Chocolate Truth?
For the first time since I left Yorktown, I have no cell signal, no data service. The steep mountains have defeated my cell antenna and amplifier mojo…I get an intermittent one-bar signal, but can’t complete calls. I haven’t even bothered with the EVDO modem, there’s no point. So, I'll write this in Word, and post it later.
I’m at my campsite in the Raccon Branch campground. Although I’ve got no cell service, I’ve got a site with electric hookups…but they’re too far away from the picnic table, so now my ride has become a rather expensive camp chair.
Today was a difficult day. About thirty miles, medium to medium-tough riding, and my legs are still reeling in the aftermath of Sunday’s 50-miler. I started the day with a pleasant round of gagging in the motel room – my stomach was not at all happy with its Aleve this morning. I almost didn’t leave, flopping onto the bed and thinking hard about my choices while waiting to see if my guts would stop warbling. But I knew what awaited me if I stayed in that room: all of the anxious nonsense that I avoided yesterday. So I left at around 8:30
As the day developed, it wasn’t the riding the made things difficult, it was my head. I finally got to do the Standing By The Road Surrounded By Fields And Mountains Yelling “Why Am I Here?!” thing. You shoulda been there, it was quite a...moment.
I had made myself listen to my Cocteau Twins albums…of all my music, that stuff is the most fraught with memory and emotion, both because of the music itself and because I’ve listened to it so often. It’s a music that easily transports me, fills my head and heart, sending me to airy cinematic places. I remember listening to it in the car on the day I left Queens for the last time almost four years ago, after I cleaned out my apartment. I was driving to our new house, beginning the whole adventure of home ownership and cohabitation. By the time I reached the Bear Mountain area, night had fallen, and I drove along Seven Lakes Drive with all the windows and the moon roof open, playing one of the Cocteau Twins tapes that were always floating around in the car.
And yes, today I thought of that night, as I huffed and puffed up hills, surrounded by rolling green Virginia countryside and watching the high clouds slowly pile up and break over the mountains like a cascade of darkening, high-altitude foam. But the music didn’t really send me into the past, and I didn’t really reclaim it as a soundtrack for this present journey. Instead, it just made me emotionally weary, to match my physical state. I wondered – not for the first time – why I’m doing this, whether I can do it. But I plodded on, and when I finally reached the forest, and the air became cooled with the scents of trees and rushing water, I felt better.
I’ve got the campground all to myself – there’s no one here at all, and the on-site hosts are away for the week. I put my $16 in the permit envelope and dropped it into the lockbox, as an honest camper should. I’m not isolated in natural bliss, mind you…there’s a road about seventy five feet up the slope from me. The car traffic and occasional logging trucks remind me that I’m not hiking, I’m triking, which means I’m always going to be near asphalt of some kind.
The host of a neighboring Forestry Service campsite stopped by an hour ago, to check on the site and take a look at the trike. We chatted a bit...I was still in my suffering climber mode, and he agreed that around here, anything with a trailer on it was bound to be tough going. “Once you get out of the hills, you’ll be all right,” he said, with an understated assurance that is much more obvious and meaningful in retrospect.
Later, I dug out some small bits of Dove chocolate that Pea’s father donated to the adventure back in May. They’ve been bouncing around in the food bag, enduring the same frying that I have, and are no longer quite the same as they were four weeks ago. They've sort of been melted, frothed, and re-solidified into an entirely new form of chocolate. Each one comes wrapped in a blue foil wrapper which has a “Promises™” affirmation-style blurb printed on its inside. The first one reminded me to smile at myself in the mirror. Um...OK. I opened another one, so that I could have more mutant-Dove chocolate goodness. The wrapper read:
Coincidental, really, like the fortune cookies slips that are so vague as to be applicable to almost any situation. And yet for me, right here, right now: appropriate, and meaningful, like the host’s blithely reassuring words.
