June 30, 2006

I haven't written very much here about my more negative states of mind. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I tend to write less when I'm not in a good place, emotionally. And second, I'm not entirely sure it would make for good reading, which is mostly a function of how well I write about the subject. But it is part of the experience, so I suppose I should make the attempt, if only for the possibility of catharsis.

As I mentioned in my brief note yesterday, I'm in a Super 8 motel in Hazard, Kentucky, which is just about 30 miles from the hostel in Pippa Passes where I stayed Wednesday night. Pippa Passes, in turn, was a 57-mile ride from Elkhorn City, which is where my current low state began (I say "current" because it's been, unfortunately, a recurring state).

If you'll recall, I ended up spending two nights in Elkhorn City in a misguided attempt to avoid riding in the rain that the goons at NOAA assured me would be arriving on Tuesday. It seemed the right choice to make, especially after spending two nights camping in the rain. But the rain never came, so I spent the day alone in the dimly lit, grubby motel room, venturing out only once to hit the ATM in the center of town. Elkhorn "City" is really a misnomer...in addition to the motel/store/restaurant complex I was staying at, the entire town consisted of one stop light, two banks, a restaurant, a closed Rite-Aid, and an optometrist.

I have not yet been able to consistently adopt the proper stance regarding this trip. If it is, ultimately, about making it all the way to Santa Barbara under my own power, then I am way behind schedule, and every low-mileage day or rest day in a motel is an occasion for anxiety. If I do manage to put myself into the "the journey's the thing" frame of mind regarding mileage and destination, it doesn't last long...I miss my old home, I miss my Pea, and my psyche is well-used to obsessing and mulling over such thoughts until I've reduced myself into a near-paralytic, fearful mess of incipient tears and knotted stomachs. Well, just one knotted stomach. You get the idea.

The task I have set for myself is daunting. Not only is there the physical effort to contend with, which, given the terrain, has been nearly overwhelming, there is also the psychological impact of making the attempt alone. I've got no one to egg me on up hills, or to get my ass out of bed when I've decided on a single rest day in a motel and am tempted by a second, or third, or fourth. There's no one with me in the morning, no one waiting at the end of the day, and no one to help me through any situation that might arise on the road.

Wednesday's ride was extremely difficult, and not only because of the mileage. The folks I met at the motel when I arrived had sensibly left the previous day, so I departed alone, as usual. At some point during the early portion of the ride, a corner of my trailer cover came unsecured, and one of my ditty bags fell out onto the road, unnoticed. I discovered the loss when I pulled into a general store. It was a toiletry bag, but I lost my bottle of Mobic, a prescription anti-inflammatory that I cadged a supply of from my orthopedist before I left as a "just in case" measure. I lost my Flonase and my albuterol inhaler, neither of which I've actually used yet. The bag also held my earplugs, a pair of grooming scissors, a sewing kit, a bottle of Camp Suds, and my collection of motel soap. Nothing vital, but it was a psychological blow, nonetheless. I rode back along my route for a half-mile or so, but found nothing.

At the mid-point of the ride, as the sun was getting high in the sky, I stopped at an ice cream place at the intersection of routes 611 and 23. Not for ice cream - for their Pepsi machine. I've found that the sugar and caffeine of soda is helpful on longer rides, so I stop almost whenever I see a machine. I payed the machine its $1.25, downed the soda, and headed off on Route 23, a busy four-lane road with a downhill cant to it. After I turned off onto the next road, I stopped to get some fig newtons out of my pannier.

That's when I saw that I had foolishly left the top of my pannier open. My wallet was gone.

The crushing sensation literally knocked my to my knees, there in the gravel on the side of the road. I frantically tore through the pannier's contents, scattering fig newtons into the dirt, hoping that the wallet had just slid down into the bottom of the pannier. It hadn't.

Already getting tired from the day's riding so far, and still low in spirits from the wasted day in Elkhorn City, I knew that I had to turn around and ride back up that hill. I decided right there that if I didn't find my wallet, my trip was over. Obviously, I'm not much of a steely-eyed adventurer if that's what it took to bring me to that point, but it did.

As I rode back to the intersection of route 23, a fellow in a newer-model green pickup pulled up across the road and commented on my rig - desperate, I told him of my predicament, and asked for his help. I thought that my wallet might be up at the ice cream shop, and I knew he could get there far faster than I could. It was an incautious choice. But he knew the place I was talking about, and said that he'd head up there. If he found the wallet, he'd meet me as I rode back up 23.

So, with everything hanging in the balance, and the additional possibility of getting robbed, I turned onto the shoulder of Route 23, heading back on the same side I rode down and, thus, riding the wrong way. I was numb, trying to think about how I would arrange to end the trip and get back somewhere safe and familiar with no money, no resources at all. I was almost relieved: the decision would be made for me, or at least, there would be an excuse. I didn't have to press on, forcing my weak self go through the motions of the Big Journey.

After about half a mile, I saw the familiar black nylon lump, lying there on the shoulder. I had cried when I lost the wallet, and I cried again now, kneeling on the side of the road and clutching it to my face. I put it into its zippered pocket in the pannier - my failure to do that accounted for its dropping out in the first place - and closed it up tight. I turned around and rode back down the hill, and as I waited at the light to once again make the turn onto the next road, the green pickup truck pulled up next to me. He hadn't found the wallet, of course, but I thanked him profusely. He drove on down 23...he had actually gone out of his way to head up to the ice cream shop to help me out. The story might've been different if he had found the wallet, of course...but I don't think so.

Then, with the morning's emotional roller coaster behind me, I had the physical ups and downs of 30 miles' worth of fairly serious climbs before I got to Pippa Passes, including Abner Mountain. At another general store, I was cautioned by some boys on motorbikes and quads about the mountain: "There's drunks up there, and dopeheads," they told me, and the road was narrow and curvy. I didn't have any problems, but it just added to the sense of general unease I've had since crossing into Kentucky mountain country.

When I finally reached the hostel, I met up with JB, an older man from North Carolina who's riding a RANS two-wheeled recumbent and making a big loop along part of the TransAm route and the East Coast loop. He had passed me earlier on in the day, shortly after I lost the ditty bag. A 24-year old named Al was also staying at the hostel. He had started in Tijuana, and was heading to Yorktown and then up to Boston. Traveling fast and light, he had averaged 100 miles a day or more across most of the western portion of his trip, and was now doing "light" days of eighty and sixty miles through the hills. Eastbounders are good to talk to, because they can tell you about good places to stay, and offer news of the route.

I'm not like Al. He's younger, fit, and has an upbeat attitude that no doubt keeps him away from the darker emotional territory I spend too much time in. "It's a mental game," he told me. "You'll get into your groove, just wait."

After Al and JB left the hostel yesterday morning, I was still plodding around loading up my heavy trailer with all of the heavy things I'm toting along behind my heavy trike. Almost as soon as I hit the road, I could feel a disturbing lack of strength in my legs that didn't bode well for the planned 40-mile ride to a church in Chavies, which some eastbounders had left a note about at the Cookie Lady's place in Afton. I stuffed myself with an entire box of cereal bars and downed a Mountain Dew, but I knew it was a lost cause. My muscles were depleted from the previous day's ride, and no amount of carbohydrate was going to change that. I had thought the night before that I might even push another 13 miles beyond Chavies to get to the campground at Buckhorn Lake, where JB was headed, but I could tell there was no chance of that.

So I checked the map and saw that there were motels in Hazard, a few miles miles off the route. On Route 80, I passed a small billboard for the Super 8 motel, promising renovated rooms, microwaves, refrigerators, and wi-fi, just seven miles ahead. I decided that there was no point in torturing myself just to end up on a church lawn, so I called and made my reservation.

Like many roads in Kentucky, Route 80 - a busy, four-lane affair with lots of truck traffic from the strip mines that border it - has "rumble strips" on the shoulder, which are supposed to wake up drivers who swerve off the road. They also make the shoulders nearly useless for cycling, and are loathed by all who pedal. You can see one in the lower right corner of the photo. Fortunately, the shoulders on 80 are wide, and I could ride to one side of the strips, away from traffic...until they changed. Instead of running parallel to the shoulder, they became patches of perpendicular washboards, evenly spaced every 75 feet or so. The seven-mile stretch of highway I rode had several up-and-down climbs and descents of about 150 feet in altitude each. On the downhill side, the rumble strip patches became regularly-spaced buzzes beneath my tires at high speed, not too bad at all. When I reached the motel and went around to the back of the trailer to turn off my tail lights, I saw that the left bracket had vibrated loose and fallen off, taking my tail light with it.

After the previous day's experiences? Not a big deal. Today, as I walked back along 80 to the Wal-Mart for some food supplies, I found the bracket and the remains of my tail light. The headlight, along with its battery and charger, is going to get boxed up and sent on ahead to my mom in Santa Barbara, thus becoming the first piece of equipment I've shed. It was kind of a dumb choice...I brought it along just because it's my headlight - I used it on night rides, and it was natural to put it on the trike. But I don't really need to see on this trip, I need to be seen, so a cheaper light with a "blinky" setting would've been a better choice. I'll pick one up at a bike shop along the route, along with a new tail light.

Pea thinks that my recurrent low spirits and, sometimes, downright misery are an emotional "stage" of my trip, like a stage in the Tour de France. I certainly hope she's right. Contributing to all of this was the stress and chaos that began the whole thing: trying to sell the house so that I could leave on May 1, and having the deal get so fouled up that at one point I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to leave at all; the emotional strain of leaving Pea; knowing that I wasn't as trained up as I needed to be. Getting underway was less a celebration of a journey begun than a escape from one form of massive uncertainty into another.

Then there's the psychology of the terrain I've been riding through. I can't see the horizon here. The forests and mountains are close quarters, claustrophobic at times, and I feel bound up and limited by them. I'm looking forward to the praries, if I can manage to push on.

I'm not really a believer in the whole "growth through suffering" thing, particularly when said "suffering" is deliberately sought. What I've got here is me - the same "me" I've always been - in a situation where there is little or nothing to distract me from my states of mind, my flaws...in short, my self. And what I've discovered about myself is nothing new, nothing I didn't already know, at some level: I tend towards unsourced sadness. I dwell on things that are not uplifting, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. I have been this way, I now fully realize, for my entire life. I'm sure there are various psychological explanations for it, but my several attempts at therapy - both pharmacological and otherwise - have only scratched the surface of what it is within me that drives this process. So whatever "suffering" I experience here, on this journey, is really no different than the suffering that I would be experiencing if I had just gotten an apartment and carried on with life as usual.

The difference is that out here, on my own, there is nothing I can do to hide from myself. Several days in a motel is no different than successive days at campsites or hostels. Alcohol use to excess is so obviously counterproductive that it's not even half an option. There are only two choices: press on, or give up.

And whatever choice I make...well, there I'll be.

Tomorrow: a short 25 miles to the Buckhorn Lake campground. There aren't many places to stay around here, so it's the short ride tomorrow and then a 60-mile push to a motel in North Irvine, which will leave a bitty 20-mile ride to Berea and then - finally, blessedly - out of the mountains.

Until Missouri, of course.

But that's later.