Читать книгу Miles from Nowhere - Barbara Savage - Страница 11

Neither Larry nor I slept much the night before we set out on our journey. We were too nervous. Our stomachs were bundles of twitching, raw nerve endings, and both of us had a royal case of the runs. My hands and feet were damp with sweat. No matter how hard or how often I swallowed, I couldn’t dislodge the huge lump in my throat.

Lying on our living room floor in my sleeping bag, I stared at the darkness. Our apartment was completely bare except for our bikes and the two piles of gear that would accompany and sustain us through the next two years of our lives. The emptiness made me feel uneasy and insecure. My mind whispered, no jobs, no earnings, no home, over and over. In the morning we would leave behind everything that was familiar to us and step off an invisible ledge into a way of life we knew almost nothing about. Now that the day we had so anxiously planned and waited for for over a year was almost here, I was frightened. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t leave after all.

The next morning at six o’clock, on May 14, 1978, Larry and I dragged ourselves out of bed and began packing our panniers. We didn’t say much to each other while we packed. We were too jittery to carry on a decent conversation. As is the case with most inexperienced bicyclers, both of us had too much gear, and we could barely cram everything into our packs. It wouldn’t be long though before we’d begin tossing out or mailing home a good portion of our clothing to reduce the weight and bulk of our panniers. After two months on the road, we would each have scaled ourselves down to a couple of pairs of shorts, a few T-shirts, one pair of long pants, a sweat shirt, rain jacket, down jacket, some socks and underwear.

Once our panniers were packed and attached to our bikes along with our sleeping bags, mats, and tent, we pedaled—wobbled is a more appropriate description—into town to catch the train to San Luis Obispo, a city one hundred miles north of Santa Barbara, where our journey would officially begin. A young friend of ours, John Warren, had convinced us that San Luis would be a good place to start out from.

“I want to ride with you your first day out,” he had told us at the beginning of the month. “And I’ve always wanted to take that ride from San Luis out to the coast and north a ways; so let’s combine the two. Besides, we’ve all done a lot of cycling around Santa Barbara already. Let’s start out from someplace new.”

The short ride from our apartment to the station was our first attempt ever at riding our bikes with the full weight of our gear. A few days earlier Larry and I had strapped part of our gear onto our bikes and ridden to Carpinteria and back, twenty miles round trip, as a trial run. “No sweat!” Larry had quipped along the way. “Carp today, tomorrow the world!” But now that his bike weighed ninety pounds and mine seventy we discovered it took all our concentration and strength just to keep ourselves wobbling along in a somewhat forward direction. As we struggled to inch our way toward the station, the awful thought occurred to me that at the rate we were moving we could easily spend the entire next two years pedaling to the Oregon border.

A group of our friends was waiting at the station to see us off. Cary Holst, a friend who would later join us in Scotland, broke out a bottle of champagne after we rolled up, and everyone laughed and joked and snapped pictures. And then it was time to leave, and I was immediately homesick. I could barely see through my tears while my friends hugged and kissed me good-bye. I started to step up into the train, but then I stepped back and grabbed a friend’s hand.

“I’m scared, Ann,” I blurted. “I feel so alone, so unsure and without any—I don’t know exactly how to describe it—without any supports or foundations I guess. After the ride here, bicycling twenty thousand miles sounds impossible. I don’t think I can go through with this.”

I began backing away from the train. But Ann smiled and gently pushed me forward.

“You’ll do it,” she said. “Just remember that you can do anything you really set your mind to, anything. You’ll do it all right. I know you will.”

I squeezed Ann’s arm and climbed up the steps.

As the train made its way north, Larry and I sat together holding onto each other’s hands and staring blankly out the window. We were too choked up to speak, so John busied himself talking with the other passengers.

There were twelve miles of low rolling hills between San Luis Obispo and the campground at Morro Bay. In that short distance I learned that the difference between the maneuverability of my bike with and without fifty pounds of gear closely resembled the difference in the handling of a Mack truck and a Porsche. The first time I turned my handlebars to miss a rock in the road my bike continued to move straight ahead, and my front tire collided with the stone. The impact nearly jarred my teeth loose.

“All right,” I muttered to myself after I regained my balance, “next time you’ll try a sharper turn.” And the next time I spotted a rock in front of me I gave my handlebars a hard shove. Unfortunately that sent my bike sliding sideways and me bouncing across the pavement. But after a bit more experimentation I found that if I leaned my whole body in the direction I wanted my bike to go and turned the handlebars farther than I would without the extra weight, but not too far, I wobbled less and missed most of the rocks and sticks on the road.

When we reached the campground at Morro Bay, an hour and a half after we left San Luis, the rangers at the gate met us with some good news. Under the California Bike and Hike program, anyone who arrived at a state campground on foot or on a bike paid only fifty cents to camp, instead of the regular fourdollar fee. The rangers assigned us a huge secluded campsite full of pine trees.

John was ecstatic. “This is perfect!” he exclaimed after we set up camp. “Pine trees and fresh air everywhere, and we’ve still got time before it’s dark to bike around the bay and pick up some fish for dinner. Yeah, this is the life! You guys are gonna have a great time these next two years.”

Maybe, I thought. But I was still too nervous to relax and enjoy our surroundings. And when I crawled into our tent after dinner I couldn’t sleep. The ground felt hard, and my thin sleeping mat hardly provided any padding. I kept thinking about the next day. It would be our first full day of bicycling, and Larry and I planned to pedal all the way to the Plaskett Creek campground, over sixty miles north of Morro Bay along the coast. During the final twenty of those sixty miles, we’d be tackling the treacherous grades of the southern Big Sur coastline. Sixty miles over lots of mountains—what a way to start out.

The three of us got up early the next morning and scrambled some eggs and brewed a pot of tea for breakfast. By eight o’clock, we were on the road heading north along Highway 1. A few miles from the campground, the bottom of my handlebar bag started to scrape against the top of my front tire—our cookstove and cookset were too heavy for the bag’s supporting bracket. I stopped and reorganized my gear, shifting the stove and cookset to one of my rear panniers and repacking my front bag with lightweight clothing. In the next month I would make at least a dozen more such reorganizations before I’d learn how to balance the weight of my gear and how to position it for quick access to the items I used most often.

The morning of May 15 was clear, crisp, and sunny, perfect for bicycling, and John rode along with Larry and me for over an hour before he headed back to San Luis to catch the train home.

Larry and I stood at the edge of the road and watched John move back down along the coast, back to his home, family, and friends. After he disappeared around the last bend in the road we closed our arms around each other and held on tight.

“It’s just you and me now,” Larry whispered. “This is it.”

At long last, we were alone together starting out on our adventure. Almost immediately our homesickness and apprehension dissolved, and an anxious excitement bloomed in their place. The sun beat down out of the heavens; the Pacific sparkled; the air smelled fresh and clean; the surf crashed, birds sang, cows mooed, and the garden snakes, lizards, and squirrels scampered beside us alongside the road. No phones rang; no typewriters tapped; no clients screamed. For the next two years, there would be no rent or utility payments to make at the first of each month, no more forms and government regulations, no more eight-to-five behind a desk in a room filled with stagnant cigarette smoke. Trees, streams, and wildlife surrounded us now, and we were free to wander wherever we pleased. The freedom felt great, and Larry started to sing.

The two of us sang all the way to San Simeon, some thirty miles north of Morro Bay, where we stopped to eat lunch—and then all hell broke loose. San Simeon at lunchtime turned out to be where and when the merciless coastal headwinds began, and after we finished our meal we cycled straight into them for thirteen miles over a relatively flat terrain. Larry pedaled in front to block the wind. I stayed behind him, my head down, my eyes glued to his rear fender. We crept along in our lowest gear.

It took us two hours to conquer those thirteen miles. While we struggled against the wind, the sun fried its way through our sunscreen and sizzled our faces and lips. Every twenty minutes, when my knees, feet, seat, neck, shoulders, and back screamed for me to stop, I would pull off the road and lie flat on my back on the dirt shoulder. I’d dip my bandana headband into my water bottle and spread it over my scorched face, then for five or ten minutes try to block out the pain that was needling my muscles before I gathered myself up again and pounded my pedals for another twenty minutes. At the end of two hours we were at the cliffs.

When I first spotted them up ahead—the string of mountains that plunged into the ocean—I wondered how, when we were barely negotiating flat ground, we’d ever be able to climb them in the wind. I found out soon enough.

The mountain ridges ran east to west creating inlets or bays between each other. As we approached the first mountain, the road curved inland around a deep, wide bay, then climbed up the side of the mountain while heading back out toward the ocean and the end of the ridge. The mountain protected us from the northerly wind while we pumped up the steep grade, and we found that the climbing was actually easier than pedaling on flat ground against the headwinds. It felt wonderful to escape the howling wind; wonderful all the way up to where the mountain dropped off into the ocean and the road curved around the ridge’s sheer, rocky face as it turned back into the next bay. Logic told us that when we rounded the curve and were no longer shielded by the mountain, the gales would be there to greet us.

Just before we hit the curve I went into a crouch and took an iron grip on my handlebars. The wind struck me the moment I swung far enough around the side of the mountain to glimpse the endless series of ridges and bays that stretched along the coast ahead of us. And when it struck me, it swept me and my bike into the air and heaved us off the road and into the face of the cliff. The right side of my sunburnt body bounced across the gravel and rocks, and the gales pelted my face with sand and dirt; then all seventy pounds of my bike and gear came crashing down on top of my legs.

Fighting the explosions of air currents, I struggled to my feet, dragged my bike upright, and climbed back on. This time the wind blasted me into the opposite lane. I yanked my handlebars back to the right, but the bike’s tires continued to skitter toward the dirt shoulder on the left-hand side of the road and its menacing, vertical two-hundred-foot drop to the rocks and crashing surf below. Just before I ran out of pavement I jumped off the bike and toppled onto the asphalt. This time my bike landed on my hips.

Almost as soon as I hit the pavement I heard a car approaching. It was barreling up the grade from the next bay, and it sounded awfully close. Larry had managed to stay upright in the turn because he and his bike weighed more than I and my bike. He heard the car too. He ran to the middle of the road and motioned for it to stop.

“Get up!” he screamed. “I don’t know if this guy sees me!”

I was still crawling out from under my bike when the car’s brakes started to squeal. The driver slammed to a stop fifteen feet away from me, and I quickly pulled myself and my bike across the road and up against the cliff.

I wrestled my bike around the rest of the curve and partway down the incline before I climbed back on and tried to pedal again. It was all downhill to the back of the next bay, but even so, I had to pump hard to keep moving forward in the wind. Not until I reached the back of the bay was I free of the gales.

For four hours we battled the twenty miles of coastal mountains to the Plaskett Creek campground; grinding up the grades, dragging our bikes through the curves, and struggling downhill against the wind. Every half hour I had to stop, pour water over my face and lips and into my parched throat, and lie on my back to rest my aching muscles.

After our first two hours in the mountains I was physically exhausted, and there were very few places on my body that didn’t hurt. My left shoulder muscle felt as if someone had thrust a butcher knife into it and was slowly turning the blade back and forth. My throbbing rear end refused to go numb. I was tired from not having slept much the last couple of nights, and I felt as if I’d burned up every last calorie of the lunch I’d eaten four hours earlier. The thought of two more hours of wind and mountain ridges was almost overwhelming, and to keep myself pedaling I tried pep talks. “Come on kid. You can do it. Come on now. Toughen up. It’s not much farther. Just keep pedaling. Just get to Gorda.”

Gorda was the dot on our map where we planned to buy our supplies for dinner and breakfast and gorge ourselves on enough food and drink to propel us through the last five miles to the campground. It was over an hour from the time I began my pep talks to the time we got to Gorda. The last few miles were touch and go; Larry kept telling me that Gorda was “just around the next turn,” and I managed to push my pedals through turn after turn and climb back onto my bike each time the wind tossed me off it.

At six o’clock we crept into Gorda. The grocery store had closed at five-thirty. I wanted to cry, but I was too tired. Instead, I pushed my bike back out to the road and prepared to expand my upper limits for pain, hunger, and exhaustion. As we pedaled out of Gorda I hunched my shoulders against the wind and fell into a near delirious chant: “Come on Barb. Come on Barb. Come on Barb.” About a mile north of Gorda the pavement suddenly gave way to a loose dirt path sprinkled with rocks. As soon as we hit the dirt, the cars that sped past blinded us with suffocating sprays of dust and gravel, and I quit chanting.

“I hate this!” I hollered. “My shoulder is ripping apart, my muscles ache, my face is scorched, my lips are blistered. I’m dead tired, and I’m shaky ’cause I haven’t eaten in over six hours! I’m all scraped up ’cause these tornado winds keep chucking me off my bike, and now there’s no road! And don’t you dare tell me the campground’s ‘just around the corner,’ cause I know damn well it’s not!”

Larry couldn’t see me through the cloud of dirt that engulfed us, but he could hear my every word. He knew that I’d hit my limit and that there wasn’t a thing he could say to help me. He kept quiet and prayed that I would keep pedaling. I did, and after a mile or so of the dirt and rocks the pavement reappeared.

It was seven o’clock when we reached the campground. We had been on the road for eleven hours, creeping along in our lowest gears in the blazing sun. I coasted to a stop next to the picnic table in the first empty campsite we came to and eased myself off my bike and across the top of the table. Larry set to work pitching our tent while I lay on the table staring blankly up at the sky, marveling that every ounce of my body was in pain. And I wondered why, after the last time I’d experienced such excruciating pain, the day we had pedaled from Santa Barbara to Ojai and back, I hadn’t learned my lesson and abandoned bicycle touring altogether.

Once the tent was up I made my way across the grass. My legs continued to move as though they were still pushing pedals, and my torso refused to straighten up out of its hunched-over position. I “pedaled” on into the tent, curled up on top of my sleeping bag, and promptly passed out. If Larry hadn’t started ranting hysterically about an hour later I would probably have slept straight through the night. He’d pedaled up the road a mile to the grocery store in Pacific Grove, a two-building town, and had just returned with a can of beef stew and a packet of won ton soup only to find that our stove wouldn’t start up because it was missing a gasket. It seemed the gasket had fallen out unnoticed when he’d cleaned the stove after breakfast in Morro Bay.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I climbed out of the tent. The nap had helped. My left shoulder still felt like it had a butcher knife in it, but I wasn’t feeling as drained as before. Larry explained about the stove, and I shrugged my right shoulder.

“Don’t you understand what this means?” he pleaded.

To me it meant we didn’t have to bother with cooking and washing dishes and we could go to bed earlier. I had passed the point of being hungry even before we got to the campground.

“It means I’m going to die of hunger right here and now before your very eyes!” he shouted. “It’s been eight hours since I’ve eaten anything! I’m beat and I’m starved. I’ve got to eat something right this minute or I’ll die!”

I wanted to tell Larry that he only thought he was going to expire; that nobody who weighs one hundred sixty pounds and is in top physical shape has ever starved to death overnight simply by skipping dinner, but I decided that wouldn’t be a good thing to say at the moment. By the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice I knew he was no longer capable of rational thought; exhaustion and hunger had finally taken their toll. Larry could endure a lot more physical pain than I, but when it came to hunger—well, that was another story. I tried to calm him.

“Look, I’ll go borrow a stove from someone,” I said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

I spied a campstove with two burners sitting on the picnic table in a neighboring campsite, and its owners were glad to lend it to me. When I carried it back to our site, Larry was sitting on one of the picnic benches rocking back and forth, whimpering softly to himself. I lit both burners and heated up the soup and the stew. The moment Larry started shoveling the hot food into his mouth, the look of hysteria began to fade from his eyes. By the end of the meal, it had disappeared altogether.

After we washed up our bowls and returned the stove, we climbed into the tent. We rolled around on our mats for a while trying to find a spot on our bodies that wasn’t quite as sore as the others.

“You know,” Larry mumbled just before he started snoring. “It’s been one helluva day. We’ve sure gotten off to a thundering start.”

The first rays of sunlight that filtered down through the pines and into our tent coaxed us awake early the next morning. We lay in each other’s arms and watched the blue jays and squirrels and listened to the breeze dance through the pine needles. The chilly morning air felt good against our sunburned faces. Our bodies still ached, but we felt rested, and that brightened our spirits. Just as we were about to fall back to sleep someone’s voice snaked in through the tent walls.

“You two asleep in thar?” a man asked in a southern drawl. It was Mr. Marston, the fiftyish fellow from Houston we’d met the night before when we hobbled into the campground. He and his wife had parked their truck camper in the site below ours.

“No, we’re awake,” Larry answered. “What’s up?”

“Breakfast. All the eggs, sausage, toast with blackberry jam, and coffee you kin force down inta those stomachs o’ yers. It’ll be ready pretty quick now, so ya’ll come on down as soon as yer up.”

The mention of food literally shot us out the door of the tent. Larry and I sat ourselves down at the Marstons’ picnic table, and Mrs. Marston dropped a huge plate heaped high with hot food in front of each of us. Nothing could have tasted better. As soon as we finished what was on our plates, Mrs. Marston piled on more. By the time we had polished off three platefuls neither of us could move, and we felt supremely indebted to our two new friends.

The four of us talked for three hours—mostly about the state and national parks the Marstons recommended that we visit while we pedaled through America—before Larry and I walked back to our campsite to pack up and start pedaling again. The headwinds had died down, but we were too sore to go very far today; we decided to cycle only as far as Limekiln campground, seven miles up the road.

As we started to take down our tent one of the other campers, Pete Olsen, a middle-aged fireman from Los Angeles, came over to see what we were all about. Pete stood next to the picnic table and surveyed the mountain of clothing and gear stacked on top of it. Since we had packed everything wrong the day we left Santa Barbara, putting things we wouldn’t be using very often on top of the things we would, we had had to pull everything out of our panniers to get at what we needed the night before and that morning.

“Bet you two can’t get all that stuff back into your packs now that you’ve yanked it all out,” Pete said as he eyed our books, camera, clothes, sack of toiletries, towels, tools, spare parts, cookset, silverware, candle lantern, and the two bottles of champagne our friends had given us at the station in Santa Barbara. “You must be new at this. Where you off to?”

“Around the world,” I answered sheepishly, trying to stand up straight without wincing in pain. “Yesterday was our first day.”

Pete didn’t say anything, but I could almost hear his mind at work: You mean you two pitifully disorganized kids, who could just barely limp into the campground last night—one of you collapses inside your tent while the other one screams at your stove which you never did get to work—and who today, after only one day on the road, are too sore to pedal more than seven miles, are going to stand there and tell me you’re gonna bicycle around the world? Around the world with a busted cookstove and two bottles of champagne. Well, good luck to you both. You’ll need it and a lot more!

Pete took another good look at everything on the table, then shook his head and walked away.

At the store in Pacific Grove Larry and I picked up a gasket for our cookstove and supplies for lunch and dinner before we pedaled on to Limekiln. We pitched our tent among the ferns and pines and spent the day walking the beach and hiking in the hills and along the stream that flowed past our campsite. There were showers at Limekiln, and at the end of the day we soothed our aching muscles in the hot water and washed away the layers of dirt and sweat that the previous day’s ride had encased us in. For dinner we cooked macaroni and cheese from a box and broke out the champagne. We were sound asleep by eight o’clock.

It took us three days to pedal the 135 miles from Limekiln to Larry’s parents’ house in San Jose. Each morning I started out slow—sore and stiff from the day before—and by midafternoon, after we had pedaled about thirty miles, I would slow down even more, almost to a crawl, as the brigade of sharp pains marched through more of my muscles and the butcher knife sliced deeper into my left shoulder.

Every afternoon I was drained of all my energy. Every incline looked like Mount Everest, and I kept checking my tires to see if they were flat, thinking maybe that was why I was going so slow. Even when I pedaled downhill, I had to struggle. The last ten miles of each day were sheer agony for me, and every night I felt thoroughly discouraged. I would pull out my map while we ate dinner, study the tiny stretch of mileage we had covered that day, then compare it to our projected route across North America and wonder how we would ever make it the six thousand miles we expected to pedal on our way to the East Coast.

“Now don’t get totally disillusioned right off. It takes a while, but you’ll get in shape,” Larry would say to me at night. “It’s just that you’re not accustomed to bicycling over about fifteen miles a day, and all that extra weight makes it even tougher. Give yourself a break. You’ve only been at this for a few days now. It’ll probably take you a month or so before you’re in good enough shape to whiz through a forty- or fifty-mile day or crank out an eighty-miler. And besides, I don’t think you’re eating enough. You’re burning up a lot of calories and you’re building up muscles, so you need to eat a lot more than you normally do. I think some of your exhaustion probably has to do with you just plain running out of fuel.”

When we got to San Jose I weighed one hundred seven pounds, eight pounds below my normal weight and three pounds less than what I had weighed on May 14. I felt weak, and for the first few days that we stayed with Larry’s parents I spent most of my time eating and sleeping. But by the end of a week I was revitalized and even anxious to start out again.

On May 28, Larry and I left San Jose and continued north on Highway 1. Larry’s parents were apprehensive about what our journey might have in store for us, but they were excited for us too.

“Do it now while you can,” Larry’s father whispered to us the day we left. “But be sure to be careful and take care of each other. And call us as often as you can while you’re still in the States.”

IT WAS A STRENUOUS RIDE up the coast through Sonoma and Mendocino counties. For five days the road bounced up and down the steep coastal mountains. But the coastline and the countryside were beautiful, and I soon found myself paying less attention to my aches and pains and more attention to my surroundings. We wound our way around the countless deserted coves and bays of the Pacific. The shiny turquoise waters were dotted with rocky outcroppings where the seagulls made their homes. Sometimes the road turned inland for part of a day, and then we sailed over rolling hills and grassy farmland. The coast was sparsely populated, and we pedaled to the sounds of the wind and the waves and the sea birds. The people in the few settlements along the highway were proud of their scenic, isolated land and determined to keep it that way.

“Yep,” smiled the owner of the single-room general store in Elk, a don’tblink-or-you’ll-miss-it burp on the map just south of the town of Mendocino, “us folks like it just fine the way it is up here—lots of rugged, unspoiled coastline, open spaces, and not many people. Down south it’s too crowded and filthy and noisy. There’s nothing but cement and asphalt and people down there. Yep, I had my choice some years back. I could either buy a store in Los Angeles and live in that endless asphalt jungle and worry all the time about gettin’ robbed or mugged and spend my time driving on freeways getting to and from work every day, or I could buy this place here. So I came on up here to take a look at the place, and I never left.

“Now, I just sit here and look out over the Pacific and breathe in the fresh salt air and laugh out loud every time someone from L.A. comes in here and asks me how the blazes I can stand living in the middle of nowhere. Just as soon as they ask me that I always ask ’em how the smog’s been in L.A. And when they start to get all defensive, I just smile and say, ‘Well, I gotta admit, we got our smog problem up here in Elk too. Why, just the other day a tourist came through and lit up a cigarette, and the health officials declared a first-stage smog alert!’”

When we set out from San Jose I decided to give Larry’s suggestion that I eat more and more often a try. Instead of eating only one meal between breakfast and dinner, as I had between Morro Bay and San Jose, I started eating three. We began each day with a huge breakfast—we’d wolf down six scrambled eggs with cheese, half a loaf of bread, two bowls of granola, and three or four cups of hot tea. We’d pedal on that for a couple of hours, then around ten o’clock we would pick up a morning snack—donuts covered with chocolate, caramel, or powdered sugar; or a pound cake washed down with a quart of chocolate milk. Each noon we built ourselves a couple of cheese, tomato, and salami sandwiches to go with our fruit and cookies. That would hold us until three or four o’clock when we went for the chocolate candy bars and soft drinks. If we were pedaling through a big town, we always hit the local A&W for a rootbeer float or a frostie. For dinner we dumped a can of beef stew, chop suey, or enchiladas, or a package of macaroni and cheese, into one of our bowls and a can of corn or green beans into the other and called it dinner. Our canned-food dinners were anything but nutritious, but they were quick and easy to fix. We survived on them and our junk-food snacks for the first two and half months of our trip, before we gradually began our transition to a healthier diet.

Just as Larry had suspected, eating something every two hours made a huge difference in the way I felt. It kept me from becoming completely exhausted, and that buoyed my spirits enormously. Each day as we made our way up the coast I could feel my muscles strengthening and my endurance edging higher. The butcher knife disappeared from my shoulder, and my seat became more accustomed to the brutal treatment it received all day long. By the time we pedaled into Leggett, where we turned onto Highway 101 at the start of the redwoods, I could pedal fifty miles a day without collapsing in agony afterwards.

When we entered the redwoods we penetrated the sacred domain of the legendary logging trucks of northern California. We had heard a lot of stories about the logging trucks; it seemed that every year or so one ran over a bicycler touring the redwoods. The whole way up the coast I had tried to prepare myself mentally for the day the loggers would join us on the roads, but the first time I heard that deafening, unmistakable roar closing in behind me and turned around to see the road swallowed up by an eight-ton, sixty-foot-long logging truck dwarfed by its sky-high wall of tree trunks, I nearly croaked. I swung my head back around and edged over as close to the shoulder of the road as I could without falling into the dirt. Then I clenched my teeth and stared straight ahead, trying hard to block out the explosion of noise. I prayed to God Almighty to spare me just this once, promising that if He did I would never again bicycle on a road with a logging truck.

The trucks took some getting used to all right, and although I never managed to keep my heartbeat under control when I heard one blasting toward us from the rear, after a day or two I did learn to accept them. The drivers were always careful to pull way around when they passed us, and for that I was supremely grateful.

The day after our first encounter with a logging truck, we met our first fellow bicycler. Eric pedaled up alongside us as we were coasting down a long hill between Leggett and Garberville. His bike was making a loud flapping noise. It sounded as if he had a piece of cardboard in his spokes.

“Hi there!” he shouted.

I looked over to see what was causing the flapping noise. It was his underwear.

“Hi! Where ya from?” Larry asked.

“San Diego. I’m pedaling up to Portland to visit some relatives.”

Eric looked like a typical, handsome, southern California surfer. He had a good tan, sunbleached blond hair, and a muscular build. I guessed him to be about nineteen.

“Where you two off to?” he asked.

“Oh, right now we’re on our way up to Canada,” answered Larry.

“You sure gotta lot of stuff there. Me, I’m travelin’ light. Gotta few tools, a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and a sweater, a bowl and a knife, a fork and a spoon, and a tube tent and a sleeping bag.”

He also had a pair of underwear tied to and hanging from his handlebars and when he saw me eyeing them, he flashed me a wide smile.

“Oh yeah, and this pair o’ real holey underwear. I washed ’em out last night, but they were still wet when I got up this morning so I tied ’em onto my handlebars to let ’em blow dry. That works OK, tying ’em to the handlebars like this, except that they keep snappin’ against my wrist when I go downhill fast, and that makes my wrists sting. Hurts like you wouldn’t believe when they really get to snappin’.”

“Why don’t you tie them to your rear panniers instead,” Larry suggested. “That way they won’t bother your wrists.”

Eric shook his head. “I’d be afraid they’d blow off back there and I wouldn’t see ’em go. And then where’d I be? I mean, I gotta be real careful with what little clothes and gear I got.”

Eric was headed for the Avenue of the Giants, north of Garberville, as were Larry and I, so the three of us rode together. Not more than an hour after we met up, we ran into the Copenhagen Kid. His real name was John Winwood. He was cycling south, and the minute he spotted the three of us coming up the road he slammed on his brakes and shouted for us to stop and talk with him.

John was a strange sight. His tanned skin had worn out long ago, his face spoke of more than its share of fist fights, and an ancient, misshapen, leather cowboy hat, stained by years of sweat and dirt, topped his five-foot, seven-inch frame. He wore a faded flannel shirt, tattered blue jeans, and crusty combat boots. As soon as we were within earshot, John began telling us all about himself.

“Howdy folks! Name’s John Winwood, and I’m forty-seven, and I ain’t got a real tooth in ma mouth. These here are all false. I’m a registered crazy. Was in a mental institution fer over twenty years o’ ma life. I’m one real mean SOB, an’ I beat the livin’ daylights outta people I don’t like. But don’t you worry none. I like you three just fine. I like bicyclers. They’re ma friends.”

John was riding a Schwinn one-speed modified into a ten-speed. There were even toe clips on the pedals.

“Takes some hard jammin’, but if I keep at it real good I kin get these here boots o’ mine inta them there foot holders.

“Anyway, I’m ridin’ fer the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. I started in Eureka a few days back—I sleep in the bushes at night—an’ I’m pedalin’ to San Francisco and back. I got fifteen hundred dollars in pledges if I make it the whole way. An’ I’m gonna be on TV in San Francisco! Say, you folks cycle through there?”

“San Francisco? Yep, Barb and I did,” Larry answered.

“Good. I wanna know what the folks are like down there. I heard they was some real mean bastards.”

“We had a tough time getting through the city,” I said. “The buses kept running us off the streets, and the cars kept honking at us.”

“Well, they damned well better be nice to me,” John grumbled. And to prove his point, he pulled a long sharp knife out of his only pack. But before he had time to explain what he might be planning to do with it, a voice shouted at us from inside his pack.

“The bears are thick in Garberville,” it warned.

Larry, Eric, and I said nothing as we stared nervously at the talking pack. John’s eyes were dancing, and the grin that spread across his face displayed every false tooth in his mouth.

“I read ya loud and clear, Chain Saw,” the pack hollered again. This time it was a different voice. “Ten four!”

John was laughing now. He reached inside his pack and pulled out a citizen’s band (CB) radio half the size of an egg carton.

“This sucker’s got eight batteries in ’er,” he announced with great pride, as he attached his CB to its holder on his belt. “Yep, this here’s a good one. I talk ta all the truckers all day long. Damn! You should see the looks on them big truckers’ faces when they blow by me and see I’m the one they been talkin’ to! Here they been thinkin’ I’m some big mean dude in a big rig, and when they come by and see I’m nothing but a turkey on a pedal bike—I mean they look like they seein’ a ghost!

“But ya know what? They watch out fer me. I kin hear them truckers all tellin’ each other ta watch fer a bicycler on the road up ahead. Yep, everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the bicycler in the redwoods with a forty-channel CB. You bet. That’s me, the Copenhagen Kid. That’s ma handle!”

John stuffed his knife back into his pack, then reached into one of his shirt pockets and pulled out a stack of cards.

“Look, I gotta be gettin’ along. But first I’m givin’ ya’ll one o’ ma cards. Tells right there I’m ridin’ fer muscular dystrophy. Now ya’ll have a good time up in the Avenue. They’s some mighty big trees up there. Real monsters!”

John worked for a few moments at getting his left foot lodged into its toe clip before he rolled back onto the pavement. When we wished him good luck on his ride, he tipped his hat to us, then hollered something into his CB and hurried off down the road.

There was a special camping area for bicyclers along the Eel River in the Avenue of the Giants. It was nestled in a secluded grove of redwood skyscrapers, and there were already four other cyclers camped there when the three of us pulled in. While Larry and I pitched our tent on a soft mattress of needles next to a redwood about six feet in diameter, Eric prepared to head off to the hot showers at the regular campground a half mile down the road.

“Haven’t had a hot shower in a few days,” he said as he fumbled through his packs for his bar of soap. “This’ll feel great! I always shower and wash my clothes all at the same time. I walk into the shower with all my clothes on and suds them and myself good. Then I take off my clothes and lay ’em on the floor, and while I’m scrubbing my body I stomp on ’em with my feet. That works pretty good you know. Gets all the dirt out. Then I rinse ’em out an’ put ’em back on wet, and they dry out pretty quick from my body heat. Yeah, as long as the weather stays nice and warm like it’s been I don’t mind wearing ’em wet for a while.”

After we set up the tent, Larry and I walked over to the river for a swim and to meet the other bicyclers in the camp: Mike, Ed, Craig, and Tom. Mike was a carpenter from Florida, who had just cycled across the States, and Ed was a high-school math teacher from British Columbia on his way down the coast “to where the smog starts, and then I’ll quit and fly back home.” Craig and Tom were touring northern California and Oregon together. Both of them were from Fresno, California, and “like, really into health food.” They grew their own alfalfa sprouts in the rows of little cloth sacks that hung from their handlebars, and they pedaled to “like, really mellow classical music” from the cassette player in Craig’s handlebar pack.

“Sprouts and Mozart. You know, like, that’s what I got up front,” Craig nodded, pointing to his handlebars. “Ya gotta have fresh sprouts, man. Nothing’s no good without ’em. Try this. This is good stuff. Great afternoon snack, man. You know, like, it’s got my sprouts in it.”

Craig handed us the bowl he was eating from. We looked into it, a nasty mixture of alfalfa sprouts, tofu, bulgur wheat, shredded zucchini, sunflower seeds, and a few other questionable ingredients. To a couple of junk-food junkies, Craig’s snack was one of the most repulsive sights we’d ever set eyes on.

“Hey thanks,” said Larry, backing away from the bowl as if it might attack him, “but I’ll stick to my Hostess snowballs.”

“Snowballs? Man, like, no way. Like, sugar’s poison, man,” Craig muttered in disgust. He shook his head and shoved a spoonful of the mixture into his mouth, then washed it down with a few swallows from his can of guava-apricot-papayabanana-peach nectar and turned up Mozart.

Larry and I spent the rest of the day floating in the river, basking in the sun, and exploring the redwood groves. It felt good to give our bicycling muscles a rest. In the evening, Eric, Mike, Ed, and Larry pooled some money and went shopping at the campground grocery store. When they got back, they tossed a green salad in a grocery bag, chopped up a plate of fresh fruit, and we (including Craig and Tom, who ate another tofu and sprout dish) gathered around the fire, devouring food and the three bottles of wine Mike had chilled in the river.

It was a clear night; what sky we could see through the towering redwoods was a blanket of stars. Larry and I curled up together on our mats next to the campfire. The flames warmed our bodies, the smells of the redwood needles, the fresh sap, and the burning wood filled our nostrils, and the sounds of the river and the crackling fire played in our ears. A peaceful feeling settled over me, and for the first time since we started our journey my muscles were nearly free of pain. I found myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might make it to Oregon after all.