear. In a few hours the forest would come alive, its inhabitants looking for food.

I remembered reading that bears could smell food up to eleven miles away.

The road had been empty for a while. Did the police patrol it at all? Maybe a state trooper would rouse me from my tent in the middle of the night. Better that, I figured, than a bear looking for my nuts and berries and tuna.

My phone still read NO SERVICE. If something were to happen, I had no way to call for help. And under a thick blanket of night, even with my lights, escape might be more dangerous than staying put.

At that point in my trip, I should have been more immune to the indecision of the road than I was. I walked to the edge of the grass trying to make something materialize in the forest, some clue that would tell me if I’d be safe that night, but there was nothing.

I picked up my bag, not sure what to do.

I’ve got to get out of here.

I’ll be fine if I stay.

No, I’ll die if I stay.

It was six-thirty. With rows of mountains behind me, the sun was already invisible, and its remaining light was being swallowed by the long shadows spilling from the forest. In another forty-five minutes or so, those shadows would roll right over me.

I decided to go for it.

And what did I find? The summit of those Goddamn mountains that I’d been climbing all Goddamn day was slyly waiting for me barely a half mile up the road. As I crested the top, I took a deep breath before hurtling down—beating the bears, beating the dark, beating my own bonked out, noodle-like legs—to a little town called Robbinsville.

So I’m hoping that this surgery on the 17th isn’t another false peak, that there won’t be any complications, that I won’t have to go through another round of “insurance” chemo. I’m ready for this road that I’ve been on since last October to start to level off.

But if it doesn’t just yet, I know what I’m supposed to do. Keep pedaling.

Round Two

When I went through chemotherapy ten years ago, I kept a journal. Today, on the day before I start “Round Two – Ten Years Later,” I thought I’d dig it up and see what was on my mind. Here’s what I found:

Sunday, July 13, 2003

It’s the night before my chemotherapy begins. What am I thinking about?

How badly will it kick my ass?

Will there be any long term effects?

How bad will Nick and Tony be frightened?

How bad will I be frightened?

Will it even work?

I can’t dwell on this last question too long. It has to work. It’s important that I stay positive about the whole thing. I know I’m tough and that I’ve got a lot to live for. I also know that I’ve had it pretty fucking easy for all these years, so maybe I’m due for a little suffering. That’s fine—that’s life, and I accept it. I don’t think that my kids are due for any suffering, though.

When I think about dying, I think about the people I’ll leave behind and how devastated they’ll be. But I’m too arrogant—or stupid?—to think that I’ll really die. I’ll probably feel so shitty that I’ll wish I was dead, but I do believe I’m going to come out of this OK.

Other than surviving, I hope that I come out changed in some way. I want to learn something from all this, other than a bunch of tired clichés like life is fragile, you never know what might come next, blah blah blah bullshit bullshit bullshit. I know all this already. Maybe what I’m hoping for is some perspective. Or something about fear.

The bottom line is that I’ve never really faced a struggle, and I’m anxious to see how I’ll do.

Turned out that my thoughts were pretty on target.

There was an incident during my second week of treatment—a severe allergic reaction to one of the drugs I was given—that sent me to the ER and left me feeling so shitty that I did, in fact, want to die (a story for another time, readers).

I came out changed, too, and it had everything in the world to do with perspective. My bout with cancer set in motion a lot of changes in my life and led me straight to the seat of my bicycle and a two-month journey across the country. Since I finished that three years ago, I’ve been working on my book (That Hidden Road) about the ride, about cancer, about a lot of things. Now comes the tricky part of convincing a publisher that people might find it interesting.

And I did learn something about fear. Or rather, I thought I learned it but didn’t know until just recently whether it was true. When I came out the other side ten years ago, I told myself and anyone who was interested that I never expected to be that frightened for myself again.

Sure, when my doctor told me the news a few weeks ago, my first feeling was that I was in an elevator whose cable had snapped. But the shock didn’t last too long, and what replaced it was calmness. I thought that I was in some kind of denial, but the calmness has stuck with me over these weeks, and it has a voice, too, that’s been telling me You’ve been here before (well, not the surgery, but still), you know what you’re in for, and you know what you didn’t know before—you can handle a struggle. There’s no new fear here.

When I saw my students last week, I told them that cancer is a shitty thing any way you look at it, but one thing I took from it was self-knowledge. Cancer taught me something about myself that I suspected but didn’t really know until it came along to show me: I’m a survivor.

The Condition of My Condition

I’ve fallen lots of times on my bike, and it’s always the same. My tire catches on the lip of a curb or slides on some loose gravel, and there’s a sudden shift of weight and space. My body tightens and I imagine my face registers something like shocked surprise. The world as I know it—a carefully balanced ride from here to there—has radically and swiftly rearranged itself, and I’m struggling to catch up.

But that only lasts a split second. The thing to do then is understand that you’re falling and nothing is going to change that. Just ride out the fall and wait to land. Then pick yourself up.

When I heard from my doctor the afternoon of the sonogram and he told me that I had a mass on my right testicle, a weird calm came over me. I took a deep breath, heard the word Okay in my mind, and understood that I had given in to the fall and was waiting to land. Got it. A growth. So what do we do now?

My schedule immediately filled. Appointment with a urologist. Biopsy of the growths that the CT scan turned up. Insertion of a port for chemotherapy. Surgery on the morning of the 28^th.

Okay.

The big news was that this was almost definitely not a recurrence of my germ cell cancer from ten years ago; it was a new one—testicular. I’ve never so much as won a fruit basket in a raffle, but apparently I’d hit the cancer lottery twice.

But I’ll take that bad luck because it’s more than balanced out—not even close, really—by my good luck at having the friends I have, and who have leapt into action with a swiftness and focus that makes Seal Team Six look about as efficient as the DMV.

So with all of this in mind, I’m shifting the focus of this “Queasy Writer” blog (a title that is probably going to become more literal than metaphor). I’m going to do my best to update daily or near-daily in order to chart this new journey and the people who help me along the way. It will be a way for people to stay updated on my progress, and I’ll try to make the details of my particular cancer, its treatment, and (fingers crossed) my recovery as lively as possible.

The Evolution of a Page

Time has really gotten away from me. I can’t believe that my last entry was way back in June. Between now and then I’ve been to Chicago twice, taken a trip up the California coast to look at colleges with my high school senior son, and waded through armies of costumed fans at Comic-Con.

Oh, and I finished my book.

To recap, the book is called That Hidden Road, and it’s about my solo cross-country bicycle ride, which I made in the summer of 2010. It’s also about those parts of my life that made me think I needed to go on a long, long ride by myself.

I knew from the start that I wanted comics in the book, and I knew that I wanted to draw them myself. Problem was, my drawing skills were a little rusty and I’ve never made comics before.

As I drafted and revised the manuscript, I played around with some ideas for comics and eventually came up with three main types. Backin early December, I posted a few pages from one of these, which I called the “StuffI Saw” pages. Pretty simple idea—one page of six panels each in a more or less “realistic,” sketchbook-y style. The second group of comics I called the “Voices from the Road” pages. These would also be single-page comics, but have only four panels. The style would be a little more cartoonlike and focus on some people I met along the way who made brief but memorable impressions on me. I finished these over the summer. Finally, the third group of comics would be more sustained narrative; there’s a brief two-page story in the prologue called “Pre-Ride Jitters,” and there’s a longer (eight pages) story in the middle of the book called “Welcome to Springview Farm.”

This story covers the few days that I spent on a farm in Missouri—a farm that belongs to Jan and Bill Montgomery, who happen to be the mom and stepdad of my best friend. I didn’t want to fold that story into one of the other chapters; instead, I wanted it to stand on its own even though I couldn’t—at least early on in the writing—say why.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I decided to write a blog post that went into some detail about how part of this story came together, and I thought that the easiest way to do that would be to document the evolution of a single page from “Welcome to Springview Farm.” The page in question is the third of the story, and it covers part of the tour that Jan gave me of the farm and house.

In writing this and assembling the materials I used, I found it very helpful to me as a writer to step back and examine my creative process a little more closely. As I said before, despite my lifelong love of comics and the fact that I teach and write about them, I’ve never—until this book—tried to make comics myself, at least not in any organized way. So I thought I’d give a shout-out to several helpful sources along the way, including Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Barrington Barber’s How to Draw Everything, Bruce Blitz’s The Big Book of Cartooning, the many Facebook postings by Ed Piskor of his work on Hip Hop Family Tree, several Youtube videos by Alison Bechdel about the construction of Fun Home, my friend and comics goddess Mary Fleener, and conversations with students much more talented than I am in this regard.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the story came into being. I think I got the idea within the first hour or two I spent with Jan and Bill. They're incredible people who are also pretty wacky, and as Jan showed me around and told me stories, I realized that the written word alone couldn’t do justice to this bizarre and comic experience. I was going to have to tell the story through comics.

Coming to this realization was the easy part. In writing this book, I’ve found that the most challenging part of memoir comes in trying to shape and narrativize your experience. Fact is, there’s a lot of dead time in our lives, but story demands at least some kind of structure. To get there, we need to arrange, amplify, and discard the pieces of our experience and hope to hell that in doing so we arrive at a meaningful truth. With comics, one’s experience becomes even more fragmented—literally, by individual panels. Plus, the canvas is much smaller, and the words that make it in must be pared down yet still work effectively in conjunction with the corresponding image.

Because I’m a textual kind of guy, I started with a script, though that’s a little generous of a description. It was really more of a sketch with words—lines of dialogue loosely coupled with some ideas for images. The draft was long and rambling, and like most drafts, I ended up axing close to half of it. The section of the script that covers this particular page reads as follows:

Springview Farm is filled with strange and wonderful creatures…

Underfoot, the invisible barn cat

Goosey and Goofy (two llamas)

??? (pygmy goat)

A Watusi bull (image of me taking its picture while it’s trying to mount cow)

      Jan:  “Oh for the love of Mike, don’t show them that.”

      Me:  “Why not?  It’s nature!”

Jan:  “It’s Eskimo!”

Me:  “Huh?”

Jan.  “I don’t like the word ‘nasty,’ so I say ‘Eskimo’ instead.”

Inside the house is just as interesting…

Fisherman lightswitch

Stuffed owl that watched me.

Jan’s closets

      The Fairy Closet

      The Shower Closet

      The Memories Closet

            Closeup of Chuck and Dewey poster

Jan’s dolls

The events depicted on this particular page took place in late June of 2010, and I didn’t really start drafting this script until almost a year later (fortunately, I had my photographs and journal from the trip). Like most of the drafting I do, I didn’t pause too much to double-check details. For example, I couldn’t remember the name of Jan’s pygmy goat, so I let that go. I also didn’t know what kind of bull they had (just that it looked really strange), so I let that go and filled in “Watusi” later, after calling Jan. At that point, I knew that the goat wasn’t going to make it on the page, so I didn’t bother to find out its name (sorry, pal). As I wrote, I also knew that part of my brain was thinking in terms of comics. I had an idea about what to do with that bull, and I see in the writing that I had an idea for both the image and the word balloons.

The next step was to sketch the panel breakdowns. I  saw that there was way too much material here to fit coherently, so I had to narrow it down, to start shaping the experience into narrative. I wanted to make this part of the story unfold as a kind of a “walking tour,” but the big question was, What to keep? Two parts of this section jumped out at me: the Watusi bull and the dolls. For the moment, I put the dolls aside. I knew that I wanted the panel with the bull to be big—the width of the page. In part, that was out of necessity; there was too much image and dialogue to cram into a smaller panel. I figured the rest of the page would break down in a steady rhythm of three equal-sized panels per row. I laid out the panels as textboxes in Word, and they came out like this:

To accommodate this layout, I had to start this page with the bull scene, so I moved the the material in the script that comes before—the cat and the llamas—onto the previous page. That seemed to work well in terms of rhythm, where my introduction to the various animals would climax with the bull, and he’d be at the top his own page in a panel befitting his size and, uh, horniness.

Now, back to those dolls. Sifting through photos, journal entries, and memories, I recognized that the real “punch” of my tour of the farm was Jan’s collection of creepy dolls. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m terrified of dolls; it all dates back to an episode of Night Gallery that you can read about here.

Because I wanted the “weight” of the page to come down on these dolls, I reserved the bottom row for them. With three panels left in the middle, I had to pick and choose from the remaining details. I knew I needed one of Jan’s closets in there (she has an interesting array of closets in the house), and I went with the converted shower closet, because it’s just so Jan. I also liked the light switch cover where the switch became the naked fisherman’s penis (again, very Jan). It seemed like it would be an interesting visual to pull off, so to speak. I also liked that it comes right after the bull trying to hump the cow. For the third image, I decided on the owl. I originally picked it because my plan was to make it the third image in the row so that two figures—a naked man and a bird—would “frame” the closet. Only later did I come up with a better use and reason for that owl. I did a very rough sketch of how I saw the panels:

The drawings are intentionally primitive; my purpose here was simply to get a very rough sense of what’s going to be on the page.

Now I had to decide on text and put the words into boxes and balloons. By visualizing the “containers” for the text, I’d get a better sense of how much space I had to work with and how to compose the panels. By sharpening the text into the exact language, I’d get a better sense of what exactly to draw. At this stage, I started to think more about that owl and what I was trying to do with the story as a whole. I said earlier that I didn’t want to fold my time at Springview Farm into a prose chapter and I wasn’t sure why. In actively mapping out the story, though, it came to me that it was about finding a substitute family on the road. In fact, “Welcome to Springview Farm” is split into two parts, and they bookend the very central chapter of That Hidden Road, when I drive to Chicago to see my real family. Thus, “Springview Farm” serves as a kind of counterpoint to that experience.

Anyway, back to that owl. The very end of the story is the day I leave the farm. It was raining when I left, and I wound up spending that night in a tiny Missouri town named Houston. I called Jan and Bill to let them know I made it to my next stop in one piece, and Jan confessed to me that they followed me for a few miles in their truck, just to make sure I was okay. As I was writing this part of the script, I wanted to convey that feeling of being watched over, and I remembered the owl, stuffed and staring at me in my room at the farm. Now, the thing about Jan is that she names everything, but I couldn’t remember if the owl had a name. Indulging a little bit in the “creative” part of “creative nonfiction,” I decided to name it “Mama Owl” and attribute it to Jan. I mention Mama Owl again on the last page of the story. At this point, I knew that I had to move Mama Owl to the middle of the page, which is the most important space in a comic. The panel breakdown with text inserted looked like this:

It’s worth noting here that once I typed the text on the page, more revision was needed. I had to shorten some lines, move some of the dialogue around, and play around with font sizes. The point here—and one that I stress to my writing students—is that revision is ongoing and the writing process is recursive; you take two steps forward and one step back almost constantly.

Once I was happy with the page, I printed it up, taped it to my drawing board with artist’s tape and the help of my t-square, boxed and ballooned all the text, and got ready to sketch my pencils. To help with this, I had two main tools at my disposal. First were the many, many photos I took at the farm. Here are some of the ones I used:

    

The second tool was my sketchbook. I’ve found that it’s been indispensible in testing out different visual ideas and to practice drawing different things. Here are a few of the sketches I made while penciling this particular page:

  

In the original sketch, I had Bill standing there, too, but the panel was getting a little crowded. Plus, the dialogue focused more on a back-and-forth between me and Jan, so I cut Bill out. But not to worry; Bill is very present in the rest of the story. And he knows I love him.

The next stage was actually biting the bullet and getting the pencils in the panels. I decided that I wanted to have some fun with the style, so I made the top panel more cartoony and the bottom six panels more realistic. I wanted to give those six panels more of a documentary feel to them—like a camera’s eye roving around the farm—so it made a certain sense to me that the art should reflect that. After the better part of a day filled with plenty of erasures, here’s what the page looked like with the text, boxes & balloons, and pencils:

The final stage was the inking. This is where pencil lines get sharpened and more depth is added through line weight and shading. I’m not yet completely confident with this very difficult skill, so I turned over inking duties to my talented buddy John. He threw my pencils on his lightbox, inked it up (without the text), and scanned it for me. I then opened it in Photoshop, retyped the text (and, yes, revised it some more), and performed some minor tweaks to the images. Here, then, is the final product:

All told, there are over thirty pages of comics in the manuscript of That Hidden Road, and I’ve developed a newfound respect for the work that comic book artists do. I knew intellectually that it was difficult work, but until I tried it myself, I had no idea how difficult.

But it’s also incredibly rewarding, like any kind of creative activity that allows you to “disappear” inside of the work. Entire afternoons would evaporate as I’d get my drawing supplies out, set my iTunes to “shuffle,” and get busy turning my life into story.

Well, if you've made it this far, I thank you. I'd love any feedback on what I have here or on your own process of writing, drawing, or both.

Books and Junk

In southeastern Arizona there’s a little town called Quartzsite. It wasn’t much more than a blip on my map, but it looked like the only spot of civilization for miles around. Pedaling onto the main drag, I saw a big banner that proclaimed, “Home of the WORLD FAMOUS MAIN EVENT,” and that’s it. I assumed that the seemingly endless rows of stands selling a colorful assortment of crap—signs, rocks, pottery, t-shirts—were said main event. I appreciated how obvious it all was. It was only my fifth day out, but that time had  stretched into one long lesson about how badly I could misjudge things--distances, the heat and wind, my energy, and most of all, how exposed I would feel alone on my bike.

            My destination for the night was Salome, which was still about thirty-five miles down the road. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he mentions taking a bus from Blythe (where I’d slept behind a bait shop the night before) to Salome, and I tried to recall the line but couldn’t. As I headed out of Quartzsite, something happened that seemed to defy mere coincidence. I spotted a used bookstore that was open even though it was Sunday.

            The store, Reader’s Oasis, sat at the end of a long, gravel parking lot, and the building itself had a western-y feel to it. Wooden front porch and rail that, if it were one hundred years earlier, I might have used to hitch up my horse. As it was, I leaned my bike up against it. And as I did so, I glanced into the store and did a quick double-take.

            A naked man stood in the doorway.

            Well, almost naked. I was looking at him from behind. His body was rail-thin and resembled an old baseball glove left out in the sun too long. A cowboy hat sat atop long gray hair. Down below, the tiniest hint of string circled his waist and disappeared into his butt crack. He was talking to a guy wearing glasses, a collared shirt, and khakis, and I assumed that I was looking at some crazy customer talking to the store’s owner. I was more or less right.

            I could hear one of them speaking: “…I live a celibate lifestyle, but I still like to look at sex books. Do you have any sex books?”

It was the guy in khakis.

            “Well, I can show you what I have,” the naked man said, and the two walked to the back of the store.

            After a few minutes the naked man returned, smiling.

            “You look like you’re on quite a journey.”

            “Uh, yeah,” I answered, trying hard not to think about the little crocheted sack that was holding his junk. “San Diego to North Carolina.”

            “Isn’t that something?” he said. “Mind if I take a gander at your rig?”

            It took me a second to realize that he was talking about my bike.

            He inspected it closely, asking me questions about the ride, the panniers, what I packed, and how the trip had been so far. Somehow, as we talked, I completely forgot that I was talking with a naked man and we were not standing in a locker room.

            “I’ve got a Trek myself,” he said, pointing with his thumb to some vague spot behind him. “Once a year, the wife drives down to Yuma to do some shopping. I’ll bike down there and catch a ride back with her. Yuma’s nearly all downhill from here.”

            I felt a question forming on the edge of my mind, but then the celibate guy came back to the front of the store. In both hands was a stack of reading material that I assumed were sex books. If I didn’t already know better, I would have sworn he was some preppy grad student getting ready to write a research paper. The naked man left my side, and I took a look at the numerous flyers that hung outside the front door. One was bright yellow and read, PUBLIC NOTICE—STORE-OWNER WEARS ONLY A “THONG”…IN OTHER WORDS, NUDIST ON PREMISES.

            The naked man returned to talk to me, now his only customer. He told me his name was Paul Winer, and he’d been in Quartzsite for almost twenty years. In addition to being a nudist and running a used bookstore—a pretty good one, I’d decided after poking around—he was also a musician who used to perform under the name “Sweet Pie” and a cartoonist who still drew for the local papers.

            “I’m the second most Googled thing in Quartzsite,” he told me.

            “What’s first?” I asked, hoping that our understanding of the word “google” was the same.

            “The big gem show every year.”

            I was about to take off when I remembered the reason that I stopped in the first place.

            “Ah, Kerouac,” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy since last December.”

            As I maneuvered my bike back up the gravel to the main road, Paul shouted after me, “Keep your eyes open!”

            I pedaled back onto the highway and continued east, already shaping the encounter into an amusing little story to help me on the uphills I was surely heading toward. I was trying to figure out the ending—some way to work the sex book guy back into it—when the question that almost came to me earlier returned, fully formed. It was so sudden and so obvious that I actually shouted into the sandy, rock-strewn hills all around me.

“SHIT!”

            I should have asked him if he bikes to Yuma naked.

Why Bike?

            “It’d be a lot faster by car.”

            I was eating a stack of pancakes at the Coyote Flats Café, a little place that—together with the gas station a quarter of mile down Highway 60—was the only sign of civilization I’d seen in this desert for the last few hours. The pancakes were perfect. All spongy in the middle and crisp on the edges. They were so good that I didn’t even mind the imitation syrup, no parts of which had originated in any tree of any kind.

            The place was empty except for an older couple a few booths away—regulars, I’d gathered, based on the way they tossed names back and forth with the waitress. The only other person there was a barrel-chested guy who’d been lingering by the pool table in back, an unfriendly-looking bulldog panting by his feet. The man stood and wandered behind the counter, where he refilled his coffee cup and squinted through the front window to where my bike was leaning in the shade. He asked me about it and stepped from behind the counter. That’s when I saw the big silver .45 strapped to his hip. Welcome to Arizona.

            I forced myself not to stare at the gun as I told him that I was biking across the country, that I had left San Diego about a week earlier and was hoping to get to the Atlantic by the end of next month. When he shrugged and offered his succinct advice, I didn’t contradict him.

            What I thought was, Well, yeah, it would be faster by car, douchebag. But speed isn’t really the point.

As I was biking through Monument Valley on Highway 163 less than a week later, a Honda Civic blew by me at about seventy miles per hour. A few minutes after that, coming the other direction, a rusty white pickup truck crossed the double yellow line to pass a slow-moving camper. There wasn’t much of a shoulder to speak of, and both of these vehicles came close enough to push me aside with a blast of hot wind. But I was annoyed less by almost being flattened than by their need to rush. We were in the midst of one of our country’s most picturesque places, the land where John Ford filmed some of the greatest westerns of all time. All around us, ancient fingers of red rock reached into the azure sky, dwarfing those of us just passing through this land of almost spiritual quietude. And then some bozo would roar by, jockeying around a car to get somewhere—where? where?—just a little bit sooner.

I was annoyed at the flash of recognition, too. I’ve been that driver, hurrying to pick up one of my sons at school, hurrying to a meeting, hurrying to a movie, or just hurrying because I was angry at that guy ahead of me who couldn’t seem to find his gas pedal with both feet and a map.

But life goes by fast enough without us shoving it along—an easy thing to do when we’re insulated. In our cars, with the windows up and the radio on, we’re separated from everything with sound and AC and metal and glass. A speedy little bubble on our way from here to there. On a bike, though, there’s no bubble, no real speed. And slowing down does wonders for your perspective. It’s hard to miss things. Even when I was headed downhill or cruising along with a tailwind, I could still see every empty coffee cup and broken bungee cord on the ground. I could get nice long looks at a field of corn or dark rain clouds. I could stop and talk to a woman hanging garage sale signs—like I did in Blythe, California—or ask a farmer about how the tobacco crop was looking this season—like I did in White House, Tennessee.

Of course, life on two wheels is what you make of it. One afternoon, as I was working my way to Dodge City, a motorcycle pulled off to the shoulder up ahead of me. The rider dismounted, stood in back of his cycle, and gave a little wave. When I stopped, I could see that he was smiling.

            “Need any water?” he asked.

            “I’m good,” I said. “How’s it going?”

            He grabbed my hands and gave it a few vigorous pumps. “I’m Ron,” he told me. “Thirty years ago I did the same thing you’re doing.”

            He was twenty when he set out from Boulder to New Hampshire on his bicycle. Now fifty, he was retracing his route. He still had his original map, which we somehow managed to look at in the blistering Kansas wind.

            He told me that he’d turned twenty-one on that ride. On his birthday, he was in upstate New York, deep in wine country. He wandered into a winery, bought a bottle, and drank it by himself outside of his tent that night.

            “I’ll always remember that,” he said.

            We talked for a few more minutes, took each other’s picture, and then parted ways, but not before he gave me a hug and told me to travel safe.

            I took my time before starting again. Standing next to Rusty, I leaned into a stiff prairie gust—the kind that had been pummeling me all day—and watched Ron’s motorcycle grow smaller in the distance. I turned to remount, and as I did, I noticed two spots of color on the other side of the road. Bikers, both bent low over their handlebars, legs churning furiously. The headwind that had been slapping me in the face gave them a powerful shove from behind.

            When they were nearly opposite me, I smiled and raised my arm in a big wave. I hadn’t seen another biker in days.

            There was no way they didn’t see me, but they sped on by without so much as a nod.

            I’d like to report that they were racers sporting skintight spandex, ultralight bikes, and teardrop-shaped helmets. People out for weekend exercise, focused on the task at hand to the extent that a stop-and-chat was out of the question. But they were just like me. Front and rear panniers filled to bulging. More gear wrapped tight on top of the rear rack. At least three water bottles visible on each bike. Out on the road for a while, no doubt about it. Eyes straight ahead, locked on course, no time to share a few minutes with a fellow traveler.

            What’s the hurry, guys?

Yet Another FAQ (Plus a Few Words about Revision)

            I tell my students that writing is all about revision. All writers’ drafts are crap at the outset, and it’s only through careful, astute revision that strong writing emerges. But what is revision? One thing it’s not is proofreading; correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, changing a word here and there, maybe adding a sentence are all final steps in the writing process, and jumping directly there from drafting is to leave out the part that involves the real work. That work—revision—is like radical surgery, the kind involving amputations, resections, grafts, and reconstructions. And when you’re performing such procedures on something you love…well, it can be difficult.

Difficult but necessary. And the best way to approach the task is without emotion. Yes, you may have worked hard to write that particular scene, but that doesn’t change the fact that it might not help the story and therefore needs to go. The same might apply to a character you happen to like. Or the narrative point of view. Every great novel has its phantom limbs, which are felt most keenly by the person who did the messy business of removal—the author. My own approach to revision is best summed up by a line from my favorite movie: “it’s not personal…it’s strictly business” (if I have to name the movie, then I don’t even know what to say to you), and I’ve been repeating this line to myself ad nauseum over my winter break, which I’ve spent cutting and slashing material from my book, trying to get it down to a reasonable fighting weight of about 100,000 words. It’s slow going, but not because of the emotion; revision is hard work even without that.

So with all this said, I’m presenting another installment of my “Frequently Asked Questions.” One caveat, though. These short pieces might not be the “sneak previews” as originally billed; they may very well end up being deleted scenes.

Without further delay, here is today’s question:

“What Did You Eat?”

            Lots and lots of crap.

When I told people that I was going to bike cross country, alone, they pictured vast expanses of nothingness where I’d have to dig for water and forage for meals. I have to admit that I’d pictured a little of this myself. Chopping wood for a fire, clambering down rocks to get water from a reservoir, cooking up a nutritious gruel made with whatever roots and berries I could scavenge.

But I never cooked a thing while on tour.

The vast majority of my food came from gas stations or grocery stores with names like “Piggly Wiggly,” “Ingels,” “Loaf ‘n’ Jug,” “Shnucks,” and “Harris Teeter” (I thought that this last one, when I first saw it, was an upscale furniture store).

Also, I didn’t carry a lot of food with me.

In the morning I would eat and drink leftovers from the night before. A bottle of Vitamin Water, a banana, maybe half a bagel. Throughout the day at various stops, I would load up on the same and indulge every now and then.

I went through a Milky Way phase in Kansas and switched to Three Musketeers in Tennessee. About 90% of my gas station stops resulted in the purchase of a cherry pie. The Hostess version had better icing, but the Little Debbie ones were cheaper and came in a box that kept them from being crushed in my overstuffed handlebar bag.

In Arizona I discovered the single greatest beverage in the history of beverages: The Vanilla Rockin’ Refuel from Shamrock Farms. Sweet nectar from the heavens. In addition to taste, it had everything I could hope for in a road drink: calcium, vitamins, fat, sugar, and a shitload of calories.

And then there were Clif Bars. I always had one or two of these tucked away somewhere on my bike. Unlike so many other protein or meal replacement bars, Clif Bars don’t pretend to be candy bars, so there’s no chocolaty coating to degrade into a gooey mess after sitting in my handlebar bag for more than twenty seconds. I ate so many Clif Bars that I can no longer eat Clif Bars. Just typing the name makes me a little queasy.

I didn’t carry food, but I met a few bikers who did. One was a young guy heading from Orlando to San Francisco. Stashed in various places on his bike were two family-size cans of vegetarian baked beans, cups of instant mac ‘n’ cheese, cans of soup, a couple of boxes of rice and beans, a loaf of bread, and a huge jar of peanut butter. On top of this, he had a small cookset and stove. He was obsessed with caloric intake and kept to a schedule where he ate five meals a day, making sure that each one packed at least two thousand calories.

I met another biker who always had a bag of bagels with him. We bunked together one night, and I watched him work his way through half of it. He washed it down with a half gallon of orange juice. "Eating for tomorrow," he said, juice running down his face.

Food was sustenance, and I’d shovel it in like coal to a raging furnace. But once in a while it seemed to be something more. A bag of pretzels from a guy named Pete at a gas station just over the Kansas-Missouri border. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a mom at a scenic overlook in Tennessee. A bottle of water from a guy named Sam at another gas station, this one in North Carolina. Whenever strangers stopped what they were doing and gave me something to drink or eat, I’d feel a little less alone.

I met Alan in the Ozarks. He was in his late fifties, worked for the forest service in New Zealand, and was on his way from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Our paths crossed for two nights running. On the first night, I learned about how his wife had died of cancer, how he’d felt lost after that, and how he found his way back on his bike. On the second night, I dragged him through rain-soaked streets to a $4.99 all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. I was in the mood for some serious eating, and it turned out that Alan was, too. We very nearly cleaned them out. Between the nine different kinds of pizza, the pasta (with a choice of marinara or alfredo), a loaded salad bar, and stacks of crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside brownies, we racked up over a dozen plates of food. By the time we were done, our table looked like the wreckage from a little league team after its end-of-season party. We shared some of the stories from the road and our lives in that brightly lit booth, and in the morning we would part ways, Alan heading north to St. Louis and me due west to Chester, Illinois. We never saw each other again—I knew we wouldn’t—but when I remember our brief friendship, I can still see those steaming platters of pepperoni pizza, the heaps of salad and toppings, those plates overflowing with sugar-dusted brownies.