Days 69 & 70: We'll Take the High Road

So, remaining readers, this is it. A series of four posts, one for each of the last days of August, that tell the story of our final ten days on the road.

We have been back for two weeks now, and I have been avoiding these last posts; partially because of how busy I've been but mostly because they involve the admission that our trip and the summer are well and truly over. So now while a weakened Hurricane Irene drags herself through Vermont, snarling and snapping like a wounded animal, I will sit dry and safe and try to remember what it was like to be three thousand miles away, out of water and far from town in the high desert of Eastern Oregon.

Previously, on The Long Haul:
When we left our heroes, they were stranded with a broken spoke in Unity, a small town in the middle of nowhere just East of the Umatilla National Forest. Would they find the cassette removal tool they needed? Would they get a ride into town? What would become of Rook and Bonesy?

Stranded! (Unity, OR)

Well, the next day a posse of 33 riders from Bike & Build came through town. We knew in advance that they were on their way: the proprietors of the campground and store had posted a sign for us soliciting a ride into John Day, and while no one offered to take us, several reported that a large group of cyclists were headed west from Vale. The front of the pack arrived around 4 in the afternoon, followed shortly by a big ol' SAG van. I approached one of the riders on his way into the convenience store and asked if they had the tool I needed. He said he had no idea, but that "our leaders are inside, if you want to ask them."

Now, readers, can we briefly discuss the (supported versus self-supported) touring ethic? Maybe it's best not to. It's just, like, I totally respect the Bike & Build program because they're doing a great thing -- raising money and donating labor to affordable housing projects across the country -- and even if you're not doing charitable work like that, it's still cool that you're biking across the country whether it's with a group or not. I'm just not sure, having done this now, that I would want to do it any other way. First of all, you necessarily surrender a degree of autonomy (this is an apt illustration of the Social Contract, I think), e.g. the "our leaders" comment. I just can't imagine having someone tell me how far we're going to bike today, where we're going to stay, what time lunch is, et cetera. For me, and I think for Bonesy, so much of the sense of accomplishment derived from having actually planned and executed this whole thing ourselves: in that sense, "Biking across the country" entails for us not just the pedaling, but the logistics and decision-making as well. Furthermore, when you have a SAG vehicle, and you're sick or tired, you just ride that leg in the van (obviously they can't stop 32 riders because one has heat stroke, and besides, they're on a schedule). Fair enough, but I also know that if I had missed so much as one mile of riding over the course of the trip I would have felt like I'd not quite completed it. Steve Garufi knows what I'm talking about.

Then there's the cheering. This is where I probably start sounding like a misanthrope, and but so sue me: every time one of these kids rides into town, the assembled leap and hoot and holler in support. When we get to camp, maybe a dog barks at us or some RVers watch silently from inside their mosquito netting. Then the next morning as we're breaking down camp, there's this ruckus from over at the store, and it's team Bike & Build doing their morning chant or whatever. Then as we rode the same road for two days we'd keep finding these little pastel encouragements from the SAG crew chalked on the asphalt:

"Lunch!

To

Mile

1,"

"People!!!

Amazing

All

Are

You," 

and -- I kid you not, readers -- "You have accomplished more in one summer than most people will in their entire lives!" Have they, though, scribe of the shoulder?

I'm not jealous -- the last thing I'd want to see or hear at the end of a long hot ride is a group of people who beat me there -- but to be perfectly honest (and if this is going to be a good blog it must first be honest) there's a part of my aversion to this whole mutual back-patting that is resentful. I think it's because I know these kids are going to tell people that this summer they "biked across the country," which is what we did, albeit with another 50 pounds each between bike and gear, and having to take responsibility for our personal safety let alone success. The rebuttal, I guess would be that they actually managed to benefit other people while doing it: that my criticism is based on an entirely narcissistic definition of accomplishment. Well fine, I cede the moral high ground. All I'm saying is that what we did was harder, and in light of that there's something a little bit insulting about the self-righteousness.

This brings me to a larger point about the idea of riding in support of charity/fundraising efforts, and I think I can address it better with the above rant out of the way. We both wish that we had tried to raise some money for someone during the trip. Or at least I do and Bonesy thinks it's a nice idea but rightly points out that there was nothing wrong with doing it solely for ourselves. Still, most of the touring cyclists we met had some sort of connection to a "cause," even if they were just raising awareness. My favorite approach was that of two older guys from Oregon who we met 20 miles west of Cody, WY. They were just asking everyone they talked to on the trip to donate to their (the talkees') local food shelves. I like this for three reasons:

1. It's easy (time, effort, money), both for the riders and the donors.
2. It allows the riders to have a local impact in communities all the way across the country, instead of siphoning money to larger, geographically distant groups.
3. It effectively allocates 100% of donations to the target group, which means that as a self-contained effort, the ride's fundraising component maintains perfect organizational efficiency.

If I ever do any big tour again, I'll be doing something very similar to what those guys did. Let's just think for a second, though, about this idea that all bike tours are fundraising efforts. When you go on a 7-night luxury cruise, are you frequently stopped by shipmates soliciting donations for [insert worthy cause here]? Perhaps you are. I wouldn't know.

OK! So yes, obviously I borrowed their tools and fixed Bonesy's spoke. Thank you, Bike & Build, for lending us the tools -- and for helping to address the lack of unaffordable housing at a time when we are still looking to the construction of unreasonably large single-family homes to gird the economy. Unfortunately, the B&B cavalry arrived a little too late in the day for us to start the ride over the Blue Mountains to Mt. Vernon, so we drank a lot of beer and went to bed early instead. The next day was a gorgeous ride through pine forests (checkout Umatilla NF on google maps in satellite mode: the patchwork of logging tracts is pretty cool) and over another little pass. Strawberry Mountain and its sister peaks are awfully pretty, rising out of the grassland around Prairie City which itself is a quiet gem of a town. From there we followed the John Day river through its eponymous town, where we stopped at an ersatz bike shop in the back of the Chamber of Commerce building. I wanted to have someone who knew what he was talking about check the wheel, because even though I'd replaced the spoke I was concerned that it might've gone out of true, ready to spring another one as soon as we got out into the canyons. He said it was fine.

A comically-oversized prairie schooner on the long descent into Prairie City, OR

We stayed that night at the Bike Inn, in Mt. Vernon, OR. The inn and its operator, Christy, appear briefly in this video from travelers Russ Roca and Laura Crawford, who have somehow managed to bike tour basically full time. They also document some of the other small towns that make Route 26 such a great road for cyclists. Speaking of that, it should be mentioned that the road is part of the ACA's Trans-America trail. We didn't know this when we set our sites on it while still in Boise, but it's not surprising given the lack of decent alternatives for crossing the desert that stretches both north and south. Because it lies on perhaps the most-frequently-biked cross-country route in America and otherwise is pretty much out of everyone else's way, this stretch was crawling with touring cyclists and would occasionally present us with an unexpected bike lane or a gas station stocked with Clif Bars. Everyone was either going to Astoria, OR; or Yorktown, VA, and all the locals were pretty much accustomed to touring cyclists. This was nice in some ways, like when B&B showed up which clearly would not have happened off a major touring route, but mostly we were glad to quit the trail in Redmond, OR in favor of what felt, anyway, like the roads-less-traveled.

Ginger at the Bike Inn, technically on the morning of day 71

 Ride on.