June 06, 2006

I’ve gone 233.8 miles so far, give or take a few miles to allow for plotting difference between the GPS and the laptop, little fractions of miles traveled in campsites and so on. That’s about eighteen miles a day if you do the math proper-like, which isn’t so great, but if you take out the four rest days it works out to a slightly more respectable 26 miles a day…still not enough, just over half of what I need to be averaging. That’ll improve as my legs grow stronger and the terrain gets flatter, he said hopefully.

It was a very short riding day – just over six miles. I was intimidated by reputation of the road to Afton, which is well-deserved. I also wanted to spend the night at the Cookie Lady’s Bikehouse, and the next place to camp after the Bikehouse was well outside of my range. I set out from the Misty Mountains Camp Resort not quite as early as I should have, figuring that even with the climb I’d be able to wrap up the day’s ride before the sun toasted my noggin. Also: my body just doesn’t do 5 AM. I learned the Way of Leaving Early from an old-timer who was also staying at the Mineral firehouse, an Ohio man in his 60s who’d been back and forth across the country two or three times via various routes, and who had pulled an 80-miler the same day I was deep-fried by a mere 43. But my Way will be slightly different. About an hour different, I think.

My first stop was at the Rockfish Gap Country Store, run by Ann and Paul, transplanted Long Islanders. There, I downed a Coke, ate some free peanuts (for the salt, you know), and bought two chocolate-covered pretzel rods, in case I needed a burst of glucose-laden carbohydrate that wasn’t a Clif bar. The mountain I was planning to go up loomed in the distance beyond the parking lot. I felt ready.

And I continued to feel ready. I didn’t really have a choice: one way or the other, I had to go over that tree-covered lump. As I got closer to it, I could hear the blatting of truck engines echoing from the mountainside as they downshifted on Route 250 and hurtled down into the valley – a route I’d have to climb up to get to the Blue Ridge Parkway. But that was tomorrow.

Today: switchbacks. Steep switchbacks. Crawling up the worst of them was like doing thirty leg presses of about seventy pounds with each leg, quickly, one right after the other. No cheating! This is a recumbent I’m riding, so there was no body weight to fall on the pedals, just leg muscles, pushing against gravity. I would go up a switchback, stop, squeeze the brakes, rest, then press on. But press on I did. I was surprised: this was hard work, but not impossible. At no point did it seem like my kneecaps were going to pull loose and lodge somewhere in my groin. I might have to pause every fifty feet along the way, but I was going up this road.

Then, as I was bracing myself for the 1.7 miles my GPS insisted I had left, I saw the sign with the red arrow and the spinning wheels of a yard-art bicycle. I had arrived! When I called the Cookie Lady this morning, I said that I’d be there between noon and one – it was only 11:30, and I was early. There was also a sign on the Bikehouse door, and I did what it said.

There was yet another sign on the door to the next brick house: “Please ring…I may be slow, but I’ll make it!" I waited for what seemed to be a reasonable amount of time, then headed back to the picnic table in the space between the Bikehouse and the large, cinderblock structure with a defunct gas pump in front of it that was between the two brick houses. I was early, after all, and I assumed that she’d gone into town.

After a few minutes, I heard a tapping, and looked up to see someone gesturing at the window of the other brick house. As it turns out, June Curry doesn’t move very fast at all these days.

The Cookie Lady is somewhere around 85, and as she told me, she’s having to get used to not moving as fast as she once could because of her stroke last year. She still does what she can, but has someone who comes in to help her out. This morning, she said, she was particularly tired out as the group of nine cyclists who had stayed in the Bikehouse the previous evening left it a bit of a mess. Just refolding the blankets and sweeping up was enough to put her in her easy chair. This was somewhat baffling to me – that these people, presumably adults, couldn’t muster up fifteen minutes to clean up after themselves. They didn’t sign the registry book either, so presumably they were either ignorant of or just weren’t on board with the whole Cookie Lady thing.

June’s had a place for cyclists both eastbound and westbound since the original cross-country Bikecentennial ride in 1976. Back then, she baked the eponymous cookies herself. Nowadays, they’re store-bought, but she’s still got the same welcoming attitude she had back then, with the added mantle of thirty years’ worth of tradition and appreciation. She spoke of her health, as older folks often will, seeming more bemused by the failures of her body than anything else. She took my picture with a pop-up Polaroid camera, and had to have me collapse the camera back into itself because she couldn’t do that and hold the necessary button down at the same time.

After a demonstration of the life-size animatronic Santa in her living room (laughing, June said he was given to her by a cyclist who told her she "needed a man in the house"), we chatted more about this and that: the dry weather, stories about folks who’ve passed through, and her strict no-alcohol policy. Again, an occasion to be puzzled by adults who can’t grasp the simple concept that when you’re a guest in someone’s house, you do as they ask…and if you haul heavy bottles and cans up a hill to drink at a house where you’ve been asked not to, in addition to being a lout, you’re an idiot.

After a brief sit on the porch, June handed over the key, on a leather fob shaped like a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam-style top hot. I went back down the concrete steps and let myself in to the Bikehouse.

The best thing to do right now is click on the picture to the left. It’s big – about 1MB. Once you’ve loaded it, you’ll be able to peruse in some detail the sight that greeted me when I stepped through the Bikehouse door.

Hundreds of postcards. Newspaper clippings. Photographs. Bike tires. Bike parts. Tools. Jerseys. Water bottles. Cycling shoes. Safety flags. Handmade bits of bike art, made from bits of bikes. Two small jars of water, one labeled “Atlantic,” the other “Pacific.” Volume after volume of photographs like the Polaroid June took of me (which I dutifully stuck in the current album). And, of course, the bike journals: nearly 13,000 names, all of people who had passed through the Bikehouse on their way to the the west or east coast.

Most of the objects – the tools, bike parts, jerseys, shoes, and so on – were inscribed in some way, tokens sent to the Cookie Lady by those who had finished their journeys. There was a pair of shoes hanging in the dining room that read “worn once,” presumably for about 3,500 miles. There were notes from cyclists from England, Australia, Germany, and elsewhere. A guitar leaned in one corner, signed by a South African fellow. It was in tune. In the same room, a tandem bicycle made in 1942 by a father and son to combat wartime gas rationing – it had been welded together from two separate bikes, and had a pushrod system that enabled either rider to steer it.

The aura of the place is difficult to describe. The Bikehouse is the entire first floor of what used to be June’s father’s house, and beneath the accreted layers of TransAmerican cycling history is a structure frozen in time. The fireplaces have been closed off and replaced by hulking brown gas heaters in each room, one of which you can see in the photo of the tandem bicycle. The ceilings are narrow tongue-and-groove planks or plaster, taped over where it’s cracking. The house smells musty and shuttered, even though hundreds of people sleep here every year. Everywhere there are notes from June, some embalmed in yellowed cellophane tape: Don’t open this window, because it blows the postcards off the wall. Use these two bins for bathing or clothes. Please throw leftover food across the road, we have lots of stray cats who need it. Apparently, cyclists aren’t the only wandering creatures she’s concerned about.

On a table in the front room are several bags of cookies. Not homemade, not any more. But the cookies aren’t so much the reason for the place, now. June’s actually selling the property – she owns her house, the cinderblock structure, and the Bikehouse. The sale has conditions: she can live in her current house, just as she does now. The Bikehouse must remain as is, and open to travelers. And when the new owners sell it, they must make provision for its continued operation by placing it under the care of a local cycling club or some other organization.

I ate from the well-stocked pantry: chicken and dumplings from a can for lunch, and – in anticipation of a long day on the Blue Ridge Parkway tomorrow – a big ol’ pasta dinner. I’ll sleep in the front room, near my trailer, because as welcoming as June is, this is still a big, old house that I’m alone in, and the front room just feels better to me even though the couch in the dining room has fewer lumps.

I’m beginning to feel like this journey has finally begun.