Over the fourth of July I went on my first bike tour:  an intended loop of the forks of the Salmon River.  We rode on single lane roads carved on shelves in the river gorge.  I didn’t know quite what I was doing:  was I carrying enough?  Too much?  Was I going too hard, too easy?  Drinking enough water?  The questions were endless so I tried to stop, sink that narrative way down at the bottom of the river.

It was gold country and we were riding through federally patented claims:  Glory Holes #2, Tom’s Bar.  Too many to remember.  The river was yellow to blue, rambling over rocks beneath steep stacks of oak and pine.  Bats at night, jays by day, warm IPA or cooled in the river.

Photo by Kevin

I was feeling good the first half of the first day.  By lunchtime it was 95 degrees out and we stopped by the river to swim.  When my body hit the water I was suprised to cramp in multiple places.  Strange cramps, like my back and abdomen.  But the river was so fresh and pure I paid them no attention.  I ate a bagel and some melted trail mix and grew mystified when my index finger cramped–what!!?  Then when we started to go again it felt like I hadn’t rested.  Uh oh.

From then on I was a mess.  After the river I stopped sweating even though it was boiling hot, and that mysterious internal quantity known as stamina disappeared.  As a cyclist you’re used to pushing against an unseen force inside yourself, formed by determination, will and more mysterious metabolic functions that form endurance.  But it’s happened to me a few times on the bike, and it happened on the Salmon River, that when I push there’s nothing there.  Whereas I feel weak to the core and my heart rate doesn’t make sense and my breathing is shallow.  You push against your own endurance and instead of pushing back, supporting you, it caves and you plummet.

My body grew so tired I couldn’t hold it up and I wanted to go to sleep by the side of the road.  I found myself taking long breaks in the shade, lying in the gravel, fighting my mind which was starting to crack like my body.  My thoughts were full of worry–am I going to make it?  I think every cyclist probably gets those “Why am I doing this to myself again??” thoughts sometimes while climbing a tough section of hill, but the negatives started to crowd in on me.  I found myself thinking:  I hate this.  No!  I battled the noxious idea.  As my left foot went over the top of the chainring I told myself:  stay calm.  As my right foot went over I remembered:  slow down.  Repeat.  You’re doing good.

It’s hard to explain how shredded I felt.  I felt embarrassed–I was having my absolute worst day on the bike, ever.  It seemed like it took an hour to travel a mile, counting down the county mileage markers to the campground.  Three to go seemed impossible.

That night my mind raced as I was too tired to sleep, too hot, too worried.  I got up twice to pee in the middle of the night and grew so lightheaded I had to sit down mid-stream.  That’s when I started to accept defeat–I was not recovering and wondered how I was ever going to make it over the 5700 foot summit the next morning.

I came clean to my compadres, who were treating me with a mix of sympathy and space.  I am broken.  But I will try to make it to Etna, where I think I need to drop out.  Maybe Beth can bail me out.  But I can’t.  I fought the conclusion until it was inevitable and I was so tired.

Part 2

Lately I’ve been interested in meditation.  I’ve been reading a little about it, and trying my hand at sitting still, but it’s hard.  I’m accustomed to throwing my attention far away, to follow distant threads on the internet, in a book, or in a show.  It’s easy to follow a recipe, to follow a route up a hill or through the forest and it feels good.  But what about right now, simply being?  To follow the route inside?  I know that sometimes I take a walk or a ride to find myself, to reach a state of peace, but I’m also interested in the reverse, to start here to reach there.

When I’m sitting still I can feel my mind racing, I can feel it accelerate like a car engine in neutral, wanting to do something fast.  I can feel time passing; it feels like the slider bar on an mp3 playing, a burning fuse, a tire rolling on a road.  I can feel tension floating under my scalp, sadness in the back of my head.  I try to bring everything back to now; breathing brings it back.   My breath is like a pendulum but different at every tick.  On the inhale I look inside, and on the exhale I bring up what I find, remembering to not get lost, to follow the air up back to the present.

A few days ago I sat on the beach for a few hours, looking inside and staring at the waves.  There was a small harbor seal lying on the sand; it was strange.  A man was walking two  labs, slinging a sandy tennis ball for them with a scooper, and the ball rolled right up to the seal and the dogs were wagging their tails and sniffing him as he barked with fright and pulled himself through the sand with his flippers, trying to get back into the water.  The man yelled at his dogs but they were too interested and he ran up to them as the seal swam away.  I was sitting feeling emulsified with the sand water and sun.  I was sitting with my eyes closed and my sunglasses on.  I was staring at the horizon, wishing I would see a whale.  An ownerless dog sniffing driftwood came to see me; I petted his back and he sat down beside me and stuck out his tongue and we stared at the sea together.  He was so calm.  He stuck out his paw to shake.  Some kids walked by, looking self-conscious and conscious of me.  I found myself crying but it was nice.  Who knew if you just stood still and thought about nothing you would cry?  It’s as if some long compressed pain just floats to the top and it feels good to let it out.

Finally I saw a whale on the ocean.  Or I saw its breath, a column of mist.  I watched it breathe eight times over twenty minutes as it swam north and the kids walked by again and I wanted to get up and leave before they got there so they wouldn’t think I was weird, but stayed as a personal challenge.

On Sunday I drove up into Trinity County, into the Alps on a dirt road where I saw no one, fourteen miles on a single lane road bouncing over rocks to a trail head with parking for one car at Green Mountain.  I walked up over a peak through a burnt forest and it was creepy, I didn’t know where I was or where I was going, only what I’d seen on the map, which didn’t prepare me for where I was.  There was orange peel fungus growing out of the loose dirt in the trail, it looked like dried apricot in acorn bowls.  The trail was unpleasantly steep as I climbed up over a ridge, then dropped down lower than I’d climbed, down to a saddle below the peak where a little spring emitted from the side of the hill, only to be reabsorbed a few feet later.  A Western Tanager watched me from the top of a pine as I checked my legs for ticks for the hundredth time and wondered the thought that I kept wondering but couldn’t answer:  where am I?

Lately I’ve been mired in a funk.  My stomach has been boiling with stress and everything seems lackluster.

I’ve been trying to make myself feel better.  I went to the Humboldt County Library and applied for a library card.  The library is modern and beautiful, on a rise above the bay near the Manila Bridge.  I wandered the stacks feeling kind of funny–everybody seemed to know what they were doing except me.  I tried to pretend I knew where everything was when truly I was a newb.

On the second floor I found something called the Humboldt Room. A little old lady library volunteer asked if I’d like to come in.  I didn’t really know if I wanted to come in or not, but tried to act like maybe I did.  She directed me to sign the register, then turned me loose in a dark wood paneled room full of books.

I’d been wondering about local history, thinking I should read a few books, then found myself hanging out in the library’s special collection of non-circulating historical documents.  There were shelves of yearbooks for all of the local schools, crazy old maps, newspapers from the time of the gold rush.  There were silver haired scholars sitting with magnifying glasses at a long table, poring over scrolls.  I found the section on local biology, zeroed in on local birds, and unearthed a treasure:  The Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Humboldt County produced by the Redwood Audobon Society.

I sat at the long table with my tome.  It was incredibly geeky.  They’d divided up the county into sectors, and birders had counted species for four years with an emphasis on breeding pairs.  For each species recorded in Humboldt, there was a two page essay with distribution and random facts.  I turned to the Short-Eared Owl, and read something similar to:

Everybody remembers their first Short-Eared Owl.  They may not remember the place or the time, but they remember the feeling. For this owl is more than a simple Strigiforme, it is a graceful, lethal energy.

I was eating it up.  I paged through the countless indulgent birder non-fictions.  There were too many to digest, but no worries, I’ll be back–I think I’ve found a new favorite place.  And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it did:  two little biddies were gossiping about history, each trying to one up the other, when one asked, Well, do you know the story of how Loleta got its name?  As a matter of fact I don’t!  Well, it’s quite vulgar.  I’ve read that it’s a colloquialism in the local Indian dialect for let us have intercourse!

As I watched them chortle in the Humboldt Room I couldn’t help but giggle a little bit myself.