Crazy Season

11 July 2008

This is the time of year when riding anything under sixty miles feels like cheating. This is the time of year when I come down off the hills and hit the flats in my big chain ring. This is the time of year when my first century of the season is less than a month away and I start to get worried.

This is Crazy Season.

Tom took us on a metric through the Pinelands last Saturday. I only stopped for pictures once, at Tabernacle Lake:





As we entered Lebanon – er, Brendan Byrne – State Forest, I took this one without stopping. Very unsafe, but not too blurry:



When I do centuries I hit a wall at seventy miles whether I’m keeping track of my mileage or not. So when Crazy Season hits I try to get up to or above seventy as many times as I can. Tom’s ride ended at a metric, so Mary and I pedaled on for extra miles. I stopped after a dozen; she went on for a full century, that being her weekend habit.

Larry took us from Bordentown to Cranbury the next day. I got a few shots of the Delaware River to replace the ones I took last year with my much more inferior cell phone:







July 4 was a Friday and Tom’s birthday. He got a group of us together to shun the all-paces ride at Mercer County Park. We left instead from Etra Park in Hightstown at 8 a.m. Mike M. brought a cake from Whole Paycheck. Cheryl brought the candles. Nobody had a lighter. Picture a handful of oddly-dressed people singing “Happy Birthday” in six keys at once in a parking lot at eight in the morning.

There’s one bit of pre-ride parking lot banter worth mentioning: Cheryl was talking about her family, about her being one of a large handful of kids. Big Joe asked, “Are you the youngest?”

“Yep. I’m the baby.”

“I could tell.”

“Fuck you!”

Oof! She got him! The first “fuck you” of the day and rather than coming from Joe it hit him smack-dab in his dignity. He grumbled about it for the rest of the morning.

In keeping with Tom’s newly found cloud karma, we managed to avoid all the predicted rain.

The muffins at the Farmingdale bakery suck. The guys say I’m a muffin snob. Hey, once you’ve experienced Stanton, there’s no turning back. Mike M. agrees.

We went through Turkey Swamp on the way home. In all my years passing through there I’d never seen a turkey, but this day we did. Tom pulled out his camera as the creature ambled away from us. But, as he posts in his blog, none of the pictures came out well enough to post. Rats.

For the Fourth of July weekend heavy clouds had settled over New Jersey and decided to stay a while. The threat of rain rarely went below fifty percent. The air was thick, hazy, still. By Friday night the sky decided to just rain already, spitting showers into Saturday morning, killing a planned ride Chris and I had in the book.

So I sent an email around to the usual crowd postponing the ride for a day and went to the gym, where I dragged Cheryl through my weight-lifting routine. This ensured that we’d not feel our best tomorrow.

Sunday promised more rain, but at 6:45 a.m. the ground was dry. At 7:00 I sent an email to the Slugs: “Get up! Get dressed! We’re going!”

Mike and Cheryl picked me up half an hour later and we got to Bordentown with half an hour to spare. Henry and Irene were just pulling in on their bikes. “We thought the ride started at eight!”

Chris pulled in on his bike a few minutes later, then Mary showed up on her bike, having come fifteen miles from home, ready to turn our planned seventy miles into another century. The Joes arrived one at a time.

Bit Joe fired off a “fuck you” or two before anyone could beat him to it.

The Joes were convinced we were going to get wet, but I was being optimistic. Chris had the route planned. I had a vague idea of where we were going and a dozen maps in my saddle bag in case he didn’t. His plans got us so close to one of the Pinelands pigmy pine forests that I insisted we make a detour to go see them. That’s all I wanted to do today: to see the pigmy plains.

To get that far out we took one long, straight road after another. There wasn’t much traffic so we got a lot of chatter in.

Cheryl, Henry, Irene, and I had each just seen the new Pixar movie, Wal-E, and were raving about it. Worse, we couldn’t stop repeating most of the movie’s dialog:

“Waaaaal-EEEEEE!”

“Eeeeeeeeee-VA!”

Over and over again. Turns out I can do a pretty good Eeeeeeeeee-VA.

Mike and Chris were mystified. The Joes were quiet, thinking about rain.

We passed through Fort Dix and beyond Browns Mills Lake. Our first rest stop was at the Browns Mills Wawa. There’s not much to choose from out there. As I sat on the sidewalk with Little Joe and Chris hunched over me and the maps, Big Joe called home for a weather report.

“There’s rain from Mercer County south,” he told us.

The Joes decided to go home, heading straight for the rain. We decided to go on, figuring that it wasn’t raining here.

We turned onto unfamiliar territory, Pasadena Road. Somewhere along here, Chris said, was the entrance to the burned down terra cotta factory we visited on our mountain bikes last winter.

“When are we gonna see the Pygmies?” Mike whined.

“Soon.” I told him.

A little farther on he said, “I wanna see the Pygmies.”

“Mike, I’m going to tell you a joke I learned when I was a kid. A donkey and his master were riding through the desert. After a while the donkey said, “Water, Master, water.”

Master replied, “Patience, jackass, patience.”

I spoke slowly: A little farther on the donkey said, “Water, Master, water.”

“Patience, jackass, patience.”

I took a few breaths. “Water, Master, water.”

“Patience, jackass, patience.”

Mike cut in, “This joke requires patience.”

I turned to him and shouted, “Patience, Jackass! Patience!”

He shut up about the pines.

Chris and I spotted the clearing at the same time. A sandy path led over railroad tracks and into the woods where the factory ruins lay. We rested our bikes against the trees along the tracks and walked in. Only Chris and I had been here before.

I headed for the spot we’d climbed in the winter, wondering if I could scale the cement wall in road shoes. I managed to pull myself up to the top and stood looking back at everyone else. Henry looked up at me and gave a Tarzan cry. I pounded my chest. Mike scrambled up the side and stood with my while I took pictures.









I don’t know what Cheryl, Chris, and Irene are doing in this picture. Nobody has given me a straight answer.



Mike and I climbed down the front of the façade right around the time that someone else noticed a ladder around the back.



On the ground were trip mine instructions left behind from a recent paintball game.



We hiked out again, Chris showing Mary blueberries growing next to his bike. She tried one.

Pasadena Road stretched on. Through the trees the sky was the same heavy white it had been all day.

The road ended at Route 72. I hadn’t been down here since my grad school days when I used to help my friends at the marine field station on weekends. 72 was just another busy road along the way, with the Pygmy Plains somewhere in the middle.

Across from us was a road that Chris was surprised had been paved. Cheryl misunderstood him and said, “I don’t want to be out here all day. We’re already at 72.”

I said, “We’re not going down there. Don’t worry. We won’t be out all day.”

Chris told us to go left. A few miles down the road would be the Pygmy Plains, where the pines and oaks, frequented by fire, grew stunted and bushy. It would be obvious when we got there that we’d arrived. The next intersection would be Route 539, and that’s all I knew about where we were going.

Cheryl, Mike, and I got out ahead. The road was open and straight, the shoulder clean and wide, the traffic heavy and loud. Cheryl got upset right away. She didn’t want to be on this road at all. I can’t say I didn’t blame her, but I felt safe riding to the far right on the broad shoulder.

Far ahead of us the road rose gently into the sky, which was now a steely gray. Some of the cars coming at us had their headlights on. “How far are we going?” Cheryl asked.

“To 539,” I said. I could only guess how many miles that was, maybe five. She was not happy.

As we pushed up the gradual hill the trees were getting shorter. Pitch pines and oaks that had towered over our heads on Pasadena Road were now half that height, then a third, and then we were at the top of the hill, the trees not much taller than we were.

“I’m stopping for a picture,” I said.

“I’m not stopping on this road,” Cheryl said, her anger propelling her on, Mike in her wake. I pulled over into a sandy clearing, leaned my bike against a metal fence that blocked a narrow road into the forest, and started taking pictures.

Those telephone poles should give you an idea of how short the trees were. Yep, that’s a real forest you’re looking at.







But my elation at seeing these trees again for the first time in nearly fifteen years was clouded over by the bad energy radiating from Cheryl. I’ve gone and ruined another ride, I was thinking.

I looked down the road. Mary sped past, and then Chris and Henry pulled up. Before I could say anything, Chris bellowed, “Why didn’t they stop? We were going to turn around here!” He launched into a tirade about how 539 was worse than this road, and about how we should let those ahead of us find their own way home.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I thought we were going all the way to 539.”

“No!”

So now we were chasing everyone, but because we had stopped they were out of sight. We set off again at high speed. I looked ahead at the heavy sky, the headlights coming out of the haze, the stunted trees at the top of this ridge, the black road that went on and on into the steel gray sky.

“We’re headed right for the rain,” Chris shouted.

“We can turn around when we get to the intersection,” I said, trying to calm him down. I’ve really messed things up now.

The gray sky was almost upon us when the traffic light emerged out of the haze. At first all I saw was Mary at the light. Chris said, “Let them go all the way to Allentown on 539 if that’s what they want to do.” But Cheryl and Mike were waiting on 539.

“Let me do the talking,” I said.

I apologized to everyone for misunderstanding the directions. I expected a firestorm in response but it didn’t happen. Chris gave us the options: go back on 539, which would have just as much traffic as 72 but no shoulder, or turn around and go back up 72 for twelve miles to the Wawa at the traffic circle. The decision was unanimous. We turned our bikes towards 72. Twelve miles from now would put us around fifty miles.

Mike and I got out in front. Now we had a tailwind. We climbed a small rise back to the top of the ridge. All around us the stunted trees stretched out and down the ridge. I didn’t stop for a picture; the sky was too dark and my cell phone camera too poor to capture it. Instead I pointed to the trees. “You can really see it here.” Maybe only Mike heard me.

We passed Pasadena Road and the railroad bridge just before it. Now I was remembering little landmarks I used to see on this road all those years ago. I knew what we’d have to pass before we got to the Wawa. I checked our average on my computer.

On our right was a constant drone of cicadas. On our left was a near constant drone of traffic, broken only by the gap created by the traffic light so many miles behind us.

We were going faster than we had all day, a good five miles per hour over our usual cruising pace. I checked our average again. We’d gone up by two tenths of a mile already.

I watched the landmarks go past, so much farther apart than they’d used to be when I drove the road instead of pedaled it. The New Lisbon Developmental Center. The entrance to the state park. The dive bar, the sandwich shop, and, finally, the Wawa.

We’d gained half a mile per hour in our average in those twelve miles. “Good work, guys! Great century practice!” Henry leaned over his handlebars, shaking his head at me.

“We had to get off that road,” I offered by way of explanation.

“We had a tailwind,” said Chris.

I looked back towards the highway. The sky was white again. “And we haven’t been rained on yet.” We wondered if the Joes stayed dry.

Cheryl asked, “How much further to go?”

“Twenty-five, maybe thirty miles,” I guessed.

Chris said, “About twenty-eight.”

“We’ll have eighty miles,” Cheryl said.

“You can do it,” I told her. We didn’t have a choice, really. We were all going to have to do it. “That detour cost us ten miles.”

After we got some food into us we all were in a better mood.

Somewhere on Magnolia Road the screws to my new saddlebag came loose and the bracket flew off. Fortunately Chris saw the part bounce on the ground and retrieved it. I shoved the whole thing in my jersey and spent the rest of the ride wiggling it away from my spine.

We hit mile 70 on Oddfellows Road, on what passes for a hill in southern New Jersey. Some complaining noises bubbled up behind me. I didn’t see the point in complaining. “We all made a mistake and now we’re paying for it,” I said. And I channeled Matt Rawls: “It doesn’t matter how many miles we have left. We still have to pedal!”

I had stopped looking at my computer. There was no point in it. I felt pretty good anyway. In a few miles I knew I’d hit the 70-mile wall that I always run into on centuries. But for now I was feeling all right.

We were climbing out of the Rancocas watershed, past cornfields on either side. The wind blew hot and cool.

We stopped at a corner and I broke into my stash of Shot Bloks. Three people held their hands out. Irene meowed for hers. That left two for myself. They really need to put more in these bags.

The wall hit at mile 72, just before we crossed over Route 68. I was preparing myself for ten miles of bad mood when I heard Irene’s voice to my left: “Waaaaal-EEEEEE!”

“Eeeeeeeeee-VA! Perfect timing. I just hit the wall and you snapped me out of it. Thanks.”

In Chesterfield we stopped to re-group. Henry said, “A cold ale. I’m going home and having a cold ale.”

Mike said, “You’re going to have to ride like this every day for Anchor House,” an annual 500-mile, week-long charity ride that many of our hill-climber friends train half a season for.

“Will there be ale on Anchor House?” I asked.

“There will be. I checked. Believe me, I checked.”

We left Henry and Irene to ride home and went west on 528.

After a few more miles I was hungry again. All I had left is a pack of caffeinated Shot Bloks. I downed half of them. By mile 78 I’d gotten past the wall. Four miles later we were back in the parking lot. Mary headed out again, with fifteen more miles before she got home. Chris left for the half-mile ride to his house. Mike drove me and Cheryl home.

In the end, nobody, not even the Joes, got rained on, except for Mary, who was three miles from her house when a downpour left her calling home for a ride.