For those of you who do not know: I now live in Oakland.
Earlier this week I bought a folding bike, and yesterday I took it on Bart underneath the bay and into San Francisco, and went tooling around. Here’s what I saw:
Mr. Breakpoint poses with the folding bike. He rode with me on Bart from San Francisco to Oakland.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way the buildings seem layered on each other, like they form a labyrinth. I imagine the city as a giant hedge maze in a garden that winds around for eternity.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way the buildings seem layered on each other, like they form a labyrinth. I imagine the city as a giant hedge maze in a garden that winds around for eternity.
More of that awesome layer effect. You could make a neat jigsaw puzzle out of this.
More of that awesome layer effect. You could make a neat jigsaw puzzle out of this.
I’m pretty sure this is the same fellow who hangs out around Berkeley. He sure does get around. Every 30 seconds or so he would yell out a repeated phrase, ending in, “HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!!”
I’m pretty sure this is the same fellow who hangs out around Berkeley. He sure does get around. Every 30 seconds or so he would yell out a repeated phrase, ending in, “HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!!”
My last photo of San Francisco for the day, right by the same Bart station where I started. It’s only been about four hours, but I’ve seen a lot on my little folding bike!
My last photo of San Francisco for the day, right by the same Bart station where I started. It’s only been about four hours, but I’ve seen a lot on my little folding bike!
My haul from the Farmer’s Market. (Not shown: A container of delicious hummus.) vCarried it in my backpack the whole time … it seems to have survived the trip.
My haul from the Farmer’s Market. (Not shown: A container of delicious hummus.) vCarried it in my backpack the whole time … it seems to have survived the trip.
I started this ride late, since I forgot my helmet. Both the helmets I already own are customized for Bike Party, so instead of driving home, I got a third one. I’m LIVIN’ LARGE!
La dropped me off at the top of Quimby Road, and I’d gone no more than 15 yards when I saw a freshly dead snake on the shoulder. It was a big one – about four feet long – and still flexible. I collected it into a large ziploc bag and carried it with me for the rest of the trip, so I could deliver it to Monica at the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The things we do for science!!
The park was splendid. I paused to chomp a sandwich and saw a bunny hop slowly over the road. Partway down Hotel Trail I saw a series of clustered holes in the road, each boiling over with large black ants, so I grabbed a shot of that. Many flowers were in bloom, and I had a sneezing fit from some of the pollen. Good thing I had a lot of water.
On my way up Highway 130, out of the valley, I caught a glimpse of a frog in my headlight, and stopped to grab a picture. It was slowly crawling across the road, towards the thick bushes on the eastern edge, and the lake beyond. I decided to give it some help, so it didn’t become a froggie pancake. For my troubles, it peed all over me. Good thing I still had lots of water to rinse off with!
Haven’t been all the way up here since 2008! The air was a bit cold, but it was still a nice climb. This time my bike had the custom cassette on it, so I didn’t have to do any switchbacking, and I took fewer rest stops. Hooray for “granny gear”!
During each ride, there is always at least one especially cool moment, during which I can say, “this makes the whole ride totally worthwhile.” This time, there were two moments.
While pedaling to the top of the highest bend in Calaveras road, the sun oozed out from the clouds directly behind me, low on the horizon, and warmed my back at the same time it bathed the whole road around me in a brilliant yellow glow. I rode on in silence, enjoying this ethereal lighting, and then somewhere way down the hillside in the darkened valley, a cow began mooing very aggressively. I yelled, “QUIET, COW! I’M HAVING A MOMENT HERE!” The cow went quiet.
On the way back down the steepest hillside, I was leaning on my brakes and moving slowly. I passed around a bend and saw a collection of very large birds arranged on the fenceposts at the roadside. Another bird was down in the road, and as I drew near it took startled flight and dropped what appeared to be a ground squirrel out of its claws and into the ditch. I slid slowly up to the birds and halted, and finally got a good look at their heads – withered-looking and bright red with beady eyes. I can’t remember the last time I’d been closer than six feet to a colony of vultures. Before I could sneak the camera out of my bag, a car came roaring up the road and they all took flight.
I’ve been in Stanley for two days – one day spent almost entirely indoors recovering, and one day spent biking casually along the roads near the town, looking at all the kitschy shops and the colorful fellow tourists. A couple of times I’ve been surrounded by small groups of curious people and answered questions about my route and my hardware. Each time I’ve tried to bend the responses around enough to encourage people to try bicycle touring themselves.
I have also encountered some fellow cyclists in town. Some of them on bikes, most of them on foot attending to other business but eager to talk to someone with a shared interest. Mostly they ask about riding the recumbent bike, and I’ve tried to be as honest as possible with my answers. I don’t want to sell someone on the idea of a recumbent bike when they probably wouldn’t enjoy it. Riding a recumbent requires that you pace yourself a certain way … and that you have a very good sense of balance. So if your butt and/or back don’t hurt on an upright bike, why compromise? Besides, it’s not like I own stock in a recumbent bike company, and I get uncomfortable if my words sound too much like a sales pitch.
It’s a strange position to be in … I know I probably come across as a seasoned veteran to the people who ask questions, but I don’t feel like one. And also, I almost certainly look like a weirdo. Some crazy West-Coast hippie; probably hates cars; probably has saddlebags full of granola and flyers and an ipod full of earnest music by Pearl Jam, Coldplay, and R.E.M. Get him talking and he’ll probably tell you he’s vegan and accepting donations for the Save The Turtles foundation. (Which usually I am, actually.) So I find myself trying to act against type, to convince people that bike touring is not that hard, and that it’s not that weird, and that any red-blooded yankee can and should try it out. Bike Touring: It’s Not Just For Hippies and Europeans Anymore™. I don’t just want people to take a passing interest, I want them to feel like they can participate.
Sitting in my tent, in a corner of a free campground at the base of the Sawtooth Range just a few miles outside of Stanley, with the evening winding down around me and the birdsong giving way to crickets, I think about my motivation. What am I trying to do? When I’m by myself it’s obvious – I’m listening to audiobooks, pedaling, and looking at cool geography. I’m on an adventure. But when I encounter other people, something else is going on. I’m motivated by some other desire.
I not sure, but I think that what I’m trying to do is set an example, by traveling and talking in-depth with people as I go. I want to present a way of living – or at least of acting – that shows people in disconnected groups that they could all benefit from reaching beyond the people they know, and that they are not in danger of losing their identity if they do so. I think that if people feel confident or interested enough to participate in an activity that they thought was the territory of outsiders, then they are doing something important: They are forming a bridge, for communication and relationships to extend.
Yeah, I know, that sounds way too cerebral, and also egotistical: How dull must I think the lives of others are, if I think that cruising up to them on a loaded bike is going to impress or inspire them? Well, I’m not saying I’m on this ride for the sake of other people. I’m doing it for myself. If my overriding purpose in life was to act as a “bridge”, I would have a bigger effect by becoming a teacher and assembling a civics course for English-as-a-second-language students. But look at it this way: What else should I do when I encounter other people, during a journey that is solitary by design? Sneer at them? Tell them to get out of my way? Vandalize their homes as I ride through town, for a quick laugh? Well … I might have been a bit of a vandal fifteen years ago … but that’s just not who I am these days. Call me a hippie if you want, but now I enjoy community building. Whether my motivation actually comes across, in my words or appearance, is of secondary importance to me, because hey, it’s just a hobby.
Darkness has enclosed by little tent in the woods. I listen to an hour or so of H.P. Lovecraft radio dramatizations, then snuggle down for my last night of camping.
It’s mid-morning, and I’ve been slogging along the final, massive uphill climb towards Stanley for a couple of hours already. I pull off by the side of the road at a turnout to catch my breath and gulp from the dwindling water supply in my luggage, and as I’m recovering, I notice an information kiosk. It’s a little column of rocks and mortar with a flat space on top like a podium, and a thick sheet of scratchy plastic screwed down to it. Beneath the semi-transparent plastic is a diagram of the valley I’m climbing out of, and a few paragraphs talking about what the early prospectors and expeditions saw when they came stumbling through almost 200 years ago.
According to the diagram, the jagged mountains in the distance are the Sawtooth Range. I feel a mixture of excitement and disappointment that I am in physical sight of my destination – the planned end of my bicycle ride. Now that I am so used to moving, what will it be like to stop?
The road keeps going up, and gets even steeper. Since the morning I have had the bike set to the lowest possible gear, and now that gear isn’t low enough. I have to push harder than I want to with every pedal stroke, and most of the time I use the foot-clips to pull up on the opposite pedal at the same time, trying to spread the fatigue over both sets of leg muscles. It helps, but not a lot, so I rest frequently.
But with each rest stop I take, I look around and see another interesting variation of the terrain. The mountains are hissing with a thousand tiny snowmelt streams, and snapping with a billion lively insects. In places the terrain is so compressed and segmented that it appears to have been laid out by a team of landscape artists, twisting each tree and placing each rock just so, like the decorations in a mini-golf course or a theme park, for maximum impact. Each chunk of meadow seems tailored to fill the irregular space it occupies, between faces of sheer grey rock or mounds of skree. Each river is an intricate succession of pools and waterfalls, wound expertly around the boulders, fallen trees, sandbars, pockets of eroded rock, and the embankment of the road.
Evidence of real design – human design – is visible in the road itself. Wherever the tiny streams threaten to flood the road, the builders have very cleverly buttressed it with layers of gravel and large stones, so the water drains harmlessly into the ground and pops up in some more convenient place downhill. The road here really is a kind of technical marvel.
I pass by a sliver of valley that has choked up with water and grass, and hear a riot of frogs. I pass by a grassy clearing dotted with multicolored flowers that resembles an enchanted meadow in some fantasy novel, except that it’s on a forty-five-degree slope. I pass through a V-shaped valley crowded with low green bushes, punctuated with the blackened spires of trees burned by some decades-past forest fire, making the whole area resemble a gigantic pincushion.
Eventually the sights overwhelm me and I decide to stop and spend an hour or so photographing one of the snowmelt streams in detail.
Once I have finally pedaled to the top of the mountain pass, the terrain opens into a long plateau, divided into wide sections by thick bands of forest. The road plows a corridor straight across the bands, and the clouds are long and narrow, so the entire landscape is laid out along horizontal and vertical lines. It’s an effect I last saw while driving through the Yukon.
