Yesterday I rode 47 miles to Port Ludlow and back. Sunlight peeking through a canopy of tall trees created dappled patterns on the quiet roads. Deep in thought, I noticed the forest, not the trees.
Often my rides serve as a crucible for creation. In my reverie on a beautiful day, a faucet opens and ideas become a steady stream of water. Some ideas I will later decide are good and pursue them; other ideas I will reject as ridiculous, or maybe too scary, perhaps only until the next long ride.
I have a job that is in many ways a dream job that I’ve been thinking about leaving. I’m vacillating. While riding yesterday, I thought of all that is good about the job, why I should stay and what I should do differently. I thought about email I would write to the VP, composing, re-writing, editing in my mind. Today I will recreate some version of that email and actually send it.
Often I think about what I want to say to people. Being an introvert, I don’t talk all that much, and most of what I think about saying never gets verbalized. That’s mostly a good thing because I’m an INFJ. The J is for judgemental.
Yesterday, I thought of all kinds of things to write in this blog, mostly stories from the old days that seem worth telling. Titles like Dennis, Martha, Anne Marie, Leaving Philadelphia may eventually appear in this blog.
August 26, 1967 was the beginning of a new chapter in my life. It was the day I met Alice. She was 17, just going into her senior year in high school. I was 19, home from my freshman year at Drexel in Philadelphia. My friend Jim was dating her sister Barb, who he had met earlier that year. They introduced me to Alice when we went on a double date to a lake in Pinchot Park, south of Harrisburg.
Coop and I were working at the Shop. That’s how our family referred to the family business, MiKar Manufacturing company, named after my brother and me. It was mind-numbing repetitive work. Coop quit working there when he got a better job working for the State of Pennsylvania. That’s where he met Barb – it was in an elevator, or a parking lot, I forget which.
That was one crazy summer. I was madly smitten with Alice from the day we met. She was my first girlfriend. I went back to school in Philadelphia a few short weeks after meeting Alice, but came home most weekends to spend time with her. It was a two hour trip by train or bus, longer if I hitchhiked.
My mom started giving me grief for spending too much time with Alice and told me to stay in Philadelphia and focus on school. I came home anyway, often hitchhiking, staying somewhere else. I remember sleeping on the couch at the house of my best friend Dennis.
In January 1968, I got my first co-op job with Bell Telephone Co. in Harrisburg, renting my own apartment in the north end of town. Alice and I were together frequently for six months. The following September, I convinced her to come to Drexel in Philadelphia. I don’t think her heart was ever really in college, but she and I were together constantly until December.
January 1969, I started my second co-op job in Rochester, NY. Denis, Alice and I drove up there together, and the two of them returned to Philadelphia. She flew up to visit me one weekend. I flew to Philadelphia to visit her on Valentines Day. That’s when she broke up with me.
I was devastated, more crushed than I ever remember feeling. I returned to Rochester and stumbled through life, living in a house with four other guys, working at a job that was not very interesting. It was cold, dark, and I would walk to work over icy sidewalks. All I could think about was Alice. Walking home from work, the ice on the sidewalks had melted, and I would dream that she would be waiting at the house for me. Sometime in March, I received a letter from Dennis saying he and Alice were together. I went berserk.
That’s when I started smoking. I got drunk a lot. Several times I disappeared on weekends without telling anyone where I was going. One Thursday evening, I recall wandering aimlessly in south Rochester, figuring I was going to skip town and disappear. Somehow I ended up in Washington, D.C., probably by hitchhiking. I remember going to visit Fast Eddie, who managed a strip club. Then I went to visit my friend Mike from high school, who was attending George Washington University. Sometime during that weekend, I decided to return to Rochester.
The six months that followed were difficult times for me. Thinking about them is still painful. Even now, nearly fifty years later, as I am writing, I feel these feelings. They hurt.
Alice as a high school senior – I keep this picture in a drawer, not knowing what else to do with it. I can’t throw it out.
Wanting to accumulate some mileage while the weather is still pleasant, I rode about 40 miles, north off the island to Sawdust Hill and some good climbing. Strava said I climbed about 3200 feet. Mostly it was a pleasant ride through the country.
In Travels with Charlie, Steinbeck says he did a lot of thinking while driving – planned houses, planted gardens, created turtle traps, written long detailed letters, all in his mind. That doesn’t work for me; I find driving a motor vehicle mind numbing. For mental stimulation, I listen to NPR or podcasts saved especially for the trip.
Riding a bicycle is different. On days such as yesterday, I think about all kinds of things: dream of living in farm houses that I pass, or in cabins along the coast. I dream of sailing, raising livestock or harvesting a garden. Often I solve problems from work, or come up with new creative approaches, some good, others terrible. Other times I just ride and forget about everything.
Little Free Library
Bainbridge Island has little libraries like the at the right all over the island. Each one has a unique design. People are invited to take or leave a book as the choose. Somewhere there is a registry of these libraries. I’ll put my copy of Travels with Charlie in one of these libraries when I finish reading it.
The farm below sits at the top of Sawdust Hill, overlooking the Olympic Mountains. Two dogs sauntered out of the pasture to greet me shortly after I took this picture.
I got hacked off with work, so I decided to ride my bike. My natural inclination was to pound out repeats on Baker Hill. Instead I went exploring and found another park on the north end of the island along Madison Bay.
The park entrance is on the north side of Madison Bay Road off Route 305, about a mile from the Agate Bridge. The road meanders through forest and past farms before ending at a driveway. There were no cars in the small lot at the park entrance.
I walked about 200 yards from the entrance, along a freshly groomed trail through a forest of Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, Sword Ferns, Red Elderberry, Oregon Grape. The trail eventually split in two directions, presumably making a loop that wound past Madison Bay.
The mushroom like growth on the stump at the left is called Conch. It’s a fungus that grew inside the tree, eventually killing it. Second growth Western Hemlock erupts from an old growth Red Cedar nurse stump shown at the right. These cedars flourished on Bainbridge Island before it was logged in the mid 1800’s. Madison Bay was one of the first logging settlements.
My plan was to ride from home on Bainbridge Island to Stevens Pass and back for a good long climb. Unfortunately, the smoke from the fires in eastern Washington made the air thick and hazy. It seemed to get worse the further east I rode. I turned around in Sultan, just a little past the halfway point.
Sultan is and old logging and gold mining town established at the confluence of the Sultan and Skykomish Rivers in the 1880’s. Today the population is a little over 4500. Most weekends, streams of slow moving traffic creep through Sultan along U.S. 2, one of the few roads leading to passes over the Cascade mountains.
I ride with a great group of people most Saturday mornings from Bainbridge Island to Port Ludlow and back. Like most people I find on the island, everyone has a friendly attitude; most have had a lot of experience riding. We usually start at a pretty good clip north on 305 to the Kitsap Peninsula. The pace eases and people chat more easily once we turn off the main highway. Most weeks we follow the same route.
I like this group because, in addition to being friendly people and good cyclists, we enjoy pushing the pace at times. Right now I’m one of the stronger riders in the group, only because I’ve been riding more frequently. When I was riding with them last year, I was not as strong but the rides were still fun. Most people in the group have ridden long enough they can share similar experiences of up years and down years.
Most weekdays when I’m riding alone, I ride at a much slower pace so that I’m primarily burning fat for energy. With this group, I’m frequently tapping more glycogen stores. Round trip for this ride is 43 miles. Strava says I burned 1638 kCal on the ride. That’s about equal to the total caloric capacity of the glycogen stored in my muscles and liver. A good indicator of fitness is that I could enjoy the entire ride without eating anything and arrive home not feeling trashed.
I’m hoping to do a longer ride tomorrow, hopefully a long climb up a mountain pass. A key check on my condition is whether I’ll be able to recover to start fresh tomorrow and enjoy back to back hard rides.
3/4 pound fresh halibut
