“I’m sorry, Jack, but we’re going to be carb loading tomorrow night in preparation for a bike ride on Saturday,” Emma said as we buckled ourselves into her Prius. “We’ll probably be making pizzas.”
Sam and I looked at each other and groaned in mock-anguish. “Oh no, don’t make us eat pizza!” I said, cackling.
The joke here is that back when Emma was my boss and lived at the farm where I still work (sadly) in her absence, she and her partner and another student built an outdoor pizza oven that we used all last season for monthly community pizza nights and regular farm team gatherings. Sam and I would assist my coworkers in building, loading, and unloading around forty or so pizzas in the span of a couple hours. Many an hour outside of work has seen Emma, Tyler, Sam and me making and eating pizza together in large quantities—usually with Wet Leg playing in the background from Tyler’s bluetooth speaker.
This time, we’d be making only ten pizzas for a small group of Emma and Tyler’s Colorado friends, in their galley kitchen in Salida—one of many Southwest towns whose officially mispronounced name reveals a history of successive colonisations.
It’s a long four and a half hours between Salida and Cortez, where we had flown a few days earlier in a small, eighteen-seater plane to see our friends Mimi and Austin. Half the seats had been unbolted, and I had had the best leg room of my life as I watched the San Juan Mountains pass below. We drove up through the San Juans to get from Cortez to Salida: Mimi and Austin took us as far as Pagosa Springs, and from there, Emma drove us up through the Wolf Creek Pass to get us the rest of the way.
We arrived a day before Emma and Tyler’s cycling friends and were given the single guest bedroom. The four other non-locals spending the night before the bike ride would be relegated to the shed—complete with a Pack ‘n Play housing a handful of baby chicks.
Despite the large group and the small accommodations, everyone was in high spirits, talking shop about bikes in details far beyond my ken (my first time on a bicycle since 2015 was a few days earlier, riding the short distance from Mimi and Austin’s house to the local brewery and back). After it became clear that the kitchen could not, in fact, hold more than two people maximum, most of the crowd moved outside where Moxie (our hosts’ dog) waited beseechingly for folks to toss her bits of crust.
During our small road trip with Emma, I had had images of the sorts of feasts I used to eat in high school as a cross-country runner and dancer—but, as it turned out, carb loading for thirtysomethings is rather different to carb loading for teens. (I’m actually pretty sure that Sam and I each ate more pizza than anyone in the group that was actually going on the eighty-mile bike ride.)
Being a generally shy person around strangers and completely ignorant with respect to bicycle lore, I mostly stuck to the kitchen, doing preliminary washing-up and pizza prep. But as the evening wore on, Emma showed us some mail from a mail-based Christian ministry that has been sending her tracts and letters multiple times a week, and the conversation shifted from discussing bicycles to reading the amusingly ClickHole-esque language aloud. “OUR PRECIOUS LORD FEEDS THE BILLIONS OF BIRDS WORLDWIDE EVERY DAY,” read one page. “But, notice that the birds, leave their nests to go and get that food.”
Despite the early morning to come, we stayed up later than we meant, flipping through a tract titled How to Improve Your Life and giggling at pages that had, “HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS. Homes come in many shapes and sizes: apartments, condos, etc.” underneath a soft painting of a house, and a list of Positive Thoughts to Fill Your Mind With that included suggestions like “It’s good to have extra money,” “Happy because it’s working,” and “Include God in your finances.” By the time we all finally called it a night, I was in fact considering giving our address to the folks at Saint Matthew’s Churches so that we, too, might have entertaining content regularly sent to our mailbox.
“Don’t give them your address!” Emma called from across the house as Sam and I brushed our teeth. “They’ll send you mail every day and they won’t stop even when you’re dead.”
(I still might do it anyway.)
Jack Kamps (’16) has been paid to do many things, such as teach preschoolers, pastor youths, schlep things in warehouses, bake pastries, design curriculum, serve coffee, maintain gardens, and fix computers. Jack is currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary—though they tend to spend more time working at a few local farms, plotting a future cheesecake business with their spouse, and listening to/talking about the latest Material Girls episode than doing their homework.
