A Cursory Look at Hike and Bike Culture

The bus spit me out in the small lumber town of Rio Dell. It was nearly 3pm, but the weather was fair and my demeanor expansive. I called my mom and ate a few tacos. Then off, down that road, the mighty 101, still getting used to the weight of the bags, maybe 50 pounds making the bike a more sluggish, deliberate vehicle which resisted going uphill and then refused to stop going down. The route, which I have taken by car countless times, took on a whole new character at cycle's pace. In no time I was on the Avenue of the Giants winding around ancient redwood groves and minivans full of Arizonans on the last legs of tourist season.

Just before dark I floundered into Burlington camp ground and chatted with the host. I paid the man $5 and set up camp in the Hike and Bike section. Camping next to me were a couple from Switzerland, of course, half through a trip bicycling around the world. No matter where you go, if you see someone on a bike loaded up with gear zooming through the middle of nowhere, the odds would favor you to assume that they are Swiss, and their destination is the tip of some distant continent several months away. The Swiss simply have shit figured out.

At the next site over I met Malcom and James, both of whom had started their ride about a month earlier in northern Washington. I had seen James a few days before standing on a corner with his bike in uptown Arcata. He is biking all the way to Argentina. He'd better like the Swiss.

I took a walk in the woods. When I returned it was dark and I went to my tent to sleep. But then, a great noise aroused me from slumber - a voice, loud, assertive, incessant, engaging the couple camped next to me.

"I'm John! I'm the strange one! I'm going north! That's right, north! Straight back to Canada! Slowly but surely! What kinda bike is that anyways, hey? An old GT knockoff, hey? Well, I will be damned, I will be god damned! Ya know, I got a friend over there at the GT factory in New Mexico! Oh yeah, they all know me there! Crazy old Canadian John! Just another wacky Canuck, thats me!"

Canuck John went on for about half an hour, requiring only the vaguest grunts of feedback from his audience to continue.

"Ya know there was this one time I was at a campsite a lot like this one! I lit up a doobie, a huge old thing, must have been about a foot long, and just about as wide! And this woman comes over, real hag, she says 'I don't like that!' but I just look at her and smile and say, 'hey lady, look around you. You're in the woods!'"

Eventually, when John's Grand Combustion had finally expired, the campground was silent. The next morning he spotted me on the way to the bathroom.

"San Diego, hey? Let me tell you about this one time in San Diego..."

And off he went on some story about booze, buds, babes, and bikes. I liked the guy. It was 8:30 in the morning and he was already puffing a joint and working on a silo of Busch Light. He struck me as a sort of archetype, something out of a JRR Tolkien novel or an old Druidic folk tale, the hapless fool who comes plowing through the woods at just the right time, spilling beer and stories and a laugh that makes your spleen contract.

We talked for a while. Well, I listened for a while. A truck full of convicts in orange jumpsuits arrived and began hacking down tree limbs and sweeping things up. The campground was closing for the season. Everybody packed up and took off.

The last thing I heard was Canuck John hucking it up with the camp host saying, "Slowly but surely, thats me!"

written by  chaddeal on October 20, 2009 from Rio Dell, United States
from the travel blog: The CaliforniaX 9000 Autumnal Bicycle Bonanza
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