Thursday, March 26, 2009

Cross-country bike trip (cont.)

H


Hazards, road. There are lots of dangers, difficulties, and inconveniences to be encountered on America’s highways (see Animals, Bodily functions, Climbs, Close calls, Dogs, Food), but there are two hazards on the road that deserve special mention. The first is the ubiquitous “alligator,” that hunk of tire tread that litter road shoulders nationwide. Sometimes they’re barely visible, sometimes they are whole truck treads that I am barely strong enough to drag off to the side but, large or small, they are always dangerous to bikers. Treads almost always contain thin reinforcing wires, probably about 20-gauge, that break off into little nail-like lengths. In my experience, more than half of flat tires on my bike have been caused by those little wires. It was also true on the trip (see Tires). Greg says that most of the “alligators” are from retreads, which some states prohibit. We see a lot more of them in Arizona, probably because of the heat and the number of Mexican trucks on the road. Riders spend a lot of mental energy searching shoulders for glass, but broken glass is way down the list of tire dangers. If you should have a chance to voice your opinion for an anti-retread law in your state, you’ll have a legion of lycra-clad fanatics behind you.

The second big hazard I discovered on this journey is motorcycles. I hasten to add that not all motorcycles are hazards, just the ones with the earsplitting, headache-making, unmuffled exhausts. Greg, my mentor in all things vehicular, says the ones that do it are the bigger Harleys which have had their exhaust systems modified from the relatively civilized factory specs. I first noticed them on the interstate in southern Idaho. Some of the motorcycles that passed us were so loud that I suffered real pain in my ears. It doesn’t happen when they are even with me, but when they are down the road a bit. Then the pop-pop-pop percussive sound becomes sharper, more penetrating, more painful. I don’t know why this is the case. Greg also says that many states have laws which forbid unmuffling motors or impose decibel limits on them, though these laws usually go unenforced. So, again, if you have the opportunity to speak out for restrictive legislation or more vigorous enforcement of existing laws governing exhaust noise, do it. For the sake of our old guys on bikes, do it.


Hometown. I rode into Keokuk IA, my native place, on the third of July. I had not thought of my time there as a farewell visit, but that’s what it turned out to be. My sister, Bev, was the last Brown in town. Then, four years ago, she died, and there were no more. It is a hard thing for me to get my mind around. The Browns had been in town and the area since the beginning, in the mid-19th Century. In the 1840s and 50s one of my forebears, Andrew Brown, was known as “Citizen” Brown and carried a lot of influence in the community. My grandfather, Horatio Brown, ran the county farm early in the 20th Century and was bailiff of the District Court in his later years. My father was a member of the Republican courthouse gang in Lee County and was elected County Clerk several times in the 30s and 40s. Two of my aunts were well-known teachers in the Keokuk schools. Great-uncles and great-aunts lived in nearby small towns; second- and third-cousins abounded. The small town was coextensive with family in my childhood. Everywhere I went in the town, the eyes that watched me and knew me were as likely to belong to family as strangers. Spatially, my immediate family lived in many of the town’s neighborhoods. I lived in eight different houses before I left town at seventeen. They were on the north side and the south side, Keokuk’s two social worlds, and from 19th Street, near the country edge of town, to 5th Street, closer to the River. From the time I was nine or ten, old enough to get anywhere on a bike, the whole town was my playground. We kids ran the alleys, the dirt roads, the vacant lots; we knew all the woods around the town; we sneaked off, against rigid prohibitions and prudent advice, to swim in the river, never for a moment granting that it might just be one of us who died in it that summer. My memories of the place are rich and my attachments strong.

On the way into town, I decided to visit the Hickory Grove cemetery, where most of the Browns are buried. Searching for the graves of grandparents, aunts and uncles, I paused at the newer plots where classmates, family friends, near and distant cousins, are buried. What a trip that was; I was awash in memory, conscious of the passage of so much and so many into near-oblivion, and keenly aware of my own survival in the short term. I spent the rest of the day, and the morning of the next, riding around the town to all the places I’d lived, past the gutters and curbs where I’d lost marbles, raced little cars, made dams and caught worms after rainstorms, past the buildings that housed neighborhood groceries, past the vacant lots that once held my schools, my church, the grocery I worked in. Then I went to Oakland Cemetery where my parents, sister, and my maternal grandparents, the Craigs, are buried. That, too, was a trip to my childhood. Cut into the stones of the cemetery’s Catholic section are the names of the families who were members of St. Mary’s parish or St. Peters, the people the Craig side of the family talked about on summer evenings, sitting on the front porch—lots of Irish (from St. Peter’s ) and Germans (St. Mary’s) leavened with a few Italians, apostates, and heathens. It was a sentimental journey of the first water, a visit to the home that exists only in my mind and heart. Though I have made noises about going back for my sixtieth high school class reunion five years from now, it’s likely that I’ll never return to the town again. As a farewell gesture I took a picture of the statue of Chief Keokuk in Rand Park. I’ll send you one, if you like.

July 4. Statue of Chief Keokuk on the bluff overlooking a wide stretch of the Mississippi River known as--you guessed it!--Lake Keokuk.


Hole, Jackson. More than three months after the fact, it is hard to capture the revulsion I felt in Jackson WY. Memory dims, the gorge subsides, and nice infiltrates the space of nasty. But I’ll try to recover some of it for the record. You must know, first of all, that after the descent from the brilliance of the snowy Teton Pass, down the harrowing nine-mile grade, past nesting bald eagles, sliding into a sump of terrifying traffic and tourist trash is a bit nauseating. Now imagine yourself, still a little green, reeling from another blow—the motel you’d picked from the internet because rooms were just $50 is actually charging $88 more. See yourself, riding through the gutter detritus of a throwaway culture, trying to be aware of the clot of cars racing up from behind to kill or maim, going from dump to dump attempting to find lodging at an affordable price. Then feel the triumph of finding a 1930s-vintage tourist cabin for only $100, the cheapest room in town. Then realize that you must reverse your course for a couple of miles, daring the narrow streets and traffic once again, to find something to eat—at an outrageous price, of course. (I’m beginning to tremble now; I think I’m into it.) The people who live there changed the town’s name from Jackson Hole to Jackson some years ago because visitors were probably much too inclined to drop the “Jackson” and add a “Hell.” You can be sure it didn’t take me long to do it. What a relief it was to ride out of town the next morning and luxuriate in stupendous views of the Tetons for hours on end!


Hours. How long does it really take to ride across the country? To say 46 days is to give a grossly approximate measure. It actually took 316 hours of pedaling, an average of 6.88 hours on the bike each day. The shortest day on the bike was when we rode over Teton Pass to Jackson (a.k.a. Hell) Hole, a distance of 25 miles, in just three hours. That was almost matched by one of our short Ohio days when we rode from Athens to Parkersburg in 3 ½ hours. Our two longest days were from Bridgeport NE to Ogallala, when we had to climb “them hills around Lewellen” with the wind in our faces (see Climbs), and the hot, muggy day when I wilted on the grueling hundred-miler from Pleasant Plains IL to Tuscola IL. On both those days we were in the saddle for 11 ½ hours. Other long days worthy of note were the 101-mile trek across the lonesome sagebrush plain from Shoshoni WY to Casper, and the nerve-wracking climbs over the hump of the Appalachians from Clarksburg WV to Mt. Storm, both eleven-hour days. To put our piddling little endurance dramas in perspective, the record for a biker in the Race Across America Marathon is just over 125 hours.


I


Infirmity. I did have a few misgivings in the spring about undertaking such a long ride, figuring that the old body might not be up to the daily grind. I’m not one of those eternally young sorts who can’t imagine they are over 50. One of the gifts of cancer is a certain objectivity about mortality, including how close the end may be. So I was quite certain about my age, 72, and rather open-minded about the disability that age implies. I expected to get out of bed a few times each night to ease my bladder or to work out leg cramps. I wasn’t too worried about migraines, which can be controlled by medication. I found on the rides around Arizona and Colorado that the pills do work and that I can bike through a migraine, if necessary. I was really more concerned about bad colds and stomach distress than about headaches. But, amazingly, neither was a problem, excepting the two-day episode following the dreadful chop suey at the Hong Kong Restaurant in Idaho Falls. I was also concerned about my rear end. It is susceptible to compression sores that can turn into boils when I ride a long time in the heat. I take as much tender, loving care of my butt as a fashion-plate model does of her face. I’m glad to report that there were no serious difficulties in that area, though I’m sure it resembled hamburger by the end of the trip. I had some discomfort in my SEWR zones (shoulders, elbows, wrists, and rear). Experts figure that, on a road bike, perhaps 30% of one’s weight is carried by the upper body and arms. Arthritis in my wrists and elbow led me to reduce some of that load by raising my handlebars and selecting a plumper saddle to cushion my rear in the new, more upright position. Still, shoulders, elbows and wrists hurt after a long ride. Fortunately, it was short-term discomfort; by morning I was always fresh and ready to go again.

There was one injury that I feared would be a trip-stopper. I think it was at Belknap Springs OR, on our second evening, that I somehow injured my right Achilles tendon. I don’t know how it happened; there was no moment I said “ow” (or worse), and I don’t remember it giving me pain at bedtime. But the next morning, when I started pedaling, it was sore as the boil I never got. With every turn of the crank, pain shot through my ankle and up my leg. It was somewhat less painful if I turned my foot to the right and let it rest on the pedal without pushing. So that’s what I did: over to Sahalie Falls; up the five-mile grade to the Santiam Pass; across the crest and down to Sisters—all that had to be done virtually one-legged. I hoped it would improve overnight, but it didn’t. It got a little worse, in fact. Luckily, we had no long climbs like the one over the Cascades the day before. But after five days my leg started swelling, ankle to knee, giving me a noticeably lop-sided look. Then I got really worried, thinking that, if it continued to worsen, I’d have to abandon Greg and find a bus back to Beth’s farm in King’s Valley. Greg and I had discussed the possibility of one, or both, of us bailing, for whatever reason. He had taken care to note the cities that were served by Southwest Airlines, his discount carrier; I figured I could get a bus somewhere. I talked with him in western Oregon about the possibility that I might have to bail. But then I started imagining a little improvement each day while being dismayed at the ongoing reality of pain. The day I stopped taking five or six Advil a day the swelling stopped, to my vast relief. Nonetheless, the pain continued. One June 27, I noted in my log that the ankle still hurt, starting about ten minutes into the daily ride and lasting until I was well warmed up, sometimes starting to hurt again on a steep or extended climb. It wasn’t until the Fourth of July Break that it healed enough that I didn’t think about it any more. On the ride from Bliss ID to Burley ID, a week after the ankle pain started, I decided that it was caused by the heavy sandals I walked around in at Belknap Springs because my bike shoes were soggy from the rain. Being an entirely rational actor, I threw those sandals into the motel trash in Burley and bought a new pair—plastic, cheap, and light—in Pocatello. As it happened, I never had to wear them on the trip, but I am wearing them now as I write this. The extended ankle episode reminded me that bad stuff just happens at my age. Old folks who never smoked die of lung cancer. Gym rats in their seventies drop dead of strokes on their treadmills. Mortal stuff happens.



Itinerary. (The wee gods in the Blogger program had their way with this entry. Sorry.)

Day Place of Motel Miles Total Day Place of Motel Miles Total

0 Florence OR 0 0 26 Seward NE 72 1812
1 Springfield OR 71 71 27 Nebraska City NE 80 1892
2 Belknap Springs OR 54 125 28 Bedford IA 72 1964
3 Redmond OR 69 194 29 Corydon IA 79 2043
4 Mitchell OR 68 262 30 Keosaqua IA 79 2122
5 John Day OR 71 333 31 Keokuk IA (Craig) 52 2174
6 Unity OR 51 384 32 Hamilton IL (Craig) 4 2178
7 Vale OR 64 448 33 Pleasant Plains IL (Craig) 105 2283
8 Boise ID 74 522 34 “ (July 4th Break-Craig)
9 Bliss ID 90 612 35 “ “
10 Burley ID 85 697 36 Tuscola IL 100 2383
11 Pocatello ID 80 777 37 Rockville IN 60 2443
12 Idaho Falls ID 54 831 38 Greenfield IN 80 2523
13 Victor ID 66 897 39 Glenwood OH 72 2595
14 Jackson WY 27 924 40 Wilmington OH 65 2660
15 Dubois WY 86 1010 41 Chillicothe OH 58 2718
16 Shoshoni WY 100 1110 42 Athens OH 63 2781
17 Casper WY 101 1211 43 Parkersburg WV 40 2821
18 Casper WY (rest day) 44 Bridgeport WV 76 2897
19 Douglas WY 57 1268 45 Mt. Storm WV 74 2971
20 Torrington WY 102 1370 46 Winchester VA 80 3051
21 Bridgeport NE 72 1442 47 Fredericksburg VA 77 3128
22 Ogalalla NE 92 1534 48 Richmond VA 78 3206
23 North Platte NE 56 1590 49 Hampton VA 74 3280
24 Lexington NE 66 1656 50 Virginia Beach VA 19 3299
25 Grand Island NE 84 1740 (Cape Henry)


J


Jersey. Visibility counts for a lot. Hence, most of my jerseys are incandescently high-viz green, except for a white one, the first I ever bought, and my Arizona shirt, the design and color of which is copied from the state flag of Arizona. I mean the official state flag, not the unofficial state flag which is the plastic Wal-Mart bag stuck to a cactus. The official state flag has none of the high-viz green in it, but it is egregiously colored, not to say electric. A large gold star hovers on a bright blue field, surrounded by alternating sunrays in yellow and red. One of my older biking buddies in Green Valley hated the shirt because it reminded him of the Japanese flag we all despised during World War II. It is outlandish, and the “ARIZONA” on the belly and back don’t help any more than the “GRAND CANYON STATE” that runs up the right and left sides. The smaller gold starts on the sleeves are an added fillip one hardly notices. I never wear the shirt when I am in Arizona, only when I’m in foreign places, such as Oregon and all the other states we crossed during the summer. After it warmed up enough so that we didn’t have to ride in our jackets all day, I wore the Arizona jersey every day, washing it out each night in the motel. It’s a pretty good jersey, actually, the most expensive one I own; it’s also effective at wicking moisture to keep one’s skin dry and relatively cool. But it is a sight! It has an odd mesmeric effect on some animals. On the day we we saw the hundred-plus antelope on the long ride to Casper, I noticed that they would stare at me as soon as I came into view and keep their eyes on me until I was well past. I can only believe that they loved the jersey! After encountering a couple dozen rapt antelope, I’d shout “Nice jersey, huh?!” Not one antelope ever shook his head “No.” Oddly, only one human being ever commented on the Arizona shirt. It was a garrulous old guy I talked with in the Romney WV MacDonald’s. “It’s a wonder they (West Virginians) didn’t kill you wearing that shirt,” he said. “It’s outrageous.” “It is outrageous,” I shot back, “and you’re the first person to say so!” I still wonder at all those other people I talked to, the ones who silently averted their eyes from my jersey; what could they have been thinking?


K


Kindness, acts of. It is probably impossible to make it across the country without benefiting from numerous acts of consideration. We were constantly grateful to drivers who slowed down for us in tight places on narrow roads, and to the truckers who pulled over into the oncoming lane of traffic when they could to spare us fright and destabilizing winds. Beyond such civilities are the affirmative acts of kindness that smooth the rough spots in human relations, make new people seem like friends, overcome the human consequences of scarce resources. In the realm of kindness, you hope to give as good as you get. I’m not sure that our balance sheet is reconciled yet; we’ll probably have to work on it a while more to pay back to our species what was so generously given us. We met some really nice people. Ray and Marva, owners of the motel in Shoshoni WY, let us stay in their camp trailer when there was no room to be had for miles around (see Motels).


June 18. Shoshoni WY. Ray and Marva's luxurious camping trailer, with bikes.

Tom, a Keokuk biker, his wife and his friend, invited me to their table and bought me breakfast on the morning of the Fourth of July. Pote put me up in Hamilton; Charlie and Barb lavished their hospitality on me in Pleasant Plains over the weekend of the Fourth, and invited a dozen Springfield friends to a potluck at their house (see Rest days). Most of all, we have to mention John the Archangel/electrician, our personal St. Christopher, who got us across the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Henry (see Virginia). We were lucky enough to find opportunities to be kind to others, as well. In Parkersburg WV a boat trailer came disconnected from its pick-up truck just as we pulled up behind it beyond the intersection. We helped pull the trailer into a gas station driveway and looked hard, though fruitlessly, for the lost hitch-pin. My most spectacular kindness to another came on the 15th of June, on our way from Idaho Falls to Victor ID. I was suffering the effects of swill I’d downed at the Hong Kong Restaurant the night before, and considered myself extremely fortunate to happen upon a Phillips 66 gas station just outside Ririe ID precisely at a moment of great need. I raced into the station only to find a person already waiting for the rest room. I braced myself to tough it out and wished the fellow godspeed as he entered the toilet and locked the door. Just then, a Hispanic man, all hunched over and barely able to speak from the strain of holding it in, rushed in, assessed the situation and asked, nay, begged, to be next in line. He tried to tell me he’d be no longer than two minutes. I finally caught his drift and responded, “dos minutos,” thereby exhausting my command of Spanish. He looked overcome by gratitude and raced into the toilet room when the fellow before him came out. Less than two minutes later, he emerged looking like a poster boy for Quick Relief. I couldn’t really appreciate the moment, since I had to use it racing for the throne on my own behalf. But I like to think my expression was as joyful as his was when I emerged, though I don’t believe there was anybody around to notice.


L

Lawns. As we neared Seward NE it seemed that we had crossed over some sort of line into Midwestern culture. The sign to me was the vast lawns that began appearing around farmhouses. Further west, in sagebrush country, lanes run up through the dirt to parking lots, also dirt which might be more or less tidy, according to the inclination of the householder. In the Midwest, that’s the moral equivalent of living in sin. One’s lawn is a sure sign of virtue, that one has been blessed with good estate and that, if the John Deere doesn’t fail, it will look like a good estate, evenly mowed and a delight to the tidy eye. The connection between the expanse and condition of one’s lawn and the state of one’s soul has been often remarked, recently by Elizabeth Kolbert in a review article in The New Yorker. She reiterates the link, noting the irony that the currency of middle-American morals is foreign coin. All of our lawn grasses—Bermuda, rye, bent, and good ol’ Kentucky Bluegrass—come from Europe or Asia. All that aside, it is astounding how much time, energy, and resources a farm wife or suburban husband is expected to spend on keeping up a lawn. As some will recall, I did it myself in Springfield, where I had nearly two acres to mow. But that was back when I was manifestly virtuous. I have failed a lot in recent years.


Life and death. The most fortunate encounter of the trip came on July 17th as we made our way from Clarksburg WV to Mt. Storm WV. We were thoroughly enjoying a beautiful, relatively flat stretch of road along the Cheat River near Aurora WV when Greg heard a faint cry for help. We turned off the road to the right, down a driveway from which we could see a truck and some machinery in an untidy pile at the end of the yard near the river. As we got closer and threw down our bikes, we could see an overturned tractor and a man pinned underneath. It was immediately clear that we’d have to get the tractor—a large lawnmower with a big deck—off him, and that lifting the tractor was the only option. So we tried, failed, and tried again, the second time successfully, though I have no idea how we were able to flip the tractor off the man. He said he was all right and could walk, so we got him to a chair in the shade. His voice was weak, his breathing labored, and his upper body and arm movements limited, but he was able to tell us that he was driving the tractor onto the truck when a ramp kicked out and the machine overturned on him about 45 minutes earlier. He assured us that, though he was having trouble breathing and moving his arm, he was OK. He did not appear to be in shock, so we got him a glass of water, called a neighbor lady over to look after him, and told him to call 911 if his breathing didn’t improve. The neighbor lady gave assurances that she’d call an ambulance, if necessary, so we got back on the road again. About an hour later, as we were struggling up one of the steepest and longest climbs in the Appalachians, a car pulled up alongside Greg. It was Carl being driven to a hospital by his wife. They got our names and the name of our town and Carl wheezed out that we had saved his life, and they drove on. Later, after we had arrived home in Green Valley, we each got a call from Carl. It turned out that he had been seriously injured (5 broken ribs, a dislocated clavicle, one lung collapsed and the other punctured and partially collapsed, and paralysis in his right arm from nerve damage, not to mention a lot of bruising). His wife had taken him to the hospital—I think it was in Elkins WV—and the emergency room doctor said he was OK and that he needed just to go home and rest. So Carl went home, where he began to fail dramatically. He’s a pharmacist, so he knew pretty much what was wrong, so went back to the hospital and demanded to be admitted. When the doctor found the extent of the damage, he told Carl that he was lucky to be alive and that he would have been quite otherwise had he been pinned under the tractor much longer. Carl wrote each of us a note around the second week of August to thank us again and to let us know that he was mending, though slowly. Ironically, way back in Nebraska Greg had commented that we were sure to happen upon a just-occurred accident before our journey was over.

The second life and death situation was mine. As we were passing through Newport News on our way to Hampton VA, on the penultimate day of our trip, the temperature was in the high nineties and the humidity was twice that, I swear. It was about 1:00 p.m. and I was fading fast. I told Greg that I had to get off the road, find some shade, and rest a bit. A couple of blocks further on, I pulled into a little parking lot for some apartment buildings and a synagogue, as I recollect. There was a big tree shading the sidewalk and the curb area, so I parked my bike, took a big swig of water, and lay down on sidewalk, arms spread out, and dozed off. When I awoke, about twenty minutes later, Greg was talking with two women about 15 feet from where I lay. I could tell it was a conversation of concern and reassurance. Apparently, women had spotted me lying on the sidewalk from their second-floor apartment. They watched for a while and, when I didn’t move, they came down to see if I were as dead as I looked. Greg rode up from doing some errand just as they approached me and assured them that I was not dead. How he knew that, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him some time. In any case, the women were relieved when I performed my Lazarus act and walked over to thank them for their concern and wish them a good day. I have to admit, though, Virginia is exactly the place where one could succumb when the temperature-humidity index climbs into the “terminal” zone.

Lost. It may interest you to know that we were only profoundly lost once on the whole trip—in Richmond VA where we got onto I-95 and narrowly escaped arrest (see Cities). I was completely lost once when I was riding alone to my July 4th rendezvous. Between Keosaqua and Farmington IA, on my way to Keokuk, I had a strong and sudden urge and pulled off the road into a state forest to relieve it. When I emerged from the forest, I couldn’t remember whether I had pulled off to the right or crossed a lane of traffic to pull off on the left side of the road. I was down in a little holler, so couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing, nor was there moss on any side of the trees. The day was cloudy and gray, so there was no sun to give me bearings, either. I had no idea. But, I took a guess and began to ride. After about a mile things began to look familiar, though I couldn’t be sure whether they actually looked that way or I just talked myself into believing it. So I stopped and waited a few minutes until a car came by so I could ask which way to go. Then the car sped on by and I waited a few more minutes, then a few more minutes until a car finally stopped. Then I muffed the whole thing by asking an overly complicated question, i.e., “Is Keosaqua that way (pointing the way I was headed) and Farmington that way (pointing the direction I’d come from)?” The young fellow responded to the two-part, confusing question with a two-part confusing answer, which I thanked him for, then forgot. So I had to repeat the process, this time asking the simple question, “Which way’s Farmington?” The helpful old couple pointed the way and I took their advice. I spent the miles between that spot and Farmington repeating solemn vows to pee only on the right side of the road.
I think it is amazing that we didn’t get lost more often. Sometimes, especially in large towns and cities, we’d not know exactly where we were, but we usually had a functional sense of direction and some confidence in the seats of our pants, even when we were lost in Paradise (see Paradise).

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