back on his way home to scream at us one more time. Then he screeched off, leaving us lying there, awake, in his wake. Lying there, I thought to myself that, yeah, he woke us strangers, but his yelling disrupted the entire neighborhood and disturbed his own friends, neighbors, and fellow residents of Hartsburg. As if to confirm my thoughts, I could hear the woman from the house across the street come out, let her dog run a little bit, and then bring him back inside. I wondered about her thoughts. Well, I’m awake anyway, I might as well take the dog out. Or I’m going outside, and if he comes back, I’m gonna really give it to him. Or Those poor cyclists trying to sleep; I’ll bet that’s so-and-so. I’m going to say something to his parents. He didn’t come back, and I did get some more sleep.
I
’d ridden the Katy Trail six times, eaten and slept in Hartsburg, Marthasville, and many small towns between and around. Folks had always been friendly, welcoming even. I’d never been yelled at, cursed at, or woken up in the middle of the night. One or two young men in one vehicle on one night may or may not represent rural Missouri: I don’t know. We’re probably different, but we find a way to get along. We rely on their cafes, bars, B&Bs, and ice water; they appreciate our tourist dollars, no doubt. I don’t talk politics with Dotty or Don at the Community Club Park in Marthasville, but as my African-American son napped in the pickup under the elm in the park, I know that no one bothered him, questioned him, harassed him, or gave him a ticket. Lying there in my tent, I knew the incident would come up in the morning with the other riders. I knew I would have to be able to interpret it, mediate it even, for the guys I was with. I would have to find a way for this guy not to be the villain, for them to see that, rural or urban, cyclist or farmer, redneck or liberal, we weren’t that far apart.
Lying there in my tent, I thought about the baseball game. Earlier that evening, after getting the guys settled in and hosing off my sweaty head, I’d walked over to the picnic table behind the backstop to watch the game. Two teams of little boys, about third or fourth grade, were playing. It was kid pitch, so I knew there would be a lot of walks, passed balls, errors, and slow grounders. The kid on the mound—not a mound really, but a white circle chalked into the middle of the diamond—was pitching with his arm only. With no lower body effort, he held the ball in his right hand above his head, pulled back a little bit, and flung it toward home. This wasn’t pitching so much as it was throwing; I wished he’d had a little coaching, and I recalled my days with my son Deion’s summer rec league teams, with Gary Kyles coaching the pitchers. The boy on the mound was big, bigger than the other kids, and flinging it pretty hard. His control was inconsistent, but when he got it over the plate, the opposing batters could not make quality contact. The noise of the crowd was clearly behind this pitcher and his team. I always feel a little bad at hearing a crowd cheer a strikeout, because while they cheer one boy’s success, they’re also cheering another boy’s failure. I was sitting at the table, taking all this in and processing the entirety of the scene, as things came into tighter focus for me, and I watched the batter, the catcher, and the umpire. Once I focused on the pitcher, and my eyes got used to the light of the field and the dimness of the picnic table, I realized that the darkness beneath the brim of the pitcher’s cap was not so much shadow as it was a dark face, and that the darkness of his arms was not my eyes adjusting to the sunlight, but dark arms. Yes, the pitcher was AfricanAmerican. Here I was, in Hartsburg, MO, rural mid-Missouri, population 106. I’d biked past two Confederate flags in the last hour.
17