Hot. The word of the day is Hot. Hot as in fire, which - although I never saw - seemed to be chasing me, like a mountain lion, unseen but waiting to pounce. Hot as in the sun, which beat down mercilessly the whole way. I would have thought that by now my skin would be tan enough to deal, but apparently yesterday the sun was worse for some reason. The state of Oregon, by the way, is on fire. Now, I realize that, safe in your homes in San Francisco or New York or whatever, that statement may have limited impact. It may be hard to conceptualize what it means for Oregon to be burning. But here, in the middle of it, there is nothing theoretical about it. The smoke is choking the air all the way out here in Mt. Vernon, 70 miles away. I rode yesterday near the Painted Hills, but I didn’t even bother to detour up to see them because there’s nothing to see except thick gray smoke. You can smell it in the air, like somebody decided to roast marshmallows. It burns the eyes and the throat.
In some ways, a good bit of yesterday’s ride wa one of the more pleasant I’ve had. Because of the conditions, Highway 26 had an eerie post-apocalyptic feel. I rode brazenly right down the center of the highway on smooth paved road, and after an intiai climb it was mostly downhill. I played games with taking my feet out of the clips and just riding spreadeagled down the road, swinging wide S arcs from side to side. Kinda fun. (Then it got hot and sapped my will to live).
I stopped off at the John Day Fossil Beds, which were cool, and did a mile hike into a gorge with blue-green rocks. At the paleontology welcome center - perhaps the only paleontology welcome center I will ever go to - there was a really nice woman that I struck up a conversation with. Turns out that she’s home for a summer internship, there are 4 of them working there, 2 in the back doing actual paleontology, and 2 out front doing customer relations and museum stuff. The four of them live together on site and she said it was basically the best summer ever. This prompted two thoughts: first, I really wish I was still young enough to get an internship. Second, for most of my life, if you had asked me which of these internships I would rather have, I would have said the science one, of course. But now, as an adult, I really think I would like - and learn more from - the role that she had, meeting folks and working on social skills and just learning more about people. So that’s kind of a shift in my life.
By the way - 1000 miles!!1!!111!!!!!
Today I met my first real “Transamerica buddy”. A guy named Mike heading the opposite way was also staying at the Bike Inn in Mt Vernon. Super nice guy, works in film in NYC. Had a really interesting conversation with him about what I’m about to face coming up. He’s pretty screwed because of the fires, so he has to do about 80 miles today through the middle of nowhere just to camp in the dirt and do it again tomorrow, to get around everything. I know he’ll be fine but grumpy. :) One of the worst parts is he has to ride back about 8 miles along road he already covered, which just sucks.
Mike and I had a conversation last night which actually made me want to brooch a topic that’s been on my mind since I finished reading Wild. It’s a bit of a controversial topic, but hey, that’s what this blog is about. Two of my good friends back in San Francisco - Alex and Brent, my Australian running and yoga buddies - gave me Wild as a Kindle book before I left. As a piece of writing I give it a B, but as a work of non-fiction it gets a C-. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a book about a woman named Cheryl who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail. Cheryl is a pretty young blonde thing, and a terrible, terrible hiker. She spends most of the first part of the book surviving on the generosity of others, getting rides over bad parts of terrain, and generally whining to anyone who will listen about how hard her life is. Near the end of the book, there’s a remarkably self-aware story. She meets up with three young attractive guys who have hiked even a few more miles than she did, and then loses them, and then a month later meets up with them again, near the end of her trip. I’ll quote from the book here:
“So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh. “What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say. “The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie.
“Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.”
I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone— the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon— I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.
As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.”
Mike was telling me about his trip last night. He’s been over 3000 miles on his bike, and I think he’s enjoyed his trip, but he told me flat out that people have not really been terribly nice to him. Now, I liked Mike. I thought he was a really great guy. But there’s no question he’s a New Yorker. He talks fast, move fast, bikes fast. He’s in incredibly good shape. He’s half Hispanic, and really tan, with a goatee. He told me that from time to time people took him for one thing or another - Hispanic, usually - and they were just a little bit frosty. Nobody was offering him free cabins. Which is a shame, because he’s a great guy, and totally a good dude. He regaled me with a story about protecting his friends on the NY subway from a bunch of teenagers with guns. Mike is the kind of guy you would want on your side in a bar fight. But he’s not a pretty young blonde thing, and in this world, that makes all the difference. Now, I have to admit that on this trip people have been very nice to me. I’ve been trying to smile a lot, and I think that helps. But in life in general, I’ve definitely bemoaned the fact that women - and especially cute women - go to the front of the line, every time. And if *I* feel that way, I can only *imagine* what genuine minorities feel - African-Americans, or short people, fat people, poor people.
I don’t know what the right answer is here. I’m not suggesting that people with privilege should turn that privilege down. If you’re hiking the PCT and you’re tired and someone offers you a free room, and you suspect it’s because you’re attractive, I am not going to tell you to turn that free room down. What I might suggest - and this advice is as much for me as anyone - is being self-aware about how lucky you are, and maybe paying it forward, maybe even to someone who doesn’t seem at first to be the obvious choice; someone who looks scruffy or homeless or just doesn’t fit the mold of polished attractiveness. And maybe, once in a while, I would turn that room down - to build character, as my Dad would say. That’s a goal of mine for this trip - to be nice to everyone, no matter what they look like or who they seem to be at first, until their behavior proves me right or wrong. I won’t succeed 100% of the time, but I’m going to make an effort.
