the prompt was: describe your favorite PLACE
South Carolina,
California, and Everything In-Between
This
summer my favorite place became the United States; specifically (but still
generally) the route I took from Charleston, SC to Santa Cruz, CA. As I rode my
bicycle across the country with my 29 teammates I saw some amazing geographical
and cultural changes. Some changes were gradual, going by unnoticed, and some
were sudden, drastic, and disorienting. I spent the summer biking for
affordable housing with a group called Bike and Build and I experienced every
geographic change from the East to West coast from a bicycle.
I
spent five days in Charleston and immediately recognized the change in
humidity. I stayed in a marina and took some time adjusting to being near the ocean.
Walking around the marina I saw a dolphin, turtles, many fish, and many more
bugs. Charleston was very flat and nice to bike through except for railroad
tracks at strange angles (a cyclists worst nightmare and cause of my first
crash), and poor road conditions such as potholes and drains. We ceremoniously
dipped out back tires in the water of the Atlantic Ocean as we headed out the
first day. Leaving Charleston and biking through the rest of South Carolina and
then Georgia was extremely hilly and forested. Trees and other plants hugged
the roads in Georgia. Going from Georgia into Alabama I learned that there was
a drastic cultural shift in the concept of dog ownership, as nearly none of the
residents cared to chain or fence their dogs, dogs which chased bicycles and
got progressively more mean the further we got into Alabama. Leaving Georgia I
hit a dog on my bike and had my second and last crash of the summer. The dog
was fine, too bad I ended up unconscious for a minute while my friends called
me an ambulance.
Mississippi
was another beautiful, very green, state. I noticed an invasive vine throughout
MS, which I later learned is called Kudzu. It covers all other plants and trees and
creates a rather Dr. Seuss inspired landscape that I swerved on my bike more
than once to stare at. Arkansas
was beautiful and very similar to the states before it. Known as the rice and
duck capital of the world, Arkansas proved to be full of character, and
human-sized mosquitoes. As we rode into Oklahoma, however, things changed for
the worse. It was a decent state for the first couple miles that still looked
like Arkansas, but suddenly all plant life around us died as if the apocalypse
was something that had been going on for a while in OK and the rest of the
world was just starting to catch on to. Oklahoma is a geographically large
state, what this means to a cyclist is this: you’re going to be there for a
while. Our daily mileage increased throughout OK and stayed high through the
panhandle of Texas. With two century (100 mile) days in this region and 80-90 mile
days the rest of the time, there was no way we were going to like this part of
the country. To make it better, Mother Nature provided us with spirit-crushing
headwinds as well as hellish heat up to 114 degrees. We also noticed a
worsening of road conditions with hills, construction, and less-than patient
drivers. The prevalence of gargantuan trucks should also be noted here.
Needless to say we didn’t have high standards for the next state and were
immediately won over by the small corner of New Mexico we rode through. All it
took was a tree every 20 miles or so, and some degree of scenery. I think the
real advantage of New Mexico was simply the fact that it wasn’t Texas.
I
should mention that we took the scenic route across the country, and right
about here is where the ridiculousness begins. We biked up a fragment of New
Mexico into my entire team’s favorite state, Colorado. We arrived just a day
after the fires had been put out and didn’t notice any smoke during our rides,
just a lack of oxygen from a sudden increase in altitude. Our first mountain
pass in Colorado was Cuchara pass at 9,995 feet, painfully close to 10,000. I
had to ride twenty yard increments and stop to catch my breath because I was so
new to the increased altitude as well as the increased ride difficulty. We
quickly learned that Colorado had a funny way of sneaking mountains between
each town we had to ride to. There is no experience quite like biking towards a
mountain range, thinking to yourself “I have to go through that somehow,” and
then doing it. Unanimously my team named our ride over Independence Pass as our
favorite ride, riding from the beautiful Twin Lakes, CO (a place with next to
no light pollution and the best view of the stars I have ever seen), to the
ritzy and pretentious resort town of Aspen with a reputation for celebrity visitors and skiing. We climbed to 12,095 feet from somewhere in the range of
8,000 feet. Filled with joy and terrifying the families that had driven there,
we had a dance party atop the pass once everyone arrived. We danced amidst
patches of snow in an area designated as sensitive tundra; we biked to a
different climate in one ride-day.
We
forgave Utah for being a desert because it managed to still be pleasant to look
at, beautiful even. Biking into scenery that included the amazing and signature
red rock of Utah, as well as some amazing climbs and descents into Mars-like
valleys. There was a drastic shift in driver culture on our first ride in Utah. Immediately upon leaving CO we got onto a highway with a reputation that
preceded it, Highway 40. Commonly used by oil drill workers and almost entirely
huge truck drivers, this road was not a hospitable one for cyclists such as
ourselves. We experienced every form of driver harassment, ranging from
yelling, to throwing food, driving as close to us as possible and off the road
a couple of times, purposefully accelerating to blow exhaust from their trucks,
honking and every other form of unfriendliness you care to come up with. We had
three days on this road, I could only stomach two days and spent the next in
our support van worrying about my teammates as the road worsened with the new
obstacle of single-lanes due to construction.
We
rode through the driest part of Idaho, which made my job of convincing everyone
to move here much harder. The desert was quickly forgiven however by the
once-again dramatic change in driver attitudes. Idaho drivers right from the
state line gave us more space on the road, waved at us more, and all around had
Utahans beat for niceness. Biking into Boise confused my teammates even though
I had done my best to make it sound like the mid-desert oasis it really is.
Soon enough we were back in the desert, Oregon desert. This confused some of my teammates which only knew about the Oregon that existed in Portland,
they anticipated a rainforest and got a desert. We spent one night in Oregon in
a town called Wagontire, with a population of one. We spent that night
convincing the one man that lived there to like us, as he had formed a negative
opinion from the group that was on our route the summer before.
California
was all kinds of Geographic insanity. The beginning was still desert, and
startlingly cowboy-obsessed. We biked along a 15-mile Alkali lake at one point.
With a pH too low for any living organisms, it was just a bright blue, barren,
salty, smelly, and disorienting lake view. It was beautiful to ride alongside
but didn’t make any logical sense to me so I spent the majority of the ride
being confused by the scenery rather than enjoying it. We also rode along many
salt flats, giving me the impression that we were biking on a different planet,
especially disorienting when we saw random signs warning us of loose Bulls
which seemed like anything but a native species, extraterrestrials seemed more
likely. We rode through Lassen National Park and had another rare experience,
this time we rode over a volcano, a dormant one but still, a volcano! Some
riders even hiked to the top of the volcano once they finished biking to the
top of the pass, where they managed to find patches of snow to slide down. We
climbed somewhere in the range of 6,000 feet that day. The rest of our time in
California we were supposed to steadily lose elevation as we approached sea
level, and yet CA managed to give us some of the hardest climbs of the trip.
One day consisted of 60 miles of climbing. We rode over an extremely steep
mountain pass on our final day and later in the day were slapped in the face
with an 11% grade hill, or more accurately called a wall.
The
final three miles in Santa Cruz we rode as a team, which resembled something
worse than herding a group of cats towards a pool. We arrived at the beach
welcomed by the locals, yelling solely because they heard us yelling, and our
family and friends blocking traffic for our final turn into the beach. We
sprinted as a group into the cold water of the Pacific and sang songs
ecstatically as we danced and hugged in the water, singing songs that had
become signature to our trip. This repertoire included some Katy Perry, the
Killers, and that one song ‘Call Me Maybe.’ That night we gathered around a
bonfire on the beach for a final group goodbye. The only geography that I was
aware of on that last night with my team was; the heart-stopping realization
that we had ridden our bikes there from Charleston, that we had conquered
insane mountain passes and other immensely insurmountable obstacles along the
way, and that within hours and days each of the people I had grown to love so dearly
that summer would be returning to their homes and scatter back across the US
like a handful of marbles falling to the floor. After everything we had gone
through that summer, within days I would be without the people that had given
me the most beautiful experience of my life, and all of those obstacles we
had biked over would divide us geographically until the day we all end up
moving to Colorado and living together in our own Bike and Build commune.
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