Day 80, August 24
We slept a little later than usual, since we had been up later than most nights, and had comfortable beds to sleep on. We quietly packed our bikes. Jack was still asleep in his bedroom, so we closed the door and pedaled on. I was very anxious to get on with it, to get to my parents’ home.
We continued south and the road turned into Torrey Pines Road. We stopped at Daisy’s Restaurant and had a big breakfast. It superficially resembled Nancy’s Restaurant back in Kentucky, which we had been searching for ever since. We didn’t like chain restaurants, and wanted what we considered “real food.” This was a very enjoyable breakfast. As we let our food settle, I figured our expenses for the trip. As of the night before, we were now at $835.09 for the summer, or $10.45 per day, just over the $5 per person per day goal.
We turned east just before we got to La Jolla Shores, my favorite beach in California, for we would have to bear southeast from this point onward to get to my parents’ home in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon. I told Inanna about going to La Jolla as a high school kid, driving through Miramar Naval Air Station to get there. During my last week of high school I played in a tennis tournament at La Jolla High School, and although we didn’t play well, my doubles partner Charlie Ross and I had a wonderful time. It was the end of a chapter of our lives, and I knew I was headed for the Naval Academy in two weeks. I really don’t know where Charlie was headed, and I have lost touch with him. It would be nice to talk to Charlie again.
Jack had painstakingly traced out a route for us to take through the northeast edge of San Diego to get to my parents’ house without encountering too much traffic. I was unfamiliar with most of the roads he had listed, but kept to them and we were clearly making progress. Wherever he said we would find a road, we found it. And he had listed the mileage between each new road.
Suddenly we were coasting down a very steep road, and I saw a thrilling sight: we were above Jack Murphy Stadium, coasting right down to it in Mission Valley. The stadium was the home of the Chargers and the Padres. The coast downhill was too steep to talk to Inanna, or I would have told her about how my Dad and I had season tickets to the Chargers when they first came to San Diego. They played in Balboa Stadium while this stadium was being built. Balboa stadium was the home of the San Diego State Aztecs, and was where my Dad had played in the late forties and early fifties. He had been a 5’7” halfback. He was fast and an intense competitor and had been Captain of his team as a senior. Mom had shown me clippings from the San Diego Union. These old yellowed newspaper articles had told of Dad’s exploits, scoring a touchdown, even a breaking a shoulder. She had clearly been very proud of him.
The Chargers lost their quarterback, Jack Kemp, to a broken finger. He wound up in Buffalo where he became a congressman and later a presidential candidate. But in 1963 the Chargers won the AFC championship by a lopsided score as Keith Lincoln ran for over 200 yards. Before the ‘64 season began, I entered college back east and began to lose touch with San Diego sports.
We whizzed past the stadium and biked through Mission Valley for several miles. We then had to climb out of the valley and encountered steep hills, which winded us. We next found ourselves riding through Fletcher Hills, the higher-class neighborhood that had been just above us to the west when I was in elementary school. Jack and I had run and played all over the slopes of those hills, between our subdivision and the Fletcher Hills neighborhoods atop them. Inanna and I stopped and had lunch, a Gulchburger and a soda each. It would be our last meal on the trip. Soon Inanna and I were coasting down Fletcher Parkway into El Cajon. This was the last hill, and it was a steep downhill coast. From this point on we would be in the flat valley of El Cajon.
I am told that El Cajon means “the big box”. It is a wide valley, perhaps ten miles in diameter, surrounded by rugged hills to the west and south, and by mountains to the north and east. Our family moved there from San Diego proper in 1950, barely able to afford a two-bedroom house on Cuyamaca Street at the foot of Fletcher Hills. There were four of us then, but soon there were six and we moved again to a four-bedroom house in the center of the valley. In the ‘50s and ‘60s it was an ideal place in which to grow up. Much of the valley was farmland, although subdivisions were sprouting all over. In fact, during one year the city claimed to be the fastest growing city in the country. But by the ‘70s the bloom was off the rose, and by the ‘80s it would become almost slummy, certainly not one of the ideal spots in the county.
The El Cajon we pedaled through that summer day in 1977 was not the same El Cajon I had known as a kid. I tried to tell Inanna about it, making excuses for the town, but she was non-judgmental anyway, so my efforts were not needed. I was projecting again. We pedaled through the valley toward my parents’ home near Granite Hills High School—a school that would experience a shooting in 2001, with alarming national news coverage. I had graduated from El Cajon Valley High School. It is approximately midway between Granite Hills and Santana High Schools, both of which would experience shootings within weeks of one another.
However, we were not thinking crossfire as we rolled up into my parents’ driveway. They were expecting us and ran out to give us hugs—even though they were meeting Inanna for the first time. Dad had a camera ready, and I still have the photo of the two of us, standing with our bikes, my hair scraggly, looking proud of ourselves.
We were very happy to have arrived, and it is nice to be anticipated. It had been several years since I had seen my parents, and they were overjoyed to see me again. It seemed odd to them that I had chosen to make the trip in this manner—but of course the purpose wasn’t only to visit them. The main purpose was the trip itself. I was already feeling ambivalent about it being over.
There is a security in knowing what you are supposed to do each day. And now I was going to be between journeys, which is an anxious time. Each morning I would pack up the sleeping bags and tent, we would eat breakfast, we would ride for three hours, eat lunch, ride for three more hours, buy food; find a place to camp, set up camp, eat and go to sleep. Once you have entered such a life, there is not much to it. The first challenge is entering it, and the next challenge is leaving it.
What was to be next?
We sat in their living room and drank cold drinks. I was quite different from how they had last seen me—stronger, more tanned, quieter, both more relaxed and less adept socially. It is like I had been at the bottom of the sea or in a space station for 3 months. I had to learn how to be social and normal again. I remember meeting a man a couple years earlier that had spent several years in a Trappist monastery. He had not spoken during those years, and had been out only a couple of weeks. He could not do much more than smile handsomely. Our experiences were quite different, but the necessity to shift gears was similar.
The next few days were spent catching up with my brothers Pete, Ian and Tony, and my sister Margie. They were all musicians eventually, but Pete and Ian were still teenagers then. I connected with Bill Speckmann, with whom I had shared the run to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and who would later lead us to the Devil’s Punchbowl. He had recently returned from living in a log cabin in rural Arkansas. But I had been away since 1964, except for a few visits, and in those 13 years I had lost track of most of my other friends from high school.
I still had the dream of relocating to California. It was a silly fantasy, because it would have isolated me from my daughter Cathy, or forced her mother to also move to California, and that would have been unfair to all concerned. Still, I perused the want ads and even went to a job interview. I didn’t have proper clothes with me, so bought some things, but the pants I had brought with me seemed like they would work—until I put them on. They fell right off me. I had lost four inches in my waist! They had been size 34, and Mom took them in to a 30! I had only worn them once—coming down from Trail Ridge in the cold, fog and rain—and had worn them over my shorts that time. It was a complete surprise to have lost so much fat around my middle, without even trying.
The interview didn’t go well—in hindsight, I was ambivalent about the position, and the interviewer must have picked that up. It is just as well—I had to return home.
And the trip home was easy. United Airlines provided boxes for the bicycles and each could be shipped home for $10. All we had to do was loosen a nut and turn the handlebars 90 degrees, so they would not take up so much space. They slid nicely into their boxes. We traveled in the lap of luxury, it seemed to us, and after a brief stop in Chicago we were once again in Virginia Beach.
Next: Transition back to real life