Interlude: Hitched a Ride to Garden City
Song of the Day: Elton John — Salvation
9AM: Wake up thronged by hunger pangs despite turning into a spaghetti blimp the night before. Construct a pre-breakfast sandwich in Lindy’s toastmaker-and-egg-poacher machine, an anacronistic and wondrously odd appliance laid over from the househould consumer boom years. Later devour heaps of Lindy’s blueberry glazed french toast, drink a coffee then top it all off with more buttered toast an an energy shake (Lizzie will describe her disgust with my shakes in mortifying detail.) We pile into Warren’s sedan for a 50 mile ‘booster ride’ to Garden City.
Warren explains the nihilistic vector by which once swift flow rivers have been denigrated by corporate irrigation schemes supplying farmlands for GMO cornfields, only to produce corn-based cattle feed, which in consequent turn half-nurtures sickly, stagnant cattle, the sorry subjects of mass-scale production of beef (and toxic soils.) Further still down the overproduction/overconsumption chain, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water must be sprayed on the megatons of unfertile, chemical-adled manure lying idle in the parched fields, in order to prevent dust storms of pure cowshit from becoming a permanent feature of the air (it’s apparently OK as an intermittent occurence, says the ETA.)
As Marx and Dickens each observed so long ago, it doesn’t have to be this way: an active and nefarious distortion of public interest is required to keep such destructiveness in motion.
In Garden City we enjoy a prolonged lunch with Lindy and Warren at Traditions, an old-fashioned malts and melts diner. Lizzie and I are visibly faded from accomplishing 295 miles in three ‘working’ days. We part ways with our Warm Showers friends and head over to the main street bike shop — what will transpire there?
