June 9, 2015
11 – Some Kinda Vortex
It rains all night and all morning, harder and softer, harder and softer, never stopping for more than a few minutes at a time. Seven in the morning becomes eight and nine and then ten. We sit inside the tent eating, working, and waiting.
We don't know what the weather forecast looks like, but we know the rain might stick around all day. The air just has that feeling to it. We also know there's only so long you can keep two people and a dog inside a humid tent before everyone concerned starts to lose their mind, starts to suffocate from the wet stink, or both. And so dressed in rain jackets and rain pants with all the fashion sense of someone who chose their outfit from a rural thrift store where all the lights have been turned off, we tear down, pack up, and shoot off down the road. We speed through the mist and the showers and filthy spray kicked up by semi-truck tires as we rumble over bridges above the thundering Pemigewasset River on our way toward the town of Lincoln.
The place feels half dead. It's a big tourist trap in the winter because of all the nearby skiing. It's a big tourist trap in the summer because of the nearby rivers and lakes and water parks. But the ski season has passed and the summer season is still a few weeks away. That means most everything is closed. The streets and sidewalks stay empty except for locals with thick beards who drive trucks with body panels so rusted I can see the frame rails that run behind them.
We stop at a mini-mart to load up on food for the night. The sky opens and the rain falls in sheets and waves moments after we pull the bikes below a short awning on the side of the building.
"Yep, it's gonna be like this all night," says the woman who stands behind the counter. "Supposed to storm all the way through until five in the morning tomorrow. That's what the weatherman says anyhow. Of course you can't trust them. They get paid all that money to make up them forecasts and they're wrong all the time. And it's not like it matters. The weather here's always different than anywhere else, even just a few miles away. We're in some kinda vortex."
With no break in the rain coming, we push out toward the motel room we booked for the night. The rain falls so hard that all of the dirt and sweat and sunscreen that collected on my head over the past few days becomes liquid and runs stinging into my eyes. It's hard to look at anything but the patch of wet road right in front of my tire. And it's distracting enough that I don't notice until a mile later that Kristen isn't wearing her rain pants.
"Hey, what happened to your rain pants?" I ask her.
"Covered in mold," she says, matter-of-fact, like it's the most normal thing in the world.
It turns out this is what happens when you shove your wet clothes into the bottom of a pannier and forget about them for the next three days.
To get to our motel we pass under Interstate 93. From Concord in the south to the border with Vermont the road is known as the Styles Bridges Highway. It's named after Henry Styles Bridges, a New Hampshire politician who served a term as the state's governor before spending twenty-four years in Washington D.C. as a U.S. Senator. It's now believed that he also drove one of his fellow congressmen to suicide. The Boston Globe explains:
The saga began on June 3, 1953, when Lester Hunt Jr., son of a Democratic senator from Wyoming, was arrested in Washington’s Lafayette Park and accused of soliciting an undercover male police officer. At the time, the younger Hunt was president of the student body at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. Since it was a first offense, police declined to prosecute.
Soon after the arrest, however, an official in the police Morals Division, Roy Blick, apparently was contacted by Bridges, then the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and another GOP senator, Herman Welker of Idaho, who was a close ally of Joseph McCarthy. Bridges and Welker, according to a 1954 column by the influential D.C. journalist Drew Pearson, threatened Blick's job if he failed to pursue the case. Soon after, there was a trial. Hunt Jr. was found guilty and paid a $100 fine.
The story ran in the conservative Washington Times-Herald, but not in any of 36 papers in Wyoming, where Hunt was a candidate for reelection. “If the opposition brings this up in the Senate race, I shall withdraw,” Hunt is said to have told Drew Pearson. After facing threats that Republicans would do just that, Hunt, a mild-mannered former dentist, agreed to terminate his candidacy. Soon afterward, he shot himself in his Senate office. A cousin of Hunt's said the senator himself named Bridges as his tormentor. Information about Hunt’s son's case was found among Bridges's papers at New England College.
And still the freeway bears his name.
We're soaked beyond soaked by the time we wheel the bikes into the too-small motel room. But it doesn't matter. Our first night in a proper bed since we left Los Angeles more than three and a half weeks ago waits for us and it feels like the highest of luxuries. Everyone showers or gets thrown into the bathtub and washed against their will. Wet clothes drape themselves on any available hooked surface. Emails send, electronics charge, legs stretch. Walter sleeps on the bed and underneath the shelter of a desk chair. It's a reset for all involved.
Thunderstorms roll in late in the afternoon and stick around well into the night. It rains and rains and rains, although the real fury of the storms spends most of its time in the hills and valleys beyond us. But then, with no warning or any kind of lead-up, the sky goes bright white and a burst of thunder cracks so loud that all three of us shoot bolt upright in an instant. The lights flicker and every electronic device in the room resets itself as a power surge works its way through the system. And after that, nothing. The lightning and the thunder return to wherever they come from and Lincoln, New Hampshire turns quiet again. Must be the vortex at work.
Today's ride: 12 miles (19 km)
Total: 330 miles (531 km)
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