One of my favorite activities during road trips is to check out the lay of the land, and the political boundaries--who "owns" what, how the land is divided and parcelled up. I often wonder who it is that would even want much of the land I see fenced in--yeah, you own that cliff with no vegetation on it. Pretty useful, aint it?
As we moved north of Calgary in Canada, we noticed that increasingly there were fewer and fewer land demarcations. There were fewer and fewer people, as well. Much of the land was gorgeous, but empty, remote, and unlivable for large portions of the year. We never travelled along roads that close down over the entire winter--all of them are plowed and used throughout the cold & snowy season. But people aren't, I guess, as worried about trespass, or anyway worried enough to justify the cost of fencing in their land. I can see that you might want your land fenced if you have herds of animals that might escape, but I can't imagine that everyone in America has these, or that nobody in Canada does. It was interesting to go for days without seeing a fence even though there were occasional gravel driveways winding off into the trees.
Besides watching the lay of the land, I'm an avid amateur sociologist. I am not the most observant person, but I do occasionally notice a thing or two. Over the course of the summer, I went from barely knowing most of the folks I was riding with to considering them family members: I don't always approve of or appreciate their choices, but my respect for them is firm and unshakeable. We bickered, we disagreed, but we trusted one another and everyone helped make the summer better. I don't try to ascribe motives to people since I know that my own motives are so often mis-assumed, but I saw changes.
I wasn't the only person who felt the change, I know--we all started referring to the group as family by the end of the trip. It was a challenge--I think that except for a few standouts, these people are not the sorts of folks I'd choose to hang out with normally. A lot of personality types, from aggressive and unforgiving to ultramaterialistic to preppy jock to princess, were represented on our team. Some took longer than others to become people in my mind, but by the end everyone had broken out of their box to be someone I trusted and whose company I enjoyed. I think almost everyone else professed the same feelings, and everyone felt them to some degree.
I miss them already.
Fortunately for those of delicate sensibilities, everyone on our team was in good enough shape to give their tuckuses a pleasing contour. Everyone's different, but everyone still was in basically good shape, which of course makes trailing them more pleasant. But over the hundreds of hours we spent in the saddle, I spent a lot of time watching the road when I did happen to be in front, or got tired of looking at cabooses, and for most of the ride, we made shadows.
An interesting feature of shadows that I'd never noticed is that while they reflect the shape of the caster, it's not constant. Bike shadows are good at demonstrating the difference--if you click on the picture I have linked in here and look really closely at the shadow the bike and rider cast, you'll see that it gets fuzzy, kind of unfocused, as the distance between the object and its shadow-on-the-ground increases.
I spent a lot of time looking at my own shadow and the shadows of others as we rode this summer. One of the most surprising things about riding so much is that I got so comfortable and accustomed to being in the saddle that bike riding is pretty hypnotic. I've never felt like running or swimming really let me zone out (quite likely due to my heinous technique!), but biking, even while pedalling, is smooth and repetitive and lulling and even soporific sometimes! I found it even comforting to watch the shadows of the rising and falling feet cycle from nearly-sharp to nearly-blurry (not as sharp as the wheel-edge on the road, not as blurry as the top of the head).
One of the most defining moments of the trip for me came in Banff National Park as the road went over a waterfall and I stopped and looked at my shadow on the water that was rushing down, hundreds of feet away. My shadow was a kind of vague blur, at first I thought because the water is blurring past at an unknown speed but certainly accelerating at 9.8m/s^2...and then as I sat and watched and felt the world changing in every instant (you can't step in the same stream twice), i saw that my shadow was actually a fixed point of reference. Not the most solid or sharp punctuation to my life's story, but an apt analogy for the trip this summer--the miles are fleeting, the road always changes, but what we're doing perserveres despite the entropy of our world, and someday we'll win the fight and we can be proud that we influenced it, even if just as shadows passing over the surface.
Despite what you may think, I did not choose the harder route this summer. By all accounts, both routes are difficult, though nobody has ever compared GPS data to see what the differences in altitude gain might be. So far, this has pretty much changed every year--routes are inconsistent and definitely change by the day, and of course days when the team has to drive change everything up.
So we all climbed, a lot. Our bikes certainly made that easier than it would have been on foot, but as far as major challenges, rain wasn't really a big factor (I don't think anyone wiped out because of rain, and it didn't slow us down much, either). Wind was far more demoralizing, actually, though Jordan calls it the best training. The wind, you can't really do much about, and unless you are riding an out-and-back course, it's unlikely to suddenly start helping you. So all you get for fighting it is a good workout.
The hills were one of our favorite types of challenges. This is not to say that we enjoyed the experience, but there was almost always some kind of reward for a climb--in the form of a descent! We started at 501 feet of elevation above sea level, and ended at 377 feet--so all of our work was cancelled out by all of our play, in the long term.
In the short term, hills suck. I like climbing if I can hammer up a hill--which means that it's a very short hill. That's where I shine, actually--on the short hills. The long hauls slow me way down and wear me out. More than once I saw someone vomiting on an uphill, while I never saw any suffering on a downhill. But they, and the wind, both made us much feel like we'd really accomplished something hard..gave us something to fight so we wouldn't become complacent. And so we loved the hills. But, we loved the "right lane ends" sign even more whenever we saw it--since it meant that a climb of sufficient proportion to cause a passing lane was near its end =)
I actually expounded on this at some length during my journal entry for 26 jun--second to last day in week 4.
I've always been a bit of a loner. One of the niggling concerns in my head about doing this trip was being "stuck" with my teammates all summer. I love to have some downtime, although I wouldn't necessarily class myself as an introvert these days. I enjoy the company of people, I just get to feeling trapped at times without a solitary place to retreat to. It turns out I shouldn't have worried--I could be alone anytime I wanted on the bike! Just go slower or faster than everyone, pull over and take a break, whatever. So I did a fair amount of my riding alone over the course of the summer and I think it kept me sane. As well, on days off, I tried to make some time for being alone and that worked out fairly well.
The funny thing was that I didn't usually ride alone. I grew to love my family, and while I didn't spend every waking moment with them, for the first 3/4 of the trip, neither did I ride alone for the sake of riding alone very often. I found it a pleasure to sweep, to paceline, to chase and catch folks and chat a bit with them, admire the scenery in their company, etc. We definitely learned to ride as a team, stayed back to help eachother, and in general found eachother to be great riding partners.
By around day 55 I noticed that I was striving to ride alone sometimes, and on day 70 I intentionally rode alone for much of the day just to kind of bask in my own feelings, my own mindspace. I haven't done any deep conclusion-drawing yet, but I think we all kind of braced for the impact of the real world, of the dissolution of family, and I've always been a Leaver. One who Leaves--not when the going gets tough, but who tries never to overstay his welcome, in conversation, in sharing the company of another, wherever. And so I guess I saw the end coming and was too detached from the now, living in the future and so started to detach...from the group, the summer, and the experience. This journal is a small way of maintaining my connection...
I found myself growing impatient with people who dedicated their day's ride to people without cancer, or to the same person over and over again. It was completely unfounded and uncharacteristic of the personality I strive to embody. The only explanation I've come up with is that I'm an impatient person and sometimes that rears its head unbidden and unwelcome at unfortunate times. I forced myself to be accepting in the medium term, since it was obviously the right thing to do. In the long term, I have no idea what to do about this personality flaw. I'll have to let it percolate. If I come back to this in a few years, maybe it'll be obvious..