In my opinion, if you want to see America, and I mean really get to know America, then you have to travel the backroads, visit the small towns, talk to the local people and most importantly, go to breakfast every morning at the local coffee shop before all of the townspeople head out to work. There is no better way to burrow yourself into the pulse of a community than to share coffee and eggs with the locals at the nearest greasy spoon. You can position yourself as a wall fly, but quite frequently, you'll find yourself a part of, if not the topic of, all the conversation in the restaraunt.

When Paul and I arrived in Lockwood, we took a right turn onto Main street and were immediately greeted with the flashing lights and ringing bells of the train gates, closing off access to the other side of Main Street. "Please don't be a coal train, please" Paul begged. "Some of those coal trains can be over a hundred cars long. They just go on forever and we'd be stuck here for about 20 minutes. Everyone in town hates these tracks, especially the mayor. Boy, she's a pistol. A few years back, she had about every congressman in the state come down to Lockwood to check out this interesection until they finally agreed to put up these safety gates. Then she had it out with the trains. One time, she decided to stop a train for a couple of hours that was coming through town so she could give it a ticket for speeding. Can you imagine that? She stopped a train in town to ticket it for speeding. I guess she figured if she couldn't do anything to change the railroads, then she was going to at least take control of them in her town. She sure is a firecracker."

The train ended up just pulling a load of box cars and oil tanks, so it had passed within 5 minutes. I stared at the boxcars as they passed, looking for hobos and outlaws, sitting on the edge of the car, staring at the countryside and playing their harmonicas, but my search was fruitless. Surely on some boxcar, somewhere in America, this glorified image that I hold of young men, hopping the rails, searching for new opportunities, looking for adventure, still exists.

After the train had passed and Paul and I reached the restaraunt, we sat down at the table closest to the door next to a large, moustached man, named Larry. Larry was a contractor, as were most of the people in the restaraunt, and was currently working on a job replacing the roof to a farm house. Apparently a bad hail storm passed through earlier in the spring, so a lot of the houses in the area needed to replace their roofs. Most of the people in the restaraunt were all working on replacing roofs and came to eat early, so they could get in a good days work before the early afternoon heat made it too hot to work.

The topic of conversation shifted as often as the wind. It started out about the heat and the weather, evolved into how dry things were and how brown the grass was, then began to include stories of snakes that hid in the grass and then various encounters with snakes, which then turned to complaints about the forest service in Missouri (which they referred to as the conservationalists) who were releasing timber rattlesnakes into the surrounding forest, which then evolved into stories about bees and bee stings, and ultimately the migration of killer bees from Mexico into the states of the southwest and a small debate as to the role the government should play in halting the movement of the bees. As the regulars began to get up to go about their day's work, Paul insisted on paying for breakfast. After some insistance, he finally allowed me to leave the tip.

By the time I got back to Paul's house, packed up my bike, said goodye and thank you to Paul and hit the road, it was 7:30. Originally, I was hoping to get on the road much earlier, but before the trip started, I made a pact with myself, that I wasn't going to become a slave to the miles. If I found a field that I wanted to sit in for a while, I would stop and sit, if I found a river that looked like fun to swim in, I would stop and swim, and if I met someone who's company I enjoyed, then I would spend as much time as I could with them. Paul was someone I really enjoyed talking to and if it meant I would have to ride in the heat of the day or stop short of my planned mileage, then that was just going to have to be okay.

A few miles past Golden City, the land began to buckle and what was easy rolling hills began to become sharp turbulent climbs. The elevation remained consistent, but the roads twisted and turned and pointed straight up, then immediately pointed straight down. The pavement also began to shrink. While I had grown accustomed to wide and relatively smooth shoulders across the west, the Missouri Transportation department has apparently decided to cut costs by not including shoulders on any of their roads. What this means is you ride your bike right in the middle of the road. Usually cars are courteous and slow down and give you plenty of room while they pass, but there are a few vengeful drivers, primarily in pickup trucks and big rigs, that seem to speed up and drive uncomfortably close. When encountered by one of these drivers, your first instinct is to issue them a one-fingered salute, but you're quickly reminded that the pickup trucks are usually equipped with a shotgun rack and the big rigs have CBs that can call out to their buddies, so you just swallow your pride and keep pressing on.

Twenty-six miles past Golden City is the little town of Everton. I arrived around 10:45 and already the temperature was sweltering. In the center of town is a general store, camouflaged amongst the rotted, deserted buildings of what once a somewhat bustling Main street. I stopped to buy a Gatorade, but the only non-alcoholic drink was soda, so I bought a Dr. Pepper and a Snickers. After cooling off in the semi-air-conditioned store for about a half an hour, I walked outside to get back on my bike to begin riding. When I exited the store, a man in an old, beat up, red cadillac drove up and said "so you're the one piece of traffic coming through town today."

"I guess I'm the only one stupid enough to be out in this heat."

"How far you going today?"

"Well, I was hoping to get to Marshfield, but the heat's so bad I think I'm only going to make it to Ash Grove."

"Be careful on the roads out there. The truck drivers are maniacs. When I was in Korea, the local farmers used to bring their pigs to the butcher on their bicycles. They'd get the pigs all drunk on rice and grain alcohol then tie them on to the back of their bike, then ride down the country roads to the butcher. A bunch of guys in my outfit would then get in their trucks and drive up and down the road trying to come as close to the bikes as they could hoping that the wind they created would knock the pigs off the bike. I think once the war ended, those guys became truck drivers in Missouri. Guess it's not as much fun when you're on the other side, huh?" I just kind of looked at the guy and got on my bike and started riding towards Ash Grove.

When I arrived in Ash Grove, only 33 miles from Golden City, I was exhausted. The thermometer outside of the bank said the temperature was 100 degrees, the local radio station said the heat index was 110 and it wasn't even noon. I couldn't go any further today, so I decided to stay at the only place in town, the Maple Tree Inn, a bed and breakfast.

The Maple Tree Inn was on the outskirts of town and overlooked the surrounding fields where the cows grazed. The Inn itself was a grand Victorian house, built in the 1880s and restored just recently to retain the historical charm and significance of the house. Joan and Fred Ruth ran the bed and breakfast and rented out their spare bedroom to weary bicyclists and passing motorists. Even though the house was beautiful and it was the only place in town to spend the night, the Ruth's didn't advertise their bed and breakfast, for they only occasionally enjoyed visitors and the interuption to their quiet lifestyle that comes with their guests. "We love guests and the interesting people we have to come and stay, but Fred and I usually don't like more than a few visitors a month. We're not in this for the money, just the opportunity to meet new people," Joan explained as she showed me to my room.

Soon after being given a tour of the house, I bathed and was sprawled out on the bed and napped for two and a half hours. When I woke up, I went downstairs and out to the front porch to sit on the white, wicker chair that overlooked the fields and the cows. While I was staring in the distance, contemplating the heat and my lack of distance for the day, Joan's granddaughter, Jade, came out carrying a glass of iced tea for me. Jade was twelve years-old and a sixth grader at the Ash Grove school. Her father dropped her off while I was sleeping to be watched by her grandparents while he went to work at the Springfield airport. After handing me my glass of iced tea, she proceeded to tell me about involvement in band, chorus, church, science club, and several other activities. Even though I had just woken from a nap, I was ready to nap again, having been tired out from all of her enthusiasm. She then proceeded to tell me about her best friend, Ashley, and her boy friend who was going to be moving to Ash Grove from a local farm this Fall. I asked her if he was excited and she replied "he better be." Poor kid's not going to know what hit him.

A little later, Fred came home from work, he's an insurance inspector, and joined me on the front porch. Joan and Jade were inside making dinner as Fred and I sat on the porch, looking at the scenery and talking about the weather and life. Fred grew up on a farm in Iowa in a house that didn't have indoor plumbing until he was in high school, went to a one room school house where he was the only one in his class, then bragged proudly that he graduated valedictorian. He then told me the story about when his teacher was trying to explain diagramming sentences, "nobody in our class knew what she was talking about. She tried for a week to get us to be able to properly diagram a sentence, you know subject, verb, what have you, but all of us farm kids just didn't understand. Eventually, she just got fed up and said 'forget it, you guys are never going to need to know this anyway,' so we moved onto another subject. You know what? I never have had a reason in my life to know how to diagram a sentence."