Anything’s Possible

“Don’t you know, it’s gonna be sweat

And some tears

And some hard years

Best believe they’ll be hurt

And some pain

Expect some rain”

- Jonny Lang

Riding along yesterday and realizing I only had two more of these to write, I couldn’t help but have this baseball analogy crop up over and over in my head.

Yesterday was like managing a baseball or softball team (no disrespect intended to anyone for the use of male pronouns) and you only have two pitchers. The ace pitches every game, while your reliever comes in only when the game is out of hand and the outcome has already been decided. The ace staggers into the clubhouse an hour before game time, and it’s clear he tied one on last night and is in no condition to pitch the critical game. Your head drops, your shoulders sag as you glance out to the bullpen. Your reliever is completely unspectacular and unreliable. Think Rudi Stein, not Nook Laloosh (for the younger audience, use your Googles). You reluctantly send him the word he’s going to pitch. The smoke in the air is already wreaking havoc on his chronic asthma. Now it starts to rain. Not enough to cancel the game and let your ace sober up, but just enough to hamper the reliever’s already shaky command of the strike zone. The game starts and somehow, despite an onslaught of hits and walks, you find yourself still in the game. Your pitcher is exhausted but you have no choice but to keep trotting his spaghetti-arm back out there for more abuse. After 6 innings, he comes staggering to the dugout with a massive blister on his hand. Amazingly, it doesn’t pop. He slogs back out to the mound for the 7th and 8th. When it comes time for the 9th, he finds a reserve of energy he didn’t know he had and blows through the inning. The team has survived and lived to play one more day.

Translation: Yesterday morning before even beginning my penultimate ride, my first string bike had a flat. I have no idea how. It was fine the day before when I was finished. Thank God for redundancy. It had helped the day before with respect to my GPS apps and it helped yesterday that I had brought my spare bike with me. The spare has been a model of consistency over the years, getting a flat tire on average about every 50 miles or so. To describe me as nervous to count on it to get me through is a significant understatement. I had the spare tubes available to fix the other bike, but I was running a bit later than I hoped and I would have had to sit out in the rain to do it. You read that correctly. In Sisters, Oregon, where the average September rainfall is 0.4” and where they have received 0.05” in the last two and a half months, it rained. Of course, my packing for this last section of the trip focused on daily high temperatures, not low ones, so 61 and raining in a (wet) long-sleeve t-shirt was suboptimal. The traffic on the highway was somewhere between heavy and very heavy. It also appears to have been the day selected to move all the hay from eastern Oregon to western Oregon on massive trucks on this particular route. In addition, I had removed the fenders from the spare bike awhile ago, so the rooster tail from the back tire left a dirt and mud stripe down my back from my neck to my seat. Not to be outdone, the rooster tail from the front tire coated my face and helmet. After the sun finally came out about 30 miles into the ride, the spray being kicked up from the still-wet road, put a nice thick layer of road grit onto my sunglasses as well.

At the 62 mile mark, I met up with Kelly in Detroit, Oregon - a former resort town that was reduced to ashes by a fire a couple years ago. Now all the businesses operate out of shipping containers. About 5 mile before I met her, I had ridden through some road construction. Shortly after, I heard this consistent clicking noise, like something was perhaps caught in my spokes. When I stopped in Detroit, I looked at the back tire and pulled an industrial staple (? - see picture) out of the back, sure that the tire would instantly deflate. Miraculously, it did not, although now I was even more reluctant to be riding this bike. Our next rendezvous was 19 miles up, but I asked Kelly to see if she could find a place to pull over sooner, just in case. I caught up to her again and decided to keep going as long as I could and we decided to aim for Mill City. About 8 miles out of town, my energy was definitely dipping and a bit of a headwind kicked up. It was time to go to the music. I had resisted all day due to the combination of traffic and rain, but as both had abated somewhat, I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had finally finished the first lap through the 2,161 song list on the trail ride in the LG on Saturday morning. Thus, I considered myself a free agent and could listen to whatever I wanted now. For me, there was only one choice so, after fumbling the AirPods on to the highway and having to turn around and retrieve them, I put on Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy from the Refreshments. I got so pumped up, I blew right through Mill City and apparently right past the van and Kelly standing on the side of the road. She had to drive 3 miles farther down the road before she caught up to me.

One of many waterfalls feeding down to Santiam Creek and the North Santiam River

The final climb

The Santiam River

Thankfully, that somehow punctured the tire horizontally and never touched the tube.