June 16, 2015
18 – Our Little Hollow
For the first time in more than a week our legs don't feel like blocks of lead as we crank out the first mile of the day. The low clouds in front of us hide the tops of nearby mountains and wrinkled cans of Labatt Blue rest where the gravel meets the grass on the road's shoulder. We're far enough away from any kind of city that more semi-trucks pass us than morning commuters.
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Soon the clouds let loose. First comes the light shower, then the angry downpour. But rain on a windless sixty-five degree morning is a lot different than the awful mix of cold and wind and wet that followed us around for two months in New Zealand. Back then the idea of jumping head first into a furnace started to make good sense. Today we're only soaked. It seems weird to say, but we feel almost happy about that.
People love to sit in their pickup trucks and let the engine idle in this part of the country. I'd bet good money that one of the ten most popular hobbies in rural upstate New York is sitting in your idling Ford F-250 Super Duty in front of the gas station for like ten minutes while texting or playing lottery scratch tickets or digging for boogers stuck so deep in your nose that to a person watching from the other side of the glass it looks like you've lost a knuckle.
The wet makes my bike's disc brakes squeak and squeal and yelp like some kind of creature you'd meet just after passing through the gates of hell. I yell at them with words so awful I can't write them down. This has no effect.
When the rain returns with vengeance we pull off the road and take cover in a parking garage at the the Adirondack Museum. This gives us a chance both to dry out and to watch disappointed tourists with umbrellas as wide around as a tractor tire surge into the museum in waves. Just about all of them seem to have ended up at the place to eat hamburgers and ice cream and stand around unimpressed indoors because it's too wet to eat hamburgers and ice cream and stand around unimpressed outside.
The miles and hours pass but it's hard to know based on sight alone. The thick clouds mean 7:45 looks the same as 9:30 or 2:00. It makes it feel like we haven't gone far from where we started despite all the pedaling and spitting and unfunny jokes. We press on along the edges of a string of lakes, each one gray and flat and cold-looking and empty of boats. We ride through mist and showers and downpours under dark skies. But because tourist season doesn't start for another week or two the road belongs almost all to us.
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Color returns to the world late in the afternoon when a switch is flipped and the sun replaces the clouds for good. But the day still feels somehow off, like it did before the overcast left us. We pass through small lakefront towns every few miles, but all of the restaurants are closed and the motels empty. For every fifteen houses we can see, maybe one is occupied. I know that most of them are vacation homes, but it still feels as if some kind of plague has swept across the land and only the strongest are left.
But then we hit the town of Inlet and any fear that we'll be hunted down and killed for meat by the survivors goes away. I refuel on Twix bars and a tall can of cheap iced tea. We load up on supplies for the days ahead. Walter runs through the grass along the waterfront of the park with a look of unmatched happiness spread across his face.
A couple of miles down the road we come across a trailhead leading into the Fulton Chain Wild Forest. We park the bikes and follow it on foot. Only a few hundred feet up the trail we walk off into the woods and soon find tucked among the moss-covered stones and shallow ridge lines a flat spot just wide enough for a three-person tent. It's the ideal home for the night.
It's a hell of a lot of work to push a mountain bike with a dog trailer and then a cargo bike up steep slopes meant for hikers, but with patience and teamwork and brute force we manage. We sit cross-legged, eat crackers and cheese, and watch how the setting sun shines on the leaves of the tallest trees like a spotlight and turns the leaves bright and powerful shades of green. We can't stop smiling; we're so happy we found this perfect corner of untouched, unbothered Adirondack forest. From our little hollow we can still see and hear traffic passing on the highway below but stay hidden to the rest of the world. Well, most of the rest of the world. We hear a noise crashing through the forest toward us and look up just in time to see a deer shoot by parallel to the tent no more than twenty feet away. It's the only one we see, but we hear others calling out from nearby with loud sniffs and snorts.
We scramble to put on the rain fly when the skies open up an hour later, but it turns out there's no need to rush. The thick canopy of branches above means that although we hear the full force of the rain, little makes its way down to the forest floor. That peaceful, fresh, safe sound carries us off long before the day's last light has faded.
Today's ride: 53 miles (85 km)
Total: 585 miles (941 km)
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