I'm Riding Across the Rolling Green Hills of Western Virginia Butt-Ass Naked!

May 7, 2017

Research parks and intramural soccer fields and the giant empty football stadium every proper college town should have guide us south. We ride on a paved trail, where the slats of wooden bridges rumble beneath our tires. Soon the creeks and trees and badgers give way to the tract homes and Walmarts and Waffle Houses of Christiansburg. At a stop light, I see a bumper sticker on the back of the van in front of me. In big letters on a bright red background it reads NOT A LIBERAL.

We ride past a little yard sign that says The wages of sin is death, followed soon by a tidy white church with dark green shutters flanking its tall windows, the parking lot full on this Sunday morning. I launch a fat ball of spit toward the ditch off to my right. But at that moment a gust of wind spools up and catches it. I watch the ball arc up, then back to the left, and finally down. It lands with a heavy splat on my right-front pannier. I just stand there for a moment, thinking about my glamorous life of adventure.

The hills are like roller coasters. Clunk-clunk-clunk up the back, a short pause at the top before gravity and steepness take over, then the bottom falls out and the sound of rushing wind fills our heads and cold air shoots up our nostrils. I wear smiles of joy and my head rushes with excitement and danger.

I ditch another layer of clothing with each passing hour, until at last I'm riding across the rolling green hills of Western Virginia butt-ass naked! Not really. But if I wanted to, only a handful of drivers and a few confused old men standing on the front porches of their single-wides with their hands in their pockets would see.

This is a place of 150-year-old cemeteries ringed with white picket fences, modest houses with clapboard siding and rusting sheet metal roofs, and dogs that turn their heads and bark at us as we roll past but can't be bothered to actually get up and run over to the edge of the yard. The graffiti etched into the dividers between the urinals in the gas station bathroom reads "Jesus reigns."

We ride on a rail trail for a few miles near Draper. I'm overtaken by the green of the trees above, the green of long grass below, the green of rolling pasture land to both sides. It is an ocean of green, alive with shadows from the sun and movement from the wind. It's one of the most peaceful places I've ever ridden. It's also flat flat flat, which we haven't been able to say about anywhere in Virginia for the last week.

When we reach the point where the TransAm route turns away from the trail, we decide we're not following. We'd be on highways near the interstate the whole time. With the trail, we can ride twenty-five easy miles, then take country roads to easily hook back up with the TransAm tomorrow. We both agree that it's a fine plan.

It sure makes our day finer. We ride over old wooden trestles a hundred feet above the creeks and streams below, then through narrow cuts in the bedrock blasted away for a rail line long since forgotten. Farther on, we tilt our necks back hard and look up at sheer faces of jagged rock carved out by the flow of the muddy river off to our right over millions of years. Sometimes we look over and see the narrow openings of dark caves that lead back inside the cliffs.

The tunnel of trees around us helps blocks the wind that had been howling in our faces all day long. We see small clusters of homes or cabins every now and then, but we almost always ride alone, far from the noise and danger and commotion of the highways. That we didn't expect to be here makes the experience all the more amazing.

It's a magical afternoon and evening. Until all of a sudden it's not.

We're no more than three miles from a state park campground when in an instant Kristen's rear wheel goes from freewheeling to locked up and skidding, leaving a deep and wandering divot in the surface of the trail behind. Neither of us is sure what happened, but whatever it is has the distinct sound of bad news.

The bad news turns out very bad. All afternoon we've been dodging small and not-so-small chunks of wood that have fallen on the trail in the last few weeks from the strong storms that passed through the area. But Kristen managed to miss one of the last of the day and that mistake changes everything. My eye falls to her rear derailleur. Instead of running parallel to her frame, a piece of wood has jammed itself somewhere in the mess of the cage and pulleys and chain and caused the derailleur to face almost ninety degrees out toward the right edge of the trail. It is screwed, hosed, a shambles.

After a few minutes of cursing and despair, I try to engineer a fix. With the derailleur junked, the first thing to do is disconnect the chain and get it unstuck. The chain is old enough that we can't get the master link undone, so we have to use a chain tool to pop out another pin and break it loose. Soon we realize that even if we manage this, now that the chain won't be going through the derailleur it'll have way too much slack to stay in place on a single sprocket. And so I decide to take out what I hope is the right number of links, place the chain on what I think is the right-sized sprocket, and turn Kristen's bike into the country's most heavily loaded single-speed touring bicycle.

It takes another half an hour of cursing and despair and searching for spare chain pieces in our bag full of extra parts, but somehow we get there. The bike is no longer immobile. It's kind of slow because I didn't pick quite the right sprocket for riding on the flat grade of the trail, but it will get us down the road. And when I email the bike shop that sits thirty miles away at the end of the trail asking if they have derailleurs in stock, I get a message back three minutes later saying that they do.

All things considered, we could be in much worse shape.

We reach the campground just ahead of darkness. I set up the tent while Kristen cooks dinner. Everything happens in concerned silence. Kristen tells me she's most sad about the fact that the whole derailleur problem means we won't get to catch up to Jerry again tomorrow, or this week, or maybe even this month. I'm most sad about the fact that for the foreseeable future this trip is going to be, well, derailed.

Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 431 miles (694 km)

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