Because I’ve been having some problems with Cyclist’s palsy, which started soon after putting new bars on my bike, I decided to switch back to the old bars just to see if that might alleviate the problem. Changing bars means unwrapping the tape, removing the STI levers, removing and replacing the stem and bars, sliding the STI levers onto the exactly correct position on the replaced bars, clamping them in place, pre-loading and tightening the stem onto the stearer tube to ensure no play in the headset, doing a few test rides and re-adjusting until the levers and bars are positioned correctly, then re-taping the bars. Also, on one of the test rides, discovering that one of the brake cables is too short on the replaced bars, necessitating finding a replacement cable in my bin of bike parts, threading the new cable into the levers and housing and brake calipers, cutting the cable and crimping a cap onto the cable end. Happily, it’s easy to find how-to articles, even videos for each of these steps. How did anyone manage to work on a bike before Google?
Actually, part of the answer is, before Google, bikes were simpler and didn’t change as frequently. Like car manufactures, companies like Shimano, Sram and Campagnola are creating new and improved designs every year to suck more money from naive cyclists. Each new design has different methods for installation and removal.
Karl on Peterson Hill
Anyway, the final step in my bar replacement was a test ride around the north end of the island to verify all was good. Bike was good, everything tight and in the right place. A light rain was just starting to fall as I reached the top of Peterson Hill, about four miles from home.
The first year after we were married, Martha and I lived in Lansdowne, right outside Philadelphia, where we worked. The year was 1973. Martha was teaching preschool at Blankenburg Elementary and I was working at the AV department at Drexel University. The director’s name was Beatrice. Martha and I were happy and at the same time I was restless.
When B. decided to leave, I was offered her position. It was a dream job opportunity, but I was not happy with the salary offer. Drexel offered to pay me $10K, a 25% increase over my current salary. Because I knew B. was earning $17K for the same job that’s what I thought I should get. (Yes, at 23 I was a bit naive.)
I suggested an alternate plan for both Martha and me: tell Drexel to go to hell, quit our jobs, travel and explore the country. We had little money saved, about $2k; we were also in the middle of a recession and prospects of getting employment anywhere were uncertain at best. We were clueless.
Departure
Amazingly, Martha acquiesced, and then I vacillated for several weeks between the sensible choice and the stupid choice. Eventually of course, we made the stupid choice and embraced the dream: go west, discover for ourselves the Rocky Mountains. We quit our jobs, packed up our belongings. left a network of close friends from college like we would never again have, and drove off in our red Dodge Dart to look for America. Our lives were forever changed.
Footnote
Nine months later we were settled in Cobleskill, NY, where Kathleen would eventually be born. I had a job doing similar work to what I had been doing at Drexel, but at a lower salary. Martha never again found a job like she had at Blankenburg.
We stayed in contact with friends from Philadelphia, but as years passed, drifted apart. For more than a year afterwards, I often regretted leaving Drexel, which built a brand new AV center, with many new toys and a budget to do many cool things. I was working at a much smaller school with less money and fewer toys. We never developed the network of friends in Cobleskill like we had in Philadelphia.
We were also living a dream shared by both of us – in the country, beautiful upstate New York, and we continued to dream of new adventures.
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.
