Facing the yellowlight windows of a rural bar/diner, I come to the conclusion that I may be consuming the best basket of fries I have ever yet had. Cooked evenly. Well-salted. Even the portioning is right- enough to avoid dissatisfaction, not so much that it congeals into a ball of potato and grease inside my stomach. The trouble, of course, is that good and bad french fries are so close to the same for me (which is to say my bar is set so incredibly low that anything constructed of root vegetable and fried will earn points) that I am likely to lose this moment to my lifetime’s fry eating. As it stands, I don’t remember eating a particularly bad set of fries and, until this moment, I don’t remember a basket of fries that has so left an impression.
I should write it down somewhere.
A shadow passes over me: a vehicle rambling down the highway outside. Six men and four women slowly churn their feet at the base of a rolling bar. They look exhausted, hungover. One of the men anchors himself on the seat and vomits out onto the pavement. A woman steers from behind and a man in the center begins shaking a new cocktail. Hearing the rattling contraption outside, the owner/cook of the restaurant I watch from steps out to the porch to take a look for himself. He spits casually into the gravel parking lot and shakes his head.
It’s a party bike, hundreds of miles away from any city that should support one. I’ve been waiting to tick this one off my list- not at all an easy thing to find and, knowing my luck, an easy enough thing to lose. I stuff the rest of the fries into my mouth and wipe salt and oil into my jeans, passing the man on the porch his money on my way out.
I make a mental note to write about the fries.
‘With no official criteria with which to serve as a diagnostic guide, there is a good deal of disagreement regarding what constitutes a case of ‘The Boonies.’ It manifests mainly as a sudden, irrational resolve to remain on the Wayside- a sudden, insatiable need to remain in transit. What sets it apart from similar disorders (and the reason for which it is not formally recognized) is that it is as likely to occur in groups as it is in the individual.
A family, returning home from a visit to the country, will miss their exit, will miss dozens afterward. Night will fall and they’ll shake their heads and pat themselves on the back for their clever spontaneity, paying for a room in a hotel and vowing to return after continental breakfast. They’ll pile into the car the next morning and keep going. A city bus full of people will drive through the downtown of a faraway capital, the passengers thinking occasionally of signaling for a stop, but never reaching for the cord. The most obvious cases are those that occur among strangers practicing strange modes of transport, which is why the public understanding of ‘The Boonies’ is so tied to the party bike. These glorified refreshment stands are palatable, if not annoying, in the balmy, slow-streeted cities where they originate. But to see one attempt a sloping interstate exit? To see one shaking delicately on an unpaved forest road? These stand out among the lost families asking for their picture to be taken with unremarkable vistas and among lone motorcyclists, anonymous beneath their helmets and shades. These are the cases that make the occasional headline.
And so, ‘The Boonies’ is a disease associated with the party bike, where a group of four to sixteen people pedal together into the great American unknown, sustaining themselves on the sugar and fruit of expensive cocktails and never needing to stop for gas. Upon spying them, consider passing silently and with signals. They mean no harm except that which they inflict upon themselves.’
The party bus has made impressive progress by the time I catch up. I realize, late, that hovering behind will make my gawking obvious, so I limit my study to only a few minutes of ‘will he pass, or won’t he?’ They’ve been at it for a while, I’d think. Every bar attendee sports chiseled calves and a sickly, distended stomach that hangs vaguely between their thighs. The same man throws up again, a spray I avoid easily enough.
They’re straining, I realize, because the highway is sloping mildly upward, an ascent I wouldn’t have registered except that as I shift down I see a sort of terrible relief cross their faces. The sort of relief that breaks a person.
-traveler
