Day 52 - The San Francisco Treat!
My last of sleep in the wee hours of Day 52 can be traced to several reasons: twitchy overworked body, gross room and smelly bed, ate too much too late and retired before digesting, and I WAS GOING TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO THAT AFTERNOON AND, THEREFORE, WILL HAVE RIDDEN MY BIKE ACROSS THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES!
So arising and getting my ass out the door wasn't a problem. I had been texting my SF buddies consistently for a couple days keeping them apprised of my progress and would be doing so throughout the day. My hope was that i'd have a small but mighty band of welcomers at the Golden Gate Bridge. But i was also like: i'm still gonna be there even if no one can make it. I didn't really know how long the day's journey would last since i'd be taking a ferry from Vallejo across the San Pablo, San Rafael and San Francisco Bays and hadn't figured out how often they run and that whole deal. I was out the door at 6:50 into the morning sunshine.
A mile or so down W. Capitol Ave. i picked up the Yolo Causeway Bike Path which runs alongside the 80 (or "Route 80" as we refer to it in NJ) finishing on the east side of Davis, CA which is home to UC Davis (Debbie's alma mater), a town and campus where i'd never visited. Suffice to say that it wasn't exactly teeming with co-eds at 7:45am on a summer morning just before Fourth of July weekend. What Davis is teeming with, however, is bike paths; the ride through town has you off the road and on the paths which are easy to follow. After passing the campus/downtown area, i found myself immediately surrounded by farmland. Not farms like those in Kansas or other states i passed through, but rather farms where they actually grow food for people to eat. The bulk of farmland in this nation is used to grow corn and soybeans which are mostly used to sweeten, grease up and process our food, to grow and process food for livestock, or for the livestock themselves. Again, i'll namedrop Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma as books i've read which spell all this stuff out in hundreds of pages better than i can in several hundred words. I could see with my own peepers how land is used. And it was my craving for fresh fruit and veg that impacted me throughout the trip - not the theses of two books i read. I may have mentioned before that Son of Semele developed a play written by Matt, Fencerow to Fencerow, that was inspired by The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's super-difficult to explain but coincidentally the character i played in most of the "Fencerow" incarnations was a guy who starts out the play looking for the variety of food once grown on the Iowa landscape, obsessed about the perfect apple he once ate (yes, it's quite out-there). By the end of the play, he's addicted to high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil. ... Wait, is that me or the play? Clairvoyant type-casting. (Except, thus far, i have averted transforming into the obese couch potato my character becomes as i was simultaneously riding my bike 8 hours per day during the height of my 8-week addiction to trans fat and corn sweetener).
You've all been hearing me complain about the lack of fresh food from Day 1. I certainly eat my share of animal products, on this trip and otherwise, and i'm not campaigning to end that for myself or anyone else. But isn't it fucked up that we as a country possess millions of acres of land that can be used to grow wholesome food, and barely any of it is used for that purpose? Of course it doesn't pay to use the land for that. And "we" don't own it anyway; Cargill does. There isn't as much money in broccoli as there is in high fructose corn syrup. It's just so crazy to me that i couldn't find barely ANY fresh vegetables in Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. And Nevada. Utah and Colorado were better but that's mostly because i rode through more touristy places. Annoyingly, there were farmer's markets throughout the trip but they were never on the day i was riding through. But if produce is sold locally at farmer's markets, shouldn't local restaurants buy the produce to serve to their customers? Well, they don't.
Ugh. I know i get a little preachy on this issue. I just find it interesting to be experiencing personally and directly something i've already learned from a book. And thankfully i'm back in California where i can get the food i want. From Davis through Vacaville i passed orchards of citrus, peaches, plums, apricots, olive trees, broccoli, leafy greens. The availability of this stuff helps me keeps my obsessiveness to a low hum, maintains my sanity.
Although i was experiencing headwinds while pushing mostly westward that morning, the terrain was mostly flat. Near Vacaville, I was approached by Dave, a fireman, with whom i rode for about 10 miles. He shot me the hard questions about the trip: why did i do it? what did i learn about America? what was my favorite part? what was my least favorite part? Even "how many miles per day?" is difficult because i don't know whether to include rest days in the total. Sigh. I've gotten more practiced at answering some of these questions but i almost always feel put on the spot. I'm considering creating a one-sheet that i can hand out to anyone who inquires. I'll include the blog address at the bottom if you want all the details. This part of the ride went quickly; Dave's company was welcome and i focused on the brain power that's required when conversing with a stranger, rather than the brute force of pushing a bicycle through the wind. After going out of his way for almost an hour, Dave took off back toward Vacaville to babysit his granddaughter while i stopped to eat in Rockville. In Rockville, i met a group of cyclists in matching yellow and orange outfits from nearby Benecia who were out for a workout. One guy in particular was overly pushy about providing me with an alternative to the route on the map with less headwinds. As i was taking no chances in getting lost on this day in particular, I politely demurred. But he wasn't paying attention, so i smiled and nodded in all the right places pretending to ingest his better, more wind-resistant directions. This man was also the second person of the day (Dave being the first) to ask me how much weight i lost on the trip. It's probably not surprising that it took 52 days for anyone to ask me this question. It's body-conscious California, I suppose, where ostensibly hetero men are comfortable discussing such issues without fear of being feminized. In case you're wondering, i weighed 143 lb. when i went to the doctor in LA in late April, and i weighed myself in Scott City, Kansas (when i slept in that gym) and was 128. I haven't weighed myself since then but i imagine it's more or less the same. You plateau rather than keep losing. At least that's what i read.
Moving on, i barreled toward the Vallejo ferry station. At lunch i had called for the schedule but forgot it as soon as i heard it.
Except for some reason 2:30pm stuck in my head. I had texted the SF contingent to say i'd be there at 4pm. If i got the ferry at 2:30 (it lasts an hour), i'd just make 4pm with the 6 or 7 mile ride to the Golden Gate from the terminal in SF. The winds from the bay did their best to slow me down but i worked hard, anxious to see friends, a city i love, and the bridge and be done with this leg of the journey.
Ha! I got there at 2:28 with no time to spare. Except that the ferry was not until 3:30. Oops. So i had an hour to kill. I got a giant smoothie and talked the ear off the lady cleaning the floors who didn't believe me at first when i told her where i rode from. I paced around, peed like 3 times, didn't know what to do with myself.
The boat was comfortable and clean. I parked Whitey where the boat guy said to and went on the observation deck. It was cool and windy, exactly what you'd expect from San Francisco. Not grasping the geography of the
Bay Area well enough to know where Vallejo was, what direction we'd be traveling, and when i'd catch my first glimpse of the city, i snapped some pictures of myself to capture the moment. As in the ferry terminal, i couldn't sit still. I went to the upstairs deck, then down to check on Whitey, then upfront inside the cabin where i took some bad photos of the the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge (thinking it was the Bay Bridge) and of the city way in the distance. I tried to focus on the Transamerica Pyramid (in part for the obvious reason - get it? - but mostly because Donny loves skyscrapers and i've gotten him lots of miniatures of buildings including this one). I was so jittery, i think, because it's hard to stop riding and then start again. I was gonna have to ride to the bridge and then to Carlos and Hendrik's or Carrie and Jeremy's place. Also, this marked the end that wasn't really the end since i still had 500 more miles to bike down the coast - three days of which would be with Donny!
The ferry spat me out and i rode down Embarcadero, around Fort Mason and whatever that park
is called, on Marina and alongside of Crissy Field. There were tons of people on bikes - many rented by tourists riding them to see the Golden Gate and the Presidio. I was a tourist too and proud of it. The day was sunny and beautiful. I had this huge shit-eating grin on my face and tears running down my cheeks when i caught that first sight of the bridge. Coldplay's Viva La Vida played (a perfectly self-aggrandizing song!). Everyone i passed seemed happy and relaxed. People were flying enormous kites in the whipping wind. I was reminded of the last time that I was in London. Since Ju and Kersh live near Manchester, that's my home-base when i go back to England. London is now a separate trip-within-a-trip. Ju and I went down when i was over there two years ago, and we went to the South Bank. Everyone there - walkers, runners, cyclists, loungers, sunbathers, picnickers - seemed joyous in my memory of it, that summer feeling you dream about when the weather's dull. Maybe it's just the feeling of being on vacation? Anyway, the feeling of the people riding along the bike path and lounging on Crissy Field was the exact same - with the added bonus of the fact that i had made it on my bicycle across the country.
I took several minutes and texts to find Carrie and Phoebe and Finn. And then Carlos and Hendrik found us. We were all excited and impressed (Finn is a baby so he was probably less excited about something specific). I forgot a few times we were talking about me and what i had accomplished. It felt like i was referring to someone else; I'm so used to the habit of minimizing my own success that unabashed pride is frequently a foreign and uncomfortable impulse that should be squashed. Is being pleased with oneself socially acceptable? I can hear the voices in my head, usually so clear, saying like: "Oh, such-and-such-accomplishment can't be that big of a deal since i did it." But those voices/impulses are kind of quiet these days. It's not so much that i think i'm the shit - it's more that the journey was so hard throughout. It never stopped being a challenge - the weather, the loneliness, the discomfort, the food, the riding. I can't argue my way out of feeling good about it.
My arrival in San Francisco was only eleven days ago but i remember other stuff more clearly from the days and weeks before. I decided it was best to stay at Carlos's place since he was offering his bed and would shack up with Hendrik for the night. Bike directions to C & H's were discussed and outlined avoiding the evilest of SF hills and we agreed to meet Carrie and Jeremy for dinner in about an hour. Hendrik is studying for the MCAT in August so he was gonna skip dinner. The half-hour i was told it would take to get to the apartment near 16th and Market from the Golden Gate ended up being more like 50 minutes and added 9 miles to the day's journey for a grand total of 94 miles. We dined at Serpentine which i have enjoyed in the past, and it did not disappoint. I ate twice as much as anyone else but still couldn't finish the second or third round of bread i had demanded. Carrie had just completed her second or third sprint triathlon and Carlos is already training for the LA Triathlon (though it isn't for 3 months) which we previously did together a few years ago, so i was in good company (not that i wouldn't have been had they not been tri-bound - i'm just singing their praises!)
I did laundry (actually Hendrik did it - thanks, Hendrik!) and went to bed in Carlos's absurdly comfortable bed. I did it. Almost.
Comments
Post a Comment