Dude, Nice Penny-Farthing: June 2008

The first thing that came back was that large, indeterminate chunk of time had passed. The next was that I was on a couch in Lower Crotch, and the third was that there was a pleasantly-oval-shaped pile of my own vomit on the carpet beneath me.

My departure time for the trip was scheduled to be three hours ago, and I was hung over. I made an attempt to wipe up the vomit with a paper towel. Then I messed around with my crap, drank a bunch of water, and made another attempt at cleaning the vomit, this time with a wet paper towel.

I still had to mail myself some things, which I did and finally got started around noon an a 400-mile trek towards Stanford. My first step was to bike through LA. On surface streets.

After an hour of potholes I was on a crowded noisy street in some industrial park with a long line of tractor trailers belching at me from a few feet away. I was attempting to huddle under the shade the the single tree in the area, but failing, as I changed a flat. I couldn't pump up the new tube. I had bought a pump specifically for this trip, but never used or tested it. Pumped up the old tube. It held pressure so I put it back on the bike. No, it was really flat. I switched in the new tube. Couldn't pump it up. Took out the new tube and pumped it sitting there on the sidewalk. Finally, in a momentary lull in the rumblings of the engines around me, I heard the hiss of death. My brand new tube had a hole in it. I patched both, and put in my third tube.

I thought Los Angeles would never end. It was brutally hot. There were stoplights everywhere. I was getting saddle sore, and worse my lower back was aching horribly. There was too much traffic and no usable shoulder. But at last, quite suddenly, I looked up from the road and saw the sea.

There was a bike path that wound along the beach. It was a ridiculous mode of transportation considering how it wound back and forth incessantly with turns to sharp to navigate at any reasonable speed, but I was so glad to be out of the traffic that I happily rode along until it ended. From there I picked up the PCH, which was another disaster, since it was being resurfaced and was simply a long, gutted stretch of bumps for the next two miles.

In the early evening the road smoothed out beneath me. I looked out and realized all I had to do from now on was to keep the ocean on my left. I was saddle sore despite the bike shorts Ian and Kangway cajoled me into buying. My hands were tired, and my lower back was campaigning ever-more vigorously for a long, motionless rest break, preferably in zero-G. The wind had never ceased blowing into my face. But I felt that wind in the cooling air, and thought suddenly how glad I was to be out here. Doing something new and alone, and taking myself fantastic distances under just the power of my own body. Independent, unworried except by the most trivial matters of corporeal existence.

I road through Malibu until around 7, when I saw a tiny strip of grass by a sidewalk. It was about two feet wide, but I am even less wide than that. I lay down on it, groaning as the load finally came off my lower back, and ate handful after handful of the last loaf of bread I had baked for myself. I swallowed horizontally while the clouds floated up above.

Half an hour later I was back on the bike, still saddle sore and aching in my lower back, but mostly able to deal with it. I climbed a few big hills and wound up by the Leo Cabrillo campsite just as darkness set it. There was a shower and all, I didn't pay a penny (since I kind of hid my stuff back behind a tree in a vacant camp spot), and got a long night's rest.

I got my next flat an hour into the second day. Further, my pump was now definitely broken, since I somehow lost the piece that seals the pump to the tube. Fortunately, there were lots of bikers around, and a good Samaritan stopped to pump me up. He rode off, and I realized the patched tube was still flat. The process was repeated with the other patched tube and another good Samaritan, which left me walking until someone else actually gave me a tube, which went flat immediately when he rode away. I popped the tire off to check for anything that could cause this, but found nothing. So I walked.

I walked about four hours before someone pulled up alongside. It turns out he was a professional bike something (since it was on his business card), though I lost his name. He personally replaced my tube, demonstrated that I was getting flats because I was pinching the tube while using tire irons to pop the tire back on the wheel, and then drove me to the nearest bike shop to buy new tubes, a pump, and some other stuff.

I finally got on my way again in the early afternoon, and after ten minutes I was back on the trail with the ocean to my left. I made Santa Barbara around 5pm. At this point, I was following surface streets because route 1 had merged with route 110, a limited-access freeway where bicycles were clearly not invited.

Fortunately, there were these little signs posted around Santa Barbara that said "Pacific Coast Bike Route" and pointed which way to go. Unfortunately, they weren't actually directions. They were a trap laid to lure unsuspecting bicyclists into an exploration of half of the city's dead ends and circular drives.

I'm still not sure how I actually got out of that city four hours later, but I found a road that followed the side of the highway and took it until it dead ended at a fence 16 miles short of where highway 1 becomes ridable again.

It was about 10 already, so I locked the bike to a fence post, took out my bag, drank a can of tomato sauce, and went to sleep in the field. A couple hours later there was suddenly a bright flashlight being shone in my face and a man in uniform behind it.

"Is that your bike over there?"
"uh, what? no, my bikes over that way..."
"What, out in the field?"
"wait, where am I? Oh, yeah, that's my bike over there."
"Where I said the first time?"
"Yeah. That's right. Is it okay for me to stay in this field?"
"Hmm, well I guess so. But just so you know, we found a body in this field the other day."
"I see."
"Okay, well, just be careful. Also, there's been lots of reports of bear around this area."
"Right."
"That's all then. Have a nice trip."
"Thanks."

I went back to sleep for a few hours, but at 3am I woke up and realized that the traffic on the highway was down to one or two cars a minute, and that since I was trapped with no other visible route to where I wanted to be, now would probably be the best time to get through the twenty miles or so between where I was and the split I wanted to obtain.

I carefully lifted my stuff item by item over the barbed wire fence, hoisted my bike over, climbed over myself, and reassembled everything on the other side. I got started down the road, and realized it wasn't bad at all. There was a wide shoulder, I had a blinky, and there was very little traffic. However, my free dynamo flashlight wasn't much of a headlamp, since it was in the process of dying and would only illuminate the road ahead of me for thirty seconds or a minute at a time before I needed to recrank it. Still, without incident I rolled into a rest area two miles from where the highways split, got out my sleeping bag, and took a few more hours of sleep before beginning day three.

My hopes were high as I packed up the next morning. I was sure I would finally have a day without excessive flats, getting lost, etc, since it seemed from the map there was nothing but good long stretches of highway out in front of me. I thought I would knock off a huge chunk of mileage.

There was good highway. It happened to be going over mountains. I climbed through the mountains for 20 miles into Lompoc, took a rest, and got started again on the way to San Luis Obispo. Coming down another mountain, I suddenly felt the bike swerving beneath me. It wobbled back and forth underneath me five or six times, wobbling a little further each time. I tried to think whether I should hit the brakes or not, but soon I was on the shoulder rolling with the bike chasing behind me.

I had fallen before, but this time I was going 25 or 30 miles an hour, down a hill. When I realized I was going over, I saw how fast the ground was coming towards me and when I hit it I rolled down the shoulder, not sure when I would stop, and thought it was possible this could kill me.

But I did stop quickly. I had fallen off the side of the bike, and it lay just a bit behind me. I never lost consciousness, and could move to get myself off the road. I started trying to flag down cars. The first two drove right past. I didn't understand how you could just drive past someone bleeding by the side of the road far from anywhere. But within a minute a man had stopped and was wrapping a shirt around my bleeding arm and calling 911.

An EMT stopped just after that and started speaking in an authoritative voice, which was nice. There was some pain, but nothing unbearable. I was bleeding pretty well from some deep cuts on my forearm, and was scraped up all over, but wasn't in terrible shape. I crashed right by Vandenburg Air Force base, and within fifteen minutes there were five or six individuals, a fire truck crew, and an ambulance all crowded around me.

They wrapped some gauze around the obvious things, asked me a bunch of questions, and strapped me to a big plastic board. I rode to the hospital and spent a few hours getting cleaned up, wrapped up, and briefly x-rayed. It was too late in the evening to get a bus, so I spent the night in a motel and took the greyhound up to Stanford the next morning to stay and recuperate with JR for the remaining days before camp started.

I'm still not totally healed. Once at Stanford, I took some long afternoon walks and got fairly badly sunburned so that I'm still peeling. The scrapes on my hands were especially difficult to heal because the new skin and scabs would form while I slept with my hand bunched up, and when I opened it up in the morning the skin would rip apart again. I was finally able to run one day last week, but then next afternoon got stung by a bee. The bee sting was on my leg, which swelled up for three days. After that, I was recruited for the "counselor's relay" in the camp olympics, fell down while sprinting, and reopened the scabs that were finally healing on my right hand. Also, I think the deeper wounds in my forearm may be infected, so I could have a lot more fun with this before it's over.