Читать книгу The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal - Tom Davies Kevill - Страница 9

If a squadron of mosquitoes hadn’t been feasting on every bit of tasty skin that wasn’t wrapped in sweat-drenched clothing, and if the tired muscles in my legs had not been contracting in complaint at their unexpected new existence, I might have obeyed the friendly sign that greeted me at the gates of the state park. Yet as the last minutes of twilight began to give way to gathering darkness and a distant growl of thunder warned me of the weather to come, I decided to risk the wrath of an angry park ranger and wheeled my heavy load up the last hill of the day. Finding a little corner of grass hidden between a large rock and a malodorous public toilet, I set about pitching camp. Pre-trip daydreams had been buoyed with romantic ideas about camping in the moonlight on the banks of foreign rivers, grilling fish over an open fire, but being able to count my previous nights under canvas on one hand, I was about to find out how immature this boy’s own fantasy was.

‘Ultra light’ it declared on the bright label of my brand-new one-man tent as I pulled it from its tidy little nylon bag and rolled it out on the grass. Could have been a bit fucking lighter if you ask me, I muttered, while trying to decipher the complicated Swedish instruction manual.

‘Grattis, du är nu den stolte ägaren av ett nytt tält’

The annoyingly efficient-looking Swede in the pictures instructed me that my first job was to link up the two sausage-strings of shiny, metal poles. Once connected, they had to be slid into their relevant holes before the whole tent could be pegged down. This was not dissimilar to knitting with a pair of eight-foot needles, but I managed, with an adequate amount of swearing and loss of temper, while being perpetually pestered by the biting and high-pitched whine of every blood-sucking insect in New York State, to get the right bits in the right places. And, as if by magic, my new home rose miraculously out of the ground.

It hadn’t looked that small when I performed a dry-run erection on the living-room floor of the pokey, one-bedroom flat in London where I had lived for the last five years. But now, dwarfed by the immense trees and the public toilets of Nyack State Park, it looked pathetic. A London estate agent would have described it as ‘compact and with a clever use of space’, but as I climbed inside there was no escaping the fact that my accommodation for the next two years was inconveniently petite.

To rest my bones at the end of a hard day in the saddle, I had also invested in an expensive, ultra-light, self-inflating camping mattress. It too lived in an efficient nylon bag and, once removed, it unrolled itself like an asthmatic woodlouse, wheezing pathetically as it tried to ‘self-inflate’.

That’s it?

At that price, I had hoped that a plump and bouncy airbed would expand before my eyes, but instead a small, bright orange piece of foam that looked about as comfortable as a doormat materialised in front of me. ‘Tat-tat, tat-tat-tat.’ The sound of rain drumming away on the tightly-stretched nylon that now surrounded me didn’t help lift my sinking mood. I made a dash through the escalating downpour to rescue my panniers and other bits of equipment, before retreating back into my bunker, soaking wet, to begin making plans for supper. My first-night fantasies of an open fire were literally washed away, and instead I would have to fire-up the most exciting item hidden in my bags. The camp stove.

I have no doubt that if you find yourself stuck on a freezing mountain at high altitude, somewhere in the Himalayas, and you fancy a quick cuppa, a high-octane jet engine is just the job for melting a few litres of snow and getting a good brew on, but if all you want to do is reheat some Puerto Rican rice and a couple of sausages, the violent little object I was now unpacking is completely unsuitable. Faced with a confusing set-up of metal cables and a bright red fuel tank that looked as if they were part of a bomb-making kit worthy of Al Qaeda, I unpacked the new toy that would cook my supper. Carefully following the English instructions, I obediently tweaked the levers and pumped the pumps. My shiny lightweight aluminium pots and pans were loaded with leftovers. I struck a match.

Booom—whooooooooosh!

A yellow flame filled the entrance of my tent. My eyebrows sent out a smell of singed hair and, reeling back, I looked on in horror at the angry little object now roaring away with a ferocious blue flame in the tent porch. It seemed more suitable for stripping paint than cooking a light supper. Acrid black smoke invaded my living space. I plucked up enough courage to turn the thing off, then scraped away at the inedible burnt offerings welded to the bottom of my pans. I had to admit that the Hungry Cyclist’s first night in the great outdoors hadn’t quite gone to plan. I turned in, dirty, disheartened, dishevelled and hungry, wondering how and why I had given up a comfortable London life, an agreeable career in advertising and a beautiful girlfriend to be here alone, eating burnt sausages, camped next to a public toilet, in the pouring rain somewhere in New York State.

The following morning I awoke in the claustrophobic conditions of my nylon coffin, exhausted. I had all the gear but evidently I had no idea what I was doing. I climbed out of my tent, bleary-eyed, stiff and despondent. Strange calls and scratching had distracted me throughout the night and I had enjoyed little sleep. I needed coffee, and after rolling up my wet tent, gathering my belongings and getting back on the bike, I went in search of someone who might sell me one. Ten kilometres outside Nyack I found a busy café attached to a gas station. At just before six in the morning, it was full of dusty truck drivers and delivery men.

‘Sit wherever you can find a spot, darling,’ called a waitress busy filling coffee cups from a glass percolator jug.

But instead of taking a seat I headed straight for the rest room. I brushed my teeth, washed my face in the basin and took a sad look at the drained face that appeared in the mirror. I felt weak, demoralised and nauseous.

What am I doing?

The state I was in, I would have let somebody steal my bicycle, but I still found a booth next to the window where I could keep half an eye on my worldly possessions propped up in the parking lot. I ordered a tall stack of pancakes, which arrived dripping in maple syrup, and downed cup after cup of bitter coffee while I laid out my damp map on the table and made a plan for the day.

Now where am I? Nyack, Nyack, Nyack—here!

It took a few seconds to find the small red dot that signified where I was, and when I did, it was completely soul-destroying. In a day that had left me feeling physically and mentally drained, I had cycled no further than two-thirds of the width of my little finger. A pathetic thirty-seven miles. Looking north, the Canadian border and the Great Lakes were a stretched hand away. If I carried on at this pace Toronto would take two to three weeks and Rio de Janeiro was clearly impossible.

The next week was the stuff of nightmares. I was unfit, underprepared and it was very hot. The sun woke me from my tent every morning and soon became a merciless tormentor as I struggled further north into the Catskill mountains of Upstate New York. The rich landscape of pine-carpeted mountains and placid lakes should have been breathtaking but I had no breath to spare. As each day of hard labour came to an end, I was greeted with another uncomfortable broken night’s sleep in my reeking tent, before having to start all over again at sunrise.

More than seven years of a nine-to-five existence in London had left me completely unsuited to the hardships of life on the road. However I cut it, pushing a ridiculously heavy weight up a mountain in 30-plus degrees just wasn’t fun. I was meant to be revelling in a newfound freedom. This was about as far from freedom as I could imagine. Dragging an oversized ball and chain disguised as a bicycle and trapped within a strange alter ego that called himself the Hungry Cyclist, I was meant to be cycling the Americas in search of interesting food and digging up local recipes. Instead I was surviving on chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and whatever else I could get my hands on at the sporadic gas stations that lined my route. I barely had the energy or enthusiasm to open a tin of beans. The Hungry Cyclist and his dream were both falling apart.

‘Buy me; buy me,’ called rusty station wagons parked in driveways.

‘Take me, take me, look at my powerful motor,’ goaded shiny, chrome-covered motorcycles with their fluorescent ‘For Sale’ signs.

And how easy it would have been to quit. To cash in my bicycle, dump the panniers and go on a real road trip in the land of the motorcar. The raw chafing between my legs would be a thing of the past. I could kiss goodbye to my aching buttocks and throw away my dirty, sweat-stained clothes. Covering as little as thirty-five miles a day, against the hundred I had projected, no more than a soul-destroying centimetre on my tatty map, I was making slow, painful progress on my way to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes. But as the long days and short nights gradually ticked over, the hills slowly became easier. It was revealing to see how body and mind learnt to deal with life on a bicycle, and I came to terms with the fact that this journey would not happen in the way I had imagined it would. After an initial few weeks of pain and suffering, I arrived in the town of Buffalo, famed for its chicken wings and the Niagara Falls. It was here that I would cross into Canada. I had cycled some five hundred miles after leaving New York. I was feeling fit, I was sleeping, I could operate my camping stove and I was almost having fun.

I was a cowboy. My sister was an Indian, hiding at the bottom of the garden in her wigwam that smelt of wet socks, doing whatever seven-year-old East Anglian girl Indians did. I would creep stealthily through the unkempt grass, in my finest hat, with a six-shooter at the ready, primed for an ambush.

‘Yeeeeeeeeeeee ha!’ Pow! Snap! Pow! Snap! Bursting into her peaceful camp, guns blazing, I ruthlessly fired off reels of pink caps while she ran for the cover of home, slapping the palm of her hand against her mouth, doing her best to warn me off with an unconvincing war-cry.

But cap guns and cowboy hats were soon replaced by a Walkman and a mountain bike, and the only contact I had with Indians was limited to over-imaginative, lustful thoughts provoked by Disney’s buckskin-clad, leggy recreation of Pocahontas. As I matured a little, Daniel Day Lewis running bare-chested through the mountains of Upstate New York in his moccasins and Kevin Costner soulfully pursuing herds of buffalo across the Dakotas provided me with a little insight into the native tribes of the Americas. But shamefully, as I arrived on banks of the Great Lakes, apart from childhood and Hollywood fantasies I knew nothing about the great and tragic history of the land I was now cycling through.

Moving further into Ontario, surrounded by the waters of lakes Huron, Ontario and Michigan, it was clear I was in Indian country. Eagle feathers and dream catchers now hung from the rear-view mirrors of pick-up trucks, whose ‘Support our Troops’ bumper stickers also declared ‘Proud to be Indian’. The patriotic posters that portrayed dust-covered New York firemen emerging from falling rubble under a red, white and blue Stars and Stripes, declaring ‘These Colors Don’t Run’, no longer adorned the graffiti-covered doors of gas station toilets. Instead, dreamy, sepia-toned images of old men wrapped in blankets with feathers on their heads, gazing at the horizon, proclaimed you should ‘Do what you know to be right’. But instead of taking their advice, buying a car and racing to Vegas, I continued cycling up the Bruce Peninsula that bisects the shallow waters of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.

A popular summer destination for those escaping the sweltering city heat of Toronto, the Bruce Peninsula’s picturesque towns were well prepared for this seasonal boom. Pretty clinker-built houses, once home to wealthy fur traders, were converted into twee bed and breakfasts. Organic cafés, decorated with wind-chimes and lesbians, sold overpriced cups of coffee, and the famous Great Lakes ‘white fish and chips’ seemed to be sold in every one of the restaurants. Holidaying Ontarian families, towing caravans in long convoys up the Peninsula main road, licked ice creams and stared into the backs of digital cameras, but on the side of the road, the vendors sitting in part-time stands next to the highway selling wood carvings of eagles, feather-decorated dream catchers, buckskin moccasins and bags of wild rice to the passing trade told of deeper tradition in this bountiful corner of eastern Canada. Arriving in the port town Tobermory, given its name by Scottish fur traders, I caught the last ferry to Manitoulin Island. With my bike tied up below deck of the Chi-Cheemaun (big canoe) with the motorhomes and caravans, I sat above in the cool evening air watching the wake of the boat rip open the glassy skin of Lake Huron and began to feel thoroughly ashamed of my historical ignorance. I decided to take the very first opportunity to swot up on the First Nation culture of the Great Lakes. The next morning, after camping on the banks of the lake and full of campfire coffee, I rode to the Manitoulin Island cultural visitor centre for an education.

An impressive building with heavy wooden beams and a triangular roof, the centre provided me with vital information about how to stretch a tribal drum and weave a fish trap, and also gave me a potted history of the area I was in. I was in Ojibwa country, the largest and most powerful of the Great Lakes tribes and considered by many to be the most powerful in the North American continent. Occupying the lands around the Great Lakes and stretching as far west as North Dakota, the Ojibwa lived far enough north to have avoided the early flow of migration from Europe, but by the late eighteenth century they found themselves too close to the rapidly expanding trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, and they were soon engulfed in a fur trade that was turning the Great Lakes into a war zone between the English and the French.

Beaver skins were big money back in Europe, and as demand for this New World commodity grew, the old rivals fought heavily to control the rivers, lakes and ports of the region. As outstanding hunters and trappers, the Ojibwa were unwittingly caught up in the Fur Wars, which continued well into the nineteenth century. Treaties were signed, alliances formed, alliances broken, and tribes were pitted against each other to best feed the appetites of smart Londoners and Parisians, who could not live without their fashionable beaver top hats. The Ojibwa traded with their new European invaders and, although the weapons brought wealth and power, the Ojibwa soon became dependent on French and English goods. The introduction of gunpowder, alcohol and smallpox would change the Great Lakes for ever. Changes in fashion brought a welcome end to the fur trade, but it was only replaced by a new hunger for lumber, copper and white fish, which tempted more Europeans to the area, where they pursued a policy of deforestation and overfishing that emptied the ancient woodlands and lakes of their harvest.

Like after any good museum visit, I found myself in the shop browsing for postcards, novelty pens, key fobs, moccasins and dream catchers, but to my excitement I also discovered a traditional Ojibwa recipe book. Until now the only regional dish I had found that Ontarians were at all proud of was poutine, a clumsy bastardisation of a French dish, consisting of a heap of greasy chips, topped with lumpy gravy and some rubbery cheese curds, normally sold from the hatch of a converted ambulance and served on a flimsy polystyrene platter. It had all the charm and sophistication of a late-night kebab. So to browse recipes of such exotic treats as beaver tail soup, boiled moose nose, white fish livers and manoomin (wild rice) was an exhilarating experience. As I left, the kind woman who sold me the book called after me to tell me that the Sagamok Anishinabek annual traditional pow-wow was being held at the weekend, and if I was lucky I might well be able to taste some of this traditional native fare.

Following the north shore of Lake Huron, I cycled deeper into the barren landscape of Ontario. Small one-café towns, surviving on the logging industry, provided well-needed breaks from the never-ending tarmac of Highway 17, romantically known as the TransCanada Highway. After two days I turned off this noisy road, which flowed with fume-belching logging trucks and made happy time along the pothole-infested back roads that wound their way under towering russet rockfaces and along the banks of placid lakes. Riding in silence, apart from my heart beat and the whoosh of my spinning wheels, I was alone. My imagination, overfed on Spaghetti Westerns, began to work overtime. I peered up at the cliffs flanking the roads and squirmed at the haunted calls and ominous shapes of the patient turkey vultures circling overhead. Rocks tumbling down precipices were no doubt misplaced by the warring redskin scouts who crept up on their bellies, primed to puncture me with arrows, and I could see the angular features of ancient warrior chiefs in every shadow and rock formation that surrounded me.

An hour before sunset I was still thirty miles away from where I hoped I would find my pow-wow and so decided to call it a day and cover the rest of the distance in the morning. A couple of miles along a disused, rust-stained railway track I hit on a good spot to camp, perched above the steep, rocky banks of Silver Lake. Hot and dirty after a day in the saddle, I stripped off, scrambled naked to the lake’s edge and plunged into the cold clear water for a resurrecting swim. Before darkness fell I had failed to catch a fish for supper, but I had gathered enough wood for a small fire and prepared some lentils that had been soaking in one of my water bottles since the morning. The fire kept out the crisp chill of night and under a clear sky I lay back alone in this vast landscape. The mocking laughter of loons echoed across the calm waters shimmering in the moonlight. At long last my bicycle was giving me real freedom, allowing me to find this perfect place, but after a month on the road I felt alone. For the first but not the last time I began to wish I had someone to share it with. It seemed a waste having it all by myself.

At sunrise I restarted my fire, brewed some coffee and cooked some oats before packing up, clicking my panniers into place and returning to the road. I did my best to make good time, before it got too hot, on a twisty road that ran between jagged rockfaces and thickets of tall pine. It wasn’t until midday that I caught a glimpse of another human being. He was perched behind the wheel of a rusty old pick-up and wore a black felt hat that covered his long dark hair, which was stretched tight over his ears and gathered in a tidy ponytail behind. I offered a raised hand of acknowledgement, but the angular native features of the man did not flinch and he rolled slowly past until the mechanical clanking of his engine disappeared into the silence. Minutes later a beaten-up station wagon stuffed with several generations pulled alongside. Its occupants peered at me from the windows with blank, unwelcoming expressions.