Bluegrass 101

Date: September 22
Mileage: 25.6
September mileage: 294.2

If there's one thing Alaska will never have a shortage of, it's live bluegrass music. You can't wheel a cart down the frozen food aisle without bumping into someone who plays in some kind of bluegrass band. I personally work with more than a handful of such musicians. Tonight we went to the Island Pub for thin-crust pizza and ended up spending a couple of hours watching the stylings of a decent Juneau bluegrass band, "Bluegrass 101." Most of the musicians were inexplicably dressed like mod hipsters, dancing around the stage as they shared a single microphone. But in the back, almost lost in shadows, was the female bass player. Decked out like an extra in "Annie, Get Your Gun," she stood with quiet dignity and plucked at the strings as the whirlwind swirled around her. It made me wish I never gave up the bass.

It happened in the seventh grade - a terrible time to take up any instrument, really, let alone such a social monstrosity. But that's how things happen with me. I showed up at Orchestra 101 on the first day of school and sat in quiet confusion as they doled out all the string instruments. After a while, my bespeckled string-bean of a teacher held up a bass. Nobody volunteered. He looked pleadingly at the class, in such a way that without even saying a word, he somehow convinced me that I would be adored and showered with As if I accepted the strange challenge. I remember the decision being motivated by a misguided attempt to be a teacher's pet. But I think there were early sparks of an inherent desire to be unique. Either way, my reluctant hand crept into the air.

I didn't quite realize the gravity of my mistake until the teacher assigned everyone an hour of practice per night. He said this as I stood next to my instrument, towering a full two feet above my 5-foot, 90-pound frame. But it didn't sink in until he handed me the body-bag-sized carrying case.

In middle school, I lived literally behind my school building. It was a two-minute walk if I dawdled. But the prospect of hoisting that thing across the soccer field, past the fence and into my house filled me with the kind of terror that only 12-year-olds can appreciate. I've been trapped beneath an overturned raft in churning whitewater. I've ridden out a swirling storm at 13,000 feet in a turboprop plane. Those later experiences don't even come close to the kind of scary I was facing as I stood in the empty orchestra room and contemplated my walk home from school.

So there I was, the end of my first day in middle school, waiting and waiting and waiting in the dark room until I was certain that either the building had cleared out or the apocalypse had come. I crept into the empty hall, first dragging the bass behind me, then bear-hugging it as a waddled slowly foward. When I reached the door, I lifted it over my head with all the strength my tiny arms could muster and broke into a full-out, no-holds-barred sprint. I truly believed that by running fast enough, I would somehow become invisible. My lungs burned and biceps ached, but they were no match for the searing humiliation, the indignity of it all. I don't know that I've since run so hard, or experienced a 200-yard commute that took so long. But I made it home, wheezing, panting, sinking into the numb realization that this was what my life was going to be like every day from now on.

Well, the next day my mom put in a call to the school and came to an agreement that they would give me two basses, one to keep at home and one to play at school. That first-day bass run was the only one I ever did, but the damage was done. Any chance I ever had for musical passion had burned out in a flash of embarrassment. I was, from that day forward, the surly, scowling adolescent slumped over a string bass in the back row.

Do you ever wonder how your life would be different if one single day, one simple humiliation had somehow worked out differently? That's what I wonder sometimes about the upright bass. Maybe I wouldn't have become one of those people that obsessively rides a bicycle every day. Maybe I'd be in a band called Bluegrass 101.

It almost seems strange that I'll never know.

Equinox

Date: September 21
Mileage: 56.0
September mileage: 268.6

Last long day.

And a window of daylight opens between rain and more rain ... not sun, not dry, but at least the pavement is visible.

We start riding where the city ends and head out the road to nowhere. With a dead end as a destination, there's really nothing to look forward to but simple miles of forest, peppered yellow and steeping in salt-encrusted salmon stink.

Beyond the streams the air smells sweeter than spring, as it often does when leaves start to die and sag on their branches. As most life does when it has better things to do than survive.

Nothing to lose.

We discover these new places ... a totem pole, a Catholic shrine, all sacred in their own ways, in their own place, hidden in the woods where their only chance for worship is knowledge.

Or serendipity.

The road is cut off without fanfare by a single sign with a single word ... END ... but there's a boat ramp and it's already obvious that everyone else out here has gone further. We're stopped by geography and the limitations of our equipment, and that's OK. Until I make the disheartening discovery that here, 28 miles from anywhere ... except encompassing swarms of gnats ... my rear tire has grown a tumor, an ominous deformity that has very few miles to live.

I grit my teeth because I know it's my fault. I never take good care of my things. I ride and ride and ride my bicycle, grinding the rubber into thousands of miles of road. I knew these tires were near the end of their life, but I never let it get to me until ... I'm stranded.

Only, I'm not. Not until it's really gone. Not until the final, fatal pop. I have faith. I have no choice. So we turn around. We turn our backs on the END sign to face uninterrupted miles of pale yellow and paler green.

They go smooth and they go fast. I doesn't take much time or thought before I'm home. Free. Saved.

Lesson learned? I reflect on it. Somewhere, above this curtain of clouds, the sun is beginning to sink beneath the sky. It's time again to move forward.

Into the first long night.

Here I keep my dreams

Date: September 18
Mileage: 28.7
September mileage: 212.6

If you ever have an hour or 37 to kill, I strongly recommend reading through the bicycle tour blog "Cycling Silk." It chronicles the adventures of several college students crossing western China's Silk Road and Tibet on bicycles ... one of them, Kate, is my friend's cousin or cousin's friend. I don't remember. The connection is distant and I've never met her, but I read what she writes and I feel like I know her:

"On a bike trip, you are exposed to the world around you in a way and to a degree that few other modes of transportation afford. That kind of raw vulnerability has its drawbacks - like choking on the fumes of transport trucks that roar past, or feeling every little bump in the road translate itself into a saddle sore. But in the end the perks take the prize: the freedom to explore a landscape at your own pace, under your own power, and the exhilaration that comes with traveling with all you need strapped to your wheels. This is nomadism at its best, with every day bringing some new adventure, be it grim or glorious, soul-stirring or soul-shaking. Whatever happens, on a bike you are rarely bored."

I won't spoil any of Kate's adventures, but it's definitely worth it to click on the archives and start from the beginning. It's my dream to one day visit this part of the world - cross the Gobi Desert and roll over the 17,000-foot passes that separate China from Tibet. So I'm guilty of armchair adventuring with only a stranger's blog and vague notions to guide me.

I dislike using the term "someday" as much as I dislike using "never" when I talk about my goals. I'm of the opinion that if you want to do something with your life, you should be working toward it right now. Even if it's financially or physically impossible, if you're not taking any type of action - stashing away savings, teaching your kids Chinese - then it's nothing more than a dream. It's no different than the confounding images that haunt my groggy morning snooze sessions ... they're not real, they're not satisfying, and, inevitably, they're bound to be forgotten before the Cocoa Puffs hit the bowl.

In a way, I keep hitting the snooze button on bicycle touring. I love it. I dream about it. It's a big part of who I've become. But I never do anything about it. Three years ago, I rode a bicycle from Salt Lake City to New York, and I don't think I've since found a simpler, purer way of living. Bicycle touring isn't practical as something to do forever, but I also don't like to use the term forever. I like to think about what I want or need to do right now. And right now, I'd like to work toward taking another bicycle tour.

Someday.

Le (yet another) Tour

Date: September 16&17
Combined mileage: 43.6
September mileage: 183.9

I have an idea for a decent endurance biking event in Juneau. It came to me today as Geoff and I, while tooling around on a short ride, decided to cross downtown to look at a particular house for sale. The city is carved into a mountainside, not unlike San Francisco, in a way that each city block becomes progressively steeper. I flew across the first five blocks (about 5-7 percent grade) ... began to labor at the next two (10 percent) ... started wheezing at blocks 8 and 9 (15 percent) and wavered alarmingly up the last two blocks (judging by hikes that I've done in the past, I'd say these streets easily push 25 percent grades). About 30 feet from the summit stop sign, I glanced over at a cement barrier and became terrified at the thought of putting my foot down - for fear I would slip backward back down the street and over the edge. But I also wasn't sure I was going to make it - I was feeling light-headed enough that I feared for my consciousness. This happened on the tail end of a casual, 15-mile ride. Now, I'm not in the best shape I've been in all year. But I'm not exactly in the worst shape of my life, either.

So here's my idea for the endurance cycling event - it's a road ride, because the four-mile-long mountain bike trails around town aren't exactly distance-friendly. The cyclists start in downtown and ride out to the end of the road the turn around and return to town, covering the Mendenhall Loop on their way home (~80 miles). Then they cross the Channel bridge, ride to Douglas, out the end of the road, and back (~30 miles). Then they ride out to the southern end of the road, at Thane, and back (~14 miles). So, by covering every bike-legal mile of highway in the whole area, I have a 124-mile ride. I thought I could flesh it out to 150 by then weaving the course through every side street in downtown Juneau, so at the end of their century-plus, all the riders would have to climb and then descend, climb again and then descend again - every heartbreaking, breathtaking road in town. It's the Tour of Juneau. A 150-mile road ride isn't exactly a groundbreaking endurance event, but I thought all those short, steep late-ride climbs could really make it interesting.

Now, if only I could get the city to go along with me. I wouldn't even know how to begin to put together an mass-participant event, but it sure would be fun to try. I already have a T-shirt design idea. Because you can't drive to Juneau, it often carries the reputation in the Lower 48 that it has no roads. So I was thinking the slogan for my road bike Tour would play off that line at the end of the movie 'Back to the Future:' "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."

Um, yeah. I should probably try to get some sleep now.

Orca skyward

Date: September 14
Mileage: 32.3
September mileage: 140.3

Today Geoff and I rented an 18-foot skiff with an outboard engine and eight hours of cloudless daylight to motor aimlessly around in. We had this crazy idea that with no experience, no depth finder, no anchor and one halibut pole, we were somehow going to come home with dinner. We headed out to Shelter Island just as the last of the morning frost melted away in a blaze of sun. We pulled in to a place called "Halibut Cove" (which means there's got to be halibut there, right?) and began fumbling around with a bag of still-frozen-solid herring and tangled hooks when Geoff let out a loud gasp. I whirled around just as a massive whale erupted from the surface no more than 200 yards in front of our tiny boat. With a thunderous roar it twisted its sparkling black torso, flashing a white underside and falling headlong back into the water, tail sinking beneath a geyser of white spray. Geoff and I just sat there, still balancing dead herring and hooks in our hands and giving each other a "did that just happen?" kind of confused stare.

The camera came out after that, as did many dozens more orca and humpback whales. The rest of the day's theatrics were decidedly less dramatic - but, I gotta say, there's nothing like a good opening to really carry a performance. We watched a pod of five synchronized-swimming humpbacks breach and pull their tails back in the water in perfect unison. Three playful seals came up right next to the boat and splashed around for several minutes as they swam away. Every once in a while, a chorus of whale songs echoed across the channel. Eagles coasted overhead as we skimmed the smooth water and distant icefields - almost never visible from shore - sparkled in the sun. Oh ... and we didn't catch a single halibut.

Despite our failure to bring home fresh fish, this turned out to be an exceptionally good weekend, and I have the sunburn to show for it. Yesterday we did a "bike tour" of Juneau. We rode out to the valley, crossing the path of a marauding black bear before connecting with the Spalding Trail. We hiked up (well, more like stair-stepped up) a plank-lined drainage to a high meadow, where we could soak in the clear air and work on our much-neglected sunburns. We ate lunch at this locally lauded Thai place that actually was pretty good (which, for this city's restaurant reputation, is pretty much shocking). Then, with stomachs full of basil tofu and vegetables, we rode the 15 miles home in a casual - almost effortless - hour. There should be more weekends like yesterday and today ... but right now, lingering in the last breaths of summer, I'll gladly take just this one.

The kids aren't alright

Date: September 13
Mileage: 23.8
September mileage: 108

Right now I work as a wire editor, which basically means I have my pick of dozens of national and world news articles to run in our local paper. Recently, one of my coworkers accused me of running "too many fat-kid stories." I can't help if all the published scientists are so single-mindedly focused on obesity (well, that and global warming.) I think these reports are justified. They scare me, too.

The latest study is saying that one in five children younger than 18 will be obese by 2010. Not pudgy. Not slightly overweight. Obese. It makes me wonder where these kids find the time to put on all this weight. You can't tell me that 20 percent of the youth population is genetically predisposed.

I guess what I don't understand is exactly when it got so bad. I come from "Generation Y," albeit the very, very front edge of it. But we had video games and Carl's Jr. and 7,578.2 satellite channels. We ate Doritos and Dr. Pepper for lunch and zoned out in front of the computer for hours (back in the days when texting was still called "chatting.") Now that I've joined the line of cane-waving, "back-in-my-day" generations, I'm just trying to make sense of the great health epidemic of our time, and why it seems to be hitting the youngest generation (Generation Z? Generation iPod?) so hard.

When I was a senior in high school, I wrote an opinion column for my school newspaper decrying exercise as an egomaniacle waste of time. Teenagers don't need to "exercise," I reasoned, because a teenager's life is exercise. They participate in school sports. They thrash around for hours at rock shows. The financially strapped among them (of which I was one) have to walk everywhere (because, when I was 17, it was not cool to ride a bike.) "Kids only exercise," I wrote, "because they're vain and think a few situps are going to make them look like Gwen Stefani." Yup. I had it all figured out.

I would have been royally outraged if the government tried to take away my Dr. Pepper machine. I would have laughed at efforts to slim down school lunch (we wouldn't even eat the greasy junk they served.) But, most of all, I didn't want someone telling me to spend precious hours of youth lifting weights or running on a hamster wheel, when there was a world of real fun right in front of me. It made so much sense then. What happened?

The thought of what children must be doing that causes them to grow so large almost scares me more than the public health implications. Could they really be spending that much more time staring mindlessly at screens, downing an endless supply of processed food until they're too numb and stuffed to think? That's bleak. It's one thing to eat yourself into an early grave. It's another to waste away in a soulless existence.

I know that obesity is a complicated issue, and I believe it's not always a matter of lifestyle choices. Some children are genetically predisposed. Others struggle with larger issues such as poverty and parental indifference, issues that often accompany unhealthy lifestyles. But how can we help the rest? Those overwhelmed with such rapt indifference that they let the world go by through their television monitors and turn to food for the shallow sparks of joy food can provide? If only somehow we could make biking cool. That, I have faith, would solve everything.

What is this bright light?

Weather.com had the audacity to call for "abundant sunshine" on Wednesday. 61 degrees. That's call-in-sick weather. At the very least, I have no choice but to take my bicycle out in the morning.

I haven't ridden much this month, but I haven't fallen off the bandwagon yet. I have become a reluctant member of the cheapest gym in town, also known as "Juneau's #1 Gym." It's a musty old place above a deli and across the street from the high school, where I can exercise to the aroma of sweat and salami while teenagers rifle through my car.

It also is a scapegoat that allows me to groggily nurse a cup of tea all morning before putting in a frantic hour of running/lifting/magazine reading before work. My biceps are looking a little less, well, imaginary - but it's just not the same. After all of the progress I made this year, it is, alas, a place of defeat. So this is my September resolution - to rediscover the joys of bad weather bicycling, and to work toward becoming a - sigh - morning person.

Maybe it's this unfamiliar yellow orb in the weather forecast that fills me with such resolve. But, if the those predictions prove true, I'll have no excuse for not posting numbers tomorrow.