Post-Nevada Wrap Up
Here’s an overview of the complete route, made from stitched GPS recordings:
Here’s an overview of the complete route, made from stitched GPS recordings:
June 29, 2020 Filed under Curious
June 25, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
I set out in the morning with a much lighter bike, thanks to Matt. Lots of miles to cover!
The weather was hot, but the air was fresh.
As I rode, I thought about the argument I’d seen on Nextdoor the previous day, and the thoughts I’d had about social conflict, and urban versus rural populations, while passing through all those small Nevada towns.
My thougts ran like this:
America has had a very public battle with its demons of slavery and racism since forever. “Public” in two senses:
First, there is a constant supply of Americans who believe that the status quo isn’t adequate, including plenty of Americans who believe in changing the status quo even if they struggle with subconscious racism in their hearts. They are politically active, socially active, and vocal.
And second, “public” in the sense of a free press, and because journalism that calls attention to conflict has always been especially popular. Compare this to places like China, where the government has a long and ongoing history, up to the present minute, of abducting entire ethnicities it doesn’t like to go live in forced labor camps, and the “press” is simply forbidden to talk about it, and in fact government censors work to prevent the public from discussing it privately as well.
A loud and public battle is a lot more progressive than a timid, secret one. There are other affluent places in the world whose citizens are collectively shockingly racist, but simply aren’t being challenged by the presence of enough different people to confront it.
America has come a good distance since it was nearly torn apart by an internal war that confused economic interests and human rights. There was a time when bands of white people used to roam the countryside plundering and murdering their white neighbors for not being racist enough. Now that segment is reduced mostly to ghostly online rants in ugly corners of the internet – possibly abetted by foreign agitators – and anarchist morons insinuating themselves into protests to turn them violent.
As we all know, it isn’t adequate to end a policy or a tradition of racism and declare the battle won. We have to replace it with something stronger. Real social bonds, real examples of solidarity, everyday exposure. Fewer people willing to listen to monsters on AM radio spreading weird theories about a “grievance industry”. Each of us, personally, really can contribute to that.
Each of us can go out into the fringes and weeds of our social circle, and find someone who is markedly different; someone whose story we can barely guess at. With just a little bit of bravery and effort, we can connect to them. A short conversation leading to an invitation. A chance to tell a story.
Whenever we do this, we add a thread to the fabric that binds everyone against bigoted ideas and behavior, because those ideas can only take root when there is a separation for them to occupy.
It’s a quiet process. It’s not “virtue signaling”; it’s not going to score us points online, but it will make a real difference. If that’s what we really want.
If what we really want is to stop feeling shame for a little while, whether or not progress happens, then we can go ahead and keep screaming into the online void.
Mulling this over, and listening to some podcasts and music, carried me several thousand feet up the mountainside and into the evening. Then I saw this ahead:
Pretty sketchy, but I can deal with it. Then I noticed this:
Aww come on, where am I gonna go now that I’m up here?
Rather than ride onto the tightly confined lanes of the freeway and risk my life, I decided to roll into the gravel, and chew my way slowly along in relative safety. I have no idea what the construction crew would have said, but they weren’t around to see. The entire work zone was depopulated.
At the top of the hill I found a restaurant and RV park. I might have been able to stay here for the night, if I’d known ahead of time. Oh well!
I paused for a while to catch my breath and get some neat photos of a Smokey Bear carving, then it was time for the big downhill rush.
While taking photos I also stopped to marvel at my iPhone. It’s operated in temperatures well over 100 degrees for multiple days. I got a “heat warning” once a few days ago after leaving it in the sun, but it was fine 10 minutes later. It’s endured multiple nasty drops onto the road surface, with no damage. It’s had legitimately impressive battery life even on long days of fighting for a marginal signal. Dang, these gadgets are amazing.
Zooooom, I went. For a while I used the construction zone, since it gave me a lane to myself, but I kept worrying that the pavement would suddenly turn into gravel or just end, so I had to grip the brakes. When the construction zone ended I swung out to the shoulder and stayed there, drifting up to speeds above 40mph as trucks slowly moved by.
“My iPhone’s been performing well,” I thought, “but that’s distracting me from the real miracle: My body. It’s been wonderful this entire time. I just put in water and food, and sleep, and it just keeps pedaling, day after day.”
Having a body and not having to worry about it, that’s a true blessing. I’ve been through times when I had to worry very much indeed about my body, and I remember how it constantly threatened to sweep everything else off the table, even small daily tasks.
We get a small rash, some bacterial thing; we dismiss it because we’ve seen it a dozen times before and we’re already thinking ahead to a few days from now when it will be gone. But it’s a reminder. The world is coated with tiny things that are furiously trying to eat us, and if our bodies stopped working for only a few hours those little monsters would make significant progress. We are made of material – through and through – that is food for others, and every day that goes by in our self-assured counting is only possible because our bodies fought mightily to avoid being digested into nothingness. This stays true every second as we are wholly occupied by vague future plans.
In less than an hour, I was in the middle of Las Vegas, and heading towards the south-east corner on a series of little roads and bike paths.
I arrived at Matt’s house very tired and rather hungry, but in good spirits. We immediately started chomping a pile of thai food. Awww yeah!
The weather in Vegas and beyond was going to be quite bad for the next few days. High heat and sandstorms. With my options for continuing south severely limited, I realized that today was probably my last full day of biking for this trip. That’s OK; it had been a good one.
June 22, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
For the next three days I hunkered down in Pahrump and worked, visiting nearby restaurants for food. Between sessions of writing code I did my own writing, and checked in with friends and family.
I got out a few times just to look around. Pahrump didn’t have much going for it. It felt like just the wrong size — too big to be close-knit and friendly, too small to support fancy shops or a unique culture. Perhaps Las Vegas was stealing all its momentum.
Any city is filled with two categories of residents: People who want to be there, and people who can’t leave. I think the ratio in Pahrump is 10/90.
At the end of the first day, standing outside a fast food joint, I got some nice video of the local bats flitting about:
In the middle of the second day I made the mistake of logging in to Nextdoor, a social networking site focused on gathering people from the same neighborhood and putting them into the same forum. No matter what neighborhood you start with, the forum always devolves into a mess of passive-aggressive complaints and reports of “suspicious characters” that are often blatant racial profiling.
My neighborhood back in Oakland was no different. This time the Nextdoor turmoil was because someone was circulating a petition to remove all the historical markers from Jack London Square and rename it to something else. Why? Because, according to the petition, “Jack London was a racist who embraced eugenics and forced sterilization.” The author of the petition wasn’t suggesting that we honor anyone in particular as a replacement in Jack London Square. Just that we tear out Jack London. He compared it directly to the tearing down of monuments to Civil War generals in the South.
“Huh, what’s this all about?” I thought. “If Jack London was racist, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
I did some digging. Turns out the author of the petition had not even read Jack London’s work, and was basing his conclusion on a short essay about London written by a food critic in the East Bay Express. That in turn was based on a very narrow reading of a non-fiction essay Jack London wrote in 1902 called “The Salt Of The Earth.”
In the essay, London describes what he believes are the geopolitics of China and Japan as potential world powers, and how Western perception does not account for them. He declares the West is underestimating the strength, resources, and ability of Japan and China as nations. He declares China a sleeping giant (it was) that will be awakened by Japan’s imperial aspirations (it was), and that this will lead to China and Japan’s growth into superpowers on the world stage (they did), and that as nations, Japan and China will present threats to the West that the West is unprepared for (yes and yes).
Not a bad bit of prediction for one writer just following his instincts. But, by referring to the Japanese nation collectively as “the little brown man” in the essay, he provided just enough material for the food critic to willfully misinterpret his meaning and accuse him of endorsing a race war.
In my personal opinion – and I’m definitely not alone here – Jack London is a brilliant author, worthy of honor in his hometown of Oakland. He wrote and traveled prolifically, and his life story is nothing short of awe inspiring. He was largely self-educated with the help of an Oakland Public Library librarian, went to work in a cannery at the age of 13, rode the rails as a child, became an oyster pirate, got into UC Berkeley, sailed to and participated in the Klondike Gold Rush, was a war correspondent for the Russo-Japanese War traveling with the Imperial Japanese Army, and wrote with passion about everything he experienced. My father loved Jack London’s stories growing up, and so did I.
Needless to say, I found the petition appalling. It was a perfect example of what some people call “cancel culture,” which is not just free speech or editorializing: It’s a deliberate attempt to take something that isn’t currently a sign or symbol of racial division by those who embrace it, and make it into one, so that those who embrace it are forced to either defend themselves, or voluntarily destroy the thing to prove their innocence. (E.g. “The host of your favorite TV show just said something problematic in a tweet! You are now supporting racism by liking the show; cancel it and find something else or you’re a racist.”)
It’s a thin cloak of political progressivism thrown over a desire to watch your enemies burn — even if you have to create those enemies by carving them away from your allies. It’s not very hard to recognize. It also seems to be confined to the internet, as it requires a certain amount of indiscriminate groupthink to operate.
No one – and I can say this with absolute confidence, categorically – NO ONE who embraces Jack London does so for his supposed racist views. A campaign to slander and erase the beloved Oakland author serves no purpose but to pointlessly divide and make enemies of sympathetic people.
Compare this to the monuments to Civil War figures in the South: Most of them were put up well after the war ended as an attempt to claim public spaces for white supremacists. These are people whose only claim to fame is as representatives of the antebellum south. In their case I do support tearing the statues the heck down. But even then, we need to practice some restraint and figure out why or whether anyone cares about them, instead of leaping to a conclusion about their current significance.
Or hey, here’s another suggestion: We could start a tradition where we get all our farmer’s market produce that looks too gross to sell, and bring it to the square every week, and pelt the monument with it, to constantly renew our contempt for their ideals. It could be a scheduled thing, with food stalls and music, and lots of explanatory plaques for why we do it every summer. Wouldn’t that be useful, and cathartic as well? Old General So-and-so with rotten turnips hanging off his sword, until he rusts away?
Anyway, I had to make some posts on that forum, and then sit and stew for a while, before logging off and getting back to work. Has the whole country gone mad this summer? Maybe COVID-19 has given people too much free time, and too much stress, simultaneously?
On the third day, my friend Matt came over from Las Vegas to hang out with me. We grabbed late-night dinner in an empty casino, then he took me on a tour of the slot machines, explaining to me how they worked internally and what the pay tables were for.
It was a fun distraction, and I even won twenty bucks on a machine, which was just enough to pay for dinner!
At the end of the night, Matt let me pack all of my heavy luggage into his car before he drove back to Vegas. Tomorrow I would be making a 3000-foot ascent over the mountain pass into the city, and it would be very hard to do in a single day with all that extra weight. Thanks, man!
June 20, 2020 Filed under Amused, Curious, Introspection
In the morning I picked my bike up and wheeled it down the hallway to the casino floor. It was one giant room with banks of slot machines filling two thirds of it, and restaurant tables filling the rest. I kick-standed the bike and took a table far away from the other patrons – there were only ten or so – and ordered a giant salad, plus corned beef hash and eggs.
There was a massive television on the wall in front of me, in the traditional casino style. As I ate I saw an ad for an antidepressant.
The little daughter wanted to show her mom something, but her mom was staring down the hall leaning against something and looking pained, so the daughter turned away. Then the daughter talked with the Dad, who looked worried, and the daughter shrugged, looking away distantly. Bad mommy; you made daughter sad! You could have had a nice parenting moment with her, but your sad feelings ruined it! What a failure. Your sad feelings need to be amputated, pronto.
Next was a scene of the parents sitting down with a doctor. A scene of the mommy outside, throwing a ball for the dog. The dog was running in slo-mo, tongue everywhere, obliviously happy. Do that, mommy! That’s your role model: Sloppy, slobbery dog.
In three more scenes the mommy looked progressively happier. Finally she had that parenting moment with her daughter, who is smiling. Hooray, everything is fixed!
I wondered if people of color are ever featured in these ads, or if it’s always Northern European women. I wonder if it has something to do with that guilty protestant religious background trucked over from Europe, where a woman is a vessel for child-rearing foremost, and if she’s underperforming in that role it’s because of some internal defect she must root out and neutralize. “You don’t like being a mom, and nothing else? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
If it’s not an ethnic thing, I bet it’s at least a middle-class thing. I wonder if working-class people see these ads and think, “Oh sure, all I need to do is start taking some pills, and then everything that’s upsetting in my life will magically not matter. Hah! Do they even know what kind of crap the world is throwing at me? A pill isn’t gonna make my heating bill go away, or pay off this credit card, or magically fix this damn car.”
Antidepressant ads drive me up the wall.
The meal was good though, and I set out on the day’s riding with a full stomach and lots of water.
Outside I gazed at a giant cow while I pondered my route. Today I would finish the ride to Death Valley Junction on the California side of the line, then go over a low mountain pass and enter Nevada, then coast downhill into the town of Pahrump. That would put me within reach of Las Vegas.
As I pondered the giant metal bull across the street, I thought about radiation. That “Area 51 Alien Center” I passed by yesterday was only 50 miles south of a massive nuclear testing range. They say the fallout from atomic testing in the 50’s spread radioactive debris all over the Earth and into every living thing. I wonder if I am getting proportionally more of that radiation by being in Nevada? Parts of it look like a blasted hellscape, and parts of it literally are a blasted hellscape. Perhaps it’s good that I’m just passing through … and that California is generally upwind.
Anyway, it was time to ride. The wind was against me but the road went slightly downhill, which canceled it out. I entered California early in the day.
Pretty soon I was at Death Valley Junction.
Here is where I would have emerged from Death Valley, if I’d gone down into it from Beatty. Several thousand feet of steep road in blistering 120 degree heat, with no services anywhere along it, and no services here in Death Valley Junction to greet me when I arrived.
It was the only road out I could have taken. The south edge of the valley runs into Interstate 15, which cannot be used for cycling, and on the other side is Mojave National Preserve, with several thousand more feet of blistering climb, and again no services. Even if I brought along four gallons of water and a huge pile of snacks I would still need to sleep rough, perhaps for multiple nights. It just wouldn’t work.
“Perhaps I’ll try that some other time, when I have a companion with a car to be my safety net,” I thought. “For now, it’s time to do something easier.” Then I turned left, onto State Line Road towards Pahrump and Vegas … and immediately got a flat tire.
As I was working, a guy in a stetson stopped his truck to ask if I was okay. I thanked him for stopping. Then 15 minutes later, a woman turned her truck around on the road just to come back and say she was going into town and could fetch things for me. I politely declined and thanked her for stopping.
A man in his 50’s, dressed all in leather and riding a motorbike, turned around and then stood near me making conversation for a while. He mentioned that he belonged to the Warmshowers website. We exchanged historical details and he told me he was from Oakland, and had spent 30 years there working on refrigeration equipment for trucks and buildings. I thought that was pretty cool.
“You will find people out here to be more friendly than California,” he said.
“Well I can say for sure they’re more likely to stop and help out a cyclist. You’re the third person who’s done that for me since I got this flat tire.”
He laughed. “They’ll keep stopping. You sit here long enough, they’ll form a line.”
I began packing up, and he waved goodbye and zipped away on his motorbike. I continued my slow progress up into the hills, feeling glad that people were looking out for me.
Like it usually goes on long isolated roads, people coming in the other direction started raising their hands in greeting as they went by. I waved back as often as I could.
I also found some mysterious things, as usual.
It got hotter and hotter as the day progressed. I found myself looking forward to one of the basic perks of civilization: Refrigerators. Part of the joy of passing through these hot regions is you know you will get into a town eventually, and then be able to drink all of the ice water you can handle. “Aaaaaahhh,” you’ll think, and get that nice visceral rush of satisfaction, from something that you usually find so ubiquitous that you just ignore it.
We have bodies designed to get pleasure from the slaking of thirst and the feeding of real hunger, and we live a lifestyle that is never dry or lacking in calories. No wonder so many modern people struggle with depression.
I patted the frame of my bike. “Just one of the small ways Valoria here saves my life,” I thought.
In the afternoon I caught a swirly dust devil to the north, and watched it a while:
I managed to get a bit of video of it too:
By my reckoning I was about 3/4 of the way to the top of the pass, when I stopped for a drink of water and stood around in the narrow shade of a hill, and then suddenly felt the pressure of a deuce knocking at the door. My body decided that it was time to poop, and jammed on all the “go” buttons at once. I shuddered and nearly fell over.
I tried to reason with my bowels. “Now look!” I shouted, waving my arms and waddling towards the embankment. “I told you yesterday, and this morning! I said, hey, this is a nice hotel room, why don’t you drop something here? And you said, ‘Nah, we’re good. Just keep cramming the food in.’ Now you ambush me on this hill! There’s no toilet paper, no water, not even a place to hide! Have you no decency?“
“DROP THE SWEATS,” said my ass, “OR WITNESS THEIR DESTRUCTION.”
The road was on a little causeway, built up across a dip between two hills. The embankment went down about four feet, which wasn’t enough to hide me, but it was better than dropping trau right on the shoulder. There were no bushes. I had no idea how I was going to clean up. Curse you, colon!
Then, a miracle happened: Just as I reached the bottom of the embankment, I glanced up and saw a drainage tunnel running under the highway. If I squatted down and ducked my head I could just about waddle inside. PRAISE BE! A SHELTER FROM HUMILIATION! I got inside and got my clothes out of the way with half a second to spare. As I pooped, I heard no fewer than three cars go rocketing down the highway. That’s mortal embarrassment avoided, three times over.
With nothing else in reach, I did a mental inventory of my laundry back on the bike, and decided that it was time to remove one of my socks, and clean up with that. I’m not proud.
As I emerged, I thanked the Kickstarter campaign of future time lords, for reaching back into the past and editing reality and placing this tunnel here, so I didn’t have to lose my dignity pooping in full view of those motorists. Feeling refreshed, I got back on the bike.
Almost near the top, I saw a guy muttering to himself and staring at me as he drove past in the opposite lane. “If only you knew the embarrassment I just narrowly avoided for both of us,” I thought. “But really — why is he muttering at me? Because I’m taking up too much precious road?”
I imagined him coming back the other way and stopping next to me to give me some kind of lecture about how I shouldn’t be on the highway. How would I respond to that? I figured it would be something equally chastising.
“How did you imagine this was going to go? You’ve said your piece. Now what; you drive away? And I’m still out here on the road between two towns, like before. You’ve just wasted our time.”
Honestly, I can’t think of anything – anything at all – that a person could angrily yell at me from their window that would change my mind about bike touring. I’ve been honked at, passed aggressively, yelled at, had things thrown at me, more times than I can remember … Everything short of actually being hit by drivers in their cars. Sorry, all you jerks out there, I’ll do everything I can to make room and stay out of your way, but I am not going to stay off the road.
As afternoon became evening, I began the pleasant downhill ride into Pahrump.
I passed a cluster of pickup trucks, with some folks shooting skeet nearby. Some small bits of ranch land, a few warehouses. Then the suburbs appeared. Everything looked a little ragged and burned out, including the people.
I was almost out of water, so I stopped at a convenience store. A car rolled up as I was leaving. A skinny man in his mid-20’s got out, wearing shorts and a button-down shirt, with tattoos all up his arms, a thin mustache, and a cigarette in his mouth. His face had a pinched, hunted expression. An early-20’s woman holding a baby stayed put in the passenger seat. Two kids sat behind her. As the man passed through the open door of the shop, he picked the cigarette out of his mouth and hurled it to the ground outside. A minute later he emerged with a paper sack, bent down and picked his cigarette up, and stuck it back in place. Away they all went.
I rolled on, and the sun dropped below the hills. On a few silent stretches I saw bats fly out across the road. I passed little squares of land, covered in un-mowed grass, surrounded by varieties of fencing, each with a small house in the center – or just as often, a trailer – and a large “NO TRESPASSING” sign stuck just next to the gap in the fence made by the driveway. Block after block of this, until I lost count. Some chunks of land had dogs inside, chained to various things, and barking. I guess Pahrump is where all the people who can’t live in Vegas go instead.
I kept pedaling and made it to the one sushi restaurant in Pahrump, with enough time to sit down and have a meal at an actual table. It was after 9:00pm, and all the other patrons had cleared out. I ordered a huge pile of sushi and drank four glasses of ice water, one after the other. With a big tip, all it cost me was $45, which is half of what it would cost in Oakland. Not as fresh, but so what?
From there I swung out onto the main drag, and rolled past a bunch of casinos. I saw a “China Wok” restaurant and instantly imagined a Chinese man crossing the street in the bronx, getting accosted by a car, and screaming “Hey! I’m China Wok here!”
That made me laugh all the way up to the hotel. I exploded my luggage all over one of the two beds, then called up Beth and had a nice chat about Nevada, and culture shock, and work. Another weird bike touring day successfully concluded!