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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:49:08 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: Part 35 of CAA #2
NOTES FROM THE EAST
#35 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Easton, PA; 13,505 miles.
September 3, 1987
copyright 1987, Steven K. Roberts
Somewhere in the Delaware River Valley of northern New Jersey, in the back
yard of a hostel that's supposed to be open, I drown in a sea of white noise.
The tent around me roars with rain -- the sound pouring into my head,
saturating my senses, washing away the stress of a day's traffic and hills.
The rainsound invites writing... perhaps because it resembles some madman's
attempt to empirically prove that an infinite number of typing monkeys can
produce a masterpiece. I'm just part of the experiment, tapping out tiny
rivulets of thought in the hope of stumbling into a ravine of greatness.
The days have melted together, and it's been awhile, I know. All of New
York has rolled under these wheels since last I wrote of anything besides the
Other Woman, and the problem I face now is more subtle than simple catch-up.
The problem is this: extremes are homogenized by time. It's like throwing
three jalapeno peppers, a handful of Godiva mocha truffles, six ounces of
Glenfiddich scotch, and a dollop of Ben & Jerry's "Cherry Garcia" ice cream
into a blender: four separate inspirations fuse into a single uninspired goop.
A travel writer dealing in retrospect has a problem. Look at it this way:
the pain of your last injury and the bliss of your last orgasm have both
become vague symbolic reflections stashed away somewhere in your brain without
benefit of sensual playback. "Ah, that was wonderful," you recall with a sly
smile, but the memory is a vaporous one, a construct of words and impressions
rather than the powerful senses that spawned them. (Imagine the society we'd
have if memories could make us sweat, scream, bleed, or cry out in wild
exultation...)
The art of writing about past experience is simply a process of closing
your eyes, projecting the archival film of memory onto the viscera of
sensation, then poetically documenting the simulated experiences before they
fade. It's a sort of schizophrenic madness, this conjuring of false realities:
at this very keyboard I have wept, giggled, throbbed, and sighed... moved by
the unexpected potency of pseudosensory recall while sculpting ASCII with
Microsoft WORD commands.
It's kind of perverse, now that I think about it.
* * *
So. Here we are along the Delaware River, fighting a succession of long
hills on what should, according to the map, be a lazy riverside cruise. It's
been difficult travel here in the mideast: the roads are rough, the hills are
steep, and the locals are not, in general, very friendly or intelligent (making
the exceptions, when they occur, delightful indeed). It's a land of drivers
who have never had to put up with others of their ilk, and cold looks that
slowly melt into reluctant smiles if I grin aggressively enough. One National
Park Service employee in the Delaware Water Gap area shouted from his truck,
"ride over there, idiot!" -- pointing to a ragged shoulder of gravel, glass,
and deep ruts.
Odd culture out here, a blend of brash and backward. We met the people
who make futile stabs at immortality by painting their names on cliffs -- four
young bucks from The City out on one last blowout before school. Along the
stunning Hawk's Nest stretch of route 97 in southern New York, they stood with
their backs to the vista and one- upped each other with theories about how to
deface where no man has defaced before. "Hey, it'd be WORTH gettin' killed,
man -- as long as you got your name up there befoah fallin' off..."
This mentality has been reflected in other encounters as well. If Big Sur
is one pole of the camping spectrum, then the "Upper Delaware Campground" is
its opposite. For $12 a night (contrasted with a dollar per cyclist out west),
we found clutter, confusion, pay showers, no toilet paper, broken bottles, and
the competing whoops of buzzed rednecks-in-training on a drunken New York
Saturday night. Groups clustered around campfires and Coleman lanterns sang
raggedly to boom-boxes, with as many as four different rock 'n roll hits
converging on our quiet tent at any given time. The placid river reflecting a
poetic peach-lavender sunset was ignored. The sliver of lunar silver peeking
over the hills didn't stand a chance. Somewhere outside the ragged sphere of
campground racket was a calm misty evening in the mountains -- but there on the
south side of Callicoon nature cringed, muddied by spinning tires and pissed
upon by the beer- sodden children of a myopic culture that sees the wilderness
as a place where you can get away with anything.
Speaking of culture, I've noticed a higher incidence of derisive laughter
from kids on the street. They see us and either look away in studied coolness
or crack up -- not in true mirth but in that grating laughter reserved for
schoolyard torment of those more than one standard deviation away from
meanness. "Who taught you to make fun of things you don't understand?" I asked
one group, and, thus chastened, one of them had the presence to say, "cool
bike, man." But they're different here in the hills... less friendly than the
kids of midwest small towns and less aware than those of that distant fantasy
coast.
Of course, there are delights as well. Our present host in Easton, PA
(I've been moving while writing this, so don't try to keep track of where I
am... other than somewhere in Dataspace) is a long- distance recumbent cyclist
we met in Utah. His home is a blend of flawlessly maintained machine shop and
a spare, almost fiftyish, bachelor apartment. He sculpts aluminum with a sort
of passionate precision, and herein lies the answer to our trailer problems --
which have stranded us four times in the last week with broken axles and
hitches. (Lousy roads, you know.) We've become adept at rebuilding hubs from
scrounged small-town kids' bikes, and made friends with a welder in Port Jervis
who fixed Maggie's fractured hitch (an aluminum casting). But this layover
should fix those problems: Ray-the- machining-wizard can make metal things as
easily as I can make paragraphs... and HIS work can be lightened by drilling
holes, a process that usually destroys mine.
A few days back we stayed with the police chief of Windsor, New York.
Everybody between Binghamton and Hancock knows Johnny, and when we rode in his
squad car to arrest a pet-rabbit-eating adolescent German Shepherd we saw more
smiles and waves than we do on our loony excursion modules. We waited out the
rain in his homemade home, falling in love with the naughty dog, fantasizing
about letting him run around America with us, and listening to Johnny's
engaging tales of small-town copdom and his basic evaluation of our lifestyle:
"well now, you get involved with that, that's somethin' different. Real
unusual..."
Well, there are amazing people everywhere, and THEY'RE something
different. The day before Johnny, before the first of our broken axles, we
glided into the Golden Door Restaurant south of Binghamton for caffeine and
something eggy. Jeanette was there, with the good- natured infectious guffaw
and smiling eyes that instantly told us the place was named after her heart.
Chemotherapy doesn't faze her, nor does the grueling schedule of running a
restaurant seven days a week. Here is a robust woman who loves people, loves
life, and welcomes "something different" with an enthusiasm rare in this part
of the world -- and her daughter, 12 years old and beautiful, reflects the same
spirit. If Sartre was right when he said, "we are what our parents leave of
us," then young Judy will rise far above the culture that surrounds her.
See, we live for the exceptions -- we cling to them with love and thirst
the way migrating birds find the nature preserves in megalopolis. The
blandness is rampant out there, propagated by TV, low expectations, pitiful
schooling, and the shallowness of the average dream. But you can bet your
sweet asymptote that even the most pathetic of backwater towns will nourish odd
blossoms of brilliance, strange orchids blazing bright in a compost of
mediocrity. I can no longer write off places of faded clapboard and discarded
chewing-tobacco tins, no more than I can expect widespread intelligence in
college towns or a kindred spirit on every bicycle. One of the great lessons of
this journey, I suppose...
Human treats. The more I look back, the more I realize that the
adventure is measured in people, not places. My map line meanders along Lake
Erie, cuts inland at Buffalo and dodges Rochester, then winds south through the
Finger Lakes and along the Susquehanna River, over the hills, and down the
Delaware. Yet my tales are less of the countryside than of the inhabitants,
for lovely as this land is, it lacks the stark drama of Utah or the humbling
grandeur of Colorado. There are pleasant surprises, of course: northeast
Pennsylvania's international orange LIZARDS (Lacking Intelligence, Zipping
Across Road's Deadly Surface). Sunset on Seneca Lake, a ribbon of gold between
drumlins. Warily circling a pack-stealing skunk, trying to distract him
without making the tail twitch. A new speed record of 50.5 on a perfect hill
in perfect light, flying down 97 toward the sun-sparkled river valley in mad
glee. 14% grades up to our host's home in Vestal, topping an already long day
with the kind of exhaustion that made their swimming pool seem as decadent as a
night at Plato's. There are hundreds of things like that, the daily surprises
of the road. But it's people that make the lingering memories, not the subtle
differences between campgrounds or the latest twists in hillside highway
engineering.
Take Joan Smith, for example. We arrived on the south side of Buffalo,
hot and sweaty, seeking a place to relax. We found her in the League of
American Wheelmen hospitality home directory for touring cyclists (a great
resource, if you're on the road), and called with the tentative
self-introduction that marks a request for help. Three days later we pedaled
away from her downtown home... with the lingering hugs of sad farewell to a new
friend. It happens that fast. Joan is a bicycle maven, an activist, an
energetic lady of "middle age" who makes most 30-year-olds seem static. Her
house is a museum of bicycle memorabilia, and she is the hub of a social swirl
of active people. She's blonde, fast, funny, and lithe. Yet I know someone
else the same exact age who's gray, slow, and resigned to a long slide into
life's ultimate dormancy. The difference lies in the question: Does gray
matter?
While at Joan's house, by the way, we took a side trip by car to Niagara
Falls. Everyone advised us to avoid doing this under our own power -- not only
is the tourist traffic potentially fatal, but the customs goons are paranoid
about computers and bicycles. Local cyclists in Buffalo have been hassled in
both directions, suspected of bike smuggling, and one fellow we met was
detained for over an hour because of his laptop computer. Another lost his car
for carrying back a bottle of 222's -- the only useful headache remedy I've
ever found (codeine, aspirin, and caffeine). Extrapolating linearly, we
figured we'd be jailed for "crossing imaginary lines with unconventional tools,
sensible medicines, and strange-looking vehicles."
So we drove up the Canadian side one night, eager to see what all the fuss
was about. We found it all right: a natural wonder overshadowed by the lights
and noise of big-time tourism. There were shops, hotels, restaurants, discos,
and a general feeling of Las Vegas madness. Cars choked the road; a slow flood
of pedestrians strolled the walks. Cops directed traffic and shouted at balky
gawkers. And underneath it all, suffused in the glow of giant floodlights
which change color every few minutes to keep the video-conditioned visitors
stimulated, roared Niagara Falls.
It's hard to get excited about something wild and beautiful when it's
tamed, contained, and cloaked in hard-sell hooplah. I'll take an animated
rivulet in the woods any day, a dancing thread sparkling over sunlit rocks
unnamed by man and embellished only by nature. The goddamn tourism industry
would charge admission to the starry night itself, if they could just figure
out how to control access to it...
* * *
And then there's technology (my other "Other Woman"). She's been a bit
sluggish lately -- shaken by potholes, out of radio range, and torpid in the
sun.
Long-distance telephone calls, for so long something taken for granted,
suddenly seem to require strategic planning and technical skills. How do old
folks, set in their ways, put up with the hodge- podge of confusing access
codes and options that has become the phone system? Hell, even a confirmed
techie like me has trouble making calls these days, and I'm supposed to be some
kind of expert at doing business on the road. In Broome County, New York, you
have to dial 119 before every long-distance call (not 911, which, like a good
lover, makes a cop come). But hey: with my handy new Sprint travelcode, I
simply hit 11 digits, wait for tone A, hit 11 more digits, wait for tone B,
then key in 14 more digits to give the system my account number, the acceptance
of which is indicated by tone C. 36 keystrokes to tell mom and dad I'm fine:
0-000-000-0000 / 0-000-000- 0000 / 00000000000000. And it rarely works the
first time -- except in cities, where I can leave off four of the digits unless
an intercept tells me otherwise.
Speaking of communications, my interest in amateur radio is undergoing one
of its periodic surges, leading to the next addition to my already-overloaded
bikeasaurus: a full-spectrum HF ham radio station. The rig is a Ten-Tec
Argonaut, running on bike power and driving a clever antenna called the "Slinky
Dipole," donated by the Elba, New York ham couple KA2VTX and Y. (We had a
day's layover there, before the Finger Lakes and after Buffalo, installing a
cooling fan on the bike and eating sweet corn with new friends.) The Slinky
antenna adapts to any pair of trees, rendering setup something other than the
usual pain in the tuner. Dahdidahdit dahdahdidah...
You know, it's funny. Everyone predicted, back in 1983 when I first
trundled away from Columbus at 135 pounds, that I would get to the first hill,
scream with knee pain, and start jettisoning superfluous gizmology. But within
three months, the system was up to 160 pounds, then 185, then 200. By the
Pacific Coast, it was 220. Now it's 255 and still growing, with 275 the likely
total by the time the new ham gear is fully installed in its waterproof custom
pannier. There are cyclists out there who tear the tags off their teabags to
cut weight, as obsessed with small numbers as are golfers. My machine, on the
other hand, is now officially too heavy to be an ultralight aircraft. I
suppose I'm insane.
But then, I'm happy as hell. With new friends and adventures every week,
low overhead, a delightful mate, and plenty of fresh air and exercise, how can
I complain about the weight of my life-support system? We're off to DC now for
the International Human Powered Vehicle Championships, where we oughta pedal
away with top honors in the load-carrying competition...
In the meantime: cheers from the Pennsylvania-Jersey line!
-- Steve