We have a lot of time to think every day while riding our bikes. Sometimes we can at least talk to each other, but we are typically too far apart or separated by deafening winds, whether it's a head wind from dear Mother Nature, or caused by increased speed traveling downhill (our favorite), or created by the many cars and trucks passing us by. It was in the past few days that I started to think about a blog post from me. And when discussed with Seth, he confirmed my thought, "Schwan, that's a great idea!" So -- here I am.
As you may guess, Seth is the author here, the one responsible for the eloquently-written blog posts. He writes well and several people have commented as such. With my guest appearance, I can guarantee you a (sometimes brutally) honest change in perspective. We have a lot of time to think every day while riding our bikes. Sometimes we can at least talk to each other, but we are typically too far apart or separated by deafening winds, whether it's a head wind from dear Mother Nature, or caused by increased speed traveling downhill (our favorite), or created by the many cars and trucks passing us by. It was in the past few days that I started to think about a blog post from me. And when discussed with Seth, he confirmed my thought, "Schwan, that's a great idea!" So -- here I am. My perspective on this trip is an interesting one. I am an able-bodied person riding a typical upright bike with no obvious musculature aiding in my propulsion (such as Seth's arms that gain many comments). I don't like to be the center of attention, but neither does Seth. Only, he has no choice here. Everyone we encounter goes straight to him. They either stare with no spoken words or say things like: "That looks comfortable!" or "You like that bike? I bet you'd get used to it." (Implying that he has a choice to use a handcycle). Or as the ferry workers in the Bay Area demanded several times, "Get up and walk, you can't ride that on here." They even said it with a smile, assuming we were joking as we informed them of Seth's inability to walk. One of my favorite comments was said to me after giving Seth a good stare-down, "Why you making him do all the work?!" I guess the guy didn't notice the trailer, wheelchair wheels attached to the trailer, 4 paniers and 2 sleeping pads that are hanging off my bike. Seth and I just laughed. This is a top shot of my bike as we were all laughing about how much crap I had exposed. I was drying the towels that got wet in the fog overnight, was attempting to charge a battery pack with the solar charger, had a speaker out to get us through the boring farm land, as well as the usual rain jackets and our shirts as we shed layers in the sun.
I am curious to see how this perspective changes as we start to cross southern borders. Simply said, Seth is a beast and deserves the attention and accolades. Of course people notice him. Good thing he's so chill and able to handle whatever comes his way, including the awkward questions and comments from strangers. It's always an adventure when a McBride is involved. And to think we still have 11 months on this journey together...
8 Comments
Three days of rest sounded like an eternity when we were pushing 50 mile days through the rice fields north of the Bay Area, but it's amazing how time flies when you're not riding your bike. Oakland marked the first major transition of our trip - from inland to the coast, we caught our first view of the Pacific in the hills above Vallejo. It's a companion we'll be staying very close to for the next 9,000+ miles. We had all sorts of stuff to keep us busy in Oakland, between hanging out with family and friends, running around doing errands to resupply our gear needs, and eating as much good food as possible (side question: why is it that road food in the US is a bunch of fried nastiness, and in other countries it's simple deliciousness?). Still, there were a couple of things that we had to make time for. One was making a day trip up to Petaluma visit Linda Garrigan and the great folks at CamelBak, who are supplying all our hydration needs for The Long Road South. CamelBak is a large company that still has the feel of a small business and it looks like an amazing place to work. We showed up at lunch time and there were employees hoping on their road bikes and lacing up their running shoes to get in a quick workout. The company even provides cruiser bikes that employees can check out if they wan't to make a run into town to pick something up for lunch. It was`awesome seeing that, if a company provides the environment and infrastructure to keep people moving, they'll readily take advantage. After meeting some of the people that helped get us supplied, Linda gave a tour of the facility, including a peek inside their design lab, which featured some amazing toys and machines abusing water bottles and bite valves until they failed. All in all, a nice glimpse into the workings of a pretty awesome company. A day later we made a trip up to Berkeley, which has been a place on the forefront of the disability rights movement since such a thing existed. Kelly and I wanted to go check out the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program (BORP), which is doing amazing things getting people with disabilities outside and moving. BORP occupies a couple of ramshackle-looking buildings near the Berkeley Marina. Greg, a tanned, wiry man with an exuberance of energy runs their adaptive sports programs. Greg cycled across Africa in the mid-90's and is especially excited to talk about bikes and BORP's cycling program. Many disabled sports programs operate under what I like to call a duckling mentality. Activities are group-based and highly structured, and as a result, participants who might simply want to do their own thing are liable to shy away. BORP's cycling program features a stable of adaptive bikes and allows program participants to show up, check out a bike, and take it out for the day. While we were there, we even ran into one of Kelly's old patients from Emmanuel Hospital, Jorgé, who comes by BORP regularly to ride one of their handcycles. He was super excited to hear about our long tour and eager to share his own bike stories. At BORP, staff and volunteers are around to help those who need it, but folks who can manage themselves have a place to try out different equipment and get a workout in on their own terms. As a way of facilitating physical activity among people with a wide variety of disabilities, it seems highly effective. After visiting Borp, we headed back to Oakland to finish preparing our gear to head out on the road, this time with my sister Jessica and her boyfriend Steve , our first participants in The Long road South, riding with us. We've had some epic riding since leaving Oakland, and that story's to come shortly, but now I'm tired and it's time to take a shower, go to bed, and put in some more miles tomorrow. South of Tulelake, where horseradish fields stretch to the horizons and Mr. Wong's potato trucks rumble by, stacked high with unwashed Russets, civilization drops off in a way that's only possible in the mountain west. For six days we rode through the backcountry of NE California, at one stretch - between TuleLake and Adin - we pedaled for 73 miles without seeing more than a few lonely houses. We pedaled big miles because there was nowhere to linger. The landscapes were epic but the weather harsh, with piercing high-altitude sun, raking winds, and below-freezing nights. Luckily, we know some pretty awesome people, like one Mr. Jared Cure, who decided to ride his BMW GS Adventure up from Oakland to join us for a couple of nights of wild camping. He showed up in the dark, after we'd finished a 52 mile day, busted out a bottle of Crown and a can of tuna to ward off the cold and proceeded to freeze his ass off for the rest of the night. We were just as bad, sleeping in every layer of clothes we brought with us. When it gets down to 25, whiskey can only help so much. The next day, eager to hang out and talk to someone other than ourselves we put in a short, but grinding day - 22 miles of varied ascent, the road rising through a gash in the trees like a series of stepped plateaus. Some 50 miles into California there was an agricultural check station, the woman working looked bored and waved us through without a second glance. At Howard's Gulch, a free, limited-service campground that seemed plush compared to the clearing we'd slept in the night before, we arrived right as Jared was returning from an expedition to the closest store, some 30 miles up the road. Camp tacos, salami, and grapes, might not sound like a feast, but if you ever find yourself through the Modoc National Forest, such foods present as wondrous and exotic as spices from the West Indies. After Jared zoomed away on his 1,170 cc rocket ship, we got back to the task of putting in some serious miles. For three days we rode over mountain passes and through flat, cattle range valleys. Kelly's first years of life were spent next to cow pastures in northern Kentucky and as a little girl she'd spend hours watching and talking to her bovine neighbors. Now, rarely seeing a person not clad in automotive armor, the herds upon herds of black angus made this wide-open landscape seem a little less lonely. Often I'd hear Kelly's voice ahed of me and yell, "What?!" into the wind. "Just talking to the girls..." she'd respond more often than not. The miles, mountains, sun, and wind took their toll on our bodies. After seven consecutive days of riding, even gentle gradients started to feel like L'Alpe D'Huez (one of the monster climbs in The Tour de France). Our worst day of the trip came when we pedaled out of our campsite amongst a herd of Hat Creek's noisiest cows, and the road that had been described as "mostly flat" by every motorist we'd asked was actually a 1,000ft climb over 12 miles. We stopped for lunch in Old Station at a place called JJ's Cafe where the new owners had sold their home in Hillsboro, Oregon to settle near Lassen Mountain. There we learned that the road, that was "pretty much all downhill to Redding" actually continued to climb another 2,000ft to Eskimo Pass. Blazing sun, toasted muscles, a tuna melt (damn you tuna melt!!) sitting heavy in my stomach and wreaking havoc on my blood pressure, all combined to wreck our afternoon. Four or five miles from Old Station and I could barely turn my cranks. We pulled over and I laid on the ground for 10 minutes while Kelly held my legs above my head - a bizarre scene for passing motorists, I'm sure. Trying again, my blood pressure slowly got better but my arms felt leaden, and then even heavier. I looked down and saw a now familiar sight, flaccid rubber of a punctured tire. Dejection and anger. We pulled over again, now already past 4pm and still 8 miles from the summit, and over twenty miles from our destination for the night. Even at without mechanical issues, the fatigue and terrain were making it uncertain whether we'd have enough light to get where we needed. As we worked on the tire a lady towing a horse trailer pulled over and asked if we needed any help. Sometimes when you're at your lowest point the kindness of strangers is impossible to pass up. She offered to throw our bikes in the trailer and give us a ride to the summit and we accepted. The bikes nestled amongst hay and horse dung, us packed in the cab and it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from our shoulders. Britt lives in Orland, CA but runs free range cattle up in the mountains, and they'd been rounding up 18 cattle that got lost and were wandering near the road. "I was worried that you'd run across some as you were riding,"she said as I reveled in the engine's rumble. "But you'll be past them up at Eskimo so I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore." After a long descent and a short night in a cabin we kept riding. Mostly down for real this time, but every hill that kicked up, Kelly and I could barely turn the cranks. Our bodies were breaking down and we had to listen. So yesterday we took a rest day in Red Bluff, two-nights of luxury in a Best Western that Kelly's parents generously booked for us. It felt fantastic. Today we had the kind of day we needed, 50 miles of fast, flat, and tail-wind aided. All of a sudden we're riding through olive groves and onion fields. With any luck we'll be in Oakland three days from now, resting and recovering at my sister's house, and preparing to keep pushing South. Chemult, Oregon isn't a place many people choose to stay the night. A half mile strip of a town that looks like it's barely hanging on, its buildings look like they're slowly being stripped away by the elements, one splinter and paint layer at a time. I don't know the economics of central Oregon, but it looks like most of the money in the region passes through quicker than the semis that rumble down 97. Kelly and I stopped in Saturday night and booked a room at the Chemult Motel, a collection of wood shingled buildings that surround a parking lot of puddly gravel. The office is located across the street at the Chalet Restaurant where Ray, the owner of both establishments, also serves as the sole cook. Ray was busy Saturday night. With the Ducks opening up Pac-12 play in a night game vs. Cal (Goooooo Ducks!), hunters in town for opening weekend, and mushroom pickers camping out to scour the surrounding pine forests, the Chalet was stretched to its capabilities. Most of the attire was camo, ducks gear, or combinations thereof. While the Ducks have turned into a modern and moneyed brand that may seem at odds with Oregon's rural roots, the family in front of us, from weathered grandpa with missing teeth to the motocross sweatshirt wearing grandson knew as much about Josh Huff, Braylon Addison, and the intricacies of the spread-option as the rest of the restaurant. Huge cheers erupted whenever Thomas Tyner touched the ball. We arrived after a long day into a demoralizing headwind. 44 miles took over 5 hours of actual pedaling time. Nevertheless, it was our farthest day on tour. With a high wind advisory, 40 degree rain and the forecast, it finally felt like we'd earned the chance to hunker down indoors for a day. So hunker we did, taking trips to the Pilot and the Double D Market, but otherwise doing nothing but laying around and watching football. By Monday morning the rain had blown through but the winds remained, a steady southwester. Somewhere around midday I actually fell into a rhythm for the first time in the trip, not that there was anything to distract me. The road cut an unwavering path through the pine forest and what I kept imagining to be distant rises in the terrain flattened as we approached. Such was the monotony of gradient that Kelly started comparing central Oregon to the midwest and I started imagining that I could see the curvature of the earth. The day's excitement was a sheriff pulling us over to ask if we'd seen an older gentleman wandering along the side of the road. "Sorry sir, we haven't seen much of anything since Chemult. Should we keep an eye out?" "Nah, he'd be north of here. Say, how far are you planning on going today?" "Somewhere around Chiloquin is about as far as we can make it today." He furrowed his brow and lowered down to his s authoritative voice, "Now, I wouldn't stay in Chiloquin if I were you, tough town there, lot's o problems. We'd heard the same thing in La Pine, while discussing the ammenities of central Oregon's small towns with a RV driver who'd pulled into the diner parking lot where we'd stopped for breakfast. "Chiloquin?" He'd said. "Don't stay there unless you have to." "Why not?" I'd asked. "Well I hate to say it," he'd replied, then switched to the inside voice that bigots use when they think they're in like-minded company, "but there's a lot of drunken Indians." After the second warning, we started to figure that whether the drunks were Indians, hillbillies, or Klamath teenagers looking to binge, it might be better to just bypass Chiloquin altogether.
Somewhere after mile 35 the road curved west and I sang a little ditty of excitement. Not long after it really did appear that the earth was dropping away and soon we were zipping along at 30 miles an hour. It's funny how landscaped can change so suddenly, for as soon as we began descending, the forest thinned and evergreen hills dotted the skyline. Within a half mile it looked like we'd entered the high sierra landscape of Northern California. We found a campsite at Collier Memorial State Park about 5 miles from Chiloquin and found nothing to worry about but the overly friendly RVers who wanted to tell stories of the crazy things they did in their younger days. We made it to Klamath Falls this evening, and are fully enjoying the luxury of a hotel that the incomparable Jared booked for us. Southern Oregon is beautiful and neither Kelly or I can wait to make the push into Northern California tomorrow. Neither of us has ever been here before and we're stoked to see what the road brings. Wild camping, long days riding on remote roads, and a visit from a man on a motorcycle are what we have to look forward to. |