"How do I explain what's happened?"
"Very simply. You start typing, and explain it..."
"What if the reasons don't make sense?"
"They never do. Skip 'em and just get on with it."
I'm back in Tennessee.
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I've heard the american heartland compared to a sea many times, and every trip I make through it impresses upon me the aptness of that analogy. Mountain asked me where I was heading from Denver, and upon hearing my response "east", remarked that there was no good way east out of Denver. He had a point. Everything east of Denver is flat and straight for a very long way. It's road that needs burning, and fortunately, equipped with 1164ccs of engine and a heavy throttle hand, I was well set.
Still, even going plaid, Nebraska is a big, long, boring state. Somewhere in the middle is a big ornamental bridge over the interstate. That's how you know you're still in Nebraska and not in hell. Hell doesn't have that bridge.
To be sure, there are less-oblique ways of getting from Los Angeles to Knoxville. Going via Nebraska was down to three things. The first: I wasn't sure whether I was going to Knoxville or continuing the trip in the midwest. Going north left both options open. The second: I needed a tire change, and I could do it for free in Denver. The third: The southern plains in August? No thanks. I prefer my temperatures (and humidity) in the double digits, thank you much.
Going north also yielded a bit of unexpected entertainment. The Black Hills Rally starts tomorrow, so the last couple of days have been filled with trailers full of bikes heading to Sturgis. To be fair, many bikes were actually on the road, their riders not opting to engage in that most-ridiculous-of-activities, hauling a bike to a bike rally, but still, I couldn't help but laugh seeing a broken-down truck that had just previously been pulling what were presumably perfectly serviceable motorcycles. Last I was in that part of the country during the rally, I remember the gas stop a hundred or so miles out where people were unloading bikes from trailers and smearing dirt on their gear. Everyone who rides distance on pavement knows you don't get dirt. You get bugs and grease and diesel sludge. Fucking posers.... at least do it right.
Speaking of which, I just shaved with a real razor for the first time in two months, and peeled off a thick layer of gray disgustingness along with the neck beard. It had apparently been posing as skin, and passing well enough that soap and an aggressive wash-cloth-ing could not remove it. The road is not always the nicest place to be.
From Cortez: Hawg riders at the first gas stop asked where I was coming from. "Tennessee." They meant my last big stop. "Well, I left Los Angeles yesterday..." Silence, and their eyes got big. *Stifled smirk.* It, along with any semblance of boy-racer speed I had were washed away by that afternoon's rain. Second rain day of the trip, and it was utterly miserable, since my tires are not cut out for the wet, and even I avoid flat-tracking mountain passes on a seven-hundred pound bike.
Riding distance for me is like speeding up to slam into a wall even harder. When I have miles to burn, I can't sleep, I can't think, I can't do anything but ride. Pulling into St. Joseph, MO at the end of a long day felt like death, and not just because I was in Missouri. (The interstate at night there is like a game of Frogger that nature keeps losing. ... which is totally disgusting when played in real life, by the way.) Well beyond the near edge of exhaustion, I still lay awake, unable to sleep because my whole body ached and my mind couldn't give up on how far I might make the next day. Gone was that sense of balance I had in the desert, replaced by a mad, greedy rush to put as much tarmac behind me as possible. The next day I awoke in the early dawn hours to a vicious headache and a still-completely-beat body, climbing back on the bike only because no more sleep was coming for at least twelve hours and I had nothing to do otherwise. If I was going to be miserable, I may as well ride. It might even distract me from how terrible riding across Missouri is.
Made Bowling Green that night and booked a nice hotel with the thought that a non-disgusting shower and a decent bed would do me some good. It did. Just knowing that I wasn't going on another absurd push (another 800 mile day would have put me in Tennessee) or engaging in a late-night fleabag hunt improved my mood substantially, and a wad of prime rib and a big beer finished the job. These are simple things, really. Red meat and booze. Easy to do wrong, but equally easy to do right. Fortunately, after a push like that, which it was didn't really matter.
Road in Tennessee is unlike road anywhere else I've seen. Compare Deal's Gap, which may as well be a public raceway with its perfectly smooth, banked and graded turns to State 85, a road I began what's sure to be a love-hate relationship with today. Doesn't look like much:
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Zoom in. Look at the road they drew but didn't highlight. That's the road that's on the ground. The yellow one doesn't exist. That's true of many roads in the Cumberland Plateau.
Just past that, as the road clings to the side of a draw, it's been progressively relined as the edge of the road has fallen down the ridge. I remember road construction on the PCH, where they were rebuilding road that had fallen into the ocean. In Tennessee, they just draw the lines closer together.
But yes, I am again in Tennessee for the very short-term future. In a week or three, I'll be heading up the east coast to finish the unfinished business left there. I may bring the Triumph on this leg. In the mean time, it's back to the grind in the garage, perhaps punctuated with small-scale adventures. I don't want to be off the road yet, but the prospect of putting life on hold seemed equally unattractive. The whole point of the trip was to integrate all of the disparate strands of my life, and now that my head's straight, the next step requires that I be here. To stay out would have just complicated matters and postponed what I'm doing now.
(What that is will doubtless be the subject of future updates.)
I'm finally off to get some earned rest.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
desert mind
When you fill your jacket with a convenience store bag of ice, take care not to get frostbite. People will laugh at you if you get frostbite, no matter how mild, when it's more than a hundred degrees out. They will also laugh at you for putting ice in your jacket in the first place, because they're idiots. Nature of the beast. But be careful.
Riding in the desert is doing math. I get 'X' miles to a tank at 'Y' speed, so there will be 'Z' hours between stops. During 'Z', I need to replenish 'Q' liters of water, and 'R' will evaporate from my soaked gear, so I need to carry a spare 4*(Q+R), in case I break down. If my tires are wearing too fast, I need to slow down, so all of that gets re-figured. Once the math is done, riding is just pointing the bike and pulling the trigger. Nothing more.
The usual concentration, the focus on every little thing requisite of riding elsewhere, is easily replaced by a nervous calm. If something goes wrong... if anything goes wrong, it's probably a very long wait in a very hot place. The raised stakes make every noise, every vibration I've never noticed previously come alive, resonating through my spine and skull, a sure portent of eventual doom, but I loathe the idea of stopping. Stopping throws off the math, and when- in a very real sense- you live and die by the math, introducing error is a very bad thing.
Or that's an option, anyway.
Said concentration can also be replaced by an immediacy, a connectedness to everything but the bike. I trust that it will do its job, so I will do mine, which in this case is to keep it pointed in an appropriate direction, keep the throttle cocked, and not think so damn much as to go crazy. If either of us fails, we'll deal with that when the time comes, but barring that, the net result is basically a lot of looking at the horizon and a lot of abstract conjecture.
Gas layovers are always interesting. Cagers don't understand that the suit is zipped up tight against the heat, holding "cold" in, not hot. When ambient temperature is greater than body temperature, insulation keeps you cool, and all that the suit holds in is water, and even that only temporarily. I'm a walking swamp cooler with a foam ice chest as a hat. It's hot, but manageable, and nothing like the killer hot that exists outside it.
They also don't understand that if we each break down, in my space suit, I stand a chance of being able to walk far enough to do something about it, or something more than stand and wait and hope.
Riding solo across the desert is, unsurprisingly, a solitary experience, and once I get over the bullshit and worry, surprisingly also a comfortable one. A hundred five degrees doesn't feel so bad when I'm soaking wet and eating a seventy mile per hour headwind. Sipping electrolyte juice (like Gatorade, but without the sugar and twice as expensive) every few minutes, water bottle at the ready to re-soak when my gear dries out, I can just sit and hammer across the pavement. The ZRX looks like a seam has split somewhere and a string of water bottles has emerged from it, all from the left, out-of-the-sun side. LA traffic is fortunately miles away (in so many senses of that term); the bike was nervous enough with just the tires strapped up top, much less twenty pounds of water contributing to a substantial imbalance. Me in my space suit, it with its water bottle bandoleer, we make our way.
It's pleasant in the desert. And beautiful. The sun is such a massively powerful entity, and that's somehow lost in most other places. Here it beats down on everything equally. The road looks like water at times, oily snakes of heat distortion rising from every surface, and other vehicles disappear, bend, then double in its reflection. At other times, it just looks like road. Long, straight, flat road.
Cages are few and far between, windows rolled tight and A/C cranked against the overwhelming heat, oblivious to the lunacy of riding through the Mojave in a mobile greenhouse, and entirely missing the point. They're locked up tight against the desert, trying to get through and on to wherever else they're going. They miss it because they aren't actually in it. They don't understand what they're doing, or the real value of shade, or water, or any of it.
This sort of riding is low impact. Once the math is set and my mind is right, I can go on indefinitely, even (long) after I run out of desert. Evening sees me in Flagstaff, and the sun sets over Navajo territory in my mirrors. Red rocks, red dust, red sky... symmetry in a way I didn't expect. Passing cars by the score, gas stops stretch from fifty miles to a hundred to a hundred and fifty. Despite the heat and the altitude shifts, the bike is just purring, and I'm feeling good. Two days with no caffeine, no alcohol, good food, lots of water, and enough sleep has paid off, and I'm starting to wonder whether pushing through to Denver might not be worthwhile.
No. At a gas station in the flooded town of Kayenta, I call it. I could probably make Denver, but it would be foolish, and would guarantee I'd lose time on the balance. That's a desperate measure in a non-desperate situation, and one that would need to be followed by multiple short days to recover. Better to stop short, regroup, and take an easy pull into Denver the next day, leaving open the possibility of harder pushes in the future. I settle on Cortez, a hundred twenty miles (most of a tank of gas) away, find a hotel, and rack up for the night. At eight hundred thirty some-odd miles, it's still far and away the longest day of the trip.
Sitting here at the desk in my far-too-nice hotel room a thousand and a half miles from there, I'm still riding that wave. I refuse to play into that stereotype of going on a long trip and coming back somehow changed (in air quotes), but I can't help feeling that my already broad (I think) mindset has somehow been expanded. If southern California is a land of lotus eaters, the desert sings the Sirens' song, and while for that I know I can't stay, I don't doubt that I've brought some part of it back with me.
I'm probably still humming it in my head when I'm not paying attention.
View Larger Map
Riding in the desert is doing math. I get 'X' miles to a tank at 'Y' speed, so there will be 'Z' hours between stops. During 'Z', I need to replenish 'Q' liters of water, and 'R' will evaporate from my soaked gear, so I need to carry a spare 4*(Q+R), in case I break down. If my tires are wearing too fast, I need to slow down, so all of that gets re-figured. Once the math is done, riding is just pointing the bike and pulling the trigger. Nothing more.
The usual concentration, the focus on every little thing requisite of riding elsewhere, is easily replaced by a nervous calm. If something goes wrong... if anything goes wrong, it's probably a very long wait in a very hot place. The raised stakes make every noise, every vibration I've never noticed previously come alive, resonating through my spine and skull, a sure portent of eventual doom, but I loathe the idea of stopping. Stopping throws off the math, and when- in a very real sense- you live and die by the math, introducing error is a very bad thing.
Or that's an option, anyway.
Said concentration can also be replaced by an immediacy, a connectedness to everything but the bike. I trust that it will do its job, so I will do mine, which in this case is to keep it pointed in an appropriate direction, keep the throttle cocked, and not think so damn much as to go crazy. If either of us fails, we'll deal with that when the time comes, but barring that, the net result is basically a lot of looking at the horizon and a lot of abstract conjecture.
Gas layovers are always interesting. Cagers don't understand that the suit is zipped up tight against the heat, holding "cold" in, not hot. When ambient temperature is greater than body temperature, insulation keeps you cool, and all that the suit holds in is water, and even that only temporarily. I'm a walking swamp cooler with a foam ice chest as a hat. It's hot, but manageable, and nothing like the killer hot that exists outside it.
They also don't understand that if we each break down, in my space suit, I stand a chance of being able to walk far enough to do something about it, or something more than stand and wait and hope.
Riding solo across the desert is, unsurprisingly, a solitary experience, and once I get over the bullshit and worry, surprisingly also a comfortable one. A hundred five degrees doesn't feel so bad when I'm soaking wet and eating a seventy mile per hour headwind. Sipping electrolyte juice (like Gatorade, but without the sugar and twice as expensive) every few minutes, water bottle at the ready to re-soak when my gear dries out, I can just sit and hammer across the pavement. The ZRX looks like a seam has split somewhere and a string of water bottles has emerged from it, all from the left, out-of-the-sun side. LA traffic is fortunately miles away (in so many senses of that term); the bike was nervous enough with just the tires strapped up top, much less twenty pounds of water contributing to a substantial imbalance. Me in my space suit, it with its water bottle bandoleer, we make our way.
It's pleasant in the desert. And beautiful. The sun is such a massively powerful entity, and that's somehow lost in most other places. Here it beats down on everything equally. The road looks like water at times, oily snakes of heat distortion rising from every surface, and other vehicles disappear, bend, then double in its reflection. At other times, it just looks like road. Long, straight, flat road.
Cages are few and far between, windows rolled tight and A/C cranked against the overwhelming heat, oblivious to the lunacy of riding through the Mojave in a mobile greenhouse, and entirely missing the point. They're locked up tight against the desert, trying to get through and on to wherever else they're going. They miss it because they aren't actually in it. They don't understand what they're doing, or the real value of shade, or water, or any of it.
This sort of riding is low impact. Once the math is set and my mind is right, I can go on indefinitely, even (long) after I run out of desert. Evening sees me in Flagstaff, and the sun sets over Navajo territory in my mirrors. Red rocks, red dust, red sky... symmetry in a way I didn't expect. Passing cars by the score, gas stops stretch from fifty miles to a hundred to a hundred and fifty. Despite the heat and the altitude shifts, the bike is just purring, and I'm feeling good. Two days with no caffeine, no alcohol, good food, lots of water, and enough sleep has paid off, and I'm starting to wonder whether pushing through to Denver might not be worthwhile.
No. At a gas station in the flooded town of Kayenta, I call it. I could probably make Denver, but it would be foolish, and would guarantee I'd lose time on the balance. That's a desperate measure in a non-desperate situation, and one that would need to be followed by multiple short days to recover. Better to stop short, regroup, and take an easy pull into Denver the next day, leaving open the possibility of harder pushes in the future. I settle on Cortez, a hundred twenty miles (most of a tank of gas) away, find a hotel, and rack up for the night. At eight hundred thirty some-odd miles, it's still far and away the longest day of the trip.
Sitting here at the desk in my far-too-nice hotel room a thousand and a half miles from there, I'm still riding that wave. I refuse to play into that stereotype of going on a long trip and coming back somehow changed (in air quotes), but I can't help feeling that my already broad (I think) mindset has somehow been expanded. If southern California is a land of lotus eaters, the desert sings the Sirens' song, and while for that I know I can't stay, I don't doubt that I've brought some part of it back with me.
I'm probably still humming it in my head when I'm not paying attention.
View Larger Map
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