I
was very impressed with the Adventure Cycling route. Narrow roads, no shoulder
but it was not busy at all. The views
are not as good we were told as on the Mormon Emigrant Trail but the lack of
traffic more than made up for lots of glorious vistas. Hardy and Daniel joined us at Hams Station and we unloaded the
Gitane for Hardy to ride. With the 42-24
gearing, he could go much faster than Ralph or I, but it must have exhausted
his reserves. He gave out in Kirkwood.
We badgered him to make the last 5 miles to the pass but he was
toast. When we caught up to Daniel
chilling on a rock with a 270 degree view we sent him for sandwiches and he did
a masterful job of getting bagged lunches we shared overlooking some really
fine scenery. Riding uphill all day is a
pain but it’s so pretty I wish it could have gone on and on. I was already thinking of the loneliest road
in America across Nevada. I wasn’t
expecting much but heat, mirages, and Mormon crickets..
I
mention the Mormon crickets because I had the misfortune to read the Wall St
Journal one random day while waiting for a breakfast meeting to start at Panera
Bread and there on the front page was this huge ugly locust thing with the
headline exclaiming that this year was the 17-year (or whatever) cycle for the
re-appearance of these nasty crickets that plague little towns in Nevada. It went on to describe clouds of these
insects descending onto roadways made slippery with their guts crushed by
passing cars. I was trying to visualize
being 40 miles from some nowhere town with nary a car in sight when a 10 square
mile cloud of locusts lands on me. I had
heard of snakes sunning themselves on the road and the curious case of a
speeding cyclist who ran over a sidewinder crossing the road, throwing it up on
his body where the frightened snake bit him multiple times while he was locking
up the brakes. That had worried me but
riding for miles through locusts seemed worse.
And tomorrow was the day!
When
we left Kirkwood we told the guys to meet us at the summit. When we arrived they were nowhere to be seen
and we did not have cell coverage. Ralph
and I waited around for 30 minutes in the parking lot at the summit but finally
it was getting so late we just had to head down. I was steamed at my son because the glorious
descent would be marred with worrying about where he was. If he had driven off a cliff I should be
doing something besides biking to Carson City and if we missed him we were
about to really pick up the speed and would be hard to find. Perhaps the car had problems. My son is almost as bad a mechanic as I am
and his buddy Daniel of the clueless clip-in is an English major and could
deconstruct Joyce but I wasn’t sure he could jump off a battery..... We found
the renegades 300 yards down the hill at an overlook. They figured we would see them as we came
down, which was true. They were rock climbing.
It came to me that if they fell off a rock while we were descending 50 miles to Carson City,
things could get interesting. Suddenly
having a sag seemed a liability! One
more thing to worry about. I had to stop
this planning for every eventuality mind set.
I think I was trying to ride as if we did NOT have the Sag backup to get
a psychological feel for how to do the trip without it. So I was trying to pretend we didn’t have one
and be completely independent of it and then on the other hand figure out how
to use it effectively to see all and do all we could. Like trying to live two lives at the same
time under different assumptions and belief systems. Tiring.
Have you ever played a round of golf with two different balls and kept
the score accurately? I have started a
game like that but I can’t recall that I’ve ever finished a round like that.
Need to “Quit worrying”. We are not
going to die in Nevada on a US highway unless we get hit. Lack of planning may leave us thirsty but not
skeletons.
Well,
the downhill was about all I had dreamed of.
Five miles in the big chain ring off the summit and then a slight
downhill across an alpine meadow where hundreds of fisherman were casting flys
in the glacier runoff. Every turn was
more cliffs and my neck got tired of craning to take it all in. We T’d into the foothills road to Genoa and
suddenly we were in a much drier clime.
We passed the Nevada line--one state trans-navigated and three to
go. Genoa was an historical little town
we would have liked to stop in but it was getting late. I had planned to camp at Lake Tahoe after
dropping Ralph at an hotel but I was hungry so we all just de-camped to the
Hampton Inn and punted the camping thing.
There was just enough Time to get
dinner at a steakhouse after showers.
Beer is an incredible soporific after 119 miles on the bike. It was close to 11:00 when we left the
restaurant and we missed the hanging out by the pool because I was too whipped
to get in the sauna. I would never have
gotten to the room if I had set foot in the hot tub.
Carson City is not that ugly. Certainly no worse than my own hometown,
H--------. I have gotten very critical
of the physical appearance of suburban America.
It’s hideous. You know the
problem; strip malls, signs, Walmart,
roads everywhere. It’s made for the cars not the people. It may prove to be the optimal utilization of
society’s scarce resources because it
can change but it is not as pretty as Nature.
Nature can be remote, dangerous, and
brutally indifferent to human comfort and a fast food restaurant is
hospitable with its food and A/C but most towns’ physical appearance makes me
sad about our lost opportunity to have already created a human space that’s
comfortable and chic. Can’t we have
esthetic urbanscapes? I think as a
society we could do much better, though I’m no architect or urban planner. Our cities “look” is determined by the income
production of its individual parts. We
are a free country and individually we decide to build something that can be
paid for in a reasonable amount of time.
What could we do differently?
Europe is older and prettier but has a lot of laws, high prices, and
shortages. The CAR creates the “look” of
America. Bikes can operate in this world
but seem forlorn. What would a mass
transit and bikes system look like? At minimum, Higher density for
accessibility. I do not mean to tear
down the junky buildings we’ve got and construct some Versailles but it would
be useful to put in place incentives that would make building more
environmentally conscious and ecologically sustainable. Cheap gas has distorted a social order that
would be prettier if not so dependent upon the hidden subsidy of cheap energy.
I think it’s cheap because the market prices it short term, the people who
might use it in 100 years don’t get an economic vote. Some would say the ‘real’ price is
determined by the market but I think that is a short term price, the long term
price is simply not calculable....(or actionable). I think we have a lot of physical CAPITAL
stock that is really valueless and not suited for sustaining us in the
future. Bad mortgages have us
‘underwater’, but thoughtless planning has drowned us in decaying
infrastructure. And then I see pictures
of Haiti or Somalia or a favela in Rio or slum in Bangalore and I say, you know
it could be a lot worse..
What
do contrarians believe in? I tend to
pull against the common wisdom. I tend
to be the devils’ advocate. Where did I
get that psychological predisposition? My mother. I
like people, I’m incredibly sociable and forgiving. I don’t hold grudges-or at least I’m 57 and
don’t have any so it’s likely I don’t collect them easily. It’s arguable that contrarians don’t believe
in anything. They believe the opposite
of what you think. Contrarianism is
however a sharpening foil. It is
designed to elicit what you “really” believe.
Contrarians don’t buy lip service, we’re looking for the real deal.
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