One of my twenty-something sons and I took a little two-day bike trip last week. He’d given me a coupon good for one snowboarding lift ticket last Xmas that I’d never cashed in since it was such a shitty warm winter. I knew I wanted to do something outdoorsy with him, as I’ve done that with each of my sons in their younger teen years… short “coming of age” biking and kayaking trips with one of them at a time. It hadn’t occurred to me do something similar with them now that they’re in the their twenties so this trip woke me up to the possibility.
We each rode a recumbent bike — he borrowed my daughter’s and I borrowed a friend’s.
Recumbents are the Harley choppers of bicycling, we decided. We fancied ourselves as Easy Riders, Wyatt and Billy touring the countryside on our Captain Americas, with Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” playing in our goofball brains:
Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Soon after we left Northfield on Thursday the squall line of an approaching thunderstorm began bearing down on us. We were in heaven. We both love storms and there’s something special about a summer thunderstorm in the rural countryside where you can see it coming for miles. We kept riding till the last minute and then took 45 minutes of shelter in a horse barn till the downpour and lightning let up.
A steady light rain the rest of the afternoon rescued us from what would’ve been stifling heat and humidy on our way to the Mississippi river town of Red Wing. But we soon learned we had overestimated the comfort of recumbent riding. No, we didn’t have the sore necks or tailbones usually associated with touring on drop-down handlebar bikes when you’re not conditioned for them. But we hadn’t anticipated that our legs, especially our knees, would object to a steady regimen of hilly country roads, recumbents or no. But discomfort on a trip like this can be a good thing. This passage, from Chapter 2 Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has long stuck with me.
John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining. Also, to arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. If John and I and Chris arrived with this feeling and Sylvia arrived seeing them as “nice” and “pretty,” there would be more disharmony among us than we would get from the heat and monotony of the Dakotas.
So our mutual knee pain, along with the sting of rain on our faces on a couple of 40 MPH downhills in a cloudburst, became our shared adversity to celebrate when we sat to a big dinner at the end of the day… and where we inadvertantly administered more self-inflicted pain, gorging ourselves on lousy pizza and crappy cheesecake.
We found a cheap room at a rundown no-tell motel, where we stashed our bikes alongside our bed, hung our wet clothes from the lampshades, and crashed for the night. Here’s a flattering shot of me, fresh out of the shower, trying to mount a rear view mirror on my helmet. The reading glasses are a nice touch, don’t you think?
We had an uneventful but luxurious, with-the-wind ride home. Our knees appreciated it.