From the Archives - How a Camp Stove Almost Cost Me My Marriage

Introduction

It goes without saying that every obstacle thrown at us presents a litmus test of our value as a human being. If you can’t meet every challenge with grace and aplomb, they might as well take you out with the trash. With that in mind, I offer this true story from my archives. It takes place two days into an 8-month bicycle tour (and was written a week or two later).

Note: I hope it’s obvious I was kidding just now.

How a Camp Stove Almost Cost Me My Marriage - March 1994

Before setting off for a trans-continental bicycle tour, all the guidebooks warn us, you must begin a daily training regimen. One book told the sad story of a man who planned a long bicycle tour in Europe, but started off too quickly and “ruined his knees.” His ended doing a moped tour instead. Hardly a glorious enterprise, especially when you consider the French word for moped: mobylette. Pathetic. With this cautionary tale in mind, my fiancée and I are starting out slow.

Of course, along the way we’re learning how to not get along. Prior to the last couple of weeks, we’d really never bickered about anything. It was one of those really placid romances totally devoid of passionate fights, of bathing each other’s hands in tears, of rending our clothes, of screaming “I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!” and then getting to take it all back later in a wonderful reconciliation. We never made our friends feel important by soliciting their advice on matters of the heart. We never balanced daringly on the edge of deciding to “see other people for a while.” Everything has been really easy, and why wouldn’t it be? We’re young, unburdened, and had been leading a luxurious life in the paradise of San Francisco, eating at the best restaurants in the world, taking long walks in the gorgeous upscale neighborhoods, and saving all of our bad moods for our co-workers.

But now, what with the hardships of the elements, the fatigue of pedaling a loaded bicycle all day every day, and above all the tedium of the myriad logistical chores we now face daily—packing up the panniers, cleaning dishes without a sink, trying to dry out a rain-soaked tent & ground cloth, trying to fold the map, et cetera—we’re both pretty grouchy. For example, I’ll be impatient to load everything in the morning, so I’ll gripe when my fiancée has to dig back into one of her panniers to get the toothpaste, having realized she forgot to brush. Then, she’ll get impatient when we’re on the road and I’m digging through a pannier for the compass since I’m uncertain that we’re going in the right direction, and kind of want the security-blanket feel of having a compass handy. (When you’re carrying your world around in panniers, you’re always digging around for something, and out of eight panniers total, it’s almost impossible to find anything. We were lucky to dig the camera out in time to get a photo of a lizard. Preparing for the photo of the banana slug was much less frantic—we could’ve painted its portrait.)

So, since we’re both perpetually crabby now, we’ve got plenty of opportunity to practice those fair-fighting skills that so far we’d had no need for. Our partnership is being tested.

Exhibit A: my first engagement with our new camp stove. Weighing in at under 1.5 pounds, and capable of burning white gas, kerosene, diesel, unleaded, jet fuel, and probably liquid oxygen (what couldn’t burn liquid oxygen?), the MSR XGK II stove seems perfect. It has great features, was recommended highly, and is the most expensive stove on the market. I had to have it. So I bought it, threw it in the pile of “trip stuff” that seemed to grow as fast as the newspapers in the recycle bin, and then didn’t look at it until it was time to actually use it. The price tags were still on it, even.

That’s okay, I thought; a big, goofy, jolly guy I know who wears lots of plaid flannel shirts and loves the great outdoors told me, “Working the XGK II is a cinch. It’s way easier than the instructions say.” This was a relief, since the instructions run eight pages and seem to have been pretty hastily produced, without a lot of proofreading.

There are lots of confusing bits, such as “Use kerosene and only in a ventilated area.” If taken literally, of course, this defies the very selling point that sold me on this stove: that it would burn anything. I imagine that the intended meaning was, “If you use kerosene, you should have adequate ventilation.” But this too is problematic, since any idiot knows you should use adequate ventilation wherever you run a stove on anything, so it won’t burn your tent down or use up all the available oxygen so you keel over and die. More enigmatic was the inexplicable blank space in the instructions that ran for a couple lines after this stipulation, as though further instruction had been wited-out.

[Note: I have just learned, via this random blog post from which I got the above photo, that it was indeed Wite-Out obscuring two lines of text. The obscured text originally said, “… should weather conditions necessitate the use of the stove inside a tent.” My fellow blogger’s instructions had been altered with a Magic Marker instead, perhaps because his were printed on glossier paper.]

Another problem was that the instructions given are for the XGK model, not the XGK II. A little scrap of paper was enclosed explaining the substitution of instructions, but not explaining how to operate the stove that I had actually purchased. The main difference between the two stoves seems to be that my stove doesn’t have a knob that strikes a flint, igniting the fuel. Okay, fine: where it says to spin the knob, I won’t. (I mean, I can’t. There’s no knob.) But how, then, do I light this stove? Obviously, I would need to use a match: but do I need to take any extra precautions, so that I don’t light my hand on fire? The instructions do mention the “Stop, Drop, & Roll” method of extinguishing yourself, but I wouldn’t mind beginning my safety program at an earlier step.

These are minor points, however. I was not worried about my ability to get the stove working. It’s a simple mechanical device, nothing more. We all know the exceedingly limited potential for any such device to cause frustration. (If the last sentence did not strike you as ironic, by the way, then you are abnormal, and should be building model airplanes or something instead of reading fine literature like this.)

Well, I hooked everything up, turned the vapor control valve knob, and waited for “about a teaspoon of fuel to collect near the jet.” This process made me apprehensive since the schematic diagram of the stove, while pointing out all the obvious pieces such as “fuel container” and “wind screen,” neglected to point out the jet. No matter how long I looked at the picture, the “jet” label just never materialized.

I figured I would just watch very carefully for the jet, with a water bottle nearby so that if the jet turned out to be a centimeter from my eye, I could flush it out. Well, the fuel never really collected anywhere. So I dribbled gas on the place where I hoped the jet was, lit (with great effort) a (scarcely lightable) waterproof match, held my breath, and lit the stove.

The stove seemed to light, but it was impossible to be sure. It made a terrible gasping, wheezing noise; produced a small, orange flame; created a small amount of heat; in short, behaved in such as way as to create an utter mystery: was it not lit properly and in need of tweaking, or was it performing at 100% of its capabilities as a perfectly shitty stove? I realized at this moment that the guy who’d said, “It’s way easier than the instructions say” was probably lying, so that I’d look back on his words and think him some kind of genius. It’s a simple social trick, available to anybody with a total disregard for the truth.

According to a test I took in a high school Health class, I have a “Type-A Personality.” This means that I am a hothead and control freak; am headed for an ulcer; am a pain in the ass to get along with; and will suffer high blood pressure. The recommended remedy for this personality was a daily regimen of being put in a dimly lit room with pastel walls, where I would lie on a suede couch with a cold compress over my eyes and listen to New Age music. Since I have failed to implement this protocol (though I did get a massage once), conventional wisdom has it that I’m doomed to have every little annoying glitch in my life build up inside me while my face reddens, my blood pressure building up higher and higher, until I ultimately explode, shattering my skull from within and spattering innocent women and children with red pulp.

But I escape this fate through my own method of coping: I share. I make my problem everybody else’s too, so that by comparison, I am one of the less miserable people around. I vent, in other words, which is different from whining, griping, and complaining in that it is an accepted method of dealing with stress, like beating on an inflatable dummy with a Wiffle bat. But I don’t even need the bat; like Caliban, I use foul language to release my ire.

As I fumed over the stove, my need to emote increased significantly when I noticed my betrothed doing me the disservice of simply not caring about the stove. She sat there and read a novel, like nothing was wrong. Every so often she asked an innocent question like “Should I be smelling gas fumes?” to which the obvious answer is “NO, YOU SHOULDN’T BE SMELLING GAS FUMES, YOU SHOULD BE DRINKING HOT COCOA THAT YOUR FIANCÉ HEATED UP FOR YOU!”

Of course, venting shouldn’t get personal, so I spoke only to the stove. Meanwhile, I tried to be more rational about solving the problem I faced. For example, I considered using an alternate fuel, like firewood thrust into the stove at high velocity. But the stove wasn’t the actual root of the problem: the real problem was me, or more specifically my stupidity. I cursed myself for not having tested the stove earlier, back when I could have gotten help or taken it back to REI. Too late now … the receipt is either in Ashland, Oregon with most of my stuff, or in Sacramento with the rest of my stuff. Or I threw it away.

As time dragged on and the stove did seem to stay lit, I had to wonder if—notwithstanding the gasping, choking sound it was making—it might in fact be working properly? The answer was, how should I know? I’d never seen an XGK II in use in my life! So, I decided to compare my stove’s performance to the statistical results given in the product literature. Finally, something objective to hitch my poor brain to.

Well, the specifications say that the XGK II will boil water in 3.4 minutes. I looked at the fine print to find out what conditions they assumed. Sea level, starting water temperature of 70 degrees, and white gas as the fuel … okay, that’s all fine. But how much water? A teaspoon? A gallon? The specs didn’t say. So, after failing to bring a quart of water to a boil in forty minutes, I decided the stove was as crippled as it sounded.

Furious, I vented my findings to my fiancée, who was still kicking back with her novel. “Just blow it off,” she said. “We can eat something else.” Unspoken subtext: “Just give up, since you’re obviously incompetent and worthless. Why continue the struggle when you’re obviously no smarter than a baitfish? I have no faith in you … why do you continue to pretend you’ll eventually succeed?”

The problem with this method of undermining my self esteem was that it was so passive. If she’d outright accused me of being lame, I could have monunted a defense, perhaps challenged her to fix the stove herself, etc. Damn it, when I’m overreacting, I want the company of somebody at least as irrational and heated as I am! The downright sensibility of her statement infuriated me (particularly as it gradually dawned on me that her castigation was probably all in my head).

I decided to start over from scratch. I blew out the flame, completely dismantled the stove, inventoried all the components, figured out which piece had to be the jet (it’s smaller than a pencil eraser, by the way), took apart the fuel pump, cleaned a little ball that is a part of the check valve system, completely shined, polished, and praised every little piece, reassembled the whole thing, figured out how it worked, and now it runs like a top (though it’s still surprisingly loud). My stove now can actually boil water, in my lifetime. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the process (which lasted several hours) involved quite a bit of that therapeutic venting, and by the end my wife-to-be had decided that I must be angry at her, since surely nobody could get that angry at an inanimate object, or at himself, for that long. I exonerated her by explaining how the stove was a symbol of my ascent into manhood, and that childhood camping experiences in which I was denied the opportunity to even operate a stove, much less fix it, had set the stage for an inevitable camp stove crisis with my entire ego hanging in the balance. We established that the future of our relationship was not at stake, especially since I did eventually get the stove to work.

Amazingly, it appeared that, notwithstanding my embarrassing display of anger and frustration, and my admission of the worst kind of maleness, this woman somehow still wanted to marry me.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Looking for a Legal Highway

Introduction

As described here, my wife and I did a 7,500-mile bike tour back in 1994.  This was a totally ad hoc journey:  we had no specific route, and never knew in advance where we’d camp each night.  Back then, we lacked a great many technologies that would have greatly altered our experience:

• Cell phones
• GPS
• Digital cameras
• The World Wide Web
• A lightweight laptop with a good battery
• Widespread Internet connectivity

Even so, I managed to send regular e-mail dispatches to friends and family.  E-mail was new then.  I had a laptop the size of a phone book, which weighed close to ten pounds with its giant power supply.  The battery was good for about an hour.  For connectivity I had a 2400 baud external modem that could be powered by a 9-volt battery, but of course required a phone jack, which was hard to come by at the campgrounds and even the barebones motels we splurged on a few times a month.  Connect speed was about 1/8000th of what most Americans connect at today.

The following dispatch concerns a day when we couldn’t find a legal highway to ride on—the interstate abruptly became illegal, which presented an interesting dilemma:  if we turned around, we’d be backtracking for hours, and would probably have to camp at the site we’d left that morning, and then what would we do the next day?  This was the desert Southwest, which didn’t have a lot of highways to begin with.   Our quest ended up involving pornography, a chemical toilet, death, the Center of the World, and a 6-year-old gunman.  No joke!

Searching for a Legal Highway – March, 1994

Ever since leaving the Pacific Coast Highway, we’ve had difficulty finding legal routes through southeast California and Arizona.  The only route that shows on our map is Interstate 8, which is sometimes legal and sometimes not.  (In general, it becomes illegal if any alternate route is available.)  A day’s ride west of Arizona, a California highway called Old 80 began nicely enough, paralleling I-8 and offering reasonable pavement and little traffic.  Eventually, however, the traffic and road surface alike dwindled to almost nothing.  Huge cracks crisscrossed the road like veins on a bloodshot eyeball; the only vehicle in sight was a military truck that never quite outran us, since the hapless driver was forced to stop regularly to stabilize his load of wooden pallets.  (Where he was taking them, we had no idea.)  We crashed along behind, ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, and I winced with every jolt as I thought of my computer in the rear pannier, and its vulnerable hard drive.

After about fifteen miles of this, we decided to take a break and refill our water bottles from the jug I’d been carrying on the back of my bike.  It’s an accordion-style collapsible jug, and fit nicely under the straps that hold the sleeping bag, tent, and ground pad to my rear rack.  I unstrapped it, and then . . . the horror!  It had been leaking all day long, out of invisible holes!  We’d lost a good amount of water, and all over our tent!  My first instinct was to douse the jug with Coleman fuel and torch it.  Once I’d gotten over the shock, of course, I was more reasonable:  I decided to transfer the water to our other jug, then douse the offending jug with Coleman fuel and torch it.  By the time I’d transferred the water, I’d decided instead to return the evil jug to REI and demand a refund.

[It’s hard to see in the above photo, but I’m holding up the defective jug.]

We continued riding:  ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP, ba-DUMP.  The abysmal pavement continued for another twenty or so miles, before the road suddenly ended at a giant sand dune.  Two signs were posted.  One said, “Such and Such Landfill.  No Trespassing.”  The other was some kind of disclaimer about using the sand dunes for recreation at your own risk.  Next to a giant dumpster was a big RV, with an old man sitting out front.  Since we’d just passed by an overpass, we decided that I-8 must be legal east of our spot, since no alternate route was available.  We struggled over the overpass, only to find that all-too-common sign:  “PEDESTRIANS BICYCLES MOTOR-DRIVEN CYCLES PROHIBITED.”

Was this what fate had in store for us?  Trapped, 40 miles into the desert, with little water and no road?  I began devising my plea to the highway patrol officer who would ticket us for riding on an illegal freeway:  “Officer, we had no choice.  With too little water left to turn around and go back, and no alternate roads, taking this highway was a matter of life and death.”  But I anticipated his response:  “Well then, I guess a $250 ticket is a small price to pay, isn’t it?” 

We rode back to the landfill and asked the RV man what to do.  As it turns out, his job was to sit out there under the blazing sun and watch to make sure nobody threw anything flaming into the big dumpster.  He must have been bored out of his mind, notwithstanding the porno mag he had tucked under his arm, because he eagerly gave us instructions.  “Ya see, this used to go through, and you could take another off-ramp to the dunes, but the trouble was, people used to take a shortcut across the interstate, see, and then this one fella, I think it was maybe a year ago now, no—wait a minute—not quite that long ago, anyhow, this fella was crossin’ the highway there with his daughter, and he motioned for her to follow, but she wasn’t watchin’, or payin’ attention, or somethin’, because she just sort of froze, you know, and didn’t get out of the way and some guy in a car ran her right over.  Killed her.  So they closed the exit, and now what you gots to do, see, is go across, and you’ll have maybe half a mile—no, wait, less, I dunno, maybe quarter mile—yeah, quarter mile—of deep sand to go through, you’ll have to walk yer bikes, and then you’ll come to this chemical toilet—”

“A what?” Erin interrupted.

“You know, a toilet, a chemical toilet.”  We’d heard him right.  “You get to that, and well as I said, quarter mile, and anyway, from there there’s this barbed wire fence, see, and you’ll have to get across it somehow, with your bikes, and as I said, a quarter mile, and you’ll see this blacktop, and why that’s a frontage road, you see, take you all the way down to the rest stop, maybe six or seven miles down, and from there, well I’m not sure what to do.  But see, it’ll look like this.”  He dropped to one knee and began tracing a complicated map in the sand.  On his map, I-80 looked like a nest of snakes.  He kept drawing more and more roads, jabbering away all the while, looking like he might lose his balance and flop right over on his map, since he was still keeping his porno mag pinned to his side with his elbow.  By the time he was done, we had no idea which way to go.

Eventually, we did find the chemical toilet, the sand, the barbed wire fence, and even the blacktop road.  The whole afternoon had taken on a surreal, dreamlike aura, and so I was scarcely surprised when, off the side of the road, we came upon the Campground that Wasn’t.  A sign declared, “Welcome to Such and Such Campground,” but there were no facilities whatsoever, just a few outhouses.  No picnic tables, no trees, no water spigots, nothing but RVs and families standing around in the sand. 

We decided to stop and investigate further, and even in my dreamlike state I was shocked to see a man and his son sitting in lawn chairs playing with a large rifle.  The man was teaching his son, who could not possibly have been more than six years old, how to shoot.  (I envisioned the father saying, “Son, how old are you now?  What?  Six years old already?  Six years old and you don’t even know how to shoot a gun yet?  Come on over here son, I’m gonna teach you.  This here’s a 30.06.”)  What their target could have been, I have no idea. 

Other children, also tiny, drove around the dunes on ATVs.  I decided on the spot that if we camped here, we would either be shot, or run over, or both.  After a very brief discussion, Erin and I rode away.  As we did so, we saw an entire family waving.  “Bye bye,” cried the mother.  “Have fun, and take care!”  We waved back, and Erin and I began discussing whether or not I’d misjudged these campers.  They did seem nice enough—but even still, guns and ATVs in the control of small children give us the willies.

Eventually we reached the rest stop that the dirty old man had mentioned, and just before the off ramp we could see, alongside I-8, a sign stating “Bicycles must exit.”  What was this?  How could they tell cyclists to exit when they weren’t legally allowed on the interstate to begin with?  It was like a sign stating, “If you’re driving drunk, pull over and stop.”  The only possible solution was that the highway had become, at some point, legal for bicycles.  Never mind that we hadn’t been given the opportunity to get back on.  We rode to the next on ramp, and I-8 was indeed legal for several miles.

At the next exit, we came upon another “Bicycles must exit” sign, and exited.  At the next on-ramp, another sign said “PEDESTRIANS BICYCLES MOTOR-DRIVEN CYCLES PROHIBITED.”  This time, there was a frontage road, but it was barricaded off.  “ROAD CLOSED,” read the signs.  By this time, the sun was low over the horizon and we weren’t in the mood to find another chemical toilet, another barbed-wire fence, another section of unmarked blacktop.  We took that closed-off road for several miles, until it reached the little town of Felicity.

Felicity is the strangest town I’ve ever seen.  We thought it might have a campground, since the sign for it, over on I-8, seemed to have a picture of a tent.  When we strained our eyes, however, the picture seemed to be of a pyramid.  Our eyes, it turned out, had not deceived us:  in Felicity was a giant pyramid, visible from our frontage road.  Near it was a spiral staircase leading absolutely nowhere, to nothing.  Strange flags, taller than they were wide, dotted the town.  The seven or eight buildings were all a pastel orange color, and an elaborate city limits sign declared Felicity to be “The Center of the World.”  Its only businesses were a restaurant (inside the pyramid, I believe), the Felicity Real Estate Center, the Organizatione de Centrale du Monde, and the Center of the World Headquarters.  In the waning sunlight, the place looked as surreal as a Dahli painting.  I should have taken a picture.

[Of course nowadays we have the Web for this stuff.  Needless to say that’s where I got the photos below.]

That night we stayed at an RV park in Winter Haven, only ten miles west of California’s eastern border.  We’d been worried about being turned away; instead, they had for us a lawn and a picnic table, not to mention a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, and laundry facilities.  RV parks are amazingly common in Arizona; the “snowbirds” frequent this place during the winter from as far away as Canada, in order to escape cold weather.  We have found RVers to be totally friendly; the next night, in Wellton, Arizona, we met a pair of permanent RV dwellers, Berkeley grads like us who spotted my Cal jersey and called out to us.  They had us over for breakfast the next morning.  Thanks to them, we remembered to reset our wristwatches to Mountain Standard Time, having completely forgotten as we crossed the border into Arizona.

Epilogue

So what about that lousy defective water jug?  I never did warranty it, but we did manage to find a suitable replacement:  a 10-liter (2.6-gallon) collapsible jug called “RELIANCE” that worked like a champ!  Here it is on the back of my  bike, riding high.  Note also the gallon can of Coleman fuel lashed to my starboard pannier.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The Vermont Incident

Introduction

As described here, my wife Erin and I did a 7,500-mile bike tour back in 1994. For the most part, we found our fellow Americans to be very friendly, and we rarely felt unsafe. We were ripped off only twice—once by squirrels and once by a raccoon. That said, on one particular morning we stumbled into something rather harrowing. Since it’s a slow news day at albertnet, please enjoy this true story from my bike tour journal archives.

The Vermont Episode – August, 1994

After our visit to Burlington, a long day on the bikes brought us to the Onion River Campground near Plainfield, Vermont. To get there we had to tackle a devilish 3‑mile climb, which culminated in the breezy declaration by the ranger that they were full. Erin, expertly trained in sales, said, “Well, we’re not leaving.” Within moments, the ranger said, “Aha! We’ve had a cancellation!” It was a fine campground and we enjoyed a pleasant, quiet evening. Then it rained all night and our gear got soaked. The next morning we were packing up our sodden stuff when a disturbance at a neighboring campsite caught our attention.

A fellow camper, a very small, flimsy-looking man, had somehow broken the driver’s side window of his little pickup truck. Seemingly on the brink of tears, he looked up the trail toward the restrooms and howled, “Honey, honey, I broke the window! It was a mistake! Honey, I’m sawwwwww‑ry!” A giant Gorgon of a woman, twice this guy’s size, with arms like champagne magnums and a clanging, booming voice, charged down the trail towards her husband, screaming, “YOU IDIOT! YOU STUPID BASTARD, WHY, YOU JUST WAIT UNTIL I GET OVER THERE!” He really was in tears now, and pleaded lugubriously, “Honey, please don’t hit me—I love you! I’m sawww‑ry, it was a mistake! Don’t hit me!” She reached him now and screamed, “I’M NOT GONNA HIT YOU, YOU STUPID PIECE OF S—, BUT WHEN WE GET BACK, WE ARE THROUGH, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

His voice climbing an octave a second, he begged, “Awwww, honey, stop it, I love you, I need you!” She spat back at him, “Not my problem! YOU STUPID F—ING IDIOT! WHY DIDN’T YOU WAIT? GOOD FOR NOTHING, USELESS PIECE OF S—!” He wailed, “Aw, honey, stop, you’re breakin’ my heart!” He was fully cowering now, seeking shelter behind their little pop‑up trailer tent. Now we couldn’t see anything, but heard a string of her obscenities punctuated regularly by loud thumping sounds and his continuous wailing. What could we do? The ranger station was a mile away—and who would believe us about husband abuse, anyway? Should we intervene? We just stood there at our site, frozen with indecision, and breathed a sigh of relief when the noise subsided.

Five or ten minutes later, I ventured forth from our campsite to fill up our water jug at a nearby spigot. It was then that the Leviathan intercepted me. The horror! I was transfixed by her giant face, oversized and yet sunken, like a cinnamon roll; her eyes, huge and black; the faint mustache beneath her flared nostrils. I could imagine the tabloid story: CAMPER MAULED BY BIGFOOT. But then I realized she was almost in tears: “I’m so sorry!” she wailed. “I came over to apologize for my foul mouth back there. I’m just so sorry you had to hear such bad language!”

Language? Heck, I’ve heard far worse language—but never wielded like a club by one spouse against another. And did this beast actually think I’d failed to hear her thumping on her husband?

She was pathetic, somehow, and yet so fearsome, all at once. A smaller woman who hadn’t just battered her husband might perhaps incite some sympathy and understanding—but not this brute. For her to be capable of contrition and embarrassment—well, it seemed absurd! How could she be sorry? How could she be embarrassed? She was evil incarnate! Her trembling was real, her manner sincere, and yet I almost expected her, like a Star Trek villain, to suddenly shake off her humanoid appearance and become even more sickening, the hideous alien being that she actually was.

Had I been closer to her size—i.e., if I’d been a bodybuilder or something—I might have said, “Don’t apologize to me, you sicko! Apologize to your husband!” But no, she was formidable and very likely totally insane and in that moment I could almost relate to the pitiful cowardice her husband had shown. I wanted nothing but to be away from her. “Well, I just hope you two work everything out,” I said, finally. She retreated to her campsite, and we didn’t hear any more yelling or thumping.

Eventually the husband swaggered over to us, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his shorts, head swinging from side to side, perhaps trying to look manly, even reckless. I almost expected him to say, “Okay, pal, go ahead, punch me in the stomach as hard as you can—I dare ya.” Instead, he said something unintelligible and when I responded, “Pardon?” he cringed and took a step back. Then he gathered himself, lowered his head again, and took a few more cocksure steps forward.

He spoke: “Yeah, well, the old lady, yeah, she locked the keys in the car. I tried to get ‘em out.” He looked up at us and shook his head a little to the side. He was almost bald, was missing a lower front tooth, and wore thick glasses that eclipsed much of his face. His head looked too big for his body. “Thought I could pry the window open, ya know. Busted it, tryin.’” He did something between a sigh and a drawn‑out “yep.”

His manly swagger was as unconvincing as his wife’s apology. “The broken window ... that’s not a big deal or anything, is it?” he asked us. “I mean, it happens, right?” We assured him it was no big deal. “Yeah, well, you know, the wife . . . “ he exhaled gravelly, “she’s gone an’ made a big deal out of it, you know.” He paused again. “Well, you know, marriage, heck . . . I can take it or leave it. Yep, I figure I’ll get the insurance check for this window, and . . . probably Friday, I’ll go. I’ll just leave. Yep.”

He went on to tell us about his character. He’d saved people in two different plane wrecks, he said. “You know, I’m the kind of guy where, hey, if a guy yells ‘help,’ I’m there, ya know? Just my character.” He looked down again.

“So you consider yourself a caring person?” Erin suggested. The man replied, “Yeah, my mother was in the hospital last couple years, dyin’ of Alzheimer’s. Had to take care of her. Very tough thing to do. You have no idea . . . it takes a toll on a person, it really does. Takes a lot out of ya.” He paused again. “You don’t get in any kinda trouble, do ya, driving around with a broken window on your car?” We assured him it was no big deal, citing examples of windstorms and earthquakes that broke windows across a city. A fix‑it ticket at most, Erin said.

The man talked some more, saying he was from New York but moved to Vermont to please his wife. He said he still doesn’t like the place. “How long have you two been married?” Erin asked. “‘Bout a year,” the guy said.

This amazed me. I figured a relationship as pathological as this would take a lifetime to build up—a long cycle of bad habits feeding off of one another. But no, these two must have been naturals at marital strife. The man talked some more, saying how he had cancer but it was in remission. “My disability checks will make my wife a rich widow,” he said several times.

Then he asked us how much cash we carry with us. I’m not kidding, he actually asked this. “None,” I said quickly. “We write checks or charge everything.” He said, “I’m not tryin’ to rob you or anything, just curious.” He talked some more, and then asked, “How much are your bikes worth?” This guy was coming off stranger than ever. He mentioned his wife becoming a rich widow off his disability checks one more time.

By this point we had our bikes fully loaded, and all our gear secured, and he asked us where we’d been camping. We told him, and at the name of one campground he gave a little chuckle. I asked why, and he said, “Well, heh heh, those guys didn’t like me too much. Yep, got in a bit of trouble over there, a bit of trouble with the law.” He paused, definitely for effect. “Truth is, I’m a bit of a rebel,” he proclaimed.

I almost laughed, which would have made me feel pretty bad. As absurdly and darkly comic as this fellow’s utterances were, his situation seemed tragic. Erin and I said our goodbyes and began to roll out, and the guy was still shaking his head and muttering as we pedaled off. We were so awestruck by the whole ordeal that we totally forgot to visit the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury that day.

-~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass

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.

Easy Camping Recipes

Burgers Tartare

1 pound grass-fed beef, ground
6 sourdough rolls
Heinz ketchup
Mustard
Sliced tomatoes, pickles, onions
Ice

Before you leave for the camping trip, slice the tomatoes, pickles, and onions. The pickles will need slicing because they’ll be the whole-cucumber kind, and good ones. The onions should be sliced so thin you could practically read through them. This guideline always applies, but especially when you’re camping, and overconsumption of raw onions goes from “annoying” to “dire” within the confines of a tent. (Slicing these things ahead of time might be the one thing you get right on your camping trip.)

This is a great recipe for that first night at a hike-in campground when you’re exhausted and it’s totally dark by the time you get your tent set up. Say, for example, you tried to use a bike trailer but didn’t know that half a mile of the 1½-mile hike is along the beach, where a fiendishly strong, cold wind is blowing and the deep sand makes it almost impossible to push the bike along (much less ride it), and suppose also that the trailer breaks before you get to the trail and it takes another hour to drag the lurching, tipping thing to camp, and that you left the headlamp in the car and can’t really see what you’re doing, and that the wind is howling through the campsite, blowing steel plates off the table, and from the tent your children are whining about the cold and one says, “All my memories of this trip will be negative.” This is a perfect night for burgers tartare.

Separate the ground beef into six balls and smash them angrily into a large frying pan. Ignite a burner on a large heavy Coleman camp stove, setting the flame so that the burner gasps and wheezes. As the burgers cook, dink with the stove a lot, pumping more air into it and wondering what the hell is wrong with it. When by dim flashlight you can see that the patties have shrunken a bit, tear a roll in half and submerge it in the fat in the pan. Eat this. Assemble the rest of the burgers , not forgetting the condiments. (Note: it is never okay to serve a hamburger without sliced tomatoes, onions, and pickles—no hardship excuses this.)

Halfway through your first burger, shine the flashlight on it and note how raw and red the beef is beyond the thin membrane of cooked exterior. Note also that your entire family is making yummy noises. Finish this burger and eat another. Delicious. You have introduced your family to burgers tartare. (Ssssh, don’t tell!)

Smordités

1 bag marshmallows
1 large Hershey bar
1 box graham crackers

This is a handy variation on the traditional s’mores recipe. Obviously, the enduring popularity of the s’more stems from its alignment with the slow food movement, but nutritionists are now questioning the health effects of charred marshmallows and dirty sticks. Meanwhile, our global warming crisis has become sufficiently dire that environmentalists are now becoming critical of that favorite camping institution, the campfire. Not sure where you come down on this one? If it’s too cold to even think about gathering firewood, and too windy to light a match, and too dark to see if your campsite even has a fire pit, the decision is obvious—but just try telling your kids there won’t be any s’mores.

Preparation couldn’t be simpler. Thrust a graham cracker, a square of chocolate, and a marshmallow into the hand that extends greedily from the tent. Enjoy.

Chocolate pancakes

Pancake mix
Water
1 large Hershey bar
Cooking oil

One of the challenging things about camping is that even if you thought you brought enough supplies to sink a ship (or break a bike trailer), you’re bound to have forgotten something. Say, for example, maple syrup. Voilà! A new recipe is born.

Prepare the pancake batter according to the directions. Oil the pan liberally. If you run out of fuel halfway through the first pancake, no problem—you are now actually glad you schlepped in that extra gallon can of fuel. Feed the botched pancake to the raccoons and start over.

After flipping the pancake, break some pieces off the chocolate bar and place them on the top. When the corners of the chocolate pieces start to get rounded and the text of “HERSHEY” begins to warp, serve the pancake. (Click to enlarge photo.)

Instruct the eager diner to spread the chocolate around with the underside of her fork. Exquisite.