I Am Trikeman
I travel in a bubble of faith...which usually has as its immediate focus the topping of a mountain. Its longer gaze is fixed upon the west coast, but I can't really look that far ahead. Right now, it's still too much for me to encompass.
Today was a challenging, wonderful day. This morning as I left the Bikehouse, a woman on a motor scooter came chugging up the mountain - her name was Debbie, and she was the Cookie Lady's helper. She told me that June was actually up and about, so I got to say good-bye instead of just leaving a note by the donation jar. It felt like something of a benediction...I was off with her blessing.
After that, the rest of the climb up the Afton mountain road. Apparently, it wasn't finished with me just yet: about a mile of the same switchbacks I encountered yesterday. Then a long, steady climb on Route 250 until I finally reached the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The Parkway is a narrow, low-traffic road designed for cruising, not for high speed travel. It's closed to commercial traffic, so there were no trucks at all. I really wish that all of my riding could be along parkways like this...the character of the experience is completely different. The road surface is good, so I don't have to be on the lookout for wheel-grabbing cracks or potholes. The speed limit is a sane 45 miles per hour, so what few cars pass by aren't hurtling machines of incipient death.
And the surroundings are a balm for the senses. I stopped at the first overlook, with Rockfish Valley spread out below, and saw how far I had climbed since yesterday morning:
There was much more climbing to be done. It wasn't easy work, but the fact that I had climbed the mountain to Afton yesterday gave me confidence, and the surrounding forests, mountainsides, and overlooks provided easy places to rest and soak in the sense that at last, I was truly out in America. Oh, the towns, highways, and malls are America too...but they're an America that is so similar to where I've spent most of my life that there was no real differentiation, no suggestion of adventure. Instead of grabbing a sandwich at a Subway, as I did when I rode into Charlottesville, I paused at the Greenstone Overlook and made myself a PB&J. A much better meal:
After a long climb, with more climbing ahead, I pulled into a parking lot near Humpback Rocks. It's a 40-minute hike to get to the top of Humpback Mountain and its southerly valley views, so I rested for awhile in the shade, and enjoyed the view of the fields and the Parkway winding upwards instead.
It wasn't until I had passed Raven's Roost, the highest point on my ride, and glided down a couple of descents that I came upon a view unmarked by human activity. At all of the other overlooks, I could see farms, small towns, roads, antennas on distant mountaintops. At 20-Minute Cliff, the view was pristine. The helpful sign there told me,
IN JUNE AND JULY DURING CORN CHOPPIN TIME, THIS CLIFF SERVES THE FOLKS IN WHITE ROCK COMMUNITY AS A TIME PIECE. TWENTY MINUTES AFTER SUNLIGHT STRIKES THE ROCK FACE, DUSK FALLS ON THE VALLEY FLOOR.
The folks in White Rock community weren't in evidence down below, but there was a couple from Massachusetts on vacation who were taking in the view and the sight of me huffing and puffing into the turnoff. I stood at the stone wall with them and looked out across the variegated green that carpeted the hillsides to the horizon. We were high enough that we could look down on raptors as they soared over the trees far below, small brown crescents with beak-points of yellow.
Looking off to my right from 20-Minute cliff, I could tell by the serpentine break in the distant treeline that there was a road across the valley that cut up and over the next mountain. I was vaguely hoping that it wasn't the Parkway, but of course it was: a long, slow, uphill effort in the hottest part of the day, with frequent rests to allow beat legs to regain a little energy for the next attack. Eventually, I was riding along the ridge, bordered on either side by fields of wildflowers and grassy acres of what was once pastureland.
After several long, deep descents, it was time to exit the Parkway, and take Route 56 down to Vesuvius, my destination. I had heard stories of the descent into town, but while the Adventure Cycling map warned in boldface of a steep, winding downhill for the Eastbound route (which I had, therefore, climbed up), it made no similar mention of the Route 56 descent.
The fastest I've gone on this trike with the trailer is about 43 mph, on roads where the turns weren't very sharp and visibility distance was long. If I had let the trike go on this descent, I would've easily hit 50, or even faster...at which point the trailer would've flipped, probably taking me with it. I quickly discovered that pulsing the disk brakes was a necessity: they got so hot that I could feel the heat from the rotors on my hands, and a thin slick of molten pad compound formed on the metal, causing the brakes to fade. There were "bailout" patches of gravel every few hundred yards, and I stopped at each one of them to give the brakes time to cool off. The edges of the rotors, once silver, turned a burnished brass color, and stayed that way.
When I finally sailed onto the valley floor and into the small town of Vesuvius, I came to rest at Gertie's Country Store. There was a flat field of mown grass out behind the store, with a couple of small willow trees and a tiny stream, where the owners told me I could set up camp. The interior walls and ceiling of the store, like the Cookie Lady's Bikehouse, are covered with their own sort of cycling ephemera: almost every inch has been written on by people who've passed through Vesuvius, with names, dates, and destinations in every color that Sharpie makes. I sat down at a table and bought myself some dinner, then headed out back to my tent.
With the hard work and open vistas of the Blue Ridge Parkway bracketed in the morning and the evening by the hospitality of the Cookie Lady and Gertie, it was a near perfect day, more like what I was hoping for when I tried to imagine what this journey would be like.
There will be tougher days ahead, I know. But I'll try and hold on to this one, as a measure of possibility.
