June 5, 2015
7 – A Nap in the Warmth of a Sunbeam
We get up early for a morning hike through the woods of Maine. Our shoes and paws fall with the smallest sound on a trail bed covered with a soft layer of leaves left over from last fall. We cut through marshy areas and creeks on bridges made from planks of wood and by way of paths that we engineer into existence by figuring out the optimal route between one rock or stone to the next. Compared to the forests of Acadia we see fewer spruce trees and less granite but more birches and oaks. For as slow as we've been riding, we've still come far enough that the countryside has started to change around us.
We might have pedaled into Camden or we might have taken a wrong turn and ended up on the back lot of a movie studio by mistake. It has the look and feel of a small Northeast town as some Hollywood writer would have created it in their head: the stately summer homes, the delicate bed and breakfasts, the brick bank building, the pure-white church spires, the chowder house, pristine sailboats tied to the wharf or swinging easy at anchor, men in heavy sweaters with thick beards, lawns groomed to perfection, and every last face a white one.
It's also the kind of place where a lot of the people I say good morning to feel too self-important to respond with anything but a blank stare that says what the hell do you want, you homeless bicycle rider? I imagine their names to be something like Benedict or Esther or James. Not James like you or I would say it, but James pronounced long and slow with a thick and self-important British accent that drips with the certainty that the person saying it is far more important than you'll ever be.
Camden feels half charming and half unnerving in its perfection and pretension, but the high-brow pastries are delicious and the skate-punk kids are all polite.
At Rockport we hang a right turn, say goodbye to salt water for the next three or four months, and start down the long, slow road to the West Coast. The homes out here all have steep roofs meant for shedding heavy winter snows. In front of some of them we pass thick groups of lupine flowers that reflect vibrant shades of purple or pink or white in the bright mid-day sun. We have more of a chance to pay attention to these things because we're less worried about Walter. And we're less worried about Walter because the trailer is a complete success. In the span of just a day he now feels safe enough to curl up and take a nap in the warmth of a sunbeam as we crank up steep Maine hills at three miles per hour. It's going to be a wonderful summer and it means so much to know that all three of us will be in the right state of mind to enjoy it.
We grab lunch at a tavern in Waldoboro where the thick accents of the gray-haired old timers at the bar turn the word sidecar into sidecah, farther into fahthah, and George into Geahge as they talk about motorcycles and semi-trucks and the buddies laid up sick at home that they haven't seen in months. From there we pedal up and over an endless procession of hills, each one a gift left behind as the fingernails of the glaciers scraped down from the north about a million years ago. On the brief stretches where we leave the busy highways behind, the blurred deep orange of orioles flashes in front of us as they dart between trees and bushes.
We park the bikes on a narrow little one-way side street when we roll into Damariscotta. It's the least obvious place we could have stopped. And yet within ten minutes a young guy stops to ask us where we're going. It takes only a few moments more to learn that he's also a touring cyclist, and that he just finished riding from Oregon to Maine. The dude is hardcore; he left on the second day of April and finished the full cross-country ride in just two months.
"Whoa. Wasn't it super cold?" I ask him.
"Um, yeah. It was cold," he says with a sigh that says he's reliving the numb fingers and frozen ears of those days in his head as he answers. "It was cold all the way until Nebraska. Really cold. Nebraska was wonderful, by the way. I really liked Nebraska. Iowa sucked though. You think Iowa and you think flat, but it isn't. Not really at all. There were so many hills all the way across."
He's one of at least four touring cyclists we meet, wave at, or see passing by in the distance today. Finding ourselves in touring country in the heart of the riding season has been great. Whenever we see a set of four panniers rolling our way we can't help but smile. It reminds us that we're not alone out here, despite what it feels like most of the time. It's good for the soul.
Highway 1 is not. On this Friday afternoon it's filled with cars and trucks and RVs and semis, some of which pass in unbroken lines as many as twenty-five vehicles long. It doesn't take long before I settle into the middle chain ring and zone out. I decide that if someone decides to barrel down the ten-foot-wide shoulder at sixty-five miles per hour and flatten me, well, I'm going to accept that as my fate. I don't have the bandwidth to commit any more energy than that to this piece of shit road today.
At Wiscasset we leave Highway 1 and the Adventure Cycling Assocation route behind to try and avoid the traffic and larger cities and suburbs that lie ahead. Our reward is a gas station dinner of potato chips, Triscuits, and some weird sounds-healthy-but-probably-gives-you-cancer soda called Coca-Cola Life. Of course it could be worse. We could be the guy who marks the end of a long, hard week of work by walking out of said gas station with a large, flavorless pizza that he's going to wash down with a six-pack of O'Douls.
Our other reward is a quiet back road that leads us right to the southern edge of public woodlands we didn't know existed. With no idea what camping options might wait for us down the road, we walk off into the woods as soon as an opening reveals itself. There we find a flat spot clear enough for the square footage of a three-person tent and settle in for the night in a place that no cycle-tourist before may have ever camped.
When Walter turns tired he walks up from the foot of the tent, wedges himself into the spot that exists between where Kristen and I are laying, circles once or twice, and then plops down in a tight ball that makes sure a little bit of his body touches each of us. He's content; we're content. Everyone's in good spirits. And why wouldn't we be? It was a fucking great day.
Today's ride: 43 miles (69 km)
Total: 169 miles (272 km)
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