Home at last

Date: August 25
Mileage: 32.1
August mileage: 333.4
Temperature upon departure: 55

Tomorrow marks week 3 since I "moved" to Juneau, and I have finally moved to Juneau. I just signed a lease on a little apartment in West Juneau - decidedly less cool than my place in Homer, but private, well applianced, cat-friendly, and it includes my own yard and garden. And, well, it's a roof. Which is much better than I can get for $300 a month at the Mendenhall Lake Campground. And it's on a island. I've never lived on an island before. Now I can fantasize about the bridge getting washed out and having to call in stranded. If we get much more rain, that fantasy may not be far from reality.

I feel like my three weeks of homelessness helped instill a grizzled sort of sourdough strength that probably would have taken me much longer to develop if I hadn't been ripped so clean of my comfort zone. Those first 10 days in a tent were a baptism by immersion, quite literally, to life in southeast Alaska. I lived out in the weather and learned to move with the rain. I learned how the drizzle stung my eyes but the downpour cleaned my skin. I learned the hard way how to construct a decent tarp shelter, how to dry clothing when there were no dry spaces, how to clean up for an office job using public facilities. Even when I moved into a hotel, I still maintained a sparse, minimalist existence - all but the bare necessities locked away in storage or far away in Homer. I lived with the few things I needed, ate what was immediately available and rode my bike for the shear wonder of exploration (because, to be honest, when I just wanted to work out, I took the easy, rain-free option and went to the gym.)

And despite the disproportionately bad luck and numbing displacement that have come to define August for me, I feel like I hit the ground running. After all, it's not supposed to be easy to move to strange city isolated from its own state, which is in turn isolated from its own country. We outsiders have to be flexible to survive out here, or we'll go crazy trying.

Missing Homer

Date: August 23
Mileage: 21.1
August mileage: 301.3
Temperature upon departure: 54

Another day, another ride, another road silt shower.

The air is saturated with rain so light it doesn’t fall, and mist so thick it doesn’t settle. Low-lying clouds roll down the mountainside like ragged curtains, ripped into powder-puff patches by the tree tops. Riding out Douglas Island on a day like today is like looking through a windshield with the defrost turned off - squinting at a ghost world masked in featureless gray. But in that otherworldly way, it’s beautiful.

Water spalshing up from the road hits my face, so I look forward until the mist stings my eyes. I close them for several seconds, open to check for road hazards and close my eyes again. The darkness feels oddly liberating, like diving underwater to suddenly find yourself breathless but weightless. I open my eyes for little gulps of light, but I savor the thrill of riding stretches of this remote road blind.

So it hits me as a little surprise when I round a bend and realize that I’ve emerged from the cloud cover. A slate of gray water stretches beyond the channel. And in the distance, actual distance, I see snow-covered peaks. I feel like I’m looking at the Kenai mountains across Kachemak Bay, the same sight that greeted me every morning for nearly a year. There’s a moment of blind confusion, and then the creeping realization that I am a long, long way from my comfort zone.

That was the first time that homesickness really hit me since I left Homer three weeks ago. That little bend along a waterlogged road was so eerily familiar that it reminded me how unknown everything is, how far I’ve really wandered, and how I'm really not going back. There's a time to embrace new adventure, and there's a time to mourn the world left behind. They're both rewarding in their own way.

Few roads

Date: August 21
Mileage: 33.4
August mileage: 280.2
Temperature upon departure: 57

This morning before work, I rode out near the end of the Douglas Highway. I had to turn around about 11 miles in due to time constraints, and later learned I was only about a mile from the end.

This means that, having lived here only two weeks, and having ridden a total of only about 250 miles, I have now pedaled nearly every stretch of nonresidential road in the area. All I have left is the 8 miles of the main road that I missed when I crashed out Friday, and the one mile at the end of Douglas. As I looked out at the cross-channel view of town today, I began to form a realization of just how boxed in I really am here in Juneau. But at the same time, I feel grateful that what I'm "boxed in" by is thousands of miles of untrammelled wilderness. So, if I can box in some time, and if I can unpack some boxes at a (still crossing my fingers) new apartment, I hope to hit the trails real soon.

27

Date: August 20
Mileage: 15.7
August mileage: 246.8
Temperature upon departure: 59

Today's my birthday
A year of growing older
A day in the sun

Kissing pavement

Date: August 18
Mileage: 56.2
August mileage: 231.1
Temperature upon departure: 57

I'm sure seasoned cyclists begin to treat the experience as almost mundane, but for me, there's still nothing like launching off a bicycle at 20 mph to really puncture a perfectly good ride.

Even the sudden monsoon-like downpour that hit me yesterday at mile 28 of the-only-road-out-of-Juneau really wasn't that bad. It had been raining on and off all morning, and I thought, if anything, the thick drops would at least help wash the layer of glacial silt off my clothing. Deep puddles began forming on the rough and remote road. I plowed through them without even thinking about it, until my front wheel dropped into an pothole roughly the size of the Grand Canyon, completely covered by water. I felt the sickening crunch of the rim meeting the pavement through the now-flat tire. After that, all I can remember is the sequence of body parts splashing down - first my left hip, taking the brunt of the fall, followed by my elbow, and then, finally, with a loud "thud," my head ... groaning in a shower of gritty puddle water.

Every time I'm in the midst of a crash, I'm always surrounded by a feeling of unconditional calm. My thoughts turn to an involuntary play-by-play analysis of my situation ... "Road burn there ... That wasn't hard enough to break anything ... I hope this doesn't rip my coat ... Shoot, that sounded like my helmet being destroyed." Then, like an animal darting a moving car - almost mid-skid - I jump up and rush off the road, throw my bicycle in the grass, and spend several shock-filled seconds standing quietly in the right-of-way, building up the courage to inspect the damage. I usually inspect the bike first - not because I'm all that crazed of a gear head, but because it usually feels right to let the adrenaline settle down before I start tearing off clothing layers. My hip was throbbing with pain and I could see a large purple lump forming around the bone, but it moved OK and nothing seemed broken. My elbow was only skinned and my coat was intact. All-in-all, a fairly minor crash, but every step I took hit my hip bruise with streaks of pain, and I did have that nagging problem of being 28 miles from home. After about 15 minutes of standing very still and watching rain pelt that sadistic puddle, I decided that I could at least attempt the 16 miles to the nearest bus station. So I gingerly changed my flat, readjusted my seatpost and set out down the road.

I noticed I couldn't put much pressure on my left side without hitting those pain streaks, so I had to do all the pushing with my right leg. I have definitely had less pleasant rides - but not many - and the ride home was really only salvaged from a "worst ever" designation by an unexpected break in the clouds that brought the first rays of direct sun I have felt in weeks. Still, I passed the bus station feeling much less pain - repetitive motion tends to do that - and I did make it back to the hotel under my own power. But then, as I was mounting my bike on my car roof rack, I noticed papers strewn all over the passenger seat. Turns out some punk broke into my car, rifled through my glove box, and stole all the spare change out of my ash tray - including a handful of wafer-thin nickles that I once placed on train tracks in rural Ontario, which I always held on to for good luck. I tell you, this is not my month.

I'm joining a gym

I'm out in the Valley today checking out housing. I'm at a library right now to dig up old landlords' contact info, hoping for a glowing reference so I don't get rejected again. I stopped at a bike shop because both my road tires are flat, slashed in several places, so I had to go buy some more patches and new tubes. I think I might have run over a mound of shattered glass, and my tires have about 5,000 miles on them - they just aren't what they used to be. I had ambitions today to ride out to the end of the road, but it hasn't stopped raining, quite literally, for four days straight, and today it's raining hard. I got soaked just vacuuming out my car. I thought it was just a dark cloud over my head, but it turns out it's like this in most of the state. Somehow, that makes me feel better. But I just can't face that soggy chill, water cascading off my helmet, down my nose and over my mouth until I can't tell whether I'm drooling or drowning. Not today. So I'm going to take advantage of free gym trials to spend a warm, dull "weekend" afternoon running circles on a hamster wheel. I feel really good about this decision. Sorry I don't have a picture today. I'm hoping to find the motivation to hike up Mount Roberts tomorrow, and I should get some great shots of gray, all-encompassing fog. Stay tuned.

(small) Stroke of luck

Date: August 14 and 15
Mileage: 13.7 and 4.7
August mileage: 174.9
Temperature upon departure: 55

Today I did a short ride but a decidedly long run. I've had a recent deluge of little annoyances that I attribute to bad luck. The latest involved popping a tube on the Douglas highway this morning, only to learn that my portable bike pump has seized up (probably due to rust or an inordinate amount of road grit.) So rather than hitchhike or shamefully limp my bike down the highway, I stashed it in the woods and jogged five miles back to town. It only took me 45 minutes! It was a short five miles, but still, I felt really good after the run. Probably even better than I would have if I completed the ride.

One flat tire does not a bad luck streak make, but there have been other incidences. The other night, I went to a Laundromat and stuck a load in, which failed to drain completely during the rinse cycle. I stuck to whole dripping mass in a dryer for an hour and did some grocery shopping, but my laundry was still nearly as wet when I returned. So I ran the dryer for another hour, left again, and when I came back, some of my clothes had - for lack of a better word - melted. Others were still damp. I'm pretty sure I've seen that Laundromat on a rerun of "The Twilight Zone." Then, as I was leaving, I stuck a pair of shoes on top of my car and accidentally left them there. Those are gone. And let's not even talk about the black cat back in Homer.

But I think my bad luck streak is breaking, at least in part. A benevolent co-worker hooked me up with a longterm motel room today, where I can stay until his mother arrives at the end of August. It's suck an anomaly - Mini fridge! 30' television! Roof! I showed up at work today raving about it like I had just spent the night at the Four Seasons, and my co-worker cut me off to remind me that it's a budget motel. Doesn't matter. My rolled-up tent is still fermenting in rainwater in my trunk. It's all about context.