November 12

Cold this morning, and stayed cool past noon. I was joined, shortly after I entered Mississippi by a man named Tim, who was riding a road bike, out for exercise. We rode together for ten or more miles, riding beside each other and conversing when traffic would allow. He does design work on AutoCAD for a shipbuilding company, and is Cajun, from the Lafayette area. He has two daughters, both university students, and a wife who also rides. It was good to have company for forty-five minutes or so.

I had thought, when I started planning this trip, that I would cook my meals on a stove I made by drilling forty holes around the sides of a gallon paint can, in which I would burn scraps of wood that I gathered from the roadside. That never happened. The only time I used that stove I gathered deadfall in the Islands Provincial Park. As punishment for removing those sticks, which should have been allowed to rot and help form soil, my stove overheated and I permanently blackened my pan. It is also hard to find the ingredients for a meal except in supermarkets. Country stores, as I have observed, are mainly convenience stores. I carried Sterno as a backup for the paint can, but Sterno is inadequate. It will not produce enough heat to cook a meal.

I ate cold food for five weeks, and then, may the saints of ecology forgive me, I went to a Wal-Mart in Suffolk and bought a Coleman one-burner gasoline stove. I've had it for a month, and I've spent $1.04 on fuel. Now I will buy an onion and a green pepper (bell pepper down here) a can of diced tomatoes with green chilies, a can of meat or a package of shrimp or fake crab, and whatever other veggies might appeal to me, and cook it all up in a 9" skillet with a folding handle (also from Wal-Mart).I have a pie pan that doubles as a plate and a lid for the skillet. Breakfast is oatmeal laced with trail mix and 12 oz of tea. Lunches are whatever I can get in stores along the road, but I keep bagels and trail mix for those times when there aren't any stores.

I leave a great deal of trash. It all goes into trashcans or dumpsters, but I produce much more than I would at home. And half of the trash I produce at home goes into blue bags or a green cart.

I help further global warming by staying in motels: towels and sheets get laundered after one use , heat or air conditioning in poorly insulated rooms is wasteful, and so is running a gallon and a half of water out of a tap before it warms up enough for a shower.

To my credit, I stay in motels less than a quarter of the time, and I use electricity only
for this laptop and to recharge my cell phone.