This journal was first published on the website Crazy Guy on a Bike and was removed along with all my other journals and articles as of 1-21-2018.  I harbor no ill will to the CGOAB webmaster but I feel I overstayed my welcome there by a couple of years and needed to move on. Along with efforts to correct typos and other errata I have added a few new descriptions and recollections some of which I felt would violate the CGOAB journal rules, both written and unwritten. 

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In September of 2008, at the age of sixty one, I road from Crater Lake National Park in Southern Oregon to Cayucos Beach on the Central California coast.  I knew I would be crossing a brief section of road that overlapped with my teenage odyssey described in these pages.  I felt it would amount to short footnote in my journal. I could not have been more mistaken.  I was stunned as I rode again through the giant redwoods of my youth.  As I was writing up this journal, I came to the overlap of geography and overlaid time and found I could write no more without piecing and gluing together shards from my memory of this earlier ride together into some semblance of a journal/memoir.

All the events described here happened.  The exact day, place and even the states have in some cases been blurred by the intervening decades.  A few events did not happen on the trip or events directly connected to the ride, but they had an influence on the story.  Such events and stories should be easily identified.  Mostly this is a telling of the tale of two socially ill fitted teens making what was for them a large step in coming of age. 

As best as I can, I have tried to tell this four decades (now five) plus old recollection from the viewpoint of two sixteen year old boys.  But it is not easy to keep the reflections of a sixty one year old grandfather (now seventy one) from finding space on the page.

With this said, at the time of the first publishing I had not seen or heard from Ed for over forty years. But thanks to the internet we reaquaited a year later and I visited his equestrian stables the following year during a ride following the length of the Columbia River.  With Ed's reading of the "first edition" he mentioned several episodes and events I forgot, deliberately left out or emotionally stripped from my memory(?). And during casual conversation in the presence of our wives other streams of memory would spring forth. My class on Greek philosophy is almost as old an distant as the ride itself but I maintain a tenuous affinity with Heraclitus of Ephesus. The river and its course has changed as have I - to wit the journal.

Memories are voracious.
What is left of my
life after, each day,
they have had their meal?

     -R. S. Thomas