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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

And now: water, birds, and sun.

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The sore throat mostly went away, but it seems I'm still fighting something off. So now it's a bit of race to see if I can get to Port Orford, where a friend of my mom's has some room for me for a few days, before I actually get sick.

I'm pretty tired right now (25 miles to Umpqua Lighthouse State Park, some climbs) so I'm going to clean up from dinner and get into my tent to escape the mosquitos, read, and sleep to the sound of the distant foghorn.

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I'm feeling a bit better, although there were coughs and some phlegm at the beginning and the end of the day, just to let me know that I've got to get my rest and keep popping my Vitamin C. 21.6 miles today, gove or take a few feet, at an average speed of 9.6 miles per hour, which is not bad at all considering that it wasn't all flat. I'm at a US Forestry Service campsite at Horsfall Lake, in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. It's an ATV campground - meaning the air is filled with the 93-decibel noise of four-wheelers, motorbikes, and other petroleum-based dune-hopping fun machines. I don't mind, really. My other choice was the Bluebill campground, another USFS site about a mile and a half up the road, which was deserted, looked to be built in a marsh, and had no showers. Both sites cost $20, so I'd rather have motor noise and showers than isolation and malaria.

Because it's for motorsports, the sites are arranged around the parking area, which means I've got my own patch of asphalt. I set up the solar array and spent the afternoon trying to eat enough, reading, and tending to my sun juicing. A much better scene than being stuck at Bluebill, all around, even though there are skeeters here, too...but they've got another hour or so before it gets too cold for them and they bugger off to wherever it is that cold mosquitos bugger off to.

Tomorrow, I've got a 29-mile off-route journey to Bullards Beach State Park. The route-planning folks at Adventure Cycling are often of the opinion that hills build character, which they try to disguise by routing "scenic" excursions off of Route 101. Such is Seven Devils Road: twelve miles over seven not-so-high but steeply-graded hills, and everyone who's ridden it has encouraged me to take 101 inland instead. So that's what I'll do, despite my close-to-the-ocean rule (the ride will end up at a beach, so technically, it's still in service of the rule). Then, on Thursday, another 29-mile ride into Port Orford, where rest, a roof, an ultralight folding cot, a replacement idler wheel, and a box of food and mail from New York await me.

I've spent the past couple of days in the company of Tom and Rich (left to right respectively), a pair of vagabonds from South London who are riding from Vancouver to Tijuana, and will eventually end up in Rio in time for Carnival via other, non-pedaling means. They passed by me my first or second day out of Astoria, but I only caught up with them now...our paces are similar, as they are a) on mountain bikes b) big blokes and c) given to the regular consumption of vino and other stuffs that tend not to lend themselves to high-performance cycling. Which is not at all what it's about, for them, they're happy meandering down the coast, taking their time, much like I am (only without the aforementioned "stuffs"). They took a rest day at Honeyman State Park yesterday, mainly so that Tom could ride back into Florence to have his rear cassette replaced, while I pressed on to Umpqua Lighthouse. I'll probably run into them again at some point, which lends a sense of camaraderie to to the enterprise...in fact, my night at Honeyman was the first time on the whole trip I've had the whole "hanging out at the picnic table in the dark with a bunch of cyclists" experience. Much wine was in evidence, of which I had none, but there was a small quantity of smokables being passed around, of which I had a bit. I did this primarily to reconfirm that yes: it's still well off the list of Things I Can Have. Nothing new, there; it has been for years now. But I am about a week and half away from cycling through Humbolt County, California, and I'd rather dabble with the tiny bit that was floating around that night than the log-sized fatties that my imagination assures me are doubtless being swung around in campsites there right this very minute, setting the forest ablaze with stoned abandon.

Also to be found at Honeyman was a fellow whose name I can't remember, if I ever knew it. I first ran into him at Washburn. He's in his forties, with a sizable gut, riding a mountain bike to which he's affixed a pair of plastic bins with a kind of shoestring-stitchery arrangement - he calls them his "two-dollar panniers" - with an external frame backback strapped over their tops. He's got a tent that's too small for him; he drapes a tarp over the open end, and puts his feet and lower legs into a plastic garbage bag that pokes out the end. He spent most of the day at Honeyman and at Washburn sitting at his picnic table, either listening to something on the headphones, or simply staring into space. He'll engage in conversation easily enough, but there's no point in mincing words: he's not quite right in the head. His affect is just off somehow, in that realm of behavior that exceeds the merely eccentric. At dusk, while we were sitting around the picnic table, he just sat vacantly at his table, wrapped in a purple threadbare down blanket. He seems functional enough - when I saw him last, he said that he was done with this portion of his trip, and would be heading to Florida, although the details were vague.

But I think that's what he said the first time I saw him, too. So if I see him again further south, I'll know that he's stuck in some sort of loop, where he's always finished with this leg of his journey, always about to head to Florida, but never actually getting there.

So now it's tea time - chamomile tea, with a Benadryl to make sure it works. I took one last night, as well, to insure that I got the sleep I know I need to hold of whatever it is that's threatening to make me sick. It worked, too: I went to bed at nine and didn't wake up until about 12:30 AM, when a raccoon stuck its noisy head into the empty box of Better Cheddar crackers I had stuffed with trash and temporarily deposited in my firepit until I could throw it away in the morning. It sounded like something having at the tarp covering my rig, so there ensued the following: I strapped my lamp to my head, turned it to its brightest setting, burst forth from my tent making loud disturbing noises, staggered five feet or so, then tripped over a root and fell in the dirt. This, as planned, frightened the raccoon a full twenty feet away, where it looked at me curiously with LED-shined eyes. I had already hung my food bags in a nearby tree, so I moved the cracker box out of my campsite, went back into my tent, fired up the laptop and ordered a length of Dyneema bear line to replace the one that was stolen from me by a psychic squirrel at the Wytheville KOA in Virginia.

I haven't told you that story, actually, but the end result was that I've been using inferior replacement line to sling my food bags up into trees since then, and this first actual encounter with a raccoon convinced me that I needed to acquire another length of the higher quality line. It's stiffer, stronger, doesn't tangle, and is just generally what you want when you're heading into bear country. So, add that to the list of things waiting for me in Port Orford.

No real pictures to be taken, over the past two days or so...I've been focused more on the riding, and at any rate much of the countryside along 101 has been unremarkable, in that in consists of undistinguished hillsides with vast swaths of forest shaved off of them, leaving grey dust littered with tree bones that used to be draped with green moss.

OK...now it is tea time.

Really.

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But I have seen a frog. That's it right there, being small and hidden. I spied it hopping along the sandy path as I walked the three-quarter mile trail from my campsite here at Bullards Beach State Park to the beach proper. Once it was convinced I couldn't see it anymore, it stopped, and I got in close to get the photo.

The beach here is a new type for this leg of the journey: the Dangerous beach. It's narrow, with steeply sloping sands, so that each wave that comes in fights against the remains of the ones that have clawed their way up the shore ahead of it and failed in their attempts to inundate the continent. The bleached remains of trees litter the base of the dunes, looking the like skeletal remnants of ancient dinosaur combat. I flew my kite for awhile, keeping one eye on the encroaching waves in case "high tide" turned out to mean "this beach goes away." The trail back to the campsite wound through the wilderness that must've bordered all the beaches along the coast, before they put resort towns there: grasses, scrub pines, thick growths of low shrubs and other sand-dwelling vegetation.

The day started with another somewhat technical ride over a long tall bridge - the Coos Bay bridge, in this case, and the technical bits involved keeping the trike's left front wheel about five inches away from the curb's edge, while trying not to scrape the right hub or fender too badly against the stone and metal railings. Failure to keep the left wheel on the curb meant a sudden eight-inch drop, possible frame damage, and tumbling sideways into traffic. Still, it was exhilarating, having to focus so intently, while slowly riding up into the air along a high arc over the waters of the bay.

After that, things got a little less elevated - the inland detour around the Seven Devils I mentioned yesterday involved riding through the city of Coos Bay, which was a weirdly bleak sort of place. I've noticed that the cities and towns that are surrounded by clear-cut areas tend to be much less pleasant. Brad, a hiker staying here at the site, pointed out that these are the logging towns, which makes sense...they're the northwestern equivalent of mining towns in Kentucky like Hazard and Elkhorn City. At one point, I passed by a large assemblage of conveyors, towers, and hoppers, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to shred logs into chunks, and then arrange those chunks into large piles. I did manage to find a supermarket on the way out of town, though, and secured a good meal for dinner, which mitigated the rough, unmarked shoulders, the traffic, and the general weird vibe of the place.

Once out of the city, I dealt with two or three long, not so steep climbs, finally reaching the campground around 4:00. Dinner ensued.

Tomorrow, there will be another 29-mile ride to Port Orford, but without any bridges or logging towns. Always a good thing.

And now, as my increasing brevity indicates, sleep.

But first: beach.

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