It is evening at my first campsite, about half a mile back from the rim of Crater Lake. Dad has wished me good luck and left to drive home. I’ve constructed my tent and placed all my gear in the bear box. The bike is leaning on its kickstand, chained to one metal leg of the box.
I’m sitting on top of the picnic table, looking at my iPhone, which is displaying “No signal”.
“This is it,” I think. “I’m really on my own, now. The only way out of this campground is on that bicycle; and from there it’s 600 more miles to get where I’m planning to go. … I sure hope this works.”
I think the weather is mocking me, because it began to rain just as I was setting up my tent, and now that the tent is constructed and thoroughly wet, the rain has tapered off.
Evening turns to night quite suddenly. I am dead-tired, even though it is only 9:00pm. I crawl into my damp tent, jam in some earplugs, and have nine hours’ worth of strange dreams.
The day before Mother’s Day, I went on a bike ride into the hills. This was the first ride I made with a full complement of touring gear since the Pinnacles Monument ride in January. This time, I packed up a lot more stuff, with the intention of making the trip a lot more comfortable and safe.
On the Pinnacles ride, I had to use both my rear panniers for the tent and sleeping bag, and place everything else in the front panniers. That made the front of the bike very heavy and hard to steer. I didn’t want to make that mistake again.
So I removed the tent from its sack and stuffed it into one front pannier, and the sleeping bag got stuffed into the other front pannier, consuming all the luggage space on the front of the bike. One large item remained: the roll-up mattress. I stuffed that into the sack belonging to the tent, and laid it on the rear rack neatly between the two panniers. I anchored it down with a bungie cord, hooked between the rack and the underside of the seat, and the bag of tent poles hung suspended beneath the bungie cord, crosswise against the rear of the rack, on the back of the bike.
The end result was a lot more compact than I expected. The large panniers were still completely free for food, laundry, and gadgets. So, of course, I completely stuffed them.
Things I took along for this trip that I didn’t open: Three bags of fritos, three packages of peanut-butter crackers, four Odwalla bars, a bag of “energy chews”, and a 20-ounce bottle of mint tea. I also packed two t-shirts I never wore, four pairs of underwear and socks I never put on, a backpack I never wore, a heavy repair kit I never opened, and — through a combination of poor planning and dumb luck — I ended up not needing the tent, the poles, or the stakes. (You can probably guess why.)
Before loading everything into the van, I weighed myself, and then weighed myself again holding the bike. From this I learned two things: One, I’ve gained almost ten pounds since my last major ride. Two, I’ll be pushing 77 pounds of equipment around. (That includes the bike!) That’s exactly 2/5ths my body weight. Good thing I have spare calories to burn.
I took my time preparing, since I had a couple modifications to make to the rack, and some food to cook, and some playlists to load onto the iPhone. I also rode up and down the street with the loaded bike a couple of times, testing the distribution of weight.
By the time I was ready, La was up and about, and it was late afternoon. I whined a bit about the steepness of the hills I would be climbing, and La rolled her eyes and agreed to drop me off partway up the big hill. She’s a really good sport. :)
While driving, we had a lively talk about anthropology, and cultural milestones, and adulthood. The terrain became very scenic. We contemplated stopping for a picnic, but before we could make up our minds I spotted an interesting rock formation and we stopped to investigate.
Apparently a tiny stream has been washing layers of chalk down the side of this hill for quite a while. Neat stuff, and only a dozen miles from my office. That surprises me.
La dropped me off about 2/3 of the way up the hill. Before she left she got a few pictures of me test-riding the bike. For the first one, I posed with some Miner’s Lettuce propped on the handlebars. (Miner’s Lettuce is a fragile, primitive-looking plant that grows in these shady forest regions. It’s completely edible, though a bit bland by itself.)
In the second picture, you can see how low the front bags sit compared to the rear bags – it looks ridiculous, and it’s also not very aerodynamic. I may need to purchase a different rack just to cut down on the wind blockage. It would also be nice to have a little platform to stick my camera and snackies on…
I climbed VERY slowly up the hill for the next three hours. My top speed was probably 2.5mph. I had to take frequent rest stops because the muscles in my lower back were in very poor shape, relative to my January ride. Good grief, what has happened over these last four months? Or was it the height of these handlebars, messing with my posture? I really need to get them cut back down.
Anyway, I inched slowly upward. I tried to call my Mom and wish her a happy day-before-Mother’s-Day, but my phone cut off about five minutes into the conversation, and then lost signal entirely. A fire engine came screaming up the road past me, lights flashing. Just after that I began rounding a curve and noticed a road flare, blazing brightly near the center stripe, making a spot of hot pink in a yellow sunbeam. Slowly I pedaled further around the curve, and saw a man in a leather biker outfit, standing by the guardrail next to his motorbike, waving a handkerchief in the air. The road curved again beyond him. Whatever he was trying to warn people about was around the next curve.
I pedaled doggedly towards the biker. A half-dozen cars passed me before I reached him, all slowed down by the flare and the handkerchief. “What’s happening?” I asked him.
“Accident. Guy laid his bike down on a curve.”
Before we could say any more, a troop of harley riders came farting up the road, and stopped near the man. Three bikes, six riders. They all dismounted and began talking excitedly. The guy who had the accident was a member of their gang.
I put my feet back in the pedals and began inching around the next curve. There, parked almost diagonally astride the road, was the fire engine. Just beyond it was an ambulance, with the doors open. Beyond that, a police car. Grim-faced, I pedaled on. In the gap between the ambulance and the fire engine, I looked across the road and saw a crowd of people in uniform, arrayed around a man and a woman sitting dejectedly on the shoulder. The woman was wearing a freshly-installed neck brace. The man was pressing one hand to his head, and his clothes were disheveled as though he’d just finished tumbling around in an industrial clothes-dryer. They were clearly not having a good day. There was no sign of their motorcycle.
Another of their biker friends was standing further up the road, next to a police officer. He noticed me and said, “Easy does it, eh?”
“Two miles an hour, man, all the way up the hill.”
I kept pedaling until I was around the next corner. There, I stopped at a driveway, and stretched my back on the road for a while, and ate some snacks. For all the times I’ve wished terrible punishment on the harley riders and their 3:00 AM farting machines, farting me awake for no good reason on a work night, seeing it up close, even dealt to them impersonally by the road itself, does not bring me any joy.
Frustration, mostly. Bikers know the risks they take more than anyone. Yet they still make bonehead decisions, and then the road chews them up for it. I lost count years ago of all the times I’ve seen bikers do stupid things for the sake of a car length in traffic, or ten seconds less commute time on the open road. I get ahead of myself here, but on the way back from Santa Cruz in the van the next day, I was passed by an enormous man on a harley, weaving his way through the middle of two packed lanes, wearing a bright orange shirt that read, “CAN YOU SEE ME NOW ASSHOLE?”
Two seconds thought; just one thought after your first thought of “Ha, that’s my attitude”, to the next thought: “Will these words make me less likely of a target for abuse? Or MORE?” Nope. The second thought either never happens, or is discarded. Perhaps bikers, as a collective, are paying the karmic debt of their worst, when they get mangled by an innocent curve in the road. That would be unfair, but it might explain why the belligerent ones survive more than a few weeks on the open road.
But whatever. If the man in the orange shirt isn’t squished flat by an annoyed trucker, he’ll have a heart attack soon enough, judging by his shape. I don’t have to get involved in any case. Hah.
Where was I… Oh yes. It sucks to see people injured. But we’re all out here because we love the road.
It took another 45 minutes to reach the summit. At the top, I called my Mom again to continue our Mothers’ Day chat. We talked about gardening and movies, and my early life in Scott’s Valley, and the way that raising kids has changed in the culture at large. We reminisced about owning geese, chickens, and ducks. “We had names for all the geese, but the chickens … they just didn’t have enough personality. One chicken seemed like the next. The only one we named was the rooster, Spike. Spike was chicken even for a chicken – whenever anyone entered the corral he would flee to the other end and hide there.”
She also reminded me about how the sandbox I used to play in as a kid eventually got converted into a potato patch. I’d forgotten that. It was nice to have an “a-ha” moment, and see a memory spring into focus: The deep green, angular leaves blooming up out of the wooden enclosure, with a hint of the yellow sand still beneath.
She really made that house into a wonderful place for growing up. It will be hard to follow in her footsteps, though fun trying. Hopefully La and I won’t have to be a two-income family while our children are young, and we can pay proper attention to enjoying their youth. It would be a travesty to have kids only for the sake of putting them in daycare so we can work enough hours to pay for the daycare, and hope that at some future date, we may actually earn the freedom to be with our kids for a span longer than a weekend. That’s some serious Brave New World crap right there, man.
If that is the new American way of life, then the new American way of life is not for me. I will opt out of it. I will have kids when – and if – I am ready to enjoy it. Some people are married to their careers, or their schooling, and see parenthood as a sort of obligation to their future selves. “If we don’t do it now, we’ll be too old.” But people have kids at 19, and at 29, and at 39, and occasionally at 49. The only reason the valid range seems so narrow to Americans is because their families are all ripped apart for the sake of economic mobility and rugged individualism. We pay a dear, dear price for this. Lacking a clan, where young and old alike are always around, we think our clear-cut generations are the norm.
Hrmm, I seem to have stepped on my soapbox again. Stepping down now…
Anyway, Mom and I finished up our chat so I could start zooming down the hill and out of cell range. The rushing wind became cold in the shadow of the trees, so I stopped at an overlook and put my sweater on. I discovered that I was using my brakes a lot less than I expected, even though the bike was much heavier than usual. At the time, my theory was that the low front panniers were creating a whole lot of wind resistance. And, I was sitting higher in the saddle with that handlebar extension. More adjustments to make.
Later on I realized, it may have been that the extra weight of my bike was helping to keep me glued to the road more strongly, making my inertia feel less dangerous.
I cruised down Highway 9 with ease, enjoying the respite from pedaling, until it connected with Highway 236. I was expecting 236 to continue down the hill, but after about 100 yards it leveled off and then began to tilt slowly upwards. After a while it got just as steep as the hill I’d been climbing all afternoon. I hadn’t been expecting this, and as the gloomy dusk gave way to darkness, I realized that I would be arriving far too late at the Big Basin preserve to register for a campsite.
Well, perhaps I could sneak into one? I was too far down this hill to turn back, so I continued along 236, as it tilted up, and up some more. Very occasionally a car would rumble past me. Usually I just pedaled along into the white halo of my headlight, listening to my ambient music, and hearing the occasional animal noise from the woods.
After a while I stopped and checked my iPhone map. The GPS put me about halfway along 236, between the junction with 9 and the intersection with China Grade Road. Out of curiosity I explored the map around China Grade, in case it offered a better route than my current one, but it squiggled way up north towards Portola State Park and then disappeared. No help there. I looked around me and realized that I could see stark shadows, and turned around in my seat to see a huge orange moon glaring at my back from between the trees, like Sauron’s eye.
I felt a bit spooked, but decided that it was best to soldier on. With my bike in the lowest possible gear, my progress was painfully slow, and I began to regret packing so much luggage. But what could I have left out? As I spun the pedals I went over my packing list in my head, and realized that the only thing I considered “extra” was the food. The gear I was pedaling with was the exact set of gear I would be using on my extended trip in July. It was also the equivalent of what I took with me to Pinnacles at the beginning of the year. Why did it feel so much heavier now?
I stopped, and considered my surroundings. “Well, one thing’s for sure, there won’t be any damn hills like this on the route I’ve chosen,” I said out loud to myself. That’s one of the things you start doing, on midnight bike trips in the woods: You start thinking out loud. It helps to scare away the mountain lions, right?
“And there was one big hill on the way to Pinnacles that was almost the equivalent of this, and it slowed me way the hell down just like this hill does. And back then I didn’t even have this ultra-low gear. Also, this hill is twice as long. Perhaps all this weight will be okay when I get to flatter land.”
It was an encouraging thought, but it wouldn’t help me now. I was looking at several miles of steep hills in any direction. I considered just pulling out into the woods and trying to set the tent up in a clearing, but my chances of finding a clearing were low.
Frustrated, I pedaled onward. Just my luck that I would live in a region where the only accessible forests, the only fresh land for an enjoyable ride, would be laid across punishingly steep hills.
A car blazed past me, on its way down. From the driver’s side window, I heard a man’s voice yell something that sounded like, “harfhl hrraarff hlarrrfh!” Whatever, dude. Just after that, the hill finally leveled out, dropped a bit, and then went on a long level course as it snaked across the hill. I got up to a good 17 miles per hour, then hit an incline just long enough to stall me out at the top and force me to gear way down again. I paused there, to drink a bit of water and munch some chocolate, and in the distance I heard a young woman’s voice laughing and shouting. Campers in the park? Was I that close to the park already?
I checked the map: No, I still had several miles left. Perhaps it was just a house nearby. I shrugged and pedaled down the crest of the hill, then began coasting. After a few minutes of rushing air, I passed by a rocky outcrop and the forest opened, allowing the moonlight to illuminate the road. There, up ahead, was a large sign announcing the entrance to Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
Just beyond that, China Grade Road came swooping down from the north and cut a sloping intersection into 236. It seemed to mark a change in the roadway: Past China Grade, highway 236 began to twist and curve downward with more intensity. I pedaled through the intersection and onward, hoping that the uphill section of my tour was finally finished.
I got up to about 20 miles per hour and then the road made a series of stair-steps, dropping and then leveling out repeatedly. The trees had become irregular, and I could see bush-covered hillside above and below me. The air became much colder, and started to bite, and I regretted not packing my sweatpants. But then an interesting thing happened. I began to pass clumps of trees on my left, and every time I did so, I would hit a wall of air, luxuriously warm and humid. It was as though the trees were buffering the air from earlier in the day, which had accumulated as the sunlight cooked the road. I began to anticipate these columns of air, and breathe deeply as I passed into each one. Aaaaah.
Eventually I plunged down a final stair-step and entered the forest again. This time it was even darker than before. The moon couldn’t penetrate the canopy of the tall redwoods in the park. I continued in rushing silence, taking note of the signs announcing the approach of the Visitor’s Center. I saw a few lit campgrounds in the distance off to my left, but found no driveways leading to them. They must have been on some other road.
At long last I rolled up to the big wooden lodge of the Visitor’s Center. No one was on duty. Behind the clerk’s window I saw a hand-lettered sign, propped on a chair, declaring that three of the five campgrounds were booked, and could not accept walk-ins. “Alright, well that leaves two campsites, maybe I’ll get lucky after all,” I thought, and pedaled on.
No. I rode past the three sites that were full, and then encountered a large, permanent-looking sign at the fourth: “Under construction. Closed for the season.” The sign was mounted on a barred gate, sealed with a padlock. The padlock hadn’t been disturbed for some time.
“Faaan-tastic,” I muttered to myself, followed by a dozen or so expletives. I pedaled forward for a minute and found a second padlocked gate, with a second sign just like the other one. The last campground, also closed for the season. No sites available. Next time, make a reservation, ya dummy.
I stopped by the gate and propped the bike on its kickstand, and dismounted to stretch my back. Eventually I leaned on one of the gateposts at the edge of my headlight beam, and considered my options. Should I keep riding and try to get to Santa Cruz, and check into a motel? Should I attempt to stealth-camp out in the woods after all? Should I go back to one of the campsites and ask any campers who were still awake if I could share their spot?
I thought about calling someone on the phone for advice, and walked over to the bike to check my phone’s signal strength. Zero, as I expected. There never seems to be any coverage in National Parks, … perhaps by design? Is there some legal problem putting cell towers in here? Perhaps an environmental one, with laying the cables…
I looked up towards the gate that I’d been leaning against, and noticed a building beyond it, dimly visible from my bike. I unsnapped my phone from its mount, cranked the brightness way up, and held it out as a flashlight as I walked over to inspect the structure. It had four doors, two of which were unlocked. A large bathroom and a set of showers. The power was off, so the motion-activated lights didn’t engage. The bathroom had a suspiciously clean smell, as though it hadn’t been used for many months. I flushed the toilet out of curiosity. It was in working order.
I turned around and tried the lock-button on the door. It engaged with no trouble and immobilized the outside handle.
“Well whaddaya know. It’s like my own little personal motel room.”
The bathroom was large. I went out to the road and fetched my bike, and wheeled it into the room, and locked the door. I set my iPhone on the washbasin for some light, and started some piano music playing out the tiny speaker while I set up my bed.
The mattress and the sleeping bag were both quite comfortable. I laid out some fresh laundry, drank some water, stuffed my sweater into the pillow-sack of the sleeping bag, and set an alarm for 6:00am. I would get less than six hours of sleep, but I was OK with that. I was feeling paranoid about being discovered by rangers or construction crew and having to explain myself.
Yep: I slept in a bathroom. High adventure this isn’t, folks.
I kept the water nearby, since I was used to sleeping in the San Jose air and waking up parched. But when I woke up at 5:30am, I wasn’t thirsty, thanks to the humid coastal air. It was the first time I’d experienced that in at least a year. I’d been missing it.
I packed my things back onto the bike, washed my face (cold water, yuck) and used the toilet. It was right there, so … why not. Outside, the forest was just starting to brighten into dawn. I took some time to eat breakfast and mosey around the campground that had been closed for “construction”. No sign of any construction, or any construction workers, or any rangers. I could have probably set up in one of these camp sites just fine. Oh well.
I hauled out my iPod and began playing a spooky collection of soundtrack music by James Newton Howard, and started pedaling up through the lush forest towards the south entrance of the park. The steeply angled morning light made the trees glow fantastically, and I wished, not for the first time, that I could just spend all week riding through woods like these, perhaps stopping at bed-and-breakfast cabins so I didn’t have to haul so much gear… Well, some time in the future, perhaps. When I have more money.
33 years old, camping overnight in Big Basin Redwoods, California.
Between the bathrooms and the park entrance I passed by one other person: A tall, scruffy man walking down the road with a huge backpack, carrying a long curved pole wrapped in insulation and tape. He didn’t nod hello as I passed him by. What was he carrying? It was far too long to be a rifle, and if it was a longbow it was un-strung, which would be useless. If it was a fishing rod I don’t know why he would wrap it – perhaps to conceal it from rangers? But where would he fish, around here? The fishing here is extremely poor.
Oh well, it would have to remain a mystery. I left him behind and pedaled out of the park.
A while after that I stopped for a drink and discovered that I was standing about six feet away from a young deer, quietly munching greens by the roadside. I had to make noises at her to get her attention long enough for a face-to-face picture. She seemed quite calm. You can see a bonus banana slug in the first picture.
A while after that I noticed that my phone was getting signal bars, so I stopped and took off my sweater, ate some chocolate, and called La on the phone to tell her where I was. She’d been napping, but she was glad to hear from me. We chatted for a while, then I continued my slow slog up the hill, and eventually the road leveled off just in time for me to see a sign for “Little Basin Road: Rough Road: No Outlet” on my right.
I stopped and checked my map. Yes, Little Basin was the road I was supposed to be taking in order to get to Bonnie Doon, but if this sign was to be believed, the road would be impassable. Well never mind that then. I’ll just stay on this road, and ride to Santa Cruz via Felton. I browsed my map a bit more, until I realized I was hearing a strange noise: A bird call, repeating, going “aww-WAAH, aww-WAAAAAH”, quite loudly.
I turned to my left and saw a house surrounded by a series of wire fences and squares of grass. That explains it. Someone’s running a peacock farm here. I scanned the grass and saw a couple of the birds, long and low to the ground, dark tails folded up and dragging behind them. They sure are noisy in the morning. Maybe it’s feeding time.
A couple of cheerful cyclists passed me, going towards Big Basin. “Mornin’,” they called out, and raised a hand. We’re all glad to be out here, and we’re pretty smug about it sometimes. Heh heh.
The road turned downhill from that point on, and became steep enough that I had to apply my brakes on the curves. I stopped at the top of a particularly scary one and got out my camera, and stuck it on the handlebars in movie mode, so I could make a film clip of my descent. The camera only takes movies in 60-second bursts, though, and after the minute expired I had to come to a complete stop to put the camera back in my luggage.
After my second attempt at a movie, I was packing the camera back into my rear pannier, and I looked up and saw a large hand-painted sign announcing the presence of a Buddhist Retreat. Beyond the sign, up the hillside a ways, I saw the turret of a bizarre structure. I wheeled my bike up the hill and took out my camera for a photo.
While I was standing there, a woman came walking out of the house nearby and said hello. She was years older than I, but very pretty, with simple clothing, short grey hair, and a kind face. I struck up a conversation with her about the Temple, and she told me about the founder – a wealthy professor from San Francisco, I think – and the monks they had transported from Nepal to act as cultural emissaries and lead meditations. I told her I was very glad to see such a place, because I found the strong Christian presence to be … tiresome. She seemed encouraged by this and invited me to attend an open-house that they would be having in July – the 14th, I think. There would be music, free food, and tours. I made a mental note to tell La and Kashy about it. Then I politely said goodbye and walked my bike respectfully off the property … since I was obviously trespassing, after all.
The road squiggled quickly down towards Boulder Creek. I passed a golf course, with a bunch of people zipping around in little motorized carts. A few of them waved at me. I took out my camera for a photo of some trees and noticed that the card was full, so I stopped at the side of the road to import the photos into the laptop and clear up some space.
Then it was more downhill, through a stunning avalanche of green, plants and bushes and trees, seething at the edges of the road, eating up the rough, earthy hillside, sparkling with water and pillars of light. I’d forgotten how lush and alive this place was.
I would have to get on a plane and fly a thousand miles in any direction to find something more lush as this, possibly on an island out in the Gulf of Mexico, or up along the misty coastline of Washington. And that would be without the redwoods, of course. There’s nothing like them anywhere else in the world. It sucks to live just beyond reach of all this, down in central San Jose. It sucks worse than living entirely apart from it, I think.
Eventually I reached Felton, and stopped in a park near the middle of town, to arrange my gear and eat more snacks. I called The La and asked if she would mind picking me up here. She said yes, so I walked around the park and bided my time.
I did some people-watching, and inspected a covered bridge. I passed by a young woman in goth dress reading a book beneath a tree, and did a double-take. She was the spitting image of Carolyn, but I knew it couldn’t actually be her, unless she had managed to age about a year backwards in the intervening seven years since I last saw her. I stopped under another tree a respectable distance away and listened to a podcast, and noticed a creepy-looking guy carrying a plastic sack and wearing leather work-gloves. He was walking around the park, on the cement pathway, in a figure-8, over and over. I watched him curiously until my vision was interrupted by a jaunty black labrador, sopping wet, who ran over to a bush near the park entrance, sniffed it, and peed on it voluminously. There seemed to be no end to his pee; I suspect he just about killed the bush outright.
The traffic turned out to be horrendous. Among other things, La passed by a car that was ON FIRE as she threaded through the beach traffic over highway 17. She is a brave soul. Eventually she rolled into the lot near the park, and my second overnight “camping” adventure of the year came to an end.
This marks the first time I’ve done back-to-back “training day”-style rides, with food, gear, and a destination. I felt surprisingly good afterwards, except for some minor butt soreness and a little tossing and turning overnight. I’m beginning to realize that my stamina is greater than I thought. Perhaps a lot greater, thanks to all my riding this year.
This also marks the first time I have been able to use the battery pack I built, even though I don’t have an enclosure for it. I put the batteries and the regulator board in little plastic bags and then sealed the whole thing in a large bag with a USB extension cable running out. With the whole mess stowed in my luggage, I was able to keep the iPhone charged at 100% full the entire time. (I’ll be crowing about this later on in the story…)
Saturday I did a ride across town to the south end of the valley, then entered the rolling hills around the Lexington Reservoir. Along the way I listened to the full broadcast of the latest “Intelligence Squared” debate, about whether the government should be responsible for universal healthcare. It was an excellent debate, and very relevant, as I considered what kind of situation I would be in if I were hit by a car, or if my knees deteriorated. I spent one of my rest breaks sitting on a stone bench outside of a hardware store, and just as a debater was talking about the crowded conditions in emergency rooms, I saw an ambulance go screaming down the street.
Night fell fast. I probably spent less than a mile biking in daylight, and had my headlamp on for the rest. That lamp continues to be a brilliant piece of hardware – literally. It lights up my bike and the road around me without being an eyesore to traffic and it stays lit for as long as I need it, no matter how long I ride. I feel very sorry for all the other night cyclists I see out on the roads. I worry for them. Their lamps are either pathetic and impossible to see, or blinding and annoying to drivers. I saw one guy who had what looked like a damned flashbulb screwed onto his handlebars, going FLASH! FLASH! FLASH! FLASH! every half a second. What numbskull engineer designed that? I can imagine a driver being tempted to run him over just to stop that damned flashing.
There were three “totally worth it” moments for the first ride:
Biking up into the private property of a church-funded “retreat” hospital as part of my route, and rounding a corner to discover an illuminated statue of the Virgin Mary embedded halfway up a gigantic hedge, then going a few more feet and being presented with an unexpected panorama of the entire south valley. Surreal.
Being stopped by a locked gate and a wire fence, and realizing that I was actually on the wrong side it it, then spotting a twisted hole at the underside of the fence just large enough to slide my bike under, which I did. I turned the iPhone brightness all the way up and shoved it under my chinstrap, then laid flat and inched backwards under the wire on my stomach. I’m all Special Ops and shizzlick.
At the south end of the reservoir, after riding up and down a lot of gentle squiggly hills, I stopped in the middle of the road and looked behind me. The black silhouettes of the trees framed a V-shaped wedge of dark blue sky that was glistening with all the millions of stars that I couldn’t see when I was at my house downtown, under the hazy air and streetlamps. It stunned me and I had to stop and just be there for a second, on that dead silent roadway, enjoying that private space. “It’s not really private,” I thought. “People have been driving up and down this road all day.” But then I realized, even if it’s a location that many other people go to, it’s not a time and a way that they do it. Right now, it was mine.
Now that I can keep the iPhone perpetually charged, I don’t have to worry at all about how intensely I use it. I can leave the GPS running and the display on all the time if I feel like it. And for the trip through the woods leading to the reservoir, that’s just what I did.
It was really quite incredible. I’d never been there before, but when I saw the road lose shape and change to dirt, I was not worried at all. I pressed a few buttons and instantly I had a daytime satellite photograph of the entire woods. My route along the road was drawn across it with a purple line, and there at the top was a little dot, showing exactly where I was. As I rode the bike I could glance down at the dot and confirm that, yes, there’s the tree I should be seeing, and there’s the spot where the road bends,… et cetera. All this with one device, and as I was navigating, it was playing music for me too. I even got a few new emails. I was so impressed that I just had to talk about it, so I began calling people up, and chatting as I rode.
One device. Frankly, it’s like having “god mode” for a bicycle. It turns my bike into a mobile command center, almost an extension of my home. DO YOU NOT SEE!!! I cannot EVEN CONVEY how impressed with this technology I am!! It is fucking amazing, people!!! I ARE SERIOUS!!!!
It also makes me overconfident, I think. I have often taken risks with my navigation that could have ended badly. It’s not that I expect the phone to get a signal all the time – I don’t depend on it for that – it’s the feeling you get from using it. With a few bars of signal and a data connection, I am just as connected to the digital world and my social network as I am when sitting at home, vegged out in front of a computer screen. That connectedness inspires a feeling of closeness to home, a false sense that no matter how deep into the woods I push my bike, I am still just a finger-touch away from all the trappings of modernity. On the second day of this weekend I was hit by this cognitive dissonance pretty hard, when I wandered very far into the back woods of the Nisene Marks nature preserve.
I was pushing my bike over a dirt-and-gravel road that looked like it had been literally carved through the woods. The press of branches was so thick that they effectively formed a wall, and I wondered how the animals could possibly thread their way between them. The canopy was closed overhead of course, so I was in total darkness except for my headlamp and phone. And every 30 yards, as the road lurched down the backside of another misshapen hill, the gravel was erased by a shallow creek that seemed to flow right out of the wall of branches on one side, and into the wall on the other side. Here instead of road was a corridor of rocks and pools of water lined with mud. At the first one I tried to ride my way through, lost my balance, and had to dunk my shoe in the water. At the next one I carried my bike across, simultaneously using it as a gigantic flashlight to see the rocks I had to step on.
The road was extremely uneven, so the recent rains had formed innumerable potholes filled with water. Whenever the beam of my bicycle headlamp brushed along one of these, some of the light would be scattered upwards and reflect off the trees in front of me, creating a wavery illusion of movement. The first three or four times it scared the crap out of me. I kept thinking that someone was coming down the road towards me, waving a flashlight. After I figured out what it was, I was impressed by it. It’s just the sort of unexpected material phenomenon that could make people scream, “THE WOODS ARE HAUNTED!! AAIIIIYYEE!!!”
Anyway, I got past this gauntlet, and the road tilted upwards. The phone began displaying ‘NO SIGNAL’, but the GPS still had my location marked on the map, which was already loaded into memory. “I’m still alright,” I said to myself. “I just need to stay on this road and I’ll pass through Nisene Marks without trouble.” (I was babbling to myself out loud in order to make my presence obvious to things like skunks and mountain lions.)
Then the road wandered off the map. It began to squiggle all over the place like a damned spaghetti noodle, and my path (as described by the line on my GPS tracker) did not match the map line at all. Then it got steeper. I had to dismount and push my bike uphill. Out of curiosity I launched the “clinometer” app and calibrated it, and it told me that I was going up a 22-degree slope. (Yes, the iPhone does that too! See? It is “god mode”!!) Since my wheel wasn’t turning as fast as the headlamp wanted, my light became very dim. Then the road forked, and forked again, and again, and again.
Each time I chose the fork that pointed back towards the line described by the map, but each time the road would turn and wander away, keeping me off course. Eventually the phone started showing a few bars of signal again, so I called up La (who was having dinner with Alison at her house in Santa Cruz) and whined to her about how damn steep the hill was… But I couldn’t help thinking in the back of my head about the potential severity of my situation.
Suppose the dynamo in my front wheel failed. I’m not sure how it would, since it’s tough, water-resistant, and relatively simple… But suppose it did. I’d have about five minutes of dim light on my headlamp left, and then I’d be in darkness.
Then I’d have to take the iPhone out of the holster and hold it in front of me, and push the bike with one hand. By itself, in ideal conditions, the iPhone would probably last about four hours this way. But I’ve got my battery pack. But suppose that failed too? Or suppose the backlight in the iPhone just broke all of a sudden?
Then I’d have to take the GPS tracker off my bike, leave my bike on the ground, and go blundering back the way I came in total darkness under the forest canopy, using the mini-map on the GPS to retrace my route along the road. Once I stumbled back out onto pavement I’d have to walk for a good long while until I found a payphone – or perhaps I’d get lucky and flag down a car. This is assuming, of course, that I don’t break my ankle or my neck by tripping over a deadfall back in the woods.
But say the GPS tracker craps out too. Now I’m in total darkness in the middle of the woods, with no shelter, and some meager snacks. I’d have to stay put until daylight and then attempt to backtrack along a road that now looks completely different from how it was in the dark. Maybe I’ll come out in a few hours, maybe it’ll take me all day. Either way I’ll eventually come home to a La who’s been up the entire night worried sick and probably called the police.
This all went tumbling through my head as I pushed my bike up that huge hill. I had not been expecting a road like this. All I remembered of the roads in Nisene Marks was the road leading in, from the front, and that was nice and flat and wide. This road was the opposite. I should have checked the route in satellite view before committing to it. Actually, no, my problem isn’t that. I’ve just been too stubborn again. I saw that sign at the head of this road, where it suddenly stops being pavement and turns into a sheet of gravel. I should have obeyed that sign. Instead, I thought, “Oh boy, another deep woods adventure! Last time this was awesome!” Apparently I’d forgotten that last time I was obviously pushing my luck. Now here I was again, pushing my luck. A couple of mechanical or electronic failures could endanger my life.
“On the other hand,” I thought, “how is that any different from driving a car?”
I had to ponder that for a while. Eventually I reached the peak of the hill, and the road leveled out and opened up to a clearing. Then I forgot all about the danger I was in, and just stared.
There, before me, was the Monterey Bay, wide and black, swathed in the glowing yellow embers of civilization and the sparkling diamonds of the midnight sky. Transparent ribbons of cloud swept down across the stars and joined with the mantle hanging over the ocean, like fingers of a gigantic white hand. The moon lit the panorama from behind, sketching the jagged tops of the trees that blanketed the valley, all the way down to the fringe of city lights in the distance. As I rolled to the edge of the clearing and dismounted my bike, a soft breeze flowed down from the hilltop behind me, picking up the heat that was still bleeding out of the hills and drawing it across my back like a warm cloak. Right there in front of me was a pair of park benches. So I sat down.
The urge to sit there for the rest of the night, caressed by this warm breeze, staring up at the stars… Was almost unbearable. This had not been on my to-do list, or even a stop on my route. I drank some water and ate a little bit of chocolate, and thought to myself, “I can’t believe I’m actually here. It’s midnight on a Sunday and I’m here, all by myself, miles from any paved roads… And somehow I feel as safe as if I was sitting on my couch at home. What a strange feeling.” Then I looked over at the iPhone and noticed it was displaying “3G” and five bars. “Hell yeah. Best invention ever,” I said, and called up La for a while.
I was so impressed with the phone, once again, that I opened up a voice recording application and began to rant out loud about it. “It’s perfect! Perfect for a bike! It’s like the software was chosen specifically to complement riding! Even the size is perfect!” Rant rant, rave rave, et cetera. I felt kind of foolish talking out loud, but I kept doing it since it helped me avoid mountain lions. I’ve only ever seen one up close once (and that was while I was in a car), but the paranoia never fully leaves you…
Anyway, I eventually kept riding. The downhill route out of Nisene Marks and into Aptos, then Santa Cruz, was easy going. I sang They Might Be Giants songs out loud. I went through every single one I knew, and had to switch to Weird Al for a while, before finally being free of the forest and potential lions. Then I found it hard to stop blathering out loud to myself, since I’d been doing it for so long. I felt a little crazy. So I called up La and talked to her, which helped. She eventually met me at the Cabrillo exit, with a change of clothes and some snacks.
Setting up a night-time photo and having a 40-minute chat with Mr. Breakpoint about camera technology
Lying on my side next to the camera to photograph a long exposure of the house across the valley from me, and attracting the attention of a concerned motorist. The pickup truck stopped, then reversed 50 yards back up the road, then the window rolled down and after a while a woman’s voice asked, “are you okay?” Since I was almost completely blinded by their damned headlights, I waited until I’d gathered up my camera, then I stoop up all at once and waved at them, smiling. The woman apparently had not been expecting that, and she let out a scream that sounded like, “BGAWK!!!!” … and then she (or her friend at the wheel?) drove away. I wonder if my camera looked like a gun or something.
Going 18mph down a curvy forest road, screaming, “DAMMIT, WHAT’S THE SECOND VERSE TO BIRDHOUSE IN YOUR SOUL? I KNOW THE SECOND LINE, BUT HOW DOES IT START? SOMETHING ABOUT KEEPING BEACHES SHIPWRECK FREE? CRAP, WHAT IS IT!! NAA NAA NAA NERRRR SHIPWRECK FREE… SOMETHING… I SWEAR I KNOW THIS SONG. SOMETHING ABOUT SCREAMING ARGONAUTS.”
All these pictures give some sense of just how dark and creepy it really was … but they also make me think, “Wow, I definitely want a better camera…”
This trip was too much to handle. I went about 47 miles and burned almost 2400 calories according to the Mac, and had to call Pit Crew La and ask for a pickup between Felton and Ben Lomond, almost ten miles away from my goal of Santa Cruz. I took some downright stupid risks and made some inexcusable mistakes… And I clearly haven’t learned my lesson, because if I’d known I would get out of it alive, I would have done it anyway.
I left from Cupertino at around 3:00pm last Sunday, fortified with 10 hours of sleep and a huge meal in me from the night before. I still didn’t have the advanced battery pack built for my bicycle, but I was tired of waiting for the parts to arrive and didn’t want it to stop me from riding.
The Risk: Leaving late in the day can make you rush to meet your deadlines. Rushing on a bike ride is bad.
The Solution: Leave earlier, duh.
I pedaled north from Apple in high spirits, then turned left on Homestead Road, with only light traffic. The city biking was uneventful until I passed down a side street and saw this sign:
I passed into a suburban area and began to encounter a lot of bicyclists. Almost all of them were men. Almost all of them were wearing custom biking clothes, most of them with racing decals. Everyone had that lean, gazelle-like shape, like they’d been doing this forever. There were absolutely no pedestrians. The few people I did see on foot were walking in or out of restaurants. The contrast with the diversity of downtown San Jose, ten miles east, was telling.
I could tell it was an affluent part of town because no one was smiling, and no one said hello; not even the fellow bicyclists. But once I got further up into the hills, the cyclists reduced to the handful who were traveling the same route, and they were very friendly. We would always nod and smile, and occasionally chat as we passed or re-passed each other. Since we were on this road, we were obviously sharing the same adventure.
It got quiet, so I switched to the ambient playlist. I passed a stables and a pasture, and saw a deer resting beneath a tree, and a rabbit darting around by the side of the road. Small lizards went zipping under rocks as I approached. Vineyards and orchards went rolling by. The houses grew more palatial, some almost crossing into parody, with roman columns, crosshatched colonial shutters and brickwork, iron-filigree windows, and stone cherubs spewing water into fountains. Nice stuff, but mostly it made me think, “If the poor migrant workers in downtown San Jose saw this, they would be enormously aggravated at this community.” … And about ten miles’ distance through thin air is the only wall separating these groups.
Honestly though, I’m not as angry with “the rich” as a group as I was when I was younger. I’ve come to understand that they are about as morally diverse as any other slice of people, except they tend to be much more strongly imprisoned by genetics. When you live with – or even owe your survival to – genetically inherited wealth, you are compelled to believe that the genes demarcating your family line actually contain some justification for the inheritance. This belief can easily poison you and your relationship with most of the world. Be that as it may, the desire to spend money on your kids, and your kids only, is part of us all… So, whatchagonnado.
Anyway, I took frequent rest stops and ate grapes from my saddlebag, and chatted on the phone with La. With my quieter music playing I could hear better, so I began to switchback up the increasingly steep roads. The rushing sound of the approaching vehicles gave me plenty of time to get back to the safety of the curb.
The Risk: Switchbacking up steep hills puts you in danger of collision with the huge metal death monsters otherwise known as “cars”.
The Solution: Get a decent low gear on your damn bike so you don’t have to switchback.
The iPhone map guided me up past the nature preserve and the various landmarks. In general it was easier to find my way this time because I understood that not every curve in the road is actually on the digital map… The map is a line drawn by interpolating between points, and there aren’t enough points to describe all the curves, so you only get an approximation of what the road does.
The Risk: When you rely on a digital map, what you see is not always what you get, and it’s hard to track your exact location.
The Solution: Memorize your route, go with a guide, or use a GPS tracker with your map. Or all three.
On a particularly steep rise, the road went around a sharp curve directly into the setting sun. I’d been riding beneath forest canopy for almost an hour, so my sunglasses were in my saddlebag. Instead of stopping immediately to put them on, I tried to switchback my way up around the curve while half-blinded, and was so distracted that I almost rode into the path of a fellow bicyclist who was speeding down the mountain.
The Risk: Almost all bike accidents happen during sunset hours when the light can blind people, and approaching cyclists do not make noise like cars do, so you can’t rely on your hearing.
The Solution: Wear sunglasses and keep them on until the sun has set, so you don’t get blinded by surprise coming around a curve and fling yourself over a railing.
I stopped at the edge of a preserve to drink water and futz around with the camera. The second I stepped off the bike I was surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and flies. “Ahh yes, the sunset hours,” I muttered. I laid my bike by the roadside and went marching up into the hills for a while. Almost caught a bunny rabbit on film, but he was too wascally. While setting up a picture of some sunlit grass, I suddenly observed that my arms were almost red with sun exposure.
The Risk: Short sleeves in the summer will get you fried by the sun and then eaten alive by insects.
The Solution: If you’re a “touring” rider, consider a long-sleeved white or reflective garment. Perhaps not those tiny spandex things the pros wear, since a determined mosquito can poke right through those, but something with at least a little thickness to it.
Back in the saddle I pedaled hard for a while to distance myself from the insect cloud. Only a couple of determined flies kept pace. I don’t know what they were after … I can’t imagine them being able to drink anything off me that makes up for the energy they expend chasing me down. Oh wait, there’s an easy explanation for this: Flies are dumb.
I passed a gang of llamas parading around some very pretty farmland. The slope leveled off, informing me that I was at the top of the mountain and due to encounter Skyline Boulevard soon. The setting sun continued to blind me around many of the curves. Finally I came to the four-way intersection I was looking for, where Page Mill Road crosses Skyline Boulevard and turns into Alpine Road. About a mile further I stopped to eat the burrito that Pit Crew La made for me. Looking west, I could see the fingers of mist filling the valleys between me and the coast. None of that moisture makes it to San Jose. Dammit.
It was nice and quiet so I decided to walk to the edge of the road and pee. My bike shorts have no front zipper, so I have to pull them partway down, which is quite awkward. “Of course,” I thought, “the second I get them down, a car’s going to come rushing around the corner. So I might as well get this over with… Yep. There’s the car, right on cue…”
I yanked my shorts back up and pretended to be arranging luggage on the bike. The car went out of sight, so I got ready to pee again, but of course a second car came up. “Oh yeah. Cars usually appear in groups,” I thought. Then I got ready to pee a third time… And a third car zoomed by, going the other way. A minivan with a bunch of kids pressed to the windows. “Fine,” I shouted. “I don’t care who sees me. I am peeing on the side of the road right now.”
…And since I was already exasperated, no cars appeared. I put my headphones back up, put my helmet back on, remounted the bike, and kept riding west.
Gradually the road squiggled around to the south, and then became extremely steep. Toast-your-brake-pads steep. Around a couple of curves I had to brake so hard my front wheel began making a terrific squealing noise. I should really adjust that, I guess, but it’s already come in handy a few times to alert drivers to my presence.
I shot out from behind a hill and all of a sudden I was staring down the mountainside, across a valley, and out over the ocean. Except that instead of water, I was seeing a dense ocean of clouds. The whole coastline was covered in a thick wooly blanket, starting at the base of the hills and extending all the way past the horizon. The rapidly setting sun lit the tops of the cloudscape, and drew a line of fire all along the outer rim. As I rushed down the peak of the hill towards this scene, I looked down into the valley on my right, filled with eerie dusk shadows and cool air. It seemed to go by in seconds, and as it curved up to meet the hillside, another valley opened on my left, filled with more huge shadows and rushing air. I glanced at my GPS display and observed through streaming eyes that I was going almost 40 miles per hour.
After gazing slack-jawed at the terrain for a while I realized I should stop and take a few pictures. The sunlight got very dim so I turned on my bike lamp. About half a mile later the road did another nose-dive and entered a forest. A sign blew past me, and 200 yards after that I finally parsed what I had read: “Not a through street.”
“Well that doesn’t make sense,” I thought. “According to the map I examined last night, this road goes down to a nature preserve and campground, then connects with Highway 9 and leads to Boulder Creek…” I’d seen the signs for the nature preserve, so I assumed I was still on the right track, but… “Not a through street?”
The Risk: You’ve checked the route on several maps, but real-world conditions vary, and your plans are destroyed.
The Solution: Come prepared to encounter harsher conditions than the map says. Bring enough gear to stay out longer than you plan.
“Maybe it’s passable by bike, but not cars,” I told myself. I’d already gone way, way down the hill, so I was trying to rationalize going forward instead of turning around and inching my way back up. “Let’s just get down there and look around…”
The road arrived at an open checkpoint, like the kind you see in front of nature preserves. I slowed down long enough to see that there was no one in the booth, then kept going. The forest canopy got very high and blocked out the remains of the sun. Abruptly it was night. I glanced at the iPhone and it said 8:00.
The road became wide and smooth as it snaked between the trees. After riding in soft silence for a while, I began to hear distant voices, and saw the yellow windows of lodge houses. The road split, then split again. I tried to determine if I was still heading south by craning my neck to catch the moon flickering in the branches, but all I saw was blackness. It felt like south. Short gravel driveways appeared on either side of the road, and I realized I was passing unoccupied campsites. Was there another way out of this place? I had definitely seen one on the map at home…
I saw a sign ahead, pointing down a thinner road that branched off and up a hill. “Old Haul Road”. That sounded encouraging. A road good for hauling stuff is a road that goes somewhere. It became so steep that I had to dismount and push my bike, but only for a minute. At the top of the hill was another sign: “BRIDGE OUT.”
Well that explains it. No bridge, no escape for cars. I stopped to catch my breath and consider my situation. It was 8:30pm on a Sunday night. I was on a bike, at the bottom of an enormous hill, 35 miles from home. I had probably deviated from my route, which had obviously been inaccurate to begin with. My phone, my traveling lifeline, was displaying the words “No Service”.
Well, if I was going to bike all the way back up that hill, I would definitely be late to Santa Cruz. So I’d need to find a payphone at one of the lodge buildings and call up The La. That would be the smart thing to do. But on the other hand, what if the bridge is only closed for cars? Maybe I can just bike right across it anyway.
I decided to go have a look. How big of a bridge can it be, anyway, here in a campground at the bottom of a valley?
The road twisted and turned through thick forest, then opened up to a large dirt clearing. A small, temporary-looking building stood in the middle of it, next to a stack of wood and a huge mound of debris. Some construction equipment lay scattered around, bluish-grey and shadowy in the weak moonlight. At the opposite end of the clearing I saw a few wooden sawhorses with red plastic ribbon strung between them, and a large metal sign propped in front. I rode up to the sign and read it with my bike light: “BRIDGE OUT. Road closed to cars, bicycles, pedestrians. DO NOT ENTER.” Et cetera.
Just beyond the ribbon, the construction workers had pushed together a thick pile of branches and rocks, physically blocking the road. But beyond that I could see the road continued. So I wheeled my bike around the blockade and kept going. After another 30 yards, the asphalt of the road connected to a grey strip of concrete about a foot thick, like the lip of a bridge, but without the bridge. Beyond it was darkness and the faint trickle of flowing water.
I leaned my bike against a concrete barrier nearby, and detached my iPhone from the holder. I set the iPhone to the “adjust brightness” screen, which is mostly a big white rectangle, and turned the brightness all the way up. It made a pretty good flashlight. Over the edge of the concrete lip I could see the worn dirt slope of a riverbank, and beyond that a shallow creek. I climbed carefully down and scanned the area for an easy place to cross, holding the iPhone out in front of me like some enchanted weapon from Clash Of The Titans. On my right, downstream, the huge broken slabs of the bridge lay buried in the mud. To my left, some flat rocks formed an easy path over the water. I stepped across them and then climbed carefully up the hill, where I found the torn edge of the road. It clearly continued beyond the missing bridge. The way was open.
So, I climbed back over to the other side, grabbed my bike, and carried it across, holding the iPhone in my teeth to light the way. Back in the saddle on the far side of the creek, I began pedaling, and my bike light pulsed into life. The scene it revealed made me very worried: The road was littered with branches and redwood leaves so profusely that it looked like the forest might swallow it up. Did I just haul my bike over here for nothing?
Nervously I rode around the corner, snapping twigs and branches. The road continued up a hill. Partway up it, I saw a large gravel-covered clearing on my left with a couple of small buildings dimly visible. I pedaled up to them and observed they were covered with vines redwood leaves. The windows were dirty. The front door of the smaller building was obscured by a blackened weed that had burst from the cement landing and then dried out. I got the impression I was looking at a checkpoint, like the one at the campground entrance. This road had obviously been closed for years.
“Spooky stuff!”, I whispered to myself, and rode out of the clearing. The hill got steep so I began walking the bike. Only a quarter-mile up, the road connected to a wider dirt-and-gravel road that appeared to be in better condition. That was surprising. Nearby I spotted a wooden frame with a map posted on it, under a pane of thick plastic. In the lower left corner was an X, labeled “YOU ARE HERE”. The X was positioned in the vague middle of a hairy mass of lines, all connecting at right angles to a thicker, straight line that ran diagonally down the map from left to right. That line was apparently Old Haul Road. Since I’d joined this road from the trunk of a T-intersection, I had previously been on some other road. Where the hell had I been?
I looked around the X for roads that passed over a river, and found several. The curve that fit the route best was a road that joined up from the south. So if I had been on that road, and I wanted to head southeast on Long Haul Road towards Santa Cruz, I should turn right.
I turned and began pedaling. The road was in good shape, and refreshingly straight. Pleased to be making easy progress, I let my mind wander. Fifteen minutes went by. Then I arrived at another T-junction, with a sign posted. Old Haul Road to the left, Pescadero Creek to the right. With the distance I’d just gone, I was probably off the edge of the map back at the kiosk, so even if I could remember any details from that map, or had taken a picture, it wouldn’t have helped. I decided to turn right since it was probably more towards the coast, and pedaled on for about a hundred yards, then drifted to a stop.
My iPhone had no signal, but I still had my GPS tracker. I’d just remembered that it could show a miniature drawing of where I’d gone. It had no roads or detail, but by looking at the shape of my route, I could orient myself and figure out which road I should really be taking. I turned on the eerie green backlight and poked at the device for a couple of minutes, confused by the awkward menu system, and finally got the line to appear. There was my route, very clearly going… Northwest. Oops.
This was Old Haul Road alright. I could tell because the line on the display matched the shape of the line back at the kiosk. But I’d just cycled almost two miles in the wrong direction on it.
I stood there swearing for a while, then congratulated myself for finally remembering that my GPS tracker could do that, then wheeled the bike around and rode back the way I came. 15 minutes later I blew by the kiosk. The road continued for another five minutes, then was interrupted by a very serious looking gate in front of a bridge. A metal sign posted above the gate declared that the land across the bridge was owned by a logging company, and that no cars, horses, or bicycles were allowed, and no pedestrians after dark.
Time to break some laws. I monkeyed the bike around the gate and walked it across the bridge, then got back on and kept pedaling.
The gravel crunched under my tires. Occasionally it would become thick and moor the bike, throwing me off balance and forcing me to walk. I passed a lot of intersecting roads, but I had convinced myself that all of these were for logging access and didn’t go anywhere, so I stayed on “Old Haul Road” wherever the road signs indicated. The GPS console said I was going in a direction that matched the road I’d seen on the map at home, which was a good sign, but I was constantly worried that the road would simply end.
I got a serious fright when I rode onto a straight section and saw a tractor and a backhoe in the distance, parked in the middle of the road, next to a pile of dirt. “Oh CRAP,” I thought to myself. “Don’t tell me they’re still building the road. After all this, am I going to have to turn around?”
I approached the pile of dirt to see if there was even a trail on the other side. When I got there I found that the road kept going, just as straight and wide as before. For some reason there was just a big pile of dirt heaped in the middle of it. Uh, okay…
So I rode on. Four or five miles later the road brought me through a large clearing, dotted with young fir trees that leaned and stretched eerily in the moonlight. I felt a surge of instinctive paranormal fear, and had to stop and calm myself down. “If you start seeing ghosts behind every tree,” I told myself, “you’re going to have a really hard time out here.” I checked the iPhone clock and it said 10:30. I was due in Santa Cruz in half an hour, and I had absolutely no idea how far I needed to go. After a few deep breaths my nerves settled down enough to keep riding.
More crunching gravel, more steep hills and intersections. A few of them were unlabeled so I just looked at my GPS map and picked the one that went southeast. Every now and then I’d hear the noise of some unknown animal crashing around in the bushes. Once I heard it so close by that I turned around and made a very loud hissing sound at it. It’s the sound I always make at forest animals. It scares the crap out of them but doesn’t sound human, so I don’t reveal my presence to other humans when I make it, which for some reason has always been important to me when walking around in the woods. (Probably because a lot of the time when I was growing up, going into the woods meant trespassing on other people’s property.)
I came to another clearing. This one had been bulldozed flat and laid with gravel, making a staging area. A decrepit-looking tanker truck was parked on the left edge. Ahead of me on the right I could see a wooden fence with a camping trailer installed next to it on cement blocks. Beyond an opening in the fence I saw more trailers, arranged on either side of a narrow driveway. Beyond that, a bright electric light illuminated part of a low building. This looked like the outpost of some construction or logging business.
Aside from the driveway, there was another road leading out of the clearing to my left. I didn’t want to go blundering up to the trailers and wake the sleeping humans within… I would have rather turned around than do that… But luckily I didn’t have to make that choice. I took the road leading left. No sooner had I gone 100 yards around a corner when a dog began to bark. Not the high, alert bark of a family dog, but the low, explosive, coughing bark of a large muscular guard dog. A tone that said to the base of my brain: “If I find you, I will bite your throat right off your body.”
A few weeks ago I’d been walking around outside my house, bringing some food to a stray cat, when I heard dogs barking and a woman screaming in panic. I went striding towards the sound and saw a young man holding the collar of an enormous pit bull. The dog was panting heavily from it’s wide flat mouth and seemed to be in a good mood, but was pulling to be free of the boy, who was having serious trouble keeping the dog in place.
“Is this your dog?” I asked him. “No,” he replied. We talked, and I learned that the boy’s mother had been out walking her two small dogs when this dog had simply wandered up and started fighting with them. The mother’s screaming had brought out the son, who held the dog back while she fled into the house. Now he was standing outside in his boxer shorts at 10pm trying to restrain an anonymous dog that weighed only a few pounds less than he did.
We took turns holding his collar, which was actually a thick loop of rope with a broken tassel hanging off of it, and The La (who had walked up behind me) called the police and then an Animal Control unit to come deal with the beast. Meanwhile, we were lucky that the dog had some instinctive respect for humans packed away in its brain, because as I spoke with it and groomed it (while practically sitting on it to keep it in place), it calmed down a little bit and remained in a good mood. At the time I wondered if it was just happy to be free. It had clearly gnawed through it’s rope leash some time ago.
The cops arrived and they handed me a strong skinny leash, and asked me to clip it to the dog since I seemed to be keeping him calm. It took several of us to corral the reluctant animal but we eventually tethered him to a metal signpost. Once he was attached to an object he stopped jumping around. We all chatted with the police for a while, who expressed their frustration with pit-bull owners and owners of large meaty breeds in general. “What ever happened to the Golden Retriever?” I asked. “You know, dogs with actual brains?” “Yeah, seriously,” one of them said. The kid went back into his house with his mother. I petted the dog one last time and then left him for Animal Control.
Anyway, that incident was fresh in my mind while I stood on the road in the middle of the forest. Big dogs with big mouths, in bad moods, were very scary. And this time I was alone, and clearly trespassing. There was no way I could make a case for “I was just riding and got lost, sir.” Not after 15 miles.
The huge booming bark continued for several minutes. It echoed across the valley and back, and I realized that the dog was probably barking at it’s own echo, since I’d long stopped making noise. Finally it trailed off, but when I resumed riding, the dog resumed barking less than 50 yards later. With a sinking feeling in my gut I realized that the road was leading me directly towards the sound.
Like an idiot, being an idiot for the fifth or sixth time that day, I rode on. In another 50 yards I saw a driveway on my left, and the reverberation of the barking changed, informing me that I had just passed within direct line of sight with the dog. As soon as I did so, the barking ceased. That was even more unnerving, because most dogs quit barking when they’re running. Was I about to be jumped by a guard dog?
I pedaled as hard as I could up the hill, for almost 200 yards, expecting at any moment to hear barking just a few feet away, or the bite of teeth in my leg. I’d been bitten by dogs just twice in my life, and both times they were just ordinary neighborhood dogs. I was anticipating far worse from this one.
But the attack never came. I rolled to a stop, panting, and tried to hear the presence of any other animal. None. What had happened? After standing in place for a few minutes to catch my breath, I figured it out: The bike lamp. It’s almost as bright as the headlight of a motorcycle. The dog had seen my lamp, which obscured everything else, and had come to the conclusion that I was a vehicle, and that there was no point in barking.
The Risk: A guy on a bike looks like a giant hamhock to nearby dogs.
The Solution: Blind them with science.
Twenty feet further up the hill was a sign nailed to a 2×4, facing the other direction. I rode over to it and read the writing on the front: “No Trespassing.” That was a relief. I was riding out of a place that required that sign. Just ahead I found the paved ribbon of an actual public road. Hot damn! Back in civilization. I turned on the iPhone and it showed a few bars of signal.
The first thing I did was call La, to tell her I would probably be later than 11:00pm. But she was busy driving over Highway 17, so I said I’d call back. Then I went looking for a street sign, and found none. So I turned east on the road and began pedaling. It switched back a few times, then began to climb straight up the hill. Was this taking me back up the mountain? That would suck.
I rode for a while longer, unsure what to do, and then got a bright idea. I’d compare the squiggle on my GPS route with the shapes of the roads near Boulder Creek. Maybe I’d find a match. In only a few minutes I had it: I was on Saw Mill Road. That intersected Highway 236, and Highway 9, in less than a mile. Eagerly I rode on, zig-zagging up the steep road and chatting with The La over my headset. I told her I’d be late, and she said she could do some shopping, so it wouldn’t be a big deal.
I hung up the phone after I was on Highway 9, and fired up the music player since I was no longer worried about battery life. By the time I passed through Ben Lomond I was feeling pretty run-down, because the cold air was turning my arms numb and, like an idiot, I’d forgotten to bring a sweater. I stopped to call The La again and looked at the GPS readout, which said “42.42 miles”. An auspicious number!
We agreed to meet along Highway 9, between Ben Lomond and Felton. She began driving up from Santa Cruz, and we found each other on my 46th mile. Gratefully I loaded myself into the passenger seat, and we drove to Santa Cruz for Saturn Burgers and shakes with our friend Alison.
Quite an adventure. And clearly I have a lot to learn about trip preparedness.
