Yesterday, rather than spend the night at the same campsite as the aforementioned lunatic Canuck, we rode 43 miles instead of 22. He turned up unexpectedly in Point Arena as Tom and I were standing outside the Library, waiting for Rich to finish up on the Internet inside. As soon as Johnny had finished telling us how much he drank and smoked the previous day, he headed up the street to engulf some food, and we plotted the avoidance plan. Once advised of the danger of imminent Johnnyness, Rich agreed, and we were off.

I was pretty cranky by the end of the ride...the "$1.75 for four minutes" showers at the Ocean Cove RV park didn't help much with my Big Grump. But today, we're at Bodega Dunes State Park, where the showers are free. So it all averages out, in the same way that big hills are balanced by blazing descents, meal costs are shared, and dishes are done by whoevcer feels like doing them. A weird little pedaling tripod-style circus are we. That's Pod Thomas there, praying to the gods of fog and sea that he won't miss his line and slide under a truck during his incipient mad downhill careen.

This circus, I might add, is getting to San Francisco a day ahead of schedule, due to our steely determination to not hear another interminably enthusiastic "I spent all day at this great swimming hole, ay? Drank a quart of scotch, got drunk, rolled up some reefers! Oh yeah, it was a good time, ha!" story, or any variations thereof. We've got 35 miles tomorrow, then 17 the next day, then 19 on Sunday, at the end of which we'll ride across the Golden Gate through the soup of fog that's been following us down the coast for over a week now. Not quite what we were expecting from California...clearly, someone's forgotten to pay the weather bill.

But! San Francisco is a significant point in the journey, for all three of us, so getting there, fog or no, is all milestoneish and so forth.

I'd like to prattle on more, but the gray sky has reduced the solar panels' output, and I've got about 20 minutes' worth of battery left on the laptop.

Now: some fog for you. Looking north, from one of the higher bits on the climb to Fort Ross.

Read more from the On The Road: Week 14 Archive
Permalink

...and a bit tired just now. We had to pull a 31-miler to get here instead of the planned 19 miles, due to circumstances which I will tell you more about tomorrow, when I've had more sleep. Right now, Tom, Rich, and I are the only occupants of a hotel downtown that's been closed for business for over a year...it's in mostly good shape (that is, not particularly seedy or run down), and there's just a bit of The Shining vibe going on. However, there are no creepy twin girls hanging about the halls and, so far, Nicholson has been passed out drunk in a maintenance closet and hasn't done much in the way of axe swinging.

I'll have more tales and photos and such later.

Read more from the On The Road: Week 14 Archive
Permalink

The view from the windows at the desk is mostly of these three buildings, names unknown to me, and of a hotel farther in the background to the right which adds a bit of movement to the scene with four external elevators that shuttle up and down its side, little glowing pods in the fog of the evening.

This, hopefully, will be my city.

The idea to relocate to San Francisco occurred to me within hours of our arrival. I'm not sure exactly when...probably not during the wine tasting party that we attended on Sunday night at the house of the parents of a friend of Doug's. That event's greatest entertainment was the sheer oddness of being in pristine rooms, white-walled, filled with objects d'art and well-off people who I didn't know, with not a tree or pile of pine needles to be found anywhere and three months' worth of beard and sun on my face. Further entertainment could be had by watching Tom and Rich try to make sense of the idea of sipping from many different bottles of wine and then filling out little cards with their opinions of the anonymously-wrapped vintages. Tom's method was to find one he liked and have a big honking glass of it, then find another he liked and repeat the process. Rich's was to drink the beer he'd brought along. Mine was to drink water and enjoy the novelty of remaining sober at a social gathering.

There is something here, and Doug probably put it best: many of the people who are here just want to be here, and have stories similar in nature to my own. That is, somewhere along the way they've made a decision to try for the storied Fresh Start, and when they arrived in this place, it seemed to welcome their intentions. I've got more checking to do into the practicalities of it all, but so far the job prospects (via Dice and elsewhere) look good, and - perhaps more importantly - I've got a sensation of moving gently along my life's currents that has been missing for quite some time.

Actually getting here took some doing. On Friday morning, as we pedaled out of Bodega Dunes State Park, I had to stop and replace my rear derailleur cable, which had become frayed at the shifter to the point of unusability. Because I am a mechanical genius, I routed the cable housing so that it passed between the upper and lower portions of the chain under the seat, which resulted in the housing getting chewed into a ragged mess by the idler wheel in the parking lot of the grocery store in Bodega Bay. Fortunately, a fellow in an RV who was planning on re-cabling his mountain bike was able to give me the old housing right off his bike, and Douglas from the Candy and Kites store across the street also showed up with a length of housing from his garage, in addition to a pound of taffy for the three of us. I spliced two pieces of cable housing together, and braced the joint with small lengths of the old housing, wrapped up in a bolus of electrical tape. By the time we got that all sorted out, it was after two PM, and we ended up riding until seven in the evening, arriving at our RV park destination just as the sun disappeared behind the veil of thick clouds to the west.

The next day, Saturday, we decided to ride just eight miles to Samuel P. Taylor State Park, because a) our original destination turned out to be a "walk-in" campsite on top of a whacking great mountain and b) we needed a bit of a rest day, as we'd been pushing hard since Monday. At the park, we found some decent places to pitch our tents in the redwoods. We also found Johnny, who showed up after we'd been there for a couple of hours, along with a couple of other cycling characters who together created a trifecta of the weird that sent the three of us to our tents early. One of them was an enormously fat man with a somewhat disturbing affect who, despite claims of "working locally," turned out to be a homeless fellow who stayed the two-night limit at the hiker-biker sites in the state parks around the San Rafael area. He cooked up a couple of pounds of ground chuck as burgers over a fire made from brush, pine needles, and the styrofoam the meat was packaged in, then liberally applied chunks from a wobbly oil-sweating block of cheese to them. He slept on one of the picnic tables and snored like a herd of oxen. The third fellow was in his fifties, seemed to have a speech impediment of some kind, smoked a tobacco pipe, and, apropos of nothing in particular, made sure we all knew that he was thinking about buying a house in Bulgaria.

Johnny was more subdued than he'd been the last two times we saw him. This may have had something to do with our near-total lack of response to anything he said. We didn't want to encourage him, lest he park himself at our table, roll up fat stinky joints, and annoy us by being his usual pseudo-raconteurish self.

We fled the park before ten the next morning, finally crossing the Golden Gate around three or so. There was some group dynamic friction after we'd crossed and got a bit turned around on the other side of the bridge...I'd been fairly grumpy and short-tempered over the previous three days, snappish, and Tom finally got pissed off enough at me to object. He was right about it...I know I can get impatient with people, so I apologized, and by the time we'd arrived at the hotel, met Doug, showered, and gotten ourselves to a local mart for some snacky foods, all was well. Ups and downs of the group, I suppose. But I also must admit that I'd been sharing some of Tom's smoky things with him, not too much, but consistently enough, I think, to affect my overall mood in the usual negative fashion. It's a mistake I won't be repeating...it seems that I really can't get away with anything like that. It's a shame there isn't a safe smoky alternative to weed, so that I can have the cannabis equivalent of 7-Up or tonic in social situations.

This evening we attended a baseball game, where the Oakland Athletics beat the Boston Red Sox 2 to 1. Tomorrow's activities are as yet unplanned, but on Friday we'll be taking a night tour of Alcatraz.

Now, it's time for me to head bedways, maybe for a bit of reading, while the ringing of cable car bells filters through the windows.

Read more from the On The Road: Week 14 Archive
Permalink

OK, not my own Wikipedia entry...but my Proloxil cartoon is mentioned in the entry for Sertraline (Zoloft, that is), in the Popular Culture section.

Yee!

And so on.

Read more from the On The Road: Week 14 Archive
Permalink

Oh! The troubled head,
the fallen heart.
The vibrant silence,
shattered by an insistent soul.
Cloaked in fragile pottery:
as an egg of nascent watered steel
I burst forth into molten awareness,
joyous beneath the hammer and the tongs.
I will be a blade of life.
I will carve quiescence from my own bones,
and cleave stillness from my own mind.
I will tower:
stripped of experiential gravity,
my flesh will be a cloak of light.
I am a sentinel of my self.

Today was a wandering day: lunch at Taylor's with Doug, then along the Embarcadero to the Bay Bridge, then over to a few shops for the British boys to browse, then a movie, dinner, and home again. Spending time walking around the city keeps the legs moving, preventing us from shrinking into small old men who won't be able to pedal out of here in a few days. And the randomness of our treks lets us find new things in the city, although we are becoming familiar with a particular large hill on Powell Street because we always seem to end up coming back that way.

This is a singsong time for me, because I am contemplating a large-scale movement of life, a deliberate removal of myself from the East Coast, where I've been since age four or so, back to the West Coast, biorhythmic zone of my birth and infancy. Sitting here at my desk in the Hotel de Shining, with my headphones on and the iPod playing Milk & Kisses, the At Home And Alive feelings are stirring. It's strange to realize that my journey isn't over yet, and doesn't end here. There are still 340 miles to go under my own power, an effort that will be fueled, I think, by the anticipation of returning to this city by the bay.

There are still many practical things that will need doing, but my intention is becoming more focused every day, as I get used to a new clarity of mind and of purpose.

Read more from the On The Road: Week 14 Archive
Permalink