Day 11: 6/15/77
The next morning we had breakfast with the campers. At first I was disappointed they made us pay for it. Somehow, I thought we should be considered honored guests. But they explained they had bills to pay, and the $1.50 apiece wasn’t so much. It turned out to be one of the best breakfasts of my memory: a huge fresh peach, homemade granola, warm from the oven, and homemade yogurt.
We headed south for Damascus, Virginia, where Steve Wood had said *** would try to meet us. We pedaled through the Mt. Rogers National Recreational Area, past Mt. Rogers. At 5700 feet, it is the highest elevation in Virginia. That’s just about the elevation of the Eastern Colorado plain just before the climb into the Rockies. But we didn’t have to climb Mt. Rogers, just gaze at it as we passed it, from the valley below. The road didn’t seem too steep, and we enjoyed the ride.
We met a group of bikers going our direction. There were nine of them: Jean, Sue, Pam, Joey, Joe, Ken, Glen, Richard and Gordon. The most memorable were Ken, 66 and undaunted by a cross-continent bicycle ride, and Joey and Sue. Joey had cerebral palsy. His right arm and leg were withered. He had a special strap to keep his right foot on the pedal. He had moved his right brake lever inside the handle bar, near the fork, where he could use it. He also had thick glasses and a strange medallion around his neck. He explained that he had seizures, and that he and Sue had struck a bargain. She was a nurse who would take care of him in medical emergencies. He was a bicycle mechanic who would be her escort and keep her bike running. Although the nine in this party would stretch out and separate during the day, camping together each night at a pre-arranged spot, Joey and Sue always rode together.
We had lunch with some of this crew, and Joey and Sue left before us. An hour later, on a long downhill, we met them again. We braked hard to stop, because his rear wheel was off. It seems they weren’t paying attention, and both hit the same pothole, breaking spokes and giving them flats. Joey was trying to remove his freewheel, that big assembly on the rear wheel with five sprockets (on a ten-speed). It was on so tight he couldn’t budge it. Neither could I. I suggested I stand on the wrench while he held the wheel upright. When I did, the whole wheel bent. He groaned and lay back on to the ground. I felt terrible.
Joey wouldn’t let me touch his bike after that, and seemed to have confidence he could fix it, so finally we apologized again and left.
After only forty miles we were in Damascus. This small town is just north of the Tennessee border, although still in Virginia. It is the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and the Bikecentenial Trail. The local Methodist church sponsors a hostel for the travelers there. It had a rustic kitchen, a more rustic bathroom, and empty floors with foam mattresses. My good friend *** was there, along with several other backpackers and cross-country cyclists. We were glad to see ***, and he seemed to be as glad to see us. He was having a tough time, and was behind his schedule. He had to get to Maine before winter set in, and he was getting a lot of blisters, which were slowing him down. Carrying 60 pounds on your back, up steep trails, with no grocery stores for days, is a lot harder than riding a bicycle. As we talked about our trials with *** and the other through hikers, we felt we had the more enjoyable challenge. There was some rivalry between the hikers and the bikers, as each tried to assert the superiority of their quest. But the rivalry was friendly, and I overheard one backpacker say to another, “You’ve got to admit, they eat better than we do.” The luxury of being closer to civilization, cycling past little grocery and convenience stores in each small town on the map, buying relatively fresh food each night before dinner, became easier to appreciate for us. I stopped griping about the poor choices of food in these stores. I remembered the backpackers.
We ate chicken cooked in the hostel kitchen with ***. We slept on those foam mattresses that night, and left again the next morning. *** didn’t seem so anxious to put that heavy pack on his back and start walking, but we had a sense of urgency. If a certain number of miles weren’t complete each day, we would not be done by the end of the summer.