This summer, it’s been
hard for me to react to all the fuss about high gasoline prices. I
never have sticker shock at a gas pump because I haven’t owned a
car for 30 years, and far from being a liability, my life has been
all the richer for it.
It has certainly enriched my
travel experiences. Alone on my bike, or with my wife Sandra on our
tandem, we’ve explored Northern California and Oregon. The
grand vistas of our region — the Pacific Ocean and Coast
Ranges, the interior valleys and forests — can all be
truly appreciated from the seat of a bicycle.
In a car,
the natural world is “out there.” On a bicycle, you’re a part of it
all. Of course, that can have its down side. Sandra and I know,
through our sweat and huffing and puffing, why the Columbia River
Gorge is a favorite place for wind surfers. But we also know what
it’s like to swoop down the California coast with the wind at our
backs and a glimmering, turquoise ocean stretching out as far as we
can see.
We’ve been battered by coastal rains and
arrived, soaked and dispirited, at a campground near midnight. Then
the next evening we’ve sat in utter contentment, sipping tea
at the end of the day as we watched pelicans glide over the waves.
We travel back roads for the most part, and with our
quiet mode of travel, we catch glimpses of wildlife we might not
otherwise see: The possum scrambling in the brush by the side of
the road, a blue heron about to take flight.
I recently
completed a 500-mile bike trip from my home near Mount Shasta, down
the California coast to San Francisco. One of the things I look
forward to on a trip like this is the unexpected, the serendipitous
experience that may lie around the next bend. What I did not expect
this time was spending a night dwarfed by redwood trees in the
middle of a grove called the Avenue of the Giants.
I wish
I could say that I’d stopped deliberately, wanting to
commune, Thoreau-like, with those magnificent, ancient redwoods.
But the truth is that my bike light failed, it was pitch dark and I
was stuck until the sun came up — a mystical and eerie
experience.
Eerier yet was the time I was biking on the
road that winds along the Klamath River, and spotted a man plodding
down the road in a wetsuit. When I stopped to ask about his odd
hiking attire, the man told me he was a miner, one who tries to
scoop up gold by swimming underwater with a suction hose. Had I
been whizzing along in a car at 50 or 60 miles an hour, intent on
getting to San Francisco by the end of the day, I might have
exclaimed but not stopped to satisfy my curiosity.
Speaking of the unexpected, how about the transvestite in a low-cut
top and red glitter wig? He-she was standing on a back road just
north of San Francisco, cheering on a passing stream of cyclists.
As I pedaled alongside them, I learned that this was a training
ride for HIV-positive cyclists, preparing for a fund-raising trip
from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Had I been driving a
car, I would never have met a grizzled man named Steve, who was
staying in one of the hiker-bicycle camps that dot the California
coast. Steve was the proud middle-aged and chain-smoking owner of
one of the best-equipped bikes I’ve ever seen. It was sleek and
black with 24 speeds and featured a portable computer and coffee
thermos mounted on the handlebars. Stashed away in compact zippered
bags was more equipment than you’d find on a lot of recreational
vehicles. Steve, I learned after talking to him awhile, was
homeless. He stays in a mission north of San Francisco in the
wintertime and tours state parks the rest of the year. The high-end
bike was the closest thing he had to a home.
For this shy
and introverted writer, riding a bicycle has been a 30-year
privilege. It’s been a bridge connecting me to people I might
not otherwise meet, and a link to landscapes that would otherwise
be framed by a windshield.
Tim Holt is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives in
Dunsmuir, in Northern California.
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