“Haven’t had a hot shower in a few days,” he said as he fumbled through his packs for his bar of soap. “This’ll feel great! I always shower and wash my clothes all at the same time. I walk into the shower with all my clothes on and suds them and myself good. Then I take off my clothes and lay ’em on the floor, and while I’m scrubbing my body I stomp on ’em with my feet. That works pretty good you know. Gets all the dirt out. Then I rinse ’em out an’ put ’em back on wet, and they dry out pretty quick from my body heat. Yeah, as long as the weather stays nice and warm like it’s been I don’t mind wearing ’em wet for a while.”
After we set up the tent, Larry and I walked over to the river for a swim and to meet the other bicyclers in the camp: Mike, Ed, Craig, and Tom. Mike was a carpenter from Florida, who had just cycled across the States, and Ed was a high-school math teacher from British Columbia on his way down the coast “to where the smog starts, and then I’ll quit and fly back home.” Craig and Tom were touring northern California and Oregon together. Both of them were from Fresno, California, and “like, really into health food.” They grew their own alfalfa sprouts in the rows of little cloth sacks that hung from their handlebars, and they pedaled to “like, really mellow classical music” from the cassette player in Craig’s handlebar pack.
“Sprouts and Mozart. You know, like, that’s what I got up front,” Craig nodded, pointing to his handlebars. “Ya gotta have fresh sprouts, man. Nothing’s no good without ’em. Try this. This is good stuff. Great afternoon snack, man. You know, like, it’s got my sprouts in it.”
Craig handed us the bowl he was eating from. We looked into it, a nasty mixture of alfalfa sprouts, tofu, bulgur wheat, shredded zucchini, sunflower seeds, and a few other questionable ingredients. To a couple of junk-food junkies, Craig’s snack was one of the most repulsive sights we’d ever set eyes on.
“Hey thanks,” said Larry, backing away from the bowl as if it might attack him, “but I’ll stick to my Hostess snowballs.”
“Snowballs? Man, like, no way. Like, sugar’s poison, man,” Craig muttered in disgust. He shook his head and shoved a spoonful of the mixture into his mouth, then washed it down with a few swallows from his can of guava-apricot-papayabanana-peach nectar and turned up Mozart.
Larry and I spent the rest of the day floating in the river, basking in the sun, and exploring the redwood groves. It felt good to give our bicycling muscles a rest. In the evening, Eric, Mike, Ed, and Larry pooled some money and went shopping at the campground grocery store. When they got back, they tossed a green salad in a grocery bag, chopped up a plate of fresh fruit, and we (including Craig and Tom, who ate another tofu and sprout dish) gathered around the fire, devouring food and the three bottles of wine Mike had chilled in the river.
It was a clear night; what sky we could see through the towering redwoods was a blanket of stars. Larry and I curled up together on our mats next to the campfire. The flames warmed our bodies, the smells of the redwood needles, the fresh sap, and the burning wood filled our nostrils, and the sounds of the river and the crackling fire played in our ears. A peaceful feeling settled over me, and for the first time since we started our journey my muscles were nearly free of pain. I found myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might make it to Oregon after all.
CHAPTER THREE
Bears
Things fell together nicely from the Avenue of the Giants through southern Oregon. I had finally built up and toned my cycling muscles. And on our second day in Oregon, I knocked off my first eighty-mile day. Bicycling felt good by then. I enjoyed working and strengthening my muscles every day, and the constant exercise felt exhilarating, even necessary. On the days we didn’t bicycle, we always went for a hike or a jog to avoid the listless or anxious moods that fell over us when we failed to exercise. Bicycling kept our bodies feeling alive and invigorated.
Now that I was in shape, cycle touring seemed like a great way to travel. We moved slow enough to see and hear things that to passing motorists were only blurs of color and sound. We took in the textures and odors of the soil and the vegetation. And because bicycling is such a quiet mode of travel, wild animals weren’t frightened away when we came up the road toward them. Deer, accustomed to seeing and hearing huge, noisy boxes of accelerated steel on the roads, often loped to the edge of the pavement to find out what we were. And too, touring by bicycle made it easy for us to meet people.
Whenever we stopped in a small town to pick up a snack or food supplies at the local country stores, people always hurried over to talk with us. The Oregonians were extremely friendly folks, and shop owners always took the time to sit down and talk with us. First, they wanted to hear about our trip and how we were faring, then they would tell us what they thought we ought to know about themselves, their relatives and friends, the history of their town, and the points of interest up ahead.
It was also in southern Oregon that we discovered free camping, something which made bicycle touring even more of a joy. At the end of our first day in Oregon there was no campground nearby, so we pulled into a secluded cove somewhere between Brookings and Gold Beach and pitched our tent on a grassy spot along the beach. The cove was surrounded and protected by high cliffs covered with green ferns, and a freshwater stream flowed off a cliff and down across the wide sandy beach and into the ocean. Larry and I bathed in the stream at sunset and watched the blue Pacific turn a brilliant orange and the white sea gulls float back and forth across the darkening sky. That was the first time we camped outside of a campground, and instead of being surrounded by packs of recreational vehicles with rumbling generators and the blaring stereos and televisions that some people like to take with them when they go camping, we were embraced by a quiet peacefulness, free of noise and exhaust fumes. From that night on, we stuck to free camping and stayed away from campgrounds, except when we wanted a hot shower.
The weather along the coast of California had been perfect; warm and sunny days, and cool crisp nights tailored for sound sleeping. But then, being a native of southern California, that was exactly what I expected. When we left Santa Barbara, I was confident that we’d be pedaling through nothing but clear warm weather for the next four months. It never occurred to me that there might be some places in North America where it actually rained during the summer. Therefore, I was flabbergasted by what the owner of the grocery store in Smith River, California—the last settlement before the Oregon border—said to us as we strode through the front door of his shop and made a beeline for the last package of chocolate donuts.
“Which way you folks going?” he asked.
“North,” Larry answered. “Up the coast of Oregon.”
“Oregon, huh? Well that’s Oregon over there where the rain starts,” he chuckled, pointing out one of the windows. “Least, that’s how the saying goes. If it’s not raining over there today, it will be tomorrow. That’s what we say around here.”
Larry and I stepped outside and glanced uneasily in a northerly direction. Sure enough, there were clouds up ahead. I was surprised we hadn’t noticed them earlier.
“People up there have moss growing all over their bodies,” the owner grinned. “And when they tilt their heads, water falls out. You can bet you’re going to get mighty wet pedaling in Oregon. That’s for sure.”
LUCKILY, THE RAINS DIDN’T COME until our third day in Oregon. The first two days were cold and overcast, but we ignored the threatening storm and savored the spectacular coastline and pine forests enclosing our route. Then, on the evening of June 10, we pitched our tent beside a lake near Reedsport and awoke the next morning to the awful sound of a downpour. I peeked out one of the tent windows and watched solid sheets of water descend from the sky. It was raining so hard I couldn’t make out the edge of the lake.
“Looks like we won’t be pedaling today,” I said, climbing back into my bag. “What do you think?”
Neither of us had much experience bicycling