Introduction
During my recent
camping vacation with my family I tried to get some bike rides in. You may have read about my Ebbetts Pass ride. I did one other memorable ride
during the trip—memorable more for my difficulties than anything else. My goal was to head south on Highway 395
toward Lee Vining, where I’d turn west on Highway 120 (aka Great Sierra Wagon
Road), which goes over Tioga Pass and into Yosemite National Park. In addition to the pass itself, I faced
several challenges: the Nabokovian
dilemma; shortage of time; shortage of water; fear; even a missing receipt.
Nabokovian dilemma
I guess “Nabokovian
dilemma” isn’t a household phrase … yet.
(Quick, send everybody you know the link to this post!) I’m referring to a memorable passage from Vladimir
Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory,
when he describes his boyhood mania for butterfly hunting:
oooOne of [the characteristics of butterfly hunting] was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania…. In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent fun. He arrived one summer night ... from a town some twenty five miles away. His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stouthearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.
ooo On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone.... Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.
The dilemma here
is simply the desire to be two places at once, in my case due to conflicting
impulses to a) pursue my individual cycling mania and yet b) be with my
family. Like the young Nabokov, I sought
to sneak out early. I hoped to get in a
couple hours of riding and then arrive back just in time to make pancakes on
the camp stove—but I was pretty sure this wasn’t actually possible.
Normally,
this conflict would barely have registered, but the campground we were at was,
though very pretty, also kind of spooky.
When cruising around choosing a site we couldn’t help but notice how
many of them resembled a shantytown or homeless encampment, or even an Occupy
site (Occupy Eastern Sierras?). Sagging,
faded lawn chairs; ad hoc canopies; larger furniture; I could swear I even saw
a car or two up on blocks (though surely this is the embroidery of
memory). One empty site was completely
covered in broken glass. Our kids were
oblivious, only noting the wonderful little forest of aspen trees. I came to realize how much I rely on nice
cars, spiffy tents, and other newish REI-style gear to signify recreational
campers like me as opposed to downtrodden folks who got nowheres to go. I wasn’t sure how enthusiastic my wife would
be to be abandoned in this place at dawn.
(It was obvious she shared my misgivings: during our reconnaissance, she hummed the
dueling banjo theme from “Deliverance.”)
Meanwhile,
there was a fellow camper who had given us pause. Erin first encountered him while depositing our
payment in the unmanned registration box.
He wore a t-shirt that said, “If it weren’t for flashbacks I’d have no
memory at all.” He had a mean-looking
dog on a leash with a choker collar.
Erin, though friendly to the guy, nonetheless cut to the chase: “Can you assure me your pit bull won’t attack
my kids?” He denied only that the dog
was a pit bull. Later he came by our
campsite and was friendly enough, describing to me in great detail a bike ride
I might try the next morning. He looked
pretty much like a cyclist, but he also twitched and trembled, which made me
wonder if the build of a meth addict might be fairly similar to a cyclist’s. True, he had cycling sunglasses, sort of, but
they were gas station Oakley knockoffs.
What if his suggestion of a morning ride was just a way to get me out of
his hair while he robbed my family? Of
course you’re shaking your head at my paranoia, and rightly so, but I’m just
not used to strangers in “flashback” t-shirts being so friendly.
Probably I’d
have ignored all of this entirely had it not been for my ill-fated attempt that
night to find water. The campground map
showed various locations of (albeit non-potable) water spigots. At least we could use this to wash up and do
our dishes; we didn’t have much drinking water.
I wandered all over the campground and couldn’t find a single spigot. A pickup truck coming the other way passed me
really slow and the front passenger asked what I was up to. I explained I was looking for water. He flashed a gap-toothed grin. “Just keep going thataway,” he chuckled. “You’ll find water.”
So I kept
going and found myself in the campsite at the end of the line. There was a kid of maybe sixteen sitting by
the campfire. I asked about a water
spigot and he looked completely bewildered, even frightened. “What?” he said, his voice shaky. Suddenly two adults appeared, looking alarmed,
as though I’d been harassing the boy. At
this moment I realized the kid looked exactly like Blaster, the huge scary
gladiator guy from “Max Max: Beyond
Thunderdome” who, once deprived of his knight’s helmet, looks baby-faced and
vulnerable. I repeated my simple
question to the grown-ups, one of whom engaged me in conversation while
escorting me away from his campsite.
He was gaunt
and ponytailed and looked like a classic rock guy from the ‘70s who’s been ridden
hard and put away wet one too many times.
“What site you campin’ at?” he asked casually. Unwilling to divulge this I said, “Oh, down
that way a piece.” (My subconscious
slippage into his vernacular almost had me saying, “Down thur a right fur
piece.”) He acted as though the notion
of a spigot at this campground was completely absurd, but gave me elaborate
instructions on finding the creek.
(Duh.) I was afraid I’d have to
take some false turns rather than lead him to my site, but eventually he
stopped walking with me and headed back where he came from. Dang.
One other
thing. According to the flashback guy,
this campground had a resident bear. This
bear was normally unaggressive, but Yosemite-area bears are known to rip cars
open like sardine tins to get at the food inside. Flashback said that this particular bear
could recognize a cooler. Most of the
sites had bear boxes but ours didn’t; I wasn’t about to ask a neighbor to
share. So I had to cover up our cooler
in the back of the car and make sure we didn’t bring any toothpaste or
deodorant into the tent.
Suffice to
say, part of me thought it best to keep an all-night vigil with a large Maglite
across my lap. But the other part wanted
that morning bike ride, so I went right to bed.
Shortage of time
I woke up
somewhat early, but not as early as I’d hoped.
When I’m camping it takes awhile to find all my stuff, unlock my bike,
etc., especially when I’m trying to be completely silent. Plus, there was the matter of the pre-ride,
uh, lightening ritual. The outhouse was
really far from our campsite. I brought
my own toilet paper, and good thing: the
outhouse had none. Given the little
aspen forest we were in, I might just as well have gone there. As it was this outhouse offered nothing
except a platform to sit on and a little privacy. Oh, and of course graffiti to look at in lieu
of a magazine.
But then,
this was a special campground with special restroom graffiti:
And graven
with diamonds in letters plain,
There is
written her fair neck round about ;
‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am,
And wild for
to hold, though I seem tame.’
What? you’re asking. Are you
kidding? Of course I am. Just making sure you’re awake. But those lines, from Sir Thomas Wyatt the
Elder, did cross my mind for some reason.
Maybe it was the No-Doz. Needless
to say, most of the graffiti was totally unoriginal, like the old “Here I sit
all broken-hearted” ditty (too vulgar for this family blog, but I could
paraphrase it: “Here I set, growing
petulant, tried to defecate but was only flatulent”). But then I came across this:
Yo momma is
a myth
Atlantis is
a myth
So yo momma
is Atlantis
You may have
guessed that I got out my pocketknife and carved below it, “This argument is
not sound, because its first premise is obviously false. Also, this argument is not valid because it
commits the logical fallacy of ‘the undistributed middle.’” But you would have guessed wrong: I never, ever indulge in graffiti. Besides, I couldn’t remember, that early in
the morning, the name of the logical fallacy.
I could recall the logical structure the argument was surely trying to
resemble—modus ponendo ponens—but
what was it called when the mechanism was erroneously reversed? Before I caught myself, I wasted a good many
precious minutes pondering this matter (and related questions like “What kind
of idiot thinks that’s worth carving on an outhouse wall?”). Curses!
Shortage of water
It had been
my idea to only buy only one 2.5-gallon bottle of drinking water the night
before. I’m just cheap, especially when
it comes to bottled water, which always tastes uncannily like the tap water of
the region (except in the Bay Area, where tap water tastes better than bottled). In my defense, I had reasonably trusted the campground
map showing water spigots. Now,
preparing for my ride, I had to decide how much water to deprive my family
of. I eventually set out with only one
bottle.
No problem—I
could just refill at the Mobil station at Lee Vining, where 395 meets 120,
right? Well, this gas station—perhaps
because it has remarkably good food—tends to have a line at the cashier. And a lot of motorists go through there. What would I do if my bike got ripped off? Walk ten miles back to the campground? You must think I’m the most paranoid guy in
the universe, but consider that along the roads near my home, there have been
several recent cases of bike theft and even of cyclists getting mugged.
Plus, my
bottle was just water, not energy drink, so I was relying on gels for
sustenance. Ever eat a gel without
washing it down? Didn’t think so. It’d be easier to eat a sleeve of Saltines
without water. Of course I didn’t start
pondering this until I was well underway, riding hard over an unknown distance
toward Tioga Pass, a climb I’d only ever gone over in a car. I had no idea what this ride would be like
and how long it would take.
Fear
One problem
with riding a road for the first time is worrying about traffic. I had seen a pretty good shoulder on Highway
120 on the drive over on the previous day, but it only takes a short section of
shoulder-less road to create a hazard.
Plus, I’d seen lots of these Cruise America rental RVs on this
road. The very idea of Rental RVs
strikes me as dangerous, like discount sushi or amateur dentistry. I recently watched a guy in a brand-new RV
spend about 90 minutes backing it into his campsite. He looked really stressed, as did his wife,
standing behind it guiding him in. She
saw me looking, and to ease the embarrassment I said, “That’s a really
great-looking RV.” She replied, “Stick
around … we may be selling it soon.”
Now, pedaling my way up the pass, I could just imagine a similarly hapless
RV newcomer with no sense of the size of his camper whacking me without even
realizing it.
If you’ve ever
considered riding over Tioga Pass, I can tell you it’s just fine climbing it from
the east. There’s a generous shoulder
the whole way up. Heading the other
direction (downhill towards 395), there are sections of the road where
guardrails cut into the shoulder, but these are short; plus, you’re going pretty
fast, so the likelihood of being passed at all is pretty low. Even during the climb, very few vehicles
passed me. They tended to come in
clumps: half a dozen fuming SUVs stuck
behind a Cruise America RV.
Another problem
was the weather. Despite having grown up
in Colorado, where afternoon thunderstorms are a given, I stupidly set out
without a jacket and now the clouds above were purple-black. The air had that strange electricity you so
often get at high altitude. What is it
our brains detect? A constant shifting
in barometric pressure? The whiff of
distant lightning? A sudden increase in
humidity? The peculiar foreign wind of a
storm system? I wouldn’t say the sky
darkened because it had never actually gotten very light. A cold wind bullied me. Here is what Tioga Pass looks like with
better weather (I didn’t bring a camera on the ride; this photo and those following it I took a couple days later,
during the drive home).
As I reached
8,000 and eventually 9,000 feet of elevation, all this became stronger. I was hit with that delicious
cool-rain-smell. And of course I was
suffering. While my conscience continued
to nag at me (“What might be happening to your family back at that eerie
campground while you pursue your pleasure/suffering centers?”), I begin to bask
in the sheer epic-ness of this ride. I,
a speck of under-fit cyclist, seemed about to be caught in a thunderstorm at
10,000 feet on a little highway in the wilderness.
Missing receipt
It costs $20
to drive to and/or through Yosemite in a car.
Your receipt gets you unlimited access to the park for seven days … if you have the receipt. I couldn’t find it the morning of the ride and
decided to plead my case using other receipts we’d gathered (a rather expensive
lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel dining room, and a batch of groceries that included
day-old discounted sushi, which was disgusting) that proved we’d been in the
park. All this just to get past the toll
gate so I could finish the last bit of Tioga Pass and say I’d done it. Worst case, I could pay another $10, though
then I’d have nothing to buy food or water with. And this was looking like about a fifty-mile
ride. Hmmm.
In the event,
there was a long line of cars at the entrance gate and I didn’t feel like
bothering with it, especially since all manner of social outcasts, possibly
including a bear, were probably converging on my family at that very moment. So I headed back down the east side of the
pass.
The descent
was sublime. My wife and kids had felt
something between awe and outright fear when we’d driven down it, but I’ve been
descending mountain passes since I was thirteen and can’t get enough of
them. Descending Tioga Pass is
sweet. Good road surface, very few cars
(not a single one passed me on my descent), and world-class scenery. I even outran the rain (which did finally
come to pass, but later in the day).
Epilogue:
Mono Lake
Just a few
miles from the campground, at the point in the ride when I needed to eat my
last gel but had no more water left, I saw the sign for the Mono Lake visitor’s
center. I headed over there. Here’s what you need to know about Mono
Lake:
- It’s pronounced “Moe No,” not “Ma No.”
- This lake is the breeding ground for 90% of the seagulls in California, due to a vast number of tiny flies that feed on an even vaster amount of salt-loving algae.
- Those crazy crystalline formations, called tufa towers, are not made of bird dung (which is what I told my kids), nor is “tufa” the Paiute Indian word for “tofu.” The formations are made of calcium carbonate (i.e., limestone).
- There’s a drinking fountain right outside the doors, perfect for a paranoid and parched cyclist.
When I got
back to the campground, my family was just finishing up breakfast. Nobody had bothered them, not even a bear,
and they had plenty of water left.
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