June 04, 2006

1. You pack up your trike and trailer the night before, pump up the tires, fill up your various water-holding devices, and go to bed at around 9 PM (in accordance with the Way of Leaving Early). At about 10 PM, an alarming, prolonged hissing fills the room as your rear tire spontaneously releases all of its air. Subsequent examination of the tube reveals not a puncture, but a deterioration of the valve collar on the tube, which is not patchable.

2. You wake up at 5 AM (again in accordance with the Way of Leaving Early), and the previous evening's meal has transformed itself into a rumbling bowling ball somewhere in your guts.

3. You stumble on down to the Waffle House in the steadily brightening dawn, eat your carb-heavy fuel-breakfast, return to the motel room, and yak it up. Not all of it, just a bit of it. Twice.

So, I'm in the motel for yet another day. It didn't seem wise to get on a trike and attempt to ride for 28 miles when I wasn't certain whether I had food poisoning, the flu, a really bad case of nerves, or a combination of all three. So I moved my campground reservation from tonight to tomorrow night, called the front desk and signed up for another night her at the Red Carpet Inn, then crashed from 7 AM to about 11 AM.

I'm a believer in the utility of dreams: they're an auxiliary processing path that can do some of the heavy lifting when our lives get intense. I haven't had any memorable dreams for several weeks, but this morning I had a couple of thick, vivid imaginings, one of which concerned Peapod. Pea and I were back at the house for some reason, and the buyer was there with his belongings and his tools, working on finishing the projects we could not. As I wandered through the familiar rooms, I found a painting on the dining room wall and thought, "Oh no! I forgot to pack that." But it wasn't my painting, it was the new owner's. He had just hung it in the same place. There were other vignettes of the same type, all conveying the same message in inexorable dream-logic: not our house anymore, not my home anymore.

There were ancillary nonsensical bits, like showing up at the Whole Foods grocery store up the road without any clothes on. But when I finally woke up, the deep tension that has been roiling in my chest and gut for the past couple of days had diminished somewhat. The panic I felt when I realized that I wouldn't be able to ride today had gone. And I felt myself, finally, starting to let go of what has been, and perhaps settling more fully into what is now my life.

This is the part of the journey that doesn't involve pedaling and, frankly, it hasn't been much fun so far. But: I expect it will improve.

Now I'm going to take advantage of my extended stay to get more work done, and hike down Route 29 a ways to another bike shop and lay in a supply of 20-inch tubes. I was counting on being able to patch several holes in a punctured tube before replacing it, which was the strategy I employed in the city...I once had a tube with six patches on it that I only stopped using because I got new tires. But this valve failure has me concerned - I can't patch that kind of damage, and that means that I'm down to one spare tube for a trike with two front tubes that may or may not be deteriorating in the same way as the rear tube.

Off with me! For tubes!

LATER:

I told you things would improve. Steve Roberts just bought me a beer (a PayPal beer, which means I get to enjoy it later).