January 19, 2025
Roots Research Revisited
I spent a full two hours yesterday pouring through the tables of contents for every tour we’ve posted in the last seven years, ever since we decided to sell our home and go vagabond. I’m looking for an old photograph that I’m certain is in here somewhere, but haven’t found it yet. I found something far better though: Roots Research, a post I put up a month after moving out of our condo and into our first airbnb so the unit could be cleaned up, repainted, furnished and ready to go on the market.
About two weeks earlierwe drove up to Seattle for dad’s birthday celebration, and while I was there I took the opportunity to look through my parents’ own box of old photographs. It’s a copious box, larger than ours, for dad was also a photographer and even developed his own film in his darkroom - something I think he picked up collecting merit badges as a Boy Scout back in Bluefield, West Virginia. So many of the real passions and activities that have been the focus of my life stem back to the influences of my stepfather, who married mom when I was about three years old. He was a photographer. He loved the outdoors, and to me it seemed like he knew the identity of every bird, tree and plant we would see on the walks he took me on in the hardwood forests back in our new home. He was even a star runner in his high school track team, a hurdler. I owe that man so much, and its sad that when I see him now his memory is too far gone to remember what I’ve told him.
He’s never cared for travel though, and has been less willing to leave home for the insecurity of a strange place the older he’s gotten. That’s mom’s contribution to the mix.
I was rummaging through the box hoping I would find a photograph of my first bicycle, a three speed for sure and I believe a yellow Schwinn. I’m certain it was a three speed, because I can remember being able to disassemble and reassemble its Sturmey-Archer hub. It’s the bike I rode on my first significant ride, a fifty mile loop of Lake Washington. Over sixty years ago, this was a significant accomplishment - not just for the ride itself, but for the challenging conditions. This was years before the Burke-Gilman trail, and maybe before the first such trail in the country. There was zero bike infrastructure at that time, and the ride was full of scary places trying to cross busy, truck-filled highways.
It’s also the bike I rode from Seattle to Sun River that I described in the introductory post for the journal. Since that time, I contacted Elizabeth to see what she recalled from that summer, thinking that maybe I had started out planning to ride the whole double century in one day. Her response surprised me: she didn’t remember me being there at all. There’s no doubt about that though, and I told her about sitting on a raft in the lake there with another guy and two girls.
And then yesterday I came across the Roots Research post. I never found a photo of my first bike, but I did find several others I was delighted to find several others that I took photos of with the iPad and then included in the post. Here’s one I’d forgotten I had. I wonder who the photographer was?
I shared this with Elizabeth, pleased to prove her wrong for a change, and then asked her thoughts on what year that must have been - but to me, once I thought about it, the answer was obvious: 1961. That’s the year she graduated from high school and that fall she moved into Sigma Chi, one of the sororities affiliated with the University of Washington, and her home for the next four years. 1961 was the last summer she’d still be around for a family vacation.
So I wasn’t fifteen as I suspected, or sixteen as seemed also possible. I was fourteen. My parents let me go off on a 200 mile wild camping overnight when I was only fourteen. What a different age from ours, where helicopter parents barely give their children the opportunity to explore the world on their own.
And don’t I look like I’m only fourteen? Look at that cheezy grin!
I found some other photos and memorabilia of interest - me in my runner’s uniform, and some race results clipped from the newspaper (I was a credible miler and cross country runner in high school and my first years of college); and an article about a relay run by my high school cross country team around Lake Washington that I helped organize. I forget the sequence of events now, but I think this relay run was inspired by my bicycle ride around the lake I described earlier. Reading the clipping again now, I’m pretty impressed at our time - it’s over 50 miles around the lake. There are no bikes in all this of course, but if you wrap your mind around it right you can see some continuity with my pre-nascent interest in bicycle travel.
There are several other photos in the link, but I’ll post them here again for the context and also to increase the odds that I’ll find my way back to them in the future.
This one must be from 1959 or 1960, in front of the family’s first house on NE 61st Street, up by Sand Point just north of the UW. I’m waxing the family car (a Peugeot 403 wagon, which dad proudly reminded me had 350,000 miles on it before he finally let it go after rebuilding its engine himself twice. He finally gave it up when he could no longer find spare parts for it in the junkyard).
Three things about this photo strike me: first, I’m surrounded by kids several years younger than me. I was a bit of a pied piper figure in our neighborhood, organizing the kids into various activities, preferring to spend time with them rather than my peers whose interests I generally didn’t share. Second, my mother reminds me that one of these activities was the Around-the-block Club - I would lead the kiddos in runs/races around the city block. So maybe that’s an forerunner of my interest in traveling under my own steam? And then, there’s the Peugeot - certainly an odd choice for the family car sixty years ago. Maybe it presaged my longing to see France? Certainly it influenced my choice for my first touring bike, a Peugeot U-08.
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And here I am again in my high school runner’s uniform this time.
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And finally there’s this newspaper article about a relay run by my high school cross country team around Lake Washington that I helped organize. I forget the sequence of events now, but I think this relay run was inspired by my bicycle ride around the lake I just mentioned. Reading the clipping, I’m pretty impressed at our time - it’s over 50 miles around the lake. There are no bikes in all this of course, but if you wrap your mind around it right you can see some continuity with my pre-nascent interest in bicycle travel. and I’d forgotten all about the boat!
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That’s enough though. It’s time to move on and open up this slender, small notebook I brought down from Portland. It contains my long lost journal of that first real tour, from Bellingham to Salem in 1980.
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