From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIV

Introduction

This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.

If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.

May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara

You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.

Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!

So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!

Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.

January 19, 1991 – Berkeley

Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?

April 6, 1991 – Berkeley

Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.

Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else”  anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!

August 19, 1992 – Berkeley

School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.

November 6, 1992 – Berkeley

Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.

I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.

I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.

November 16, 1992 – Berkeley

I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” It never ends.

In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - When You Are Engulfed in Shame

Introduction

Last May, I took a writing class called “Memoir: Art of the Personal.” The instructor encouraged her students not to shy away from troubling material. Her advice was something like “go where the pain is.” This makes sense. Had Dostoyevsky written a novel called Obedience and Praise rather than Crime and Punishment, he might not be so famous.

More recently, I read a parenting book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. It has a chapter titled “Why Kids Lie” that offers some, well, shocking statistics. A four-year old, a cited study attests, “will lie about once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour.” The book goes on to describe how “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars.”

As a kid, I was no exception: I was not above lying. Plus, I stole. If this seems interesting to you, perhaps you will enjoy this story, which I wrote for my class.

When You Are Engulfed in Shame – May 27, 2010

When I was about ten, I stole money from my family. Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly—daily, in fact—for a couple of weeks. I felt no remorse (at least at first), and had no regard for consequences. I was pilfering change from the bus money jar.

Every day, as soon as we got home from school, my brother Max and I would to get a dime from the jar for our bus fare, and walk about half a mile to the bus stop to catch the slow, meandering #5 bus that would take us all the way across Boulder to the YMCA. It was a boring trip made all the more boring by our taking it five days a week for years. At the Y we had swim practice. I hated swimming—still do—and especially hated being bullied in the locker room afterward. Bigger kids would roll towels into a “rat’s tail,” get the end wet, and snap us with it, leaving red marks on our bare skin. Then, my eyes burning from the chlorine in the pool, I’d wait with my brothers for forty-five minutes for our mom to pick us up around 7. Given the time demands of swimming and school, I had no life.

The money I stole was for Zēmis. A Zēmi was a fancy soft drink, prepared to order by a high-tech vending machine in the Y’s lobby. You’d put in your 25 cents, select your flavor (cherry, lime, whatever), and then watch in awe as a tapered plastic cup— ornate as a crystal goblet —dropped onto a little grille and was half-filled with crushed ice. The Technicolor syrup came next, climbing the ice. Then carbonated water fizzed in, right to the top—such precision! I’d treat my friend John to one, too. (He was a year older and really weird—he used to fly his hand along ahead of him as we walked, making it dip and soar, making cool spaceship noises.) My generosity was half the fun of the Zēmis for me: I loved being Big Mr. Moneybucks.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think the stolen bus money wouldn’t be missed. My family had already gone through a bus money embezzlement scandal. That time, my brother Max—the troublesome middle child—had been blamed, and was harassed for days. It finally come out that our dad had needed change and raided the bus money cache, and hadn’t thought to mention it. Though Max was exonerated, the stigma never really went away. So now, when I was stealing bus money for real, I figured I’d have a readymade scapegoat when the theft was discovered.

When Mom noticed the embezzlement, an ad hoc tribunal was formed. Each of the four brothers was both a prosecutor and a defendant. Max was harassed all over again, even while I continued to steal to support my Zēmi habit. I repeatedly accused Max myself, both to make my innocence more realistic and for the sheer joy of it. My brothers and I thrilled to the intrigue of crime and punishment, basked in the righteous indignation of shaking down a suspected wrongdoer and bringing him to justice.

(That it wouldn’t be actual justice didn’t matter a bit: the satisfaction was the same. Once, years before when I was like five, sitting around the house bored, I decided to scrape my leg with a Lego until a large red welt appeared. Then I went crying to my oldest brother, Bryan, telling him Max did it to me. I watched with great satisfaction as Bryan went over and beat on Max, bawling him out the whole time out for hurting his little brother. It made no difference to me that Max was innocent; the spectacle of richly deserved punishment being meted out was really all I needed.)

Perhaps to prevent us from all getting spanked by our dad, my mom actually offered amnesty. “Okay, this is your chance,” she said. “Whoever stole the money, step forward now, and you won’t be punished. Just admit you did it, and all will be forgiven.” I wasn’t even tempted to do this. Maybe Mom wouldn’t punish me, but I’d have to listen to my brothers castigating me not only for my heinous theft, but for having accused Max the whole time. It would also be tough to witness Max himself attaining new heights in righteous indignation.

And, truth be told, I had finally become ashamed of my actions. Funny how that works: if nobody had noticed the missing money, I’d have blissfully gone right on stealing (just like a pro athlete who blithely dopes and will go on doping until he gets caught and then, sobbing, apologizes to his fans and vows to help clean up the sport). I cursed myself, my friend, and those damn Zēmis. I’d never felt so low. It became more important than ever to hide my guilt.

The truth came out soon enough. My brothers, who had long envied my fancy drinks, now questioned whether it was really my friend John paying for them. I insisted that it was. “Well, I’ll just give a call over there and find out,” Geoff announced. I was almost sure he was bluffing—after all, all four of us were deathly afraid of the phone. (Just calling a business to find out its hours, as our mom sometimes made us do, was almost impossible. Whichever kid made the call would be almost unable to talk—his throat would go dry, his vocal chords would contract, and his strangled voice would come out in a thin, reedy squeak. Naturally, his brothers would mock him for this.)

But I couldn’t bring myself to call Geoff’s bluff. There was just that small chance that he would actually go through with the call, and my friend would unknowingly sell me out, and that was just too much to face. So I spilled my guts before Geoff dialed the first digit. I confessed.

Right away my brothers lit into me, cackling like hyenas, thrilling to my shame like rabid journalists. Max was the most triumphant. Over and over he cried out, “I can understand a liar—but a fieth?” He brandished this indignant cry like a Gatling gun, making sure everybody heard and appreciated it. It became the slogan for my defeat. I felt so low I didn’t even have the heart to correct my brother (“It’s not ‘fieth,’ it’s ‘thief,’ you moron!” I’d have said). I let my brothers have their day in the sun, and felt completely deserving of my humiliation. After all, I’d stolen repeatedly, lied, and—worst of all—sold out my own brother, all for a fizzy drink.

dana albert blog

Big Red - Letter to a Young Gearhead

NOTE: this post is rated R for mild strong language and thematic elements.

Introduction

Awhile back, I sent a photo around to the guys on my bike team. The photo was of a very cool bike, with incredibly large wheels, that my brother Max recently acquired. Here's the very photo of the very bike and the very brother:

Just recently a pal on my bike team e-mailed me about it:

This was such a loaded subject that I wasn’t surprised when my response ended up being rather long-winded. I suppose the popularity of Twitter, with its ultra-short, off-the-cuff, breezy messages, should dissuade me from assuming anybody has the patience anymore for a lengthy discussion of bike parts, bike lore, shop talk, personal history, and such, but just in case I’ve lucked out and you’re a bike nut or at least an aficionado of machines and/or blue collar matters, I’ve decided to post my letter here, with some more or less appropriate photos.

In the photo below, Jan is on the left. In the middle is our friend and EBVC teammate, Mark. As may be evident from the photo, Mark and I are old enough to be Jan’s dad. That said, Mark and I are still idealistic enough to cling to youth, fight off age and the aura of responsibility, and generally try to pretend we’re still Jan’s age. The limitations of that approach are represented throughout this post.

My response

Jan,

Sorry for the delay in answering your question about the bike with huge wheels. It’s impossible to broach such a loaded topic briefly, and if I tried to keep this brief it’d take me even longer. But you’re a young, unfettered guy, looking to take on a hearty mechanical project, so you won’t mind a long-winded response, I’m sure. (Myself, I dare not take on any bike projects, lest I end up out on the curb with the Floor-Mate and the old armchair and whatever else Erin decides is cluttering up the garage. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that I’m a lot older than you, whatever my self-delusions try to tell me.)

The photo I sent around is of my brother Max’s bike, which he calls “Big Red.” I haven’t ridden it yet—I haven’t been back to Boulder to visit Max since I got the photo. A very cool bike it is, and perhaps all the cooler for being kind of pointless. The wheels are indeed a stunning 36 inches in diameter. Max says 36 inches is a standard size for rickshaw wheels so it’s easy to get tires for Big Red. He says the ride is smooth as silk—“You can just roll over a curb and not really feel it.” He said it’s a great bike for getting noticed, too.

That’s the good news. I asked Max if the bike is hard to steer; he admitted that it really is—“Like the Exxon Valdez.” There’s also the issue of gearing; you really want gears on a bike like that but good luck finding such a thing. The previous owner (more on this later) retrofitted the bike with a Shimano Nexus 7-speed internal hub, which wasn’t at all easy to do.

I suppose I should say a few words on the subject of internal gearing. I’ve encountered enough youngsters like yourself, who have never ridden a bike with friction shifters or toe clips, to know there’s a good chance you’ve never dealt with internal gears. There’s nothing like a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub for a proper commuting bike. So much more dignified than a “kicky, fun” “commuter bike” with “grip shift!” Of course, the Sturmey will turn on you, time and time again. I’ll be riding along on my old Triumph 3-speed, a black beast I call the Arseless, a proper English bike with an upscale bike license from Connecticut that expired in the ‘50s or ‘60s (the decal is no longer very legible), with my heavy work bag and u-lock in the basket, humping it up some 2% grade that feels like Alpe d’Huez, and suddenly the drivetrain will just give, no longer engaging the rear hub, and my body will heave forward, my knees crashing into the bars and stem, and I’ll almost go down. There’s no way to adjust the Sturmey well enough to prevent this; there are little gears and pawls and whatnot in there whose corners get rounded off over time. Second gear is the scariest. My brothers Geoff and Bryan could take a Sturmey apart and overhaul it but I never learned; those hubs are like clocks inside. Geoff had a 5-speed that was a nightmare; he got so fast at field-stripping it, he’d give it a complete overhaul every few days, as naturally and fluidly as a chain-smoker lighting up.

The Shimano Nexus 7, though, truly represents the impending ascension of the Eastern world. (After decades of prominence, Sturmey-Archer almost went out of business before being bought up by a Taiwanese company.) True, the Nexus has a grip-shift thing, not nearly as cool as the lousy Sturmey Speed-Switch shifters, and true, Shimano makes fishing reels, and true, Shimano has disgraced itself and its customers with electronic shifting for road bikes, and true, “Nexus” sounds like the model of a cheesy Nissan, totally lacking the coolness of “Sturmey-Archer,” but man, the Nexus shifts beautifully. I had one on Erin’s Bianchi Milano, rest its soul. When Alexa was in day care, Erin would go to work really early, riding the Bianchi to North Berkeley Bart and leaving it in the locker. I’d get Alexa fed and dressed and drive her to El Cerrito to day care, then get on Bart at Del Norte. Erin would get off work early, Bart to Del Norte and find the car, and I’d get off work late and ride the Bianchi home from North Berkeley Bart. Except one day the bike wasn’t there: the locker door would sometimes spring open spontaneously if you didn’t test it after locking up by kicking the daylights out of it like you were trying to kill it. Erin just didn’t kick hard enough, I guess, and some douchebag stole the Milano. Here’s an old photo of the bike, with my brother striking a pose:

Back to Big Red: its previous owner wanted it to have a Nexus 7 hub, which of course doesn’t have the same flange diameter as whatever the bike came with, so he had to have spokes custom made for it. I can’t imagine how hard he had to look for a shop with the special tool that cuts and threads spokes. It’s hard enough to find a shop with a decent wheel builder, what with the popularity of these new-fangled pre-built wheels.

(Now, lest you think I’m going to go into some impassioned sky-is-falling defense of old-school hand-built wheels, think again. The modern wheels are lighter, stiffer, and more aero, and anybody who denies their superiority should be ignored, just as you should ignore anybody who denies that there is sex after marriage, like this guy I used to work with who assured me of this marital sex myth the moment I got engaged—it was one of his pat lectures, he’d just blather on and on, wasting my time, and when he finally stopped talking and I’d start to say something curt like, “Noted,” he’d check his watch as though I’d buttonholed him, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him there probably just wasn’t sex after marriage for him because he was so annoying. But I will say I miss the days of expert wheel builders, like my brother Geoff who, without fail, could reach into a box of spokes and grab exactly 16 of them, without looking.)

Even with stock spokes, getting the right length is always, and has always been, a difficult process. At the greatest bike shop ever, the High Wheeler (or Thigh Feeler as we called it) in Boulder, there was a homemade card catalog where you could look up different combinations of hub, rim, number of spokes, and number of crosses. Whenever you built a combination that wasn’t in the card catalog, you had to make a new card. There would be comments, like “Worked OK, just a tad short, one thread showing.” Years later, working at a lesser shop, I’d often throw my hands up at their techniques—a chart you’d hold the rim up to, a Casio calculator program—and call my old Thigh Feeler boss, JB, and just ask him. Half the time he’d know the length off the top of his head.

Anyhow, the problem with spoke cutter/threader tools is that they attract the wrong element to a shop. You get these total gearhead types who show up, drool over the spoke machine, describe in great detail the project they’re working on, and proceed to chat up the mechanic for the rest of the day. My brother Geoff worked at a place in San Luis Obispo and I hung out there a lot, and they had the spoke cutting machine, a really fancy thing with a leather cover and all, and it was just a time sink. That was a shame, too, because the whole time my brother worked there, the place was slowly going under. The head mechanic was this big fat bearded guy, and though his weight wasn’t in and of itself a big problem, he had these amazingly spindly stork-like legs that barely held him up—he’d have to lock each knee while walking before it could support his weight—so he couldn’t test-ride any bikes, and obviously was useless on the sales floor. What’s more, he was really lazy, just sat around on his stool chewing the fat all day on just about any topic. He had this friend who was supposedly a porn star, “The Tripod” they called him, who would come by and they’d just shoot the shit all day. One day I watched for about ten minutes as this head mechanic used the vice to pop a whole mess of bubble wrap, patiently feeding it through bit by bit.

The owner had a soft spot for the mechanic, who it was said had a heart of gold. The owner had a soft spot for just about everybody, actually. He would have loved to hang out and eat pizza with the guys after the shop closed, but he had a wife and family at home, so he’d secretly call up and order a pizza, and leave enough cash by the register to cover it. Geoff and I would be hanging around tuning up our bikes after work and suddenly the pizza guy would be there, and we’d panic until we found the money waiting and pay the guy. Then it was good times. Nothing, I mean nothing, stoked us out like free food in those days. The pizza was always Canadian bacon and pineapple, which we kind of got tired of, but of course complaining would have been utterly ungrateful, and it was a far cry better than nothing. Now when I have that combo it’s nostalgic. I wish I had some right now.

Eventually the owner’s generosity, and myriad other factors, began to seriously erode the fiscal foundation of the shop, and paychecks started to bounce. I well remember one warm summer evening when Geoff got paid, and we jumped on our bikes to race over to Geoff’s bank. We well knew that only one or two of the payroll checks would be funded; the rest would overdraw the shop’s account. We were closing in on the bank when one of the other mechanics, our friend Garrett, came roaring by in his VW bus. He had an account at the same bank. Geoff cried out in protest—“He cheated!”—and lamented the loss of income, not to mention the fee he’d have to pay when his paycheck bounced. Later he learned to buy expensive Dura-Ace bike parts for me on the shop’s account, to be deducted from his paycheck, so that I could pay him for the parts and he’d have real money for a change. (I worked at the young upstart shop across town, Broad Street Bikes, which had been The Moped Emporium until the day I started work there. It was a good shop, and though it didn’t have a spoke length card catalog or anything, my paychecks never bounced.)

Getting back to the custom spokes on Big Red: the wheel came out fine, but the frame lacks the braze-ons that a proper bike, like the Bianchi Milano, has, so the original owner had to cut some corners. For example, he had to bolt something to the braze-on for the coaster-brake, and whatever assembly he codged together wasn’t quite working out. Max has some pals at a local machine shop, and after inheriting Big Red figured he’d have a fitting custom-made for it, but the man for the job was pretty out of it when Max went to talk to him. “He’s a diabetic,” Max explained, “and a few nights ago while he was asleep in bed he suddenly went into convulsions and basically beat the shit out of himself. His teeth are all broken up and he’s totally out of it. His roommate found him. He’s back at work but still messed up, so my custom fitting is going to have to wait.”

So here’s how Max got the bike. It’s a pretty predictable story, doubtless one that’s been told in various versions since time immemorial. He has this friend he says is “basically a gazillionaire” who painstakingly assembled a glorious fleet of bicycles, each as unique and cool as Big Red, but who subsequently got married. The guy’s wife was put off by the sheer number of bikes this guy owned, and made him liquidate most of them. It’s hard to justify the existence of so many bikes, especially in terms a non-bike-crazed woman could understand. (I had a similar challenge promoting Wells Fargo, my bank, over BofA, Erin’s, when we merged her accounts. She cited more ATMs; all I could think of was “western stagecoach motif,” so I lost.)

Imagine, finding a sweet cruiser with 36-inch wheels, then finding a Nexus 7 hub, having the spokes made, the wheel built, dealing with the braze-on problem, getting it all going, only to have to get rid of it. I feel the guy’s pain. I was minding my own business one day when Erin asked me to help put the Arseless in the back of the car. “What for?!” I asked. She announced, rather casually I must say, that she was donating it to the preschool for their yard sale. “But it’s my bike!” I protested. “You can’t do that!” She pointed out that I never rode it. “Well of course not, is has a flat!” I protested. But it’s no good explaining to a woman why a simple thing like a flat tire can sideline a 3-speed for so long. I have no problem overhauling the Dura-Ace 7701 non-cartridge bottom bracket, with its over eighty moving parts, because it’s a precisely machined mechanism. But a 3-speed?

With a bike that’s more than fifty years old, you really have to choose your battles. Every bolt you touch with a wrench could spontaneously strip out; non-metal stuff like tires and tubes can dissolve in your fingers like a dead moth. And that Sturmey-Archer … it’s just made to fail. Look at it wrong and the cable will instantly fray into oblivion, like blowing on a dandelion that’s gone to seed. The cable pulley is as old and brittle as a tooth you’d find in a dry skull. If you were trying your hand at telekinesis, you could do a lot worse than trying to bend, with only your mind, the tiny, frail chain that links the cable to the workings of the hub. But Erin would never understand; her eyes would roll at the word “wrench.” So instead of trying to explain, I just grabbed the bike from her and took it back into the garage and, on the spot, finally fixed its flat tire. We haven’t discussed it since. I think this kind of marital scenario is responsible for the existence of the strong, silent type.

When you’re married, your available wrenching time dwindles quickly almost to nothing, like the picture on a black-and-white TV when you turn it off. I can prove this objectively: when I got engaged, I was still working my bikes over all the time, for fun, and pulling the occasional shift at the bike shop just to help out the owner, so I had fairly meaty hands, the kind a man can be proud of. Ours was a short engagement, but even so, I became so neglectful of my bike-mechanic roots I had to have the wedding ring resized so it would fit my atrophied finger on our wedding day. But the terrible erosion of my manhood didn’t stop there; the decline continued, and with all this office work my fingers have become so slender and wussy—like the woman’s in the Palmolive commercial—that I have to wear my wedding ring on my right hand or it’ll fly off.

Not that I’m completely spineless and pathetic: at least I still keep my favorite bike here in the house, where it belongs. I was shocked and dismayed to learn that some of my married friends—guys on our bike team, for crying out loud!—keep all their bikes in the garage. I consider bike storage to be a good litmus test for the proper balance of power in a marriage. If all the man’s bikes are in the garage, his wife has been given too much leash. On the other hand, if all his bikes are in the living room, or the bedroom, he’s seized too much power and is headed for trouble. I think one bike in the spare bedroom or office is just about right, especially if there are kids around who need to spend as much time as possible in the presence of a fine racing machine.

It’s funny; just last night Erin said to me, “There are all these inner tubes in the garage.” I nodded. “What should I think about that?” she asked. I told her it would be better not to think about them at all. “What are they for?” she asked. Finally I broke it to her: “Those aren’t inner tubes. They’re sew-up tires, worth about $50-60 apiece, handmade of Egyptian cotton.” She asked if I would ever use them. I told her, “No.” For now, she has dropped the subject. But it’ll come up again, I’m sure.

I guess what I’m ultimately getting at is, you really need to seek out and acquire that 36-inch-wheel bike now, while you have the chance. Hell, get yourself a track bike, a cross bike, a rain bike, a 3-speed, a fast commuter, a general-purpose f*ck-all bike, just build yourself a fricking armada, so when you get married you can give in and ditch, say, half of them while still maintaining a respectable fleet. I confess, to my shame, that I have just four bikes (and one more on the way). I have tried to gain points with Erin by having her interview my biking friends about their collections, but she’s obstinately unimpressed that I lack both a track bike and a cross bike. Of course she has a point; there’s a time and a place for a real two-wheeled arsenal, and kids come with their own endless stream of accessories that clutter up your life. But for now, your living room ought to look like this (each photo is of one wall of the place I shared with my brother Geoff and a couple other guys):

So how many bikes is enough? Well, consider my friend’s blog post on the subject: you need N+1, where N is the number of bikes you have now. But be selective: any schmuck can have too many bikes, and it takes a connoisseur to assemble a tasteful collection. So don’t jump on the silly fixie trend—it’s vulgar. A monster cruiser with 36-inch wheels would be just the thing to show the world your discerning taste. I can’t wait to ride it!

Dana dana albert blog

From the Archives - Death Ride ‘99

Introduction

De Ronde van X recently got me thinking about the Markleeville Death Ride. The Death Ride is one of the most famous organized rides in California, covering about 125 miles with over 15,000 feet of climbing. I've ridden it twelve or thirteen times, and used to have a tradition of riding it with all three of my brothers. Click to zoom in on the map:

Alas, I won't get to ride the Death Ride this year. Registration is on the lottery system, with so little chance of getting in that my brothers and I no longer bother to try. But to motivate anyone among my readership who is doing the upcoming Death Ride (or any similarly tough ride), and as a companion piece to De Ronde van X, I present to you my Death Ride '99 Postmortem Report. I didn't bring a camera in ‘99, but to enliven this post I‘ve thrown in photos from the 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2007 editions.

By the way, there is a literary gimmick lurking in this tale. I will give a prize to the first reader who e-mails me at feedback@albertnet.us and correctly identifies the gimmick. (To my brothers and friends who have seen this report before, obviously you are not eligible.) Enjoy!

Death Ride '99 - The Postmortem Report

Bryan and I drove to Markleeville on Friday, July 9, the day before the Death Ride. That night we went to a Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe for dinner, and man, we really packed it in. Then it was a short drive down to Turtle Rock campground, more or less at the starting line of the ride, where we pitched our camp on a brambly dirt patch, next to our car, just at the last hour of the dying day.

The stars came out, and we gazed for awhile, pondering tritely our own insignificance in the face of the infinite beyond. Soon we tired of contemplating our mortality, and managed to fall into a light, fitful sleep (which was all that was possible given our cramped quarters in the tent).

For the next hour or so campers continued to arrive, fitting themselves into smaller and smaller patches of rocky, lumpy ground (there are no actual campsites per se in Turtle Rock park), chattering boisterously, and it seemed to take forever before the noise finally died down. Earlier, I'd really enjoyed the rare treat of seeing the stars, without them being drowned out by city light, and now I savored the dead silence. Not even the chirp of a cricket or the croak of a frog could be heard.

The night passed for me in a series of catnaps, and along toward four o'clock, as I was finally achieving a peaceful slumber, my long-sought rest was cut down in its prime by the most foul, heinous sound you could possibly imagine. At first I almost panicked—I didn't know what in the hell the noise was. It was a terrible screeching, as though an animal were being slaughtered. I finally realized it was music being played over the loudspeaker—or, more accurately, an ill-fated attempt at music by some deadbeat rock band. All I knew for sure was that it was four in the morning, a full half-hour before I'd planned to be awakened by the alarm on my Timex Datalink watch (which I'd set up to beep in its nefarious "step-tone” way while scrolling the word "DEATH!” across its LCD face). I'll probably never know what the first "song” was, but finally the "singer” let out his last gasp and another song, much less irritating, came over the PA. We decided it was pointless to try to continue sleeping, and succumbed to the cruel Death Ride wakeup call.

Breakfast

We'd elected to buy the optional pre-ride breakfast, provided by some volunteer group, though to my dying day I'll never understand why. The food is abysmal—rubbery pancakes, clammy eggs, and sweaty oatmeal, the kind of food I imagine they'd serve on death row. As is becoming a tradition, one of us forgot his ride number, which is the only way to prove to the cafeteria cashier that you don't have to pay at the door for your meal because you already bought it when you registered for the ride. While Bryan went back to the car, I stood in line and killed time talking with other Death Riders. We chattered away in the most breezy and carefree way, as if to deny the grave difficulty of the day's undertaking. Bryan arrived at just the right moment, and we moved through the chow line, which was manned by volunteers offering their hellish fare with cheerful enthusiasm. One volunteer, a rather attractive young woman, I found particularly perplexing: she was holding up a plate of plain, unbuttered, and untoasted bread, which left her very little to do but stand there and do her best to look drop-dead gorgeous. The other volunteers were much busier, and I have a feeling this gal was supposed to be making toast for us, which I would have liked—but I digress, and though I could spend an eternity complaining about the food, I should hurry up and tell you about the ride itself.

First climb

There must have been cloud cover at some time during the night, because it was less chilly that morning than I've ever experienced before on this ride—a pleasant change, but it made us worry a little about how hot it would get later on in the great adventure. The weather looked so promising, we decided for the first time ever to pass on the jackets we would normally have carried in our jersey pockets. Still, it wasn't very pleasant slathering ourselves in sunscreen, but since my once gloriously suntanned skin is now closer to deathly pale, I'm forced to resort to SPF 15 to keep from getting horribly sunburned. Needless to say Erin would kill me if I came home looking like a lobster.

We started the ride at exactly 6:00 am, with a brisk descent—not as bone-chillingly frigid as in years past, but cool enough that when we started the first climb, up Monitor Pass, our legs were totally stiff. The road was thronged with riders — the field limit this year was 2,500, and it had been reached—and yet as many riders as we saw, we know others had started much earlier than we and had probably already crossed over to the other side of Monitor Pass. As always, we marveled at the wide range of body types represented on this ride—sure, we saw plenty of examples of the lean, ripped, almost skeleton-like breed of cyclist, but every year there are also people on the ride who are, well, not so fit. In fact, I'll come right out and say it: some participants are flat-out obese—heart attacks waiting to happen. By the third pass these ones would be goners, but you had to admire their spunk.

The front side of Monitor isn't all that tough, climbing only 2,813 feet in nine miles for an average grade of about 6%, and given the freshness of our legs we were able to dispatch the climb without too much suffering. At the top we each received our first-pass sticker: the way they keep track of who did all five passes, versus the majority of riders who don't make it, is to put a different sticker on your number for each pass you conquer. After the brief (five-second) sticker ceremony, we took our picture next to a very fitting landmark: a tombstone, basically, engraved with the name and elevation (8,314') of the pass, placed there and dedicated (to nobody in particular, apparently) in 1954. We also filled up on energy drink; bananas, a potassium-rich favorite; boiled new potatoes, an unlikely but very welcome Death Ride staple; and this year's innovation, Wheat Thins, which I'm normally not all that fond of but which, under these circumstances, were just to die for!

First descent

The descent down the backside of Monitor is probably the most dangerous part of the ride; although nobody's every actually died on this ride, this would be the place to do it. It drops 3,274 feet in just 8 miles, for an average grade of almost 8%, and because it's so early in the ride, cyclists are still bunched closely together (not like lemmings exactly, but almost). This fact, combined with the breakneck speeds possible (over 50 mph is a given for Bryan and me), mean that this would be a thrilling descent even if there weren't cattle guards. But of course there are, which caused me to ponder, as we flew down the mountain, what happens to the especially stupid cows who fall into them and break a leg . . . after all, isn't it standard procedure to shoot any horse that breaks a leg? Assuming cows are treated no differently, isn't the cattle guard like a Doomsday device for any cow stupid enough to wander into the road? Then I remembered that the whole purpose of most cows is to be slaughtered anyway, so there's no point worrying about it. Anyway, the game Bryan and I play is to see how often we can make it over the thin steel strip, maybe an inch or two wide, that crosses perpendicularly over the pipes of the cattle guard, so as to avoid that annoying series of bumps each time your tire crosses the bars.

Second climb

It was a totally killer descent, reminding us why the climbing is always worthwhile, and before beginning the long haul back up the backside of Monitor, we stopped only briefly to got some more energy drink and, of course, our second-pass sticker. The backside of Monitor is much harder than the front, not just because it's steeper, but because our vigor had been deadened somewhat by the first climb. Soon enough, though, our spirits were lifted by the appearance of what I could only describe as the ride's only full-motion water stop. This Death Ride institution, manned by a skeleton crew of tireless volunteers, apparently has as its charter the filling of every single empty bottle without a single cyclist needing to stop. A volunteer sprints like a hundred meters down to you, takes your empty bottle, and then practically kills himself running back to the water jugs to get the bottle filled in time to hand it back to you as you ride by. It's an inspirational thing to witness—those guys are out of this world!

The remaining six or so miles of the second climb passed away uneventfully, albeit with the standard-issue suffering that, although long dreaded, always somehow manages to astonish me with its intensity. It's always kind of demoralizing to reach the top of Monitor for the second time, feeling significantly worn out, and realize you have almost 100 miles and 9,000 feet of climbing to go before the ride finally comes to an end some ten hours from this moment. I'd also managed to develop a saddle sore (only the second one in my entire life); it barely hurt as we dismounted at the rest stop, but was positively killing me as we got back in the saddle after filling up on food and drink. I pondered, bleakly, how Laurent Fignon believed it was a saddle sore that cost him the 1989 Tour de France (a loss from which his professional career never recovered). I cheered myself up by recalling LeMond's inspirational victory that year—his big comeback after a near-fatal hunting accident a couple of years before.

Second descent

I wish the mother of the kids across the street growing up—who earned the nickname "Mrs. Trapdoor" for her constant safety warnings such as "Bicycles are deathtraps!"—could have seen us descend the front side of Monitor. The riders were more spread out by this point, so we had more of the road to ourselves and hit what would end up being the top speed of the ride, a seemingly death-defying 53.8 mph. Don't worry, though, this was really a very safe and reasonable speed—my self-preservation instinct has increased dramatically since I set the all-time Death Ride land-speed record of 60.5 mph back in 1993 (or perhaps 1995, I can't remember for sure). Glorious as it was, though, our swiftness only served to bring us that much sooner to our greatest nemesis: Ebbetts Pass, the climb that every year claims hundreds of riders—as if they were veritable human sacrifices to this diabolically steep, winding, asphalt shrine to suffering.

Third climb

Remember "deadlegs"—the sudden punches to the thigh that bullies inflicted on you with impunity, knowing you couldn't show the bruises to parents or teachers without lowering your pants? Well, imagine feeling that kind of acute thigh pain for over an hour, and you'll begin to understand why Ebbetts is such a killer. As we labored up monstrously steep grades, negotiating switchbacks that practically stop your bike cold, all conversation ceased, kaput. We became pedaling zombies. We were too close to breathless to utter more than an occasional moan, groan, or whimper. This is the part of the ride when it's dangerous to think about whether or not you'll make it to the top of Ebbetts, much less complete the whole ride. The best way to motivate yourself at this point is to look at the relative novices around you, who never did a race in their lives, the Fuji Road Look set who seem criminally unaware of how hard this is, whose presence on this climb make you deny how difficult Ebbetts is—in short, you succumb to a totally unspoken, tacit peer pressure, and chastise yourself for thinking this is hard. You almost want to turn it into a race and charge to the top ahead of everybody—but all you can do is hold on for dear life and try to keep your composure.

At the top of Ebbetts, elevation 8,730', we were toast. We were spent, gone. We were completely knackered—shadows of our former selves, ghosts, spectres. We were history, we were in the archives, we were lemures—in fact, you might even say we'd had the stuffing knocked out of us. Fortunately, the Death Ride provides the best support of any ride I've ever done, because we were in grave need of calories. Specifically, we needed that miracle elixir of life—no, not energy drink, I mean plain old Coca-Cola Classic. Of course they had it, ice-cold, and we chugged it greedily as we sprawled on a grassy hillside, our lifeless legs spread out before us like dirty laundry.

A fellow rider was deliberating aloud about whether or not to cash in her chips, so I told her what I thought was an inspirational tale about a 65-year-old man who told me, under identical circumstances atop Ebbetts during my first Death Ride, "You finish the first three passes on ability, and the last two on guts." She stared at me like I was some kind of imbecile, which I supposed I was, or am. But then, she departed for the backside of Ebbetts, so either my little speech got to her, or she'd simply decided not to be outdone by such a wanker. After a short rest—well, okay, a fairly long rest, something just short of eternal rest—we headed down the backside of Ebbetts ourselves, fortified with carbonated water, sugar and/or corn syrup, natural and artificial flavorings, caffeine, caramel color, phosphoric acid, bananas, oranges, cookies, and What Things (a fine nickname for Wheat Thins, if you ask me).

Fourth climb

Of our climb up the backside of Ebbetts and passing back over the top, absolutely nothing is known.

Fourth descent

We descended the front side of Ebbetts with jubilance, carving up the serpentine roads and drinking in the slide show of scenic vistas overlooking the great beyond. There is an impulse, on such descents, that has nothing to do with suicide but everything to do with the repressed desire to deliberately miss a turn, to fling yourself and your bike off the edge of a drop-off and whoosh your way along in perfect freedom through open sky. Needless to say, I resisted the temptation, or you'd be reading a much briefer Death Ride report—in the obits.

Final climb

On the way to the fifth pass, my bike suffered what is proving to be an epidemic of broken spokes. If I couldn't find the technical support truck, I'd be doomed to ride a drunken, wobbling, ungainly bike for the next 42 miles. At mile 90, we were told tech support was nine miles and a scant 1,500 feet of climbing away, at Pickett's Junction (who Pickett was I have no idea, unless it's the General Pickett of the ill-fated Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, in which he lost three fourths of his Confederate troops). Since fixing the bike could take some time, and Bryan's legs were even deader than mine, I charged on ahead—well, okay, I limped on ahead—solo.

Sure enough, technical support was there, and my bike was fixed in record time by a mechanic who looked exactly like Alfred Packer, the survivor of an ill-fated mountain expedition who ate his fellow explorers, and who appears on a mural at the University of Colorado's Alfred Packer Grill (motto: "have a friend for lunch"). From Pickett's Junction to the final summit, Carson Pass, is only nine miles with 1,573 feet of vertical gain, for a paltry average grade of 3.31%, so for the life of me I can't explain why it's so hard. Much of that nine miles is a "false flat," meaning it's not really a climb but rather a diabolical stretch of road that looks flat but feels like a climb. When it begins to get steep, it's almost a relief, because the cause of your hellish suffering is at least more obvious.

For awhile, our spirits improved as we realized the end was near, and we took some pictures in which we're actually smiling. The top section of Carson is really steep, though, and in the last mile our jubilance died down and we settled into a rhythmic pedaling drudgery. We were dead to the world by the time we rounded what we believed was the final curve (but without optimism, because there are so many false summits on a ride like this one). But sure enough, the Carson Summit sign was dead ahead, and our suffering was finally near its end!

I turned and looked over my shoulder at Bryan, who was about fifty feet behind me, intending to congratulate him on surviving Carson and to suggest we stop for a photo-op. Imagine my shock to see him sprinting, all-out, hell-bent on beating me to the summit! Nothing could have motivated me to sprint at that point—nothing, that is, except the mortification of being beaten to the summit despite having a good head start and a lighter and more expensive bike. It was a sprint to the death, and to this day Bryan insists I wouldn't have beaten him but for my Dura-Ace 9-speed STI, which enabled me to shift into a higher gear, under full power and without taking a hand off the bars, to nurse a little more speed out of the mighty Guerciotti and eke out a victory.

Final summit

At the rest top atop Carson, we grabbed more Coke and the long-awaited ice cream bars (another Death Ride tradition), and headed for some lawn chairs to rest our much-abused nether regions. At the time, we were vaguely aware of the difficulty of what we'd done, and certainly unable to calculate some of the statistics I'll now quote: roughly 16,000 feet of total vertical gain; .2244 horsepower (167 watts) average on the climbs (.2480 horsepower, 185 watts, for Bryan, who's heavier); four hours and forty minutes of climbing to end up here; 8,573 feet closer to heaven than our earth-bound peers back home. Our achievement was overshadowed, though, by that of another Death Rider: a man in his seventies, thinning hair white as snow, had finished all five passes! I would kill to be that fit when I'm his age!

It's hard to recall the full gravity of our suffering now, as I sit in a comfortable chair at home, and even harder to describe it. Suffice to say we were wasted, spent, totaled, used-up charcoal briquettes, mere smears of ash, quivering masses of protoplasm. But we had survived, and what's more, as we sat on top of Carson, which seemed at the time the top of the world, we had twenty-one miles of descending ahead of us.

Finish

A glorious descent it was, too, the highlight being when we blew this guy away, rode him right off our wheels. Then, we returned to the parking lot and enjoyed the hard-won opportunity to go to our reward: the poster signing ritual, a privilege granted only to those who finished all five passes. Even as we realized we were finally done, though, we were already contemplating our return to Markleeville and to the suffering in the California Alps, every year to our dying day.