How Not to Handle a Situation

"C'mon, buddy, what'd you dump?" the police officer asks me again, as I stand there, legs spread, hands on my head. He pats me down from head to toe, and everywhere in between. My eyes are locked on his partner, who stands idly by, eyeing me back, his right hand resting none too surreptitiously on the butt of his taser gun. "Nice one, Scotty boy," I think to myself. "Real smooth."

I ended up leaving Ann Arbor a bit later than I would have liked to, mostly due to errands, correspondence, and an enticingly comfortable couch that lulled me into a skewed perspective of the passing of time. It was no problem, though; I'm in no particular rush right now, and I've been riding pretty fast lately. I just wanted to make it through Toledo by nightfall, and I'd be fine.

Cruising through back country Michigan farmland, I found myself thinking about the miles passing underneath me, and my trip as a whole. I was impressed that I'd made it this far without getting into any kind of accident, especially given some of the harrowing roads I've been on with no shoulder and RV after RV trying to run me off the road. Evidently, it would've behooved me at that point to jump off my bike and find some wood to knock on, because not five minutes later, I swamped my front tire in a deep pile of gravel in the middle of an intersection. I went down into the gravel quickly and gracefully, with all the efficiency of a raptor in mid-dive. It wasn't too bad; my bar tape and right arm was a bit shredded, but, more consequently, also broke the camera that I bought specifically for this trip, thus reinforcing my belief (for the fifth time now) that I am simply not meant to own digital cameras.

I picked myself up, reattached my saddlebags, straightened my handlebars, and walked to a nearby graveyard to sit under a tree for a spell and wait out the coming nausea (I've found that whenever I get a strong rush of adrenaline from something bad, it's quickly followed by feeling sick to my stomach). By the time I'd sufficiently recouped myself and was ready to get back on the road, I'd noticed that a little more than an hour had slipped by because of my stupid wreck. I looked at the map, and quickly realized that this would likely put me smack dab in the middle of Toledo by the day's end, which was most undesirable (finding a good place to camp in big cities is generally challenging). I noticed a state park just past the edge of town on the shore of Lake Erie, and decided to set my sites for that.

I pedaled and pedaled, doing my best to emulate the wind, that omnipresent antagonist of cyclists everywhere. As I entered the outskirts of town, though, with a rapidly dropping sun and its waning light at my back, I realized no, I would not be making it out of Toledo tonight. Having just crossed the border into Ohio, I didn't yet have a state map, and thus no knowledge of the layout of the town. I decided to aim for the waterfront, reasoning that I would likely find some park along its edge if I followed it long enough. My reasoning led me into the heart of the industrial district, reeking of a fetid, toxic soup of ag/industry runoff (though in retrospect, the whole town actually smells that way). Miraculously enough, though, sandwiched between the factories and the lake was a small neighborhood of projects, with a couple of adjacent parks. Success!

I pulled into a parking lot that turned into a mooring dock at the far end, and was bordered by a swath of trees. I found myself a suitably acceptable place tucked well back in the bushes, set up my sleeping space, grabbed my headlamp, my book and a beer, and headed back to the waterfront. I took a bench overlooking the water just in time to see the sunset. In my last hour of riding, I'd been pushing hard and fast just to get to this little spot, and I was exhausted. Oh, how good it was to just sit.

I sat there until dusk had passed, and the stars began to appear. Everyone else had already pulled their boats out of the water and gone home; even the bats had come and gone. I sat on the bench reading and nursing my beer, when my tiredness really began to hit home; it was time for bed.

I got up and started walking across the parking lot back to my bushes. As I was walking, though, I noticed a car's headlights behind me, beginning to pull into the lot. I continued walking forward, but as they got closer, decided it would not be a good idea for me to disappear into the bushes in clear view of another person. Instead, I decided to veer a little to my right, taking aim for a Port-a-Potty that was just ahead of me. Just as I arrived at it, the car pulled around to the side of it, and right as I was opening the door, I noticed it was a police van. For some inexplicable reason, I still continued on into the bathroom, and as the door shut behind me, the thought sank into me like a ton of brick: "Oh, shit. I just did about the stupidest thing I could've." I immediately walked right back out of the bathroom, but it was too late. Two officers were rapidly walking toward me, their flashlights out and directly in my eyes.

"What'd you dump in there?" the first cop asked me immediately.

"I promise you, nothing." I reply weakly.

"Put your hands on your head, please," he instructed, with superfluous courtesy.

"Any poky objects or anything that could hurt me on you?" he asked. Except for the book in my hand and the (cringe) open beer in my pocket, I don't have anything on me: no money, no i.d., everything is back, out of sight and out of reach, in the trees. I realize the difficulty of the situation; without anything to identify myself or verify my story, I need to somehow convince the cops to let me wander off into the bushes, after just making myself appear suspiciously criminal. Much like my collection of lost or ruined digital cameras, this was the fifth time on this trip that I've had to deal with the police, and I like to think that I know how to conduct myself. These, however, were cops on the beat in the projects of a crappy city, and, though I had none to offer, knew they would take no guff.

He had me take off my shoes, not so much to search them, I suspect, but more to prevent an unlikely attempt to run. I got to work explaining myself, how I'm just passing through (quite true), how I was planning on camping out (quite true), how all my stuff was back in the bushes (quite true), how I would never try and camp somewhere if I thought it was illegal (not quite true), how, excepting the half-drunk bottle of beer in my pocket, I didn't have any drugs (quite true). They ran my info through their system, and it came back to them squeaky clean (of course). They absolutely did not believe me that I didn't dump something in the bathroom, but they had no evidence to go on. They promptly evicted me from the park, as well as all other city parks, but, most pleasantly, did not give me so much as a warning for being in the park after it was closed, for having an open container of alcohol, or for camping illegally. They waited while I disappeared into the trees to gather my belongings, and followed me until they saw I was out of the park and back on my way down the street.

As soon as they were out of sight, I stopped to evaluate my situation. I resigned myself to riding all the rest of the way through the city and to the state park I had originally hoped for (another eighteen miles), when I noticed that my rear flasher had just run out of batteries, and I had no replacements.

"That's it," I thought, "I'm not going anywhere tonight." I promptly ducked right back in to a park that was adjacent to the first one, and quickly buried myself back along a tree line, this time a little farther away from the parking lot. As I drift off to sleep, the smell of rotting sewage wafting on the wind, I ran through the laundry list of the day: bike wreck, broken camera, hassled by cops, evicted, lost my beer, no tail light. Knowing full well that that whole stupid experience was nobody's fault but my own, I couldn't help but think, "Man, Toledo sucks."