Another remembrance of things past, brought to us once again by my first partner, Carol Jo.  She tells me that her memory is failing as she ages, and so she’s started going through old memorabilia and making notes while she can still remember the subject and story.  She’s also started forwarding on photos that she thinks I might be interested in.

It’s well off topic again, but the photo that arrived today at least has a bike touring story attached to it, so I might as well set it down here and pass it on before I forget more of it myself.

Heart

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At the time this photo was taken, Carol Jo and I were living in Bellingham while I was completing my bachelor’s program in Environmental Engineering at Huxley College.  We were living in a tiny house with two friends in a funky neighborhood near Fairhaven that was known at the time as Happy Valley.

After my graduation that May, I had the summer off until beginning my master’s program in Seattle.  Somehow I talked Alan and my brother Stewart into bicycling with me down to San Francisco.  I can’t recall now what inspired me to do something like this, but I think it was the influence of my friend Dennis from the army: Dennis was a bike racer when he was a student at MIT, and after I got out of the army I got my first touring bicycle, a metallic blue Peugeot U-08, and started going out on rides in the county.  When Dennis was in town visiting, he, Alan (his friend from high school) and I would go on rides together.

Yes, thinking back on it now, I think I must have Dennis to thank for all of this.

Anyway, the ride.  No one had any money to speak of, so it was a real shoestring affair.  We took camping gear, Alan and I sharing a tent and my brother Stewart carrying his own.  I didn’t keep a log (that I can still find anyway), but as I remember it now we kept a fast pace, covering about a hundred miles per day.  I think we made it down to the Olympic Peninsula on our first day, camping on Hoods Canal somewhere.  It was pouring rain in the evening, and I remember Alan and I playing go (the Japanese board game) by flashlight in our tent, and Stewart reminds me that at some point in the night he heard Alan curse loudly and overturn the board. 

The next morning, with all of us feeling soaked and miserable, Stewart excused himself from the expedition and caught a ferry back to Seattle.  As far as I know, he never really bicycled again.

Alan and I continued on, biking across the bridge to Astoria at the end of either the third or fourth day, and spending the night there in a cheap motel.  I don’t remember much about those days except for how bad the logging trucks were around Raymond, and for what a thrill it was to cross the Columbia and enter a new state.  It felt like we were really doing it, and were pumped up for continuing south to San Francisco.

The next morning though it all fell apart when we splurged and went out for breakfast at the Pig and Pancake.  Alan really loved breakfast and especially pancakes.  The whole time we lived with him, he maintained a sourdough starter and we had sourdough pancakes for breakfast nearly every morning.  He’d been looking forward to this breakfast in Astoria, and it was a real motivator for him.  

The big meal though was a big letdown.  An impersonal chain restaurant just couldn’t come up to his standards, and the disappointment just seemed to take the enthusiasm for the ride out of him.  A day later, camping out in the rain again, he decided he’d had enough too.  The next day we biked east to Salem, spent the night on my sister Elizabeth’s floor, and caught the train back to Seattle the following morning.  

We parted ways at the King Street Station, I biking north to my parents’ home near the UW and he across the floating bridge to his parents’ home on Mercer Island.  The next day, I heard from Alan’s brother.  Alan had been in a crash, going over the handlebars when his front wheel fell into an expansion joint on the floating bridge.  I’m sure we weren’t wearing helmets, and even though he sheared off the tip of his nose he was fortunate not to have gotten a concussion or worse.  Ever after, he had a bright pink patch on the tip of his nose that he had to carefully protect from the sun.

I’ve tried in the past to recall what happened to that U-08, without success.  Putting this story together with my remeniscence of the ride the next autumn back to Indiana, I think I must have disposed of it somehow when Carol and I prepared for our planned two years in the Peace Corps.  

It makes me a bit sad now that I don’t even have a photo of that bike, although I have a very clear one of it in my head.  Maybe Carol Jo will uncover one in her archives,  so there’s still a faint hope.  Among other things about that bike, I recall very clearly that by the time I got rid of it I had completely ruined its Brooks saddle by leaving it out in the rain too often.  It had a shape like the spine of a dead animal at the end, and was very uncomfortable to ride on - even worse than a new, unbroken one if you can imagine that.