Jeremy's Bike Blog

As I take a couple tablets, along with my last gulps of water just after waking up, I jokingly think to myself that ibuprofen is like water in tablet form in the sense that, lacking sufficient water, it’s the next best thing to alleviate a dehydration induced headache. I also have a couple of granola bars and carrots for breakfast, then I hit the road.

[Note: I’m switching from using past to present tense. It seems much easier…who knew!  Don’t be confused, unless stated otherwise, everything that I say “is happening”, actually “has happened” at some time in the past. :)]

I’ve gone about 7 miles on the gravel road, when I start to develop an appreciation for the climbing I’ll need to do that day. I’m pedaling pretty hard, focusing on my line down the road to avoid the fairly substantial washboard bumps. For some stretches, I ride on the very edge of the road, where ideally it’s too soft and sandy to form washboard bumps, but not so soft that I’d spin out. Of course, there are several points where I can’t keep that line, or it’s just not there, at which point I have to either (hopefully) right my bike from fish-tailing in the sand, or settle the bike bucking from the ridges, or at times, strangely, seemingly both. For other stretches, this isn’t a viable tactic, and instead the choice is to walk the bike, or keep up a speed and momentum so that the bike rattles over the bumps but doesn’t resonate with them into bucking.

It’s enough effort that I’m breathing hard through both my mouth and nose, so that as I come to a decline and I have the chance to close my mouth and recompose, it is completely dry. It takes many seconds to produce saliva to eliminate the strange and pre-panic inducing sensation of all the tissue in the mouth, down into the back of the throat, being bone dry, and I’m grateful for a few teaspoons of water in one of my bottles to aid in the matter. I don’t feel like I’m on the verge of critical dehydration as I’m not inclined to consume the remainder of my carrot, onion, or italian salad dressing packet for their moisture content, which I would expect I would be, if I were. This is actually based on a recollection I have of the ending of one of the more recent James Bond movies, where the arch criminal’s poetic justice came in the form of being left in the desert with only motor oil, and then it being revealed that when his body was recovered, the autopsy concluded that he drank the oil. Or something like that. Anyway, I feel thirsty, but not mortally parched.

That said, I don’t actually know where my next opportunity for water will be, so when I get to a junction where my route is again paved road, I’m a bit relieved to see cars. I spot a couple of men tending to a pond, with a well faucet sticking out of the ground next to them, but they’re off in the distance a bit, behind a fence. I yell to get their attention and then point to my bottle and ask if I can get some water from their tap. One of them yells back “try the house just down the way”. I start that way, then see a sign for an RV park in 500 feet, and realize that I’m being a bit premature in begging for water.

Sure enough, there’s a mini-market for the RV park, and it’s thankfully open early on Sunday. After a little bit of confusion, in some part caused by my use of the word “potable”, I’m directed to a sink in the back. I down a liter on the spot, and fill up my 3 bottles. Mostly I use 1.5 liter bottles, but I keep a 1 liter one around because it’s the only one that will fit under a lot of the faucets I come across. I buy another 1.5L bottle, increasing my total capacity to 5.5L.

Rehydrated, or at least well on my way to it, it’s time to drink some of my daily diuretic, a.k.a. coffee. The pot has some, but not enough to fill a cup, so the woman behind the counter says I can just have it, and makes another pot from which I will buy a second, full cup. Out in front of the store in the only shade available is a second baby-boomer, nursing a coffee and chain smoking. We start talking, and when he asks where I’m headed and I say Mexico, he grimaces like he’s just stepped on a lego. I’d gotten a similar reaction from the Hells Angel in the woods outside of Flagstaff a few days earlier. In both cases, after nonverbally expressing a certain amount of disgust, they say something to the effect of “why would anybody ever want to go there”, to which I say “why wouldn’t I?” I have to think of a better response because this seems to be a bit tepid and perhaps even encourages the “Everybody down there is a criminal,” or some such nonsense that follows. Then one of the key paradoxes of ignorance borne hatred becomes clear: they’d like to back up their assertion with some personal experience, or some specific supporting case, but they clearly know almost nothing about the place. To break an awkward silence, I politely ask “Oh, so you’ve been there?” to which he answers “Oh yeah, I’ve been there.” but doesn’t give any specifics.

I steer the conversation to how happy I am that I found the place and found water, and he tells me that he used to hop trains across the country. I say that I’d always wanted to do that, but was scared from doing so by the stories I’d heard when I was hitchhiking many years ago about yard dogs (railroad yard security guards) beating train hoppers to within an inch of their lives. He confirms that this is how it these days, but not when he was doing it. He says that he’s never hitchhiked but always wanted to. The topic of the good old days, being good when circumstances and our ages permitted, leads to discussion of how easy it used to be to find free food by dumpster diving. He lights up, recounting times when there was all kinds of food freely available, and then we jointly lament the fact that the restaurants and groceries now keep perfectly edible but discarded food locked down and/or destroyed in a compactor. I say “Well I guess that’s good for business. Think of all the people who wouldn’t buy food if they could get it for free”, to which he grunts a wry smile, but I sense that we’re dangerously close to broaching larger issues of economics and politics on which, we seem to both realize, we share little common ground.

I’m fiddling with my helmet and he notices my mirror, so I give my standard speech about how crazy it is to me that all cyclists, or at least distance cyclists, don’t use some kind of mirror because of how important it is to know what’s behind you. In return, I learn that he’s a combat veteran of Vietnam, and that he was rear guard for his ground patrol. I don’t know how to respond, so squeeze out an awkward “Thank you for your service…sounds stressful.” He tells me that he was depressed after serving, and they tried a drug whose name he can’t remember, and he took it exactly one time. Not long after, he says he discovered coffee, and that that’s the only antidepressant he needs. “I call it liquid mood enhancer!” I quip, and I get a chuckle. We’re on good terms and having a good time sharing things about ourselves that are on safe territory: cigarettes, prescription drugs, vagabonding…and then the woman from the store comes out. She lights up a cigarette herself and had apparently overheard my plans to go to Mexico. She starts recounting a good friend of hers, whose name escapes her, but how this friend, a white guy, would extol the virtues of Mexico and Mexicans, and had bought some property down there, and ended up mutilated. Then she recounts some completely general/vague but hateful sentiments made by a friend of her’s that is US born but of Mexican descent. One option here would have been to call bullshit on all of it, and part of me feels hypocritical that I did not. Instead, I acknowledge by saying “well, I guess there’s good and bad people everywhere.”, to which she rolls her eyes and says “yeah, I guess.” It seems clear to me that she too has no actual, substantive experience in Mexico or with Mexicans, and her credibility is not zero, but it is dwarfed by the credibility of the Bulgarians I met in Sedona who had just come from Mexico, traveling by bike as I will soon be, and who had nothing but positive things to say about the people they interacted with.

I’m disappointed and saddened by how ugly people can be as I wish them well and make my leave, but still feel a little warmth over the connection I made with the Vietnam veteran. Then again, I also think about how a non-white, non-straight, and/or non-male would have fared in their interactions at that RV mini-market, and feel conflicted about my privilege and how I handled the situation.

The grade and winds are pretty brutal, and the going is extremely slow. I’m barely going 4 mph for long stretches, and averaging 7.5mph after 4 hours of riding, but the hydration situation is vastly improved. I make a point of pushing water through my system, and I’m doing so at a rate of about a liter per hour. There’s no fill-up opportunities until twin towns Strawberry and Pine 40 miles away, but with my new larger capacity, I’ll arrive before or very soon after I run out of water, even at my current guzzling rate. Food-wise, I’m a bit light on the old regulars, bars and trail-mixes, but I have a surplus of onion, carrots, and a resealable small packet of italian dressing with which I concoct the following, that I coin the “roadside bicycle tour salad”:
Slice off a 1/8 wedge of onion and peel the skin off the wedge.
Slice some of this into smaller chunks with incisors, into mouth. Hold in mouth.
Slice some carrot into chunks with incisors, into mouth. Hold in mouth.
[Repeat with with peppers and any other available, crunchy vegetables]
Tilt back head, open mouth and sprinkle in a pinch of trail mix. Close mouth, and hold.
Pucker lips around salad dressing packet nozzle and suck in a few drops of dressing.
Chew with molars (FLAVOR TIME!)
Swallow.
Repeat.

It might only be advisable for people with sufficiently large mouths, and you do want to avoid overdoing it and possibly choking, but I’m pretty pleased with how easy and tasty it is.

The car traffic is fairly light, but comes in bursts. The only overtly aggressive gesture comes from a motorcyclist who holds out his right foot as he passes very unnecessarily close on my left. My preferred and default response has by this time become a slow, side to side nod, dipping my head down a bit, so as to convey disappointment. It seems to me that this is the most impactful sentiment that I can convey regardless of if they’re trying to elicit fear, anger, and/or insult, or if they’re simply unaware of how dangerously close and/or fast they’ve just passed me. I’d guess the latter is the more common case, and I think the gesture lands. I can tell that they’re almost always looking at me in their mirror, by the way they weave a bit off-line after they pass, or more conclusively I can see them doing so when the lighting is right and there aren’t more cars coming that require my attention. Cars following soon after the car with the intended recipient of the gesture almost always give a wider berth, I hypothesize, because they’ve correctly interpreted it. This is some indication that most bicycle endangering drivers do so out of unawareness.

I roll up on what appears to be a dead snake, and while not large, it’s large enough to startle me a bit and so I take a picture.

A few seconds later a car buzzes by unnecessarily close and startles the apparently not completely dead snake, which begins to writhe around, albeit on it’s back, and definitely startles me enough so that I make some kind of “eergh” noise and jump back. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly certain that it’s only a matter of time before the snake dies, and I’m riding off thinking “fuck that fucking snake!” when I realize that my fear is manifesting as hatred and I’m doing the snake a major disservice by not putting it out of its misery. Here, it’s worth noting that I was one of those kids that could not dissect frogs or mice in biology class. I’m somewhat unhappy with how squeamish I am, to the extent that I make a point of visually taking in as much roadkill as I can when I pass it by bike to desensitize myself. And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of it by this point. All sorts of animals in pretty much every stage of decay, dismemberment and obliteration. But I haven’t yet physically interacted with any of it, unless you count bill, the completely de-tissued, sun-bleached goat skull that I found in Greece last summer, which I don’t.

I dismount my bike, and find a sizable rock on the paved shoulder, eliminating the possibility of revealing an even less-dead snake. I gingerly walk it over to the snake, carefully line up the rock directly 3 feet above it’s head, and drop it. It’s my first time killing anything, mercy or otherwise, of that size. I leave feeling a bit shaken, but better for having done it.

A few minutes later, a day cyclist passes me and reassures me as he does so by complimenting me on doing the climb while carrying so much weight. I resist the urge to braggingly let him know that I also just mercy killed the snake he surely noticed. Many more minutes later, I happen upon a much larger snake, thankfully fully dead judging by the car-tire width flat section just under his head, but to whom I give a very wide berth before parking the bike and approaching it very carefully to take a photo.

Strawberry is a one bar town, and I roll into the parking lot knowing that Pine is only 3 miles further and has several restaurants and a market, but figure if the patron is welcoming, they have internet, and decent food, I’ll stop for my rest break and restaurant meal here. In the parking lot there’s a black guy, the first I’ve seen for days, if not weeks, with a fuzzy hat that makes it look like he has spikey white hair a la Bart Simpson, surrounded by 5 or 6 white people that look eager for him to be their good friend. There are still clearly racist undertones in this scene, but of a much more palatable flavor. Inside, the waitress that I flag down is neither particularly friendly nor rude, and reports that the WiFi works for some people and not for others.  A quick scan reveals it’s more of a smokey bar than a pub or a restaurant, so I say “I guess I’ll carry on then, thanks!” and leave.

Pine is perfect-sized, with a gas station at the edge where I get advice on where’s good to eat on a Sunday, and a market to supply up at when I’m done. I get a nice Cobb salad at the Sidewinder, and use their WiFi to order new gloves and a mirror from Amazon, shipping to my friend’s friend’s place where I headed to in Tempe. the waitress is kinda cute and increasingly friendly the longer I stay. As I get endless coffee refills while working on my previous blost (aka blog post, hat tip to Buck in Seattle for the word) she learns that I’m traveling by bike. At about an hour into it, she recommends a camping spot back up towards Strawberry a ways, where there’s a nice spring, so nice that she might check it out later herself. So, we’re clearly in flirting territory, and while she’s cute and definitely friendly, she also seems a little too animated, and I would bet very strong odds that she’s on some kind of goofballs, probably a bit of methamphetamine. It doesn’t make zero sense, she’s running around non-stop, having to be chipper for a series of patrons that I happen to notice are being shitty to her, all the while calling her ‘darling’ and ‘sweetie’.  I absolutely do not judge others in their struggles with substances, but I’m sure enough that this is something she’s struggling with and sure enough that I want to steer clear of it, that I’m sure I won’t be camping in that direction or otherwise exploring that possible possibility. As we’re out front and she’s filling some of my bottles from a pitcher she brought out (her idea, much less efficient than me bringing my bottles to the bar), I say that I think I’m too tired to go back uphill towards Strawberry, but I might pop back in for breakfast, and would she be here? She tells me that tomorrow is her day off with a “sorry charlie” smile, and my casual, maybe-rebuff and is met with a casual maybe-counter-rebuff, which I’m happy with and she seems to be as well.

I go to the market and stock up on entirely too much food. Kale, carrots, onion, red and green peppers, hummus, a box of macaroons, a half-gallon of almond milk (I practically have to, I’m so impressed they carry it), a box of cereal (I have to, given the almond milk), bananas to go in the cereal (I have to…you get the idea), a loaf of bread, packages of sliced turkey and sliced cheese, and a bottle of horseradish sauce. On some level, I know this is impractical, and that I should figure out where my next stocking-up options are before I buy so much, but instead I walk out with it all, and for the first time this tour, can’t close my bags they’re so full. I ride out of Pine and find a campground by a trailhead within a mile. I unload and have dinners numbers 2 and 3, and then manage to get all of the food stuff into the large pannier that holds my sleeping bag, pad, and bivvy when I’m riding.

I have cellular signal, and I try to do my daily duolingo, but I’m too exhausted, and I’m asleep immediately. At about 1am, I’m startled awake by a deafeningly loud yelp. As I would figure out when I tried to imitate it for someone I’d meet the following day, it sounded like a walrus. I’d seen signs warning of bears in the area, so this is my fear. It sounds so loud and so close that I have no choice but to get out of my bivvy and don clothes and sandals so I can fight back or flee when the seemingly inevitable encounter takes place. I scan the area with my very bright bicycle headlamp, but can’t see anything, so turn I it back off and take the opportunity to move the bag with all the food several yards away from the rest of my camp.

It grows a bit fainter and less frequent, so after about 5 minutes of standing around straining to hear rustling, being startled by the yelp, then turning on headlight to see nothing, I go back to bed. I (still) have signal, so I pull out my phone to research bears in Arizona, but typically, get distracted immediately. I post a stupid video on instagram, and when a friend in Guam (where it’s 6pm) comments on the FB copy, I IM with him for a bit. Oddly, just by being online, I seem to be completely put at ease. I mean, I’m still startled and scared for a few moments when I hear this extremely loud noise, but then I just go back to being distracted from the fear by the shiny little screen in front of my face. I realize it’s the same mechanism as a crying baby being subdued by a set of keys jangling before its eyes, and that that’s a bit pathetic, but I’m grateful for it all the same. My other recent experience with this was last summer in Poland, where frightened by a loud grunt, alone and in the dark I managed to not get distracted before searching for “Bears in Poland”, but was then immediately distracted and amused by the first result, a site about and for large hairy gay polish men.

The yelps subside, I log off and go back to sleep, and sleep well.

The following morning, I eat two heaping bowls of cereal and bananas, some macaroons, a sandwich, and carrots with hummus for breakfast and get on my way. The riding is mostly down hill, and I rejoice in some morning back stretches while gliding down a descent that’s steep enough to provide a stabilizing no-hands velocity, but not so steep that I need to brake. I come to some road construction where only one direction can go at a time and ride to the front of the queue of cars. I ask the guy holding the stop sign if it’s safe for me to ride through when the cars go, and he says that it would be better to put my bike in the truck of the pilot vehicle when it gets there, and that he’ll be driving. His name is Sean, and he’s very friendly. After I hoist my bike into the bed of the truck, he offer me a 10oz bottle of cold water from an ice chest also in the truck bed. Usually I like to consider myself more socially responsible, and consequently somewhat better, than people who consume water out of such wasteful little plastic bottles, but it’s such a sweet gesture that I accept it enthusiastically. During the ride, I give my story, and get his. He’s following the money, working construction jobs wherever, trying to tuck some away for retirement. I say that that’s basically what I did, living simply and making sure not to buy stuff I didn’t need, and then I decided I wanted to spend some of that money before I was too old to do something like this.

As we pass a highway worker placing tabs on the freshly oiled roadway (and it would have truly sucked to have to ride the bike on that stuff), the worker bends down at the waist and places the tabs with a certain flourish, a joke for Sean’s benefit at which he chuckles and honks his horn, at which the worker stands erect with lips puckered and finger pressed to cheek. Sean says “so, yeah, as you can see, we have some fun out here.” He asks about where I camp when I remember “Oh, right, I gotta ask you. I heard this animal last night. It sounded like this”, which is when I realize the animal sound closest to my impression that I can definitively identify is a walrus. He can’t say based on my representation of the sound, but agrees that it could have been an elk, or a bear, or a wolf. He says he’s walked up on many bears, and once they realize that he’s a human, they take off fast, and then assures me that none of the animals that might have been making that noise are to be feared, at least not in these parts.

“So, then, just snakes?”
“Yeah, keep an eye out for snakes. Watch where you walk.”

To which I tell him about my mercy kill the day before, that it was my first, and that yeah, I’m a lightweight. He chuckles reassuringly and says that, yeah, he’s killed his share.

He asks me what I think of the state, and I recount a compliment that Susan had given it the day before: it’s cool that relatively little of it is privately owned ranch, and relatively a lot of it is public land. I don’t know how true that is, but I repeat it, to which he says, almost apologetically “yeah, the land is definitely the best thing about this state.” which helps drive home for me that I’m well into the heart of the other America. He knows that I come from the progressive, urban archipelago part of the country, and I sense he’s making an implicit apology for how he knows I must be perceiving things. Then again, maybe it’s all in my head, but now I realize that I should take for granted that I’m identifiable as an outsider, and adjust accordingly.

We get to the end of the construction corridor, he helps me unload my bike, and offers me more water, which I decline saying I shouldn’t take his as now I’m so close to the next town, but thank him again for the first one.

I look up “coffee shops” in Google Maps, and find one called “Scoops”, which is actually an ice cream and coffee shop, obviously, in town. Payson is a large town, with a Walmart and a Home Depot. As I pass the Home Depot I think “oh, I can use some more zip ties!” I go in, and make a point of removing my somewhat flamboyant (by local standards) button up, and wear just the tank top I have underneath. I also take off the (different) tank top trunk that cut off to use as a balaclava. I still stand out, with my patterned board shorts and leather sandals completing the outfit, but with the fierce/flamboyant knob turned down considerably. The experiment in altering how I’m perceived is somewhat inconclusive as I ask for help finding the zip ties from Ken who has lived in and around Seattle for many years, and is friendly and welcoming enough that I sincerely doubt he would have acted any different were I wearing a tutu and tiara. Well, maybe.

In Scoops, still in toned down mode, I go in eager to attempt a joke about the fact that their freezers are broken, as reported on a sign posted on the door (in hindsight, would have been a bad idea), but I’m completely ignored by the proprietor. Some freezer repair people come by and she has time to say hi and make a bit of chit chat with them, and then to continue tending to a drink or something that apparently requires 15 different steps. Only after at least a full minute does she let me know she’ll be right with me. I’m doing my best kindly brontosaurus (google it), mostly because I want to engage for its own sake. It takes her another full minute for any eye contact, and when I get it, I ask if their WiFi is working, to which she curtly says, “ya” and continues doing her puttering thing. I look around and see some preachy christian decor, and then decide to just leave. I don’t know if she was just super stressed out because her business was dealing with, what I realize on further consideration, was probably a pretty major set back. I mean, that was probably it. But I also can’t rule out that she was being terrible about acknowledging my existence or returning any niceties whatsoever because she could tell I’m a godless liberal, and this is her doing her modest part to fight god’s war. Shit, I just need some coffee.

I find a cafe across the street, lean my bike against it and walk it. It’s a classic greasy spoon and these folks may or may not be conservative christian, but they’re the coffee drinking, cigarette smoking kind if they are, and I can definitely make this work. “Just one?”
“Yeah, I’ll sit at the counter. Just coffee please.” as I sidle up, and that’s that. Nice, albeit not at all talkative, and I’m down with it. Some standard Q&A as I leave, and a brief and small widening of the eyes when I say where I’m headed, but very neutral response “that’s crazy, I mean, the whole biking thing”. I say, yeah, I guess it is a little, thanks, and am on my way.

After a few hours, I find a shady pullout and after checking carefully for any signs of snakes, stand my bike up and unload my hodgepodge smorgasbord. I scarf down 2/3 of it, and then stretch out and start to doze off. I’m woken every 3 or 4 minutes by the screech certain big rigs make with resonating wheel noise. BTW, is that what those flaps that hang down the sides of the containers of increasing numbers of big rigs are for? This is just as well. I don’t want to fall dead asleep, and I don’t want to set an alarm for myself either. I don’t even want to dig out all the little (sub-snake-sheltering-size) rocks poking me in the butt and back. I drape a leg over a saddle bag to achieve sufficient comfortableness, and have a 20 minute siesta, after which I’m rested enough to polish off the macaroons for a post-nap desert and saddle up.

The traffic is relatively light, but again, comes in small bursts of cars. The road is 2 lanes in the same direction, disjoint from traffic in the opposite direction, and for most of the way it has a wide shoulder with a manageable amount of debris. But then comes a stretch where there is no shoulder whatsoever, and within that, sections where guardrail comes right up to the solid white line. Sharing the lane with cars going the 55mph speed limit is simply not an option, and I keep my eyes peeled on my shaky, hastily purchased substitute rear view mirror. I hold out my left hand with a thumb up to cars approaching me from the rear as soon as they move out of my lane and/or signal that they are going to do so. A few times, when the car is neither slowing nor giving any indication that it is going to get out of my lane to go around me, and there are also cars in the other lane, I slow and turn my head to face them. There’s nowhere for me to go to get out of their way, and if they’re going to plow over me, they’re going to look me in my (sunglasses obscured) eyes as they do it. The trick to doing this safely is to not pull too far to the left when peering over the left shoulder, which is a bit challenging, but thankfully thousands of miles worth of muscle memory makes it surmountable. It’s working well until one car doesn’t notice me until she has to stop so fast that the car in the left lane also stops, presumably because they think she’ll need the lane to swerve around me at the last minute. Now there’s a bit of a jam up and while the car in the left lane resumes moving to give her room to get around me, I glare at the young woman driving the car that nearly plowed into me. I do my slow head nod, but she must be embarrassed and/or a bit shaken (as am I) as she doesn’t even look in my direction as she pulls into the left lane to pass me.

About 10 minutes later nearly the same thing happens again. The driver in my lane doesn’t seem to have to decelerate quite as fast (it’s a bit hard to judge deceleration rates when you start by looking in the mirror and then turn to look directly), but he lays on his horn as he pulls up behind me. I point at him and yell “you”, and then point to the left lane, in which other cars have slowed down considerably and continue “go around me!”, to which he (yes, white dude, of course) flips me off, and passes aggressively close. It’s only after this has happened that I notice the passable shoulder has returned, and I could have been, and evidently should be on it weaving around the broken glass, sheet metal screws, and other tire popping obstacles, while bumping over the non-flattened pavement creases. That must be why there’s signs peppering the road with a picture of a bicycle saying “stay on the shoulder”. Oh, wait a minute, actually they say “share the road”. Let it go, let it go.

I’ve depleted 1.5L of water by the time I get to the one shack/shop town of Rye, where I stop and give a very enthusiastic “Hi, boy am I glad to see you here and open! Do you have a tap I could use to fill this?” holding up my empty bottle. The woman coming out from the shack and walking towards the shop says “Well, we have water for sale.” I’ve prepared for this.

I’ve only been absolutely refused tap water and told I’d need to buy bottled water once, and that was probably for lack of constructive persistence on my part. It was on a weekend trip out to the Olympic Peninsula and I’d stopped into a dark windowless mini-mart that had two men of Asian descent behind the counter. I tried to explain that I was happy to pay for the water but that I didn’t want a new plastic bottle, to which they just nodded stubbornly. I stormed out saying “YOUR NESTLE OVERLORDS MUST BE SOOOO PROUD.” An hour later I was cursing my temper as my head throbbed.

This time, I say that I’ll buy a bottle, if I really need to, but I’d really prefer to pay a couple bucks to fill up the bottle I already have. I detect a slight sigh of exasperation just before she says “there’s a tap around the side, you have to let it run for a bit before it will be cold”. I fill my bottle, then get $2 from my wallet, walk into the shop, thank her and try to leave the money on the counter. She says “You don’t need to pay me for the water” and so I say animatedly “Oh, great! I just won some some candy!” and buy a kit kat and butterfinger cups for a dollar. I tried to give her the $2, but she refuses the extra dollar. All in all I’m handling the situation a bit awkwardly, but I’m working my way through it. She says “You’re welcome to rest in the shade” and I say that I don’t mind if I do. In front of the shop she has a bunch of knicknacks of the variety you see at flea markets. I scan my mental inventory for things that I’ve been meaning to resupply, and ask if she has any candles that might fit my candle lantern. She says she doesn’t, and comments that she’s been trying to resupply, but 5 out of 6 of her vendors don’t provide her service any more. She goes on to say that it’s because the economy is so terrible lately, and I see where she’s going with this. She’s been sweet and nice to me, but thinking back to the previous morning’s interaction with the Vietnam vet and the shopkeeper, I don’t want to simply go along with everything she’s saying, and therefore everything that she’s implying.

“Do you think maybe that might be because of the Walmart in Payson?” I say sympathetically, showing that I can use code too.

“Mmmm, no. That Walmart has been there for a long time. The economy has gotten a lot worse lately.”

“Umm, I’m sorry to hear that…” I say a bit quietly, not sure what to say from here. She gives me a blank look, so I double down saying, apologetically “I mean, you’ll probably hate me for saying so, but I’m from Seattle, and there the economy seems to be doing great.” thinking shit, I hope this doesn’t backfire.

“Yeah, that’s true. You got the tech and stuff up there.”
“Yeah.”
“Arizona is one of the 3 worst economies in the country right now. Arizona, Nevada, and California.”
“Yeah, sounds like things are really tough for people around here right now.”
“Yeah.”

And that’s that. I feel good about the what’s just happened. Somebody from a blue state has just had a one on one exchange with somebody from a red state, and while it was superficial, it was empathetic and honest, which seems to be all too rare in our country these days.

A man of her age (60s or 70s), I’d guess her husband, pulls up in a pickup truck and I change the subject to the seemingly long stretch of road before the next opportunity for water. I learn that it’s probably the Casino on a reservation about 60 miles further, and at one point I ask them if they think 5 and a half liters of water is enough for me to get there. I’m honestly not trying to be funny (or daft), I’m just a little spaced out, but this is the closest I get to seeing either one of them smile. The husband says “Well, uh, we don’t travel like that…” To which I say “Right, heh, sorry. Dumb question.”

I continue on, deciding I have one more climb I want to get done by the end of the day. I round a bend on the highway and BAH, there’s hundreds of cactus trees. I haven’t yet seen a single one and it seems ridiculously sudden that now they go on, forever, in every direction but the one from which I’ve just come.

When I’m close to the top of the climb, I get cell service and directions from Google Maps for the remainder of the way to Tempe. With the shorter remainder of the route, Google Maps suggests an alternative that it hadn’t before. There’s an old version of the highway that seems less traveled and requires 200 feet less climbing overall to Tempe (less up and down). It’s a couple miles longer, but still seems to be a clear win. The routes diverge at the pass, so both begin with substantial descents. I take the old highway version, and I’m about a mile and many hundreds of feet elevation committed to the decision when I see a sign that says road closed, 2 miles ahead.

Now, there’s closed as in, closed for cars by a gate, and then there’s closed as in, does not exist any more (e.g. it’s been washed out). I’ve seen both kinds, and this sign isn’t showing its hand. I’m too far down to get signal and consult Google Maps satellite imagery. But I’m feeling lucky, and more importantly, feeling like I’m really done climbing for the day, especially climbing while back-tracking, so I continue on. I get to the road closure, and luckily it seems to be the closed-for-cars kind of closed.

I scootch my bike under the gate and continue a delightful descent, hearing a lot of rustling in the surrounding scrub, making sure to be extra quiet as I pass structures even though as I do I can tell with some certainty that they’re abandoned. There’s another barrier, and then the road is completely unmaintained, and has a “world without us” vibe to it, and it’s great fun weaving between rocks and tenacious foliage nature coming up through the asphalt.

I get to a barrier facing the other direction and I’m sad to have the fun behind me, but glad to now know for sure that it was a closed for cars road closure.

After rejoining the main highway, I’m at the bottom of the last main descent before the next main ascent, and the hour is right to find a place to stay for the night. I’m at a turn-off for a spring, so I take that, and walk my bike over washout rock beds, and through calf-high spring basins, until I get to the spring’s main basin. I have a kit kat sandwich, then 3 slices of bread with horseradish sauce, for dinner. My only other food is most of an onion and half a bottle of horseradish sauce. I have another 25 miles to get to the Casino, and no idea why I didn’t buy more calories at the market in Rye, even if it was all junk food.

As one might expect, this oasis in the middle of a vast expanse of arid land is teeming with life. There are tons of tadpoles in the spring basin, both large and nearly frog-shaped, and small. Bats swoop in just over me, as I’ve become a bit of a bug magnet, and I’m grateful for their work. There’s at least a dozen different bird songs going constantly, and among it all is one or more making really cool R2D2ish sounds. To top it all off, I’m at the bottom of a canyon wall of that looks like a exhibition of “all the cactuses, ever”.

Sleep is coming fast, and while there’s lots of rustling, I’m pretty sure snakes don’t make that much noise, but raucous birds might, so I only use the headlight twice to try and spot the culprit before I think “oh well” and let sleep take me.

In the morning, I’m a bit sad to not have any food (I’m not counting the onion), as I wake up really hungry, as I always do when I’m biking this much. But nothing to be done, and my stomach seems to realize this and after a while stops giving me grief about it. I’m in my underwear, puttering about, when I hear what sounds like a person’s voice. I put on my shorts and my suspicions are confirmed. Two guys walk up the 4×4 road and into the spring.

“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good. You?”
“Good, thanks! Where you headed?”
“Just up the spring some ways. We’re from ASU, doing some ecology research.”
“Oh, cool.”
“What’re you doing? Camping?”
“Yeah. Camped here last night, just passing through by bike.”
“Cool. Well, have a good one!”
“Thanks, you too.”

A woman catches up to them in the time they stopped to say hello, and she and I wave and smile at each other, and then the three of them are on their way.

I can hear them for a minute, and then gradually, eventually I can’t, so I figure that they’re pretty far away. I spend a couple of hours writing the earlier parts of this blost, messing around with the setup of my solar panel, and giving in to the temptation to strip down and dunk myself in the deepest part of the spring, which is about 16 inches. It feels great to rinse so much grit off, and I don’t even consider using soap, but it’s not long before I’m feeling kinda guilty about contaminating the thing with yesterdays (and the day’s before, and the day’s before that) applications of sunscreen, not to mention the always present chain grease on my right calf and other contaminants. On the other hand, it’s clear that 4x4s drive through the thing not infrequently, and that is probably just as bad.

I’ve finally loaded up my bike and am just getting on my way at 11am. I have leather sandals that are much happier when dry, and I’m putting them back on after walking through the first spring to the washout road when I see the group coming back. I walk slowly ahead to give them time to catch up, but they don’t. Seems they’ve been waiting for me to clear out so that they could come in and do some work at that spot. Or is it just coincidence? If they were waiting, were they watching me? Were they watching me when I was naked? In any event, it doesn’t seem like I stand a lot to gain by going back and approaching them…best just to continue on. There are a few more sections of road submerged under spring water, and when I’m putting my sandals on after crossing the last one, the group catches up with me.

“Gotta keep the sandals dry. Looks like you guys have the right idea though, just regular hiking gear. That seems sensible.”
“Yeah, actually I just get stuff for cheap from goodwill” says Lindsey, the woman. The two guys hang back a bit and she and I continue chatting. I confess to my dip in the pond and express my concerns about contaminating it, and am relieved when she brushes them off as unfounded. I say something to the effect of “I can tell that other people have less regard for the spring’s ecosystem, so I was sorta justifying it based on that, but I’m trying to get away from that kind of thinking” and one of the guys replies with emphatic agreement and I’m happy to see that these kids care about preservation at least as much, and probably more, than I do. They tell me about their work and what they measure, and I tell them about my trip and my plans.

They point out that it’s a fairly hot time of year to go that far South, and while it’s an observation I’ve heard made before, this time I reply by saying “yeah, maybe I should wait it out for a few months. Hmm, yeah, totally. I could leave the bike somewhere in Mexico, go back to Seattle for the warm months when it’s great to be there, and then resume the tour when it gets cooler.” and as I say it, it feels like an epiphany. I’m not sure why, it is really a completely obvious option with no major drawbacks. I could make a challenge out of finding some work or some way to earn back savings I’ve used up during the first leg of the tour, and if I succeed, I’m not so much on a self-funded sabbatical after which I’ll have to resume living in the ‘real world’ as much as I’m restructuring my life for much the better.

I thank them for helping me figure out what I’m doing with my life. I mean it earnestly, and I sense that they get that, but it is also a bit comical, us having only just met and it being a result of chit chat about the weather, and we share a laugh over it.

I tell them my roadside bicycle tour salad recipe, having just written it up, and it seems to be a hit.

In talking about the abundance of wildlife around the spring, Lindsay says “Yeah, just now I saw three raptors back there.”
“Wha?! Snakes!!” I gasp.
“Uh, no. Birds. I mean, I don’t know birds that well.”
“Yeah, me neither, obviously.”

After saying I’ll be heading to Tempe that day to stay with a friend, Lindsey asks where in Tempe she lives. I tell her and she says, “oh, that’s near where I live. That’s where a lot of people our age live.” which it music to my ears as I never tire of much younger people mistaking me for being (even close to) part of their generation.

We’re close to back to the main road when we see a battle between two hawks and maybe 4 ravens. There’s a dramatic 1 on 1 breakout battle between a hawk and a raven where the raven had been tailing the hawk, attacking it from behind, but the hawk succeeds in braking rapidly forcing the raven to do the same lest the hawk gets the upper hand, and they simultaneously drop almost vertically, wings in full stop position for what could have been anything between 10 and 100 feet. I can’t help but let out a giddy “woooooh”, but feel a little self-conscious about it when the other three play it cool. They did, after all, just mention that they see this sort of thing pretty often.

I give Lindsey my card and that’s when we actually exchange names. I can’t recall the guys names. My trick of thinking of the first person I know, famous, from childhood, or whoever, who shares the name with someone’s name I’m learning and trying not to forget, has failed me as I try to learn 3 new names at once.

I eventually make it to Fountain Hills. Again, not mortally parched, but out of water. I have an eerie walk through a massive Casino bingo hall, entering from what turned out to be an emergency exit. The sign on the door as I enter said “No Smoking, No Talking”, and I deduce the first directive must apply only to people outdoors, whereas the second must apply only to people indoors. Another few miles, and there is an oasis of fast food chains, plus one “Senor Taco”, where I enjoy a shrimp burrito, which tastes like it’s made with spaghetti sauce, which is to say, A-mazing!

Going back to Lindsey and the two guys for a moment: As we exchange information, I mention that I blog about my travels and that I’ll probably blog about this interaction, and parting on this note gives me a lot of food for thought (in lieu of food for stomach) to gnaw on for the next couple of hours.

What is my obligation to the people I’m meeting and writing about? How do I feel about the fact that I’m increasingly composing thoughts about experiences I’m having into the narrative of this blog. In actual fact, the first thing I did with, this blog after sharing the existence of this blog, as I just had, with some subjects of this blog, was to revise this entry to be in the present tense. I can no longer persuade myself that my travels and interactions as a traveler are disjoint, or even loosely coupled, from my written reflections on them. Part of me thinks, well, this is no good: How then can I know that I’m undertaking this journey for any reasons other than to write about it?

What I do know is that this blog started as almost an afterthought, and was almost not started at all. If I hadn’t been snowed in at my sister’s place for a week, I wouldn’t have created the wordpress account, and I wouldn’t have un-gifted the bluetooth keyboard that I’d given her 3 or 4 years earlier, and brought it on this trip, and then almost none of this would have been written. Sure, maybe I got a little more nerve to drop in on the yoga class in Carbondale because I thought it would be cooler to blog that I had, rather than that I had just seen it and chickened out. But even if I’m completely corrupted, and my only motivating factor in any decision I make from here on out is: what would be the thing I’d most like to report to anyone who cares to read this, is that so bad?

Um, yeah, I guess it would be, actually. But thankfully, I can say with confidence, I’m not there yet. As I ride into Tempe in the early evening, I decide I can, and will, establish a 3-way contract between myself, my other subjects, and this blog.

Regarding my subjects: I’ll stop using my old Amazon business cards, scrawling “.wordpress.com” appended to my name on the card, and only giving them to people I deem worth the hassle based on arbitrary criteria and the dwindling supply I’ve brought with. I’ll make new cards (printed paper slips, actually) that I’ll give to every person I think I may possibly write about, and respect their right to see what I have to say about our interaction.

Regarding myself: I pull over on the side of the road leading into Tempe at some intersection to drink some water and to take a piss. In the orange glow of the low-angled sun, I see two gunmetal grey pit bulls cantering in my direction from the other side of the road. They both have on red collars, and one of them is dragging a leash. I’m composing these sentences in my head while simultaneously contemplating the possibility that they saw me riding, and that this triggered an attack instinct as bicyclists do for many dogs, and also triggered their apparent recent escape.

The dogs’ gazes are locked on mine as they cross the busy road, oblivious to cars that are slowing down to avoid hitting them. I’m frightened, but a good bit less so because I’m distracting myself thinking about how interesting it will be to recount in writing whatever is about to happen. A small white car rolls up to the main road from the side road. It comes to a stop when the driver notices the dogs and that his car is on an intercept path between them and I. This is the car I’ll climb on top of, if it comes to it. The dogs swerve around the now stopped car, and are about 20 feet away. I’m still straddling my bike, returning their gaze.

Then, as if any possible threat was all my imagination, they break their gaze briefly, turn slightly to the right and resume their gaze, but keep their distance from me the same on a circular arc, then jump into an irrigation ditch along the side of the road and seem distracted enough that it’s a good time for me to gradually start putting some distance between them and I.

I decide that, along with that piss I was going to take, worrying about a contract between my experience and my narrative about that experience, can wait until later.

Like many boundaries in these parts (e.g. between cactus tree territory), there’s a distinct boundary between the Salt River Reservation and the bustle of the Phoenix megalopolis. I’m meeting a good friend of a good friend, and as of the moment I cross that boundary, I’m taking a break from detailing my activities, as I do herein. That is, other than to say, in Tempe, I’m hanging out like normal people do, going out with my friend’s friend and her friends, regrouping mentally a bit, and taking advantage of urban conveniences such as laundry, banking, mailing un-needed stuff back to Seattle, fixing one of my phone’s cameras, getting better camp cutlery and some other minor nice-to-haves from REI, and taking care of a number of fairly minor things greatly aided by borrowing and using an actual computer for the first time in almost a month, not least of which will be/is/was wrapping up this mega-post, and printing out those slips to give to people.

This experiment in solo travelling by bicycle, and documenting it, will resume when I re-embark on May 20.

Let me conclude this ‘megablost’ by saying thank you so much for reading these. Putting stuff out there like this is new to me, and I can’t understate how deeply I appreciate having (unless wordpress is lying to me) a solid, and gradually increasing, readership.