When we rolled in to Eugene we were in serious need of real food to calm the aches and pains of donuts in the stomach.  How about a Farmer’s Scramble of fiddleheads and chanterelles?  Or a tofu/mushroom/onion fry encased in a hash-brown shell like an omelet?  With biscuits on the side, served by disaffected anarchist chicks?  Yeah, we’re gonna need a lot of fuel to race those folding bikes across the city.

At Bike Friday they lent us a pair of Pocket Rockets and gave us a few hours to explore the city.  We suited up in spandex and set out on the beautiful bike paths of scenic Eugene.  The sun was shining and the bikes were fun.  Just don’t stare too long at the front wheel, because it’s really tiny and it’ll freak you out.  And never mind the wack SPD pedals with the springs tightened down so tight you have to stomp with all of your weight to clip in.  That’s part of the fun.

Those Pocket Rockets were fast and maneuverable, but what about on dirt?  Let’s check that renegade singletrack.  Little wheels are stiff and on tight turns it’s possible to cut sharper than feels safe.  Bike Fridays are easy to bunnyhop and hotdogging is especially interesting on an awesome network of parks, paths and dedicated bike/pedestrian bridges over the Wilamette River.

After an hour in the saddle the bikes felt natural, and we started to say things like, “Hey, this is really cool” as we carved endless S turns on the concrete.  On the way back we spotted a big stair-stepped hill in the distance and said hey, let’s climb that!  So we did.

Then back at the office, in a two donut, 4am wakeup haze, Kevin ordered his dream bike:  flag red Crusoe, no dorky nametag, Schwalbes and full Ultegra, dope German generator hub with a spotlight attachment and the ability to charge an ipod.  Rad.

We secured bunks at the Whiteaker Hostel where the Innkeeper wore flag suspenders as he refurbished a sailboat in the courtyard.  Kevin threw down with some boat knowledge, as a real New Englander is born on a leaky yacht and has spent many a humid summer stripping the bow with toxic chemicals and battling the green flies while thoughtfully pulling at his beard.

Over at the Ninkasi Tasting Room they had Vanilla Malt Liquor on tap, a Cascadian Dark Ale, and their wonderful Spring Reign seasonal.  I was feeling mellow, but Face Man was getting his second wind as he began to bend the bartender’s ear.  Turns out she was a distant acquaintance from Humboldt, a former Adventure’s Edge cashier vixen.  The ante rose rapidly:  hey, we’ll sponsor you guys for the Ninkasi bike race team, yeah and how about a case of promotional 22’s for the greater Humboldt Bay area?  I could only nod and try to smile.

Somehow we made it out of there and picked up a Sloppy Joe and an ESB.  Then we set off on foot to walk the six (or 1.5) miles to The Bier Stein, because we had to.  We were zombies but we had to do it.  Maybe a slice of cake would help, at that place called The Sweet Life that everyone in Eugene kept talking about.  It had a line out the door.

At The Bier Stein it was packed and hot.  The beer whelps were considering the sours–”I’ve had the gooze, I’ve had the Cascade, now I want something really sour–really really really sour.”  Sour is the new hoppy–it’s been foretold.  Kevin and I were in more of a Saison mood, and found something new:  a 2009 Saison du Pelican.  It was expertly dry and sharp like cumin or coriander seed.

But what to do on day two?  We tried to rent mountain bikes, but nobody in town had them and we were told there was no good singletrack close by anyway.  So what now, carbonium Treks?  We bounced around a few bike stores until we found one with a good vibe–Blue Heron, by campus–and committed to a pair of goofy Marin comfort bikes.

I wanted to check out the Rail to Trail down in Cottage Grove.  So we trucked the bikes down to the trailhead and suited up in more spandex, because why not?  It’s better to be comfortable than cool, yes?  Just go with it.

My bike had a trashy suspension fork that made a massive THUNK whenever I did a wheelie.  Also, a mostly nonfunctional thudbuster seat post and a fully adjustable, fully flexible stem.  Kevin’s was fully rigid, with matching fenders and a lady’s seat.

We dressed out in suburban Cottage Grove next to an extinct body shop with graffiti, pausing for comfort bike b-boy activities in front of the wall.  We rode the path out of town, up into the ferns and firs around Dorena Lake.  The path ended fifteen miles later, in a gravel parking lot with what looked like a mobile meth operation installed.  What better time to turn back and start working on the four pound vegan cookies we’d purchased at the Keystone.

Back in Cottage Grove some locals were blasting Lady Gaga from the windows of their house as we chuckled and danced and got naked in the street.  They sat on the front porch to leer at us:  who are those guys with the bib shorts and the comfort bikes?  It doesn’t make sense.  But what I learned is that a comfort bike is an express ticket to fun, an excuse to forget about being cool, to forget about going fast, to just ride and smile.  Relax and be comfortable!

On I-5 North we got wild to the Beastie Boys, which encouraged an in car dance contest with some passing students.  Back in Eugene we primed ourselves with a pair of mythical thigh burritos from El Pinche Taco and then hit the nightlife, comfort style.  At the Rogue Public House they had 30 ales on tap, and the bartender wanted us to try them all, so we started asking questions and he started pouring tasters.  We had a few, and could have had quite a few more, but what was really on our minds were comfort bikes and the serpentine trails of Eugene at night.

We didn’t have any lights, which was foolish but fun.  We rode in the dark through the forested paths of Alton Baker Park, senses jumping, trying to see.  Couldn’t see, so other senses surged:  the feel of the wind, the smell of the trees, the comfort of the bike.  We navigated the trail system by night, auditing all the bridges, riding up and down the stairs.  By dark it was an unfamiliar world full of marvel, and everything was fun:  mysterious narrow bridges to bird islands, a scale model of the solar system with Pluto 3 miles distant…

Then on one of the maps we spotted it:  BMX track, a few miles away.  Must find!  I tried to memorize the map and the series of turns required.  We felt our way gradually through the darkened maze, until:  success!  An unlocked, unfenced, unlit BMX track across from the gigantic University of Oregon stadium!

We rolled around a bit on the track tentatively, waiting to crash, wondering what was possible.  Then we pushed our bikes up to the starting gate and looked at eachother with wild eyes:  you ready?

We dropped in and rolled over the tabletops, rode high through the first berm.  Then came the rhythm section, a tight series of little jumps.  I pushed down hard on my flexing handlebars and inane fork as I pumped through the jumps.  Berm, tabletops!  Another rhythm section, faster than the first!  It’s a miracle that neither of us went over the bars.

We rode the track three times, and then adrenalized, laughing, we paused to sit in the dark grandstands and savor a special beer and the camaraderie of two new friends in a new city on new bikes doing new things.  Riding comfort style in Eugene, Oregon.

boot usb0/hub@1/disk@1:,\yaboot

I managed to boot off of a USB Hard drive, painstakingly formatted in HFS because that’s what Powerpc Debian wants; not HFS+ which would have been so much easier.  I’d assembled a makeshift bootable HD by unpacking the Debian Netinstall ISO onto the HD, then copying the kernel and boot files to the root.  There’s been a CD stuck in the internal drive of my laptop for a few years now, and my Mac refused to boot off of a USB CD drive for some stupid reason.  Well, one of the reasons was a bad burn of a disc image.

So it booted off of the hard drive, but the installer expected to find the packages on the CD device, which wasn’t mounted.  Ah, so close… attach the drive, mount the cd, whir and spin, read the packages, please be good–success!  With bleary late night eyes I nuked my OS X partitions and took the leap of faith, unpacking Debian onto my laptop.

This is not to mention the time I spent trying to boot off a firewire disc or the pinche thumb drives.  Or how I managed to format the USB disc as HFS by “evaluating” MacDrive (terrible stuff) then pirating Disc Warrior (eh, it’s okay) to repair the terrible job that MacDrive did.  Or the thousand times I pressed eject on my laptop, hoping that sinister CD might finally pop out…

And not to mention all the howling I did to Beth about how much all of this sucks and how frustrating it was, the whole thing a fickle, un/mis-documented puzzle.  Following breadcrumbs through Internet forums, trying to gain wisdom from anonymous comments, throwing solutions at the wall, savoring the challenge yet getting destroyed by it.

Now I’ve gone from beautiful, slow OS X to a crude, nerdy default Debian desktop.  OS X is fine, but my laptop is six years old and Apple seems to relish in planned obsolescence.  But now I’ve stepped away from the “Genius Bar”, I’m over here in the corner with the geeks in my penguin tuxedo and ugly fonts.  As it should be.

We bought a baguette, then armed ourselves with $5 worth of Humboldt Fog and a slice of Truffle Tremor.  We stopped by the ranger station to get our free C Line Road permit plus the combo to the gate.  We sped up Bald Hills Road into the mist.  We found our turnoff and fumbled with the lock on the gate.  I tried the combo backwards, upside down, guessing at hypothetical dyslexic interpretations of the numbers we had written down.  We were about to abandon hope, go for a different hike, when I gave it a frustrated jiggle and it popped open.

Down C Line Road towards Redwood Creek, drifting the Tacoma through muddy corners, wondering where we were going and what it would look like.  At the trail head only a beat up Isuzu Trooper and a bank of mist billowing up through the trees.

We hiked Tall Trees Trail, down steep red clay soil through a tunnel of bright madrone.  We stopped at the interpretive trail markers and Beth was so courteous as to narrate, to direct our attention toward old creek beds, fire carved cavities, the diversity of trees.  If there were no fires, the doug firs might never crack the redwoods.  The early settlers called the fire damaged hollow redwoods goose pens because they made great places to store your fowl.  Vanishing trails, prospector routes, donkeys and pick axes, numbered on markers.

At the bottom we looped the Tall Trees Trail, on the bank of the creek.  We saw what was considered the tallest tree, as recently as the 80’s.  Mushrooms and sorrel grew from every mossy opportunity.  Big leaf maples stood in circles, leafless in the winter, bursting with miniature ferns like tall spider sculptures.

Redwood Creek moved swiftly, colored cold slate.  I love how all of the rivers and creeks in Humboldt County have different colored waters; they’re trademarks and signatures.  We walked up the bank to a group of tangled logs that looked like a good picnic bench, startling a pair of American Dippers.  I sat down on the log and there was a long, stinky salmon spine sitting next to me.  Who ate that fish?  Whodunnit?  I stared deep into the water, looking for clues but couldn’t come up with anything.  I fumbled a crumble of Humboldt Fog into the water and thought:  fish bait.  I watched closely but nobody came to claim it.

What a magical combination baguette and cheese is!  What a treat.  To sit on a redwood log on Redwood Creek with nobody but my baby and a Steelhead Pale, a carrot and a satsuma mandarin.  To stare deep into the water and let my mind go downstream.

Driving the gravel road back to the gate a Ruffed Grouse liked us and hoped to come along.  It was foraging in the dirt by the side of the road, but when it saw my truck it walked up as I hit the brakes and it pecked around my wheels for seeds.  I backed up and it followed, seeming to demand, “Feed me!  I want some millet!”  We didn’t have any, so I gave it the slip and we sped back to civilization.

Enough time has passed since I last listened to Sweetheart of the Rodeo that right now, for one brief listen or maybe two, is it no longer worn out. This morning it feels fresh and renewed yet comfortable and old. A sing along record, a groovy morning starter–one of those rare moments when an album exactly hits the spot.

I haven’t been in a very good music appreciation groove since I moved to Humboldt. The ritual has changed. It used to be that Todd and I would listen to music at our desks all day long. It was part of work: I’d come in, and if I was there first (hopefully) I’d queue up an album. Then after it was done I’d respectfully allow Todd to select one. And repeat, choosing thoughtfully, a pair of desktop DJs trying to make the day go down a little more enjoyably. Trading riffs, swapping anthems, or sometimes more embattled and grumpy, pitting Fleetwood Mac versus primitive French black metal. What an unholy match up that was!

But this morning I’m DJing for myself and it’s me and The Byrds and a toaster creation of jalapeño bagel, egg and cheese with some semi-experimental Larrupin’ sauce inserted somewhere. It’s actually not much of an experiment because I’m beginning to learn that Larrupin’ Sauce can be safely employed almost anywhere. And that maybe it’s a sign, that through fully adopting this local elixir I’m becoming a more fully naturalized resident of the Emerald Triangle.

Now that Sweetheart is over, the next pick is Song of America.

I put the ingredients in my backpack and we headed for home. However on the way back los amigos decided it would be way radder to climb back up over the ridge instead of taking the flat way home. I grimaced and weighed a mutiny but decided what the hell, I’d do it.

Somewhere on the minor death march back up the hill the brown paper grain bags in my backpack burst open from sweat and jostling. As we rode back down through the forest, floating root sections, hooting and hollering, the grains got tossed in my NATO pack with all of the jacket lint, miniature ribbons of old trail maps, and etc. This was the first step in the creation of the Backpack IPA.

The second step happened later that night when we fired up the massive propane ring in Dbo’s back yard and boiled ten gallons in ten minutes. Somehow I ended up with Amber DME for my mini-mash IPA, but no matter. You do your best and adapt when change becomes unavoidable.

Last night we reprised the Community Forest Blue Lake route, but this time at night, wearing 12 watt halogen bulbs. Nobody crashed, and the night was clear and mellow with a beautiful full moon. When we got to West End it was so bright we didn’t need lights and rode through the ghostly pastures and farms in moonlight. The Mad River was silver and we all thought about how lucky we were.

The brewery was celebrating its 20th anniversary by tapping a cask of double IPA and a few kegs of wheat wine. It was overcrowded and hard to get a beer from the bar; as we wedged our way in we found ourselves parked next to a guy with an impressive mustache and a skyscraper of empies. “Six firkins!” he started ranting, “Pour these gentlemen six firkins! And a pint of bourbon barrel aged stout to drink while they’re waiting.” That’s how I found myself in possession of two fists full of DIPA. And that was about all I would need.

Today I bottled the Backpack IPA into two 1.5 gallon Tap-a-draft jugs. As I was finishing up, trying to pull the hop bag out through the neck of the carboy, it got wrung and produced a glass of hop juice in the foot of the fermenter. Ah, sweet nectar: I drank it. Tastes like adventure.