Over the Hill(Slug)s and Far Away

3 May 2008

Credit where credit is due: I patched this ride together from two Morris Area Freewheelers rides.

The first was last fall when Cheryl convinced me to try one of their rides out of Pluckemin. Not two miles into the ride the group left me, Cheryl, and Doris, the ride leader, in the dust. The three of us had a grand old time, especially when she took us all the way down Black River Road. At the bottom I said, “If I ever see this hill facing the other way, I’m turning my fat ass around.” A week later John Smolenyak suggested I get mountain bike gearing for Kermit. I did.

The second ride was one that Cheryl and I were smart enough to skip, the day after Thanksgiving last year, when it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. She, Jack, and I went to Hacklebarney State Park instead. Mike B. went on the ride, froze, and promptly got dropped by everyone. He came back raving about the scenery though, so in March we went up to try the ride on our own (see Fifth Wheel).

When I got home and looked at the map, I realized how easy it would be to add the mind-blowing Black River Road descent onto the Fifth Wheel route. A few map geek minutes was all it took, and Over the Hill(Slug)s and Far Away was ready.


*****

Smolenyak is biking the 25 miles from his house to Pluckemin. He calls me at 8:00 and says that there’s a light mist falling on Washington Valley Road, east of where the ride will start. We’re going to go northwest. I tell him we’re going anyway. It’s too late to cancel; people are on their way. Besides, I put too much work into this just trying to learn how to get to Pluckemin from home. And the weather forecast says there isn’t much of a chance of rain anyway.

Mike M. is carpooling with Tom. Larry is going to meet us up there. Chris pulls up in front of my house twenty minutes early. Cheryl and Mike arrive fifteen minutes later. Mike takes Cheryl and Chris takes me.

By the time we get onto Route 287 the mist has turned to light rain. We keep going. It’s still raining lightly when we get to Pluckemin. Larry is already there, wondering if I’m going to go through with this.

“Hell yeah. We drove all the way up here.”

Smolenyak says, “It’s not that far to Oldwick.” A good muffin is a good muffin.

“We can go for a few miles and turn around if it gets bad,” Cheryl says.

Tom wants to know why I made it rain. “I’m only responsible for the headwinds,” I tell him.

There are nine of us, seven more than I expected. Even by Friday afternoon I thought it was just going to be me and Cheryl, which would have been fine. Not many people (including me) are willing to drive so far, especially when the weather is like this.

By the time we set off the rain has stopped. Instead we’re heading into gray mist.

Mike B is coming off two weeks of respiratory illness capped by conjunctivitis. Now he’s manic. He thinks he knows where I’m going and a mile into the ride signals a turn I’m not going to make. I shout him down. At the next corner I signal a right turn and he signals left with a big grin. Now I have to give him a stern talking to. “Mike, don’t do that. It confuses people. I’m trying to lead a ride here.” He turns into a puppy with his tail between his legs and drops behind me for a while.

I’ve studied the maps, but my memory of the route from last time isn’t quite good enough to make me confident. Cheryl, who was up here a week or two ago, is in the lead, making turns before I get there. The faster people are with her. I’m near the back, keeping an eye on the rest of the crew. Smolenyak is in no hurry. He’ll have done nearly a century before the day is out. He knows the roads better than anyone else, and I’m glad to have him along when road names change differently from what the maps say. He also knows what hills are coming, something that only Cheryl and I know. Mike B. should, but his road memory is somewhat lacking.

We pass through sections of road that are soaking wet, and a moment later cover ground that is bone dry. The mist makes the new greenery stand out. We can’t see anything past the road we’re on, which makes the country seem even more isolated than it is.

Tom has his camera, so when we pass a statue of a horse in a field, the cry, “Picture! Picture!” goes out and we all stop so he can get the shot.



When we turn onto Rockaway Road, we soon stop to gawk at a stone house.




Tom and I stop for more photos further along. Last time I was here there was still snow in the woods. Now everything is misty greenery. I try for the same picture I took in March. Here it is then




and now.



Tom’s is better.



I know that the first big climb is coming up on Hoffmans Corner Road. At the top is a hairpin turn at the edge of a ridge. From the top you can see out to the next ridges on either side, and to the other side of the Raritan River in the valley below.

The road before Hoffmans Corner is Mountain Grove. There’s no street sign, just a hand-painted one nailed to a tree. We start to go up. It’s tougher and longer than I remember. I watch Tom ahead of me. He’s just put mountain bike gearing on his triple (“I can climb walls with this!”), and he’s trying to get used to the way it all feels. His derailleur is so long it might as well be dragging on the ground. I call out to him, “There’s Tom and his eight feet of chain.” I take my time, knowing there’s more around the corner. But when we turn onto Hoffmans Corner Road we’re at the top. Cheryl points to her left, out over the ridge. We can’t be there yet; this was too easy. But we are. I’ve faked myself out. We finished the first of two big hills before the turn.

We go around the hairpin and I try to get some pictures. “Don’t fall off the edge,” someone says. Chris says, “She’s got the wrong bike for that.” I look down. I don’t know if I’d have the ‘nads even on my mountain bike. I take a few pictures, trying to get it all in with my crappy cell phone camera.






Smolenyak gives it a try.



I guess you just have to be there.

We plummet down towards the river, ride along it for a mile or so, and cross over it in Califon, heading for the Califon General Store.


“What flavor muffin do you want?” Cheryl asks. This I remember about the place:

“No muffins. PB and J.”

By the time I peel off my jacket, gloves, and helmet and step inside, there are at least four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches being made behind the counter. I go for the coffee. I’ll need 20 ounces for the next big climb. There’s no decaf. I’m going to be wired. The caffeine hits even before I’m halfway through the cup.

I forgot to mention last time that there’s handmade jewelry hanging, for sale, inside the store. It looks like the stuff I used to make back in college, before I had a real job, before I started working with art glass and silver. Last time I was here I got to talking with the artist, a woman in her twenties. I told her about Etsy. This time I ask if she’s set up her Etsy page yet. She has. She gives me the URL for her page and I give her mine. We both agree that business is all right. We don’t get into it, but for me that means I’m a little more than a third of the way to breaking even this year, but it’s only May. I can’t go until December without buying beads.



That's Chris in front. Smolenyak is behind Chris with the two Mikes in yellow behind him. Howard is to their left, and Larry is on the porch. I'm out of sight, taking a picture of Tom taking a picture. Cheryl is probably inside.






Back outside I gather the troops to warn them about what we’re going to do next. First we follow the Raritan River some more. The river is on our left, a bike trail on an abandoned rail line on our right. In front of us is a speed display. We’re going slightly uphill, so none of us is going above the speed limit. Tom hangs back for a picture.




To our left the river turns away and I know what’s coming. I call out, “Say goodbye to the Raritan and say hello to low gear! Take your time. It does end.” Six people immediately pass me.

Larry stays by my side. He’s worried that he’s going to have trouble since he hasn’t been climbing much this year. I know better. He says that my seat is too low. I don’t doubt it; I only raised it by a millimeter or so last week. I guess that wasn’t enough. But the tape I’d put on to mark the spot on the seat post when Kermit was dismantled last fall was still there when I got him back in December. Everything should have been just as it was, but it isn’t. After spending time scrunched down on the mountain bike, stretched out on Gonzo, or something in between in Spinning class, I can no longer tell if Kermit’s seat is where it should be. This would explain why I don’t have as much power as I seemed to have when I was on Gonzo. Oh well. Too late now.

We can see the road ahead getting steeper. I say something that’s supposed to sound comforting but comes out all wrong. Larry interprets it as hill panic and starts to coach me. “Don’t tell me how to climb,” I warn him. I am, after all, a Hill Slug and proud of it. “Okay, okay,” he says. I’m also a bitch.

The road bends to the left. The worst ones always seem to bend to the left. This is about where I nearly panicked last time. Larry just about does now. “Oh my god, does this hill end?” I say out loud what I’ve been saying to myself: “Just relax into it. It ends. If it looks too big, chop it into little pieces.”

The road levels out a little, and Larry sings as he lazily zig-zags across it. “I’m cutting it into pieces,” he says.

Mike B. is only slightly ahead of me. This isn’t like him. He should be at the top with Cheryl and Mike M. “How ya doin’, Berman?” I ask.

“Awful,” he says.

“Take it easy.” It’s not fun coming back after two weeks with the plague. I’m amazed he’s here at all.

Before we know it we’re over the worst of it, and soon after we’re at the top. There’s not much of a view, but I take a picture anyway.



I turn to Tom and Smolenyak. “How’d ya like that one?” This should give me some hill cred.

We ride across the ridge for a while, stopping to take pictures of a wooden house festooned with antlers. I wouldn’t have stopped save for the rack from a moose. I have to get a shot of that one for Jack. Smolenyak's is better:



Now we’re approaching the best part of the ride, but first we have to get to the very top of the ridge. Larry rides next to me. He tells me about the first time he saw all the stuffed mooses in our house during one of our New Year’s Eve parties. I apparently told him that Jack’s nickname is Moose. He says he told someone, “Good thing his nickname isn’t Dick.”

“Funny you should say that,” I tell him. “In New Orleans I saw a set of Mardi Gras beads with little penises on it.” Now Mike M. is looking over at me, curious. “I went for the rubber ducks instead.” Little jester ducks. Yellow, purple and green. Three of them on the strand. It’s hanging in the shower.




We pass the house where Cheryl used to live ages ago. She lived up here at the top of the world, too far away from everything, especially when it snowed.

Now we’re at the top of Black River Road. Mist enshrouds everything, but I know there’s a view behind it. We’re out in the open, looking out and downhill onto farmland. There are trees in the distance, and the road disappears into them. Our 400-plus foot plummet begins.

In the woods the view is even better. The Black River is first on one side of us, then on the other. We are enveloped in trees. The river is in a gorge to our left. The trees rise on a steep hill to our right. The road curves and dives. I hang back and find a good place for a picture, but I can’t catch the depth with the camera.






As I put the phone away, I hear what I think is a dry leaf on the road, but it’s Smolenyak coming to a stop next to me. This is life without my hearing aid. I never wear it on bike rides for fear of feeling it slip out of my ear and bounce irretrievably into a farm field.

Like me, Smolenyak had hung back, preferring a good bit of distance between himself and the next person in front on a road as wet as this one. We reach the intersection together, at the last bit of plummet. Tom is at the bottom with his camera ready. I get into a crouch and Tom takes a picture.




He calls it, “Laura trying to look fast.” Smolenyak is looking over at me, amused.

My stomach is growling.

Black River Road gets bumpy and more residential before we turn off onto Vliettown Road towards Oldwick. Cheryl and I know what’s coming. So does Smolenyak: “Surprise,” he says.

“Compared to what we just did this is nothing,” I tell him.

“Speak for yourself.”

“Hey, it was you who got me these gears.”

In Oldwick Chris sends me back a quarter mile to get a picture of carved rock sculptures in a yard.




By the time I dismount everyone else has food. I go in for some mostly decaf and a muffin. At the counter a grandfather with his grandchildren looks at me and asks where we’ve been. I tell him about Black River Road.

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” he says. “I just hope it stays that way.”

“Well, with this economy, it’s probably safe for now. And it’s probably too steep to build on.” I hope so. There are places in New Jersey that people who don’t live here wouldn’t believe are part of this state. All they see is the mess around the New Jersey Turnpike in Newark, or the Atlantic City casinos, or some decrepit, anonymous strip mall. But out here in north central Jersey, it’s all farms, woods, and tiny townships, still too far from the City to be destroyed by people fleeing from it.

I take my muffin and coffee outside. “I’m such a fucking pig,” I announce. I get some help with the muffin so I don’t feel as piggish.

I take some pictures of the view up the hill from the same spot where I took pictures in March.






We have fewer than ten miles to go. Some of it is downhill and the rest is a slow grade upwards to Pluckemin. Smolenyak says he’s going to peel off and head home. He disappears behind us and I’m not sure if we’ve dropped him or he turned somewhere. (He tells me later by email that he slowed down on purpose to save energy for the 25 miles home. And he sends me the pictures he took.)

We get back to the parking lot wired, tired, and dry.

Mike B., Cheryl, and I eat Swedish fish left over from last summer as we pack our bikes into Mike’s Jeep. It turns out that Swedish fish, properly sealed, don’t seem to go bad. Mike takes us home, and I get there in time to snack and shower before heading to Philly with Jack for dinner with friends. We take the train and arrive with enough time to stop at Trader Joe’s. I’m so hungry that, a block away from the restaurant, I break into the food I just bought.

We take the last train out of the city at 11 p.m. At home I raise my seat, and in doing so find the line I drew on the post last year. Son of a gun. It was almost a centimeter down, away from the tape. I’m too tired to figure out how this happened.

On Sunday Cheryl and I go to the Cranbury ride. Larry is there too. The extra centimeter gives me power and energy that I’ve been missing for a month. That, and I’ve had coffee before the ride to make up for the fact that I’ve only had six hours of sleep.

Anyway, I’ll do the Over the Hill(Slug)s and Far Away ride again in October when the leaves are changing.