The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it, with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
--Bilbo Baggins, in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
By Patrick O'GradyBack home after Sea Otter
MARCH CAME IN LIKE A LION, and it apparently intends to go out like the Alien, with air superiority provided by a squadron of winged monkeys and a battalion of werewolves mopping up on the ground.
The Spousal Unit told me not to even try to make it home Monday night, and not just because a day with me is like a day without sunshine. Seems it was snowing sideways on Mount Dog, and since I managed to nuke the hydraulics in the neighbor's plow last snowstorm, achieving hearth and home without fatal misadventure was starting to look like a rough draft for a Jack London story.
So instead of reclining in the ultra-chic Dog House, sipping an impertinent Cabernet from my monogrammed bowl and snacking leisurely on the odd bite of high-protein kibble, I spent a double sawski for an enchanting evening in an Albuquerque Motel 6, with a solitary Guinness for nourishment and a ringside seat for the domestic dispute going on in the next room.
Bellowing "Shut the fuck up!" seemed to have a calming effect, though such exposition can occasionally unite the warring couple against the common enemy. Either way, I'm cool. They can sit up all night, smoking crack, checking the moldy loads in their Llama .380s and wondering when the crazy sumbitch in the next room is going to kick down the door, a chattering Uzi in each hand. And I can stack up some Zs.
At times like this I question my habit of driving everywhere. The idea was to get off this snowbound rockpile and hunt down the sun, get a little color on these pallid limbs, maybe ride a bit. I managed to log a little saddle time alongside the Pacific in Monterey, but evil weather and a quickly thinning wallet croaked my plans to drift south toward Arizona's McDowell Mountain Park for a couple days' camping and cycling.
So why not give up these cross-country Toyotathons and join the mooing herds shambling past the X-ray machines, squeezing into seats designed to accommodate a 4-year-old girl and eating food that a Bangladeshi beggar would refuse? Get a little fascism into your life. Naw, your flight ain't on time, but get here two hours early anyway in case we need to cavity-search you. Mail your luggage to New Guinea, save us the trouble of losing it. Boot up that laptop, boy, we gotta make sure you ain't hiding no bazooka in there. Move along, move along. And people wonder why airline passengers attack the crew.
Fact is, no matter how you travel -- by air, by auto or by shank's mare -- sooner or later you're going to find yourself stuck in someplace that sucks. But you have more options if you're piloting your own rig.
When you fly, you get to listen to the shrieking of children or some button-down corporate thug boasting about his latest killing. When you drive, you can treat your ears to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" on Flagstaff's KNAU, or eavesdrop as callers to KUNM's "Native America Calling" discuss a sacred hoop of eagle feathers that will be carried across the country as part of a walk to draw attention to Native American issues.
And you get to see things that make you go, "Hmmm." Like a sign for "Brown Material Road" near Paso Robles. I'll stick to Highway 46, thanks all the same. A billboard advertising a New Mexico eatery with "cave atmosphere." What's that, bats hanging from the ceiling and guano on the floor? Diehards riding their bikes through the snow to Flagstaff's Late for the Train coffee shop on San Francisco Street.
OK, so I was stuck in this Motel 6 in a whorehouse of a town sporting the red light of cookie-cutter capitalism, Wal-Marts next to CompUSAs across from Mickey Ds alongside Dennys. But I'd just eaten a great Italian meal in Scalo's, on Central near the University of New Mexico, and I was sipping a pint of stout while scanning The New York Times online. Try that on a 737 sometime. You'll get a plastic tray full of warm flu, a bottle of Bud Light and an "inflight magazine" written by the 4-year-old girl they designed the seats around.
Next morning, I had my coffee and a breakfast burrito slathered in fiery red chile in Santa Fe's Guadalupe Cafe, over a copy of the local muckraker, The Santa Fe Reporter. Lunch was a brace of tacos from Tess's Dairy Drive-in in Walsenburg, Colorado. And by midafternoon, I was home.
Naturally, it's snowing again. But at least I know where my luggage is. Right here, next to the PowerBook, where I can get to it quickly. Wonder what the weather's gonna be like in Fountain Hills this weekend? I could use a road trip.
"Like barkers in a shooting gallery, they throw out kind of a Texas Guinan routine ... 'Hello sucker, we like your money, just as well as anybody else's here.'"
--Tom Waits, "Nighthawk Postcards," from Nighthawks at the Diner
By Patrick O'GradySaturday at Sea Otter
EVER SEEN ONE of those shopping-center carnivals? Not like Six Flags Uber Alles or even a seedier knockoff like Denver's Lakeside Gardens, but a real bag full of assholes, a here-today-gone-tonight kind of outfit, with more bad tattoos than a New Mexican jail and all the ambience of an 24-hour porn theater?
Back when I was a hairy young evildoer, the proprietor of one of these ratbags, who'd had a couple of henchmen vanish mysteriously, offered jobs to me and a friend. Join the carnival, see the world, or at least as much of it as is visible from a toilet of a traveling tent show with a few clattering rides, a beanbag toss and some other tried-and-true ways of separating a mark from his money.
We declined, and probably saved ourselves from being sold as playthings to wealthy ass-bandits or some other, equally appalling fate, perhaps even worse than the never-ending nightmare of being a middle-class white teen-ager in Colorado Springs, though we couldn't picture a worse place at the time, what with our parents being dicks and the price of dope and all. But I always wonder where that road might have led.
Happily, if you're patient, another carnival will come along, and it won't have you looking over your shoulder for escape routes, shifting your wallet to a front pocket and palming a knife. The past couple of years, it's been the Sea Otter, which has more bike racing in four days than most places have in four years. And it's not all about racing, which may be the reason for the Otter's appeal, and subsequent success. There are fun rides, play areas for the kids, food, beer and a consumer expo packed wall to wall with toys, lots of toys, from big dogs like SRAM and Cannondale to small puppies like Chris Kelly and Ibis.
I came here for the first time last year, working for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. This year, I came back on my own, just to get the hell out of Colorado, where winter has been relocated to spring. I'm not making any money here, but I wasn't making any back home, either. At least here the sun is shining, the women aren't wearing much of anything, and I don't have to work, unless you count an hour spent signing books and Fat Guy jerseys at the VeloNews booth.
Hey, check it out, I'm finally part of the carnival. Step right up, ma'am, this way to the Amazing Mad Dog. He flies back and forth across the Great American Desert with no visible means of support. Be sure to stand well back from the cage should he lift up a leg, buddy. Makes the monkey house at the zoo look like a night in the hot tub with Elle McPherson. Filthy pictures, mister? Just ten bucks, guaranteed 100 percent ink on paper or your money back. How about a nice yellow jersey, woven by native craftsmen from the finest baby polyesters? Get 'em now before the oil runs out. The XXXL doubles as a three-season tent, poles and guylines not included, some assembly required. Step right up, step right up, everyone's a winner, bargains galore.
"We treat children like young calves being groomed to become veal."
--Richard Killingsworth, Centers for Disease Control, noting that today's kids spend the bulk of their days confined in small spaces: in front of the tube, in a classroom, or in a car
By Patrick O'GradyFriday at Sea Otter
ONE IN FOUR ADULTS in this land of plenty is obese, according to Richard Killingsworth, a health scientist with the Centers for Disease Control. He must've seen the same porker I did, muscling a beater Toronado into a Denny's parking lot in Marina, California, a cigarette dangling from one swollen paw. I think she was all four of those folks.
Killingsworth and Congressman James Oberstar were at Sea Otter at the behest of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, the trade mag I work for, to encourage bicycle-industry types to work together to solve America's fitness problems and their own financial troubles. This is not unlike asking the Democratic and Republican parties to unite behind Pat Buchanan's campaign for the presidency, an event that would give the name "White House" a whole new meaning.
The bike industry has been sitting on its collective hands for years now, waiting for the next mountain bike to come along. Meanwhile, says Killingsworth, there are 75 million people out there who are ready to struggle up and off the couch to engage in some sort of family-related physical activity, if only someone would show them how.
But we're not marketing to them. In fact, it's not clear exactly who we are marketing to. Bicycles are used in advertising to sell just about everything except themselves, with multiply pierced stud muffins and muffinettes flying through the air like bad guys in a Jackie Chan flick. Killingsworth suggests that big butts, not big air, should be the issue here. Boy, you won't sell much Mountain Dew like that, dude.
And that may be part of the bike industry's problem. We don't much like the kind of folks who go around drinking lots of Mountain Dew because their TVs told them to. They tend to be on the stout side, they don't know diddley about 10-speed Campy, and they couldn't clean a speed bump on an ATV.
Trouble is, there's a lot more of them than there are of us. And if we don't make a few more of us out of the raw material that is them, we might as well all get jobs selling something they do like. Dew like? Hey, I think we've got a new marketing campaign happening here. Let's Dew lunch.
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts....
--Heinrich Heine
By Patrick O'GradyThursday, en route to Sea Otter
GAS PRICES MUST NOT be too high yet. The annual Texan migration is well under way, from Colorado to California, and they're not driving Geo Metros.
Like buzzards returning to Hinkley, Ohio, these happy wanderers are not concerned with the price of gasoline, whether it's $2 a gallon or $20 a pint. They're piloting rigs the size of Goodwill donation trailers, towing SUVs with boats on the roof and scooters on the back. Just east of Kingman, Arizona, there was a brief eastbound pod of Toyota Dolphins, an elderly class of mini-motorhome often powered by the venerable 22R four-cylinder. Flipper among the whales.
The gas prices in Kingman offered some explanation for the sudden preference for Nipponese nomadry: Buck-seventy-nine a gallon. Inexplicably, the station nearest the interstate was hawking go-juice for 10 cents less than everyone else, and the bluehairs were queueing up like it was the last tankful they'd ever see. Could be.
My own rice-grinder, the Road Dog -- a 1998 Toyota Tacoma -- was sucking down the 87 octane like a bog-trotter guzzles Guinness, thanks to a killer headwind, a V6 power plant and someone's lead foot. I'd wanted to drive the four-cylinder '83 to this year's Sea Otter, but it lacks a camper shell, and I like to snooze in the truck on these cross-country jaunts. This offers all the amenities of a Motel 6 without the $40 price tag and the six drunk construction workers in the room directly above yours.
All the Tacoma lacks is fuel efficiency, a cab light and a functional CD player, which was finally pummeled into silence by Crusty County's indifferently maintained gravel roads. I learned a lot about Jesus when NPR finally gave out around Mohave.
I almost always learn something on these road trips, which is why I prefer driving to flying. What I've learned this time -- or, perhaps, relearned -- is that Americans will not be giving up their SUVs anytime soon, no matter how much the gas costs. You can't tow a motor home with a Geo Metro, and only migrant workers, fugitives and itinerant journalists sleep in their trucks.
Words and pictures © 2000 by Patrick O'Grady/Mad Dog Media. All rights and most lefts reserved.
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