Island Lake State Park: Bring on the MTB

Today, I finally popped my MTB cherry. It's about time. Since buying my Gary Fisher four years ago I have logged countless miles of pavement riding, using the front shocks to hop curbs, avoiding bumps and potholes whenever possible, and rarely if ever straying outside the road-bike-accessible realm.

To be honest, my reasons for not hitting the trails thus far have been around 10% lack of opportunity and 90% fear. I don't know if it's the X-games or just the hardcore MTB kids, but I'd placed the danger level of mountain biking on par with, say, bull riding. I'm sure if I tried I could find trails that would make Pamplona look tame, but I know I'm unlikely to encounter them in Michigan.

It didn't take long to dispel the myths of 20-foot drops and bike eating monsters. My friend recommended Island Lake State Park because it's a well-groomed singletrack trail that's fun at a lot of levels, but still easy for beginners. It's got lots of relatively smooth sections with lots of twists and turns that feel great to speed through, and of course included a taste of the "fun stuff" with a few sharp and rutted drops and making some decent climbs.

Even after spending the summer becoming a competent cyclist on the road, though, it turns out that most of my habits don't translate well to the trail. For example, despite knowing that my wide tires will get me through, my instinct is to brake when I ride off the pavement onto a soft shoulder. Of course, when you're going through piles of sand or down steep hills, tensing up and losing momentum is the last thing to do. It was hard to get comfortable with not being fully in control (especially when I don't have health insurance) and it's going to take some effort and practice before I really learn to power through the roots, ruts, and sand pits.

Of course, riding in Michigan in October you can hardly expect the weather to cooperate, and as soon as we arrived at the trailhead it started to sprinkle, and rained progressively harder throughout the ride. Now, I don't have a problem being wet, and I know that my bike would have picked up a decent amount of dirt in any weather, but after about five miles my drive train was making me cringe with horrible grinding noises. Mentally aussuaging fears over my personal safety suddenly seemed easy compared to talking myself through the bike damage ("it's okay, your bike is made for this, we'll clean it out when we get home, it's only a couple more miles, this is part of the experience"), and eventually my bike and I both pushed through.

All in all, I've definitely gotten over my aversion to the trail, and I can tell this is a sport that only gets more fun as you get better at it. My only regret is that I'm discovering this in October, in the middle of hunting season and with winter looming on the horizon. Still, it's better late than never, and in the next couple of weeks you can bet I'll be calling MTB back for a second date.

Confession

So it was all a lie. Not exactly a lie, maybe, but an enthusiastically incorrect assumption.

When you're on a bike for several hours a day, you have a lot of time to think. For the first week of touring with Otesha, I mostly thought about how much I didn't want to be on a bike. It hurts a lot for the first week, but then it gets better, and for the following week, between singing John Denver songs, I started to think about why I wanted to go to Russia, and what I hoped to get out of it.

The first answer is that bike touring is, far and away, the best way to see a place. You know everything about the physical land - where and how steep the hills are, when the winds blow, in which direction, and what they smell like when they're not blended with car exhaust. You get close to the animals - vultures, deer, and even bears within yards of your wheels. It's an intimacy that's essential to understanding a place, and one I'll be sad to lose next time I'm on a car trip.

The second brilliant thing about cycling is the people you meet. Without a protective shell around you, and with your gear outing your desire to travel in a way most people wouldn't imagine, everyone wants to talk to you. Where are you from, how long have you biked today, where are you going. They're awed, as I would have been just months ago, that you've already traveled 50k today under your own power, carrying everything you need. It still blows me away, especially when I see trucks dragging 30 foot mobile home trailers that sum up someone else's conception of what they need to carry when they travel.

These were the things that led me to plan this grand adventure in Siberia, the opportunities that made it seem the perfect experiment in geographical exploration - the world's largest continent on a bike. it's romantic, and I was swept away by it.

There's one more thing that I love about bike touring, though, and for lack of a better word I'll call it, well, fucking around. My favorite moments of the trip were the spontaneous bouts of time-wasting. Spending two hours swimming in a pristine glacial (freezing) lake midway through the 80k ride to Woss, wolfing down two trays of freshly baked cinnamon rolls on a Mennonite woman's porch an a miserably windy and rainy day, and getting my eggs-and-coffee fix at nearly every diner along the route were the things that made it feel like real travel. It's the kind of travel that has no schedule, no need to rush - we still usually got to our destination in enough time to have a local beer before dinner.


I'd like to pretend that the Siberia trip might have that element of freedom and coasting and taking in unexpected experiences, but the reality of trying to cover 9,000km before winter hits will be pushing the whole thing forward at a pace of mean survival, and to me that doesn't sound like fun. There are people who want that, there are also people who run across the Sahara desert. If I've learned anything along this trip it's that I'm not one of them. I like to work hard, put in a long day, but getting there is only half of the fun, and I want to make room for the other half.

SO, I want to apologize to everyone that I may have misled. And more so, I want to thank everyone that helped, encouraged, or thought this crazy thing was as good an idea as I thought it was. All money that was given has been donated to the Otesha Project, who I can assure you is a deserving destination - when I overheard an audience member telling their friend all about us on the ferry I knew out message of sustainability had done something. For those of you who donated for either long hair or shaved head, I'm afraid I've let you down too. I chopped off my ponytail at a campsite in Port Hardy, had a fellow camper trim it, and I love the way it looks. Once you see it you will too.

To make it up to you, I'll be visiting everyone on a return trip across the country, and I owe y'all a beer. at least one. I'll tell you lots of stories of these adventures that I would never have time to write in this blog, and that are better told than written anyway. I'll also invite you on my next adventure - If anyone wants to head to my cabin in Matachewan, Ontario between Aug 5-19, I can promise amazing views, island life, nightly campfires, scrabble, good company, and a hike up to the fire tower or a canoe trip though a tunnel into a hidden lake if you're lucky. Seriously, I would love to see you there.

I'm coming through Michigan Aug 2-5 and 22ish-25ish, Toronto at least Aug 19-22ish, Burning Man, and then Seattle. All dates subject to change without notice, but I hope as I travel across the continent I can meet up with all the people I love. thanks, peace and bike grease.

Port Hardy: halfway there!

Howdy folks!

After 700km of cycling, a dozen or so performances, and only one flat tire (so far), we have arrived in Port Hardy, the northernmost point on our route. This marks the halfway point of the tour in terms of both time and distance. I feel like I'm finishing the longest month of my life, and am not sure what to think about the prospect of one more. You have a lot of time to think while biking, and I believe I may have done too much of it, because even though I feel good about this tour I'm much further away from figuring out the next steps in life. more on that later.

Woss and Port Hardy have brought us the surprisingly harsh challenge of working with an elementary audience. Just when we'd gotten accustomed to answering smartass questions from fifteen year olds (My favorite question: are you Free-gans? answer: yes. do you have any pie?), Our performance isn't great, never was and never will be. Occassionally it's good, but for elementary kids most of the urban-teenager content is lost completely. It is, however, a great time to be playing the toilet. I got more laughs than the rest of the performance combined when I was sat upon and then left unflushed. they call me mellow yellow.

Today, we'll start retracing our steps and return to Port Mc Neill, catcalling capital of Vancouver Island and home of the World's Largest Burl (a tree-tumor. it's massive.) It's a short ride to get there, about 46k, and my stinkiness will continue to build during days 6-10 of the camping stretch. It's also where we had our tours of logging camps and operations, but I'm finding it hard to write about all that at the moment. it will come.

until next time! :)G