And So, I Depart

Finishing It Offa Month Late

2009-10-03T15:40:00.000-04:00

Well, it took me forever to get on the internet and write this up. It gets harder and harder to write about things, too, as they slip into the past. Although I arrived at the Pacific on September 9, here it is, on October 3. Hopefully, I'll have it in me to write an epilogue to this, probably in a couple of weeks.

----

After Bend, I really felt like I'd hit the home stretch. I zipped along the Sisters Highway, with a decent but slightly cloudy view of the Three Sisters.

Those were elevations at which I had been in the Rockies. Now there was snow up there. I'd made it in time, but it was a good thing I hadn't lingered too long.

I turned west again, onto the Santiam Highway. It climbed into the mountains, and I was quickly surrounded by pine trees again.

The climb quickly steepened, and soon I got sick of it and walked the bike. While I didn't have phone signal on sections of the road, I was (amazingly) able to talk on the phone for pretty much the entire climb to Santiam Pass. Now that I was walking, though, it was a pretty long ways (41 miles), and by the time I got to the top, the sun was setting. I expected Cascadia State Park in 21 more miles, so I gunned it down from the pass, reaching over 50 MPH. I got to where I thought Cascadia was. The road just kept going through the woods. It started getting dark. I passed a flat clearing, so I figured I could just camp there.

Thankfully, I'd bought a 12-pack of packs of cookies (no typo there) back in Burns, so I didn't starve. But I started running out of both food and water pretty quickly. There was no phone signal here; just relatively deep woods.

The night quickly became frigid, and I was once again not hating my camping equipment, but loving it—especially the sleeping bag, whose cocoon capabilities I made the most of this time, exposing only my mouth and the bottom of my nose to air.

In the morning, everything was soaked in dew, and though it was still pretty cold, I watched the water evaporate and rise into the air off of my stuff. Looking around, I realized it was rising from the entire field as well.

I got on the road and continued onward.

I'd been socializing a lot, so a day of being alone wasn't an issue at all. The thing that annoyed me was that I was climbing again, even though I had crossed the pass. The climb steadily got steeper until I finally saw what I thought was a sign of the end.

But the road kept going steeply up. I passed another warning. And another. It actually didn't get better for a while, even after this sign:

Eventually, I zipped down, and, on that downhill, zipped by Cascadia, about 20 miles farther than I had expected. After another stretch, on which I ran out of food and ran extremely low on water, involving a few more minor passes, I reached Foster Lake.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was pretty much out of the Cascades. I reached a town called Sweet Home, stopped at the first gas station, and finally had water and food. I sat there for an hour or so, just resting and slowly eating and drinking.

And then I got my final scene of a type I had gotten so used to: as I walked out, I saw the station owner talking to a policeman at the counter and pointing at me. As I walked out, the policeman came out and looked over me and my bike.

"You rode here from Massachusetts on that thing?"

"Yeah."

"That's amazing."

"Should be done tomorrow, though."

"Oh, yeah? Where are you headed?"

"Newport."

"Oh, you've got a WAYS to go still."

I got a little worried. "It's 90 miles, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah. If that's a short distance for you."

"It's a good day's ride. But I'm expecting to hit Corvallis tonight."

"That's a good....40 miles from here."

"Yeah, that's what I was figuring on."

----

I didn't find Corvallis. Somehow, I completely missed the entire city and, right as it was getting dark, ended up in a little town called Philomath. As the end neared and there was no longer as much need to conserve money, I started splurging, and I got a motel.

By the next morning, the remainder of the trip was clearly marked for me.

I went into another mountain range, but I knew it couldn't be far now. The winds were still strong, the roads were extremely narrow and dangerous and steep, and cars whipped around at ridiculous speeds. I swore and cursed at the Coast Range, but there was no reason to, whatsoever. I should have just taken it easy. By the middle of the day, I was on the Pacific.

Catch-Up Post

2009-09-07T05:25:00.004-04:00

The road to Arco was long and empty.

I was thankful for the lone mountains on my left, because only they let me know I was moving at all. 50 miles later, they were behind me.

Back in the day, even when the area was settled, few had gone this way. I could see why. The temperature was around 110, and if you looked for rivers on the map and expected to get water, you were out of luck.

I eventually made it to a little town called Arco, at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains.

That was where I spent the night.

The next morning, within minutes of taking off, I decided to stop at the gas station and grab some breakfast; I wasn't likely to find any other food as I kept going. As I shifted into low gear to pull over, I felt a pop and then no resistance from the lever; turning the pedals some more, I realized the gear hadn't switched. I looked down and saw the culprit. My gear cable had snapped.

I ignored the situation, leaned my bike against the wall, went in and got some donuts. Then I went outside and tried switching the gear with my hands, thinking I'll just get off and put it in low for uphills or strong wind, and then get off and put it into high for downhills. I had less than 200 miles to go to Boise, and I was sure there would be bike shops there.

But alas, the derailleur—the piece that shifts the chain from one gear to another—was on a spring, and, not being pulled away by a gear cable, would always snap me into high gear. I was looking for ways to jam stuff into the derailleur to counteract the spring and hold it in low gear when a truck full of tools pulled up and the driver got out.

I got up too. "How are you doing?"

The driver looked over. "Not bad, how about you?"

"Pretty good." I allowed a pause. "You wouldn't happen to have any thin but strong cables you're planning to throw away, would you?"

His name was Michael, and there was no such cable in his truck, but his garage door had broken a while ago, and it had been held up by cables. He helped me take one and cut it to size. It took a lot of work to give it an end that would hold—the tension on a gear cable is pretty amazing—but eventually we did it, using the massive tools on his truck (his job was fixing heavy machinery; mostly tractors).

The cable was much thicker than a standard gear cable, and no matter how I adjusted the derailleur, I couldn't get my lowest gear anymore, but I could get all the others, so it wasn't much of an issue. Michael asked me if I could mail him some Boston bread. I wasn't sure what he meant, but I took his business card, and when I get back to Boston, I'll see if I can do some research and get him some.

I got back on the bike and pushed onward.

----

90 miles later, I was in Fairfield (pop. 395), where I met Cathy, who invited me to stay and rest for a couple of days. So that night, I found myself at a campfire with Cathy in her backyard, along with her daughter Monica and her friend Kip, who had just driven up from Salt Lake. I was again showered and warm. I'm becoming quite convinced that discomfort cannot last long when you are among Americans, if not people in general.

After a couple of days, Monica went back to college in Boise, which was the direction I was headed, and invited me to come stay with her there, which I did.

As an aside, I should mention that I didn't take most of the luggage off of my bike while I was at Cathy's—I just left the loaded bike in the back yard—and when I finally did go through it, I thought someone had played a joke on me.

I was about to pick it up like a piece of plastic when it moved. Realizing it was alive, I picked up the entire piece of luggage, on which it just walked around without getting off. I don't know how it appeared in the arid Idaho desert, but I left it by Cathy's artificial pond.

----

I loved Boise. It was the biggest city I had hit since Chicago (and it had been some 1,800 miles since Chicago), and I couldn't help but stay there for a few days too. I don't like to stay with one person for too long—I feel like I might overstay my welcome—so within a couple of days, I met Travis and left Monica just as her classes began. I stayed with Travis for a few more days, spending nights at bars and mornings sleeping in.

Eventually I left, shooting through about 60 more miles of country roads, still in 110-degree temperatures, until I crossed the Snake River.

I'd known this crossing was coming, but it was still hard for me to believe that I had actually hit it, although its particular significance was purely artificial.

I arrived in Nyssa, OR, around 4 PM, ready to splurge on a motel room, lie down, relax, make a few phone calls.

Instead, I followed the road through a creepy concrete tunnel into downtown. There was not a single person on the street. There was a nice-looking row of shops—except that each one had a sign hanging on the door that said CLOSED. It reminded me of walking around Tampere, Finland, at 2 AM in the summer, when it was light but everybody was asleep. I checked my watch. Nope, definitely 4 PM. Day of the week? Thursday.

I saw a gas station around the corner, so I decided to pull in and ask for directions. Except that it, too, was closed.

I finally found a red-haired teenage girl with a backpack sitting on a bench. She had a ghoulishly pale face and stared at me expressionlessly as I talked, then quietly pointed me to the only motel in town.

I got over there. There were some cars parked, but not a soul anywhere. The office was locked, and had a sign with a number to call to make a reservation. I called that number; no one picked up.

So instead of having an easy day that ended at 4 PM, after wasting some hours circling around Nyssa looking for humans, I had to bike onward, into the cornfields.

I gunned it, hoping to reach a populated area before nightfall.

Around 9:30 PM, cursing the time I wasted in Nyssa, I pulled into a little town called Vale and got a room.

----

I was told in Vale that it was 60 miles to the next town, called Juntura. I got on the road expecting an easy day ahead.

For a long time, the road snaked through the eastern Oregon desert along the Malheur River.

I was surprised by the name—not so much by its meaning ("misfortune"), given the terrain around it, but by the fact that it was French. When had the French made it out here? Were they really the first ones? I had wondered earlier about the name "Boise," until I discovered that it was on the Boise River, which in French would simply have been called La Boise, translating to "wooded river." I had biked along that river recreationally while I stayed there, and it really was surrounded by dense trees, which was not normal for Idaho. So everything seemed natural—except that the name was French. Clearly there is a gap in my knowledge of American history.

----

The road departed from the Malheur

and snaked up into the mountains.

I panted upward, starting to worry about my low water levels and thinking I should have just taken some water from the Malheur and used some of my purification tablets.

And just then, I went over a pass and, out of nowhere, came a sign.

I screeched to a stop and started looking around. And looking. And looking. The sign seemed to have come out of nowhere, and all around was just desert.

After some time, in a little hidden nook quite far from the sign, I discovered a well.

And I thought about how primitive my life seemed to be now. My biggest worry was the weather, and happiness was a well in the desert.

I also realized I had piled so many precautions on top of precautions that I was very quick to begin to worry. My water levels had not been at all low, and while I felt better after filling up, I would have had plenty to make it to Juntura. Which, incidentally, was, at that point, only 22 miles away, and it was still quite the middle of the day; yet again, I had been pushing myself for little reason.

I arrived in Juntura, which, amazingly, had a cafe. I walked in and placed an order of such proportions that when it got to the kitchen, the cook walked out to look at me. I'll bet my proportions weren't exactly what he had expected. He cooked it and came out again to watch me eat it. I finished it and just sat there, talking to him. Pretty soon, I left the cafe with a bag of pizza slices that I had been given for free, and was quickly provided with a hut (which apparently had been sitting empty) in which I spent the next two nights relaxing again.

----

Eventually, I headed off through the mountains again.

I passed signs testifying to the genius of some of those who had passed before me.

I passed signs letting me know I was getting closer to the end of all this.

There was next to nothing else along the road.

I crossed Drinking Water Pass.

I crossed Stinking Water Pass.

I came out into a flat valley with 23 miles left to Burns, over the course of which there was no way to tell that I was moving at all.

----

This, of course, bore no comparison to what came after Burns. Over the following 130 miles, I took three pictures, with 30 to 40 miles between consecutive ones. Here they are.

At the end of that 130-mile stretch, which I pretty much covered in one day—I had NO desire to be there any longer than I had to—I ended up in the city of Bend.

Bend is actually a beautiful place, right at the beginning of the Cascade range. The people were friendly, and I met Kristine here, at whose house I am now. Ever since I arrived, it's been lazy days and parties.

----

And there, I'm caught up.

2009-09-01T06:19:00.001-04:00

Happy September, everyone. It's 3 AM and frigid in the central Oregon
desert, and I somehow have enough signal to get online. The phone
isn't good enough to continue the narrative even in a cursory fashion,
but I left off on Arnie and Joy. I was checking facebook updates just
now, and saw this one from Arnie:

Loading my little pigs still breaks my heart... I feel the full weight
of how the world really works and what I am.

2009-08-31T01:13:00.002-04:00

I'd like to apologize to everyone for the ridiculous trouble I've had updating this thing. It's not easy to get my hands on internet such that my time isn't strictly limited.

This is going to be a quick attempt to catch up, with a lot less detail than what you're used to if you've been reading this.

----

From Cody, I headed up the highway into the mountains.

I followed Shoshoni canyon,

constantly warned by everyone, as well as signs, to watch for bears and have my spray ready.

I pitched my tent by the river, and the sight of a tent without a car attracted a group of bikers (the motorcycle type), of whom a couple asked me to have dinner with them. The husband and I then went fly-fishing. The Rockies weren't looking so bad. I slept decently and though I couldn't see the sunrise, I could see some of its effects.

I was told the campgrounds in Yellowstone fill up by 8 AM. Once I got there, I found they actually filled up by 7 AM. This was obnoxious, so I made a straight shot through Yellowstone in one day. Morning in Yellowstone was below freezing, so pools of boiling water helped.

If dense fog that smells like rotten eggs is your thing, Yellowstone is for you.

Admittedly, geysers are pretty cool, especially if you've never seen that sort of thing.

Since I'd decided to jet through Yellowstone, I went ahead and crossed a couple of state lines in one day.

I ended up in Idaho Falls, where I met Arnie and Joy, who owned and lived on a pig farm. I couldn't eat the pigs myself, but I could unload and stack bales of hay, or, if there wasn't any heavy labor to do, pick pea pods.

----

At the table, Arnie picked up a pork chop and took a bite.

"Yeah, Lady. I remember Lady." He took another bite. "She was a good one, Lady."

I just sat there and smiled.

"It's one thing to know your food," said Arnie. "It's another thing to know your food."

"Is it hard to slaughter them?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's hard. But the way I look at it, somebody's got to suffer. Modern technology makes it too easy to kill. People nowadays don't want to know."

"I don't even know if that's a good thing or a bad thing," said Joy.

----

OK, this place is locking up, so it looks like I'm still not going to catch up all the way.

North Along the Mountain Range

2009-08-17T02:29:00.002-04:00

Circumstances in Wyoming kept forcing me to splurge. As I arrived in Thermopolis, it became clear that there was yet another hail storm headed my way. It had now been over a week of getting at least one storm every single day. I got a motel room. The towels in the bathroom hung on antlers. The bed was made of crooked wood, with a gun tossed in.

Just outside the room was a man bandaging his leg. I walked over.

"How are you?"

He looked up. "How're you doing?"

"What did you do to yourself?"

"Went roller-blading."

"Wow. Rough sport."

"Yeah, I was going down that street over there, and there's this sharp downhill. And I just started roller-blading, you know? And braking is really tough on roller-blades, you have to put this foot this way and this foot sideways like this. So I was going pretty fast. And this pickup truck. I don't think he even noticed me, he was making a left turn and looking at oncoming traffic. So I had to jump into the middle of the street to dodge him, and I fell on this wrist, and then on this leg. Man, I'm used to it though. I hurt myself all the time. Once, when I was younger, I tried to chainsaw these wooden beams that were lying around awkwardly, and apparently when I sawed one of them, the end jumped out and jolted the one I was standing on. Anyway, next thing I know, I wake up and my face is all bloody and I can taste diesel fuel. Turned out I'd stepped into a puddle of diesel, and then my foot got kicked up and into my face when I was thrown back. Wasn't feeling good after that for a while."

"You're a logger?"

"That's what I am. Run my own truck. Used to go 1,000 miles a day, but I couldn't take it anymore. Not to mention it's illegal. So now I don't live at home, I stay at this place, that way I only have to do 750 miles a day. It saves me a good bit of money, and I feel better. We've had a lot of work lately. They've been having forest fires around Jackson, so in the last few years, the Sierra club has had a complete turn-around, they now want to pay us to cut down trees to prevent more fire. For decades they did everything they could to prevent fire AND to prevent logging, and now they're getting it, and they're starting to see their mistake. Don't know how it'll be with this new administration though. They don't like us entrepreneurs. We think for ourselves. They want us to get in line for the dole like everybody else, and that's just not in us."

"I haven't heard of any new policies on logging."

He was about to respond, but a woman walked by with her dog, and his dog jumped up and ran at her, and he had to go manage the situation.

----

The next day I rode to Meeteetse. There was not a soul on the road, and no sign of civilization save for an unmanned rest area and a ghost town.

I saw yet another storm heading toward me (not a surprise—like I said, at least one a day), but there was nothing I could do about it, so I helplessly pedaled onward. Strong headwinds prevented me from pedaling past and away from it, so I let it pass ahead of me. Part of me was glad I hadn't tried to go faster, because when I passed the section of the road it crossed, the brush around it was torn up to a point where I was glad I hadn't been there to see it.

I started climbing to higher and higher passes, and the wind on the passes was strong enough that once I'd cross, I would have to pedal in low gear to go downward. It was only 52 miles to Meeteetse, but I was worn out when I got there.

Unlike in prior small towns, I didn't get any particular welcome here. I was getting too close to Yellowstone. In one section where the breakdown lane had debris that I was afraid might puncture the tire, I swung into the street for a bit, and a car going in the opposite direction, on the opposite side of the road, started honking at me. This drives me crazy in tourist-heavy places. You try to avoid a flat, you get honked at. You ride on the street, drivers yell at you to go on the sidewalk. You ride on the sidewalk, pedestrians yell at you to go in the street. You exist, you get honked at.

I had no phone signal out there, so I stopped by a gas station, got an egg salad sandwich, and asked what the forecast was.

"More storms moving in. I wouldn't be surprised to see big hailstones. You can try pitching your tent, but I wouldn't do it."

A destroyed tent would be more costly than a motel room. I got a motel room. And since I'd gotten one, I decided to make use of it. I took a shower, changed my clothes, headed to the bar.

"You guys get a lot of tourists passing through here?"

I got an emphatic nod. "Lots of foreign people. Lots of French this year, for some reason."

I noticed a flag that looked like an American flag on the wall. It had only three stripes. In the blue section, there was a circle of seven stars.

"What's that flag?" I asked.

"Looks like an old American flag."

"Can't be. There are only seven stars, and there were 13 original colonies."

"Hm. D__n. Let me ask the big man."

Pretty soon, a bald, white-bearded, bespectacled man sitting at a table turned around. "That's the original confederate flag. I got it for this bar last year. The stars are the seven original states that seceded from the Union. When they say stars and bars, this flag is what they mean. People think of the one with the blue X, but that's not it." He turned back to the people at the table. "So anyway, as I was saying. We bring the cannon into this bar. And I put his ashes in the cannon, and she runs home and brings some of her mother's ashes and we put them in the cannon. And she's saying 'this is the most excitement ma ever had, when she was alive she never got to be on top.' And so we load in the ashes and light the fuse, and everyone gets the hell out of the bar. Except me, because I'm an idiot and I'm trying to take a picture. And that thing goes off. It's a tiny cannon, yay high. But man, those things are POWERFUL. All those cans fell off the wall, and the thing rolled back and through the doorway. And it was a few minutes before I could hear again."

----

The next morning, I went to the gas station to get another egg salad sandwich for breakfast, and found a little blonde girl stocking the refrigerated shelves.

"You got an egg salad sandwich for me?"

She looked around and smiled. "Sure." She started getting it out and the sliding door went off the track.

"So you're the one who breaks everything around here?"

She laughed. "I always break stuff."

I stood around and talked to her for a while. Why couldn't she have been there last night? I bet she would have offered a couch. I went to the guy at the counter, trying to recall whether the woman last night had mentioned who will be working in the morning; she had.

"Hey, Vince."

He looked up, trying in vain to figure out where he knew me from.

"Mind if I grab some water?"

He still looked confused. "Go ahead..."

I filled up a couple of water bottles. "How's the road to Cody, is it all downhill?"

"You'll have about three miles of some pretty bad uphill first. Then, yeah."

I laughed. "Well, that sounds a little better than the road here from Thermop." I'd realized none of the locals say the entire mouthful of "Thermopolis."

"Oh, no, definitely nothing like that. Geez, I can't even remember where you're from. Getting older faster than I thought I would. Here, have some candy for the road."

----

It was a quick ride, besides the fact that I got into two involved conversations with construction workers and then another involved conversation with the people making my sandwich at the Subway on the outskirts of Cody.

I then swooped down into the city.

"You know the forecast for tonight?"

"Boy, what do you think?"

"Storms."

"You got that d__n right!"

Cody was not only the "gateway to Yellowstone," but a tourist attraction in its own right, devoted to Buffalo Bill Cody. As such, it had tourist-style prices. I started calling motels. Most simply had no rooms available. The EconoLodge was $200 a night. (No, that's not an extra 0.) I went to a campground.

"What's the forecast for tonight?"

"Storms. Pitch at your own risk."

"OK. How much will it run me?"

"$20."

"$20 to pitch my tent in a storm?"

"Feel free to just use the parking spot and sleep in your vehicle."

"I'm on a bicycle."

"$12."

"Deal."

----

I felt a little depressed that night. Not only did I not like being in my tent during a storm (that was the least of it—it held up like a trooper), but I didn't like being in places overrun by tourists. Suddenly, no one was particularly friendly, beyond smiling and rattling off all the local attractions. Suddenly, no one really wanted to talk to me. I didn't have phone signal either, so I just lay there, with no communication from the outside world, trying to sleep.

My phone's alarm woke me up at 5 AM. I hopped out of the tent, got on my bike, and zipped across the dark town to Mentock Park. I noticed several pickups with trailers like Neil's, and went over there. There was a large group of people standing around.

"Pieball!" someone yelled and let go of a small helium balloon. It went up, up, up into the air, blown slightly west by the wind.

"How are you doing?" I said.

"Good, how are you?"

"Beautiful morning! My name is Greg."

"I'm Jim."

"You think you'll need any help, Jim?"

"Oh, nice. Yeah, I definitely will."

Suddenly, I had a circle of people around me asking where I came from and what I was doing.

"Neil's a good friend," said one guy. "No matter what happens, we'll have a job for you here."

That very morning, I took a balloon up into the air for an inspection flight.

----

The one thing that happened that I hadn't particularly wanted was that my story was passed on to reporters covering the balloon festival, and a story about me was written up for the Cody Enterprise. But I couldn't complain. Staff from the Enterprise took me to the Irma (originally Buffalo Bill's hotel, named after his daughter) to eat. The next day, the reporter who was writing my story invited me out for a trip through the mountains with her and a friend who was visiting. People started inviting me to stay at their places so I don't have to stay in my tent (I accepted one of these invitations). I was invited to every party that was being held. When I walked into the tent where Dave was selling shirts, pins, and other balloon festival memorabilia, he immediately picked out a bunch and simply handed it to me. "This is to thank you for coming to Cody."

I expressed interest in the rodeo, and was immediately not only taken there, but also put on a horse. Borderline ridiculous photographs of me appeared (props to Sara the photographer, though!).

I still think it ruins my experiment to be covered by the press. Before the article ever comes out, the situation suddenly becomes wholly unnatural. I feel like I should be investigating what kinds of things I myself, as a normal person and not any sort of celebrity, can achieve. However, the balloon job is one thing I can safely say I achieved simply by arriving at the scene.

Photos from that job can be found here.

The Start of the Rockies

2009-08-15T20:03:00.002-04:00

I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates. It's been REALLY hard to get online, and once I'd get access, there would be so much stuff I would need to do that I'd never manage to get around to everything. So let me try to continue the story for a bit. It will likely be drier with fewer details, as I'm trying to catch up here.

----

When I left off, I'd just about entered the Rockies. So the next thing that happened was that I entered them.

Eventually, I descended into the Wind River Canyon and rode along the river for a bit.

I saw a sign for a roadside table and pulled over to take a break and eat some cookies. But there were two tables, one of which was occupied, and when I leaned my bike against the empty one, I heard a yell.

"Hey, man, where are you going?"

"Oregon!"

"Come sit over here!"

Never hurts to have some companionship. The guy shook my hand.

"I'm Ed, she's Penny."

"Nice to meet you both."

"Where did you start today?"

"Shoshoni."

"S__t, so you've been trekking through the desert! You probably need a sandwich. Turkey OK?"

This stuff almost doesn't even catch me off-guard anymore. "Sure."

"Mayo? Here, here's the turkey, here's some roast beef, here's some bread, make it yourself."

"Thanks!"

"Penny, do we have anything for him to drink?"

"Don't worry about it," I said. "You can't imagine how many water bottles I carry."

"Want to play a game of bones?"

"Sure, if you teach me."

It was just a game of dominoes with more complicated rules. I played one game that I completely lost because I didn't know the rules yet, then another game where I figured it out and started figuring out strategy.

"It's so beautiful out here," said Penny. "As soon as I got out of jail, I decided to head out here for a taste of freedom."

A storm was coming and the tables were sheltered, so I stayed with Ed and Penny until it passed. I figured out more strategy and started winning.

"OK," said Ed. "I think it's time you head on. Keep the score sheet as a souvenir."

I kept it.

----

Another seven miles down there was another roadside table, and I pulled over again. I checked if I had signal, and I did. I had a message, which I listened to. It was my friend Shaya wondering if I was OK, and saying that if I need it, he'll mail me stuff, or come out and pick me up. I called him back to say I appreciate it and tell him I'm OK. With the new armor, the bike was behaving beautifully, and I was feeling good.

As I talked, a man pulled up in a pickup with a trailer. He walked back and forth along the river, and I could tell he heard the conversation, which I didn't mind. As soon as I hung up, he walked over and said hi.

"You look like you're coming a long way. Want a Gatorade?"

"Sure!"

We went over to his truck and I downed the Gatorade. "Thanks!"

He asked lots of questions. This wasn't unusual, because people get curious.

"Man," he said, "today would have been a perfect fly fishing day. You fly fish?"

"Nope."

"Shame. It would have been an easy food source for you. Look, see those bugs on the water? There's going to be trout coming up to feed on them. Perfect time, right now."

It really was pretty cool, but I couldn't imagine carrying a fishing rod on the bike. Not to mention I had nothing to cook with.

"I'm Greg, by the way," I said.

He shook my hand. "Neil."

"So what's your story, Neil?"

"I'm going up to Cody. I work with a hot-air balloon crew. Ever been on a hot-air balloon?"

"Nope."

"It's really quiet and peaceful. I don't know if you're headed up that way, but we're all getting there by Thursday and a lot of crews could use some help. I know ours can."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Because I actually am headed up that way."

"Well, then, you should just come. We launch from Mentock Park. Will you remember that?"

"Montauck Park?"

"That's it."

The fact that I misheard was going to cause me a bit of trouble later.

"But the balloonists get there around 5:30."

"So I guess I'd want to be there around the same time."

"Yeah."

"That's cool, I can probably do that."

"All right. Well, I don't know if you accept rides, but I could probably load your bike in the back and take you all the way to Cody."

I'd heard Cody got some VERY heavy tourist traffic and was very expensive, and it was only Tuesday, so I'd be doing nothing for a couple of days there, probably spending ridiculous money on lodging.

"I really appreciate it," I said, "but I think I'll just ride to Thermopolis today."

"That's cool. Take another Gatorade for the road."

"Thanks!"

"It's nothing, you'll sweat it right out."

It was only a few miles to Thermopolis by then, and the wind had picked up mightily, so I walked into town, thinking about hot-air balloons.

2009-08-07T15:54:00.003-04:00

At the campground in Casper, I saw a campfire, and started wondering whether or not to crash it like I crashed the one at Fort Robinson back in Nebraska. But coming closer, I realized that wasn't an issue because the fire was on my site.

"You're welcome to have a fire here," were the first words out of my mouth as I walked up. "Mind if I pitch my tent though, before it gets dark?"

"Oh," the woman looked disapppointed. "Is that your site?"

"Yeah, but it's cool," I said. "Seriously, have your fire here."

"Oh, it's no big deal. I work here. We just sometimes light fires on empty sites, but I figured someone would show up. It's all right. You're welcome to have the fire, just see that it doesn't get out of control."

"Thanks...." I said.

She left and I started pitching the tent. Pretty soon, a man walked up.

"How are you doing?"

"Good!" I said, assuming he was a neighbor saying hi.

"I see you've got a fire going. You know you're welcome to use those logs over there too, right?"

"Oh, really? Thanks!" Darn. He worked there too.

I was about to continue working with the tent when a car pulled up and an older man got out. He was hunched over, with a scraggly beard, but he walked around nimbly and his voice was shrill.

"Hello there, mate!"

"Hello!"

"Mind if we join you at your fire?"

I made a big gesture. "Come on over!"

"I got ya some BEER!" he lifted a six-pack of bottles.

"Come on in!" I said with an even bigger gesture, making him laugh loudly.

Then he stopped and pointed at the bike. "You on THAT thing?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Here in Wyoming?"

"Yes, sir!"

He paused for a bit. "Ya got BALLS, buddy. Ya got BALLS. I could never do that. Now let's help you set up this tent."

We worked on it together and talked.

"So where do you carry your map?"

"Don't have one."

"WHAT! You don't carry no MAP?"

"Nope."

"Who goes biking without a map?"

"A complete idiot, for one," I offered.

He laughed that shrill laugh again. "You're right, a complete idiot! I'll look and see if I can give you a—now, now, come around and push, you know better than to pull those—so what do you do, pay people to give you directions?"

That just opened perfectly. "Maybe I would have, but I don't have much money on me."

"What! You don't carry no MONEY?"

"Well, I have a little. I stop every so often to work."

"....ya got BALLS, buddy, is all I can say. Here, let's get some chairs around this fire."

We got some chairs out of his trunk.

"You mind if I call my sweetheart and have her join us?"

"By all means; the more, the merrier."

He took out his phone and dialed. "There, sweetheart, he said we're welcome to join! See how it works? All you have to do is ask!" He hung up. "She'll be here in a bit. Now, I don't think I caught your name."

"Greg." I put out my hand.

"SWAMP!" He shook it.

"Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet ME? I've been dying to meet a crazy bastard like you!"

His sweetheart was the woman who had built my fire in the first place. We sat for only a short while before she went back to their RV (in which they lived pretty much year-round) to relax. Swamp and I sat and talked for a while more.

"Ya got plans for dinner?"

"Got a few pop tarts at the gas station, they'll tide me over tonight."

Again that shrill laugh that could probably be heard from a mile away in the night. "You bike and don't eat proper? Now that ain't BALLS, mate, that's just..."

I laughed. "Don't worry about it. I know what I can live on."

"Well, sure, but we got a lot of leftovers, and we didn't know what to do wit'em! Now this will work nicely!"

As always, I don't refuse.

----

The road from Casper to Shoshoni was almost as desolate as everybody had warned. It was 100 miles (right about exactly) from the middle of Casper to the middle of Shoshoni, with about 6 miles of non-empty road on either end. The remaining 88 miles were desert, with only one lonely store strategically placed right about in the middle. I zipped through it as fast as I could, which still took a big chunk of the day. Thankfully, it was pretty flat. Nowhere on that road would have been good for camping.

With the storms that were coming in, I got a room at the Desert Inn, unloaded my luggage, and headed over to the Shoshoni Public Library

where I attempted to use the internet for a while, but found that there was only one computer with internet, and as soon as I sat down, people came and started waiting for me. So I let them go.

I walked outside just as another bout of rain and hail came in from the north. I jumped on my bike and zipped away, possibly reaching 40 MPH, but that thing was fast and I got hit a couple of times before running into the inn and slamming the door.

I waited for the storm to pass and went down the street to the Desert Cafe to get dinner before going to sleep. When I woke up, the first place I headed was the Desert Cafe for breakfast. That's how these towns are. One inn, one cafe. Two gas stations, though.

----

After breakfast, I continued up route 20. Shoshoni quickly disappeared, and I was back in the desert.

But now I could see the Great Plains coming to an end up close ahead, and the mountains beginning. As I rode onward, with every few miles, I could actually see that end getting closer. There was a very distinct boundary.

----

That'll be it for now.

2009-08-03T17:16:00.006-04:00

My aplogies for the rare posting; I rarely can get internet, and when I do, my time is limited SEVERELY.

----

I sat at the bar with Jay, talking to whoever came along. I don't usually talk about my trip until and unless prompted, but Jay would jump right into it and tell people about me. Some guy named Tom had a girlfriend who started asking questions, which seemed to make him really upset. He seemed extremely tense around her in general. I made a few mental notes so I could later give Jay my complete psychoanalytical breakdown.

"Getting some armor, huh?" said Tom. "Too p__sy to fix flat tires?"

"Too lazy," I said.

"When you're done with this and ready to do some real biking, you should call me up."

"When I'm done with this," I said, "I'll be pretty sick of biking."

"You need to go south from here, into Colorado," said Tom. "Don't be a sissy. Cross some real mountains."

He seemed a little drunk, and I didn't really want to engage him, but I can't help loving these kinds of jousts—especially losing them and figuring out how and why I lost.

"Generally speaking," I said with a slight smile, "adults tend to achieve things the easiest way possible."

That made his girlfriend laugh. S__t. That was not what I had been trying for. I could see the wheels in his head turning, looking for a way to put me into an awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassing situation.

"So," he said after a bit. "Have you been sleeping with a lot of women on this trip?"

I have to give it to him; that was the way to do it.

"Come on, man. Look at me. What do you think? I tried everything. Tried acting insane, tried batting them off with brooms. Nothing works." I sighed loudly. "I guess that's just my lot in life."

His girlfriend jumped in. I wished she hadn't been there. "Where are you staying in Douglas?"

I nodded at Jay. "With Jay."

"Oh, cool! When'd you guys meet?"

"Yesterday."

She raised her eyebrows, but smiled wider. "Do you ever meet really creepy people?"

I gave my standard response. "Haven't met a single person I didn't like." I figured Tom was going to try to change that.

"Isn't it dangerous?" she asked.

"I dunno, I've felt pretty safe. There's only been one occasion when someone tried to kill me, and even then I felt like I was never in any real danger."

Suddenly a large portion of the bar was looking at me, including all the women (all two of them). This seemed to drive Tom crazy, so he spoke up again.

"How did you know he wanted to kill you?"

"You can generally tell."

"What did he want to do? Strangle you? Stab you?"

I shrugged. "Dunno, don't care."

"He tried to kill you and you don't know how?"

"He never got to me." I retold the story—a shorter version than ever before.

Tom didn't seem very pleased and went off in another direction. "Don't you have a job or something?"

"I just take whatever I can right now. Just enough to keep me going after taxes."

Mentioning taxes made him even angrier. "You know why that is? Because thanks to p__sies from states like yours, we have a N___ER in office!"

Jay and I bailed out, with Jay apologizing. I still don't understand how it had anything to do with him, or why an apology was necessary.

"I like those kinds of guys," said Jay. "They're honest. Some people who don't like him [Obama] for the same reason come up with bulls__t excuses about his policies. This guy just goes right ahead and says it."

----

I biked to Casper along the North Platte river.

You can always tell where there's a river, because there are actual trees. And then, in a slightly wider swath, there's actual grass. But you can tell you're still in the desert, if by nothing else, then by the roadkill.

I tried to stay on small roads. The pavement quickly disappeared, and I alternated riding and walking based on how loose the gravel was. Then I saw what looked like a huge animal on a hill up ahead. It seemed to stand calmly, right in the middle of the road, looking at me. I stopped too and looked back. After a while, the animal turned and moved off the road. But it did it too smoothly. There was none of the bobbing up and down that comes from alternating paws or hooves. I figured it must have been a small vehicle.

I rode to the next hill, and, sure enough, saw two men working on an ATV. As I walked over, one of them walked up to me with a puzzled expression on his face.

"What's going on?"

"Do you know how long this road will remain unpaved?"

He looked even more puzzled. "....probably forever."

Thinking he was joking, I smiled. "So all the way to Casper?"

"Oh, in that sense! It won't take you to Casper. Might take you as far as Inez. Hey, will he get to Inez on this road?"

"Yeah, you can take it to Inez or Natural Bridge," said the second man. "Where are you from?"

"Massachusetts."

He chuckled. "I've heard of such a place."

I smiled. "Never been?"

"Never."

"I've been gone so long, I think I've forgotten it myself."

"On that thing, I'm not surprised."

I braced myself for yet another "you need a motor on that bike," but it didn't come.

"You should move here, where you're actually free."

----

Sure enough, the road didn't go past Inez, and, for the first time, I got on the interstate. There was in fact an unpaved road parallelling it, but it was closed off with a gate through which I couldn't get the bike. I went ten miles or so and got off at the Glenrock exit. From there it was four miles to Glenrock.

I'd thought of stopping there because they were having a festival called Deer Creek Days, but during the day, it's a relatively boring family affair, and there's nothing to do for someone who comes alone. Plus the headwind was getting nasty again, so I rode onward.

Another cyclist caught up to me and for a while we rode together and talked. But I was carrying a heavy backpack, and, after a bit, needed to take a break, because the weight of the backpack pushes me into my seat, hard, and, as you can imagine, that begins to hurt after a while. I told him I'm going to get off the bike and walk a couple hundred feet. He said "see you later." That was when I realized there's no sense in me finding a group to cycle with, especially if they have a support van carrying their luggage.

----

I spent about $200 on armor for the bike at the shop in Casper.

"Are you doing this by yourself?"

"Yeah."

"Completely independently?"

"Yeah."

"All right! I've been waiting for years to see someone do that. All the tours going through here are either big, or have a van carrying all their luggage. Sissies."

----

This was all a long time ago now, but my time on the computer is running out. Not only have I not been able to get real internet in Wyoming, but I've had an exceptionally hard time getting signal—at least, signal consistent enough to upload anything. It's been an exceptionally difficult state to maneuver in, and I've spent more money surviving here than anywhere else so far, even though everything is cheaper here.

Lusk and Douglas

2009-07-31T17:40:00.004-04:00

After I left Dick and Joyce, I tried to find my way back to where I pitched my tent, but it was too dark for me to see anything. I followed the road for a bit, adjusting my course when I walked off onto grass, then looked up at the stars and realized I had been turned around completely and was heading eastward (I knew my tent was somewhere to the southwest). After following the stars westward for a bit, I found a gravel road leading in what seemed to be the right direction, but as I began walking down it, I heard a growl. I stopped and growled back, but I couldn't see the animal and I didn't want to get much louder so as not to wake anyone at the nearby campground.

I backed up a bit without turning around, but, realizing I had nowhere else to go, walked forward again. And again I heard the growl. I needed to see my opponent. With a growl of my own, I turned on the cell phone. It didn't give much light, but it was better than nothing. As soon as the screen lit up, I heard a rustle, and whatever was growling was gone. I guess the key is to be as unfamiliar as possible.

I lit up my boots as I walked and soon came to the first stream over the road. I recalled a wooden plank across it a bit upstream, so I walked up into the grass, found it, and, teetering a bit in the blackness, crossed to the other side. The next stream I forded, but the water never went above the top of my boots. I walked across the grass and finally, the phone illuminated my tent. I got in, unrolled the sleeping bag and lay down.

If I looked directly east, all I saw was pitch darkness, but I knew what was there: a barbed-wire fence, and beyond it, the pale gravestones of soldiers killed here by Indians a century and a half ago.

----

I woke up in the middle of the night to rain pounding the tent, with flashes of lightning and thunder, first in rumbles, then in claps. One thing about Nebraska is that, it being mostly grass, wherever you are in a thunderstorm, it's difficult not to be the tallest object around. At least there wasn't anyone out there explicitly trying to kill me. With every lightning strike, I calculated the distance. The closest strike still came nearly a mile away, and then they started getting farther. I went back to sleep.

I slept in until about 7, which is late when I'm in the tent. And just as I got out and started packing up, I came to regret it. Ominous clouds formed in the western sky and a new storm came in. I put on a rain coat, but as the water started coming down in buckets, it got miserable very quickly. I realized my bungee cords had disappeared, and started wondering how I was going to transport my luggage, even if I did manage to pack it now that it was getting soaked. Then I realized my pump was missing. I must have forgotten it in Chadron.

So on top of packing up in miserable rain, I now had a bad tire, flimsy patch kit and no pump, and 150 miles to go to a bike shop.

Oh, please, I thought. Couldn't something go right?

Then I drew my breath and kept packing.

Next thing I knew, a large pickup pulled up and Dick jumped out. Instantly getting soaked, he jumped back in, then came out with a towel over his head.

"Need any help?"

"If you have any bungee cords, I'll gladly buy them off of you."

Dick nodded and produced a pair of bungee cords. He wouldn't take any money. Then he silently helped me pack.

"Did you manage to pack your own stuff before the storm came?"

He shook his head. "Nah, it's still out there. We'll get a room at the lodge and pack it up when the storm passes."

With some difficulty, we managed to pack all my stuff. I was already more content. It had been soaked before, and I knew it dries well.

"You want to get in the pickup for a bit? It's dry in there, and I've got the heat on."

It sounded good.

"In fact, toss all your stuff in the back, we'll take you over to the lodge and get some breakfast."

We went over to the lodge, and Dick reserved a room.

"Eat as much as you want, it's on me."

"I appreciate it," I said, "but you really don't have to. My money situation is OK."

Dick looked insulted. "We feel blessed to be able to help a member of God's chosen people. Don't take that blessing away from us."

I really didn't have a proper response.

----

"I heard it's going to rain all day," said Dick, "so here is the plan. We're going to get you a room here at the lodge, and you can leave tomorrow."

"I'd love to take you up on that, but I really need to get to Casper as soon as possible. The earlier I get there, the more likelihood that they'll have what I need in stock and I don't have to wait until the next order."

Dick frowned. "Well, all right. Then I'll go cancel the room I reserved for you."

They said they'll pray for me and insisted on me taking $20. That's another $20 I intend to donate to some good cause on the west coast. Meanwhile, I have more cash in my wallet.

I insisted on helping them pack everything of their own and carrying it all upstairs for them.

----

Nebraska was never flat, but it had changed now. Instead of hills, I was starting to see buttes.

There were also more trees, though this turned out to be a very temporary thing (they later all but disappeared). Pretty soon, I was looking back at Nebraska and bidding it farewell.

Before I knew it, I was in Wyoming, and in the city of Lusk. I turned on my phone to check the weather, and found, to my dismay, that there was no signal. I saw what looked like a cheap food place and walked up. A girl opened the window.

"Can I help you?"

I smiled. "First off, do you know what the weather is going to be like?"

She gave me an impatient look. I couldn't understand why; there were no other customers. "Rain."

"Figures. What about tomorrow?"

"Rain."

I looked at the menu boards. "Not great ice cream weather. You guys sell anything else?"

She looked even more impatient. "Just what's on the menu."

I looked around a bit more and realized that far in the back, there were more menu boards with normal food items; I wished she'd pointed them out. When I don't like the personnel, it makes me really not want to buy.

I smiled at her again. "Long day?"

She didn't answer.

"....or are you always this unfriendly?"

"....can I help you?"

That was it. "I'm all good, thanks." I got my bike and went over to Subway across the street.

"What's up with not having phone signal in your town?"

At least here the girl behind the counter was smiling. "I don't know what the deal is here! I can get signal in Casper, but here, it's dead. A lot of stupid things like that about this town. I really want to leave Wyoming. I mean....I do love it here, it's beautiful, the land of big open spaces and all that, but you have to deal with this crap day in and day out."

----

I left Lusk in the morning and first got a real feel for the fact that I was in Wyoming.

Deer and antelope scuttled away from me as I rode.

("They get a bit spooked near the highway," Bruce had said. "Some people around here will just shoot them. Not even for food, just for fun. If you ask me, that's just mean. Though I have nothing against hunting and eating them. I hunt them myself with a bow and arrow. I made a helmet with antlers. I just lie down near somewhere where there's water and move my head the way they do when they're lying down. They walk right over, and I shoot them. It's going to be hard this season, though. It's been raining so much, there's water everywhere, you can't just lie down at the watering hole.")

Among the road kill, I started noticing wolves. Among the debris in the breakdown lane, I started noticing gun holsters. I rounded a bend and suddenly saw the Rocky Mountains, misty in the distance.

There were towns along the route on the map, but those that didn't have a population of 1 were abandoned completely. There would be a couple of streets with a few houses that now had gaping holes instead of windows, and maybe, somewhere deep in the grass, an RV without an engine or headlights. Sometimes you'd find a beautiful specimen of something that would have been razed long ago if people still lived in the area, like this schoolhouse with a bell tower in Shawnee:

I noticed that the landscape had changed again, and now looked like a desert. If I had been dropped here and not told my location, I may well have assumed eastern California, or New Mexico.

Except for the grass. But the grass was now shorter and brown, almost resembling the sand of the desert.

----

I arrived in Douglas early in the afternoon. Despite my thin tire, I had mercifully not gotten any flats. (If I had, I wouldn't have been able to fix them without a pump, and, all the towns being ghost towns with no gas stations, there were no pumps anywhere to speak of.) I was liking that thick tube I had gotten in Chadron. I made a mental note to get a couple of spare thick tubes when I got my armored tire.

Toward evening, I met Jay. Born in Utah, and having lived in Connecticut for a while, he moved back to Utah for college and now lived in Douglas doing IT for a hospital. We went out for Mexican food ("the only decent restaurant around here," Jay said), and he insisted on paying for me. I guess I'll just enjoy and appreciate it while it's happening and pay it forward later. After we finished eating, we just sat at the table and talked for a while.

"So," said Jay, "you'd probably want to check out the Douglas bar scene?"

"Sure, I'd go for that."

He rattled off a list of bars with short descriptions, I picked one, and we went. Jay quickly bumped into a bunch of people he knew, and we hung out and talked for a long time.

Jay let me sleep on a giant bean bag in his apartment.

----

The next morning, Jay went to work, and I walked around looking for a place to finally get a haircut. Jay had suggested one, but I wandered around that intersection and was apparently blind. Lunchtime came around and I still hadn't found it, so I met up with Jay at the hospital, where he was eating in the cafeteria because it was free employee lunch day.

"You can be an employee for the day," I was told with a smile.

"Works for me," I said.

After lunch with Jay and his boss, I finally found the barbershop Jay had suggested. It turned out to be a relatively large salon—certainly larger than anything I'd have expected in a place like Douglas, WY—and they were all booked up for the day. Now that was impressive.

I rode to the place Jay had suggested for buying bear spray. It looked like a small garage painted bright yellow.

"Can I help you with anything?"

"Yeah, do you carry bear spray?"

"Nope. Bears really aren't an issue here. You'd have to go up to Casper to get that stuff."

"Oh, that works, that's the way I'm headed."

"Well, then you can try Sportsman's Warehouse, that's right as you come into Casper. Rocky Mountain Sports probably has it too, but that's clear on the other end of town."

"Sportsman's Warehouse and Rocky Mountain Sports. That's perfect, thank you very much."

"You're welcome, and good luck."

"Oh, totally unrelated question. Do you know of a place where I could get a haircut in this town?"

He looked surprised for a second. "Go back out onto Yellowstone Highway and take a right. It goes over the bridge, zig-zags and takes you downtown. At the first light, there's a barbershop on the left there. And if you go up to the second light, on the right, there's another one. You can walk in and ask for Mary-Ellen. That's where my family and I always go."

I stopped by the first one, and since the barber there readily cut my hair, I didn't end up getting to ask for Mary-Ellen. Instead, having overheard some conversation, I sat down and started out with

"Did you say you caught seven fish, the smallest of which was 18 pounds?"

"That's what I said! It was a nice day."

"Where'd you find fish like that?"

"Flaming Gorge."

"Is that nearby here?"

"Wish it were closer. It's about five hours away."

"Oh, yeah?"

"In the southwestern corner. Part of the lake is in Wyoming, part in Utah."

"Oh, must be way up in the mountains."

"What are you talking about? It's all grass. Where are you from, anyway?"

After the haircut, I thanked him, paid him, walked out, then walked right back in.

"Completely unrelated question. Do you know where I could find a grocery store around here?"

"One block up, two blocks over."

And so I bounced around Douglas, again enjoying a bike with no luggage, getting everything I needed and, at each stop, getting directions to the next place.

Western Nebraska

2009-07-29T18:59:00.004-04:00

The road to Chadron was long and didn't really change. Bruce, an avid cyclist himself, told me there was no bike shop in Valentine that could do much for me, but that in Chadron, where he lived, the bike shop might be able to do something. He said he'll help me out, but that I'd need to do some work for him. I agreed to it.

Few people knew as much about the sandhills of Nebraska as Bruce did—his father had written an authoritative book on the history of the region—and I'd been guided as far as what to look for while passing by. It's a fascinating region.

Once I was in Chadron, Bruce gave me a day to rest and then took me up to South Dakota to work on an aspen stand.

"You'll get to see the Black Hills!" he said excitedly. As we headed up, he pointed out antelope and told me all about the history of the area.

We ended up on a private dirt road. When we got to the house on the private property, we met the owner, took a look at his greenhouse, and then drove up to the aspen stand, where I helped Bruce take leaves for DNA sampling and take GPS readings.

----

The next day I went to the bike shop. It was a bike shop and a barbershop in one.

"Hello!" said the owner.

"How are you doing?"

"Okie-dokie!"

"I was wondering if you could take a look at the bulge in my tire."

He took a look. He deflated it and re-inflated it. He had me inflate it while he held it with his hands.

"Well, I'm not sure what to tell you. I think you've got a s___ty tire."

"I wouldn't be surprised at all. It's been traveling with me for nearly 2,000 miles, all folded up most of the way."

"Yeah, feel here, and then feel here. See how it's not uniform?"

"Yeah. I'm thinking I'll just get a new tire."

"No-can-do. I don't have any in your size."

"..." I'd been afraid of this.

"Do you know where I could get one?"

"The nearest bike shop will be in Casper."

Casper is in Wyoming, some 200 miles from Chadron. "You think I could make it that far?"

"Let me see what I can do."

He took the wheel to the bathroom and struggled for a while with soap and water.

"I think I've removed most of the bulge, take a look."

"Thanks. Let me try riding on it. Oh, could I buy a multi spoke wrench off of you, by any chance?"

"Don't have any."

"OK. Then could I at least get a patch kit?"

"I don't carry patch kits."

I almost wanted to ask what kind of a bike shop this was, but I knew the answer already—the best in the region.

He sent me back. He didn't take any money. I rode the bike over to the shop later in the day.

"How's it riding?"

"Seems all right so far, without luggage. But I'm feeling a little queasy about this. What do you think of that green slime they sell at Wal-Mart to seal the tube?"

"Weak. I have some much better stuff here, with better granules."

"Ooh, could you put some in?"

"No-can-do! Can't put it into Presta valves!"

....s__t.

"Tell you what," he said. "I've got a thick, thorn-proof tube that's not quite your size but will fit. Heavier, but stronger. Want it as a spare?"

I liked the sound of it, but wondered whether it would actually fit. "Could we put it in now?"

"Sure!" He put it in. I paid him $10. I rode it back and it rode fine.

Too bad he was closing. I'd wanted a haircut, too. As my hair gets longer, it gets harder and harder to meet people and elicit an immediate positive reaction.

----

In return for having picked me up after 30 hours of unsuccessful hitchhiking, I sanded the rust off of Bruce's '63 Jeep.

I helped him with a couple more aspen stands. Bruce discovered an insect he had never seen before (I can attest to the fact that that would truly be a rarity) that he suspected was stressing the aspens in some way, so he trapped two of them and took them home for analysis.

----

Then I rode to Fort Robinson, past Crow Butte. When Crow Indians invaded a white settlement, the whites alerted the Sioux, who sent hundreds of warriors to drive them out. The Crow braves had climbed onto Crow Butte and would repel any attempt at an ascent by the Sioux by throwing rocks at them from the top and taunting them.

Bruce had told me everyone hated the Crow—both whites and other Indian tribes. He said that even now, a Crow could never hitchhike successfully in that area.

----

I arrived at Fort Robinson as it was getting dark. I pitched my tent in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a road that went through two large streams with no bridge (one of these streams had a board across it a bit upstream from the road). After pitching the tent, I went up to the campground to plug my phone in and make some calls and use the internet. No signal. I left it plugged in and started eating donuts, but I was lonely again. I saw a campfire in the distance.

I felt it would be rude to interrupt people at a campfire, but whatever. So what if I was rude to people I'd never see again. I walked over.

"Hey, how are you doing?"

"Hello..."

"I have more donuts than I could carry or eat here, so I thought I'd offer you some."

"Oh," said a middle-aged woman, "I don't eat sweets. Oh, and don't worry about the plastic on my head, that's just so I don't get smoke in my hair. I don't want you to think it's going to rain."

"Actually," I said, "I heard it was going to tonight."

"Oh, no! I hope not!"

I stood around and talked. The woman's husband came back. She told him my story. They had me sit down with them at the campfire. Their names were Dick and Joyce.

We talked mostly about taboo topics like religion and politics, deep into the night. Even without knowing what was coming, I was glad I'd risked being rude.

Nebraska!

2009-07-25T15:37:00.006-04:00

"You'll cross the Missouri," the RAGBRAI biker had told me, "and you'll enter Nebraska. And then you'll go insane. It's boring, and it's flat as a pancake."

When I left South Sioux City, it was, in fact, flat as a pancake. And I loved it. There wasn't much of a headwind, so it was some very easy riding, for once. I wondered about the woman who had biked away in the other direction earlier that morning, once I told her where to find the bridge. A few things had concerned me, among them:

She had no tent
She had no phone
She carried only one water bottle
She didn't know how to fix a flat

On the last of these, I regretted having let her leave before I left, because when I departed, I immediately discovered a flat and had to stop and fix it, and I thought it would have been very valuable for her to watch. Of course, she had pointed out that there should be cause for concern for anyone who observes me as well:

I carry no maps
I have nothing for cooking food, and my diet when I'm alone is candy
I carry dress shoes
I left my pepper spray back in New York and never replaced it, and have to scare off dogs just by being aggressive myself
I bike into the wind
I'd admitted to her that my first time fixing a flat was in fact once I got on the road for this trip, and I'd never seen anyone do it before

"You're clearly an idiot," she had said, "but you seem to be an invincible one."

"I hope I'll be able to say the same about you," I said.

She got me dinner and made me breakfast, so I hadn't eaten candy that night. But now I was biking on this flat road and realized I was going to need it. I saw hills in the distance, but, like over flat water, everything over flat land is farther than it looks, and as I pedaled, they didn't get much closer.

For a few miles, at least. Then I got to Jacksonville and bought candy.

"How far is the next town going west?" I asked the girl.

She looked confused. "There's not much there. But if you go 30 miles, you'll reach Laurel, that's really the next thing you'll notice, other than grass."

I bought a bunch more candy and refilled all my water bottles. I got into the hills. And for the first time, really, I just went over hill after hill and saw nothing besides grass. I just meditated (what else was I to do?) and the 30 miles passed relatively quickly. I'd used up about one third of the candy to keep my blood sugar levels up (otherwise my blood pressure drops too low sometimes), so I stopped to get more, and decided to get a sub to eat right there.

"You're in for some beautiful scenery," said the woman. "But don't ride on the dirt roads like you did in Iowa, unless you're ready to be charged by a bull."

I had been charged by a bull on a back road in Mexico a few years earlier, and was definitely not ready to be charged by one again.

"What's the next town over, going west?" I asked.

"You'll pass Belden, but you probably won't see a single person there, just an elevator. Randolph is really your next town, it's about 16 or 17 miles from here."

When people say "elevator" here, they mean a grain elevator. I took off to Randolph, where I stopped for more candy, to put some air in my tire, and to refill my water bottle. Since I had refilled in Laurel, I only had one to refill.

"What's the next town over, going west?"

"You'll hit Osmond in about eight or ten miles."

Nice. It was actually 12 miles, but that was fine.

"What's the next town over, going west?" I asked the girl.

"There's Plainview, it's about ten miles away. You're going to bike all the way to Plainview?"

Another girl chimed in. "He probably came from hundreds of miles away, look at him! Where are you from?"

The first girl laughed. "What do you know, Juanita?"

I grinned. (You'll notice I do a lot of grinning.) "Juanita, huh? How did you know that? Have you been stalking me since I was in Iowa?"

I debated whether I should try to get Juanita to offer me a place to stay in Osmond, but the sun was still high, and I felt like I might not have covered even 70 miles. So I eventually told them it's time for me to be off to Plainview, went out, and got on my bike.

Flat tire.

I pulled over immediately and found myself at an auto repair shop.

"You mind if I fix my blowout here?"

"Not at all."

I popped off the tire and started looking for the puncture in the tube. A worker walked over.

"I've never seen someone patch a bike tire, mind if I watch?"

"Not at all," I said. "See, I just popped off the tire with these irons, and now I'm inflating the tube a little to try to find the puncture."

"You want me to bring over the air pump so you don't have to pump it by hand?"

"That would be awesome, actually, thanks!" I popped Kenbob's converter onto the valve so that the air hose would fit on it.

But when I inflated it, I found that the leak was so slow that I couldn't locate it.

"I know something that will work," said the worker, and got a big canister with a hose on it.

"Oh, is that the foam you put into flat tires? Don't give me that, that's no good for me unless there's a bike shop within a few miles."

"It's just soap and water," he said, and started spraying it on the tube. And sure enough, in one spot, little bubbles appeared. He had located the puncture.

I dried the punctured section of the tube in the sun (it was about 100 degrees out), then showed him how I sanded it, applied a film of vulcanizing fluid, and then applied a patch.

"You guys getting anywhere?" It was the owner of the repair shop.

"I think it's pretty much set," I said. I had noticed the puncture was in the same place as a previous one, and on the inside, so I was checking the rim. I realized that the rim strip had slipped off and gotten glued to the side, and I couldn't get it back with the tools I had.

"Oh, wow, I see," said the owner. He brought me some tape and taped the rim. We hoped that would avoid punctures until I got to a place where I got my hands on the right tool (I ended up fixing it at a gas station with a big pair of scissors).

"How far are you planning on going today?"

"Well, I'm told Plainview is about ten miles away, and the sun is still high. What's the next place after Plainvew?"

"That would be Orchard, but you don't want to go there. It's a good 30 miles from here."

30 miles didn't sound bad, but when I checked the time, I found I had an hour and a half until sunset, and, what with flats, I didn't want to bet on holding 20 MPH the entire time.

The owner continued trying to talk me into not going past Plainview. "They've got a really nice city park. I really think you should stay there tonight."

I smiled. "Sounds good. That's where I'll head then." I figured I'd make my decision once I got there.

"You know what you need?" he suddenly said. "You need a motor on that bike."

Ha, ha. Like I don't hear that one every hundred miles.

----

I got to Plainview, and it was as if they had planned on my arrival.

I was tired and decided to check out the free camping they had. They had lights, power outlets, a bathroom—I didn't even look any further; I just relaxed in the park, charging my phone and using it to access what internet I could. I pitched the tent after dark, but I didn't care, because I just flipped on the lights.

----

The next morning, I went across the street to grab breakfast ($1.19). As I walked out, a man in a dress shirt and slacks walked over to me.

"Hello!" he said.

"How are you?"

"I'm having a great day! And I hope you do too. Here's my business card."

Then he walked inside without even a good-bye.

----

I rode out to Orchard. I realized I hadn't even noticed how slowly, over about 1,000 miles, trees had gone from being the rule to being the exception. First it had been just forests back in Massachusetts, with small fields appearing as I went west and then through New York. Ohio and Indiana had much bigger fields, but you could always see trees on the end. Then, after Chicago, the cornfields had appeared, and you could see only islands of trees. Now the corn was mostly gone and trees were quite rare.

The $1.19 breakfast hadn't been enough, so I walked into a small shack that had the inscription "The Lunch Box," where I ordered a small steak. It was set up like a small diner with tables and no booths. I sat at a table, and the people at the next table over started talking to me right away.

"Is that your bike out there? Where are you coming from? Where are you going? Has it been fun so far?"

I tried to get them to tell me about their own lives. A big man with a mustache walked over and sat down across from me at my table.

"You don't mind if I sit at your table, do you?"

"Go right ahead."

His name was Ryan. He gave me his last name too, which I won't post here. I noticed that people here always give their name with their last name, and always expect me to give my full name too, which still makes me a little uncomfortable. Last names here will often tell people what town somebody is from and what people they mutually know. My last name being completely unfamiliar, people often mis-hear it and identify me as being related to somebody from some nearby town, which I guess I don't mind. I even occasionally say that I'm a very distant cousin, which, in the scheme of things, is, in a way, likely true.

Ryan asked about jobs I used to do before I took this trip. There were a lot of those, too, and I talked about some of them, and some of the kinds of business I tried to do.

"Oh, you translated? I could have used that. Maybe I wouldn't fight so much with my girlfriend."

As always, I grinned. "Would you have needed me to translate into some national language, or just woman-speak?"

He shook his head. "Spanish."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah, let me show you." He took out his phone. "That's her. She's beautiful, isn't she? But we've been fighting a lot lately. Her brother and cousin don't like me. Just because I wouldn't get them a cell phone. But, you know, I don't want my credit f___ed up. And they could just take off anytime. You understand, right? See, and I feel like she should, too. Her cousin back in Guatemala is a cop, and he understands. He likes me. But she was calling me all sorts of bad words in Spanish and beating me over the head with a bible. Some of those people pretend to be religious and righteous, but....I don't know, you know how it goes." He laughed. "All I know is I'm going to bible study tonight, and she'll probably be there, and I'll try to be nice to her and see where it goes. It's about all I can do."

I thought it was amazing what some people are willing to put up with.

"Sometimes I wish I could just take off like you, but I can't just leave her here alone. Not to mention I'm a single father. I've got an eight-year-old son. Here, take a look, this is him. He's the only joy in my life."

----

It was 11 miles to Inman, but for some reason, now that I'd eaten the steak, those 11 miles felt longer than 30 miles would have earlier, and less pleasant. I made a mental note not to ride so soon after I eat. I stopped in O'Neill, went to a grocery store, and snatched up 12 Little Debbie cookies.

"How far is the next town over going west?"

"Atkinson is a smaller town about 20 miles from here."

I checked the calories on the cookies, counted off 3,000 calories and ate them. I put the rest in my pack. Then I found a place in the shade with an outdoor plug, plugged in my phone, and checked my E-mail and responded to a bunch before taking off again. It really did work out better.

I stopped in Atkinson, got more candy, washed my face, refilled my water bottle. The next town was Stuart. I shot over there, washed my face again, and refilled my water bottle. Newport was another 10 miles down the road.

I started riding and got a flat tire. I fixed it, rode for two more minutes, and got another flat. I fixed that. I had one patch left. I knew of no nearby bike shops. It was starting to get dark. I started riding. It was bumpy, but I figured it would get me to the next town and I'd check it out in the morning. Then there was a pop as the tube exploded.

Suddenly, my morale was completely gone. Who had gotten the idiotic idea of making inflatable tires, anyway? Why not just make a solid rubber one that is a little less smooth but doesn't go flat?

I started walking with my bike, but I didn't know whether I was closer to Newport or Stuart. I tried to flag down a car, just to ask which town was closer. I wanted to minimize the distance I had to walk on the highway in the dark, carrying my luggage and my bike (which no longer rolled). Several cars went by. Then I saw a small one and when I flagged it, it instantly pulled over. As it did, I looked at the side and realized why: "NEBRASKA STATE POLICE"

"Something wrong?"

"Just blew out a tire and it's a little late to be taking care of it now. You know if I'm closer to Newport or Stuart?"

He thought for a minute. "Did you check which dirt road that is over there?"

I had. "463rd."

"Well, s__t. I'd say you're right about in the middle. Five miles either this way or that way. Pick your poison."

And then I realized I had forgotten to eat candy. My head got really light. I had dropped my pack and I realized that by the time I'd reach it, my blood pressure would be low enough that I'd pass out. I grabbed a water bottle and drank, hoping the water would still be cold enough to jolt me, which would give me enough time to reach a candy bar.

Next thing I knew, I was seeing pleasant but completely unrelated visions. They were like two-second dreams, one after another, and I was thoroughly enjoying them. And then one came up that was a little weird. In it, I opened my eyes and I saw pavement within an inch of them. I realized I was lying down at the side of a highway. I raised my head.

"Sir! Don't move! You need an ambulance?"

It was a frightened police officer. Oh, s__t, this one wasn't a dream. I sat up.

"Nah, I'm fine, I just need some sugar."

The cop perfunctorily patted his pockets and looked around. "S__t! I don't have any!"

"I do. Here, they're in my pack." I took out three Snickers bars (for some reason in Jacksonville they'd been cheaper than Milky Way, which I prefer).

"Are you sure you're OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine now, I just needed the sugar. Sometimes when I get stressed out, I forget."

"Diabetic?"

"Nope."

"Then you must be....what's that other thing called?"

"Hypoglycemic," I suggested. I actually don't think that's my condition—I've never really identified it—but it satisfied him.

"Yeah, that's it! Hypoglycemic."

"Sorry I scared you."

He laughed. "Oh, it's fine. I have friends in the force who are diabetic, so I've seen stuff like this happen before. You want to take a seat in the cruiser for a bit, with the A/C?"

"Yeah, honestly, I wouldn't mind at all." Ever since Ohio and Indiana, most days had been sunny and close to 100 degrees.

"I have to pat down anyone I let into the cruiser though. You don't have any firearms or knives on you, do you?"

"Nope, but feel free to pat me down."

As he patted my pockets, I identified the items he was touching out loud. I realized hours later that I did, in fact, have a knife in my vest pocket, but I'd forgotten and he hadn't patted any of the pockets on my vest.

I sat down in the front seat of the cruiser and he sat down next to me. "What's your name?"

"Greg."

"Greg...." Oh, s__t. I'd forgotten people here always expect a full name.

"It's a weird last name. Here, I usually just let people look at my license."

He took my license and a jolt came over him as if he had just remembered something. "You don't have any outstanding warrants or anything, do you?"

I laughed. "No, but feel free to check."

As he ran it over his walkie-talkie, I caught myself wishing I did have an outstanding warrant. It would have meant a ride to a solid roof over my head, with no need to pitch a tent. When I realized this was my thought process, I decided I would shell out the money for a motel.

"You know," said the cop, "I just thought of something. I'm not allowed to give people rides, but since you passed out, I might be able to get permission to take you back to Stuart. The only thing would be your bike—I can't fit it in the cage, I don't think—but we can leave it at the side of the highway and take the rest of your luggage, and I'll find someone with a pickup to bring it to you." It sounded good to me. He pushed the button on his walkie-talkie, gave the mileage on his odometer, and said he was giving a ride to a hypoglycemic man who had passed out on the highway. Whatever works, I guess.

"I don't know what anybody else says," he said, "but I love Nebraska. I was born and raised here. It's a pretty boring job to be a night shift trooper here, but that says good things about a place."

"What kinds of stuff do you usually get to do?"

"A lot of speeding tickets. Early in the night, usually some DUIs. Later in the night I'll get called to break up a fight. Basically just cleanup crew. So thanks for making tonight a little more exciting."

"'Welcome!"

"Well, you know, that's not entirely fair either. My family lives around here, and I feel like every drunk I get off the road, they're that much safer."

He helped me carry my luggage into the motel. Within the hour, a woman officer came by with my bike. "You sure you're OK?"

I smiled. "I'll be perfectly fine."

----

The next morning, I called Jilly and Kenbob and asked for any advice I could get on misbehaving tires. Then I fixed my rim strip, put in a completely new tube and a completely new tire. (This was actually a sad moment, as the tire had been with me for about 1,500 miles now, and the tube for about 1,000. The history of my flats was recorded on the tube, which was pockmarked irregularly with patches all around it.)

But when I started inflating it, I got the dreaded bulge that I had gotten on my front wheel in Dubuque. The difference was that there was no bike shop here. I called up Charlee and asked if he could give any advice on a bulge. He said it would require tools he was pretty sure I didn't have, because it would be heavy stuff you can't carry. He told me to hitch a ride to a bike shop.

The only "bike shop" around was the furniture store, I was told. I went there, and it turned out that one of the members of the family that ran it did, in fact, love bikes, and did repair them. But he had died a while earlier.

"We do have some solid rubber tubes left over from back when he was here, if you want to check if any of them fit. I won't be able to help you, but if you know your stuff, have at it."

I almost couldn't contain my shock. Just the night before, I'd been wondering why no one else had thought of solid rubber tubes and tires, and here we were. I went back to the motel (which was the same building and same family as the gas station) and asked if they wouldn't mind me staying a bit past checkout time to fix my bike. They didn't. I brought back my wheel. None of the tubes fit.

"Hold on, let me call my sister in Atkinson and see if she's got anything."

The woman at the furniture store made a call. No luck.

"Well, she said her brother in law in O'Neill might have some."

She made another call. No luck. She made several more calls to nearby towns. No luck.

"All right," I said, "I'll figure something out. But do you carry patch kits? I'm just about out of patches."

"No, but let me call my sister." She called again. "She's got patches, let me see if my husband is driving by Atkinson right now, he might be able to get them and bring them here." He wasn't, and neither were a few other people she called, but eventually, she reached someone distantly related by marriage who planned to pass through Atkinson in half an hour. I bought all the patches in the store.

----

But the problem of the bulge remained, and I needed a bike shop, so I got my stuff out of the motel and prepared to hitchhike to Valentine, where I thought there might be a bike shop. I stood out on the highway for a bit, but I realized that cars didn't seem to go past this town. The very rare car that appeared would either be leaving Stuart going the other way, or be coming from the other way and going to Stuart.

I went to the city offices. The only person there was the town clerk.

"Oh, wow, you are stuck! The problem is the county line is between here and Newport, and people tend to work within the county. It's not often that you'll have someone driving between counties. Here, let me take your phone number down. I'll call some people and I'll give you a call if anyone is headed that way. They won't take you all the way to Valentine, but partway wouldn't be bad, either, would it?"

I went back to the gas station.

The woman there apologized to me. "I called a few people I know who drive fertilizer trucks and whatnot, but they're not going out there until next Tuesday."

Wow, these roads got virtually no traffic. I smiled because I had nothing else to do. "Guess I'll pitch my tent here tonight, then."

She smiled too. "Well, there's not much else you can do, is there?"

"You know of a place I can get dinner?"

"Go downtown by the watertower, there's a bar there."

----

I took a walk. When I'm biking, it's OK to be alone, because I can meditate. When I'm stuck in a tiny town in the middle of Nebraska and don't know when I'll be able to get out, it suddenly gets really lonely. I walked around. Everyone knew who I was. Everyone waved to me. People stopped to talk. But there was no one here I really connected with (amazingly, in other places I've passed through, there have occasionally been such people), and I suddenly felt utterly alone. I desperately wanted to get out of this town, and I couldn't do it.

I walked by a small store, and the door immediately opened and the woman who was running it walked out.

"Did you manage to get your bike fixed?"

I had never seen her before in my life. "I don't have the right tools. I'm working on hitching a ride."

"I heard your issue was the tires. My kids haven't been riding much, you might be able to use their tires."

I was pretty sure they wouldn't fit, and tried to just answer politely, but a man who turned out to be her husband walked up, shook my hand, and introduced himself by first and last name.

"Lou," said the woman, "could you drive him down to check the kids' bikes?"

Before I knew it, I was in his car. We drove to a small trailer home.

"How does this tire look?"

"Bit too small and too wide."

He looked surprised. "If this one's too wide, you're SOL." (Note for foreign readers: that means "s__t out of luck.")

"That's what I figured."

He drove me back downtown (it was about three blocks away) and dropped me off in front of the bar. I went in and ordered three double burgers; with the bars out here, that's become my usual.

The sky had been blue when I walked in, but within about ten minutes, some girl walked in and as she opened the door, I heard rain pounding the ground and hailstones clinking loudly.

"Does this kind of stuff happen out here all the time?" I asked her.

She smiled and nodded. "Are you glad you're not on your bike now?"

I might not have known these people, but they sure knew who I was.

----

By the time I left the bar, the rain had stopped and you could see the storm moving away.

I walked back to the gas station slowly, still craving companionship. It reminded me of a novella I had wanted to write as a child about the Earth getting destroyed and one man being left alive (oh, how original), and about the subsequent mental breakdown he endures from the lack of socialization. I had planned to end it with him finding a payphone and dialing a number and hearing a semi-human voice on the other end saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed...", and, that being the closest thing to human contact that he was going to get, have him, in the final paragraph, holding the phone and just dialing that number, over and over, listening to the voice on the other end.

Now, walking through Stuart, I realized the story, although it hadn't been written, was already technologically dated. I got back to the gas station.

[SECTION SNIPPED SO NO ONE GETS INTO TROUBLE]

----

The next day, I was picked up by Bruce. He lived way out in Western Nebraska, and was driving up to Smith Falls to check on the aspens there.

"Aspens are amazing trees," he said once I was in the car with him. "Once they grow, they bring everything else. They grow in stands. The whole stand is one living organism with one root system. The stand by Smith Falls is about 12,000 years old. And it's going to die if we don't take care of it."

I just listened and watched the plains of Nebraska shoot by.

"In western Nebraska, we have one of the biggest uranium mines in the world. 800,000 tons of yellowcake per year. Can you imagine? We're working hard to close them down. I'm actually really upset with the current administration. Their energy policy is just not tough enough. And they're allowing nuclear. It's like they've never seen Chernobyl. I've been to Chernobyl. Twice. And nuclear is the most expensive energy in the world. More expensive than any other way to generate electricity. There's no reason why we should be using it."

I don't know why I didn't ask why the market wouldn't adjust to the expense by itself.

We got to Smith Falls via a long and completely desolate road, the last four miles of which were dirt.

"Man, look at these cedars. All over the place. I wish I could just take a machine gun and—boom, boom, boom!—gun them all down. We're working on cutting them all down. We'll have them all eradicated from here someday. See, here's a bunch we cut down. The good thing is that once you cut down cedar, unlike other plants, it never grows back."

It crossed my mind that in some sense, environmentalism often ends up being related to eugenics. But it's really not like life has ever allowed for much else: someone, or something, is going to die. The question is whether we choose to meddle, but the choice not to is just as much of a life-and-death decision.

It then struck me that humans, as well as all animals, seem to always feel a need to alter the surrounding environment, just on different levels. At first, we alter it to survive. Once we're set with that, we alter it for our comfort. And once we're set with that, we alter it to our heart's content, however we feel appropriate, to whatever seems nice to us. Bruce's constant travels around Nebraska and South Dakota to preserve the aspen stands were a sign that he lived somewhere with a very high quality of life.

We checked on the aspens, making our way through the tall grass along the Niobrara River.

Bruce walked ahead, so I knew how my footing would be, whereas he regularly fell in. He also cleared out all the ticks for me, as they all jumped onto him.

When we got back to the car, we checked each other for ticks (I only had one on my clothes, whereas he had at least 15 I counted), and I found to my delight that there was someone else who hated ticks as much as I did. He made sure to rip each tick in half as he removed it.

"At home, I have a pair of pliers to crush them. Or else, if you're feeling really mean, you can toss them into a jar of acid and just watch."

Rain

2009-07-21T10:02:00.002-04:00

In Iowa, it seemed every single day the headwind got stronger. When I left Galva, it was particularly nasty, and it started getting hilly again. I came back out onto Highway 20, and slowly made my way to Sioux City, often getting off the bike to walk. I reached Sioux City by late afternoon, and met Kevin and Mary, who let me take a shower, get online, and have a bed to sleep in.

These were truly my kind of people, who had run business after business from their own home. Kevin had even run a mortgage business, something I couldn't imagine dealing with. Because Kevin enjoyed remodeling so much, the house was constantly being remodeled, and I observed some very impressive additions in progress.

The next morning, Kevin and Mary left for Kansas City, leaving me at the house. There's really no danger of having anything stolen by me; the absolute last thing I need is extra weight. And I wasn't alone, anyway. Their son Riley would come by pretty regularly with his friends, and then there was Yeonji, a student from South Korea who had been living with them for the better part of a year.

I spent most of the time sleeping. On my last day, after Kevin and Mary returned and made some amazing chicken on the grill, Yeonji convinced me to actually get up and go outside (I hadn't been outdoors for days) to hang out with some of her friends, who first gave me the idea that if I'm in desperate need of a lantern and have a jar, I can catch a bunch of lightning bugs out here, and as long as I make holes in the lid so they have air, they will light up every time I shake the jar.

----

The next morning I left, hoping to maybe cover the 125 miles or so to Inman, NE. However, while I was still riding through Sioux City, it started to rain. And the rain got stronger. Fast. By the time I was crossing the Missouri River, I was soaked.

I managed to get to Nebraska, but barely. No matter how nice I managed to make it look in the photos, it was getting really nasty out.

I still rode for a while, but I quickly gave up. I dove under an awning, turned on my phone, and checked the yellow pages for a motel. I found one for $40/night. That's a day of work right there, and sometimes more, but there was no way I was staying out in this weather. I started heading over.

"Excuse me, sir!"

It was a woman in an official-looking fluorescent yellow reflecting jacket. I assumed I was in trouble for whatever reason and, without thinking, stopped short and jumped off my bike. Laden with luggage as it was, it started to fall over, and she helped me catch it.

"Sorry about that," she said.

I still assumed she wanted to cite me for biking on the sidewalk, on the left side of the road, or through a red light, all of which I had done. "What's up?"

"I'm a bicyclist too. What are you doing about the rain?"

Weird, I didn't see a bike. "Just heading to a motel right now."

"How much is it?"

"$40."

She paused only for a fraction of a second. "Want to split a room?"

I didn't pause at all. "Sure."

As it turns out, we both had the exact same thought go through our heads: Well, that was easy.

She was riding from South Dakota to Vermont, and this was her first day, on which she had swung south to see a bit of Nebraska. The last thing she could have on her mind was citing me, as she had accidentally ridden on Interstate 129 earlier in the day. Her bike was at the library, so we hung out there for a while discussing other potential options. We checked the weather, and the rain was definitely not going away or getting any lighter. We got completely soaked just getting to a motel.

After taking a hot shower and jumping onto a real mattress, something I hadn't expected for possibly over a week, I watched with pleasure as it poured all night. And here I was, in safety and warmth, for $20. Exploring "real" Nebraska would wait until the next day.

Cresting the Horizon

2009-07-17T22:50:00.003-04:00

With pops that had once stopped my heart, but that I was getting used to, the rocks flew out from under my tires. As the roads all turned to gravel, I was going to learn to ignore it. After all, outside of my imagination, the sound and feeling were nothing like those of getting a flat. (My most disturbing dreams now were about flat tires.)

Just the day before, in the cozy Lampost (which, it turns out, is spelt with only one "p"), I had been Algernon Moncrieff (to whose personality, they say, mine bears a striking resemblance) in a pretty random reading of Oscar Wilde, and now I was back at this. It wasn't quite flat, but it was hard to tell out here, unless I looked at the horizon. As I rode towards it, it often wouldn't actually move away. I'd get closer and closer and realize I was approaching the crest of a very gentle-grade hill. And only once I'd reach that horizon would another suddenly appear in the distance.

Sometimes, by sheer luck, I chose the "right" gravel road, which apparently saw more traffic than most (though one wouldn't notice by observing cars, of which there were none). Like the time I rode down one that had a rest area.

Other times, I didn't choose a very good one. Riding down one of them, I heard, then saw, two dogs charging out at me, barking as if I were coming to kill them but they could take me on. It no longer even surprised me when dogs were suspicious of me on my bike. Native Americans had originally thought that a horse and a mounted man were one animal. How could I ever expect a dog to discern that I'm just a human on a bike? I jumped off my bike and tried to look aggressive. Then I saw two more dogs behind them. A big black one was within a few feet of me now, and still charging.

I spread my arms and puffed out my chest. I saw it flinch and slow down, but barely. I thrust a finger in its face and barked "NO!" My bark was significantly louder than that of any of the dogs. They all stopped. I kicked some gravel at the black one and took a step toward it. It took a step back but kept barking.

"Get back here, all of you!" It was a woman coming out toward the road. "I'm awfully sorry. None of them bite."

"Oh, really?" I dropped my hands and relaxed. The dogs all came within a foot of me and started jumping and barking threateningly, but indeed, if I walked in any direction, the dog that was in my way would flinch and jump aside. I pretty much knew the next thing was going to be a question: either where I'm headed (60% chance) or where I'm coming from (30% chance).

"Where are you headed?"

"Oregon." OK, if I got one of those, the next question was almost certainly going to be the other one.

"Get out of here! Where are you coming from?"

"Massachusetts."

"God bless you! What in the world are you doing on this road?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't find a paved one."

"Well, I've got good news for you! In a mile and a half, you'll hit blacktop."

This did, in fact, make me pretty happy.

"Do you need your water bottles filled?"

"If you're offering, I'll take you up."

"Sure, come on over! Sorry about the dogs."

I grinned. "Oh, that's quite all right, I like dogs. Just never know about them when they're charging out at me. Much like people, you know?"

"You want some ice in your water?"

"Don't bother. In those bottles, any ice will be warm water in 15 minutes."

"Really? Then let me get you a glass of ice water now so you can enjoy it. Here, have a seat at the table on the porch. Let me move it over so it's in the shade. Get out of here, you stupid dog!"

I sat down, thinking—you guessed it—My kind of state, Iowa. "Thanks!"

"Actually, you want some iced tea?"

"Sure!"

"Let me get you that. Oh, and check that box, I made some cookies, there should be some left. Feel free to finish them."

The box had no fewer than 30 cookies (probably more like 40). She came out with my iced tea and then sat down and asked all the usual questions. A man came out onto the porch and I stood up to shake his hand.

"I'm Greg."

He shook it. "Paul."

"And I'm Judy."

I had gotten so into the hospitality I'd forgotten to introduce myself previously. "Nice to meet you both."

"He's biking across the US," said Judy.

Paul raised an eyebrow. "You're insane."

I grinned. "You're probably right."

"How much did you pay for that bike?"

Back in Freeport, Jilly had been reading a book about how people don't talk about money. I admired the straightforwardness. Judy filled all my bottles from the hose.

"Well," I said, "all your cookies are gone."

"Good! How many calories do you think you got out of that?"

"I have no idea and it doesn't matter. They were delicious."

"You know, I bet you can do this more easily than other people. You're a pretty good-looking guy, I bet wherever you go women are all over you."

I wanted to say that's not fair and I've met all sorts of people who have helped me just because they were kind. But I figured at the moment there was no importance to being earnest, so I shrugged and said "Probably factors in."

"In fact—and I don't mean anything by this—but you know who you look like?"

"Whom?"

"Like one of those terrorists. From one of those countries like....Israel. Or Egypt."

Dangerous political territory, of course. Again, the first response that formed in my head was to ask her when she had last heard of a terrorist from Israel, but I held my tongue (figuratively) and grinned. "Is that the definition of a good-looking guy for you?"

Pretty soon we parted amicably. I really needed to get some distance in that day.

"Safe travels!" yelled Judy as I rolled away. "Don't hijack any planes!" But not before she packed me some meatloaf sandwiches and chips for the road.

----

Dozens of miles west of there, my back started to hurt, to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. Hundreds of miles back now, Kenbob had told me the one thing I do that he couldn't is carry a backpack. He said he would much rather have had a trailer. I was feeling it now. Anytime I changed posture, it would move up or down and chafe against the skin of my back. I couldn't understand why, for well over 1,000 miles, this didn't bother me at all, and suddenly it was so painful.

A common method of torture is to administer the same pain over and over again at regular intervals. This is precisely what cracked pavement did to me (for some reason, I noticed cracks in fact tend to come at regular intervals), and within a few miles of me first noticing it, it was driving me insane. I was ready to do almost anything to stop it. I got off the bike.

I immediately thought of putting the backpack on the rack on the back of the bike. I attached it with the bungee cords that were already there and started riding. It was OK until stuff started falling off. Too much tension on the cords from the pack, it was pulling them off of the other stuff. I took a spare cord out of my pocket and secured it with that. After some experimentation, I found what I thought was the best setup, though it still fishtailed horribly and made it much harder to stay balanced on the bike. It put more strain on everything and was in general a horrible idea, but my back just couldn't take it anymore that day.

----

I pushed onward and onward, trying to get as much distance behind me as I could, but when the sun turned red and its bottom dipped below the horizon, I knew it was time to stop. I pitched my tent in the tall grass and put on another layer of clothing to block out the mosquitoes, which were just insane. I ate all of Judy's chips. I wolfed down all of her meatloaf sandwiches. I went through more or the enormous loaf of bread Emily had given me to take with me. I dove into the tent and watched with satisfaction as the mosquitoes, detecting the heat and CO₂, tried their hardest to get in and failed. As I went to sleep, I remembered saying good-bye to Emily.

"Would you mind if I pray that you be safe?" she had asked.

I had smiled and rolled my eyes. "Because I might be insulted that someone wants me to be well?"

She had smiled, almost sheepishly but not quite. "Well, you know, some people can be weird about that stuff..."

----

It rained overnight. I had no time to dry stuff off, so I packed the wet tent and raced off down the road. Another ominous cloud appeared in the west. It rained. Then it hailed. Within 15 minutes the sky was blue again, but the winds remained storm-quality for the rest of the day. I only stopped once in the morning, to eat some of Jilly's granola.

(How's that for a miracle? I was given a small, roughly half-cup plastic zip-loc baggie of Jilly's granola in western Illinois. I have used it as my breakfast every single day on the road, eating and eating until I felt full. I'm now poised to enter Nebraska, and there is still plenty left.)

On a dirt road, I saw what in the distance looked like a strange piece of a tree. It moved a bit, and it struck me that the motion wasn't consistent with that of bark in the wind. I rode toward it, but by the time I realized it was a hawk, it had taken off, it had taken off, yielding its prey to me, ever the large and dominant animal. I rode off without touching it, hoping the hawk will come back and finish it rather than leaving it to rot. I was more interested in the deer that had stood in the field and watched it all go down.

Within 20 miles my back was killing me again. I couldn't take it anymore. I entered Fort Dodge and found a bike shop (after a bit of circling due to the fact that 27th St. had been renamed to Martin Luther King, Jr., St.). I found it and went in.

"How can I help you?"

I explained the situation.

"Get this BOB trailer, all good cyclists use those." He said it and walked away.

I chased him down. "Got anything for under $350?"

"No." He walked away again.

Suddenly I really didn't want to give him my business. Out of curiosity, I went to Google Products on my phone and checked out trailers. The same trailer could be had for $120. I walked out. The total market will decide whether he stays in business, but my vote had been cast.

The good news is that bad service can inspire one in ways good service can't. Now that I wanted to avoid the trailer solution, I tried rearranging the stuff in my pack until what was against my back was all of the same consistency, not too soft and not too firm. Then I tried molding it to my back. That didn't work so well, but what did work was finding where my back was hurting, taking off the pack, and punching it repeatedly in that spot. With the new consistency, that would make a dent that would remain for a while, leaving that section of my back alone.

So far, no real back problems since. For less money than I'd have spent if I'd gotten good service.

----

It emptied out again pretty quickly after Fort Dodge. I was back in the sea of green, and would now get excited every time I'd see a farmhouse in the distance. (Spotting this one, as the textbook proverbially says, has been left as an exercise.)

I followed one street alone (called 190th St) for about 65 miles, over both pavement and gravel, passing on rare occasion through one-intersection towns that that had flashy signs, but where I wouldn't see a single person.

But mostly it was just fields. Fields, fields, fields to every horizon and beyond. I passed many, many horizons that day, but the corn didn't end. The one thing that broke the monotony was something I started thinking about when I noticed that the composition of the "road kill" I was avoiding had changed to largely birds. I quickly linked it to the fact that I was passing a wind farm. Those tall, majestic windmills, ever the symbol of eco-friendliness when looking up at the sky, were the source of the chopped birds on the road.

By the time it was getting dark, with all the detours I'd taken, I estimated that I'd gone right about 100 miles. Yeah, baby, I caught myself thinking, the words directed to cyclists who ride west to east. Century! You always brag about them. Now try one into an unrelenting headwind! Then I wondered what had happened to me telling myself this trip isn't about athletics.

I was on a gravel road again. There were strips and grooves where car wheels had removed the gravel, exposing the dirt underneath, and it was safer and faster to ride on them, but they appeared and disappeared randomly, so I would have to "jump" from one to the other through piles of loose gravel—no easy task on a road bike. I found myself using an arsenal of advanced mountain biking techniques, normally used in steep mud or clay, mini-avalanche sites, etc. It actually took a surprising amount of work to keep moving and not fall, and to use the fact that the wheels kept slipping and skidding sideways to my advantage.

Just as the sun went down, I hit pavement again and followed it into Galva.

The sign was similar to that for Nemaha, but larger and more austere, and the additional note on it was "A FRIENDLY TOWN." I liked the sound of that. As soon as I rode in, I saw a couple in their yard, pulled over, and asked if there was a place where I could get food. They pointed me to the Lumber Inn (as I soon realized, a cousin of that worn cliche, the Dew Drop Inn). The Lumber Inn was a bar that didn't let rooms at all, and one of thing I didn't figure out during my stay in Galva was why it was called an inn.

I entered and everyone turned to stare. I smiled and nodded to nobody in particular and sat down at the bar. The woman behind it came over.

"What can I get for you?"

"Do you guys serve food?"

"Yep."

"Could I see a menu?"

"Pizza and burgers."

"Cool, how much is a large pizza?"

"$6.50."

"Awesome, that's what I'll get."

"What kind?"

"What kinds of toppings do you have?"

"Right now I've got a combo, a beef, a beef and pepper and a pepperoni."

"That's cool, I'll just have a plain cheese then."

"I ain't got plain cheese right now."

I grinned. "I'm not very good at listening to my choices, huh?"

She smiled. "But I've got pepperoni."

I shook my head. "I can't have pepperoni. What's in the combo?"

"Peppers, olives, little bit of everything."

"Beef too, I suppose?"

"I think so, yeah."

"Blast. How much is a burger?"

"With chips or without?"

"How much is it with?"

"$4."

"Hmm, how about without?"

"$3."

"Cool, I'll have three of those."

She nodded and turned away, then abruptly turned back. "....three?"

"Yeah."

"I'll have to wait until the range is clear, it might take a while."

"That's cool, I'm in no hurry."

"So what brings you to Galva?"

I told her.

"....you want some water?"

"Sure."

She poured me a glass ice water, which I downed in one gulp. "You want cheese on your burgers?"

"Actually, could I have the cheese on the side?"

"Sure."

I grinned. "I know I'm weird."

"Anyone who is from Massachusetts and passing through Galva is probably weird."

"Well, then," I said. "What brings you to Galva?"

"I was born in Schaller, seven miles east of here. My husband is from Galva, so I moved here."

I smiled again. "That'll do it."

"I work as the city clerk," she quickly added. "This is my night gig."

I couldn't hide my surprise. "....city clerk?"

"City clerk, yeah."

"What city?"

"According to the last census, our population is 350."

I let it rest at that. It really was more than I would have expected. "Could you possibly bring me that cheese on the side right now? I'm starving."

She nodded and went for the cheese. Another woman came to the bar to get watermelon schnapps.

"I'm Greg," I said.

"I'm Amy."

"You look like you're a regular here."

"We all are."

I grinned. "I hope you're including me in that. I've been a regular here for almost ten minutes."

She laughed. "How did you find this place?"

"I was biking along and saw a sign saying that Galva is a friendly town."

That one drew looks and laughter from the several other people at the bar.

Amy turned around. "Hey, Gina! Gina! Is Galva a friendly town?"

A girl in a blue tanktop turned around. "No!"

"You don't count," said the bartender, coming out with my cheese. "You don't live here anymore."

A guy came up and ordered two Buds and an Amstel. "Hey, so that bike out there....?"

"Yep, that's me!"

Another girl walked up. "Wait, so where are you from?"

"Massachusetts."

"And you're in Galva, Iowa?"

It was already dark, so, needless to say, I hung out at the bar until it closed and spent the night in Galva.

Cedar Falls

2009-07-14T11:59:00.004-04:00

Pitching a tent takes time. Taking it down and packing it up takes longer. Rolling up the sleeping bag and pad generally takes at least several frustrating attempts before I succeed in catching them without giving them a chance to unroll. I saw a picnic table with a small shelter built over it and decided that there's no need to waste my time on any of this. I lay down on the picnic table and tried to go to sleep.

"That is f___ed up, man," I heard some kid saying in the distance. "That is F___ED UP."

It wasn't a wooden picnic table. It was made of a thick but sparse wire mesh that made it uncomfortable in the extreme. For the first time since New York, I took out my hat and non-cycling gloves and put them under my head for a pillow. It still hurt to remain in one position long enough to go to sleep. I took out more spare layers of clothing (which had been getting zero action for well over a month now) and padded the table enough that I went to sleep, though I'd still have to wake up anytime I wanted to change positions.

Hours had passed, but I could still hear the same kid's voice. "Dude, you and that girl, that's just f___ed up. I'd'a nailed her months ago."

Around 4 AM, I woke up and realized my issue wasn't that I needed to change my position. Dew had started collecting on me. I'd thought body temperature was too warm for that to happen. Weird.

I got up and packed slowly, taking my time. It was about 5 by the time I left. I walked out of town, rolling the bike alongside me. The houses ended and the cornfields were visible again in the early dawn. A sign said Jesup was eight miles away. Another sign said the road was closed. I walked around it and kept going. Colors began to appear. The fields became green again, touching a blue sky in every direction except the northeast, where the sky became a deep red. Dew drops sparkled on the corn.

The road was under construction, which was better than gravel but worse than being paved. I'd thought I'd walk through the closed section and then ride, but then I realized it was taking longer than I'd thought and got on the bike. I'm glad I did, because the closed section was eight miles long, all the way to Jesup. I rode at a slow, leisurely pace, dodging holes, cracks and piles of gravel without much of a problem, there being no traffic. After Jesup, I just cranked the pedals and enjoyed myself, watching the corn go by.

I couldn't help but smile at the occasional (for now rare) bales of hay I passed by. I noticed that like I had laces with which to keep my sleeping bag under control, so the bales were tied together with wires. In the 1920s, the most common—and cheapest—way to fix a broken piece of machinery was just to tie whatever broke together with that wire. The problem with the approach was that the wire had a bit too much elasticity, causing machines to behave in erratic, and often very strange, ways. That behavior was really the only association I had with the word "haywire."

By 8:30 AM, I was 30 miles away, in Cedar Falls. Not having known about the paved bike trail that leads right into it, I went up a pretty nasty road to get there (once you get into Waterloo, everything goes downhill VERY rapidly), and even though it was still morning and relatively early, I was glad I was there because I'd had quite enough.

I met Emily up by the University of Northern Iowa. Pretty much the first thing I did after coming to her place was take a shower. Then she made me breakfast. Her friend Hillary came over for breakfast too, so when Emily went to work after that, Hillary and I got on our bikes and she showed me around town. It was once again a real pleasure to be biking with no luggage.

I realized that the wood strewn all over the ground was not due to anything man had made and then poorly cleaned up. I was in the real midwest now, where there were harsh storms and massive debris afterwards. Hillary showed me a house where she and Emily had once lived as roommates, and I don't know how the current tenants planned to exit or enter that day.

When Emily got off work, we went to pick some berries and lettuce, and then to the Lamppost, a coffeeshop. Instead of making money, the people who worked at the Lamppost simply lived upstairs, and there, on the second floor, we added our berries and lettuce to the salad the tenants were making, and we all sat down to dinner together.

After dinner, I joined Krystal, one of the tenants of the Lamppost, for a run along the Cedar River. (I cheated and rode my bike alongside.) Then we walked, and now it became easier for Krystal, because I was dragging a bike. There was an incredible number of hissing geese, but like with all animals, if you respond aggressively, they back off very, very fast.

As it got dark, we all got together in a park and just sat around and talked. Then, when it got really late, we drove a ways out of town to an old bridge over a set of railroad tracks, where there was a better night sky. There, in the near-pitch darkness, save for the sparkle of the lightning bugs, and in the near-silence, save for the bullfrogs, we sat with a bottle of wine, eating bread with the pesto Krystal had made that day and telling stories. I pointed out Venus, at which I'd been staring most of the previous night, while lying on the picnic table.

A light appeared way off in the distance and as it started gradually getting brighter, we identified it as a train. As it got closer, it became blinding, like a spotlight. We did a dance for the driver. I realized I need to work on my improvised interpretive dance skills. When the train was about 20 feet in front of the bridge, the driver honked the horn, which was so sudden and loud we almost all fell over.

----

I slept in, and the final time I woke up, the apartment was ostensibly empty. Emily had left me a note on the table along with an enormous breakfast. But when I went into the kitchen to look for something in which to boil water, I scared an unfamiliar girl to the point where I thought she'd need to go to the hospital. Before anyone had come home, she had walked into the unlocked door, walked into a bedroom, and gone to sleep. Neither Emily nor I had known she was there all night, and she certainly hadn't expected me. She joined me for breakfast.

My kind of state, Iowa.

My Kind of State

2009-07-12T21:55:00.001-04:00

As I prepared to ride away this morning, I discovered my front tire
was flat. I patched it, but found that when I'd pump it up, there was
a huge bulge in the bead, to the point where I was afraid the tire
wouldn't stay in the rim. I waited for the shop to open and took it
in. The guy insisted on inflating it to its rating, and, sure enough,
with a deafening pop, the whole thing exploded. I got a new tube and
tire.

Dubuque, because of its bluffs, has some of the steepest streets I've
ever seen. I moaned and groaned over these, then got sick of it and
walked. Until in Centralia a bunch of bikers practicing for the
RAGBRAI passed me. I didn't want to embarrass myself and rode with
them and talked, panting up hills (they didn't have luggage, and said
they could never bike with it; I told them to borrow some of mine for
a few miles, but no takers). They turned around at Dyersville and I
was alone again.

It was flattening out. I was enjoying the fields, the sea of lush
green to every horizon. The view no longer changed as I pedaled, so
every time I'd pass a town, I'd be stunned at how far I'd gone.

I rode alongside a car and the woman rolled down her window.

"You need to wear something bright. What you're doing is dangerous."

She seemed to enjoy lessons, so I offered one. "You must have not
noticed any of my reflectors, probably because we're heading into the
setting sun and your headlights are off, so there's nothing to
reflect. You should have your lights on when driving into the sun."

She rolled up the window. Oh, well.

I pulled into Independence and found a park and some people walking
through. "Hey, do you know where I could pitch a tent so no one would
care?"

They looked confused, and I got worried, but the confusion was the
opposite of what I'd thought. "I can't imagine a place where someone
would care."

My kind of state, Iowa.

Dubuque

2009-07-12T08:45:00.002-04:00

I'm getting ready for some emptiness, so I made what I could of Dubuque. For the first time since I left for this trip, I went to bars. Every night. I went to a gay wedding reception and cut myself by far the biggest piece of cake of anyone there, which got me noticed (I knew pretty much everybody by the time I left). I then scoured for someone as far from my views as possible and started a conversation about politics, which I survived. A huge thanks to Hannah and her roommate Jack; not only did I live in their apartment, but they showed me where to go. And Hannah took me along the Mississippi riverfront and pointed out pretty much everything within eyeshot.

As I rode through the east, I constantly attempted to obtain a solar panel for my phone. Everywhere, people told me they don't carry them, and for some reason, the response to that particular request was always particularly rude. By Chicago, I was completely sick of it, so I did what Shaya had recommended back in Indiana and went online and got a solar panel drop-shipped to Iowa. But the manufacturer had been so afraid of damaging a cell phone that the panel is extremely finicky, and as soon as it senses a slight change in current or voltage, it stops charging. And when I plug my phone in, the screen automatically goes on, which means that once it goes back off 15 seconds later, the charging stops. And if I turn the phone off first, it charges until it begins displaying that it's charging, at which point the charging stops. I have yet to test whether I can talk on it and keep the flow of electricity constant enough to keep it charging in that situation. But it may well be that I'll need to find work for a day to cover the cost of the solar panel, but that I won't be able to use it. That also means that on the very loneliest part of my trek, my phone will have to be kept off.

Those people who read this who know me personally should feel encouraged to text me any random thing they feel like, anytime; I'll pick up the texts whenever I turn on my phone and have signal, and will likely respond. (Calls will likely not be returned because of battery considerations; I need to still be able to check weather forecasts.) I don't know quite how bad it will get, but don't be surprised if in a later post I make my phone number public.

To Iowa

2009-07-10T11:14:00.005-04:00

Kenbob helped me get the bike ready for the relative emptiness that lay ahead. He gave me zip ties and spare spokes and trued my front wheel. I told him that about 1,000 miles ago, in Johnstown, NY, I was told that wheel had about 1,000 miles left, which would have meant it's right at its end right now.

Kenbob nearly bristled. "Whoever it was didn't know what he was talking about. Your front wheel is holding up fine. You can't ever know how long it'll hold up." (I've ridden on it since and it really is fine.)

The most noticeable change we made was adding waterbottle holders. It doesn't look wonderful, but I'm now carrying seven water bottles (plus another 2-liter pack if I need it), and though I rode through relative emptiness the next day, I had plenty of water to carry me through.

Jilly took one look at the route I'd planned for myself to get out of Freeport and went to print me out some maps. The way I was going to go would be very hilly and almost entirely unpaved, which would mean walking, and walking as many miles as I try to go in a day would take a LONG time.

She showed me a slightly longer route that still had unpaved sections, but was mostly paved. I thanked her for everything, took a bunch of banana bread and granola that she had made (she makes awesome granola in enormous quantities), and took off through the fields.

Before I hit the midwest, there were constant sights to be seen, people to be met, cars and potholes to be dodged. Biking through was like exploration. Now it was more like meditation. It's wonderful to have a continent that lets you alternate things like this.

That said, when I depart a place and immediately hit endless fields, there's a sharp tinge of loneliness that always seems to appear. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I'll never again—or certainly not for a very long time—see the vast majority of the people I meet, and I now have time to think about that as I ride. I meet people and know them for one day, two days, three days, and then they are gone, washed away by the flood of fields that seems to sweep everything to the east and behind me every time I crank the pedals. And I wonder if that's what it would feel like to live forever—to forge relationship after relationship, only to have each whisked away by the inexorable rush of time.

But my job was to keep cranking the pedals, and crank them I did, up and down the little roads, westward, westward, westward, a taste of the gnawing bitterness of eternal life.

----

Every now and then I would get dumped out into a little town. These were usually comprised of just a few barns. Sometimes there would also be some houses and a church. One town had a bar.

It got hillier and hillier as I approached the river, but finally, after groaning and panting over the final bluffs, I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa.

Some Humility is Healthy

2009-07-08T00:47:00.003-04:00

I went with Kenbob down to the garbage transfer station today, where I got some firsthand experience with dumping garbage

and compressing it as it explodes.

Then I was sent to haul rocks, which I did the rest of the work day. It was an amazingly hard workout, which I'm glad I got, because while my lower body is fine with the biking, these kinds of jobs are currently my only way to exercise my upper body.

----

Then Kenbob put me on a motorcycle. Having had experience with both bikes and stick shifts, it wasn't too bad. Starting it was the biggest pain—the 1984 Honda had to be kick-started, and I would have to try over and over and over again, often breaking a sweat before the engine would actually get going. It was also easy to accidentally flood it while you tried to start it, which in turn would make it even harder to start, causing a vicious cycle.

For the first few minutes, I went through a "jerky" phase, staying in first gear and learning to apply the gas smoothly while dodging trees. I'm glad to say I didn't hit any. I found that Kenbob was exactly right when he told me engine braking was the way to go. I got more comfortable and started shifting gears and got out onto the road.

Pretty quickly, I was flying around among the cornfields and soybean fields, taking sharp turns over loose gravel without worrying about wiping out. I would still occasionally see a bump ahead and brace myself as I would on my bike, and feel momentarily stunned when I wouldn't even feel it.

At Kenbob's suggestion, I veered off the road and shot along a tiny path, with corn on my right and a stream on my left. I zipped through mud and slid down a steep slope. I was loving it. I got sassy.

At one point, flying down a path between corn and trees, shooting mud backward from the rear wheel, I realized I was about to hit a wooden power line pole. Without even bothering to go for the clutch, I tried to hit the rear brake (which is a pedal). I missed it. I had about a tenth of a second left. There wasn't time to poke around for it. I slammed on the front brake (on the handlebar like on a bike).

The motorcycle wiped out, turning left side forward, and stalled. I felt myself get thrown and let go of the handlebars. My head hit the ground, but thanks to the helmet (motorcycle helmets are amazing), I didn't feel that at all. Then my hands came down. I felt my left wrist get twisted sideways and my left thumb get pushed back. Then I felt my right knee smash into the mud. Before I could blink, I felt the entire weight of the motorcycle come down onto my left foot.

All this happened within about a quarter of a second. For the next 30 seconds or so, I just lay on the ground, quietly whimpering to myself. The words that came out were "It's all fine, I can feel it. Just lie here for a bit and the pain will go away." Then I moved on to "Oh, God. Oh, f__k. Make it stop."

After a while, I successfully got up and hobbled back and forth a bit. I managed to stand up straight. I started to laugh and realized my mouth was full of dirt. In a classic move I had seen many times but never understood before, I removed the helmet with my left hand, turned my face to the right and spit on the ground.

It took me a while before I managed to lift the motorcycle and place it back on its wheels. It was much heavier than my bike, even when my bike was loaded with all the luggage. It took me forever to kick-start it because I didn't realize that in the confusion as I got thrown, my hand brushed and flipped the emergency kill switch. Finally, I started it back up and rode back.

Feeling much better, I told Kenbob I didn't want to stop, so he briefed me on a more difficult (or, in his words, "fun") route to take.

One thing I love about Kenbob is his belief in personal responsibility. No matter how stupid I decide to be, it's my decision and my responsibility. I took the route he suggested, right through a cornfield, with very sharp and muddy turns. I got whacked in the helmet with corn, but otherwise emerged fine.

----

I went back and took a shower. Everything was better except the foot on which the motorcycle had landed, which hurt a lot when moved in certain ways. I tried relaxing the muscles and moving it around with my hands, and the pain went away, so I knew there were no fractures and it was all muscle stress. I further determined which muscle was stressed, and will try to massage it and get it to work better again. If it doesn't get better quickly, I may have to skip work tomorrow, which would be seriously annoying. Thursday, I have every intention to get on my bike and keep pedaling. I'm pretty sure I can do that even if my foot still hurts.

I'm not taking any pain killers, though. I want to make sure I learn everything possible from today.

"A humbling fall is the best thing you can get the first day you ride," said Kenbob.

2009-07-06T09:46:00.007-04:00

So Casey and I took off to Kenosha, WI, to set up the Bristol Rennaisance Faire. Everyone who wasn't part of that community would ask us both what we do.

"I'm the production stage manager," Casey would say.

"I do absolutely nothing," I would say.

But the guy who came by to set up the sound system didn't ask that question. "You!" he pointed to me. Then he ordered me to set up a ladder, climb up into the treetops with cables, and connect a bunch of speakers on the tops of poles. That's how it seems to work with jobs. If you ask for work, people mutter about liability. If you don't, they find you and order you to do it. Thankful that I discovered this new method, I climbed up the ladder and set things up.

Then I was sent to set hidden anetnnae into Faire structures to pick up signals from the microphones. Casey helped me with everything. I actually didn't mind being an insta-employee at all.

By the end of the day, I was wiped, though it was mostly from the fact that I'd walked miles and miles back and forth around the property and, when it came to lugging boxes from one place to another, was given the dolly with flat tires. I grumbled about how easy the issue would have been to fix, given that the dolly had completely standard Schrader valves.

A few days later, we went to see the Neo-Futurists. They were doing a series of shows based on movies that flopped, and I was lucky enough to be in Chicago in time for Cruising. In case Casey's theater troupe, The Plagiarists, is as good, I'll probably ask her if they're performing next time I'm in Chicago.

----

By the 4th of July I was gone, having snatched up all the food I could carry as well as some lip gloss. Believe it or not, when you bike 90 miles into a headwind, you could definitely use that stuff. But I didn't bike 90 miles when I left (I saved that for the next ride). I took a mini-tour of the Chicago suburbs. I took it easy. I spent two hours on a bench in Elk Grove eating the lunch Casey packed for me. I walked the bike for miles and talked on my phone until it died. I figured I should go no farther than Elgin, because by that point, I would be out in the cornfields.

I arrived in Elgin and stopped with Monica. Monica arrived from Spain seven years ago and has been here ever since.

"People in my country call me a traitor sometimes, but there was nothing for me in my country. At least here, I have a job."

She works at the high school, teaching kids. In Spanish.

"Over 50% of Elgin speaks Spanish, and 30% of those are illegal."

I asked how safe it is. She said she wouldn't go outside at night.

"Over here," she pointed as we passed by in her red VW convertible, "it's fine. You cross that street, and it's ghetto, psh, psh!" She made gun shapes with her hands for the shooting sound effects.

We went to the mall. Everything was in Spanish. No signs in English. There was no English to be heard. Monica saw a girl and chatted amiably for a minute, only letting herself look uncomfortable when she walked away.

"I failed her," she whispered in my ear.

Illegal immigrants in Illinois have no obstacles to sending their kids to school, where they can study in Spanish. The kids also not only get free healthcare up to age 18, but free dental and optical care. The last time I was an employee, a significant part of my paycheck went to health and dental insurance, and optical care for me was completely out of pocket.

"Illegal immigrants get very upset when a service isn't provided," said Monica.

All the service at the mall was very polite, especially when I spoke Spanish. The fact that you could bargain on the price was nice, too.

----

For the Fourth of July, Monica took me to the parade. The Mexican population of Elgin largely didn't do anything for the Fourth, which, although I felt it was in bad taste, was convenient because their businesses were open. It also meant the parade was conducted entirely in English.

A large part of the parade involved businesses sending their little parade additions—particularly those who were in the business of "fun."

Then there were various organizations, nearly all of them either gymnastics organizations that had their students do fancy tricks, or else random organizations named after animals, some of which I'd heard of and some of which I hadn't: the Elgin Lions, the Elgin Elks, the Elgin Sharks, the Elgin Ducks.

The Elks were my favorite for obvious reasons.

Among all of these were scattered random groups toting signs screaming about anything from tea parties to "healthcare for America NOW." I got the feeling that the politics there are pretty well-balanced, though of course the parade might not reflect anything real, not to mention it's a subjective matter anyway.

----

Monica took me on a tour of everything from watch factories to windmills, and then took me to Streamwood to watch the fireworks. (She was somewhat bitter about the fact that while Elgin had the money to support "20-year-old Mexicans with five kids," it claimed not to have the money for its own fireworks this year.)

----

The next day, I rode off into the brutal westerly wind, finally through endless cornfields.

For a while now, I had been in contact with Jilly and Kenbob, of Freeport, IL—serious and experienced cyclists. When I was in Elgin, I called Jilly and she sent me detailed directions for the final 30 miles of getting to them, and rode toward the town of Byron, where the detailed directions began.

It started getting hilly. Despite having been on the Mississippi so many times, I'd forgotten about the steep bluffs surrounding it, and the hills, from what I can tell now that I'm biking in the area, extend about 100 miles from the river. About 70 miles from Elgin, on the top of one of these corn-covered hills, I was waved down by Jilly and Kenbob, who had ridden out to meet me, and the final 17 miles were my first experience on this trip of biking with others and talking as we went.

The most common sentence I hear from cyclists who do it as a sport and invest a lot of money in it is "I couldn't do it the way you do." Jilly and Kenbob, unlike others, looked at everything in pieces. Jilly said she couldn't ride in long pants. Kenbob said he couldn't ride with a backpack.

"Those must be hot," said Kenbob of my steel-toed boots, "but I bet the hard soles are good for cycling."

"They're definitely hot," I said, "but if you weigh them, you'll see they're better on my feet than in my backpack."

"It's mad," said Kenbob, "but there's definitely a method to your madness."

In eatern Massachusetts, getting flat after flat, it was hard to be taken seriously by passing cyclists when they'd ask where I'm going. Now, well over 1,000 miles from home, it's much easier, though I think a lot of it is that, using the experience I've gained while biking through the east, I've changed how I do some things, and now actually travel in a way that hopefully will work.

----

"Do you have any professional painting experience?" asked Kenbob.

"Professional? None. I painted a kitchen for someone I stayed with on this trip, that's about it."

"That's the extent of your experience?"

"That's it."

"Then you're out of luck. Or rather, I'm out of luck."

That said, bright and early the next morning, Kenbob loaded me into his car and took me to a job site where I promptly not only climbed a ladder onto a roof, but began tearing out the very roof I was standing on and throwing torn pieces of it over the edge into the back of a truck.

It reminded me of a time last summer in South Boston, when I climbed out of a fifth floor window with my friend Hagan. I remembered pulling ourselves up onto the roof and sitting there, looking at the Boston skyline, enjoying the view but feeling the constant tinge of terror because of the slope and the gaping one-sided chasm at the end of it (although I have to say the worst feeling was putting my feet over the edge when it was time to climb back down). That roof was solid. I felt much calmer on this roof, which I was tearing out, and parts of which were rotten, probably because the surrounding workers were so calm and so used to it.

----

"You have a motorcycle license?" asked Kenbob.

This sounded like a job I'd have wanted to do, so it was with enormous reluctance that I answered "Nope."

"You ever ride one at all?"

Was there still a chance to do something? Unfortunately, the answer to Kenbob's question was still "Nope."

"Well, then," Kenbob smiled, "we're going to have to fix that."

Very briefly, the plan had been for me to learn everything quickly and grab an Illinois license while I'm here. Unfortunately, though with good reason, there's no way for me to prove I'm a resident of Illinois, so the knowledge will have to suffice until I get to somewhere where I actually live.

Tribute to South Chicago

2009-07-01T10:14:00.002-04:00

The day I spent biking into Chicago, I met Casey, whom I'm staying with now. The first thing she said to me when I took off my aviators and said hi? "You're filthy!"

2009-06-25T23:45:00.002-04:00

If one doesn't count the fact that I paid a dinner visit to some family friends in Rochester, NY (an old classmate of my father's and his family), Shaya in South Bend had the distinction of being the first person I've stopped to see on this trip whom I actually knew beforehand. It had been about five years since I'd last seen him, before he moved out to Indiana. When I last saw him and his wife Samara, they had two children. Now they had a fifth on the way.

The job of raising that many children that close in age is beyond heroic. It is hard for me to put into words the respect I have for people who pull this off. It is an unbelievably difficult task.

Shaya lives, from what I can tell, in the neighborhood that contains pretty much in its entirety South Bend's surprisingly large Jewish community. It was a good chance to stop for a while and study Talmud with some of the impressively knowledgeable and erudite students there. Talmud is so complex that an hour or two of seriously studying it tends to give me a headache. After a study session like that, I'm likely to go to sleep. And so, at Shaya's, I slept a lot as well. Peppered throughout was stuff like riding go-karts with the kids. I was paid for some of the Talmud study, as well as for some backyard work, which will help me a lot along the way.

On Sunday morning, I departed, and the kids all got on their bikes and rode to the end of the street with me to see me off.

----

I rode to Michigan City, and then to Indiana Dunes. The headwind was brutal, and the 50 miles I rode ended up unexpectedly being a full day's work. I was finally on Lake Michigan though. The next day, I headed onward, to a section that I was worried about. I had been told stories by various people, ranging from "you'll get shot" to "there's not a single bikeable or walkable road through there."

The first statement was completely overblown, but the second was absolutely true, and I wouldn't recommend that one try this as his first bike trip; he would end up hating Chicago and hating biking. For cyclists who are interested, I'm going to provide a detailed description here.

From downtown Gary, IN, I went west on 4th Ave (US-12) until 12 went off to the left, but I went straight onto a bridge over railroad tracks. That dumped me out onto Industrial Highway, which I followed for a few miles, past an airfield. The airfield, being devoid of trees and completely flat, had such a nasty wind that I had to get off and walk for a while. Most of the passing cars were trucks, and the amount of dirt blowing around in the wind was something I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't seen it.

I passed under Route 912 (labeled on signs as Cline Ave), and then turned right onto the next road, also called Cline Ave, which I didn't really understand. That was when I first realized I was in East Chicago and on the Chicago grid, passing 140th St. Cline Ave turned diagonally and I started seeing signs labeling it as Guthrie St. Then the signs seemed to say it was King St. I took a left onto 136th St. It dead-ended into a park, which I rode through, and continued along 136th a few more blocks. Then I took a right onto Hemlock St.

At its end, the grid temporarily ended, and all there was was a diagonal street called Dickey Rd. The neighborhood disappeared and once again there were no normal cars, just trucks and dirt in the wind. I went over a bridge. Dickey Rd ended and I took a left onto 129th St.

I went by a BP oil refinery, with some interesting railroad tracks crossing the road into closed gates with very heavy security. I took a right onto Indianapolis Blvd. I followed it through Whiting and over a bridge. The road spent about a mile under an I-90 overpass. It took some dodging to avoid merging onto it. Finally, a bike path appeared alongside the road, and I followed it for about another mile until, around 100th St, it ended and the road forked.

I took a right, walking my bike through a tunnel on a dirty sidewalk that I felt like I may well have been the first person to ever use. I came out in what didn't seem like a great neighborhood, but wasn't too terrible either. I was on Ewing Ave. I followed it over a bridge, and caught another glimpse of Lake Michigan on my right. The road forked again and I went north on Mackinaw Ave which ended at 87th St. I went left and right (Burley Ave), then left and around, onto S. Shore Dr.

I followed that to 79th St, at which point I saw a park along the lake and went into it. THIS WAS A MISTAKE. I'd have done better to stay on S. Shore Dr. The path was very bikeable, until it ran into a dune and ended. I dragged my bike over the dune. This was where I got my first view of the Chicago skyline, still way in the distance. I ended up on some other street in the upper 70s. I got back out onto S. Shore Dr.

At 71st St, I finally found another "legitimate" bike path. It took me out along the lake again and now continued uninterrupted toward the city.

Easy ride downtown from there.

2009-06-24T21:42:00.002-04:00

While I was working with the computers, Justin and Amanda went up to Goshen to see friends. So when I finished, I got into the little white truck with the streering wheel on the right (of course, I went to the wrong door first) and started driving toward Goshen. I was starting to seriously love this truck. Driving it made me inexplicably happy. I sang opera (mostly the Duke's arias from Rigoletto). I turned on some music. I rolled the windows down. I had a private dance party.

As I rolled into Goshen, people would turn and smile and wave to me. If I couldn't cross the continent on my bike, this would be my next vehicle of choice.

The friends were avid bikers who also knew the way to my heart (she made me food). Amanda read one of my blog posts out loud, because apparently it was that funny. I talked about how the quality of the blog suffers because the people I write about are often also readers.

----

This morning, after eating yet another of Amanda's meals (even if not for everything else, those meals alone would have made it difficult to leave) and having yet another deep and long conversation with Justin, I headed for the stairs to pack the last of my stuff.

"Oh, Greg, do me a favor," said Justin.

"What's that?"

"If you write anything else about me, please don't sugar-coat it. I really want to read what you really thought."

The fact is, though, that I really haven't had anything negative to write because I haven't met anybody I didn't like. That's not the issue. The issue is that certain conversations I have, which would have been deeply moving—and easy to empathize with—had they been repeated verbatim by fictional characters, when attributed to real people and read by people they know end up being a nasty form of gossip.

I've had a conversation with a man that involved the quote "He doesn't like to work hard—but don't tell him I said that." I can't publish a conversation like that, for obvious reasons. Many of the best conversations are about deeply private inner struggles that people revealed to me because I was passing through—because I would listen and then be gone. Publishing those conversations for the world to read would be a violation of epic proportions for these people.

That's why I make do without the putting the best conversations on the blog. And there's no question that the quality suffers.

----

Temperatures reached nearly 100 today, and it was humid. When passing trees, I would take breaks in the shade. So I moved slowly, but was feeling surprisingly good. And I wasn't going through the water too fast. Still, I was careful. I had only finished one of my four bottles when I got to Goshen, but I refilled it at a gas station anyway. 10 more miles up a county road, I stopped in the shade to finish that first water bottle again, and a woman who was watering her lawn offered to refill it for me. By the time I finished that first bottle for the third time, I was almost in South Bend, where my friend Shaya lives.

I dove into his air-conditioned house. Easy, easy day.

Computers: Always a Form of Income

2009-06-23T18:44:00.003-04:00

I usually try to keep a low profile everywhere I go, but it's difficult in small towns, where everybody is curious about an unfamiliar face. And so, before I knew it, Bryan had me cornered in exactly the kind of redneck drama I hadn't wanted to be involved in. (Feel welcome to ask me the details in person.) So I bought Harley a $1 burger to assemble a posse to safely escort me out of town. They stopped at the city limits where the sidewalks ended, but I got on my bike and rode on. (Harley even called me in half an hour to check that I'd found County Road C.) Since most of these people had felonies on their records and couldn't leave the state of Ohio, my first target was obvious.

I then continued along small county roads westward, westward, westward. When they would end, I would jog alternately north and south and then take the next westward road I could find. The sun was killing me (it was right about summer solstice, so the sun was at the most scorching angle possible). It was humid and muggy. I ran out of water and rode dry for a while—which was beyond unpleasant—until I passed a church where they gave me water to fill my bottles.

While the constant westerly wind is annoying, this makes me glad I'm biking east to west. This way, civilization slowly, gently loosens its grip on me, allowing me to get used to new conditions gradually. In Chicago, I will try to obtain more containers for water that will be comfortable to carry. It will also soon be time for bear canisters and spray, water purification filters, and possibly a solar-powered phone charger.

By evening I was in Syracuse, IN, where I met Justin and Amanda. They gave me water and let me take a shower, which alone was enough to make me quite happy. They also fed me the best dinner I'd had in a while. Then I got a good night's sleep on a real bed, which was doubly nice given that Harley had woken me at 5 AM and had me listen to his music. I slept until almost noon.

When I woke up, I found that Justin had patiently waited for me. He then patiently waited as I did laundry and had breakfast, and then we went to harvest radishes and spinach.

Then we made lunch.

This morning, Justin found me work. A friend of theirs needed help with computers. Computers are a real nightmare for most people, and I'm glad I'm able to help at least with that. It's also some money for the road.

So I got into Justin's truck,

and, after some trouble due to the fact that the steering wheel was on the right and the stick shift was on the left, took off to do some work.

2009-06-19T00:12:00.010-04:00

I left Sylvania yesterday. I'd slept in the basement, and when I woke up and came upstairs, no one was home. Just a note:

That basically solidified an easy day. I did as the note said and left a thank-you note.

The roads in western Ohio are on a grid. Every block is a mile by a mile. East-west roads have letters, north-south roads have numbers. Today I was able to spoil myself and stop regularly for snacks. My first was at the intersection of roads 4 and M.

Since they were rapidly getting beaten up in the backpack—not to mention it was 80 degrees out—I immediately ate all three of the apples I'd packed. I tossed the seeds into a ditch by the intersection. Perhaps there will someday be an apple tree in Fulton County at the intersection of 4 and M.

I followed M for miles. Ten miles down, at 14 and M, which looked absolutely identical to 4 and M, I ate some more granola bars. Then M ended, rather unceremoniously, at its intersection with 17.

No problem. I jogged over to L and continued westward along the grid. Eventually I got onto a state highway and took it to an actual city: Bryan.

I had heard of Bryan because it has an Amtrak station. All the trains pass through in the middle of the night, so I'd never actually been awake for it. When I pulled in, it looked decently nice, much like other small Ohio cities I'd passed.

I met Joel here, and brought my bike into the apartment where he lives with his brother Nick and his friend Harley (short for Harlan). I rolled my bike into the small, dingy apartment and let myself collapse on the couch. One of its sides had fallen off, and the sitting area on it was significantly tilted.

We just sat and talked for a bit. Then a door I hadn't even noticed opened up, and Harley came out, in a stupor as if he had just woken up. It was 7 PM.

"I'm gonna sit down next to you."

I shrugged. "Go for it."

"Harley, this guy's biking across the country, he's from Massachusetts."

"Oh, dude," said Harley, slowly, still in a stupor. "I know someone in Massachusetts."

"Oh, yeah? Where?"

"I don't know. You want to know his name?"

"Well, sure, I guess."

"Caravan. It was Caravan."

"Don't know him."

"No, wait, it was Corovan. We just called him Caravan because he was an ass." Harley's voice trailed off. He lit a pipe. "You smoke?"

I shook my head. "No pot, just occasional tobacco."

The room filled with uproarious laughter. "No one here has the money for pot, dude. This is tobacco. You want to smell?"

I wasn't going to be a snot about it and tell them I only buy tobacco at Leavitt & Pierce in Cambridge and can't stand anything cheaper. "Sure, I'll smell it," I said.

He shoved a container in my face and I actually sniffed it before realizing it was filled with old cigarette butts. Harley took a butt out, unwrapped it, and shook the tobacco into his pipe.

"I wish I could afford new cigarettes."

----

Later in the night, he came by again.

"You want some food? I got some burgers and bacon."

"Burgers would be awesome, but skip the bacon."

He paused. "You allergic....or a Jew?"

I paused too, wondering if it's really a wise idea to tell him, but the pause had already given it away. "Jew."

He thought for a little while. Then he said "Oh, huh. Well, if anyone makes fun of ya, you know what you say? Say 'Oh, yeah? Well, I killed your God. And he ain't coming back!' Funny, huh?"

I shrugged. "Why would anyone make fun of me about it? I've got plenty of easier targets."

"That's cool, dude, that's cool." He looked at me approvingly, and slapped my shoulder, as if giving a compliment. "You don't look Jewish, anyway."

I grinned. "Neither do you."

"You want to talk religion, dude, I'm all up. I can talk about religion or politics all night. I took theology."

"Oh, yeah? How much of it?"

"Just our prison class. I took a cooking class too. I'm a certified chef."

"Really?"

"I been tryin' to get as much out of life as I can. I have lymphoma, man. I know I'm gonna die. So I get the most out of everything. Get locked up all the time. Got 15 kids. Another on the way."

I couldn't contain my curiosity. "Are any two of your kids from the same mom?"

"Nope."

----

"So what did you go to jail for?"

"Which time?"

"How many times did you go?"

"Been locked up 43 times. Only been to prison twice."

"Then how about the first time you went to prison?"

"Armed robbery."

"What did you hit up?"

His face fell. He gave me a fine, judge me look. Then he turned away and quietly muttered "A school."

"Just needed the money that badly?"

"I guess. I didn't even remember I done it until they told me the next day."

"Were you in prison here in Ohio?"

"You wanna see where I was in prison?"

"Sure."

He handed me his wallet and opened it. All it had was a Florida driver's license. Pensacola.

"Wanna see where I was born?"

"Sure."

He handed me an Alabama birth certificate. 1989. Some rural town I'd never heard of. Father aged 30, driver for a wrecking service. Mother aged 22, unemployed.

"And that's my life."

----

"Let's go to the jubilee, man," said Harley. "It's so much fun. You got any money? Maybe you could get us tickets for the berry-go-round?"

"It's been rough with work, dude," I said to him.

"Yeah, dude, I know, I'm joking. We'll just walk around. Hey, you mind if I stop by my friend's house? He's got my knife."

This was no good. Last thing I wanted was to be arrested in Bryan, OH.

"Dude, let's just go to the jubilee, you can get the knife later, what are you going to use it for there?"

"Fine, but we're stopping by my brother's, OK?"

"OK, cool."

Harley's brother had seven or so earrings in each ear and some very impressive tattoos on his arms.

"You're from Massachusetts, man? That's awesome. I've been there. Cape Cod and stuff. I partied in Hyannis. Once I was lying around, totally f___ed up on the beach, and these girls come over and start tugging on me and are like 'you wanna party?' and I'm like 'hell's YEAH!'"

Harley interrupted. "Hey, man, you got cigarettes?"

"Yeah, just got a pack."

"Can I have one?"

"Yeah."

Harley got his cigarette and we were off.

----

At the jubilee, he went straight over to a girl he knew.

"You've got to meet this guy. He's biking across the country."

The girl didn't blink. "What the f__k was up with that s__t you were up to yesterday?"

Drama ensued. I looked around at the other people, but didn't want to wander too far, since I couldn't get back into the apartment by myself.

"Hey, Greg. Come here, lemme introduce you. We've got a weird relationship. My name's Harley, her name's Harley, an' I have a daughter named Harley. But no kids from her. She's my ex, but I still consider her kids my nephews." She had three kids. She'll be 18 in August.

----

"Hey, Greg, you don't mind if I bring Harley home?"

"Dude, I don't care."

"You have good hearing? If you do, make sure you cover your ears."

"Dude, I biked all day and now it's midnight and I'm out here with you. I'm going to pass out and not hear anything."

----

I woke up in the middle of the night to thunder, lightning and hail. So much for leaving in the morning.

----

"Hey, do you guys know a good barber?"

Harley and Harley argued for a while (Harley the guy claimed he'd learned to cut hair professionally in prison school), and then we went with Harley the girl's suggestion and I got a cheap haircut. I really needed it already. Harley and Harley came with me. Harley the guy got dressed up for the occasion.

"So," I asked Harley the guy, "what are we going to do about food?"

He just shook his head. "Ain't got no food at home. I'll just wait until I find some somewhere."

"You plan to find any today?"

"Dunno."

"Well, I can't just not eat for a day if I plan to bike later. Come on, we're going to Wal-Mart."

----

"You need to earn your keep though, if I'm buying you food. What do you know how to make?"

"I'm a certified chef from prison school, dude. I make awesome burgers."

"Good, take me to the aisle with the cheapest meat."

"OK. See here? That's the processed meat. This here is how much meat to how much other stuff. This is 80/20, you can see the price on that. This is 73/27, you can see it's much cheaper."

"73/27 it is, grab the big $5 thing. What else do we need?"

"Bread."

Harley the girl chimed in. "They had white for $1.18."

We went to the bread aisle. Sure enough. We got some.

"Anything else?"

"A bit of stir-fry would be good to go along with it."

"Just noodles?"

"Well, yeah, and some spices and cayenne peppers would be good. And some soy sauce."

I looked at him. "Dude, if you're starving, why are you thinking about spices? This entire trip I've been so hungry, I haven't given a s__t about taste."

He shrugged. "That's how they taught us to think in prison school."

We skipped the spices and got plain stir fry.

"Please," pleaded Harley. "Could you afford to toss in a bag of these for 89 cents? It'll taste totally different."

"What have you got at home?"

"Just some ketchup."

"OK, I'll toss that in, but we're also using your ketchup."

"Deal."

We went home. Harley had forgotten to take a key, so he had to break in by pushing in his air conditioner. It drained all over his bed, which he didn't care about because he had no sheets.

He just flipped the mattress over. Then he made burgers.

Minutiae

2009-06-17T22:00:00.002-04:00

I jogged over to Sylvania today—about a 10-mile run through the Toledo suburbs—and I'll be staying with Mike. The one I was working for. Tomorrow I plan to cover pretty much all of what remains of western Ohio.

I got a pro to toss my banner text around the picture for a few minutes. I think it looks better than when I did the same. Anyone else care to tell me what they think?

I got some questions about what "Hello, Toledo!" is supposed to mean. It's from a Brak song Leslie in Cleveland showed me, which has been stuck in my head for a large chunk of the ride through this state.

Work, At Last

2009-06-16T21:54:00.002-04:00

I didn't talk much today. I worked all by myself, and my change in geographic location was reflected in the nature of the work.

I also realized I had gone insane with rounding up. I had assumed a massive crisis in deficit spending on my part. I thought that between Springfield, MA and now, my spending had added up to about $850. The real amount? More like $350. At this rate, I may actually make it on the work I'm doing.

Hello, Toledo!

2009-06-16T01:35:00.003-04:00

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

----

It was getting late, and the landscape wasn't changing.

I hadn't left Cleveland until the afternoon, and though I had gone only about 75 miles, because of the lateness, it felt like a lot.

It is out of nowhere, in the fields several miles south of Bellevue, that a bright digital billboard appears. It stands in front of a church, displaying things like Mass times.

I rode up the long drive, listening to the chapel bells play a Baroque tune that made me nostalgic (wow, that just made me sound old¹). At this church, I met Seth, the organist.

I told him about how much I loved Bach's Trio Sonatas. He told me about how difficult they were to play, because the left hand wants to follow the foot, and those sonatas convolute all that². I told him I'd never had that issue, because I played only the piano, so I had to play the foot part with the left hand, the left hand part with the right hand, and whistle the right hand part.

We went into the chapel, where he played the organ while I walked around listening to how it sounds from different locations. The organist, up on the balcony, where he cannot be seen, actually gets by far the lowest quality sound; all the good stuff gets projected into the hall. However, he said that because of the acoustics, he can hear old ladies whispering below as if they're right behind him. He said that the first time he sat at the organ, he actually turned around to see who that was behind him.

----

Seth made chicken and vegetable kabobs for dinner, and over his dinner table, we talked about his travels with priests through Poland and Ukraine. Then we drove out to Sandusky to catch what may end up being my final glimpse of Lake Erie for the time being. It was nice to walk around it, too; another city I'd never been to. I got a comfortable night's sleep on his couch.

----

I got up pretty late again, but took off a couple of hours earlier than I had from Cleveland—minus my wallet. As I rode up the long, straight, unchanging road, a car passed me, pulled into a driveway, and out came Seth with my wallet. I really appreciate him chasing me down; I don't know what I would have done without the thing.

----

I got back onto US-20—the route I'm basically taking all the way across—and continued westward. Clyde. Freemont. I realized I absolutely hate grooved pavement. I have to avoid it at all costs. If I hit it, stuff starts falling off my bike, and too much of it would damage the wheels, too. They were not making it easy for me. A little past Hessville, I dove off onto a side road that seemed decently paved,

and took it until it dumped me out in a small town called Elmore. I needed a break. I leaned my bike against a tree in front of a house and stood in the shade, eating some of the granola bars Seth had given me for the road. Three kids—two girls and a boy, all around eight years old—were riding little bikes on the other side of the street.

A man walked out of the house and yelled to them.

"Y'all are not supposed to cross the street!"

The kids began to sulk and got back on their bikes to cross the street back to the house. Just then, the man glimpsed me in the shade of the tree.

"Where are you going?"

"Oregon."

"Oregon?—Y'all get over here right now!.... Yes, I said right now!.... So...you're going to Oregon, right now?"

"Yeah. Well, today I'm only aiming for Toledo."

"Toledo...I see...you want something cold to drink?"

Those who know me know I don't refuse. He told me to hold on and went inside. The kids crossed the street and stood around me.

"Who are you?" asked the boy.

I smiled at him. "Who am I?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'm just a guy riding his bike. A lot like you." I pointed to his bike.

"Where are you going?" Asked one of the girls.

"To Oregon. You know where it is?"

"Where?"

"It's way out west. On the ocean."

"Can't you drive?"

"Sure. But then I miss everything in between. I've driven through Ohio before, but it's my first time really being here."

The man came out with a bottle and a plastic cup. The bottle had ice in it. The cup had Gatorade.

"Here, drink what's in the cup, and then save what's in the bottle until it starts melting."

I took the bottle and the cup. "Thank you so much!"

He held out his hand. "I'm Danny."

I took both the bottle and the full cup into my left hand so I could shake it. "I'm Greg."

"Greg...hmm.... Well, you have a good trip, Greg." He went into the house, trailed by the boy and the other girl, who had remained silent the entire time. The girl who had been talking to me stayed.

"Where are you from?"

"Massachusetts. Have you ever heard of it?" I gulped down the Gatorade.

She widened her eyes. "You came here all the way from Massa-tujes?" (I'm pretty sure she hadn't, and had no idea where it was.)

"I did. And I have a long way to go, so it's probably time for me to be off. What's your name?"

"Hannah."

"It was a pleasure, Hannah."

She stood there and watched me ride away.

----

Riding from Elmore, the country road soon widened. Franchises appeared. Then strip malls. Traffic went from zero to very heavy. I crossed a bridge over a freeway and residential homes appeared. Then I crossed a much larger bridge over the Maumee river, and I was in Toledo.

Here I met Heather. She told me her friend Mike works for his father, and that their business might have work for me. Before I knew it, I had eaten huge amounts of food and was in a car with her, heading for the Michigan border.

The Ohio-Michigan border here is a stretch of power lines. Mike and Josh, another guy Heather knew, were setting up a campfire among those power lines when we arrived.

We sat there, with beers. It got dark. A couple more people arrived. I got a lot of questions about my trip.

"Sure, I could give you something," said Mike. "There's always a ton to do. Just show up tomorrow, I'll have something for you."

I plan to be there.

----

¹Over 400 years old.

²According to Seth, Bach made them difficult on purpose, so that one of his rowdier sons, Carl Phillip Emanuel, would have to spend more time practicing the organ, and thus stay out of trouble.

Mistake-on-the-Lake

2009-06-13T11:17:00.006-04:00

I had trouble believing Cleveland would be as rough as they say. Ohio seemed completely harmless, besides the fact that I was ending up walking my bike down miles of dirt roads.

I eventually came out into a more suburban area, but then I biked for miles down a road called Old Johnnycake.

Mentor, Willoughby and Wickliffe all seemed like rich suburban areas. Once I hit Euclid, though, things began to deteriorate. Rapidly. I first noticed the grid begin at E 289th St. The pavement got worse, bus stations appeared with people who looked like it would probably be a good idea not to approach them, trees became fewer and farther between. Drivers became more reckless and some would get behind me, honk, and then try to pass me in a way so as not to give me enough room between the car and the curb.

I stopped at an intersection around where E 200th St should have been and ate the last of the cookies I'd bought at a gas station in Ashtabula a couple days earlier.

I passed a sign that I was entering Cleveland. Of course, I was entering from the east, so I was entering East Cleveland, but I didn't know the significance of that. I was pretty impressed though. I'd seen boarded up houses and empty lots before, but this was something special. I rode a couple more miles before finally getting on the sidewalk, having given up after a car pretty successfully ran me off the road.

On the sidewalk, I got some menacing looks—I saw no other white people the entire time, and I'm quite sure they were not a common sight in the area—but I insisted on smiling and being friendly, and what I found was that women responded in kind, while men proceeded to ignore me.

I got morbidly curious, so I got back on the bike and swung off onto a small side street. For some reason, the roads were curvy and not part of the grid. The pavement was horrible, but some trees appeared, which was nice. I passed houses with kids sitting on porches and waved to them. Only girls would wave back. This was really making me start to wonder.

I don't carry an mp3 player. If I tried to listen to music while biking, I wouldn't hear cars. However, East Cleveland was my chance to listen to music. Approximately every other car had its windows rolled down and was blasting music. Every single one of those was tuned to the same hiphop station. So even as they passed me, and then as they stopped at red lights and I zipped by them, I got to listen to that station quite smoothly.

I rode on. It was all uphill. Massive housing projects popped up out of nowhere. I checked the sun and took a few turns onto more side streets to make sure I continue bearing southwest and don't go in circles.

A few more miles down, where I estimated E 150th St should have been, the neighborhood suddenly improved. As I biked onward, I realized I was in a really nice area. Turns out it was the area where Rockefeller lived, and where he is buried.

It was here that I met Leslie. Leslie is the first woman I have met who enjoys the music of Brak and has it on her computer, which automatically made her cool in my eyes. She doesn't work on Fridays, which freed her up for the more important task of making me lots and lots of food. She then took me to an 80s store that carried Benjamin Franklin action figures and enormous Nintendo cartridges from my childhood. It also sold magazines at a 5,900% profit margin.

She also took me to see the building Frank Gehry designed on the Case Western campus. It further solidified my conviction that Frank Gehry has no taste, no interest in practicality (including whether a building is suitable to the climate at its location), and no regard for the feel and architecture of the surrounding buildings. I know I'm not alone, because I've really never heard anybody say anything positive about anything Frank Gehry has designed. Someday I will investigate the one thing about him that really interests me: how he manages to get commissioned for these things over, and over, and over again.

I managed to break through Leslie's hatred of Cleveland enough to convince her to take me to explore downtown at night. We walked along the clean, clean Cyuahoga River, which once caught on fire. We saw a bridge that was lit from the inside with a very nice hue of purple, and tried to climb inside it from various angles. Unfortunately, they'd taken precautions against teenagers (like us, apparently) and put bars and fencing in all the right places.

We tried to walk out to Lake Erie. Unsuccessfully. I know Cleveland has a waterfront, but they don't make it easy to find, and right downtown, there's a port that has no public access. This didn't stop us though, and we caught a glimpse of the water between the piers. There was nothing special about it.

We also checked out the Amtrak station, by which I'd ridden so many times on the train, but which I had never seen from the inside.

We decided we'll research the laws of Ohio and see how much trouble you can get into for trespassing. I hear Cleveland has some awesome abandoned buildings.

Rowing the Atlantic?

2009-06-12T02:21:00.004-04:00

When I set out on this trip, the purpose was definitely not athletic. I wanted to take an extremely long, dirt-cheap vacation on which I met lots of cool new people and saw a lot of the country. Becoming a strong cyclist was an added bonus.

I encountered something cool but completely different when Galen told his friend Katie about me and she wanted to meet me. An extreme athlete, Katie plans to row across the South Atlantic, from Dakar, Senegal, to I think somewhere in French Guiana.

Unlike me, who didn't correlate the athletics with the geography at all—I'm traveling westward at a latitude where the winds always blow eastward—she's going through a section of ocean where the currents will carry her in the right direction, so she would theoretically arrive even if she didn't row.

Her trip is shorter (70-100 days), expensive ($80,000), and she's spending it entirely alone. We went to her house to check out the boat that will be her home for that period of time.

The compartment visible on the end is where she will sleep and hide from storms.

Katie kept wanting to know about my trip, and I kept trying to change the subject to hers (I already knew all about mine). Of course, her main issues were financial. While I'm able to keep a pretty low profile, she needs to constantly take her boat around and get media attention to attract sponsors and donors. (The sponsors, who will place their logos on the boats, will also be keenly interested in continued media attention later; they'll also want the proceeds from the resale of the boat afterward.)

I don't know how anyone would deal with that. Katie thought I was crazy to go without saving up any money, and to be using an old bike. I thought she was crazy to bring all her food with her and take no precautions against sharks. (My idea of crossing the Atlantic involves a kayak and a fishing pole; Katie was one of the first people I ever told that to, and she was definitely the first to say it was an awesome idea.)

Katie gave me a cape to remember her by. Cool as it would initially look, I'm not going to ride with it. It would first create drag, then get torn off. However, it's very compact and may serve me well on cold nights when I leave my luggage behind and am wearing only a T-shirt.

Rain

2009-06-11T15:04:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, it stopped sprinkling, and all the thunderstorms seemed to pass to the south. Galen's friend was having issues with his tractor, so we went over to try to jump-start it.

Then we went skeet shooting with Galen and his girlfriend. My experience being with handguns and non-moving targets, this was really, really hard. But with some training from Galen, I was able to hit enough skeet that I could tell that it wouldn't be too terribly hard to get good with moving targets. Just expensive. And cartridges seem to be going up in price. (Galen makes his own, though they don't pack quite as much punch as the ones from the factory.)

I had dinner with Galen, his parents, his brother Gavin and his sister Dixie. Then Gavin made a fire, Galen rolled up his pickup truck, opened the doors and put on some music. And we just sat around the fire with beers. It was very warm and very relaxing. The clouds parted, and the constellations were easily visible. It's late enough in the spring that crickets and fireflies are just starting to come out.

----

This morning, the weather looked nice, but when I checked the forecast, it said thunderstorms. I looked at the radar. Western Ohio looked nasty, and weather moves eastward. Galen walked by and shared his own analysis with me, which wasn't too different. He suggested I stay and wait the rain out.

I gladly agreed. A day of resting my legs and eating his mother's cooking didn't sound bad at all, not to mention that the forecast for tomorrow called (and still does) for beautiful weather.

We got in his pickup and went to Thompson, a very odd aberration in the middle of the flatness and occasional rolling hills of Ohio.

Galen is determined to party tonight. It should be a fun time.

Ohio

2009-06-10T15:55:00.005-04:00

After hundreds of miles with no internet, I was passing through Madison, OH. Sprinkles of rain were beginning to come down, and I could hear thunder in the distance. I met Galen here, who brought me home to his family, where I am safe from the rain and have internet. At least until we leave to go shoot skeet.

----

I had a lot of fun hanging out with Mel. Enough that I decided to stay the weekend and hang out, even though I wasn't looking for work. Mel was a pretty big part of the local music scene, and with her, I met a lot of other musicians and saw a lot of cool bands. I have to say my favorite was the Pelicans, who formed on the spot to perform at a show we went to on Saturday night. I wish I could have gotten a video of them performing.

I left on Monday and started biking along lake Erie. It was a nice, easy ride. I could feel that I was getting stronger. I was zipping along and getting off to walk much, much less. Until suddenly, in Irving, the riding became rough. I stopped and felt the rear tire. Flat.

"Bummer!" It was a motorcyclist at a gas station right where I'd stopped.

"Yeah," I said, "happens all the time." I walked the bike over to a bench, took off all the luggage, turned it over, and started taking off the wheel.

"Where are you headed?"

"Oregon."

"I'm from Santa Barbara, headed to Maine!"

"Oh, nice! You're almost there."

"Well, it's a little easier for me. Man, I thought I was vulnerable, riding on this thing, look at you!"

"It's been done before."

"You all by yourself?"

"Yep."

"D__n."

I walked into the gas station.

"What's up, man, you get a blowout?"

"Yeah, they happen all the time. Any chance I could just have some tap water?"

"Sure!" The guy grabbed a paper cup and showed me the back room where there was a sink. "Feel free to use the bathroom and stuff too. Check this guy out, guys, he's going to Oregon."

"Man. Where are you from?"

"Bit north of Boston."

"So you've got what, about 500 miles behind you?"

"Something like that."

"About 2,500 to go?"

"Sounds about right."

I brought the wheel into the station so I could keep talking.

----

By the time I fixed it, it had started to rain. I checked the weather on my phone. It wasn't going to get better. F__k.

"Hey, do you guys know a cheap place to stay around here? I really don't want to ride through the rain."

"I always see that motel just past the light. There's the garage, and then the motel. Looks like it ought to be cheap."

I went outside, where a kid was painting the station.

"Man, I hate the rain."

"You're telling me. Every time I paint this f___er, the rain washes it right off."

"You're not going to keep painting, are you?"

"Hell, no. I'm going home, cracking open a beer. I'd'a gone fishing, but again, the rain."

"Yeah, nice to be inside when it's raining. I'm just looking for a place to be inside myself."

"All right, man, I'm going home. Good luck with that."

I rode the half mile through the rain to the motel. It was quite cheap for a motel, but not as cheap as I'd hoped. Not that I had much choice. I didn't have any time to look for people to invite me anywhere, and the primary demographic that does—women in their early 20s—didn't seem to be present anyway.

I checked in around 2 PM. It was probably a good idea to spend one night in a motel. I fell on the bed immediately and went to sleep. I woke up in the late afternoon. The sun had come out again. I cursed myself and told myself I should have just ignored the forecast and waited out the rain at the gas station. Then I promptly fell asleep again.

I got a phone call around 11 PM that woke me up. It was pouring. There was thunder and lightning. I was again glad I'd checked into the motel; otherwise I'd have probably tried to pitch my tent under a bridge, and possibly gotten kicked out. I talked on the phone and promptly fell back asleep and slept until 5:30 AM.

I thought about it and realized I don't sleep much when I'm with other people. I had been really, really tired.

----

A little after 6, I dropped the key in the drop box and rode off. I only made it a few miles before I got a flat in front of a supermarket. I went in and bought a big box of cookies ($4) to make myself feel better. I ate as many as I could. Then I fixed the tire.

That was when I realized I'd broken a spoke. S__t. I had no spare spokes. I checked on my phone where the nearest bike shop was. Erie, PA. Guess that's where I'm going, I thought. 60 miles on one broken spoke isn't actually too awful, though I made a mental note to get a fiber spoke.

I rode another few miles. My tire went flat again. This time I got smarter and did two things right:

I didn't take the wheel off the bike, nor the entire tire off the wheel. I just popped off the section where I heard the air leaking and pulled out that part of the tube. That saved me a lot of time as I patched up the puncture.
I ran my fingers along the inside of the tire. And I found the culprit. A sharp object I couldn't identify that would have kept puncturing my tube, over and over.

From then on, the ride was fine. But I was suddenly, and inexplicably, feeling lonely. This caused me to think of all the people I'd already stayed with, and miss them. There was also an incredibly strong headwind, that made every mile seem like three. The wind never seems to blow from the east; always from the west.

To make myself feel a little better, I tried to address both issues by trying to write myself an epic poem in Russian as I rode, about how, though the winds may try to blow me back into the past, I must ride faithfully into the future. The key word being "trying."

----

Eventually, I reached a long-awaited point.

As I kept biking, I saw a sign that said "ERIE 15". Nice! I was going to get to that city with plenty of time to fix my bike, eat, and maybe do other stuff. So I thought until, several miles later, I passed another sign: "ERIE 15". OK.... I stopped and ate some cookies. I was starting to run out of water.

Several miles later, I saw another sign: "ERIE 15". Now I thought somebody was making fun of me. I rode onward. And onward. And onward. The road was completely empty, just fields and orchards as far as the eye could see. I couldn't even pinpoint myself on the map.

Finally, I pulled into a more populated area, with a long stretch uphill. I got off the bike, pulled out my phone, walked, and called my little brother. As we talked, I passed a road, and when I told him, he decided to find it on a map, and told me I was only five miles from Erie.

I got into the city, fixed my spoke, got some more helpful bike advice, replaced a spare tube, etc, etc. I got a sub, my first non-cookie food for the day. I met Kari, at whose place I stayed that night.

----

But right after getting the sub, I realized my phone battery was low. Crap. I needed to charge it. I wandered around a shopping plaza and noticed an outlet on the outdoor wall of a supermarket. I plugged the charger in. It was an active outlet. Sweet! The supermarket was selling plastic lawn chairs and had them on display. I pulled one up to the outlet and sat with my charging phone, eating my sub, checking my E-mail, calling my grandmother.

"Where are you coming from?" A man pulled up on a bike.

"Bit north of Boston."

"Nice. I always wanted to do something like that. I try to ride 300 to 400 miles a week."

I was genuinely surprised. "That's about what I'm doing."

We talked. For hours. And hours. And hours.

"So what do you do, stop at motels?"

"I can't afford those. I usually meet people one way or another. I'll probably stay with this girl Kari here, but she had to go for a while, her friend is in the hospital."

"Oh, yeah? You hang out with them, too?"

"Usually. I don't know about her, though, she seems to be a busy girl. Working a bunch of jobs so she can get out of Erie."

He laughed out loud. "She'll be back."

----

Erie didn't look promising work-wise either, and Kari really was busy, so the next morning, I took off and kept going. It had gotten flatter. I was positively flying. It was still morning when I hit the next state.

I was enjoying the speed so much that I didn't even stop when people called to me. In Ashtabula, I encountered a bunch of cyclists going the other way. One of them, a man with a big, gray beard, yelled out "Where are you headed?"

"Oregon!"

"Oregon, G_dd__n!"

And then we were mutually out of earshot. I just kept flying along.

...and here I am.

On to the Next Lake

2009-06-06T09:49:00.001-04:00

Now that I'm not looking for work for a bit, I've just been biking,
and reached Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie, yesterday.
Unfortunately, it looks like the beautiful weather is over for a
while, and I'll be hitting rain and storms, and, due to the low
population density, likely camping in them. I don't expect the
upcoming few days to be very pleasant.

Although I found a place to stay in Rochester and now in Buffalo, I
haven't been able to get access to a computer, and likely won't for a
while. Thus, no updates to the map, and no photos on the blog.

I was planning to write about what a boon for the traveler a gas
station is, what with cheap food, water for my bottles, bathrooms,
plugs to charge my phone, etc.

But I encountered another boon as I walked toward Batavia. As I go
west, the hills get smaller and I get stronger, the result being that
I don't need to get off the bike at all. This becomes, quite
literally, a pain in the ass. To mitigate that, I've been getting off
and walking a bit every now and then.

"You look like you're coming from a distance!" I suddenly heard. I
hadn't even realized I was passing a house. I walked over to the man
and we talked for a bit, starting with bikes and ending with the US
Constitution. His name was Bob.

"Would you like to come in for some sandwiches?"

"If you're offering, I'm taking."

We went inside. "It's a good thing my wife isn't home. She's skeptical
of strangers. She was robbed once."

I made myself one sandwich. I didn't want to overeat while still
biking. He had me make another and pack it for the road. I refilled my
water bottles.

Miles later, in Corfu, I saw a woman on a porch and asked if she'd
mind if I sat with her and ate my sandwich. She asked the usual
questions and told me about the new basketball hoop she got.

I got to Buffalo and met Mel, who took me out to dinner at an Indian
restaurant, and at whose place I'm comfortably staying right now.

But gas stations are far more dependable, and they let me retain my
independence.

At Last, The Great Lakes

2009-06-03T21:34:00.001-04:00

I've reached Lake Ontario at Sodus Point. I have poor, intermittent
phone signal here, so I will attempt to post from the phone.

It was an amazingly easy ride. The perfunctory accident came in the
form of a pannier falling off. The rest was just too easy. When I was
passing through Wolcott--the ONLY village of any size today--I checked
out the pizza places, but, finding them too expensive, continued
onward and discovered a spot where I got more than I could eat, and
took the rest with me and ate it as dinner. The check? $2.49.

I've don't know if I'll ever grow up. Hundreds of miles ago, in the
Berkshires, I couldn't find my tent stakes. In Utica, Krista and
Howard took me to a store where instead, I gleefully bought four
enormous, extremely sharp spikes. I wanted to run around and stick
them into stuff, but when the time came to leave, the question arose
of how to pack them. They were sharp enough to puncture any container.
We found a way of taping the tips to make them behave. Then I found my
old stakes.

In Syracuse, I went to the store and bought almost exclusively food
that made me happy as a kid. The first day, I ate a whole box of Teddy
Grahams. It gave me a slight stomachache. I didn't care. The next day
I ate an entire box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It gave me a bigger
stomachache. I didn't care.

Sometimes being a kid just makes me happy, though the stuff I end up
doing as an unstoppable adult is stuff my mother would never have
permitted.
Eating an entire box of anything, for one thing. This trip, for another.

When looking at Sodus Point on a map, I, the east-coast boy, pictured
something like Cape Cod. When I arrived, I was surprised at how
run-down it was, and how empty, in the middle of tourist season. I met
Caroline, who lives right on the water, and asked what I could give
her in return for pitching a tent on her property. She said $10. I
liked the sound of that.

I wanted to write more and organize it better, but the phone is not
making this fun for me.

Time to Go

2009-06-02T14:52:00.003-04:00

I like it here in Syracuse, but there's not much going on, and no real reason to hang around. I've decided to pick up the pace for a while. Since there doesn't seem to be much work in New York State at all¹, I'm going to put a bit less effort into work for a while—until I get to Pennsylvania—and more into moving along and not spending money. On that note, I intend to pack up and leave Syracuse tomorrow. I will finally be approaching Lake Ontario, and if all goes according to plan, the day after tomorrow will be a leisurely ride along the lake, in beautiful, sunny weather. I doubt I'll have good internet out there, so I'm goign to go ahead and update the map right now to where I think I'll reach tomorrow.

¹Actually, what happened was that I checked out the state tax code and employment regulations, and suddenly wasn't surprised at all. I wouldn't want to run a business here either. LESSON: Governments often have very intrusive regulations, and even if they don't apply to you directly, they will affect you. No matter how simple whatever you're trying to accomplish, if you don't have a lawyer and accountant you trust on your payroll, it's always worthwhile to go through the (horrendously boring) documents; you can save yourself a lot of time and effort and stress.

----

On an unrelated note, I was notified at 6:47 this morning that I'm an uncle. I hear my brother Fatso is an occasional reader, so congratulations, Fatso!

2009-06-01T15:27:00.002-04:00

Before I left, Krista and Howard took me on a day of garage sales. Garage sales in upstate New York are different from what I'm used to. The variety of stuff is incredible, and if you know where to look, you can find pretty much anything—including urinals.

SKIPPABLE DORK PARAGRAPH: I found a Commodore 64 on sale. The garage next door was selling A/V cables that fit. For a moment, I was debating buying it and shipping it back to Massachusetts (I'm still a little bitter that my parents threw out my VIC 20 back when we moved when I was 13). Had I been able to find a fitting power cable, I probably would have purchased it. The shipping would have been more expensive than the purchase.

I was already preparing for my departure and the calories I would burn. We went to an Indian buffet, where I ate enough to start stretching my stomach. That night, Krista made pasta, and knew to put more on my plate. Just the same, I finished eating long before her or Howard, and she made another, even bigger batch of pasta, which I wolfed down in its entirety.

"I still owe you cash," said Krista. I had helped her and Howard paint the kitchen orange.

"You don't owe me anything," I said. "You let me stay at your place for over and a week and you fed me."

Krista threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. This wasn't the first time we'd had this discussion. "Fine! I don't owe you cash."

In the morning, Krista made pancakes. I ate the vast majority of them.

----

In keeping with the rule that no day is allowed to go completely smoothly, as soon as I rode 20 feet from the front of the house, my entire luggage rack fell off. Krista has photos; unfortunately, I don't. I was afraid it might mean going back to the bike shop, but I was able to fix it pretty easily, and put one of my spare bungee cords to use, giving the rack some more support. Yet another thing I'll need to check periodically.

The wind was some of the most brutal I have experienced so far. At one point, I was going about 30 miles per hour down a hill when a gust, over the course of about five seconds, brought the bike to a complete stop, despite the incline. Luckily, it's only 50 miles or so from Utica to Syracuse, so I just walked a large chunk of it. Even that was made more difficult by the wind.

But I did reach Syracuse, and I met Alicia, with whom I'll be living for a few days. I went out this morning and, unlike Utica, Syracuse looks like it won't be wasting my time. Everyone told me flat out that I simply will not find work. Nobody needs anything. I met Alicia's brother last night, who said he had some tasks that needed to be done that he had decided he was going to just pay someone to do. So that might be where it's at here.

I don't expect to stay long. I need to start moving faster anyway.

Being the New Guy

2009-05-28T13:16:00.006-04:00

Staying with Krista and Howard remains a good time. Krista showed me how to sew, and I tried to patch my work pants, which had been hopelessly torn up by the gears. I ended up having to ask Krista to help me—i.e. do it for me.

I've been eating home-cooked meals, hanging out with people I really like, and generally having every amenity I could possibly want—including some very effective foot-warmers on cold days.

On Tuesday, I got up at 4:30, and, with that patch, I marched across the city and through the empty lots

to the small, standalone cinder building where I was hoping to find work.

I talked to a couple of guys standing outside it. Sounded like there wasn't much going around. Sounded also like being the first one present wasn't going to help me much. I went inside and signed in. This getting up at 4:30 thing was killing me. I took the hat out of my pocket (it was far too warm to wear it), folded it on the table, put my head on it, and went to sleep.

I woke up to a lot more people in the room, and one guy looking down at me sympathetically.

"Tired?"

I raised my head off the makeshift pillow, trying to orient myself. "Yeah."

I heard a few laughs. "You watch out, dude, make sure she doesn't catch you."

What were they talking about? "Hmm?"

Another guy carefully and surreptitiously pointed to at the woman behind the counter, then walked over and whispered "If she catches you sleeping, she'll kill you."

"Oh," I said, looking around, still confused. Then I shrugged. "Bring it on." I put my head back down on the folded hat and closed my eyes. I heard laughter and applause.

"What's going on over there?" It came from the direction of the counter, and there was an instant hush.

"What is going on?"

"Nothing, ma'am."

There was a short lull, and then conversation resumed, and I went back to sleep.

----

The next time I woke up, the room was empty, save for one man sitting next to me. I checked the time on my phone. 9:30 AM. I looked over at him.

"Did anyone try to call me?"

"Nope, everyone got kicked out."

"No work, huh?"

He shook his head. "I used to come here four, five years ago. There weren't any problems getting work here, then. Here," he pulled out a piece of paper that looked like it was at least a few years old. "This is a list of the kind of work they had. Moving, construction, trench work, clerical—everything. But I haven't been here in hears. Hopefully they still do all that."

I'd pretty much tuned him out. I'd noticed that beyond that piece of paper in his folder, there was what looked like a black and white photograph of a house. And either the angle and lighting were masterfully set up, or it had been dodged and burned in VERY well. I asked him about it.

"Oh, that...." He took it out, and, upon closer inspection, I realized it was a pencil drawing. I also realized there was a thick ream of those in his folder.

"This is the house across the street from me. And this is another house I used to own. I used to be a landlord here in Utica, not anymore. And this is the church up toward Corn Hill. These are a few more houses I used to own. This here is Hotel Utica the way it looked back in 1912. That's pretty much what it's like now. Can you imagine? It was a home for drunks for so many years, and now it's back to its old splendor."

I had read in the paper the day before about the $5 million federal loan, on which the Hotel Utica wasn't able to make a single payment. But I noticed on the page below it something that looked like Bavaria.

"Is that Germany?"

The man smiled. "Austria."

"When were you there?" I asked.

"I've never been there. But I've been to Lake Placid."

He flipped through a few more relatively realistic-looking pictures.

"I heard this thing is so big, you can drive a car under it." His finger was pointing to the Eiffel Tower. It stood on the side of a small country road, right across from the Notre Dame. Around them were just grassy, rolling hills, and the country road continued, empty, all the way to the horizon.

I just nodded. "You could drive more than a car under it."

"Oh, is that so?"

I nodded.

"You been?"

"A few times."

We both went silent.

I got up. "Well, I'd better go before they forcibly kick me out."

The man looked up at me. "See you tomorrow?"

"Probably."

And off I wandered. No work. S__t.

----

The next day, I got up at 4:30 again. To my amazement, I was still only the second guy there.

"What's up, man," I said. "What are you doing here so early?"

"Didn't know how long it would take me to walk here."

"Oh, wow. Never walked here before?"

He shook his head. "It's my first time."

After a couple of hours of sitting around and waiting and watching other people get called to work, I took out my phone and posted an ad on craigslist:

Willing to work below minimum wage! (Utica)

I'm just passing through and need money to continue onward. I'm here today and tomorrow and willing to do pretty much any simple job. Contact me via phone or E-mail. (I have E-mail on my phone, and I can text, so any method will do.)

----

I realized it was unlikely that anybody would check a listing like that. I checked the job listings myself, but I really didn't feel like modeling, and everything else required a time commitment of more than a day or two. Within hours, I'd gotten some spam, but nothing else.

By the end of the morning, everyone had been sent out to work except the two of us.

"What a f___ing c__t," he whispered, quietly pointing to the counter. "I guess they like their own here."

"Well," I said, "I don't know if I can really blame her. I wouldn't be too happy if I'd been coming here every day for months and some new guy got work instead of me just because he showed up earlier."

----

I wasn't spending any money, so nothing horrible was happening, but the question remained of what to do in Utica if not work. The only answer came from one of the local stores, and it wasn't a promising one.

I decided I was going to leave Utica. I took out my phone to make sure the weather was good for departing.

And—ta-da!—rain. For five days straight.

Screw it, I thought. I'll try working for one more day, and then I'll plow right through the rain. I don't care if it's uncomfortable. I don't care if it's less safe. I don't care if my bike rusts a little more with every mile. Then I thought about fixing a flat in a downpour, and it gave me pause.

----

"Don't give up," said the woman behind the counter to me this morning as she kicked me out. Her name was Anne. "You've been coming every day! Be back tomorrow!"

I groaned and stretched as I put on my raincoat, a gift from Bridget back in Worcester. "I don't know..."

Anne looked at me sternly. "I know. You be here, young man!"

I checked my E-mail on my phone. I swear, spammers never tire of trolling craigslist. I wondered how I should have written the post so that normal people would have checked it out. I headed for the door.

"Young man!"

I turned around.

"You promise me you'll be here tomorrow."

"Will you have something for me?"

Anne smiled. "I can't promise you that. But you be here."

I had to smile. "All right. If I'm still in Utica, I'll be here."

"Oh, you're not from here?"

And here we went again.

----

Krista mentioned taking me out to dinner tonight. This was almost as powerful a factor as the rain in discouraging me from leaving. The rain is supposed to taper off over the next few days, terminating completely on Tuesday. So I'm thinking of leaving on Sunday, when it's just showers instead of sustained rain.

Utica

2009-05-25T09:32:00.003-04:00

Budget: ~$350

I'm still in Utica, living with Krista and Howard. Between exploring the city and taking bike rides together and going to the beach (on Oneida Lake) and playing board games at night and watching Japanese shows and seeing local bands, I've been trying to work, but Memorial Day weekend is not an easy time to find anything.

Much as I hate to think this way, there are definitely large differences in people, and how they act and how they think, based on geography. Farther east, particularly in larger cities, there seemed to be a general consensus of opinions on nearly any philosophical topic. Out here, particularly in smaller towns, there also appears to be a consensus, but of a very different sort, everybody both there and here falling squarely into their stereotypes. I see nothing wrong with this inherently, but the geographic dependence shows how susceptible all of us are to the opinions of those around us. Although I've also wondered how much of it has to do with people's unwillingness to confess to a minority opinion.

In this sense, Utica is interesting, being a city in a generally rural area. I've found more diversity of opinion here than anywhere else so far, and talking about any issue has been incredibly fun because you can never guess what anybody will think, and nobody is afraid to open up. This is one of the big reasons why I'm so glad I'm getting to stay here for a while.

The brakes on my back wheel have been annoying me, and I've been playing around with them, but while I can make them work well enough, some tiny amount of friction remains when I ride, so I handed my bike over to a bike shop. They'll take a few more days with it, which is obnoxious for what I'd expect to be a half-minute job with the proper tools, but I'll be trying to work, so it's all good.

Onward

2009-05-21T01:56:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I took the bike to the local bike shop in Johnstown. We went through it there, piece by piece, and talked about what could and should be adjusted, and why. Then we made the adjustments we thought beneficial. I wanted to pay them, expecting about $100. They agreed to take $7.55.

In the morning, my bike had a flat in the front, and the back wheel was out of alignment. I took it back to them, we figured out what the issues were, and adjusted for them. They didn't take any money from me. The ride to Utica after that was the smoothest so far—the rear wheel went out of alignment again a couple times, taking me approximately a cumulative five minutes to fix.

I did about half the ride through the foothills of the Adirondacks, and the remaining half through the valley, right along the river. Google Maps led me down several closed roads, which was fine with me because the bike had no problems getting around the barriers. I ate lunch on a blocked-off and deserted section of road right on the river, with grass growing through the pavement.

Eventually, I came out to towns again, and, after a while, the crumbling mills of eastern Utica appeared. (Abandoned mills seem to be a general feature of the northeast, not just New England.)

I remembered books like Dreiser's American Tragedy that took place in the Mohawk Valley in the early part of the 20-th century. References to great, universal things involved the phrase "Albany and Utica." I had crossed their world. Two easy days on a bike.

Finally, Traveling Country Style

2009-05-19T15:21:00.006-04:00

The landscape changed significantly once I headed up the Mohawk River, and even more so once I turned to come up from the Mohawk Valley. I passed large fields and trailers. I passed confederate flags. When I saw a traffic jam on the tiny country road, I assumed an accident; as I came closer, I realized it was a farmer chasing his runaway goat.

The goat would dart out into the street, then back onto the shoulder. It reminded me of the O.J. Simpson chase. The farmer didn't want to move fast and scare the goat into really running, so he slowly and quietly walked behind it.

Eventually, I made it to Johnstown. I met Sarah here, who, in the evening twilight, went after me with an axe.

She lives in a church, where her father is the pastor, and that's where I'm living now.

Pulling up to Sarah's mother's house in Mayfield, the first thing I noticed was the trailer of horse manure. The horse was in the back. Walking around, I ran first into a cat. As I reached down to pet it, a kitten came out. Then another. Then another. I realized it had been years since I'd seen an actual kitten.

"Mom, what are you going to do with the kittens?" asked Sarah.

"I don't know."

"Mike could sell them for you."

"Why not just put them in the middle of a freeway and see who makes it across?" asked Sarah's brother Tom.

"Tom, shut up!"

Continuing onward, I was greeted by a large group of young chickens. I could see the older chickens in the bushes, but they included roosters, so I decided to stay away for now. Then crate after crate, each with one or two rabbits.

We drove around with Tom. At an intersection, an unfamiliar car passed by.

"Ooh!" said Sarah. "Who'a that girl?"

Tom stood at the stop sign and peered, confused, as the car drove away. "Beats me."

We stood for a few more seconds in silence. Then he shrugged and drove onward.

"I kill anything that's in the road."

"Tom, that's awful, don't even talk about that."

Tom grinned. "Did you know I've killed over 52 cats since I got my license?"

"Tom, that's so mean, don't even talk about it."

52 seemed almost higher than the human population of the town. I decided the figure must have been inflated. I could not imagine where he would have found 52 cats in the two years since he had gotten his license.

"The neighbors' cat almost made it across once, I had to swerve to get it."

"Tom, shut up!"

----

Last night, I went out with Sarah and her friends to a spot on a lake where we made a fire. Guys brought crates of beer, and we made "fire kites," placing pages of newpapers on the fire; they would catch on fire and fly off into the lake. Then we just stood around the fire and talked.

"Peta, go swim in the lake."

"No, dude, it's f___ing COLD!"

"Come on, Peta, you know you want to!"

"Nah, dude, not now." Peta raised an axe over his head and threw it into a large log. The head of the axe got stuck in the wood, but the handle broke off and remained in Peta's hands. Peta stood there for about 20 seconds, staring, uttely confused, at the broken handle in his hands. Then he shrugged and tossed it into the fire.

"When I finished school, I got certified with computers, so now I work at Lexington fixing computers," said Skank. "It's a decent job."

"That's ridiculous that you're going all the way across the country. Peta should come with you."

"Nah, dude, I suck at biking!"

"Peta, sut up keep drinking until you're ready to go swimming."

"Yo, wood b__ch! Go get some more wood, the fire's dying."

"More wood?"

"Actually, nah, just get some brush."

"Brush? OK."

"I guess he's now brush b__ch."

"You come here straight from Russia, man?" asked Tom.

"Well, I came here straight from Italy."

"Oh, Italy's one place I really want to visit. I've always really liked architecture."

"Dude," I said, "go. If you like architecture, hit up Venice and Florence especially."

"So what do you think of Obama?"

I gave him a plain and simple, no-BS version of my view.

"You know, dude," said Tom, "I got nothin' 'gainst black people who live like normal decent citizens. I just can't stand n____rs who get into your business. The ones who put a gun to your head and take your wallet. And morons like Obama."

----

As we drove out, we switched into 4-wheel drive, but nevertheless, within a minute, the car skidded, turned sideways, and stopped.

Rich sighed. "S__t." He revved the engine and tried to go forward. We didn't move. He put the car in reverse. We still didn't move.

"You're only digging yourself deeper," said Axel.

"I know. Get out and push."

Axel got out. "Oh, s__t, it's muddy!"

Rich laughed. "No! Really? I thought cars get stuck only when it's not muddy!"

"I've already got mud in my shoes, s__t!"

Axel pushed the car forward. Nothing. Backward. Nothing.

"S__t," said Rich. "Greg, you mind driving? I'm sorry, man."

Three guys pushed the car backward, and I sat at the wheel, trying, in the darkness, to maneuver the car onto drier ground and turn the wheels only when they touched it. Finally, I was able to pull away from the guys pushing, and pull it back to dry ground. Then, when they got out of the way, for the first time in a long time, I remembered driving in Mexico. I backed up, and, with a running start, plunged into the mud. Mud flew everywhere. The car skidded. Without braking, I steered into the turn until a wheel hit a dry spot, then hit the gas again. The car sped up. More mud flew into the air, caking the windows and the roof. The front and back of the car jumped up and down, competely separately from each other. I think everyone who remained in the car had seatbelts on; if they hadn't, the results wouldn't have been pretty.

When it looked like we had passed the mud, I stopped the car, and waited for Rich, Axel and Peta to walk up.

"You want me to drive the rest of the way, Rich?"

"No, man, I'm good driving."

----

The pastor has told me I'm welcome as long as I want. I'm torn between going kayaking tomorrow and continuing quickly to Utica—much fun as I'm having, it wouldn't hurt to put some more miles behind me.

Always Interact

2009-05-17T15:15:00.003-04:00

Over and over on this trip, the lesson is getting hammered into me: always interact with people. Connections are far more valuable than money, and pretty much anything else.

A few days ago, I was hungry, and was trying to spend the smallest possible amount of money per calorie; without thinking, I bought a box of oreos. This was stupid; by the end of it, I never wanted to eat oreos again, and there are actually far cheaper calories you can buy, not to mention there's something to be said for nutrition. But that's beside the point.

I went to Washington Park with my oreos. I sat down on a bench and took out my phone. My phone is by far the most important thing I carry. It contains all my notes, all my contacts, all my maps, all my lists (shopping, tasks, etc.), and it also is my only access to the internet a lot of the time—which means my only access to weather reports, yellow pages, E-mail, and other things I need. I have it out quite a bit. And I had it out then.

I sat on the bench, typing on my phone and eating my oreos. It was a beautiful day. A few people walked by; I didn't even look up. Some guy sat down on the bench across from me. I only noticed him out of the corner of my eye. I was getting sick of the oreos.

Some other guy walked right up to me.

"Hey, man! You sharing them oreos?"

"Sure! Grab one!"

He looked into the box thoughtfully. "I'm gonna take three."

WELL, then, I though. But what came out of my mouth was "Go for it!"

...and back to my phone.

Eventually, the guy sitting across from me got up, turned on a boom box (probably to max volume), and slowly walked away with it.

I met up with Juliana and she helped me eat the rest of my oreos.

----

This morning, I stopped by Melanie's apartment while she wasn't home to drop off my laundry and charge my phone a little. While it sat and charged, Melanie's cat Oscar, with no warning whatsoever, bolted onto the little nightstand and snapped the phone off the charger. A piece of the charger broke off and remained inside the phone.

I fished it out and tried to put the charger back together. No go. The wires inside had gotten torn, and there wasn't going to be any way for me to fix it without waiting a few days to get the right tools. And I needed the phone.

I started looking up stores. On the phone. The act stressed me out now because I felt like I was using up battery power that could not be replenished. I was also preparing myself to pay about $50 for a new charger; Albany had given me no work, and was sapping me of hundreds of dollars. I hadn't had time to do the full tally, but I was pretty sure I was already in the red.

I tried calling the stores. Some had fast busy signals. Others had the fax pick up. Others had "Sorry, this mailbox is full" messages. What NONE had was (a) a person answering the phone, or (b) a normal answering machine or voice mail. What was with this city?

I walked to the nearest store. It was closed. Everything else seemed closed too. Sunday.

Feeling utterly defeated, I turned off my phone so as not to waste any more precious juice. I walked to the library.

Doing a quick search, I found that it was likely possible to buy this charger at Wal-Marts and Radio Shacks. I wrote down all their numbers and addresses with a pencil. Then I went out into the hallway, turned on my phone, and started calling Wal-Marts, one after the other.

They all theoretically carried these. None had them in stock.

I started calling Radio Shacks. They also theoretically had them. I went down the list, finding them out of stock at each, until I called one way out in Glenmont. They had one charger left. It would only cost $30. Nice, cheaper than I'd expected.

I managed to get a computer again and look up buses to Glenmont. It was far away. The next bus left in an hour. I went out to buy some groceries and drop them off at Melanie's before going to the bus station.

----

As I walked to the store, I walked by a man.

"Hey!"

I ignored him.

"Hey, man!"

I was in a bad mood. I didn't turn around.

"HEY, YOU!"

I slowed down and turned.

He smiled. "What's your name?" He was a ways behind me now.

"Greg," I said, without walking back towards him.

His smile got bigger and he walked toward me instead. "Craig?"

"Greg." My mood started getting better just from seeing that smile. "What's your name?"

"Ozzie!"

"Nice to meet you, Ozzie."

"I saw you a few days ago at Washington Park and I wanted to say hi, but you were busy on your phone, I didn't want to interrupt. What's your story?"

I grinned and gave a brief account of the trip and the accident. "And now a cat destroyed my phone charger, so you have my undivided attention."

Ozzie threw his head back and laughed. "You're not serious! A cat?"

"I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."

"Dude, Rich has GOT to have one."

"Rich?"

"A friend of mine. He works at a store right up the street. They carry chargers for cheap, but they don't advertise it. Come on, let's take a look, my bus isn't coming for a while anyway."

----

In we walked.

"Hey, Rich!"

"Hey, Ozzie!"

"You got any....here, show him your phone."

I took out my phone. "Nice to meet you, Rich. You wouldn't happen to have a charger for this thing, would you?"

"Lemme look."

Rich dove into a back room and came out with a phone charger in a box. He'd pulled the end out and plugged it into my phone so I could see it fits.

"Nice! How much?"

"$8."

"That's it?"

"$8."

I've bought chargers cheaply before in places where I had connections—generally connections in the Asian community—but Albany was the last place where I had imagined I'd be connected.

Now I was free for the rest of the day, instead of riding a bus to Glenmont and back to pay fourfold what I could be paying for a phone charger. I can't even tell you how glad I am that I didn't ignore Ozzie.

Albany

2009-05-16T15:59:00.002-04:00

I tried posting from my phone, but after accidentally deleting the post when I was almost finished, starting over, and AGAIN accidentally deleting it, I temporarily gave up. It's hard to get online here.

I'm actually having a decently good time in Albany. I've met some really cool people, got scratched up by a cat for the first time (it was running from a dog and climbed me like a tree—i.e. with claws), and had the most enormous margarita I have ever seen. (I would post a photo, but this computer prohibits it.)

However, there's no work, which is annoying. Some days people are around, like the day I went to the New York State Museum with Juliana; another day, when no one was around and it was raining, I just sat at the library studying ancient Greek. If I had work, I'd have probably been sad to leave.

I expect to leave on Monday.

Never Smooth or Predictable

2009-05-13T01:10:00.002-04:00

I took the bike downtown this morning.

"It looks to me," I said, "like it needs a front derailleur alignment, the rack slipped on the back gears, that needs to be repaired, and there's some friction in the turning of the rear wheel, I'm not sure what's up with that."

"Well," said the professional, "let's take a look."

He raised the bike in the air and felt the spokes. The tension was different on one side than on the other.

"Your wheel is bent."

"Yeah," I said. "I'm not sure I even feel comfortable with fixing that."

"As you shouldn't. This needs to be replaced."

"Cool. Let's do it."

"Not so fast. This is a 700x23, I don't have any of those. I'll need to order one."

"How long will that take."

"About a week."

"That's too long, I can't stay in Albany for a week."

After a lot of agonizing and back-and-forth, he sent me to his competition.

"It's far, but it's the only one that might have it, I'd say."

It was five miles away. I called them up. They didn't have the right wheel either, but said it would only take them a couple of days to get one. And so, I hoisted Old Not-So-Rusty onto my shoulder, and off I went.

NY-5 here is the road from Albany to Schenectady. It is not a pleasant road to walk on by any means. It is also not pleasant to walk on it when there is a bike on your shoulder.

"What's up?" I asked a girl sitting on the sidewalk.

She looked up. "How's your day going?"

"All right. Just exercisin' my shoulder." I watched a truck pass by, kicking up dust from the road construction. "I see you picked a scenic view, how's that working out for you?"

"Could be better. I just got into a car accident. I'm just waiting for a ride."

"If it makes you feel any better, I got into a bike accident. And somehow that entitles the bike to ride me instead of vice versa."

"So you're having a similar day."

"Pretty much."

At the bike shop, I begged and begged for them to fix everything immediately upon receiving the wheel.

"I wasn't supposed to be stopping like this in Albany. I wanted to pass right through. I have nowhere to stay here. ....hey, do you know a cheap place to stay here? I'll pay you extra to finish it faster, it's better than paying for lodging." I had zero intent to pay for lodging, and zero intent to let them know that.

The man wrote "ASAP" on the ticket and said my bike will go to the front of the line. I thanked him.

Then I finally went to the buffet to which I'd never made it yesterday. But today I hadn't been riding, and by this time I'd been fed by all three of the people at the apartment at which I was staying, so when I stuffed myself, it wasn't the same. Walking back downtown, I felt like I was going to throw up. I needed to sit down. I got to the library and sat down (with "Betraying Spinoza," which had been recommended to me). I still felt like I would vomit if I didn't find a softer place to sit. I walked around with the book, but there was nothing soft at all. I managed to take a nap on a hard chair; by the time I woke up, I was feeling much better, and kept reading.

I really need to calibrate my food intake based on whether I'm biking or not.

2009-05-12T00:26:00.004-04:00

It was sad leaving Tree (short for Teresa). She and her roommates had tolerated me for a full week while it rained and rained in Springfield and the mountains to the west. At a time when camping would have been miserable, I had a cozy house to stay in. And Ferdinand the cockatiel, whom I could teach Bach.

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny morning. I took Tree out to breakfast, loaded my bike, and off I went. I knew I was climbing out of Pioneer Valley, and I knew it would all be up. And it was. 43 miles of up, into the Berkshires.

For mountains that still have trees at their summits, it was an impressive amount of up. It was my first day of biking virtually without incident, and 43 miles is a short distance, but it was still tiring and still took a large chunk of the day.

I got to Beartown, where I was planning to camp, sweaty and panting. Pulling all your belongings with you up a mountain is HARD. I went straight off to find a lake, and did.

Thankfully, I sat down and ate some trail mix before I planned to change into my bathing suit. By the time I was done eating, the cold wind had gotten through to me and I realized I probably shouldn't go swimming.

Instead I pitched my tent while it was still light out. I was glad I'd gone to Salisbury, because I'd now refreshed my memory enough to be able to do this more or less smoothly. Things like putting an initial stake into the ground when it's windy.....stake? Where were the stakes, anyway?

I looked through my stuff and couldn't find them. What the ____ had I done with them? Whatever, another item on my shopping list. But in the meantime....

I thought I remembered seeing a truck in the woods nearby. I'd wanted to investigate and meet the person, but hadn't been able to find a good pretext.

I walked back there, and sure enough, there was a guy camping. I walked over.

"How are you doing?"

"How are YOU doing?"

"Oh, I'm all right. You wouldn't happen to have any extra stakes, would you?"

"Like.....camping stakes?"

No, like cow steaks. "Yeah."

"I think I only have one."

"For tonight, that would be better than none."

He smiled.

"I have no idea what I did with mine."

"Tell you what, you can have three. It's not that windy tonight." He pulled out two of the stakes that were holding his tent.

"You'll be OK like that?"

"Yeah."

He had a fire going, so we talked for a bit. He was maintaining the Appalachian Trail, which passed nearby. (I had actually noticed when I crossed it, and was surprised by how tiny and unceremonious the signs for it were; I almost missed it.) I, as always, was biking to Oregon.

After sunset, I thanked him, took the three stakes, and erected my own dark but cozy home.

----

I had to question some things about myself when I realized that one of my first thoughts, alone in the tent, was "Man, taking off my pants has never felt so good." I've only encountered a few cyclists, but of them, a lot have asked how—and why—in the world I bike in long, thick work pants. I bike in them because I'd have to bring them anyway, and I want to have minimal stuff to pack. But wow, my legs needed some air.

With no phone signal—and thus no access to the internet— I went to sleep as soon as it got dark. I slept over 9 hours and woke up at an alarmingly late 5:28 AM. I loosened the cocoon of my sleeping bag and climbed out, and that was when the brutal cold hit me.

The combination of the numbing cold and the smell of day-old sweat reminded me of why I wasn't a big fan of camping as a kid. I have to say I still see it as a last resort—but a wonderfully versatile last resort, that gives one much more freedom to travel.

I got up and slowly packed it away. I went over to where the other guy was camping (I somehow assumed he'd already be up) and used returning the stakes as a pretext to talk some more.

And so, I departed. I zipped a few miles at a clip of 40 to 50 mph, and suddenly....what the ____, uphill AGAIN?

It was an unexpected uphill trek to Stockbridge, and from there to West Stockbridge, but I did finally make it.

Interestingly enough, as soon as I crossed the border, the feel of the landscape changed. It was the same landscape I had known in college, when I would bike all over New York, even though this was a totally different part of New York.

I was getting hungry, so I started looking for places to eat. I rode a bit down Flint's Crossing Road. Farms. Miles down Peaceful Valley Road. Farms. I started to think about just asking a farmer. Miles and miles down Frisbee Street. Farms.

SKIPPABLE PARAGRAPH: I, by the way, liked the name of that street as much as anyone who partakes of the sport probably does, but I'm willing to bet it's a coincidence. The original game was played with empty tins from the Frisbie Pie Company, started by Russel Frisbie. Frisbie/Frisbee/Frisby is a pretty normal surname with a normal suffix, shared by other surnames such as Applebie/Applebee/Appleby. I'm tempted to say the one in question has something to do with Frisia, but I have no sources to cite. The street was probably named after a totally different Frisbee.

I passed East Chatham. One general store, closed Mondays. I passed Malden Bridge. Nothing but a post office. Suddenly, I looked at my shadow and realized I was going south, which was NOT the direction I wanted to go. I checked my map and realized I couldn't figure out where I was. Around me were just farms.

I walked over and looked at an old farmer mowing his grass by the road. He looked up at me and looked back down. I continued looking at him. He looked up again, then looked back down and turned his back. I really wanted to know where I was.

"Excuse me, sir!"

He ignored me.

"Excuse me, sir!"

He looked at me and looked back down.

"Excuse me, sir!"

He shut off the lawnmower and threw his hands up in the air. "What do you want?"

"Is this NY-66?"

"Can't hear you."

"Is this NY-66?"

"Can't hear you."

"Is this NY-66?"

"Can't hear you, get over here. I sure as hell ain't walking over to you."

Now that I had permission, I walked onto his territory. "Is this NY-66?"

"Yes, and Malden Bridge is that way."

"Does it go to Nassau the other way?"

He made a face. "You'll have to take a right.....later."

"Thank you."

He turned away and started the lawn mower again. My stomach was churning, but even I didn't have it in me to interrupt him again and ask where I could eat.

I rode onward. I hit an intersection. I took a right. Five miles up, I realized I wasn't approaching Nassau, and it probably wasn't the right he meant.

I checked the direction of my shadow and took a left. The road curved in the wrong direction. I passed a pond that wasn't supposed to be there.

I pinpointed the pond on the map, turned around and headed in the opposite direction. By what gears I was using, I could tell hunger was getting the best of me.

On a bridge, I waved to a biker going in the opposite direction. As he passed me, he yelled to me, and we both stopped.

"Where are you going?" He was looking at my gear.

"Oregon, eventually."

"I mean today."

"Albany."

"Where are you coming from?"

"I was camping in the Berkshires."

"I mean originally."

"On the coast, just north of Boston."

"Oh, really? My friend did a trip last year from Oregon to Maine. But it was a supported trip, he didn't have to carry any gear."

I laughed. "That would definitely help."

"Yeah, I imagine so."

"Do they get served food, too? I wish someone would serve me food right now. I haven't eaten since I ate some nuts, raspberries and chocolate at 6 AM, and it's going on late afternoon."

"Oh, if you keep going up this street the way you're going and then take a left, there are some diners and stuff."

"You mean Route 20?"

"That's the one."

"Perfect, that's what I was hoping. Thank you."

I had three miles to go up the street to get to 20. It was getting really tough to pedal. Stupid idiot, eating all the food yesterday so the bears don't come for it. I will need to do better with food.

I managed to knock down two miles. The last mile was interminable. I had to stop and rest several times, even though the hill up which I was going was quite small.

Finally, I got to 20. It wasn't even marked. Finally, it sloped sharply downhill into the Hudson Valley. I'd been waiting for this.

The road looked much like an interstate, and cars sped down it accordingly. But with the downhill, I was able to keep right up with the cars in the right lane.

There were no diners. I still don't know what he was talking about. For miles, there were only woods and auto parts stores. I felt like I was going to die. When I saw a Hess gas station, I pulled right in. I bought a big Rice Krispies Treat, an creme egg, and two hot dogs. I wolfed them down in that order. It didn't fill me up—not even close— but it permitted me to keep going.

Now I would even get into the left lane to pass cars. I zipped along. It didn't take much more than 10 minutes. I just shot by the signs, first "ALBANY 8," then "ALBANY 4," and then into Rensselaer, where the downhill slope finally ended and I swerved into town to get on the walkway that went along the Dunn Memorial Bridge, allowing me to cross the Hudson.

I was really hungry. I needed a buffet. I looked one up in the yellow pages via my phone. It was 3.4 miles away, on the other side of town. I started heading that way.

Downtown Albany disappeared behind me. Potholes and boarded-up windows appeared. I stopped and got directions to the buffet again, just to see how much distance was left. 3.8 miles. What? I'd gone the wrong way. I turned around.

I turned at an intersection and saw a big man coming at me on his own bike. I signaled which side I was going to pass him on. He misinterpreted it and swung over that way. Next thing I knew, he smashed into me and we, as well as our bikes, were on the pavement.

I'm really, really glad I wear those work clothes that other bikers have no idea why and how I wear. I got up practically without a scratch.

"Are you OK?" I asked him.

He staggered onto his feet. "My fault."

I started gathering my gear, which was strewn all over the intersection. He got on his bike and rode away. I had to tinker with my gears a little to get my bike to ride, but it worked well enough that I headed back downtown. I'll have to take it to a shop tomorrow to have a look. (It certainly now needs a front derailer adjustment and an adjustment of a small part of the rack that got bent into the gears, as well as an investigation into what causes the new squeaking inside the gears.)

I checked out the beautiful park just up from downtown. Then I met Juliana, at whose place I'll stay a couple of nights here while I sort out stuff with the bike and go shopping for stuff I need. Her roommate made me some pretty awesome dinner, of which I had all the helpings I wanted. Who needs the buffet?

Hopefully soon I'll stop in a city again and do some work for a while. I hate the feeling of a deficit.

2009-05-09T12:12:00.002-04:00

Budget: ~$100

I'm going to go ahead and update my map position to what I expect to be my location tomorrow night, since I'm unlikely to be able to update the map from there. It looks like the long-range forecast was correct: the final storms are rolling down from the mountains and pummeling Springfield this afternoon and tonight; by tomorrow, both Springfield and the mountains will be clear for my passage.

----

Yesterday, I actually did get work here in Springfield, loading refrigerators onto a truck. Most of the time was actually spent sitting with five other guys in the back of the truck, with our legs hanging down, while it drove from one place to another.

"Man, look at that b__ch!"

"She FINE!"

"Did you see that? She just turned away!"

"She saw you's checkin' her out."

"You wouldn't guess it, but a little white girl like that is probably going home to a big mother____ing n____r."

"Man, I'd tap that. And then she'd follow me around all the time, like this other b__ch."

"Shut up, Duncan, ain't no b__ch followin' you 'round."

"There is, man, she just don't follow me to work. But she go everywhere else. Tries to walk in on me at home when I'm with another b__ch."

"Seriously? I'd'a strangled her."

"I might too. Sometimes, you just gotta strangle a b__ch."

"Yo, Russian, why ain't you talkin'?"

"Don't have much to add."

"You don't have any crazy b__ches followin' you?.....oh, right, you's bikin' from place to place, they can't keep up."

"Where you headed next, Russian?"

"Albany."

"Any reason?"

"It's on the way."

"You sure you'll always find people to stay with?"

"I've got a tent just in case."

"And you're going to Oregon?"

"Yeah."

"You plan stay there?"

"Probably not."

"You got family there?"

"No."

"I don't know what the f__k is wrong with you Russians."

"Yo, Russian, I once saw a movie about some guy named Ivan."

"You guys, stop talking to the Russian! Russian! Get over here and help me lift this thing! Do it for the Ukraine!"

"Holy f__k, look at that b__ch! RUSSIAN! Check out that b__ch!"

----

It was a beautiful day out, but nevertheless, as soon as I became the first person in months in Springfield to request a check instead of cash, I went home and took a nap before going to the bar. I always take naps during the day now because of the freaking cockatiel that wakes me up at 4 every morning.

On the bright side, though, all the Bach I've been whistling him is starting to pay off. This morning, I woke up to parts of the first movement of Trio Sonata No 1.

Waiting Out the Rain

2009-05-07T10:16:00.003-04:00

Budget: ~$50

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The thunderstorms still hung over the mountains, however, so I couldn't leave yet. (Sunday and Monday appear to be two consecutive days of sun over the mountains, so that is probably when I will cross into the Hudson Valley and Albany.) But it was just as well. I didn't know what kind of damage the cat had done, so instead of fixing the bike myself, I dropped it off at a bike shop and went for a long walk through the eastern suburbs. Although I'm technically still in New England until probably next week, it's clear I've moved away from the coast. The yards now often include rusty 1970s cars. No cows as of yet, but I know those will quickly appear once I cross the Appalachians.

When I picked up the bike (the repairman had not only replaced my tube, but added a wider rim strip for good measure, making the back wheel even more resistant to flats) and rode it home, I realized how long it has now been since I've ridden a bike that isn't loaded down with stuff. And I realized that I've already gotten much stronger. I don't think I've ever before experienced the kind of riding I was able to do yesterday.

I left the bike at the neighbors', so that the cat wouldn't be able to get to it.

----

Today, it's raining again. I was finally permitted into the labor office and filled out the necessary forms. They were approved, so if there is work available tomorrow, I might be able to make a bit of cash. But at this point, it hardly matters, because that's the only day I'd expect to be available to work here. By Sunday morning, I hope to be working my way up into the mountains, and away from this city, whose only skyscraper is a massive downtown project.

Deflating News

2009-05-05T10:54:00.003-04:00

Budget: ~$100

As I prepared to walk out of the house today, I did a double-take. The back tire on my bike was flat again. I hadn't been riding it and it had safely been sitting in the house.

It was Pumpkin, the cat, for whom the new name "Satan" was already being considered. I was actually genuinely impressed. With the kevlar, that tire, loaded with hundreds of pounds and hitting potholes at nearly highway speeds, had held up just fine. But it was no match for that cat.

I won't repair it until I leave—otherwise the cat would just pop it again—by which point it will likely have so many punctures that it will be useless to patch and I'll have to just put in a new tube.

----

In other news, I already hate Springfield. It's a dangerous place, and as of yet, I have not found any redeeming factors, though that may just be because the people I'm living with are busy with finals so I'm just showing myself around. But usually, I can find the fun places, and they seem to be absent here.

There's a company here that collects all the felons off the street and gives them jobs and takes a cut of their checks. (This happens a lot in other cities too and I generally like it, since they take care of the whole job search for everyone.) So far as I could tell, that's the only easy way to get a short-term job here. I called them up yesterday and they said they only take "applications" on Tuesdays, 8-12. I showed up at 10:30 today and was told they only take applications 9-10. I wonder if they would have told me something different if I'd shown up at 8 or 9.

I've been told by others to get out of Springfield ASAP. Believe me, that's exactly what I'd like to do. However, it won't stop raining, and my next step after leaving here is to cross a mountain range. The rest of this week is rain east of the mountains, and thunderstorms west of them. So I'm stuck until something like Sunday.

Hopefully there will be better cities ahead.

My Bike Gets Swine Flu

2009-05-04T12:46:00.002-04:00

Budget: ~$100

I left Worcester pretty early in the morning yesterday, intending to beat as much of the rain as possible. The morning was cool and sunny and breezy. I was liking it.

I headed west through hilly Leicester, up and down, up and down. I've been noticing that while all the big cities seem to be nestled in valleys, usually on rivers or lakes, the small towns are always at the tops of hills. My guess is that back when water bodies were the primary arteries for travel, whether or not a settlement was on the water played a large role in determining whether it will grow or not. But perhaps there are other things at play here that I didn't think of.

Soon enough, all the signs were posted for Spencer.

Spencer has three associations in my mind:

There was once so much sodium hydroxide in their tap water that showering would give people burns
During the bird flu epidemic, most of the discussion on the news centered around Spencer
There were a couple of unconfirmed swine flu infections in Spencer just recently

My bike clearly felt this. As I came up the last hill before the one Spencer is on, the riding suddenly got much rougher. I pulled over. Flat rear tire. I walked the bike to a parking lot with a pair of picnic tables, ate some breakfast, and patched the tube.

I shot through Spencer and a few miles past it, when the riding got rough again. The rear tire was flat again.

I walked over to a grassy area and started taking the bike apart. Another biker pulled up.

"Walk back to Spencer. It's only a few miles. There's a bike shop there. Good service, very reasonable. There's nothing farther west. I wouldn't risk it."

I'd expected that I hadn't properly patched the puncture, but when I inspected the tube, I found that the culprit now was a totally different puncture in a different spot. I patched that.

As I pumped air back in, the tire started slipping out. I deflated, readjusted it, inflated again. And suddenly it stopped inflating. It went completely flat and wouldn't inflate even a bit. I was going to have to take out the tube again. I'd probably tried to inflate it to too high a pressure for the hand pump, and broken the valve. Two hours. Three flats. I wanted to cry.

Screw it. I put the wheel back on the bike and walked back to Spencer. I found the bike shop and shelled out the money for some armor—a kevlar tire for the back wheel. I also made lots of swine flu jokes that weren't appreciated. We also talked about Oregon and flat tires.

I zipped out of Spencer. The kevlar tire had a slight bit more rolling friction than the rubber one I'd used before, but I figured if it helped me avoid flats, it was worth it. And I got no more flats.

I passed Brookfield. It started to rain. I passed Warren. These tiny towns were so much less nice in the rain. I got into the foothills of the Berkshires, the section of the Applachian range that's in western Massachusetts.

I took small, extremely steep roads. I would ride up inclines as far as I could, then get off and walk. Cars would pass me. I'd shoot down the incline on the other side. If the road turned, I'd slow down, but if I could see for a large fraction of a mile—which was often the case—I would pass the cars that passed me.

Eventually I got to Springfield, though hardly beating the rain. The roads in this city are more pothole than pavement, and when those potholes are filled with water, they are indistinguishable from puddles.

----

Forbes.com recently published an article on the most dangerous cities in the US. The statistic they use is the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people. Their dangerous cities start in the low 700s, moving up to Miami with 988, and then, way above and beyond all the others, Memphis and Detroit, with 1,218 and 1,220, respectively. Had Springfield been big enough to get on the list, it would have outstripped everyone easily, at 1,920.

I'm debating whether to risk being out at night trying to get work. But it's going to be raining for quite a long time, and I don't want to travel in the rain, so work certainly wouldn't hurt. I'll spend at least a couple of days checking it out in the daytime first.

Worcester

2009-04-30T13:23:00.002-04:00

Budget: ~$150

As I pulled into South Main, the region of Worcester where Clark University is, the maps on my phone showed lots of parks. I went to check one out. As soon as I turned off of Main St onto a side street, however, I noticed that the buildings on either side were fenced off, and behind the broken windows, one could see only blackened wood and ashes. I continued up the road. The pavement ended and it led up a hill into the woods. Toward the top, I caught a glimpse of more burnt houses.

Nice park.

I started checking out parks and asking people about them. The answers varied from "That's the place where high school kids do drugs at night" to "I'd never heard of it until someone got killed there a few months ago."

I grabbed lunch on a bench by Dead Hooker Pond, as it was known to the locals. Then I met Bridget, who is just finishing up at Clark, and at whose place I'm staying now.

We went out with her friends last night, which was a fun time until finally I just fell asleep.

I don't plan to stay here too long, so I don't think I'll get work here (I checked some places yesterday, but they wanted me for two weeks, min). Today I'll readjust the gears and derailers on my bike and replace the spare tube I used up fixing the flat. Tomorrow it will rain and I'll use the day to relax, and maybe hang out somewhere and meet people if I can borrow an umbrella. By Sunday, I should be gone.

My Lucky Day

2009-04-29T12:47:00.003-04:00

Budget: ~$160

Around 6 AM, I hugged Dan goodbye in front of the Atlantic

and took off. Despite traffic, potholes, closed bridges, and having to pull over and walk back every now and then to retrieve a fallen pannier, I zipped through the most densely populated area of the state without any trouble, and was in Waltham by 9 AM. I couldn't believe what good time I was making. My friend Heather drove down to Waltham to intercept me, and we sat around and had tea. For three hours. I felt I could easily get to Worcester by the afternoon.

Until I biked out of Waltham. It wasn't morning anymore. It was 90 degrees out. I biked into Weston. Road construction. The kind that makes the wheels skid sideways and wipe out. I tried the sidewalk, but it was covered with sand and blocked off by "road construction" signs.

I biked into Wayland. I've mostly biked either loops or coastlines, and they've spoiled me. For every uphill on those, there's a corresponding downhill. Not when I'm biking steadily away from the ocean. It was just up, up, up, and the heat wasn't helping.

By the time I got to Sudbury, I was really not feeling well, and drinking water wasn't making it better. I pulled into a Comfort Inn and asked the concierge if I could just stand in the lobby for a bit.

"Sure, have a seat on the couch. Not a good day for biking today."

I sat on the couch, chatting with him and drinking every drop in all four of my water bottles. I refilled them at the water fountain and drank more. For some reason now that I was in the air conditioned lobby, I had started to sweat—profusely—and felt much, much better. Four miles to Marlborough, 20 to Worcester. I got back on the bike and started pedaling.

Up, up, up. The road just kept going. It felt like I had done more than the 25 miles to Waltham, and yet I hadn't completed the 4 miles to Marlborough.

I felt like I was dying again. Stupid heat. I'm going to look into better ways to stay cool. (Drinking gallons of water had always done the trick, but not this time, and I don't know why.) I saw a Chinese buffet. Brilliant. With the calories I was burning and would need to replenish, buffet was the way to go.

Every time I stop, I have to take all my gear off the bike (since I can't lock it). With the backpack on my back, a double pannier in one arm, a tent and sleeping bag in another, and a pump and water bottles distributed among my hands—effectively carrying my whole current life on my person—I walk into places.

I didn't see myself in a mirror when I walked into the buffet, but I wish I had, because a girl who saw me ran to get me some ice water. Then I got a plate of just chicken and beef. And another plate. And another plate. And another. And then a plate of rice. And another. And so on and so forth.

I asked for the check. "Aren't you going to have any fruit?" the waitress asked. Not a bad idea. I got two plates of fruit and tipped her 30%. Then I ate my fortune cookie and read my fortune: "Today is your lucky day."

Wondering what luck awaited me, I walked out with all my stuff, loaded the bike, and did a routine tire pressure test. The back tire was flat. I pumped it up. It went soft again. A real, bona fide flat.

F___er.

The heat started getting to me again. I wasn't going to fix this flat on the black pavement in the heat. I walked the bike. Walking it uphill was a real pain. Lucky day, all right.

Eventually, I made it to Marlborough. I clearly wasn't going to make it to Worcester. A woman with a bike pulled up next to me at an intersection, waiting for the cars. Bingo.

"What's up with the heat?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"It's like there's no such thing as spring anymore. Weren't we freezing just last week?"

She laughed. "Yeah, you're right!"

"Did you have to go a long way?"

And so I got my segue into topics that will generally result in being offered lodging. Too bad she was visiting someone herself and had already overstayed her welcome.

I did a search on my phone for hotels in Marlborough. NONE. The closest ones were miles away, and I couldn't ride on a flat. I tried a rooming house. They sent me to a different rooming house.

I walked into that one behind a man, and asked him if he knows how to get a room for a night. He sent me to a door in the hallway that looked just like the rest of the doors. I knocked.

It was opened by an old man. He was completely naked. Every inch of his body was covered with tattoos.

"What do you want?"

"Just a room for the night."

"Don't have any."

"I really need one. Do you know any place that does?"

"Lincoln Inn, up around the corner."

"Which corner?"

He just stared at me.

"Do you know the address?"

"I told you. Around the corner."

"So do I go left or right when I come out of here?"

He slammed the door.

I took out my phone. According to Google and 411, the Lincoln Inn didn't exist.

I tried going around the corner. There was nothing there. I asked a guy, first in English, then in Spanish, if he knew where the Lincoln Inn was. He said there wasn't anything like that around there. I asked him where I could spend the night.

"If you go up this street past the second light, there will be a Mexican restaurant on your left. A few houses down, there will be a church. One, two, three.....five houses down from that, there will be a red and white house. You can try there."

I walked down there. I nodded to a man who looked about 60, smoking on his porch at the fourth house down. The next house over, red and white, was covered with "PRIVATE PROPERTY / NO TRESPASSING" signs. Lucky day, all right.

I walked over to the guy smoking on his porch. "You think they'll give me a room for the night there?"

He looked at me for a second. "That's a sober house."

"I take it that's a no."

He shook his head.

"Man, this flat tire killed me. Now I'm stuck here and there's nowhere to even stay."

He just looked at me. Come on, man, I thought, you know what I'm aiming at here. I had to break the tension.

"You think it's OK to pitch a tent on the rail trail?"

He still just looked. I let about ten seconds pass, and finally, a smile crept on his face.

"How much are you looking to spend?"

I smiled too. Finally! "What are you suggesting?"

"You can stay here for...." He thought about it for a bit. "$40."

"$40? You got it."

I walked over to a 7-11, got $40, and brought it to him. The sight of the cash clearly excited him.

His name was Donald. We sat up that night and he told me his story, from the 16-year-old daughter who overdosed on drugs two years ago to how he works for the landlord and is trying to paint the house to his girlfriend who was in the hospital.

"I'm sorry the house is such a mess. Do you want some chicken? I'm sorry I don't have much."

He made me crispy chicken. I practically inhaled it.

"I need to call my girlfriend." He picked up the phone and dialed the hospital. The phone was so loud I could hear the other end of the conversation.

"I started drinking again."

"What?"

"The landlord just had me so pissed off, I couldn't take it anymore." He sipped on his beer.

"Well, be careful."

"OK. I got a guy here. I'm letting him spend the night."

"......what?"

He moved the phone away from his ear. "Here, you talk to her."

I wasn't going to fight him.

"Hello, ma'am."

"Hello."

"I was passing by on my bike and got a flat tire. Tomorrow I'll fix the flat and be gone."

"OK."

I gave the phone back to him. He pretty quickly hung up.

"You're not some serial killer, are you?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

----

The next morning, I fixed my flat. It was a tear near the valve, so I couldn't patch it. I threw out the tube and put in a new one.

"You hungry? You want to open the Trix?"

I hadn't had Trix in probably something like 15 years. I opened it.

"Here, take the whole box with you."

"I have nowhere to fit it."

"You want me to go to the store and get you something?"

"No, I'm all good."

"The 40 bucks would more than cover it. I can help you out."

"You've already helped me out."

"You've helped me out too. I really needed that money."

----

I got on my bike and pulled away. The new tube and cooler weather made an enormous difference. I zipped along at speeds up to 50 miles per hour on downhills (though I walked some uphills), and arrived in Worcester in no time.

And So, I Depart

2009-04-27T22:38:00.002-04:00

Budget: $150.24

Spent tonight at a bar in Salem, saying goodbye to friends. Said goodbye to relatives earlier. Old Not-So-Rusty is beefed up and outfitted for a long-distance trip. Tomorrow, I'll go get my glimpse of the Atlantic, and then head to Worcester, my first stop on the "real" trip.

Salisbury: Lessons on Camping

2009-04-24T18:06:00.005-04:00

Budget: ~$400

It was an uneventful ride to Salisbury, through the flat marshland of northern Massachusetts,

occasionally dotted with towns like Rowley.

There was a brutal headwind, and occasional rain, but the rain clouds were generally small enough to be seen in their entirety.

We stopped at a small farm, bought watermelon, and ate it right there.

I'm starting to find that it's exciting to see a sign saying you've arrived somewhere even when there are still miles to go.

I had, for the first time, actually loaded up the bike in addition to carrying a backpack,

and to my surprise, it didn't make it really any harder. Or maybe that was because Dan, starting some 20 miles into the trip, had us stop every few miles to rest.

Turned out it wasn't just us suffering from the wind, too. When we finally made it to Salisbury for real

and got on the road to the beach,

the gusts became unbelievable. I barely managed to close the door to the office when I came in.

"Do you need electric hookups?"

"Nope."

"Water?"

"Nope."

"Roughing it, huh?"

"I guess you can say that."

"OK. Can I have the registration of your vehicle?"

"Nope."

I let the blank stare last a few seconds, then smiled.

"I've only got a bike."

"....so you're just looking to pitch a tent?"

"Yeah." There followed a silence for a few seconds again, except for the deafening howling and wailing of the wind.

"Don't get blown away."

"I'll do my best, believe me."

The campground was empty.

I tried to set up the tent, but it was so freaking windy, I couldn't do it. It was acting more like a kite than a tent, and the situation seemed hopeless. I wasn't getting much help, either,

I finally did yell at him to help, and then realized I'd been making a fundamental mistake ¹, which I fixed, and got the tent set up. I did have to put stakes in "prematurely" to hold down corners of the tent while I was working on other corners.

More rain came in,

but it wasn't all bad.

----

And then we had a problem.

We wanted to go somewhere and grab dinner. But the wind was blowing so hard that despite the stakes, we were afraid that if we were gone for two or three hours, we'd be facing an empty plot on our return. We tossed all our stuff that didn't contain food (except the bikes) into the tent, but the wind gusts still tossed parts of it around in such a way that it was truly amazing that the stakes were holding it at all, and we were afraid to leave it unattended.

So much for dinner. We sat at the picnic table by the tent and ate granola bars. The time was 6:30 PM. Our options were to

sit and guard the tent.
go to sleep and add our weight to the thing.

We chose option 2, which worked fine despite the extremely abusive beating the tent got that night.

----

...and we woke up completely refreshed after ten hours of sleep. At 4:30 AM.

We rolled up and packed all our stuff. It was very hard to fit it back. Some stuff just didn't fit. Now everything I have has more realistic bulk for when I'm packing it for real.

We tried to fold the tent nicely, but the wind kept getting in the way.

You can't change the world, said Robert Kiyosaki once (paraphrase), but you can take advantage of it the way it is. He was talking about financially coming out the winner in an unjust world. We used the principle to make the wind help us spread out the tent for folding.

Then, despite the obscene cold right after sunrise, we went to check out Butler's Toothpick.

This is all at the mouth of the Merrimack, by the way, the same river that flows through Lowell, just miles and miles downstream.

We followed it all the way out to the ocean.

Then we got on our bikes and headed back.

----

Important things to take with me from this trip:

Some minor lessons on properly setting up a tent
My new sleeping bag can be adjusted once I'm in it so that I am entirely hidden within it except a small opening for my face. Even so, however, if it's a cold night, my nose will get cold.
It is a good idea to unpack things from their factory packaging and try to repack them as best one can. You often can't repack it quite the same way with your hands, and you end up with a better idea of the true bulk of what you're taking with you.

Hopefully these lessons will give me enough of a start that I won't be hideously unprepared at some point on the road.

¹Never, ever hook a pole to the corners of a dome tent before you've put the other pole through the sleeve. You need to induce curvature in both poles simultaneously.

Bulk of Equipment Purchased

2009-04-22T22:40:00.005-04:00

Budget: ~$400

I'm buying up stuff so quickly that the budget is in a state of flux in which I've lost track of it. I'll have it back to the penny once the dust settles.

I got a spare tire and spare tubes for the bike.

The little boxes in the middle contain the collapsed tubes. So now if I get some ridiculous puncture that I can't patch (which, no doubt, at some point I will), I'll have a recourse. I also ordered panniers and a rain cover for the bike, which should arrive at the shop by the end of the week.

I got some camping equipment. I paid extra for compactness; it will be worth it. I tossed a boot into the photo for size comparison.

The long rectangular package is the tent. It'll be barely big enough to hold me lengthwise when set up, but barely is still big enough. The big green roll on the left is the sleeping bag. The small one on the right is a pad to put under the sleeping bag.

I never thought the pad was important until I once camped without one. It was almost like sleeping on the ground. I wondered all night why I even brought a tent. In fact, I now actually think the opposite—that if the weather were really nice, I'd potentially be willing to leave the tent packed and just put the pad on the ground and the sleeping bag on it. (Probably not, though; the tent does a good job of screening one from small animals.)

I still need:

A couple of good bike locks
Pepper spray and bear spray
First aid
Simple stuff like sunscreen, sunglasses, etc.

----

So tomorrow, I'm grabbing my little brother and we're biking up to Salisbury, where we'll sleep in my new tent and try it out. Tonight, I was thinking about getting there, and realized....Oh, crap! How am I going to attach stuff to the rack?

So I had to borrow some bungee cords.

I'll need to buy some of my own before departing for real.

Salisbury should be a good time.

Impressions of Lowell

2009-04-19T13:26:00.026-04:00

Budget: $690

Realizing tomorrow is a holiday, I decided it was time to fold, and left Lowell. I zipped pretty quickly through towns like Tewksbury

and cities like Reading.

I stopped at a bench on a lake in Wakefield for lunch.

My mood was generally good. I'd had a decently good time, and at the same time, I was glad to have left. Having no work the first day had been OK—I'd just walked around the city, exploring—but by the second day it was lonely. ("It's easy, so long as you can deal with the loneliness," said Charlee, a man who had saved up the money and toured for nearly a year on his bike without working.)

I'd spent the weekend partying with the people I'd stayed with and their friends, and it was a fun time, but I figured there would be plenty of time to do that on the road.

----

On the way out, I was on a bike for the first time after winter, and it was a new one. By the time I was on the way back, I was again able to signal to motorists, let the uncooperative ones by, signal my thank-yous, and shoot diagonally through a complicated intersection without having gotten off the bike. On the way there, it took much longer, because I kept having to get off the bike, and walk it not only through intersections, but also down miles of sidewalks on roads where the traffic scared me.

The new bike was a road bike, so the brakes weren't where I was used to having them, the gear shift wasn't where I was used to having it, and by the time I learned how to pedal so as to keep my pants out of the gears, it was a bit too late for that pair of pants.

They're my work pants, though, so they'll be fine like that.

I was quite happy to finally see the sign,

but it was miles more before I caught a glimpse of the actual city.

Lowell has a bad rap in Massachusetts, and I firmly believe it deserves it.

However, I was impressed by how nice parts of it were. Lowell used to be a mill city, and to power the mills, there are canals all over the place.

There are gatehouses on every canal,

and I picked one a ways off as a place to eat lunch on days when it's nice out.

The canals had been dug by Irishmen, mill work itself being reserved for those born in America. I wondered where all the rocks from the canals had gone. There was usually some site where such things had been dumped, and, to my surprise, I found it, though it was a bit unexpected:

The mills themselves are completely ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, there's a mill.

I found it interesting to walk around the old, largely abandoned mills, remembering books like Lyddie, which I'd read in middle school, and compare the work there to work today.

The bell tower in the above photo was to signal when workers could leave and when they had to return. The gate on the left was where they walked in and out, and it was locked promptly after time was up. Anybody who came in late had to us the side entrance on the right (now the entrance to the museum), where an official would take down the worker's name and either dock his pay or fire him. The hours were long, and work was six days a week.

Part of why I had decided to take this trip was because of the liberating nature of day work: just because I work today doesn't mean there's any expectation that I will come tomorrow. But I think even the most "oppressive" employment today doesn't take over one's life the way mill work in the 1840s did. I've done day jobs in dusty, murky environments, but I don't see myself lasting long at a job where I'm expected to show up regularly and am threatened with that kind of punishment for being a few minutes late.

I walked around an abandoned mill, thinking about that.

I think it's important to note that the primary workers' right, courtesy of capitalism, existed even then: the right to quit. We take it for granted here, but in the USSR, that right didn't exist. Also, unlike in a benefits-based system like Soviet socialism, in a money-based, capitalist system, one who saves or invests well gets to keep what he earned at work even after being dismissed (whereas benefits can terminate immediately).

The reason the workers chose to stay at the mills was because mills paid more than other jobs. The dream was to save up money and then leave.

With modern innovation, it takes less work to achieve the same quality of life, and even people who have no education and work relatively little have things like flushing toilets and electricity that, a few hundred years ago, kings wouldn't have dreamt of (in the US, even completely impoverished people, unable or unwilling to work at all, have such amenities, but that is only thanks to subsidies from the taxes others pay). Used to the life we have, we view conditions in the mills as an abomination and a horror, and are glad it is safely in the past, smashed and shuttered away.

----

I walked along the Merrimack River,

thinking about that, and about how amazingly integrated "pretty Lowell" and "real Lowell" are.

With the work I was going to try to get, I was going to be familiar with a very different Lowell.

My mind shifted to modern 9-5 office jobs, and I wondered what our descendants 200 years down the line will think of them.

Survival in Lowell

2009-04-17T10:08:00.004-04:00

Budget: &728.36

Getting lodging in Lowell was pretty easy. I met Jen, who was excited about my trip but didn't have her own place, and then met her friend Olivia who did, with her roommates Sarah and Bobby. It's been an easy life crashing with them.

Yesterday I went out to look for work, but there was none to be had. By 7 AM, Sonia, who seems to be the one who mostly deals with such workers here, came by and said "All right, boys, let's call it a day."

"At least you had a warm place to sleep," another guy who didn't get any work that day told me. "Mah b__ch wouldn' even let me in. Had to sleep out in the hallway. It was COLD out there."

"Why wouldn't she let you in?"

"Because," he said, making a drinking motion, "I'd been drinkin'. She don't like that. I don't get it myself. I'm going out every day, bustin' mah ass, sometimes for nothin', to pay the rent, and here she is tellin' me I can't come in."

I spent the rest of the day wandering around Lowell, whilstling libiamo from La Traviata and enjoying the weather. I'll post my impressions as soon as I can get the photos off the camera. Then I went back "home" to walk a dog with Sarah and just hang out, hoping I'd get work the next day (today).

No such luck. I got up at 4:30 again and headed over, and we just stood around in the cold. Sonia came by around 5:30, but left at 5:50 to drive one of us (out of about 10) to a job site. By 7:30, most guys had given up and left.

"What do you do once you leave?" I asked a guy.

"Nothin'."

"I can't believe some of the guys who just keep coming year after year," said Derek, another guy who was waiting. "It's so touch and go. And then you don't get work Friday, and your weekend's f___ed. No money."

Derek ran a business once, selling construction equipment. "It just folded a couple of years ago. We were had. Someone in Nigeria. We shipped off the merchandise, they sent a bad check."

I didn't start asking him about questionable business practices or how one bad check could crash the whole business. I just let him ask me about my story.

"Oh, that's cool, man. You'll show 'em we're not just helpless bums on welfare. We're honest folk who can work and take care of ourselves."

By 8:30, I was the only person left waiting for work, and Sonia came by and told me to give it up. I walked off for half an hour (the weather was getting really nice), then came back at 9 and hung out, making some phone calls. At 10 I gave up. Lowell is a horrible place to look for work. I'll try again Monday.

Made it to Lowell

2009-04-15T13:10:00.002-04:00

Budget: $730.44

Well, biking to Lowell wasn't so bad. As I rode, I remembered what traffic in eastern Massachusetts means (very, very different from upstate New York). I also realized that I'd ridden the same bike for so many years it was going to take a bit to adjust to a new one. I had pictures of specific problems, but they won't be posted right now. For a stupid reason.

I realized as I was biking that I had, in fact, forgotten two things.

The wire to connect my camera to a USB port
My social security card

The former is pretty simple: if I really want to describe my trip to Lowell and don't have much new stuff to talk about, I can take the camera to any convenience store and put the photos on a CD and post them.

The latter, however, is going to require me to REALLY milk my charms while I'm here. I've already circumvented the need for the card once since my arrival, and may have a (taxable) job waiting for me tomorrow. But in general, while I like to rely on my charms, it'll probably be a good idea to carry that thing around with me in the future.

The Feds Pay Up

2009-04-14T19:59:00.004-04:00

Budget: $630.44

For some reason I assumed the Feds would take even longer to pay than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I was dead wrong. Hopefully I'll make some more money in Lowell and then go on a shopping spree that should leave me ready to leave.

Old Not-So-Rusty Commissioned

2009-04-13T20:39:00.003-04:00

Budget: -$30.56

I picked up the "new" bike today. It was also rather old, not looking too different from Old Rusty, but what was inside was now guaranteed. And since I was buying it from the bike shop, they did a complete tune-up for free. When I came in to get it, it didn't look anything like Old Rusty anymore, to the point where I was afraid it might now be more likely to get stolen.

The new tires and new tape on the handlebars made an ENORMOUS difference.

On Wednesday morning, I plan to get on it and ride it to Lowell, MA, where I will spend a few days (maybe a week or so) trying to work, and hopefully making enough money to buy more equipment when I come back. That will be the real test of how well it works.

Tip From Along the Way

2009-04-13T09:45:00.003-04:00

Budget: -$30.56

If a check arrives for you and you're not there to deposit it, someone else can deposit it for you. They can just take it to a teller, along with your account number. On the back of the check, instead of your endorsement, they can write "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY". Obviously, they can't collect any part of it in cash. They also obviously can't make the deposit at an ATM.

I learned this as I looked for a solution to the problem that I will have checks arriving from non-tech-savvy clients for prior services after I've departed for the trip. As long as I have someone who has physical access to the checks, problem solved.

----

As I learn stuff that's potentially useful throughout the preparation and trip, I'll try to post it in this fashion. Hopefully there will be many such things, and hopefully they'll be helpful to somebody.

Old Rusty Decommissioned

2009-04-09T15:01:00.007-04:00

Budget: -$8.61

I had really wanted to take Old Rusty. But something came up that was actually serious.

----

I got up at 4:30 AM again this morning, and went back to Lynn to look for work. I wasn't really practicing this week, but I figured I could use some more cash. But with things heading towards Easter, everything was really slow, and it became clear that work was not to be had. No problem. I called and made an appointment with a client. It will pay off later, once I'm (hopefully) long out of here.

I headed over to the ocean

and took a walk up the coast.

Then I headed back to the bike shop.

----

I'd intended to just buy some stuff, but Mark suggested we look at Old Rusty, if only to have another laugh. We went to the back and looked at it. It did look funny among the other bikes. We rolled it out.

And suddenly we weren't laughing. Mark pointed to the fork, to which the front wheel was attached. "That can't be normal."

The fork looked as if it might have been bent forward. I took a closer look at the paint and noticed not only normal, longitudinal scratches, but also a linear, lateral clumping. The fork had gotten bent, at some point after the bike had last been painted.

"What if that breaks?" said Mark. "That would be a horrible accident."

Yeah, it would be. We went down to the basement to look at some other old bikes, and picked one out that wouldn't attract attention but would be in good riding shape. I bought it. I plan to pick it up on Monday.

----

I had a bit left in my budget, so I got some tools for the road.

On the left is the pump. I got a long one so I can pump faster. In the center is the lube, which I'll be using once a week or so on the chain. I'll need to stop once a month or so to lube up the derailleurs, for which I'll need a spray (which I opted not to carry, because aerosol cans are bulky). On the right is a set of tire irons and a patch kit. I'll need to get some spare tubes, too, once the budget is positive again.

I also got a pair of bike shorts.

They're a lot like boxer briefs, but the way this photo is taken, you can see the padding in them. It complements the padding of the seat.

Every now and then, you hear about someone becoming impotent from riding a bike with insufficient padding over a long period of time. That's some irreplaceable machinery down there. If you're riding a bike and start feeling numb there, definitely make sure you've got enough padding.

The Initial Tune-Up

2009-04-07T16:30:00.003-04:00

Budget: $80.90

When I walked into the bike shop, my first words to the kid were "Don't laugh." To his credit, he didn't.

"Actually," he said, "it doesn't look too bad. We'd just want to replace--" and he proceeded to list item after item, resulting in a tab of $350. Then he went off to show me some new bikes.

"I'm going on that one," I said, "and let's just do the minimum with it. What if we don't replace--" and I went off with "what if" after "what if," looking to replace only the consequential stuff.

The kid's father came in.

"That thing? ...well. That wasn't a good bike when it was new. With all the corrosion on it....and we don't even know what's going on inside....I really don't recommend putting any money into this thing."

It was good advice for anybody else. Indeed, I knew already that the money I would spend fixing this bike up along the way would total to more than buying a new one. However, I'm planning to do a lot of the fixing myself along the way, and even when I take it to a bike shop, it'll be on money I'm making as I stop, already on the road, to work. Way cooler than sitting around in Massachusetts for weeks more, making the money for a new bike. That's not the point of this trip.

Finally, the kid stopped trying to push me to spend more. "It actually isn't as bad as it looks."

I went through the whole thing with them and determined what I would need to fix in order to be able to ride it decently.

"I realize it'll never ride perfectly," I told them. "I don't expect that."

We settled on

A general tune-up
New gear cables
New tubes and tires
LOTS of lube and grease

I dropped $150. Pumped nearly all of it from a different source than my trip budget, because I want to get going with this trip faster. I'll be way stricter about the budget once on the road.

The bike should be ready by Friday, and should allow me to go some distance and be OK.

"We can't see the bearings," he told me, "so while the wheels and pedals seem to turn OK now, I can't tell you how long that will last. What worries me more is that the back wheel is so corroded that the brake pads might not be able to stop it very efficiently."

To replace a wheel, I'd be looking at about $50. About the same if I need to replace the bearings in the pedals. Not so bad, especially if I can already be somewhere well along the way when that happens.

Like everything else, it'll be an adventure.

Volunteering for Money

2009-04-05T23:31:00.005-04:00

Budget: $88.23

At five-something AM on a Sunday morning, I found myself driving along the coast.

To my own disbelief, I was driving back to Somerville. The highways were empty, so I zipped along pretty quickly, passing by Prospect Hill where the first American flag (the Grand Union Flag) was raised by George Washington's army on January 1, 1776, and Union Square, where Union Army recruitment had taken place during the Civil War.

I had gotten a call that someone had heard I was a good, dependable worker, and wanted to know if I would be willing to work on Sunday. I figured some immediate cash couldn't hurt, given that I was in a hurry to tune up the bike.

I was sick of loading and unloading trucks in Massachusetts. I wanted to be off. I wanted to be doing it elsewhere, with the express purpose of continuing along my way within a few days. Any chance to get closer to departure was welcomed.

And thus I arrived, and found Mike already there, having also been asked to work. Since I had brought the car today, I loaded him into it and off we went.

"I'm a better man, now that I've been in prison," Mike told me on the way. "It was no fun, but some of the guys in there, they had it coming to them, and they deserved to be there, and they'll be there for life. Now I know what I'm getting if I f__k up again. Those guys, they ain't never getting out. No more p___y for them, ever. I met a guy there, he was a few years younger than me, he ain't never eaten p___y and never will. Can you imagine? I'd 'a killed myself. Well, I wouldn't 'a killed myself, but....you know."

We pulled up to Harvard stadium. I'd been told the work would be easy, so I put on my "normal" clothes. Mike had worn work clothes. It was pretty much all he had. We were there to set things up for the walk for multiple sclerosis. We walked in at the same time as some girl did, and a woman came out to greet us.

"Kara!" she yelled. "A worker and two volunteers!"

Mike looked at me and laughed. "He ain't no volunteer!"

"Oh, he's not? Sorry."

But the rest of the day, with everyone I talked to, the question that instantly came up was "Have you volunteered here before?" I didn't lie. I just said "Nope."

We worked alongside the volunteers, doing the same stuff they did, carrying boxes, tables, chairs. Hanging up banners. ("I'm a cat on ladders!" Mike said.)

Mike was constantly walking around, asking how he could help. I just chatted with "other" volunteers, and did stuff when we were asked.

"The concept of physical work is truly important in a world in which physical work is frowned upon...," someone I deeply respect recently wrote me. "I strongly believe in physical work as an enlightenment tool." When the work is hard and requires the workers to bond, I think I catch a glimpse of that. Here, being told that I'm doing a great job when I was standing around talking, I definitely wasn't feeling it. But I was having a great time.

I ate free food, and got paid for the time I spent eating it. At one point, I sat down in a chair and fell asleep, and was paid for that. Even the people who knew they were paying me treated me as a volunteer, which I really didn't understand. At one point, I actually went ahead and asked how I could help, and was told to "just chill and have fun." No problem.

----

And then came the moment when I wished I'd had the camera on and filming a video. Mike and I were approached and asked to "move the port-a-potties back into place." We went outside, and, with disbelief, saw that two port-a-potties had somehow gotten moved about 20 feet out of line. Wondering how it had happened, we moved them back. Then we just stood outside and took in the sun.

And then a strong gust of wind blew, and, as we watched with even more disbelief, a port-a-potty slid out, sped up, hit a bump and tipped over. Two other port-a-potties followed it, but, hitting no bumps, just sped up and shot along the pavement, reaching speeds greater than most people could sprint (I estimate about 20 MPH).

Mike and I started running after them, but, in a beautiful display of chaos theory at work, they went off in different directions. The air was filled with feminine screams as people ran to get out of the way of the port-a-potties. By the time the gust of wind was exhausted and the port-a-potties stopped sliding, they had gone a good fraction of a mile.

With uncontrollable, uproarious laughter, Mike and I spent a good fraction of an hour hauling the port-a-potties back to their prior location. We tied them all to each other, and then to a pair of poles, to make sure the incident didn't recur.

At the end of the day, we were told we did a great job, and paid fifty-odd dollars each. Plus we had been given unlimited food, which we had been eating all day. All for hanging out and talking to people and having fun. Not a bad deal.

Inspecting Old Rusty

2009-04-04T11:18:00.004-04:00

Budget: $31.50

So far, transportation has been the primary difficulty in moving between cities, because Old Rusty has been in no shape to be ridden, and the negative budget didn't allow me to tune it up. Now that the budget is going positive, my first step is start first fixing up, then beefing up Old Rusty. Today I went with my little brother Dan to give it a preliminary examination, the purpose being to see if it can be ridden as far as the bike shop.

Inspection results:

I wouldn't trust the brakes on a long trip, but they're working well enough to make it to the bike shop, where I can get new pads.
The rear gears shift; the front ones don't. That's enough to get to the bike shop.
The pedals and chain look awful, but turn fine. Looking awful is not a bad thing, considering it makes the bike less likely to get stolen.
Once we pumped them up, the air tubes seemed OK until I actually got on the bike. Then the rear tire instantly went flat, and while the front one deflated more slowly, both tubes clearly have punctures. Therefore the bike won't make it to the bike shop.

So I can either get to the shop some other way, purchase tubes, and install them myself; or I could just load the bike onto a car and take it to the shop for a full tune-up, which is probably how I'll start.

Positive Balance

2009-04-02T21:18:00.002-04:00

Budget: $31.50

Finally got one of the payments I've been expecting. I'm going to need to keep working, but I can also start really preparing for the trip now.

Building the Circus

2009-04-01T20:45:00.011-04:00

Budget: -$318.43

I bade Amanda good-bye (nearly tearful, but probably only on my end, as I had still very recently eaten all her cereal), and, slipped out into the night. I got to the office, signed in, finally collected my check for moving furniture, and sat down to eat breakfast. I immediately attracted attention, and not just for being the only upbeat person in the room.

"Look at that guy. He has a LOAF of bread and a JAR of peanut butter."

I offered him some, but he didn't take it.

I noticed two guys speaking in Spanish. One of them, I could swear, had a Russian accent, so I jumped in and asked in Spanish where he was from.

"Russia," he said, so I switched to Russian and asked him where in Russia.

His name was Igor, and he had moved, just like my family, to Austria in the late 1980s, then to Italy, and by 1990 was living in the US. However, he had been living on these day jobs the entire time, and had learned Spanish better than English.

He switched to Spanish, saying "Spanish is now the dominant language in this country."

A guy from Honduras jumped in. "What are you talking about? English is."

"Before, it was English. Now, definitely Spanish."

He also asked me if I needed a place to stay.

"There's a pretty nice shelter on Long Island [there's a Long Island in Boston Harbor]. Just don't go to the one on Pine St. They have fights there all the time."

Then we were all called to go to Government Center to help build the Big Apple Circus that was coming to town.

----

I rode in with Mike. Mike had gotten out of jail two weeks before, after having served four and a half years for armed robbery. He was concerned about my trip.

"It's going to be an awesome time, man. Just watch out for other people. They take advantage of you."

We arrived at Government Center early and sat down to have some food. I continued working on my loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter.

Mike had worked the day before until 10 PM on the circus. He warned me that it was rough work. But it was already looking good.

I had gone to the Big Apple Circus as a kid, so I thought it would be cool to be on this end.

Mike ran ahead to talk to the guard, whom he knew from the day before, so by the time I got there he knew exactly who I was and took my backpack into his booth, saying that was the only place where it would be safe.

I was quickly put to work with another guy, carrying extremely heavy pieces of metal that were basically the skeleton of the circus seating. With a lot of trouble, we would carry them on our shoulders (I quickly learned to ignore my body posture and slouch so that it would rest on muscle rather than bone, which hurt a LOT) to where they'd need to be set up, and then, with the help of two other people, heave them into place, and secure them with pins, chains, and big steel triangles that two yet other people would bring.

At one point, when we had a moment to catch our breath, I decided to make an overture, and said "What's your name, man?"

"Scares, man," he said, and shook my hand. I didn't want to ask again, though it sounded totally off.

Eventually, later, I did say "Dude, I'm so bad with names. What was your name again?" But, with an annoyed expression on his face, he just said "Scares, man," and shook my hand again. "Scares?" I asked. Looking even more annoyed, he said "Yeah."

Later on, I saw a list of our names and learned his real name, but if Scares is what he wants to be called, that's what I'll call him. Back to when we were carrying heavy pieces of metal.

"How long have you been doing this kind of stuff?" asked Scares.

"This is my fourth day," I said. I suppressed the word "nonconsecutive" that would have been in there, for fear of sounding pretentious.

"I've been stuck in this since 2002," he said.

"Wow, that's what....seven years now?"

"Yeah."

Scares looked away and I snuck a picture of him and the rapidly assembling circus.

We were sent to haul wooden boards and load them onto the metal framework. This was much lighter work than assembling the metal framework, and provided us with a solid floor to walk on, replacing the jungle gym we had been dealing with.

Then we were sent to set in a bit more metal. And suddenly, a tractor trailer was opened up, which contained all the chairs that needed to be assembled.

Now work became hell. The chairs were attached in groups of three, which made them heavy, though much lighter than what we had been assembling into the framework. However, the chairs were SO awkward to carry that this part actually felt worse.

I noticed a man hauling the chairs who looked like he could have been a professor of mine. He also reminded me of my father.

We were ordered to drop our work and go to the white tent in the back for lunch.

The circus was looking better and better.

----

We went to the white tent and got lunch. Igor sat with me and talked. I was under the impression that he hadn't spoken Russian in a long time and wanted to. Then he went off to wander around the city with Scares and a few other guys.

I thought about joining them but then saw the guy who had looked like a professor and slid into a chair at his table with the words "What's your name?"

His name was Mark (like my father's). Immediately and with no prompting, he started telling me about what a strange place Boston is, and how, because it has so many students whose parents pay their rent and who are willing to work for very little money (or even do unpaid internships), the city, as a result, has astronomical prices and very low wages.

"Did you study econimics?" I asked.

He did, as part of his political science major at Dartmouth.

The rest of my lunch break had been decided. I kicked back, and we talked economics. How he ended up doing this sort of work is a mystery to me. But then again, my story isn't so obvious either.

----

Lunch ended and we went back to work. Igor and Scares and the rest of the guys came back too.

"Man," said Scares, quietly pointing to Igor. "What's with Old Onion Breath? I can normally handle a little, but I can't be around that guy. It's f___king disgusting. I mean, some people have bad breath, but doesn't he notice? It's f___king ridiculous. I don't ever want to work with that guy again. Someone needs to tell him. He needs to get a box of altoids. Or two."

I tried to interrupt. "What did you guys end up doing?"

He shrugged. "Walking around. Looking at hos."

We went back to work carrying chairs. I tried to position myself so that I carried stuff next to Mark. We were now talking about the differences between UNIX and MVS operating systems.

The light of the cloudy late afternoon became increasingly grayer, making the now-empty metal dumpsters strewn about look even more bland and desolate. I really didn't feel like working anymore.

At one point, I walked by Scares as he was talking to someone else. "It's like, seriously. Get that guy a breath mint. He's all the way across there and I can f___king smell it from here."

----

We unloaded the entire truck, mounted nearly all the seats, constructed the walkway that leads under the canopy. Then we were all marched outside and sent to a small trailer where we were given signed work tickets. Then all the workers were dismissed.

The circus was definitely starting to remind me of what I'd seen as a kid.

"It's weird, how small the circus is," Scares had said. "When I was a kid, I thought it was much bigger. But that was, like, 20 years ago."

I walked out of the circus tent, putting my camera away, and ended up face to face with an older worker who grinned. "A picture for the kids?"

I didn't want to explain. "Yeah."

"Show 'em the hard work that's REALLY the circus!"

----

I caught a train back up to Somerville and called Toya, the girl who was behind the desk at the office at the moment. She picked up after one ring.

"Hi, Greg!"

So now even the people who are sending me out to work for a couple of days are storing my number in their phones. WTF? I asked her if she'll be there if I drop by to get my check. She said she won't leave until I've come by.

And so come by I did. I opened the door and she smiled at me. "Hi!"

"Hi!" I said. "Thank you SO much for staying." Then I realized she was on the phone.

"You're welcome!....No, it is NOT nice to talk to you. Would you like it if YOUR own momma were trying to ignore you?"

----

She printed my check, I thanked her again, and headed for the station. I wasn't planning on coming back. I just walked and smelled the air, already feeling nostalgic, and remembering a line from Alexander Gorodnitsky: "It will become desirable and bitter in the distance, that smell of gasoline and dust...."

Bye-bye, Somerville!

Movin' Furniture

2009-03-30T22:05:00.003-04:00

Budget: -$397.19

A past comment from Matthew Marchesi came back to haunt me today.

I walked back to the office in the afternoon and was given my work ticket, along with a pair of gloves.

I was also given vague directions to where I was going. They were so vague that I used my extra time to go to the library and get a map to figure out how to really get there. Then I set out, through miserable wind and rain, to walk what was supposed to be a couple of miles to the address.

Of course, I missed a turn, and then relied on my navigation skills—which are rather poor in the rain, when there's no sun and no stars—to follow some cross between a spiral and a zigzag to the address.

I got there first, so I started carrying TVs, couches and random marble slabs down the stairs and outside as instructed. Joe arrived a bit later and joined in. Even before he arrived, I was feeling light-headed, and wondering whether I had randomly developed some condition such that I could no longer handle physical exertion and would have to call off the trip.

But soon we'd carried everything down, the truck with the replacement stuff still hadn't arrived, and Joe asked for a drink of water. Thank God. I was normal. I asked for a drink of water too.

Two hours passed. Still no truck. Just Joe and me, hanging out. I'd started feeling hungry before I'd even arrived. I broke down and ate half of a granola bar I'd brought with me. I gave Joe the other half.

Finally, Dawn, the homeowner, told us she'd called the company and the truck wasn't coming for another 45 minutes. We went around the corner to a convenience store and I bought a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. The store had tables and chairs, so I sat there and had a feast. I was in heaven.

Then Joe and I walked back out into the miserable rain, watched the truck arrive, unloaded it, and carried all the stuff up the stairs.

Moving couches is awful. Moving everything else is amazingly easy. (The gloves really help, by the way.) Too bad the truck took so long that the office was closed by the time we were done, so I won't get paid until next time I show up, which will probably be Wednesday. It'll be something like $30.

It's getting frustrating to watch my budget creep downward again. I wish at least one of my clients with a balance would finally cut me a check. Perhaps the ever-so-slow Commonwealth of Massachusetts? I've been waiting for its check for a LONG time.

Got Work

2009-03-30T09:23:00.006-04:00

Budget: -$389.61

Last night, I asked Amanda if Somerville is safe at night. She told me she walks around at night all the time, "but the east side might be a little rougher."

I smiled. "That's where I'm going!"

And so I got up at 4:30 and went out for my two-mile walk through nighttime Somerville.

And Amanda had it exactly right. As I walked eastward, I ended up on a small street that dipped down

and went into an area with shuttered houses and random people standing on street corners. After about a mile of that, I came out into places familiar from Friday.

I was there well before 5:30, but the door was already unlocked and I was only third on the list. As more guys came in, I turned a chair to face them—especially Brian, the guy who was doing most of the talking—so that I wouldn't look aloof. But I didn't talk yet. I wanted to scope out the scene.

"Luis," said Brian. "This guy—the Iron Man. He'll lift a mountain off ya." Laughter. "Mikey—worthless, he'll just talk your ear off." More laughter.

Brian pointed to me. "New guy. Don't know anything about him. If I did, I wouldn't say it, he might take out a gun and shoot us all for all I know." More laughter. "You never know with new guys. I'm just glad that light-skinned guy ain't here no more. What was his name?"

"Chris."

"Yeah, Chris. He can't never come back here no more."

Another guy perked up. "Yeah, he had bitches flyin' all over the place!" I figured out that this meant he was constantly using the B word.

"Yeah," said Brian. "And motherf___ing n____r was LAZY. He'd show up, but he wouldn't do no work. He got kicked out of a shelter, you know that? Now THAT'S rock-bottom."

A few more guys jumped in about how worthless Chris—and his whole family—were.

"Comes in in the mornin' says he drank mouthwash by accident. Didn't realize it was mouthwash." I didn't even get that at first. Turned out he'd gotten into trouble for showing up drunk.

"Can't work with those kinds of people." one guy said. "Especially if they're watching your ladder or something. Ever worked with Jim? I'll be 25 feet up on a ladder, and he's supposed to be holdin' it, and I look down, and he's takin' a walkabout."

Eventually, Brian pointed at me again.

"This guy here, probably a cop."

"He don't look like no cop."

"He's undercover."

"He don't look like no undercover cop."

"He's DEEP undercover. So undercover he's become one of us." Laughter.

"What's your name, man?"

Now was the time to stop scoping out and become part of the scene. "Greg."

"I'm goin' out to smoke a joint," said Brian. Then he looked at me. "You want a puff?.....Nah, you's a cop." And he walked out for five minutes.

My story came out pretty quickly.

"That's.....different, man. You bringing a gun?"

"Nah," I said, "the laws in the different states are pain in the ass, not worth it."

Another guy cracked up. "You tell me it ain't worth it when you's campin' out in the middle'a'nowhere and someone comes over an' says Oh, you's got a fire goin'.....hey, nice watch you got there!" We all laughed.

"You watch out," said Brian. "You're not careful, your bike'll get stolen. I locked mine up once by the train station in Quincy. Took the seat off an' carried it with me. I come back, front tire's gone, screws are gone, anything they could take off. Right in front of the train station! Still had my back tire, since I put the lock through the back wheel."

Another guy jumped in. "Me an' my friend used to steal bikes all the time. I had some nice ones. Had some Treks, a few Specialized, a NICE Diamondback. Didn't do so well on hills, but good on flat ground."

I asked him all the details about how he stole bikes. He told me about what locks he could open and how. I have a much, much better idea now of how to lock up my bike to make it harder to steal. I still expect stuff stolen on this trip.

Guys started getting called to work, so the conversation died down. A man walked over, shook my hand, and introduced himself as Joe.

"You say you worked in Lynn last week?"

"Yep."

"I used to work there, years ago. How is it there now?"

"Not bad at all. When I came early, I got work."

"Good to hear," said Joe. "You know, I used to bike. Even all up around there."

More guys got called to work. I was #3 on the list, but new guys don't get called so readily. I'll need to get used to that, since I'll be the new guy pretty much all the time. A few other guys, including the one who stole bikes, got sick of waiting and left. Soon, Joe and I were offered work moving and assembling furniture. But that didn't start until the afternoon.

I called up Amanda, who works from home, and told her I was coming back for the morning. Joe gave me a ride back. Amanda gave me breakfast. Any anxiety I might have had about Somerville is gone.

Moved to Somerville

2009-03-29T22:05:00.004-04:00

Budget: -389.61

Tonight I arrived in Somerville, where I'll be living for a few days. Spent the evening talking to my lovely hostess Amanda while she washed dishes and made my bed. She even gave me my first purple towel ever (to borrow).

Spent the evening talking about our lives and Victorian England, and suggested reading material to each other on Victorian England. Is the whole trip going to be this easy?

Now I have to set my alarm for 4:30, and hopefully I'll be working tomorrow.

Google Maps

2009-03-28T14:44:00.003-04:00

I was thinking about taking maps with me, to keep track of where I was, where I'm going, where I've been. Turned out all the maps I'd need would be very expensive, and, more importantly, very bulky. They would also encourage me to find my way on my own, rather than interact with people. So I won't be taking them.

Instead, I'll be talking to people I meet, and checking Google Maps when I stop at libraries, and, with permission, people's houses. I'll also be keeping track of where I've been there. I'll be doing it in a simple, primitive way, because I won't have time to spend on making it fancy.

I've made a first attempt right now. It's not very interesting yet because I'm not on the road, but this is what it will look like.

View Larger Map

And So, I Depart

Finishing It Offa Month Late

Catch-Up Post

North Along the Mountain Range

The Start of the Rockies

Lusk and Douglas

Western Nebraska

Nebraska!

Rain

Cresting the Horizon

Cedar Falls

My Kind of State

Dubuque

To Iowa

Some Humility is Healthy

Tribute to South Chicago

Computers: Always a Form of Income

Minutiae

Work, At Last

Hello, Toledo!

Mistake-on-the-Lake

Rowing the Atlantic?

Rain

Ohio

On to the Next Lake

At Last, The Great Lakes

Time to Go

Being the New Guy

Utica

Onward

Finally, Traveling Country Style

Always Interact

Albany

Never Smooth or Predictable

Waiting Out the Rain

Deflating News

My Bike Gets Swine Flu

Worcester

My Lucky Day

And So, I Depart

Salisbury: Lessons on Camping

Bulk of Equipment Purchased

Impressions of Lowell

Survival in Lowell

Made it to Lowell

The Feds Pay Up

Old Not-So-Rusty Commissioned

Tip From Along the Way

Old Rusty Decommissioned

The Initial Tune-Up

Volunteering for Money

Inspecting Old Rusty

Positive Balance

Building the Circus

Movin' Furniture

Got Work

Moved to Somerville

Google Maps

Finishing It Offa Month Late