Riding to Mexico on a Bicycle Made of Trash

We start with a spiel that will become familiar: that we are on our way to Mexico to donate our bicycles to workers in Matamoros. Harvey offers to take us to the community center for the night, a big hall with a bar and some outdoor pavilions next to a large field. Lined along the edge are at least eight gas cookers, big enough to boil a cauldron over, and some wheeled barbecue smokers — the kind you see all over Texas. We head to the pavilion, start setting up camp and use the sinks to wash some of our clothing with a washboard brought along by Stephen Williams, a 27-year-old rider from Missouri we called “Ugg”.

Soon Harvey arrives, after apparently notifying most of the town. Pickup truck after pickup truck drives up to say hello, see the to-do and talk to Harvey as he makes calls to get the lights turned on and the gas cookers fired up.

His wife soon shows up with packages of homemade venison sausage — the fruit of Harvey’s hunting — and we all eat what feels like a royal feast, sitting around the tables getting to know each other and our hosts for the evening. There’s nothing like biking nearly 40 miles in the rolling hills to work up an appetite.

It’s a reception we didn’t expect in small-town Texas, but we find this sort of response everywhere we go.

January 8, 2009 — Day Five, 187.1 miles — Mathis, Texas

Yesterday’s 40-mile ride into Pettus was one of the hardest days yet. Four days in and the hills and headwinds had been wearing us all down, but after Pettus, the land started to flatten out, dipping into the edges of the Rio Grande Valley.

Everywhere we’ve been the roads have been littered with beer cans, bottles and plastic bags. We start playing a game today, like the “I spy” game bored children might play on a long drive. We shout out the new pieces of litter we see, each of us trying to notice the most absurd item possible. We start collecting too.

Steve finds a red bow tie and quickly puts it on, posing for a picture. Roy picks up a faded fake carnation and ties it to his handlebars. Josh scores a pair of rain pants and some Dickies jeans, while Joe finds a white, rubber-coated dish rack that he mounts to his handlebars so he can browse his Spanish phrase book while riding the flat, straight stretches of road. It seems as if every other mile produces something useful as well, like a length of climbing rope, a bungee cord or miscellaneous nuts and bolts that can be used to fix loose parts.

At nearly every stop, Ugg pulls boxes of goodies from the dumpsters behind gas stations and grocery stores. His latest haul produces a cardboard box full of Oreos, vanilla wafers, fudge-coated marshmallow cookies of some artery-clogging variety and individually wrapped bite-size Snickers bars. Five days into the trip and eight days into the New Year and he seems to have stuck with his “freegan” plans, surviving without money and living off the discards of others.

Not only is there stuff up for grabs on the side of the road and in dumpsters, but simply asking gets us leftover pizzas, hamburgers or whatever else a restaurant might otherwise throw away.