June 10, 2015
12 – Appalling but Satisfying
We don't leave the warm, clean, bug-free comfort of the motel room until the last possible moment. All three of us feel rested and ready and excited to get back to the road. There are so many mountain passes still to curse our way over, so much terrible food still to shove into our face holes, and so many racist old white people still for us to feel ashamed of.
We get back to steep climbing along the bends of a river as soon as the last buildings of North Woodstock fade from our rear view mirrors. That's how it's been in New Hampshire and how it'll be all through Vermont and into upstate New York. This morning brings the Lost River Valley. It takes us back up into the White Mountain National Forest, which is just as fresh and green and untouched as the land we passed through on the way up and over the Kanc.
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An Owen Pallett song chugs in my head on an endless loop on the long, steady climb. It only takes a few miles before streams of sweat turn the hair on my wrists and forearms so wet that the strands come together in thick black lines. This distracts me from the sunscreen that forms into thick white bands of paste on my cheeks. The last stretch before the top runs for a mile with a nine or ten percent grade that's so steep it seems like some kind of off-ramp toward heaven.
We celebrate at the top with craft orange soda and posh mint cookies, then leash up Walter and go for a short hike on the Appalachian Trail. Or at least we try to. We head west but only make it part of a mile before reaching a stream with no bridge that's so swollen with cold water it'd go up higher than our knees if we tried to ford it. We only make it a little farther in the other direction before running into an obstacle that's somewhere between a staircase and a wall. It was hacked out of rocks steep and slick enough that at least one of us would tear an ACL if we tried to make it to the top, and it puts a quick end to our AT hiking days. It reminds us that for however tough cycle-touring feels sometimes, long distance hiking exists in this separate, insane plane of hard work, discomfort, dehydrated food, and back country cat-hole shitting that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to handle.
Unlike the hikers, we get to coast down from the crest of the gap at thirty miles per hour. Farther on we head along roads where more butterflies than cars pass us. I wave at homeowners digging holes in their yards and they wave back.
Still I feel rushed. And that's not abnormal; I have more often than not since we started riding. When the road flattens out I have an involved talk with myself about why that's the case, even though there's no obvious reason for me to rush while we're out here riding bikes. We have no deadlines, no time limits, no people we have to meet along the way. Yet I can't deny that it's there, and that it changes what it's like to travel this way. The rush makes me feel disconnected from the details of the landscape and the people that surround me. It's like some invisible force pressing me forward faster than I want to go.
I think part of it's a holdover from the drive between Maine from California. We thought we'd have three weeks to make all those miles, but in the end it was more like twelve days, and the go-go-go energy from all of that hasn't yet faded. Part of it also comes from getting Walter set up on the cargo bike and then in the trailer, and all of the worry that surrounded it last week. It's like we need to make up for lost time, even though we didn't lose any because we have nowhere to be. Then there's the matter of figuring out life on the road when both a cycling partner and an awesome little dog come with you. All of the rest stops, the dinner breaks, the hill climbs — most everything — take longer than they would on my own. My internal clock as it relates to that stuff hasn't yet recalibrated itself. The rhythm of it feels off, somehow untrue. The most logical fix my mind can come up with is to crank harder.
Sometimes I just get to that state where I'm relaxed enough to let life come to me instead of trying to impose more structure on it. Others I have to be mindful, intentional, and purposeful about the shift. This is one of those other times. And in realizing this I start to feel better. I breathe deep, relax my shoulders, and let my eyes and thoughts wander into whatever quiet corner or open meadow or rocky hillside they feel like. The calm and easy road that takes us into North Haverhill on this warm and sunny late spring day is the perfect place to try to downshift into a clearer state of mind.
A clearer state of digestion becomes a pipe dream when I decide to get a chicken parm sandwich from a deli attached to a Citgo station in the middle of nowhere in upstate New Hampshire. It's a cheap but massive thing made of chicken fingers, no Parmesan cheese, and chunky tomato sauce all warmed to near boiling in a dirty microwave. It's appalling but satisfying, just how I like my food while cycle-touring.
With a lightness in my heart and a dull ache in my side we head along the bends of the Connecticut River Valley guided by the hazy late afternoon sun. We pass dozens of small family farms, some with little stores attached where the shingle out front calls out their organic chicken and pork and cheese. Half the pickup trucks who pass us have the number of their favorite race car driver posted on a two-color sticker in the truck's sliding back window. When we reach Orford we eat a proper dinner of rice and beans on the granite steps of the Mount Cube Masonic temple with Walter watching the squirrels and joggers and with the evening's first crickets starting to chirp. I feel alive in this kind of country on this kind of day. I feel happy. I feel content. And I tell myself that this is what matters, not speed or miles or how many states lie ahead or behind.
In the soft light of the fading day we pass sons playing baseball with their dads on lush green baseball diamonds. We turn down a one-lane road with covered bridges and old river-plain houses with bright white paint and broad shaded verandas standing guard over sprawling lawns. In time the one-lane roads turn to dirt, and except for the modern vehicles it's hard to know for sure that we haven't been teleported back to 1912.
At the end of the road we hang a right, cross a narrow metal-framed bridge over the river, and leave New Hampshire behind us. Ahead lies Vermont and a long line of big fucking hills. We climb away from the river by way of three of these big fucking hills before cutting down a side road and setting up the tent in near-darkness on a sloping patch of state forest lands. Our reward for all of the day's hard-earned climbing is a single peanut butter brownie. Kristen and I split it while scratching Walter's head and chest and telling him that he's a good dog as his head starts to droop with sleep. It's a simple joy, but a powerful one all the same.
Today's ride: 52 miles (84 km)
Total: 382 miles (615 km)
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