Against The Wind

Against the Wind: a bike trip across America - postscript and the end of this blog

BillButler — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:04:00 GMT

Postscript

As I look back, 29 years later, I am astounded by the entire story. For many years I have been proud of the effort and discipline it took to cycle across the country. But the ending, the miracles for both Inanna and I, overshadow the trip itself. The miracles lead to many things.

Inanna left that December, 3 months after we had returned from the adventure. We still couldn’t be with other people. She would be deeply hurt if I spoke with anybody else. I tried to include her but always failed. I had to choose to be with her alone, or to have her depressed and accusing. As a result, I stayed away from my friends. I felt more and more stifled. When we were invited to a party given by my friend Alene, Inanna refused to go. When I said I would go without her, she said she would be gone when I returned. I left at 8, and when I returned at about midnight, she was gone. She had had her brother come over, and he helped her take her things out of the house. She took only what was hers, and that wasn’t much. She still traveled light. There was a dent in the banister, evidently from moving, and that dent was the only evidence that she had ever been there.

That next August, as I began the second year of grad school, I met Mary. Her smiling eyes shown out at me from a crowd of first-year students. I tutored her in statistics, and soon we were dating. We married two years after Inanna had left. Mary struggled with being a step-mom and we began to grow through it. In 1983 we had our first baby, Lindsey, and in ‘86 our second, Shannon. Now Cathy is a college graduate, married, and living in northern California, and pregnant with my first grandchild. Lindsey is in graduate school, and Shannon is a junior in college. I am proud of them all, especially Mary. We’ve now been married 27 years.

I received my Master of Social Work in 1979 and was hired as Executive Director of a small Catholic Family Services agency. I gave my heart and soul to that agency for seven years. I then spent 12 years in the private practice of psychotherapy. After that, I spent four years as an executive in two large managed mental healthcare companies. Then came a great setback: I was laid off by the second managed care company. For a few days I was in shock, in denial, applying for jobs that were hardly worthy of my experience and skills. But when the smoke cleared, and in less than a month, I was managing children’s services for the mental health center in Virginia Beach. I had come full circle, I was once again a city employee, as I was when I worked at the Outreach Center before I quit in 1977.

This full circle is itself amazing. There is still, in me, that same belief in the mission, in the almost sacred mission of helping those without resources to cope with the struggles of mental illness in the family. And there is also that frustrating reality that the system could be so much better—and if it were that we could be so much more effective in fulfilling our mission.

Recently a fellow employee received a plaque for her 25 years of service, and she seemed to complain about having been in one place for so long. I replied that if I had stayed, I would be almost at 30 years service, and would have a nice retirement by now. But instead, it is almost like I am starting over. Dare a person start over at the age of 56? Dare a person not start over at this age? Is there a choice? I am excited that I could actually have another chance—to be reborn after being laid low.

But what difference did the bicycle trip make? Certainly I cannot claim to be a great mover and shaker because of it; I wasn’t provided great wisdom or great leadership abilities by the experience. I am not seen as a leader of my minor profession, even in my little corner of America.

Or maybe there was a certain type of wisdom picked up. I can honestly say that I have enjoyed all my social work jobs, at least until the four years in managed care. Until that time I not only enjoyed myself, but I was doing things I believed in. And in managed care, I learned many things I am now applying on a daily basis: computer skills, an entrepreneurial spirit (rare in public service), how to deal with superiors, how to not take it personally when I lose a bureaucratic battle or get criticized by a boss.

What would things have been like if I had stayed in the Virginia Beach Drug Outreach Center in 1977, and skipped the bicycle trip? What would I have been like? Some things would certainly have happened: the Outreach center would have been closed, as it eventually was, and I would have had a choice to facilitate the change or go down with the ship. Had I assisted in the planning for the future after Outreach, I would have wound up in some supervisory job in the comprehensive drug program or the mental health program. Then I may have become a seat-warmer, a bored and cynical bureaucrat looking forward to retirement. Or maybe I would have made sure I got to graduate school, joined a profession, rejuvenated my altruistic instincts, and maybe even met Mary after all. It is all speculation. It is the road not taken.

In the end, all I can say about the journey is that I have benefited from each step, and enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps that is all I can expect.

Everything that has happened in the past 29 years sprang directly from the miracle of the bicycle trip. It’s as if I had to cast my fate to the wind, leaving everything behind, trusting that everything would be OK. I had to release the trapeze without checking first to see if there was a net.

And who knows what’s next?

***

This is the end of this blog! Wow, finally, I can leave this space to someone else.

Against the Wind: A bike trip across America - Immediate miracles from the trip

BillButler — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:36:00 GMT

Against the Wind, Part III:

***

III. The Return

We were finally home. I gathered up my house keys, my car keys, and began a reentry into real life. The house was none the worse for the wear, and the cats were still alive. The car still ran. The beach was across the street from the house, and I walked on the beach, barefoot.

Suddenly I was jogging, then running—and running like I had never run before. I flew over the sand—in the shallow water, where the sand is hard-packed, and in the softer sand. It was a mile to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, and I made it with virtually no effort, on this hot day at the end of August. As I turned to run back, I realized that I was in the best physical condition of my life. I was thinner, tanner, with strong legs and a cardio-vascular system developed from 6 hours of aerobic exercise, every day, for 80 days. As I reached my house I realized that there was something wrong, however. My feet hurt. I stopped and examined them. They had become blistered from the brisk run on the sand. The bottoms of my feet could not keep up with the rest of me!

Out of balance is how I felt, and not just physically. It was difficult to readjust to real life. Surrounded by creature comforts, keys in my pockets, I now had to sustain myself in a twentieth century economy. I had to get a job, find a career.

And I was depressed. Within a couple days I was lethargic, feeling blue. It wasn’t easy to return to the world.

It helped, however, to hear Inanna’s good news. All those postcards she had sent back home had paid off. She called the school system and they immediately set up an interview. When she returned she told me the personnel director had kept every one of the cards that she had sent as we traveled across the United States. They hadn’t held her resignation of a year ago against her. She was given a job as a counselor in the high school from which she had graduated! She was very happy. She said it was a reward from God for having had faith and hope.

No jobs were immediately available for me, so I called Dr. Bernie Pendleton. He had been my professor in a class I had taken in the Graduate School of Social Work at Norfolk State College. He was also the Dean of Admissions. He was happy to hear from me and surprised that I was back in town. We chatted about my trip, and he was impressed.

“Can I come back to school? I want to be a full time grad student this time.”

He paused. “Bill, you know you have to start that process several months in advance. Classes start Monday. The incoming class has been full for weeks.”

“I know,” I replied. “I thought I would take a chance.”

I could tell he felt badly about it, but he couldn’t help me. We talked some more about my trip. Then he put me on hold—it seemed for a long time.

He came back onto the line. “Can you be here in a half hour?”

“Yes,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Somebody just dropped out of the program. We have one opening.”

I was there in that half-hour. Dr. P. signed me up, and was happy to do it. I walked down to the Veteran’s Office and registered for GI Bill educational benefits. An hour later I was walking through Brown Hall, and my head was spinning. I was now a full time graduate student, and the GI Bill would pay my educational costs. But how would I live? How would I pay the mortgage, take care of food and gas expenses, take care of Cathy?

That’s when I met Jay Lazier, Bill Russell, and Jim Duffy. I had worked with Jay and Bill while I was at the Outreach Clinic. Bill was the Director of Mental Health, and Jay ran the programs for the mentally retarded and developmentally delayed. What were they doing here at Norfolk State? “We didn’t know you were back in town!” Bill exclaimed, as I shook their hands.

I briefly told them about my adventure, and ended with today’s acceptance into the Graduate School of Social Work. “Do you want a job?” asked Jay with a smile. He explained that they had been given a government grant to do a community rehabilitation needs assessment study, and it could only be administered by a full time student in this program. They told me that nobody else there could do it, but that they knew that I could.

I was floored. The job wouldn’t pay as well as the one I had left three months earlier, but it was more than adequate to keep me going through grad school.

In an hour and a half, I had been accepted and registered for school, registered for GI Bill benefits, and been given a job. This put me into a state of shock. Even when I returned home and shared it with Inanna, I couldn’t really believe it. We had both been given miraculous gifts.

We sat and tried to make sense of it. Which of our stories was the most unbelievable? She had committed an unforgivable sin in the school system, she thought. She had struggled to get her masters but after years of trying had not been able to work her way into a counseling job. And because of her faith, and those postcards, she now had the job of her dreams—and in her own alma mater.

And my experience was as weird, but different. At least she had been trying, she knew what she wanted to do. Those faithful postcards were regular reminders of her constancy about her goal. But I had only vague ideas about what I wanted—“a job in human services.” What I had been given was related to that, but it came from the blue. Now I had to do something with it.

My “in-between” time was over. Now I knew what I would do next.

Next: the final blog, the postscript.

Against the Wind, Day 80: THE END of a bike trip across America

BillButler — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:51:00 GMT

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

Against the Wind, Day 79: a bike trip across America - gravity boots and a rock concert

BillButler — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 07:46:00 GMT

Day 79, August 23

We had a nice breakfast the next morning in the convenient kitchen in the hotel room, and packed up and moved out. It was another nice day, and we took it for granted. The morning was somewhat cool, but by 9:00 AM things were warming up. Things can get hot in southern California in August, but right along the beach it tends to stay cool. The prevailing wind off the beach and the moist air keep things pleasant on all but the hottest days. Travel 5 miles inland, however, and the temperature might be 10 or 20 degrees hotter.

We rode along the Pacific Coast Highway, with a few detours along the cliffs to see the views, as pointed out by our Caltrans map, and other detours to avoid areas of heavy traffic. We stopped at the overlook at Dana Point to look out at the San Juan Rocks offshore, and to gaze south toward Doheny Beach (made famous in an old Beach Boys song). We then cycled past the turn to the famous Mission San Juan Capistrano, where the swallows always come back, but we kept heading south. We were heading toward San Clemente, home of Richard Nixon.

Nixon had been a highly negative symbol to me, and I had been gratified when he had resigned to avoid impeachment three years earlier. I was wondering if we would see his compound, since we were hugging the beach. As we approached the town, I asked a gas station attendant where Nixon’s house was. He explained that it was up ahead, on the right, we couldn’t miss it. He said we would be above it on the road, and that it was right next to Yogananda’s house.

This was the supreme irony. The great Indian teacher and mystic sharing space with the great amoral, Machiavellian ex-President. And sure enough, there they were, sharing a wall above a gorgeous beach. I didn’t know what to think of it: did it show that Yogananda had no scruples? That Nixon was, after all, a man of deep introspection? In any event, it had a kind of sweet-and-sour effect on us: shocking, and worth remembering.

We rode on to San Onofre, where there is another overlook with ocean views of more than 180 degrees, and a nuclear power plant right nearby. It reminded us of Nixon and Yogananda, sour and sweet, yin and yang. We got back onto a little road squeezed between the interstate and the ocean, and the ride was spectacular. Then we crossed under the interstate and rode for a while between the highway and the coastal hills, and crossed into Camp Pendleton.

This was the famous Marine base of the West Coast. We saw it on the map, and expected to be identified at the gate and issued a pass. But the gate was unoccupied and we drove right through. The landscape was rugged and untouched, except for several dirt roads that wound through the hills to our left. It was clear that they practiced amphibious landings here, and I could imagine trucks and tanks charging up those roads in the hills. I could imagine jets screaming in overhead, simulating close-in ground support.

I told Inanna of my amphibious landing at the other Camp Pendleton, a National Guard base in Virginia Beach, in 1966. As a Midshipman on summer cruise, I was put on a flat-bottomed boat in the Chesapeake Bay where we floated all night, and I was seasick all night. After that horrible night, we rendezvoused with a large troop ship which carried us outside of the Bay, past Cape Henry where the original Jamestown settlers had first landed in 1607, and where the Battle of the Virginia Capes had made the Yorktown victory and the United States possible. When off the coast south of Virginia Beach, we were made to climb down those heavy rope nets into small landing craft, and ferried to the beach at Camp Pendleton. We each wore full battle regalia, and carried an M-1 with five blank cartridges. As we hit the beach, explosions rocked the sand and jets roared in overhead. We stumbled through the water and ran across the sand. There were bleachers with dozens of what looked like tourists watching us. I was exhausted because I had held no food down for 24 hours, and was only able to run a few hundred feet, loaded down with battle gear, negotiating deep sand. I plopped down behind a sand dune and fired off my blank rounds, hoping to make a good impression on the bleacher crowd. Was this what Dylan had in mind in that other verse from Highway 61?

The Roving Gambler he was very bored

At tryin’ to create the next world war

He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor

He said, “I never engaged in this kind of thing before

“But yes, I think it can be very easily done

“We’ll just set up some bleachers in the sun

“And have it out of Highway 61”

And of course I had to tell Inanna of my mother’s tour of duty as a Marine during World War II. She had been a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in northern Minnesota at the age of 20. After one year of getting to the schoolhouse at 5 AM to light the wood stove so that the children would be warm when they arrived at 8 AM, she enlisted in the Marines. She went through boot camp at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, and became a typist for a general. Her only combat experience, which she denies now but I swear she told me about when I was young, was spraying for cockroaches in the mess hall for the other recruits, and skating on roach guts when sweeping them up after they came out into the open to die.

Then, of course, another miracle happened. She was transferred to San Diego, where my father was already stationed as a young sailor. It is hard to believe this, but they graduated from the same small high school in Staples, Minnesota, in 1940. Dad had gone to work in an aircraft factory in San Diego before the war started. After a couple years making screws on some tedious machine, he had enlisted in the Navy, where he became the “singing sailor”—for a few weeks, when a USO show would come to town, the crooner would ask for a volunteer among the hundreds of sailors, and Dad would volunteer! He sang with Horace Heidt among other famous entertainers. He then went to radio school in Boulder, Colorado and returned to California, waiting to go to sea.

So when Mom transferred to San Diego, this handsome young high school classmate was there waiting for her. In San Diego, always a wonderful place, but particularly romantic during the war, they started dating, and love bloomed. He was then assigned to a ship headed west out of San Francisco for the invasion of Japan.

It would have been a bloody scene, but luckily for Dad (and for me, as it turns out) the bomb would make an invasion unnecessary. He was given an early discharge and they were married on September 6, 1945, at the Marine Corps chapel in San Diego. I was born on June 6, 1946, nine months and one day later.

We connected to Stuart Mesa Road and continued through Pendleton. This road was not as picturesque as the nice trails behind us through the Camp, but the traffic was sparse because it paralleled Interstate 5, which carried most of the motor vehicles. The road continued approximately flat, and winds continued to be light and from the west—a cooling crosswind from the ocean. It had now been quite a while since we had had to fight headwinds. Once we turned south at Santa Cruz, we had no longer been fighting the prevailing westerlies.

We exited Camp Pendleton and passed through the small beach town of Oceanside. From Camp Pendleton to San Diego is a series of these small beach towns, and my brother lived in one of them, Solana Beach. We pedaled through Carlsbad, Leucadia, Encinitas, and Cardiff. Each had beautiful, opulent houses on the beach, or on cliffs or hills overlooking the beach. But many of the houses were older and small, with wonderful locations to make up for what was probably high rent or mortgage payments. There were rolling hills between these towns, but none of them was long enough to bother us much. Except for a short section nears Carlsbad, we hugged the beach the whole way. The ocean was our constant companion to the right. But there was more traffic than there had been in Camp Pendleton. It didn’t bother us, however—we were enjoying taking in the beach scene, people- and car-watching. Everyone seemed so relaxed, whether we were watching older people in Mercedes, young professionals in their BMWs, or even younger people in their old cars, clearly going to the beach with surfboards, or confidently going about their business of making a living as part of a beach community.

Finally we were in Solana Beach. Jack was right on South Coast Highway, the road we were taking, and I knew he was on the right side of the road, on a cliff, from the descriptions he had sent of his house. His house was one of those older ones on a thin lot, but it backed up via a long back yard to that cliff above the beach. Jack was happy to see us, in his understated way. He seemed surprised to see us, even though he knew we were coming—the surprise was from the enormity of the trip we were finishing, I believe. He gave me a warm hug and was very gracious as I introduced him to Inanna. He showed us the bedroom we would be using that night, and we unpacked.

His house was cluttered, reminding me of our parents’ home when we grew up. But he was unconcerned about it. He let us move over a pile of unfolded clean laundry and we sat on his second-hand couch, drinking a beer together. We talked but the conversation petered out. Jack was a wonderful person, but an introvert’s introvert. It always amazed me that he pursued his profession as a rock and roll musician. He was two years behind me in school, and never stood out in a crowd. Now, every night he would be standing in front of a rowdy and half-drunk crowd, playing great riffs on his guitar. Jack owned his band, along with his partner Paul Shaffer. Paul was the lead singer and Jack the lead guitar player. They had a hired drummer and base player, plus a lightman and a soundman. Jack was now beginning to sing harmonies with Paul, the hardest thing for him to do with his retiring personality. He had also taught himself to play piano and his keyboard skills would later rival his guitar contributions. He told us he had a gig that night, and would love for us to come hear his band.

We walked out onto the cliff behind his house. Jack showed us the path he took to get to the beach to surf. He had taken up surfing several years after I had left home, and was doing it for his health. He was prone to sinus infections and found that the salt water and vigorous exercise kept him fit and healthy. He also showed us his gravity boots, a gizmo that allowed him to hang upside down for long periods. He said it was good for his back and for his circulation. We were definitely in California.

It was getting chilly as the sun was almost down, so we went inside and had a simple dinner together. I told Jack we would love to see his band, but needed to get back early so we could get our normal early start, one of the many secrets to our success. Jack said he would drive us back after the first set so we could still get to bed by 10, and we readily agreed. The bar where he was playing was close by.

He said it was a very informal place, with people wandering in from the beach, and our cutoffs and worn T-shirts would not be out of place. We drove over with him to the bar and helped Jack and his bandmates set up. Jack introduced us to each of his musician friends, and they were not only members of the band. He seemed to have a following among local musicians, and he was proud in his introductions to say to each that we had just cycled in from Virginia. His friends were uniformly impressed and warm toward us.

The bar filled up and Jack began playing an electrifying guitar introduction. Soon they were all playing and singing loudly, and the patrons were up on the floor, dancing. Everyone was smiling, moving with the rhythms, joking and jostling, even chatting. In the loud music I didn’t see how they could communicate, even though they did it with their faces close and clearly shouting above the noise—this could not be heard, at least by me, but could be discerned by the bulging veins on their necks as they strained to be understood. Inanna and I just sat and soaked up the scene. We were happy not to talk, but we laughed with the crowd and enjoyed our concert immensely. After about 8 songs Jack hurried us out to the car and drove us back to his house. He didn’t want to be late in rejoining his mates, but was also going to make sure we got to bed on time. On the way to his house, Inanna and I related how much we had enjoyed the music, and the whole scene, and he clearly appreciated that. He was hoping to hit it big in rock music, and at the age of 29 it wasn’t yet too late.

We explained that we would be getting up with the sun and leaving early, and knew he would be up late, so there was no need to see us out. He hurried back to his gig after giving me another hug.

We had covered 52 more miles and attended a rock concert. The next day would be the last of our trip.

Against the Wind, Day 78: a bike trip across America - a night at the Hotel California

BillButler — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:58:00 GMT

Day 78, August 22

It was time to take our leave of Ron. He had been very nice, as gracious a host as a young man of that age can be. Now we said goodbye and headed out: first carrying our bikes again over the new carpet, then carrying our gear out and strapping it onto the bikes. We hadn’t dirtied the carpet or eaten any of Ron’s food. We hadn’t even met his mother. She was evidently sleeping late, although late for us wasn’t late for most people. We shook his hand and we were gone.

We made our way back to the beach and hooked up again with the bike route along the beach. We found a little grocery and bought food for breakfast, heating water for coffee, enjoying the beach morning. Not many people were up yet, and the sun was at our backs as we gazed out to sea. Inanna and I were reminded of our opposite beach back home: at this time of the morning, we would be looking at the rising sun, and it would be hot already. Here, it was cool, although we knew the sun would be baking us by midday.

We rode again, through Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach. Then we approached Palos Verdes, a bluff jutting out to sea between Los Angeles and Long Beach. We turned inland, along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Now, for the first time in what seemed several days, we were once again fighting traffic. The street had its share of cars, and traffic seemed to get heavier as we rode along. In addition, we encountered our first dose of smog, combined with exhaust fumes directly from the cars that were passing us. It was not easy or enjoyable riding, even though the hill we climbed was not particularly difficult compared with the mountains we had climbed over the summer. My fear of smog reappeared, and I became anxious. This was a section of road to just survive. But my lungs held up, perhaps because I was so well conditioned. Finally we coasted down the hill and saw Long Beach before us. The harbor was beautiful, particularly after the unappealing ride around Palos Verdes.

Long Beach was nicely developed, and we cruised along the beach past Seal Beach to Sunset Beach. It was time for lunch. We found another small grocery and bought food for lunch. We went back to the beach and found a bench to sit on, facing the ocean. The sun was now directly above us, but we had a breeze blowing in from the ocean cooling us. We were so tanned from our summer of exposure to the sun that we knew we would never sunburn. As we ate, we noticed something else. We had chosen a spot which might as well have been called Dog Beach—it was the spot when dog owners took their canines for a stretch, and to relieve themselves. It didn’t bother us, however, even though we were downwind and could smell the dog production from time to time. The dogs were interesting, and so were their owners.

After this relaxing lunch, we moved on, past Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. We were still hugging the coastline, not having to fight traffic, having constantly changing views of the ocean off to our right. As we approached Laguna Beach, we realized we would again need to find a place to stay in this sprawling metropolitan area. We decided we needed to stay in a motel, and began to ask people where we could find one. We inquired at a couple, but the costs were prohibitive for us. Then we saw an older-looking building on Pacific Coast Highway. Although it was an old building, it was freshly painted white. The sign said Hotel California.

If for no other reason than this was the name of a great song by the Eagles, we had to check this place out. There seemed to be few people there. It had the air of a dilapidated place which had been recently and hastily refurbished. The smell of the place was confusing—old and musty covered over by the smell of fresh paint. The manager was anxious to have guests, quoting us a price for $30 for the night. We offered $25 and settled on $28.

After that somewhat awkward negotiation, he relaxed and said we could take the bikes up to our room via the freight elevator. He let on that the room he was going to give us had a kitchen, and we were pleasantly surprised. This meant we could cook our own dinner and save a little money, which seemed important at this point: we had just spent more on lodging than perhaps all our other lodging for the entire trip added together. We had stayed at two KOA campgrounds and several nights in California State Parks at $.50 each. We had slept in our tent and been taken in by several Good Samaritans. This was the height of luxury.

We relaxed for a while at the Hotel California, and I called my brother Jack in Solana Beach. He would be our next port of call, and from there it was one day to my parents’ home. Jack was happy to hear from me, although quite amazed, even slackjawed, that we had actually almost made it from Virginia to his house. But he assured me that we were welcome that next evening.

We went out to find groceries. Just a block away was a nice grocery store and we bought steaks, potatoes, salad fixings, even a bottle of cheap red Gallo wine. We took one more look at the beautiful ocean and returned to the Hotel California. There we cooked ourselves a delicious dinner and went to bed freshly showered and in clean sheets. We had covered 51 miles, and there were 52 miles more ahead to get to Jack’s place.