This morning was, I hope, the absolute emotional nadir of this journey. I slept fitfully, and when the cell phone alarm rang at 6:30 I switched it off and snoozed until 7:30, a familiar knot of dread in my gut. I only had 25 miles to go today, but I felt the siren song of the Motel Room: stay here, it tempted, where there is a bed and a television, and you don’t have to pedal or dodge traffic or risk anything. Stay here.
It was all I could do to start gathering up my scattered gear and pack the trailer. I was like a zombie, going through these motions, unsure about whether I’d actually manhandle the trike through the doorway and set off...ever. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of abject despair…nothing made sense, there was no reason for any of this, it was all pointless. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I broke down. After a few minutes of doing that, I resumed packing. I knew that things would only get worse if I stayed in that room.
When it was time to roll the trike out, I saw that the right front tire was flat. I’ve been fortunate so far: I discovered the two flats I’ve had while in a motel room. I feared that this was the same deteriorating valve problem that caused the rear tire to spontaneously deflate back in Charlottesville, but it wasn’t. A small corkscrew of wire, which had probably been there for days, had worked its way through the Kevlar fibers and pricked a tiny hole in the tube, which I identified by inflating the tube and sticking it in a sinkful of water until I found bubbles. I patched the tube, removed the piece of wire from the tire, and reinflated it…after pausing for a minute or two to curl up in a ball by the door. Very pathetic. I felt absolutely wretched.
Last night I had a dream that I was listening to George Harrison. The previous night I dreamed that I made a fruit smoothie, which prompted me to buy some fruit at the Wal-Mart. That worked out pretty well for me, so after I finally checked out of the motel and pedaled up Route 80 to the exit for Route 15, I put on All Things Must Pass. And: everything transformed. The dreaded ride became The Ride. I didn’t think about the fact that I hadn’t left until 10:20, and would surely get hammered by the sun. I rode along Route 15, playing tag with the rumble strips. When it was time to climb, I climbed…a lot. Two or three climbs, actually, one up to 1,500 feet, in the afternoon sun with no shade. I ate energy, drank fluids, and did what I had to do, encouraged by a spray-painted message on the road and a newly-buoyant heart.
When I finally got to Buckhorn Lake, I stopped at Spark’s General Store and picked up three bottles of Gatorade, a Coke, and two cans of pasta. Sparks (I presume) told me about the church in Booneville, where there was a free place to camp. But I had done my 25 miles, and so I rode another mile up the road to the site...where I couldn't find the attendant. What few open campsites there were all had yellow RESERVED cards on them. I knocked on the attendant's RV, to no avail. Annoyed, I did one circuit around the campground road, and finally decided to replenish my water supply at one of the unoccupied sites and get out of there. It was after three, and If I was going to press on for another 19 miles to Booneville, I didn't have time to hang around and see if the attendant deigned to show up and fit me into some miserable patch in the woods.
Back at Spark's store, I confirmed the Booneville setup: place to camp, free, even (yes!) a shower. When I asked if they had a bathroom I could use, he said they didn't...and gave me the key to the church up the road. There was a bathroom there I could use, he said.
When I unlocked the unassuming, brown-painted wooden door and stepped into the sanctuary, I was stunned: hand-planed, tongue-and-groove fitted beams soared in the vault overhead. The chandeliers were fitted with glass lanterns, and the ranks of a small pipe organ gleamed behind the altar, satin in the afternoon windowlight.
Completed in 1928, "The Log Cathedral" was constructed entirely of logs by the people of Buckhorn, and is considered the largest structure of its type in the world. (You can read more about the church here.) I spent as much time as I could spare ogling the woodwork and taking blurry flashless photos, then returned the key to Sparks. We talked about the church awhile. Obviously proud of his town's history and of the church, he told me that they still held services there as long as the weather was warm enough, usually May through October. I finally pedaled out of Buckhorn at 4:15.
There were more climbs, as I knew there would be. Led Zeppelin provided the impetus for those, as did the sun, sinking ever lower above the hills. With a dead headlight and only one tail light, I didn't want to be on the road when the sun finally dipped below the trees.
There was one other thing that kept me going: faith. I knew that I had those 19 extra miles in me, and doing them today meant that I'd have a reasonable 40 miles to ride tomorrow instead of a daunting sixty. When I finally reached Booneville, a couple of guys lounging on the steps behind the municipal building directed me up the road to the Presbyterian church. There, I found a small pavilion, designated for cyclists' use only, with a sink, a shower, a portajohn...and a message:
The styrofoam plate was tacked onto the wall next to the cyclist log book. I think these guys left it for me...and it was an affirmative, uplifting end to a day that started out so terribly.
I'm wondering if, like physical muscle, the psyche can be strengthened by the sort of emotional workout I've been experiencing lately.
As with a lot of things I'm wondering about these days...I suppose I'll find out.
Today was supposed to be a simple 40-mile run from Booneville to a motel in Irvine. The map looked good, maybe a little up-and-down climbing here and there, nothing major. A dewfall across the field behind the church meant that I had to put the tent away damp, which isn't a good thing because it's starting to get some mildew growth...I'll have to remedy that when I've got some time and access to the requisite "mild detergent."
The day started innocuously enough...a bit of a climb out of Booneville, and then onto smaller roads bordered by forest and overhanging, eroded cliffsides, topped by trees with exposed roots clinging to the cliffs' edges. At about mid-morning, I encountered a brief, steep climb. Then another, and another...damn! There's a mountain between me and Irvine!
The altitudes on the GPS waypoints for this stretch didn't have any indication of such a climb, and I guess I just misread the contour lines on my route map. As the sun climbed higher into the slate sky, I found myself on what seemed to be the steepest climb of my journey so far. The pedals moved like I was pushing through thick mud. As I climbed around the curves, I kept passing small cemeteries on the sides of the road, all sparsely populated with newer headstones, some dating from the 90s, some dating from earlier but carved in the same style and with the same new-granite sheen. One of the larger cemeteries, mostly empty, was bordered by the road, curving around it and heading upward in an ever-steepening incline. Frustrated by the repetitive short climbs, I stopped there and downed some water, noting with concern that the Camelbak was getting sloshy and empty. Not thinking I'd have to deal with climbing in the day's heat, I hadn't brought any extra in the Dromedary bag.
I mounted up and attacked the hill. Throughout yesterday and today, I'd been hearing a grinding noise in the rear of the trike, which seemed to have something to do with my pannier pressing against the DualDrive hub's switchbox...when I lifted the pannier away from the box, the grinding stopped or lessened. I just needed to adjust the switchbox or the derailleur, I thought, but not now: the pedaling was so tough that I was reduced to counting off twenty strokes, resting, then counting off twenty more. It was the only way I could get up the hill.
At the top of the hill, it became clear that something was terribly wrong with the drivetrain. The pedals spun, but the rear wheel wasn't turning - in fact, I would start to roll backwards! I set the brake and got out, to be confronted by a rude sight: the bolts on either side of the rear axle had come entirely loose...the wheel was no longer attached to the trike's frame. I checked to make sure that both bolts were still present, then pushed the rig over to the side of the road into a gravel patch that marked the entrance to yet another small cemetery.
In one sense, it was a relief...I thought that I had completely stripped the internally-geared hub, which would have left me stranded on top of a mountain dozens of miles from anywhere. Bolts...those, I could tighten. I broke out the toolkit and got to work, removing the bungies that secured the Black Box and the solar panels to the rear rack, and taking off the pannier so that I could access the rear wheel. Sweat was pouring from every pore, and as the sun beat down on me, I suddenly realized that I was getting a little woozy. I needed to get out of the sun, immediately.
The cemetery plot was bordered by trees that offered shade, so once I got the bolts tightened and everything strapped back into place, I rode across the grass to seek shelter. I mixed up a bottle of Gu20 and drank it down, sitting in the trike's seat and resting for about twenty minutes. After eating a Clif bar, I headed back out into the hated sunlight.
After another few miles of riding along the undulating ridgeline, I sucked the last of my water out of the Camelbak. I had twelve miles to go when I finally began the descent off the mountain, so I steeled myself for a thirsty couple of hours until I reached Irvine. As I reached the flats, I passed another inspirational plate (thanks, guys!), strapped to a telephone pole with electrical tape. Encouraged, I forged ahead. At one point, I passed a ditch with water in its bottom, and I thought of my water filtration system...but I wasn't really at that point, not yet.
I passed into farm country, and the landscape opened up into fields bordered by steep, pyramidal mountains, more open land than I'd seen since central Virginia. I began to pass the occasional house, and I thought that it might be time to start knocking on doors. Then, I passed by Ron Sparkman, standing out in front of his house on Yon-Side farm. I pulled over to chat, and soon Mrs. Sparkman bought me a big styrofoam cup of icewater. Ron said that they get quite a few cyclists passing through, some of whom camped on his property across the road.
We talked about how isolated the communities are in this part of Kentucky, and about how, generally, folks here are good folks. But he told me a story about three young men who pushed a pickup truck up to the barn across from the house one night. One got out and knocked on his door, looking for gas. Ron only had diesel, for the tractor, and when it became clear that no gas was forthcoming, the man rejoined his companions in the pickup...then started it up and drove off. So it's good to be cautious in the mountains, and my sense of unease in some of the more isolated areas is not entirely unwarranted.
We chatted until it was time for Ron to go and "roll up some hay." Refreshed, with a newly-filled water bottle and Camelbak, I struggled through the last few miles into Irvine, stopping to ask a local out in front of his house whether I was headed the right way to get to the Oak Tree Inn where I'd be staying. He asked me about my trip and about the rig, seeing me off with "I can't say I understand it, but brother, more power to ya!"
Well, that makes two of us. I got my butt kicked today, but I made it, and now - as is only appropriate after a butt-kicking - I shall sleep. Tomorrow, it's on to Berea.
I'm currently at a bike shop in Lexington, Kentucky. My Dual-Drive hub is shot. The bike shop called SRAM, who told them that the Dual Drive hub is not spec'd for loaded touring, which makes me wonder why the hell they spec'd it for their touring trike.
An angel named Bernie stopped when he saw me by the side of the road, and I rode to his mother-in-law's house a few hundreds yards away. Then he brought a pickup truck over and drove me and the trike to the bike shop in Lexington, about 45 minutes away.
I asked Johannes at Northeast Recumbents about the Dual Drive when I bought it, and told him what my plans were for the trike & trailer. He told me the Dual Drives hold up fine, and I was assuming that Greenspeed wouldn't spec a vital part without being sure that it was suited for the task.
So: I've got a busted hub here, about 5,000 miles left to go, and absolutely no assurances that this won't happen every 700 miles if I replace the hub with another Dual Drive.
So, I've got calls and e-mails in to Johannes and Greenspeed...Johannes is in New Jersey, but Greenspeed is in Australia, so I'm basically stuck until I can get the dealer or the manufacturer to step up to the plate.
Time, and probably money, that I don't have to spend.
Consider this: if I had stuck to my planned route and stayed in Buckhorn, I would've skipped Booneville, and wouldn't have seen the plate-borne encouragement tacked to the pavilion wall.
And, if I had not stopped just where I did this morning on the way out of Irvine, Bernie wouldn't have stopped to ask if I was OK. He said as much: if I had been in motion, pedaling up the hill when he passed me, he would have waved, and that would have been that.
Instead, he stopped, and I told him I was probably not OK...at that point, it was either my cassette or the rear hub that was dying, I wasn't sure which. He called his son-in-law (an avid cyclist) on his cell, who told him that the closest bike shop was in Lexington, about 45 minutes away by car. Bernie said he'd give me a ride to Lexington, if I needed it, which I did. I pedaled up the hill and met him at his mother-in-law's house. Then, he went back to his own house up the road, and returned in his pickup truck. I disconnected the trailer, and we loaded the trike into the truck.
Bill, the wrench at the shop, hadn't seen the SRAM DualDrive hub before, but after a look at the cassette and the decent amount of chain wrap I had, he quickly determined that it was the hub that was at fault. Bernie had gone off to get himself some breakfast - which is what he had been on his way to do when he came across me on the side of the road - and when he came back, I told him what the situation was: 1) the shop couldn't fix the hub; 2) calls and e-mail were in to my dealer and the manufacturer 3) most probably, nothing was going to happen until 5 or 6 PM at the earliest, when the Australians got in to work and checked their e-mail.
So...Bernie offered to drive me back to Irvine, load the trailer into the truck along with the trike, and drop me off at the Econo Lodge in Berea which had been my destination when I started pedaling this morning. And we even went back to the bike shop when, in my flustered state, I forgot to buy a supply the various energy foodstuffs that they had there, plus a replacement tail light.
Bernie is a former Marine and a retired State and Federal game warden, given to month-long canoe trips and day-long wanderings through the mountains near the log home where he lives with his wife, Cathy. While we drove hither and yon, he told me about his childhood in the mountains of Kentucky: no electricity, no indoor plumbing, but surrounded by the wilds and the woods, into which he would hike for days or weeks at a time. Not "backpacking," mind you: he would have a tarp, a knife, a compass, and that was all. He wouldn't follow trails, but would cut across the countryside, living off the land.
As we drove along the roads I would've ridden on today, we spoke of strip mining in Hazard, and about how the mining and timber companies have raped the land here and impoverished the people. Passing one of the numerous small churches that dot these mountain roads, the conversation turned to whether I'd be welcome in such a church (I would), his non-denominational belief in the Creator, and the necessity of not living in tomorrow or in yesterday. In Berea, he bought me lunch, and while we ate he remarked that it was his sensitivity to the wandering impulse which made him stop and check on me, there by the side of the road.
Now I'm waiting to hear back from Johannes, or Greenspeed, to see what they're going to do to help me out. At the moment, I'm not even off schedule. I will be, of course, but I was planning on taking a rest day here in Berea tomorrow. Now, I'll just be staying here for several days until I can get the trike repaired. Bernie offered to come and ferry me back to the bike shop, should I need it.
But it doesn't end there. The Lexington bikeshop is called Pedal The Planet, and they are a shop dedicated to supporting the touring cyclist. Not only did they offer a place to stay in Lexington if I needed it, they also offered to ferry me and my trike back to the shop if necessary, and to support me with parts or whatever else I might need throughout the rest of my journey. Mark, the shop owner, has done the TransAm and toured in more than 50 countries.
One way or the other, the rear wheel on this trike will be fixed, and I will move on. For now, I rest in a surfeit of grace. Part of the reason I embarked on this journey was to find out what America was like. I'm starting to see some of it. It's wonderful that this happened in Kentucky, which enjoys a less-than-favorable reputation as the home of hillbillies, the KKK, and bitter poverty. You can find all of those here. But they are accompanied by generous souls, angels of the road, who watch out for wayward travelers such as myself.
I called a Greenspeed dealer in Virginia, who gave me the number of Jerome Heddinger, Greenspeed's North American representative.
The result: because the bike shop in Lexington has no experience with the DualDrive hub, and thus wouldn't necessarily be adept at swapping the guts of the old hub for the guts of the new hub,* Jerome is sending me a new wheel with a new DualDrive hub. It'll even have a new cassette on it, which I can swap for the old cassette or not, my choice. All I have to do is put my old tire on the new rim and put the wheel on the trike. Jerome assured me that he's got trikes and tandems in service with DualDrives that have 10,000 miles on them, and that SRAM's "not spec'd for touring" is just a cop-out. I may have just gotten a bum hub. Touring tandems, for example, carry much more weight than I've got on my trike.
I am humbled and astounded by this turn of events. Greenspeed is a company that stands behind their products, even if their suppliers won't stand behind theirs. Rare, and wonderful.
Now, I'm going to go bask in my relief and in the support of a benevolent universe.
*LATER:
Paul Sims, Greenspeed's Production, Tech, R&D and Web Guy, wrote back to say,
The Dual Drive, like any other component, isn't bulletproof. It is fairly reliable though, with only a few of them ever having the problem you described. We have used them on our tandems for years, so loading isn't the problem.
Many people are scared by an internally geared hub and are reluctant to crack it open. The fact that it can be disassembled so easily is a testament to its construction.
The usual remedy is to just replace the hub center, this can be done almost as quick as changing a tire :-) I've read that Jerome has sent you another wheel, so this will obviously get you out of trouble.
For what it's worth, the hub center comes out by removing the wheel from the trike, face the right hand side (sprocket side) down and undo the left hand jam nut and cone. Once the cone is removed you just lift the hub shell off the insides, that easy :-)
Hopefully the rest of your trip is uneventful of trike mishaps, hope you have a good tour!
Which sounds like something I could do with a cone wrench...makes the whole "new wheel" thing a bit of overkill, and me feel kinda dumb. That's what happens when you give in to the Big Panic, I guess.
But I don't have a cone wrench; I'd have to go back to the shop in Lexington for that. And I don't want to impose too much on Bernie, so if I can just swap the wheel out here in the motel room, I should be good to go.
Like I said, though: one way or the other, the problem will be resolved, and I'll be underway soon. If this had to happen anywhere, it's best that it happened here...Berea looks like an interesting town, and unlike most Econo Lodges, this one is actually close to the town center.
I've mentioned here and there that part of this journey is about "discovering America," and as it's July 4 I'm feeling a bit of obligation to write a bit about that aspect of it. It is true that you'll see a lot of detail when you're moving through a country at average speed of eight miles an hour. But for me, right now, that detail has yet to resolve into anything resembling a theme, or a motif, or much of anything beyond the simple (and recent) observation that there are some mighty fine people to be found in the hills and hollers of Kentucky.
This is, I think, largely the result of the condition of Your Humble Narrator's head. Sitting here in my motel in Berea, I do feel as though I'm about to move from one stage of the trip to another, which is partly due to the anticipated change in terrain and partly to a change in myself, best exemplified by the difference between my reaction to losing my wallet and my reaction to the failure of the DualDrive hub. The first threw me into despair, followed by elation. The second just pissed me off, which was followed by expeditious problem-solving.
The greatest contribution to this sense of incipient change has been the people I've met. Because of my late departure (due to the incompetence of Ron the Mortgage Broker, who will, I hope, suffer paper cuts and unexpected blows to the head for the rest of his natural life), my low average daily mileage, and my over-reliance on motels, I've missed encountering very many fellow cyclists. For the first month, I was traveling in an isolated five-wheeled pod, deeply mired in my own states of mind. But as I've started to adjust to this life, I've started to meet more people, and they have enriched the experience immeasurably.
So, right now, I don't have much in the way of Pontificatin' about America going on. That'll come later, don't worry.
I hope you all had a reasonably decent Fourth, with suitably grilled foodstuffs and satisfying explosions.
...I should also mention that, in addition to the people I've met on the road, there are people I've never met in person who are supporting me with encouraging e-mails, hitting the Tipjar, and offers of assistance and places to stay when I pass their way.
This being an online venture, that sort of support actually started early on, and continues to be a great morale booster. I won't name names, but you all know who you are! Thank you.
This always happens...whatever the reasons for staying, no matter how sound, I always end up with the Motel Malaise. But I've gotten some work done today (which is why I'm still here, after all), and I'll be hitting the road tomorrow, bound for a campground near Burgin.
My new wheel arrived yesterday at 10:30 AM - Jerome managed to send it out overnight on Monday, with a day's delay because of July Fourth. I decided that I did, in fact, want to swap the new cassette for my current cassette, just because I know that the one I've got works, and it has worn together with the chain over the past several hundred miles. No point in changing it out before its time.
True to his word, Bernie was available to ferry me over to the bike shop in Lexington, where they swapped the cassette for me at no charge, and even had one of little plastic tools I needed for my two-piece cranks, which they also gave to me for free. I bought one before I left, then put it in storage with the rest of my bike-related stuff. I also picked up a spoke wrench, because I forgot to pack one, and a cheaper replacement headlight. Then, Bernie took me to the post office, so I could mail the old wheel back and ship out some other gear. We also hit Gall's, an outiftter where Bernie shops, so that I could pick up some more drybags and a few more bricks of campfood. He basically spent his afternoon taking me from place to place, and while he drove we talked about the possibility of turning part of his twelve acres and his basement into a place for cyclists like me to camp. He said that his encounter with me had inspired him, and that once his wife gets back from Alaska they'd talk about what would be feasible for them to do. He's a good man...if he sets something up, it'll be done right, and a boon to travelers.
Berea, unfortunately, turned out to be shut down for the Fourth. It's a college town, really, so it's slow in the summer to begin with, and around these parts many places close for the holiday. So on Tuesday I walked around town for a couple of hours, and then had to retreat back to the motel to escape the heat.
And yesterday? It poured. So, due to the circumstances with the hub, I was off the road and avoided the rain. Just one more little way that things worked out for the best this week.
Still, I've had three days off instead of the one I was originaly planning. I'm hoping that I'll be able to build up my mileage if the terrain is as un-mountainous as I've been hearing. I suspect, though, that there will be a series of smaller hills until I reach Illinois.
Total mileage so far: 787 (29 of those in Bernie's pickup). I'm going to try and put in a solid six days in a row (a first), so I should break 1,000 miles this week. It'll be nice to get out of triple-digit total mileage.
As always, after an extended stay in one place, there's the long process of packing everything back up into the trailer, out of which gear is inevitably strewn. (That's the trike in the foreground, serving as a drying rack.) With the new drybags, I should be able to pack the trailer a bit more efficiently...whether that will translate into less trailer bounce remains to be seen.
So, I'll spend the rest of the day doing that, a bit at a time, so that I can hit the road at a suitably early hour tomorrow. It looks like there will be stretch of good weather for the next few days, with reasonable temperatures, so I'll try to get the miles behind me. It'll be just under 40 miles tomorrow, because experience has taught me that trying for higher mileage after an overlong rest period doesn't work very well at all.
That seems to be the way of this journey so far...stretches of mundane and often boring inactivity punctuated by wrenching physical effort and, increasingly, amazing experiences. I'll have to work on reducing the mundanity by stepping up the number of days that I spend in motion...as I understand it, that's one of the defining characteristics of, you know...cycling across the country.
Like a lot of rides after I've been holed up for a few days, this one started out lousy. I was in a foul frame of mind, because late yesterday I discovered what looked to be a fine network of fatigue cracks in the metal bar the connects the trailer to the trike (it's called the "tongue"), so I was faced with the prospect of yet another major equipment failure just five days after the first one. I was stewing about how to resolve the problem, and just getting fed up. Not having any fun. The day started out with my discovery that the road I needed to take out of Berea was closed...really closed; they tore a bridge down, leaving a twenty-foot gap. Fortunately, they had piled up some dirt into a sort of ramp, and the gap was at the base of a big hill...so I headed back up it, turned around, got up a good head of steam, and managed to jump the gap without causing damage to my equipment or my body.
Or, to put it another way, I backtracked and took a detour so that 45 minutes into the day I was exactly one half mile from where I started. Then, later on, I took a left instead of a right, and then spent some time trying to figure out why the GPS was telling me such crazy things. It was just trying to get me back to where I was supposed to be. The end result of all these wrong-way Norris shennanigans was an extra six miles on the odometer.
As if that wasn't enough, it wasn't flat yet. For the past couple of weeks, I've been holding fast to the "It gets better after Berea" mantra. And it did get better. No real mountains. But not flat, either. And I wanted flat. Needed it, like I needed electrolytes.
By noon, I was in a damn-it-all funk. Not having any fun. Losing all sight of the now, projecting into the future, where everything is always difficult and hot, all the Pop-Tarts are broken, and the water smells funny.
I rigged up the antenna and called Pea, asking her help - she looked up the numbers for Arkel Overdesigns and Burley, manufacturers of panniers and trailers respectively. I called Arkel in Canada from the side of the road, and Customer Service rep Yves (yay, Yves!) got three different recumbent panniers and measured them for me, so I'd have a better idea if my planned solution to the cracking trailer problem would work. The idea was to take most of the weight out of the trailer, putting my camping gear into panniers, and using the trailer mainly as a technology pod for the solar panels, computer, and other gizmos. But I didn't know if the left pannier would fit over the trailer hitch, and I would still need to get a new tongue from Burley, which meant coordinating shipping and all sorts of logistical nonsense.
I had pulled over at the end of a long driveway, and while I was making my calls, a white-haired gentleman came down the driveway in his pickup truck and asked if I needed help. More of the Kentucky hospitality!
After I talked with Yves, I got pissed off. I'd be damned if I'd let another piece of broken metal end this journey. So I put aside thoughts of the trailer cracking off the the back of the trike, rolling downhill behind me and getting smashed by a truck, because right then, and right there, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I powered up hills, my legs infused with the determined energy that, apparently, comes from focusing on what's in front of me.
At the end of the ride: Chimney Rock RV Park. I knew things were looking up when the attendent at the office asked me if I was cycling across the country, and immediately said that I had to sign her book, and that cyclists pay only $10 for campsites with water and electric. On my way to the shower, I stopped to chat with a fellow named Harold who apparently owns the place, sitting at what looked to be a permanent "bar" in front of an RV trailer. He said they get cyclists through here all the time, and were even written up in Bicycling.
There's no cell service here, but I had the toll-free number for Burley, and asked at the office if I could use the phone...not only could I, but I could call toll numbers if I wanted to. So, I spoke with Chad at Burley Designs in Oregon. It turns out that the network of fine cracks I noticed are actually just that: fine cracks, but in the satin finish of the metal, not the tube itself. Burley is a small co-op, and like most of the people who work there, Chad owns and uses the products his company makes. He's toured with the Nomad, abused it, and it's lasted just fine. He gave me some tips on packing it to reduce the bounce caused by hitching it to a a trike with 20-inch wheels, and I made him laugh with my description of "equipment paranoia" following Monday's hub failure.
That bit of business attended to, it was time to tend to the needs of the body. The shower was coin-operated, and well worth the quarter. The soda machine was empty, but when I asked Harold of there was another machine, his wife went and got me two Pepsis out of their own fridge.
Once again, a day that started with a bad case of malaise has ended with me welcomed, refreshed, safe...and with Wi-Fi access. Huz-zah! I am sensing a pattern here...maybe I can tweak it a bit. A little less heavy on the mope, perhaps.
To sum up the day: I saw the horizon for the first time in weeks.
When I first started planning this thing, I was going to leave in April. I knew I'd be slow, knew I'd be carrying a whole mess o' gear, knew I'd be taking a lot of rest days. Selling the house wasn't a simple thing, though, and I pushed my departure date to May 1. Then Ron The Mortgage Broker happened, and I ended up leaving from Yorktown on May 25, three weeks later than my "must leave by" date, and almost six weeks past my "would like to leave by" date.
On Saturday, I pulled a 59-miler to get to a campground in Bardstown, Kentucky, anticipating six straight days of riding. Not all 60-milers, of course, but I was ready to start hammering. I hadn't done the math in terms of days left in the decent season and miles left to go, but I knew that the numbers probably weren't good. At the campsite, I met Lonnie and Debbie, who were kind enough to share their meal with me, and were good company. Cell phone service was hit or miss, but I called the only motel I'd be passing for the next five or six days to make a reservation. There was something about the fellow who answered that made me ask whether they had phones in the rooms. Sure enough, they didn't.
This was a problem: I needed to complete my project and send it off to the client early enough in the week so that they could do what they needed to do with it, and for that I needed a readily accessible phone jack. So instead of heading out on for a 35-mile ride on Sunday, I just pedaled mile into Bardstown proper and got a motel room. Another day's travel lost.
Once in the room, I began to do some serious freaking out thinking. The thought of the Missouri Ozarks in the heat of late July filled me with dread. And when I totaled up the miles I had left to go and the days I had left to travel...well, folks, it wasn't looking good. The reason I wanted to leave in April is so I didn't have to kill myself to do this. I really needed the three weeks in May, but I didn't have them.
Ben (the mind behind The Blenster's Blog) lives about 40 miles away from Bardstown, and he came on down to see me Monday night. By the time he got there, I was a wreck. Tired and daunted, I told him of my worries. During further conversation over dinner in town, it becamse clear that it was, finally, time to make the decision: could I reach the west coast under my own power, or not?
The answer, as you've probably guessed by now, was "not."
The math told the tale. Having done over 800 miles, I had 3,400 miles left, give or take. If I did 50 miles a day, every day, that was 68 days of travel left. There was no way I could do that, so figuring five days of riding and two rest days, that was about 95 days left, which would put me in Oregon sometime in October. But, realistically, I knew that there was no way I could get fifty miles a day out of myself, not through the Ozarks in dead summer, not across the plains, not up the Rockies. I had run out of time.
Time, that is, to do the trip in a way that was even remotely enjoyable. I already knew that I wasn't a fellow who was going to burn across the country in sixty days. I like my days off, I like to poke along, I like to look at stuff. What I don't like is exertion to the point of continuous misery, and that's what I was faced with.
I had a number of options. I could just go on until I felt it was time to stop, wherever I ended up...which would probably be somewhere in the middle of Kansas, running naked and sun-crazed through a cornfield, leading my tribes of Bedouin against Akabah. I could hole up in Bardstown and write a novel...although there was the distressing possibility that I'd never leave the room alive. Or sober.
Then again...I could...skip ahead to the end. Pack all my gear up and high-tail it across the country to Astoria, then cycle 1,100 miles down the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara.
I had already written off the planned Pacific Coast leg of the journey as impossible. That was disappointing, because I do like the ocean, and everyone I mentioned the route to who had been to that part of the country had nothing but praise for its beauty. The coast isn't flat...but it's temperate, in the mid-seventies, and it's chock-full of campgrounds in gorgeous settings. The weather will stay decent through October, when the rains pick up.
I needed Ben's help, which he graciously provided: a ride to the Lousville airport, there to rent a minivan. We hung out at his place for awhile afterwards, eating Chinese food and watching cartoons...very good for my head, actually. I had, after all, just committed myself to bailing out on the Epic portion of my journey. Although the Pacific Coast route is no small feat (and neither, for that matter, are the 800 miles I've done through the one of the toughest part of the TransAm route), "across the country by minivan" just doesn't have the same romance as "across the country by trike." I won't be cruising across the open-sky'd prarie, listening to Qawali music and getting big with God. I won't sit on my trike at 11,400 feet up on Hoosier Pass. And I won't dip my front wheels in the waters of the Pacific off the Oregon coast.
This was a very difficult decision to make, but I've made it. Today I drove 500 miles from Bardstown to Oak Grove, Missouri. Tomorrow I'll drive another 500, and then on Friday I'll stop over in Denver to see my dad and his family. It is so very strange, to be here in this motel. It looks just like a lot of the other motels I've been in. But I didn't pedal here. The trike isn't stashed in a corner of the room with me; it's outside in the minivan by itself. I didn't get to enjoy a feeling of accomplishment as I arrived with banners flying, or relish the luxury of a shower after a long day in the saddle. I'm just another guy in a van who showed up looking for a place to sleep.
I've acknowledged my limits, and I've changed my journey. It's a fork in the road.
I drove across the entirety of Kansas today. The terrain in the east was rolling prarie, followed by flatter prarie, then some real flat prarie, with the occasional bit of flat prarie thrown in for variety. At the exit for a town called Sylvan Grove, I got off of Interstate 70 and drove a short distance north, just to get an idea of what it would've been like to ride along the endless, straight roads of the heartland. I parked the van and got out.
One of the unexpected disadvantages of the trike is that, in addition to the heat from the sun, you also catch heat coming up from the road surface, baking you on all sides. It was about 12:30 in the afternoon when I stood looking down that road, with the full heat of the day about two hours away, and I could feel it squeezing me. That's now, in mid-July. In August, when I would've hit the plains, my sunblock would've been the oil in which I fried. Any remaining wistfulness evaporated right then and there.
After some uncertainty yesterday, I'm feeling good about the decision I made...there's nothing stopping me from making another cross-country attempt, after all. One that starts at the proper time, and after proper conditioning. But now, what's in front of me is a speedy drive through the country I would've traversed, and then a long, epic ride along its western shore. I'm looking forward to the drive and the ride.
Right now, I'm in a motel in Limon, Colorado, about ninety miles from Denver. I'll reach my dad's place early tomorrow, and I'll stay there on Saturday. I have a few practical things to take care of: a package of my mail will meet me there, I've got some equipment to shed and mail off, I need to grease my pedals, and I'll set up the solar panels to charge the big battery in the Black Box. But mostly, I'll just be visiting.
One of the ways I can tell that I've made the right move is that I'm actually excited about what's next. It's as though I used Virginia and Kentucky to train up for my ride down the west coast, so it's like I'm starting another trip. This time, I'm in better shape and a bit more experienced.
I'm still on the road! It just looks a little different.
Meaning, I'm in Denver now, this evening, and that I was here yesterday, and that tomorrow, I'll be leaving. Driving very fast and for quite a few hours until I reach Boise, or someplace very much like Boise, where I'll sleep, and then get up, drive to Astoria Oregon, dump my trike, trailer and gear in a motel, drive the van back to Portland, pick up another rental car, and drive back to Astoria, where I will sleep, then get up, saddle up, and pedal away.
Too complicated. And too expensive. But this is what happens when no one will rent you a one-way minivan from Portland to Astoria.
That's fourteen hours driving, just shy of 900 miles covered.
After Colorado (which was, it seemed, mostly made up of Denver and its suburbs), Wyoming started out like this:
That endless landscape soon gave way to the bluffs and buttes of the desert.
Eastern Utah pushed it just a little too hard with the whole desert thing. Then came Bear Lake (it's that bit of blue in the background on the right):
The contrast was stark: east of Bear Lake was the hard, pale-hued stone and sand of the desert. The landscape west of Bear Lake displayed much of the same underlying geology, with sharp-cliffed buttes and heavily weathered rock, but cloaked in green vegetation.
Utah continued to redeem itself with stuff like this, taken just before I drove through the gorgeous gorges of Logan Canyon:
And Idaho? In a word: sprinklers!
Apologies for the sparse account, but after 14 hours watching the road roll under the hood I'm a bit fashed.
And, doing the old picture-to-word conversion, you've got 5,000 words to look at.
Tomorrow I will be in Astoria, Oregon and, most likely, will be back on the trike on Tuesday, headed south.
I have arrived in Astoria, although certainly not in the way I intended. Phase II of the New And Improved Revised Journey (that is, the bits in the minivan) is complete. I can now drive from Portland to Astoria without a map. With my eyes closed.
I have sand between my toes.
On one of what seemed to be eight or nine trips between the two Oregon destinations, I came to the unexpectedly moving realization that I don't really know what joy is. I'm not sure how many people do. In this age of anti-depressants, therapists, and instant gratification, it almost seems quaint...a holdover from less distracted times.
What I do know is that what I've set out for myself now...cycling through a temperate clime along the coast, with ready access to the ocean...is a journey that seems as though it ought to produce a good measure of that there joy-type stuff.
And yet, this morning, for the god-knows-how-many'th time, I started awake with a ball of panic in my gut, as though a thunderclap had tossed me out of bed. No reason at all, it was just there, looming and full of dread, ready as always to take control of my entire day and turn it into a senseless trial.
And I'm just sick of it. Enough's enough. No more. I don't care if I've inherited a ridiculously hair-triggered fight-or-flight mechanism. Whatever patterns were softwired into my postnatal plastic brain can damn well unfold themselves. I've known for several years that my inner emotional life often had little connection to my outward circumstances, or was disproportionately intense...but at no time in my life has this been more evident than the past few days. Speeding through the landscapes of America on my way to what had been the best part of my grand plan - skipping to the dessert, essentially - I still couldn't shake out of the funk. No question: I do have some real-life Stuff going on. But until that water rolled over my bare feet, and I looked under the towering route 101 bridge out towards the widening Pacific, I didn't fully realize that I can choose whether to be overwhelmed or not.
I made it here. Not on my trike, but I'm here, and I'm ready to move on.
Tomorrow, I'll be heading off route a bit to Fort Stevens State Park, a little south and west of here. $4 camping for bikers, near the beach. It's not far, but my plan is to get into the rhythm I never achieved in Virginia and Kentucky by triking every day, even if it's not very far.
I'm not sure what the cell reception will be like out there, so posting may be sporadic. Hopefully, the Black Box will prove itself worth its weight.
Through the magic of my Black Box, I am able to write to you from my tent here at Fort Stevens State Park. It's after dark now, and the campsite is mostly quiet...distant voices from the RV side of town, and the buzzing of rattle-winged insects against my tent's nylon, desperate to become intimate with my headlamp. In keeping with the Way of Relaxed Touring, I'm staying up later to do this, because I'm not planning on going very far tomorrow, and won't be getting up very early. No more waking up at 6 AM, rushing around under pressure of the impending heat of the day. That's how I like it.
Once I arrived at the park and set up camp, I unhitched the trailer and rode the unencumbered trike less than a mile to the shore of the Pacific. After finding a place to lock up, I wandered down to the beach with bare feet, there to soak them, and to take pictures of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted steel vessel that wrecked there in 1906. A century of water and wind have reduced the 2000-ton ship to a small assemblage of rusted-through steel plates clinging to encrusted iron bones.
After awhile, it seemed like the best thing to do was to unlock the trike, drag it to the top of the high dune at the edge of the parking lot, and sit in it there, watching the ocean. I got a book out, but only the wind turned its pages. At the far edge of the view to the north and south, rocky crags projected seaward, reminding me of the beach in Zipolite, Mexico, on a much more massive scale. There were kites flying, making me regret that I hadn't brought one of my parafoils...but only for a little while. The endless white curls of surf did their thing, filling the air with a white noise that drew my fear from me. I buried my feet in the warm sand beneath the fairing, finally content.
Back at the campsite, I met Josh, a dude from Michigan who's making his own way up the coast, travelling cheap and light. He'll end up in Portland, crashing with some friends of his while he looks for work in the building trades. At one point later on in the evening, during a boisterous exchange of road stories, he burst out: "You and I have smoked way too much pot in our lives!" "Yes!" I agreed. "We don't need it anymore!" We were carrying on and exchanging tales and images in that high-energy way that happens with good stoned friends, even though we had just met and were quite sober.
There are no fewer than seven touring cyclists staying here tonight, not including myself. The Oregon State Park system sets aside $4 Hiker/Biker campsites, and I'll be able to stay at such parks all the way down the coast, which should help make up for my Motel Tour of Virginia and Kentucky. For the first time, I've become aware of the community aspect of this thing I'm doing...until now, I've been fairly isolated, both by accident and by design. But the west coast is already feeling different, and I suspect I'll meet up with more and more people as I head south. It turns out that this really is the prime touring season, so the route will be well-populated. A few folks came over to chat, drawn by the trike...among them Jason Perry, a mellow Texas cyclist who's doing a summer tour along the coast and elsewhere.
Seeing the ocean - the full-on, horizon-filling ocean, as opposed to the ocean beyond the mouth of the Columbia River - has done good things to me. I believe that my goal on this journey will be to keep it in sight as often as possible.
Tomorrow, another short ride, to another state park, where I'll find a place with an ocean view, and sit there until it's time to not sit there anymore.
Those are the things that defined this day. I ended up giving Ecola State Park a miss and camping at an RV park in Cannon Beach, mainly because the latter has showers. A shower wasn't important at the beginning of the day; at the end of the day, it was. I had my first climb today - modest, up to about 400 feet and then back down. There will be many more of those in the days to come.
I also spent about an hour and half on the beach at Seaside, deploying the solar panels to charge my cell phone and put a bit of juice back in the laptop. It'll be interesting to see whether I can actually make the whole solar-powered thing work...I really didn't get much of a chance to in Virginia and Kentucky, mainly because I was near an electrical outlet more often than not. I've almost depleted the smaller of my two laptop batteries, so I'll need to put some sun juice into it soon.
Cannon Beach is dominated to the south by Haystack Rock, and less dominated by the numerous small sand replcias of Haystack Rock I kept coming across. I have no idea how far the Rock is from where I started, but after a fine meal of skillet cornbread, rib-eye, mashed potato, veggies, and a local ale, I walked nearly all the way to it, and back again. Earlier in the day, at Seaside, I had a brief flare of "What will I do with my day?" anxiety when I realized I'd get to the campsite early...but then there were more miles than I expected and, once I got here, the obvious thing to do was to go to the beach and do beach-style things. This involved the wetting of the feet, the walking of the sands, and the watching of the sunset.
Once again, I am content, and thinking mellow thoughts about how the interaction of all the particles of sand with each other in the tumult of the thin sheets of incoming tide produces an assortment of intricate patterns once the water recedes. The various types of patterns are not identical, but they're similar - I've seen the same ones at three beaches now. So, there must be some commonality to the sand-water interaction, some principle that's the same wherever sand and water meet.
The last time I ended up by myself on a beach was in 1994, at Zipolite on the Pacific coast of Mexico. It was another Pivotal Moment in my life, in vaguely similar circumstances. Back then, there were great piles of locally grown pot and mushrooms. Not so much, now, which is a good thing, because I can look at the waves and the sand with unstoned eyes and contemplate the similarities between the interactions of sand and water and the interactions of people. In my life, of course, the commonality, the "principle that's the same," is me. And so it is that once again I end up by myself on a beach watching the waves and thinking about whatever it is that might come next in my life. Although, I must admit: I'm much happier on this 2006 beach than I was on that 1994 beach. Which is good, because I have many more weeks of beaches ahead of me.
This is footage of me triking through the tunnel between Arch Cape and Cape Falcon. I would've gotten more (and steadier) video from inside the tunnel, but it quickly became apparent that I needed to focus more on steering and less on videography, so as to avoid death.
Nehalem Bay State Park is on a narrow spit of land with - as one might imagine - bay on one side and ocean on the other. My first view of it was near the top of the first truly significant climb of the past three days which, although long, was nowhere near as bad as what I repeatedly hauled my sorry ass up and over in Kentucky. The soaring views helped, as did the moderate temperature and the near-constant wind at my back. I did arrive at camp in somewhat of a funk, which turned out to be blood sugar-related. I misjudged what I needed to eat for the climb, but remedied the situation with a roast beef sandwich, a mess of pasta salad, a mess of fruit salad, a quart of Powerade, and a Sprite. Thus fortified, I hit the beach.
A constant wind flows down from the north, around Cape Falcon, and sweeps all of the sand on the beach into a flat, rippled surface that shimmers with a scrim of fine particles in motion. Nothing is constant: footprints began to soften and turn into vague shapes as soon as they're made, and all objects, from gull feathers to driftwood logs, are surrounded by wind-carved depressions that conform to their shapes.
It's an environment that lends itself to thoughts of impermanence and of legacies. Any attempt to make a mark upon this landscape fails, as the forces that sweep across it instantly set about erasing it. At one point, I picked the label from a bottle of water out of the sand and released it, watching as it scurried downwind from me like a thing alive, making little paper footprints that vanished within a few seconds. I traced its bright white course for fifty yards or more, as the wind pushed it down into gullies behind driftwood and around hillocks of dune grass. Each time I thought it was done with its travels, the scrap of refuse would reappear, heading pell-mell for the high dunes, until it finally fetched up against the grasses there and fluttered at me, as though wanting me to come set it on its way again. The course of the scrap followed the contours sculpted by the wind, but it gave the illusion of self-direction.
The rest of the metaphor is left as an exercise for the reader.
There are eight other people here at the campsite - two young fellows from England, fresh from college, a couple fron San Francisco, headed north, a couple I haven't met yet, and another couple who are the first hikers I've seen so far. Today was the first day I've ridden with the solar panels deployed, to charge the laptop battery. Between shady road shoulders, things coming unplugged, and switches in the wrong position, I was expecting to see 20% battery capacity. I told myself, when I fired up the computer, that if it was 40% or better, I'd share the sun's bounty and let the hikers use my EVDO connection to send e-mail if they needed to. It was at 99%, and Davis and Anna were most grateful. Looks like this solar doohickey might actually do the job.
This is all so different from the travails of the South. People complain about the traffic on Route 101, but I've ridden worse roads, with no shoulders. The climbs, so far, do not equal those of the Appalachians. The weather is perfect for riding, the scenery is astounding, and the lack of pressure to put in the big miles has made this into what I had hoped my journey would be. Tonight, I will sleep with the soothing white noise of surf filling my tent.
This morning, I woke up, looked out the tent flap, and didn't feel like going anywhere. So I didn't. I stayed in camp and drank too much chamomile tea (yes, it is possible). I spent most of the day bumming around camp, reading, and harvesting solar energy. Then cloud cover arrived, along with more hiker/biker types.
Tomorrow, supposedly, I'm going to pedal 38 miles to Cape Lookout State Park, but we'll see how I feel about that then. I may pedal fewer miles to some intermediate point, and then land at Cape Lookout the day after.
Who knows?
Not me.
LATER:
I've learned a very important lesson today: never let the day go by without getting near the ocean. It's just a bad idea.
Back in the time before Mohammed, tales were told of the tribes of the Arabian desert who worshipped rocks. This was a misinterpretation. Each evening when they had set up camp, the nomads would find three stones and carefully set them atop one another. This represented their desert gods, and, thus, they could build a temple wherever they could find three stones
I rode the full forty miles today, without too much trouble. I was tired towards the end, of course, but that vanished as soon as I saw where I'd be setting up camp: in a towering forest of pines, the thick, persistent and gnarled sort of pines that, when knocked down, will thrust another tree forth from the ruins of the old, creating the impression of a calloused wooden fist clutching the earth with massive mossy fingers. From my chosen spot, I could see the waves crashing against the hidden shore. When I laid down on the ground on top of my tent's ground sheet - I always test the sleepability of a spot before pitching the tent - I stared up into a fractal chaos of tree trunks, out-thrust branches, needles, and sky.
The rides themselves are quickly becoming the least parts of my days...it's about getting to the next place, now, and being with the sea, and watching the sun set as often as possible. Route 101 is sometimes unremarkable as it winds down the coast...today, for example, I spent a lot of time with traffic, and when I was near mountains they were often piebald, with regular square patches of gray clear-cut areas, leaving their forested profiles uneven and disheveled.
When I finally cruised back down to sea level after a modest three hundred foot climb, things improved: salt flats along the bay, flat riding, and, finally, the stony beaches of Cape Lookout. This is a beach that vanishes at high tide, as the ocean rushes in to continue its work of turning boulders into stones and stones into sand. Mist shrouded the bluffs towards the south, and the beach to the north eventually vanished into an impenetrable cloud.
It's very hot inland this weekend, so the park is full of campers in cars and RVs who have fled to the coast. A large crowd gathered for the sunset, something I always enjoy. There's an ancient sense of community there: a bunch of humans, gathered together to watch the sun do its thing. On an impulse, I stopped by the registration station and got myself a bundle of firewood.
So, this is where I am writing to you from, right now. In the middle of an evening forest, by a campfire, listening to the waves crash against a beach made from a hundred million potential temples.
It's a bit after 10 PM, and I'm in the county park at Pacific City. It's an undistinguished, windy camp, but it has the virtue of showers (coin-op, always worth the quarters) and a nearby laundromat. So I and my clothes have been washed. I fed myself with a seafood pasta thing at the pub on the beach, watched the waves roll in with surfers on them at sunset, and now I'm typing in my tent.
Yesterday was a pleasant enough Not Moving day at Camp Lookout, but as often happens when I stay in one place, a case of the mopes threatened to spoil things. I remedied it with a prodigious application of beach, and later on I had dinner in Netarts with Bobby and Ted, two folks I met at Nehalem State Park the day before yesterday, along with Pete. Pete and Ted are cruising down the coast southways, like me, and Bob started out with them but quit biking due to back problems, so now he's tooling around the coast in his van, meeting up with Pete and Ted now and again as they travel. There was some fine local beer involved, enough to make me finally forswear the stuff entirely. I didn't get drunk, really, but I'm pretty convinced that my brain's chemistry associates any influx of alcohol with a certain state of mind, which is not the drunkenness itself, but rather the low spirits that usually preceded drunkenness back when I was a drinking man. So this morning, I awoke in low spirits, not hung over, but simply suffering the consequences of a habituated neural network which easily sets itself into a certain way of transmitting electricity from neuron V to neuron Q, a way which makes your humble narrator bummed out and listless.
This was cured by a short 15-mile ride to where I am now, which began by going up what was described by Pete as the "legendary" hill out of Cape Lookout.
All due respect to the hill, and to Pete (who's been doing this route for a decade): Clinch Mountain eats a big bowl full of hills like this for breakfast. So I made short work of it. I also made a phone call, while climbing it. Bobby passed by in his van near the top, and following my 40 mile-per-hour descent pulled off and gave me some roast chicken breast he had picked up on the way out of town. Protein!
That's how things have been, really. I lost my MSR pack towel at Nehalem Bay (very tragic), and decided to see about ordering another one and having it sent to me at Cape Lookout. But it turned out that it wasn't Monday, as I thought, but was in fact Saturday, which meant an extended stay if I were to carry out my plan. One of the rangers there offered to bring me a towel, very kind. When I checked back at the registration booth the next day, the ranger on duty called her on the radio, asking about the towel...she had forgotten to bring it! No worries, really, I'd deal. Later that night, I came upon a neatly rolled towel on a tree stump by the hiker/bike camp's water supply, along with a note held down by several small pebbles: hey!! this towel is for the gentleman biker who lost his...from the ranger who forgot to bring it when she said she would. hope you get it -mary I took the towel and the note, and, by adding a few extra, rearranged the pebbles into a smiley face on the tree stump.
I've been running on the same stove fuel that I bought back in Damascus, Virginia, and it's running out. This afternoon the route turned inland a bit, and I passed by a gas station and general store in Sand Lake. There was an older bearded fellow in overalls working on an ATV in front of the garage there, and I asked if he had any white gas. He said they had it at the general store, and when I told him I only needed 18 ounces or so, he went back into the garage and let me fill up from a little bit he had in a can back there. He wouldn't name a price, so I gave him three bucks which was worth it to me and fine by him.
When I went in to do my laundry after setting up camp, I saw that there was no place to buy those handy little boxes of single-use detergent. There was a woman there doing laundry, and she offered me a cup of her detergent so that I wouldn't have to buy a big bottle of the stuff at the store up the street.
This just keeps happening. It started with Bernie Kash and Ben, back in Kentucky, so it's not something that's necessarily unique to Oregon. Every day, I'm meeting good people, who do good things.
In the campsite across from me is a Korean named Hun (say Hoon) who's on a German-made folding bike. He started in Anchorage, skipped ahead by bus to Vancouver, and is probably going to end up in LA. In the site next to me is Kevin, who's here because Cape Kiwanda beach has an enormous dune at its south end, from which people jump while affixed to artificial wings. He's going to spend a week here improving his novice's hang gliding skills. It's so very different here from back east...everywhere I go, people are sailboarding, kiteboarding, biking, hang gliding, surfing. As I watched the sun set into the mountains of clouds over the western sea horizon, four surfers headed out into the breakers, while their ice blue-eyed dog kept me company on the sand. When I headed back to my campsite, she followed me a quarter mile up the beach until one of her people finally came ashore: as soon as she saw the distant silhouette of the wet-suited figure carrying the surfboard, she tore back down the beach. It was as though she was shadowing me just in case something Bad happened, and needed me to go in after her people.
Today was a longish day, relatively - 30 miles with a climb of 700 feet or so. But the climb was fairly gentle, and took me inland through part of the Siuslaw National Forest. There, I pedaled up surrounded by silent towers of moss-draped pine. Even my flat tire, the first on-road flat I've had, wasn't a big deal. Folks in a Jeep Wagoneer passed by, then turned around and came back to take my picture, offer me cold drinks, cherries, and fizzy vitamin-things. When I reached Lincoln City, I filled myself with protein from the sea, had to skip my usual sunset watch because the wind was so strong and cold, and bought a kite.
I'm very excited about that last thing. All my many kites are in storage, and I've been missing them while I've been on so many lovely windy beaches. I bought an small HQ Symphony 1.2, the little brother of a larger parafoil I own, and a steal at $35. I will fly it tomorrow when I reach Beverly Beach which, I am assured by the cycling coupling in the next tent over, is the equal of Cape Lookout.
I am, however, quite tired right now, so I'm going to keep this short.
I built this one on the windy fogged sands of Beverly Beach, where I type to you now via the LED light of my Petzl headlamp. Power supplies and cell-phone signal are at a premium, here, so this post won't be overlong.
It was a twenty-mile hop from the lumpy campsite at Lincoln City to here, but it was a good ride, and a good thing, too: I had a lousy night. I kept waking up, startled by traffic noise from the too-close Route 101 in town, I couldn't get comfortable on the ground I chose, and deeply weird dreams assaulted me. I woke up in a funk, and a crow stole one of my blocks of Ramen. My tube patch job from yesterday proved inadequate - the tire pressure dropped by forty pounds overnight - so I pulled the wheel off and redid the patch. The solar panels wouldn't deploy properly, requiring a rearrangement of bungies, which looked like it was going to be irrelevant anyway because of the high fog bank that rolled in and smashed everything.
But the ride was fine, especially the Otter Crest loop, which was a quiet, one-way road with a fat bike lane that wound along the craggiest coastline I've traversed so far. It's the first I've seen of sea caves eroded into cliffsides, and deeply hewn bays lined by volcanic-looking black rock tossed with spray from the crashing waves...impressive, and it more than made up for the traffic and gravel-spattered shoulders of 101 that I spent most of the day on.
Beverly Beach itself isn't the best beach I've been on - it's dominated by the rust-colored steel piers of the 101 overpass - but it did offer some amazing views of thick, luxuriant fog cascading over the hills at its northern end. Out to sea, the fog was so thick it looked as though a massive, thunderous storm was bearing down on me, but it was all cloud and no rain. The wind kept up at a steady, chilly 20 to 25 miles per hour...just within the range of my new kite! So there was some flying, which passed them time and removed any vestiges of the minor work-related stress I had to deal with as soon as I made camp.
Although, I must say: dealing with work entailed deploying the solar panels, firing up the cellular amplifier, and hoisting the antenna, so while I was tending to the client's project at a somewhat inopportune time, it was nevertheless difficult to forget that once the work was done, I was still in the middle of a forest 300 yards from the ocean. I'll have to do the same thing to get this post up, and hopefully I'll be able to do it before the Black Box's battery craps out. I still haven't got the hang of prioritizing my use of the solar panels...the immediate need is to get the laptop charged, but if I do that at the expense of the Black Box battery, then once the sun goes down I have minimal power to run the amplifier. I think the solution will be to just keep the Black Box battery charging all day while I ride, which I'll start doing tomorrow.
Now, it's time to retire to the relative warmth and bug-free interior of the tent...I'm sitting at the picnic table now, next to the antenna and the Black Box. In a minute, I'll start the process of getting this post from Eudora (which makes a fine text editor) and up onto the website, with all of the attendant pictures.
If you don't get to read this post tonight, you'll know the battery ran out before I finished.
Sometimes, by the time I finish my ride, set up camp, make dinner, and fly a kite, there's very little energy left to actually sit down and write about what's gone on during the day. Or, rather, it's not so much the energy that is lacking, but the recollection: these days, I always have to think for a minute when someone asks me "Where'd you start today?" and sometimes, like today, I can't remember. It's a steadily decreasing attachment to that whole time thing, and a slow replacement of my ordinary sense of life's rhythm by the rhythms of the road. This never happened back east, never had a chance to. Here, the steady accompaniment of the ocean's tides helps me along the way, sends me to sleep, and focuses my attention on the present. I get up, I break camp, I ride, I come to rest, I make camp, I sleep...repeat.
Today I crossed the bridge out of Newport across Yaquina Bay, a tall, arching affair which demanded that I use the narrow sidewalk. I wasn't going to hold up traffic across the entire span by using the roadway, but the sign told me to walk my bike across. I can't really do that, so I rode, squeezing the trike and trailer along with inches to spare on each side, squeaking beneath the sets of archways that marked the center of the bridge. The wind was steady and strong, but I carefully made my way across. In the photo I took at the top of the bridge, you can see the wind whipping the flag straight out, and bending the antenna over with its force.
Later on, I passed by Seal Rocks, a picturesque arrangement of stone and sea that you'll find an image of at the end of this post. Shortly after that, the mechanical gremlin had a go at me again: suddenly, I couldn't pedal. I decided not to force the issue by pushing until something broke, because that would be bad. First, I took the chain off the cranks; they spun freely, so it wasn't the bearings there. I was able to move the hub in both directions, so those bearings were fine, too. I unhooked the trailer and took the Arkel bag off the rack to get a better look at the rear deraileur, but it looked fine. Then, something about the idler wheel caught my eye. The idler wheel is a bit unique to recumbents: it's a small sprocketed device about midway along the chain path that helps manage the eight-foot chain as it passes beneath the seat on its way to the rear cassette. It consists of two flat disks, with a smaller sprocketed disk sandwiched in between them; the chain passes between the two flat disks and rides along the teeth of the sprocket as you pedal. The space between the two disks is less than a half an inch, and there was a rock in it. Somehow, while riding through one of the innumerable gravel patches that litter the shoulders of Route 101, this small stone had bounced perfectly into the gap, where the chain helped it to crush one of the sprocket teeth and wedge itself firmly into place.
I turned the trike on its side to get at the idler wheel, and a bit of work with the screwdriver had me on my way again. A very odd, random rock bounce, that.
Now, I'm at a very small hiker/biker site at Beachside State Park, which, true to its name, is about fifty feet from shore. A calm day, windwise, but flying a parafoil in low winds is its own game: slow, subtle, with the occasional broad gesture on the lines to bring the foil higher into the air and keep it from collapsing on itself and falling to the ground like a wayward scarf. After a nice dinner of boiled water, rehydrated food-in-a-bag, Oreos, and chamomile tea, I'm sleepy, and ready to discover whether I picked the right spot to pitch the tent. In about twenty minutes, I'll go watch the sun set.
Tomorrow: 35 miles or so, to Honeyman State Park in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. About a mile away from the ocean, but I'm told that the dunes are spectacular.
.
OK, so I didn't go 34 miles to the spectacular dune place, I went 16 miles to a fairly nice hiker/biker site a little north of Heceta Head, at the Carl G. Washburn Memorial State Park. Who was Carl G. Washburn? I don't know, but it's the nicest hiker/biker site I've been in for awhile, so he must've been a good guy. I was getting tired of hearing the traffic on 101 at night. Here, all I can hear is the ocean, about a half mile away through the forest. Cell signal here is weak, but my kung-fu is strong, so I'll be able to post.
Not that there's much to tell. I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore throat, which could have just been from the cold night air, but I was also feeling a bit blah and tired, so I decided to halve my mileage. It's a good thing I did, because my body is threatening a walkout if I don't give it a rest day, and this is a good site to take one in. So I will.
This morning I discovered that my first tube patching job was not, in fact, inadequate, because there was another pinhole in the tube, onto which I slapped another patch (Remo Tip-Top touring patches, for those who want to know...anything else is a waste of time, especially those puny self-adhesive laughable pseudo-patches, feh). I also put bits of electrical tape over the rough places on the inside of the tire surface that were wearing holes in the tube. Kevlar is tough, but the shoulders here are so covered with gravel and other bits of assorted pointiness that even the miracle fiber sometimes snaps under the impacts, creating little rough spots that work their way into soft inner tube material over time.
I had a good climb over Cape Perpetua, where the road winds up along a mountainous shoreline, offering views of rocky coast and spuming white waves crashing in the sun. Those are the kind of sights that make me laugh out loud as I pedal, because they're so wondrous and it's so absurd that I'm looking at them from the cockpit of my five-wheeled freakmobile with its banners crackling in the breeze on the side of a mountain.
Before I got to the park, I decided that I would cook breakfast for dinner: pancakes, bacon, and OJ, and damn the sloppy KP afterwards. The little RV park grocery in Searose Beach had all the ingredients: a box of Bisquick, a small package of bacon (the last one!), a little bottle of OJ. I stashed the bacon in the Bug next to the laptop and made the five miles to camp before it thawed, and after my traditional welcome shower fried up the whole lot, and ate it all with four fat Bisquick pancakes. Yes! Now I am tired and a little chilly, but full of camp-style breakfast food, and I just realized that if I put my socks on I will be warm, so that's something.
And now: rocks and water in a pleasing arrangement.
I admit it. The whole "discovering America" thing was a bit of a sham.
Oh, not a real sham...more of a sham sham. In that yes, I did want to go across the country, see the folks in it, see the landscape, get down with the whole American Experience thing.
But, as many of you who've been reading this site for awhile know, it's mostly All About Me, and as most of you who've come to the site since I hit the road are probably figuring out, it's still mostly All About Me. The quest, then, was not for the country, but for my self.
Virginia and Kentucky were big bashes upside the head, states of body and of mind that I won't rehash here. It should suffice to say that it was probably apparent to many readers, long before it was apparent to me, that I wasn't going to be dipping my front wheels in the Pacific to symbolize of the end of my full-on pedaled-the-country experience. What I got instead was the full-on pedaled-myself-into-the-ground experience, which is its own...not reward, precisely, but it certainly had its share of teachable moments. I know what my habits of behavior and of thought are, and the time I spent frying on southern roads was time that I would've spent drinking, alone, in some apartment somewhere, eating bad food and getting fatter, doing some job I didn't care about, heading towards an inexorable breakdown. It's happened before. Too often.
But not this time. What I seem to have done, instead, is strip away everything that would allow me to tread once more down the well-worn paths of drink and entombment. I can't do it out here. Oh, I tried, back in those motels in Charlottesville, Christiansburg, and Berea. But I couldn't, not really...it was too obviously self-defeating, too glaringly stupid, and all the familiar enabling factors were gone. And when I reached the west coast, it became emphatically clear: once denied the opportunity, the desire revealed itself for what it was: a tottering, wrecked mutation of behavior I adopted out of necessity long ago that has grown into a tumorous weight. I am excising that weight with pedal strokes, miles travelled, and elevation gained. My waistline isn't the only thing that's shrinking...I am leaving the unnamed burdens of my distant past by the shores of this ocean.
I won't get into too many of the gooey details. But it is better to be present, looking with sober eyes into the mirrors I find on this road, than it is be in a home, with a warm bed, and a flickering television, and a nearby liquor store. It is better to suffer my undimmed emotions against the backdrop of churning waves than it is to crush them with whatever means presents itself. This...this, right here, and right now, with all of its sweat, and pain, and tremulous states of mind and soul...this is why I am here.
This morning was, I hope, the absolute emotional nadir of this journey. I slept fitfully, and when the cell phone alarm rang at 6:30 I switched it off and snoozed until 7:30, a familiar knot of dread in my gut. I only had 25 miles to go today, but I felt the siren song of the Motel Room: stay here, it tempted, where there is a bed and a television, and you don’t have to pedal or dodge traffic or risk anything. Stay here.
Last night I had a dream that I was listening to George Harrison. The previous night I dreamed that I made a fruit smoothie, which prompted me to buy some fruit at the Wal-Mart. That worked out pretty well for me, so after I finally checked out of the motel and pedaled up Route 80 to the exit for Route 15, I put on All Things Must Pass. And: everything transformed. The dreaded ride became The Ride. I didn’t think about the fact that I hadn’t left until 10:20, and would surely get hammered by the sun. I rode along Route 15, playing tag with the rumble strips. When it was time to climb, I climbed…a lot. Two or three climbs, actually, one up to 1,500 feet, in the afternoon sun with no shade. I ate energy, drank fluids, and did what I had to do, encouraged by a spray-painted message on the road and a newly-buoyant heart.
Back at Spark's store, I confirmed the Booneville setup: place to camp, free, even (yes!) a shower. When I asked if they had a bathroom I could use, he said they didn't...and gave me the key to the church up the road. There was a bathroom there I could use, he said.
Completed in 1928, "The Log Cathedral" was constructed entirely of logs by the people of Buckhorn, and is considered the largest structure of its type in the world. (You can read more about the church here.) I spent as much time as I could spare ogling the woodwork and taking blurry flashless photos, then returned the key to Sparks. We talked about the church awhile. Obviously proud of his town's history and of the church, he told me that they still held services there as long as the weather was warm enough, usually May through October. I finally pedaled out of Buckhorn at 4:15.
After another few miles of riding along the undulating ridgeline, I sucked the last of my water out of the Camelbak. I had twelve miles to go when I finally began the descent off the mountain, so I steeled myself for a thirsty couple of hours until I reached Irvine. As I reached the flats, I passed another inspirational plate (thanks, guys!), strapped to a telephone pole with electrical tape. Encouraged, I forged ahead. At one point, I passed a ditch with water in its bottom, and I thought of my water filtration system...but I wasn't really at that point, not yet.
This always happens...whatever the reasons for staying, no matter how sound, I always end up with the Motel Malaise. But I've gotten some work done today (which is why I'm still here, after all), and I'll be hitting the road tomorrow, bound for a campground near Burgin.
As always, after an extended stay in one place, there's the long process of packing everything back up into the trailer, out of which gear is inevitably strewn. (That's the trike in the foreground, serving as a drying rack.) With the new drybags, I should be able to pack the trailer a bit more efficiently...whether that will translate into less trailer bounce remains to be seen.
On Saturday, I pulled a 59-miler to get to a campground in Bardstown, Kentucky, anticipating six straight days of riding. Not all 60-milers, of course, but I was ready to start hammering. I hadn't done the math in terms of days left in the decent season and miles left to go, but I knew that the numbers probably weren't good. At the campsite, I met Lonnie and Debbie, who were kind enough to share their meal with me, and were good company. Cell phone service was hit or miss, but I called the only motel I'd be passing for the next five or six days to make a reservation. There was something about the fellow who answered that made me ask whether they had phones in the rooms. Sure enough, they didn't.
Then again...I could...skip ahead to the end. Pack all my gear up and high-tail it across the country to Astoria, then cycle 1,100 miles down the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara.
Those are the things that defined this day. I ended up giving Ecola State Park a miss and camping at an RV park in Cannon Beach, mainly because the latter has showers. A shower wasn't important at the beginning of the day; at the end of the day, it was. I had my first climb today - modest, up to about 400 feet and then back down. There will be many more of those in the days to come.
This morning, I woke up, looked out the tent flap, and didn't feel like going anywhere. So I didn't. I stayed in camp and drank too much chamomile tea (yes, it is possible). I spent most of the day bumming around camp, reading, and harvesting solar energy. Then cloud cover arrived, along with more hiker/biker types.
In the campsite across from me is a Korean named Hun (say Hoon) who's on a German-made folding bike. He started in Anchorage, skipped ahead by bus to Vancouver, and is probably going to end up in LA. In the site next to me is Kevin, who's here because Cape Kiwanda beach has an enormous dune at its south end, from which people jump while affixed to artificial wings. He's going to spend a week here improving his novice's hang gliding skills. It's so very different here from back east...everywhere I go, people are sailboarding, kiteboarding, biking, hang gliding, surfing. As I watched the sun set into the mountains of clouds over the western sea horizon, four surfers headed out into the breakers, while their ice blue-eyed dog kept me company on the sand. When I headed back to my campsite, she followed me a quarter mile up the beach until one of her people finally came ashore: as soon as she saw the distant silhouette of the wet-suited figure carrying the surfboard, she tore back down the beach. It was as though she was shadowing me just in case something Bad happened, and needed me to go in after her people.
Sometimes, by the time I finish my ride, set up camp, make dinner, and fly a kite, there's very little energy left to actually sit down and write about what's gone on during the day. Or, rather, it's not so much the energy that is lacking, but the recollection: these days, I always have to think for a minute when someone asks me "Where'd you start today?" and sometimes, like today, I can't remember. It's a steadily decreasing attachment to that whole time thing, and a slow replacement of my ordinary sense of life's rhythm by the rhythms of the road. This never happened back east, never had a chance to. Here, the steady accompaniment of the ocean's tides helps me along the way, sends me to sleep, and focuses my attention on the present. I get up, I break camp, I ride, I come to rest, I make camp, I sleep...repeat.
Later on, I passed by Seal Rocks, a picturesque arrangement of stone and sea that you'll find an image of at the end of this post. Shortly after that, the mechanical gremlin had a go at me again: suddenly, I couldn't pedal. I decided not to force the issue by pushing until something broke, because that would be bad. First, I took the chain off the cranks; they spun freely, so it wasn't the bearings there. I was able to move the hub in both directions, so those bearings were fine, too. I unhooked the trailer and took the Arkel bag off the rack to get a better look at the rear deraileur, but it looked fine. Then, something about the idler wheel caught my eye. The idler wheel is a bit unique to recumbents: it's a small sprocketed device about midway along the chain path that helps manage the eight-foot chain as it passes beneath the seat on its way to the rear cassette. It consists of two flat disks, with a smaller sprocketed disk sandwiched in between them; the chain passes between the two flat disks and rides along the teeth of the sprocket as you pedal. The space between the two disks is less than a half an inch, and there was a rock in it. Somehow, while riding through one of the innumerable gravel patches that litter the shoulders of Route 101, this small stone had bounced perfectly into the gap, where the chain helped it to crush one of the sprocket teeth and wedge itself firmly into place.
