Occupation of Independence

Consider how easy it is to be a member of the amateur commentariat. No wonder we don't get paid for it. Then again, look at how easy it is to be an amateur anything: you only do what you want, when you are in the mood to do it. What a remarkable talent it must be to be a novelist, and to put yourself into other people's heads and hearts. I will never be able to do that well. The extreme difficulty of doing this was brought home to me today. The local bicycle email group notified us of a cycle touring guy who was going through the Little Pueblo, trying to raise awareness of the dangers of texting while driving. His college-age son had been killed recently on his bicycle by a distracted driver who was paying more attention to texting than driving. Most of the local cyclists were out of town for a special race, so I am the only one who rode out halfway to escort him in, to honor him and his cause. He was some kind of medical doctor, and a very personable fellow, easy to talk

Long-suffering readers are probably tired of my complaints against the trivialness of travel-newbies or the romantic escapism of wannabees. OK then, let's keep it positive. Every now and then a reader runs across an exception to the trivia of travel, and it can occur in the most unlikely place.  I read bicycle touring blogs. Normally they show pretty postcards of landscapes, punctuated with mind-numbing prose about camping details. Or ride statistics. Everybody has a cycle odometer these days. If they rode  56.43 miles today, as read off the screen of the odometer, they will include the '3' in the hundredths place in their daily post, as if the reader really cares. Now I ask you, folks, what does the hundredths place have to do with the Human Condition or the state of the Universe in general? But there are exceptions. A bicycle tourer was going through Egypt during their recent uprising. He stayed at a hostel next to Tahrir Square. He actually had the guts (or recklessnes

Today was a special day in the southern New Mexican highlands. Let me write about it before the memory fades. I had mountain biked on a paved road up the standard hill, until it was time to jump out onto a forest trail. The trail was so carpeted with long ponderosa needles that I wouldn't have been able to follow it if trees hadn't been marked, even though I was familiar with the trail. At the beginning of autumn I had been pelted by falling ponderosa needles near here. Wikipedia doesn't say whether ponderosas are semi-deciduous, but it sure looked like it. Instead of being cold and dark at these higher locations like I feared, the forest canopy seemed more open than in summer. It was actually warmish, 25% sunny, and dead calm. Thus it was warmer than at the lower elevations, which are open, windy grasslands. The gaps in the canopy allowed me to always feel connected to the cold clear sky. I was giddy in a forest! Previously I had belonged to a large school that dislikes

There's probably somebody out there who knows how many armchair travelers lurk on internet travel blogs. For purposes of discussion let's assume it's 90% of the readers of travel blogs. Having fallen into the ignoble category myself, I have often wondered why I keep coming back for more. After all most bicycle touring blogs don't make for great reading unless you are really interested in whether they had oatmeal or pancakes for breakfast, or whether they found a laundromat that was open, etc. Most of these people are remarkable endurance athletes, but poor visitors. They simply crunch miles all day long, and end the day over-accomplished in one activity (burning calories) and impoverished in all others, leaving them with little to say despite all their effort. So why read their silly blogs? For awhile the explanation seemed to be that theirs is a true adventure, in contrast to motor-vehicle-based vacationers or RV bloggers. But that wasn't totally satisfactory. L

For a second or two it felt like a real punch to my stomach when the waiter told me that the little cafe would be closing soon. I cherished stopping in on the way back from a standard summer bicycle ride. The food was surprisingly good here, just a few pedal kicks from the continental divide, on the edge of an old mining town.  To actually get pleasure from a restaurant is so rare for me that it is worth dwelling on this wonderful little cafe. Normally I consider food at restaurants to be mediocre, tasteless, and obscenely over-priced. Oh, and the background din. This year they had added a overhead shelter made of galvanized, corrugated steel, one of the building materials used in decaying New Mexican dumps, a great favorite of mine.  Red chiles hung dried in bunches next to my table. The rafters of the structure looked like de-barked pine logs, and made me think of the ponderosa forest I had just bicycled through. Off in the distance was a pair of mountain peaks which some frie

Bicycling isn't the only sport that needs a certain amount of gathering-up prior to beginning. Nor is old age the only time of life when you forget things. But for some reason none of that helps when I start a bike ride without a water bottle.  My ride begins by climbing over a 1000 feet up to the continental divide. If I notice that I've forgotten water halfway up the hill I become so angry at myself that I can't think about anything else. A desperate thirst overtakes me. This happened again recently. (Why not just store equipment, including the water bottle, on the bike? Then you won't forget anything. I've been telling myself that for 30 years.) To make matters worse there is no place to buy bottled water on my route. What the heck was I supposed to do? Approaching the Divide I suddenly got an idea: there are always plastic bottles littering the roadside. Normally I just avert my eyes. Why not keep an eye out for them, grab one, take it to the cafe or somebod

This wasn't supposed to happen to me. I don't even know where to get treatment for it. I'm talking about becoming addicted to travel blogs. A journal junkie. No, not RV travel blogs. They're nice folks, but their notion of travel is un-adventuresome to the extreme, as is the case with about any motor-vehicle culture. With RV culture, old age makes it even worse. Nor have I gotten hooked on the young world-vagabonder blogs; hitchhiking around the globe and staying in youth hostels is something I just can't relate to. Rather, it's the bicycle touring blogs that have hooked me, even though I loathe tent camping and high-traffic highways. Perhaps the key to enjoying any subculture is to discount or laugh off 95 percent of it as uninteresting or uncomfortable stereotypes, and then look for the 5 percent that is juicy and interesting. Deja vu helped too. When I was being drawn into dog culture I went to an agility trial for the first time, and was really entertai

Because of our rainy and snowy winter I got a bit out of shape. This offered me an unusual chance to relive the process of getting in shape in the spring, like I experienced it years ago, back East. It was the sequence of the human machine that interested me. First the quadriceps get stronger. Then aerobic fitness makes a comeback. These two things happen quickly. The last thing on the list, which takes all summer, is lower back strength. It really is the back, and not "thunder thighs," that gets you up the hills.  The second-to-last machine part is the subtle one. The human body must be harnessed correctly in order to efficiently operate a crank-machine like a bicycle. I can't quite remember, but I think it was the classic book on medieval technology by Lynn Townsend White that emphasized how slow the development of the crank was. A crank mechanism converts rotary motion into linear motion, or vica versa.   You might even remember your grandmother powering her Singer

A reader recently touched one of my hot buttons when he said that he ' should exercise more.' It's ironic that I am writing this when Coffee Girl, my new dog, is not supposed to exercise because she was spayed a couple days ago. Yesterday both dogs and I were restless and irritated. I think we are going to be naughty and have a nice walk today. If only I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone say that they should exercise more. That is the moral equivalent of sitting on the sofa in front of the boob toob and saying 'I really should eat more organic dehydrated alfalfa pellets, washed down with distilled water, instead of this bag of potato chips and ranch dip, but ...' Why do people discuss exercise like they are swallowing bitter medicine? The worst idea of all is to do routine exercise indoors. No wonder people think that making yourself exercise is an exercise in sheer will power. Is there an alternative to this self-defeating s

After pulling into town RVers typically park in the spacious parking lots of big boxes on the edge of town. Let's say you've done so but are still hitched up, and then you see the store you really want just across the street. What do you do: walk or drive? For your sake I hope you drive, as silly as that seems. There is little allowance made for pedestrians on most American streets, except in Oregon or some mountain towns in Colorado. I had a close call walking across the street in western Colorado, recently. Despite the close call, Colorado is quite good in that department. I dreaded returning to culturally backward states like Utah and Arizona.  Since western Colorado is in the gravitational field of Moab, I found a cycling newspaper and read about a tragic accident involving a cycling advocate. I started rolling the tape back over all the cyclists I've known who were smacked by cars. The next day I stopped to help a caterpillar cross the road near the B

Normally I only have a bit of success in getting anything out of geology books. It's not the geologist-author's fault (ahem) necessarily--it's the nature of the subject to have lots of jargon and memorization in it. On a mountain bike ride the other day, my little poodle and I headed up the Uncompahgre Plateau on a smooth dirt road. It was pleasant but unexciting, and since there was no special scenery along the way it seemed like the ride might be a little disappointing. But then the magic started happening; I started to lose self-consciousness and melt into the landscape. There is a trance-like quality to one's state of mind at times like this. Perhaps because of that, or because of the congruity of the bicycle's speed and the gradual changes up the plateau, I was able to imagine the grandeur of geologic time. "Imagine" or "appreciate?" I'm not sure. But in either case it would have been impossible for me to experience this a

It was time for one last ride near Leadville, CO. It was my first time here and I have sort of fallen in love with the place. I chose to mountain bike up a dead end road; they are unpopular with weekenders. Heck, they were even unpopular with me during the first couple years of full time RV boondocking. It took some real effort to break away from the nearly universal preference for a loop road. On the ride we passed a fine old cabin. Apparently somebody lived in it, at least seasonally. It had a marvelous view back to Mt. Elbert. When I hike or bike uphill I never turn around, per Satchel Paige's classic advice. But in this case I'm glad I did. Although it was only mid-morning Mt. Elbert already had a canopy of threatening clouds. We explored a bit more before returning.  Coming down was such a glide! At one point I went to check out a spur road that went up an exposed ridge, my favorite topographic form. The freshening breeze was so delightful, on a day when most

East of Santa Fe, 7500--10,200 feet. Today's adventure was to see how close we could get to the top of Glorieta Baldy Mountain.  A mountain bike ride starts off well when the forest service road is smooth, packed dirt, and you are surrounded by thinned ponderosa pines. Better yet, the road followed a ridge so we gained our altitude with little waste. Finally our luck ran out as the road got steeper and rougher. It isn't just altitude and gravity that kills a rider off--it's the road texture. I groaned when the ponderosa pines yielded to spruce and birch, and then to sub-alpine fir. The blackness and bugginess of dense forests is depressing. Still, it's fun to watch for transitions as a sign of your progress. The humidity and cloud cover were gloriously moderate; and the road was shaded. Were we getting anywhere near the top? I couldn't see anything of course. And yet there was the overarching reassurance of being on a ridge. There is beauty unique to si

It is only fair that a Westerner should admit that his forests are deadly dull compared to back East. The West has other advantages; a good sport must lose on something. But at least we have ponderosa forests. Every hiker probably appreciates them: the semi-openness, most of all. (Most western forests are horribly mismanaged bark-and-needle thickets.) A mountain biker probably likes ponderosa forests even more. Because the ponderosas grow separately, enough sunlight hits the forest floor to keep it dry and warm; lots of grass grows between the ponderosas. Presumably that's the origin of rich brown soil in these forests, even when lava is close to the surface, such as on the Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona. Ahh, rich brown soil; smooth and hard-packed. I flew along on a single track trail today and felt like a kid. At times the bike launched into the air, after cresting a mogul. After this giddiness, at the end of the ride, I biked through an area with many yellow flowers . Noth

There are disadvantages in being a solo traveler. It is a serious topic, but somewhat long. I prefer to just nibble at the edges of this topic. There are several assets that could make life less lonely for a single traveler. For instance, a perfect salesman-like personality would help a lot. Or be a cute woman with an interesting foreign accent. Bicycle tourers attract attention and help because they don't look like the standard tourist. Lacking any of those advantages I came up with another. Consider a recent experience. A construction worker noticed my little poodle who was doing his usual routine in the cargo trailer behind my mountain bike. We were all delighted to find out that the construction worked had once had a small poodle with the same name as mine. We had a nice chat. I wish I had a nickel for every person who approached the little poodle and me when he was on the job in the BOB trailer behind the bicycle.  I usually ask them, considering how many horse trailers t