Chapter 7: Trip Magic

 Chapter 7: Trip Magic

 A little something for everyone this week: a tidbit for the romantics, some meat and potatoes for the bike nerds, and some musings for the philosophers.

I'm not out of the woods yet, literally or figuratively, but this is a photo of things to come soon!

 

May 14, Wednesday: 50.8 miles (1909.8)

 I rode away from the Outward Bound school feeling awful, the base camp manager's angry words running on a continuous loop in my head.

I couldn't say goodbye to Jo McLellan in person before I left because she was in town that morning, so I had left a card for her. As with almost everything I wrote back then, I made a copy to keep in my journal. Reading it now, it's clear that I felt a genuine fondness for her, some connection deeper than just a passing infatuation. She had a warm, easy smile, and she was generous with it. In Laura's first letter to me after she arrived there, she wrote, "I met Jo today; I can see how you fell in love."

To my delight, when I stopped in Ely to buy food, I ran into her in the store. The supermarket wasn't a good place to have a heartfelt conversation, though, so I was glad I had left the card. 

Jo ended up being the person I stayed in touch with the longest after my trip; we wrote letters back and forth for some years, hers always from some different, distant locale. Our paths never did cross again, though, and eventually we lost track of each other. She is the one person whose name I have not changed here, hoping she won't mind, and that just maybe, someone who reads this will know how to reach her, and we can re-connect and compare how our lives have unfolded.

As I rode out of Ely, it sank in that I was alone again, I really wouldn't see Laura for a long, long time, and it felt like I was starting the trip all over. The scolding for so egregiously over-staying my welcome kept eating at me, too, so that I felt terrible all day.

In the evening, a few miles from the campground I hoped to reach, I was on a dirt road detour around a bridge that was out, when one of the mounts for the rear rack broke. 

I couldn't ride with the rack broken, so I found a partially logged pine grove and camped there. I fashioned a temporary fix for the rack, by bolting a piece of perforated metal strap to the bike frame and wrapping it around the broken leg of the rack, but wasn't optimistic about how long it would hold up. 

Even aside from the rack, I was at a low point, at the end of a low day. 

"Darkness descended with a strange feeling this evening. The sky cleared just at dusk - it had been cloudy all day - and I was somehow spellbound, so that I stood and looked at the sky, and the trees silhouetted against the dying glow of the sun, for quite a while before going to bed. I sang the Boz Scaggs song 'It's Over' to myself, at first to get the scolding out of my head, but then with Laura in mind."

This photo is not actually from the trip, but without a visual break here, the transition to the next day would be too jarring!

 May 15, Thursday: 92.2 miles (2002.0)

 "Wow, what an up day! Whoever is setting this trip up is doing an awfully good job. I guess they must have figured I needed a boost today. Some things were a little too perfect to ignore. Like the rack breaking late enough in the day so that I didn't lose a lot of miles yesterday, but I would still have time to come up with a temporary fix without losing time today. And much more incredible than that, less than 10 miles into the ride today, finding not only a shop that did nothing but welding and metalwork, but a friendly old man inside as well, welding away at the very moment I rode up. He welded another nut on, ground it down, and let me drill it out, all for no charge. Mind you, I didn't have to go an inch out of my way, and the shop was in the middle of absolutely nowhere Minnesota, in a 'town' that consisted of only 2 other buildings: a house, and the post office!"

 This seems like a good time to pause and cover some of the nuts and bolts (literally) of the bike setup. 

 The rear rack was a primitive steel monstrosity that my older brother got when he had a paper route, so it was made to accommodate the full width of the Sunday edition Hartford Courant, longer than the typical bike rack. I modified it so that it perfectly fit my tent stuff-sack and my Cannondale panniers, replaced the bottom mounts with something that would work for my bike, and brazed nuts onto the frame of my bike for the top mounts. Being steel, it was a little heavier than an aluminum rack, but also stronger and more importantly, much easier to repair when on the road; there are a lot more places set up to weld steel than aluminum. This would not be the last time that mattered on this trip!

Rusty from years in the barn, unused, but even a rusty picture is worth a few words. Note spare spokes still taped to the vertical supports!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the story:

"I saw a lot of friendliness today. The most outstanding case was a man from Effie who pulled over in his camper, gave me soda and cold cuts and water, and would have done anything he could to help me, I'm sure. He's a school bus driver and had seen me on the road earlier. He said he wished he could bike, but both his legs had been broken in a truck accident. He praised me for my courage, and did what he could to lift my spirits, though they were already high."

It was a perfect day for riding: blue sky, warm but not hot, not much wind, the road was smooth, and the land was flat. And it had an incredible, spine-tingling end.

"Just as I was about to go to bed, wolves started howling. It was an unearthly, blood-curdling, primordial sound. They were on all sides of me, and some were not very far away. It was amazing to hear one call close by, then another answer from a distance, and yet another from farther away, almost too faint to hear. It occurred to me that if they wanted, they could relay messages across the entire state that way, and I wondered what they were saying."

 

 May 16, Friday 75.2 miles (2077.2)

Another spectacular day, starting with watching several kinds of ducks patrolling the lake. It was so beautiful I didn't want to leave; I was up at 6:00 but wrote letters and didn't start riding until 11:00. The sun was hotter today and I got a burn despite lots of Coppertone. Less forest and more farming - fields being plowed, etc."

 

May 17, Saturday: 90.3 miles (2167.5) Crookston MN

 "More miles than I thought today. I had a good tailwind, and it is flat here. I have to chuckle when I think about the frame of reference people here have about hills. People warned me miles in advance about 'big hills' that turned out to be little slopes that I cruised in 3rd or 4th gear, and there was even a 'HILL' warning sign for a little dip that dropped maybe 50 feet. I am in the plains now - I saw prairie dogs, even."

A long, convoluted chain of events led to my staying the night in the building that housed the Crookston police department and Corrections Center, so I can *almost* say I spent the night in jail! By chance there happened to be a payphone there, so I was able to call friends, and even caught Laura at her sister's house where she had stopped on the first leg of her drive to MOBS. It was really nice to talk with her.

These Midwest photos prompt mention of another invention/modification that I had added to the bike in preparation for touring. With all the luggage on the bike, a normal kickstand would never work, and as you can see, very often there was nothing around to lean the bike against. My solution was an aluminum rod with a hook on the end, bolted to the bottom of the down-tube in such a way that it could be swung out and hooked into an eye bolt on the handlebar drop, thus locking the front wheel in a straight position. Then I could just put a tent pole under the seat and down to the ground, and the bike would stand almost anywhere.

 

May 18, Sunday: 92.1 miles (2259.6)

I have experienced a phenomenon often enough on long adventures, biking or otherwise, to have a name for it; I call it "Trip Magic." It is the feeling that there is some invisible hand steering events for my benefit, for instance a spoke breaking so that I would lose just enough time to be in position to meet Phillip French, or abandoning a perfectly good campsite for no reason beyond a gut feeling, to move to one that was no better, except that in the morning, a moose and her two calves walked right by my tent.

It can be explained as coincidence, of course, and maybe it happens in normal everyday life and we just don't notice it because of all the distractions. On a long trip, life is simplified, stripped down to just a few essentials: eat, sleep, ride, meet people, and I guess if you're me, write. Being open to possibilities, and following your instincts are both more important, and perhaps easier to do, on an extended trip.

This week seemed to have more Trip Magic than usual, so I will close with my journal entry for today, which grapples with it a bit. I apologize for the length, and hope that it doesn't offend anyone who is especially religious. My mother was very religious, though not in a proseletizing way. It just never took for me.

"Got an early start - 7:15 - and it was nice to ride in the cool early morning. Some weird stuff happened today. I was planning to go to the McVille Dam campsite, but 9 miles before I got there, I saw a sign that said 'Free Camping' in Aneta - 4 miles out of my way. Something made me go there.

I asked a kid playing basketball if he knew anything about the camping, and he gave me directions. (I already knew where it was.) Then I asked if he knew anyplace where I could get drinking water. He thought for a minute, and then said he'd give me some at his house, so he led me on his go-cart. Just as he was getting the water, his parents came home. They were very friendly, especially his mother, who offered me some bean casserole. 

I sat with them awhile. It turned out they were pastors at the local church. They gave me a bible, which I confessed I was reluctant to take, as I didn't think I would read it. The mom started telling me how everyone has an empty place inside, and the only thing that will fill it is Jesus. There ensued the inevitable uncomfortable silence, complete with downcast eyes and fidgetty hands, until someone mercifully mentioned the weather.

They offered me a shower, which I needed badly, so I accepted. They also gave me half a dozen eggs, and a newspaper so I can catch up on what's going on in the world. I ended up riding to the McVille Dam anyway, so it seems that the only reason I went to Aneta was to meet those people, which is kind of spooky, because then it seems like "God" is trying to tell me something, and I just don't buy it that any one religion has a corner on the truth."

*****

"I started feeling like I *should* be doing something this evening, like writing or something, so I intentionally didn't do anything but watch the clouds as the sun set."

"Not doing anything" included not taking a picture, so this one from Maine will have to do.

 

 

As always, comments welcome, and somewhere here there should be a place to sign up for email notifications, though I had a hard time finding it when on my phone.