The End of Crazy Season

4 October

"Beep."

Light from a low window. Highway sounds. A motorcycle powers up. I’m in a motel in Cape May Courthouse. It’s Saturday.

I roll over to look at the clock. 5:45 a.m. Cheryl is still asleep in her bed across the room.

“Beep.”

Smoke detector with a weak battery. Fifteen more minutes.

I roll over again and try to doze.

“Beep.”

Cheryl’s cell phone vibrates and she snaps awake. I look across the room at the phone. It’s going to ring any second now. I throw the bedspread off – no blankets in this place – and reach the phone before the second ring.

We dress and finish our brought-from-home breakfast. I share the jar of iced coffee I made at home. Pure caffeine this time. Sumatran, French roast. It’s smooth like chocolate. I feel it working in about five minutes.

I’m stuffing the contents of the ’fridge back into my cooler when there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in, Berman.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“’Cause it’s 6:56 a.m. and we’re supposed to meet at seven.”

Tom follows Mike into our room. “Oh, now I recognize you guys. I wasn’t sure who it was last night.”

Right. We were all in our street clothes when we met for dinner in Allentown before driving down here.

“Beep.”

Tom stands under the smoke detector in the vestibule outside our doorway. “I can leave a note with the key,” I offer.

“I have a better idea,” he says, and leaps straight up, just missing it two times. He goes into his room, returns with a chair, and pulls the detector down from the ceiling. It’s attached by wires. He lets it hang. Cheryl gives me a pen.

“Beep.”

It’s cold outside. We’re in leggings, arm warmers, jackets. Cheryl is still planning to take Mike’s car down to Cape May while we finish our century.

I ride with Tom, half an hour northwest, to Belleplain State Forest and Lake Nummy. Tom figures we won’t be going near Nummytown today, so the lake will have to do.

“Have you ever heard ‘Garden State Stomp’?”

“Nope.”

I search for it on my iPod as we get out of the car. I hand it to him after we sign in for the Shore Cycle Club’s Belleplain Fall Century.

There aren’t very many people here, but the spread of food could feed Berman for a week. Cheryl says, “Dunkin’ Donuts coffee!”

“Hey! Wasn’t mine good enough?”

“Sure,” she says, but she wants more. Which turns out to be lukewarm and not very good after all.

I’m distracted by a sign.



We go back to the car to unload, Tom still with the headphones in his ears. We unpack in silence, then he says, “It’s Moon-ATCH-ee.”

I wander over to the lake. Mist and the sun are rising.




Tom gets in a few shots too.



One more on our way out of the park:



We run into trouble right away: we can’t figure out which direction we’re supposed to go to get out of the park. A handful of other riders are equally perplexed. We’re all relying on Tom. He came down here last year when this event was canceled to do his own ride for the book he’s written. We all just assume he knows where he is. He doesn’t but that doesn’t stop us from thinking he does.

The roads are flat. Mercilessly flat. And there’s no rest stop in the first fifty-mile loop. We bitch about that until Tom tells us he knows where there’s a Wawa.

I’m the timekeeper again on the five minute pull pace line. It’s steady and quiet until we get to the East Point Lighthouse.






We’re not really at the lighthouse after all, but Tom knows how we can get closer. He takes us down a hard-packed dirt road to the foot of the lighthouse. I walk in for a closer look and a place to pee.



As soon as I squat I’m besieged by a squadron of small biting flies who pretty much have me captive for half a minute. They go for my legs, for the warm, black tights thin enough to bite through. I warn Cheryl on my way out.





I have sand in my shoes.

Flat. Straight and flat. Past marshes, into woods, into marshes again, and then to the Wawa.

I’m not feeling as good as I should and we’ve only gone about thirty miles. I have half an energy bar with my muffin head.

We see more yard signs for Ron Paul than for anyone else, but there’s a fair sprinkling of McCain fans down here. As we approach a McCain lawn sign placed close to the road I hock a loogie straight at it, a fine spray arcing through the air, landing at the sign’s feet.

I haven’t heard Mike laugh like that since the time Cheryl split her shorts (two summers ago when we were painting arrows for the Princeton Event).

We stop for a picture of some old cars.



Tom says it’s the only interesting thing we’ve seen for miles.

Back at the park at the fifty mile mark, I’m far more tired than I have reason to be. This worries me. I still have some coffee left in the jar, so I pour that and have a PB&J sandwich, one of four I made for all of us from Jack’s bread on Thursday night. Mike already had his, of course. Tom says he’s more tired than he should be, too.

Mike says it’s the tights. “It’s fifteen percent more effort to ride with them on,” he says. I find that hard to believe.

I strike up a conversation with one of the rest stop volunteers. It turns out he’s a scientist teaching at Stockton and that we have a mutual friend on the faculty there. We spend a long time talking about research funding and about the insanity of running a lab, something we’ve both ducked.

I go back to Tom’s truck to take off my tights. Mike was right. My legs feel so free. I hang the tights to dry over the edge of the cab.

As soon as we hit the road again I know I’m in trouble. The extra hit of caffeine has me far too zingy. My head is buzzing. I feel terrible from the waist up. My legs go ’round and ’round, somewhat disconnected from my head, which is starting to hurt. My shorts pick this moment to declare that they’ve officially worn out.

And it’s too flat to coast.

We’re in the woods, the Pinelands, now. I’m still timekeeper but I’m not saying much.

Is that a little hill up there? We’re elated!

But then it’s flat again.

We’re approaching a sign painted in the road: the 50-mile loop is straight ahead, the 28-miler to the right. This is where Cheryl was going to turn off. But she doesn’t turn. She stays with us.

More forest.

Yellow line, white line, asphalt, trees, sky.

Mike says, "The only thing changing on this road is my odometer."

So we try singing. I go first, from the middle of the pack, belting out “Garden State Stomp.”

Mike is next with a few verses from “The Battle of New Orleans.”
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Q47i4zGBs)

I wait until my pull is over and I’m drifting back before I holler the next one, another one from Dave Van Ronk:

Oh, the whores of San Pedro are older than God
Their beards tumble down to their tits

Cheryl says, “Laura’s lost it.”

And with one mighty thump of her ponderous rump
She’ll grind your poor pecker to bits

Sooooooo,
Here’s to the whore of San Pedro
To that marvelous fucking machine

And if I had my way I would see her today
On the cover of Time magazine.

That puts and end to our singing. I go back to feeling wrong. Cheryl and I stop taking our pulls. Tom promises a Wawa any mile now. I get quiet. My worst stretch is always between fifty and seventy-five miles; I know I just have to pedal on through.

The Wawa emerges at seventy-three miles. I sit against a wide, metal post. I don’t want to move. “Mike, can you do me a favor? Can you get me a caffeine-free diet Coke?” I reach for my money but he says it’s his treat. I lean back and call Jack. He’s in Manhattan for a long lunch with Nora and Sharon. Jack is outside waiting for Nora; Sharon has gone in. “Hey, what am I if I’m 1673?”

“Well, that would be the beginning of the long Eighteenth Century. But wait. You’re only at 1573.” I’m so fuzzed I’ve given myself an extra century. That puts me in the Renaissance. When I finish my eighteenth century I’m going to celebrate it with him and our Eighteenth Century literature scholar crowd.

Jack suggests I call back later. I say I will, twenty-seven miles from now.

Mike appears with my Coke. He insists I eat some banana.

I go into the bathroom and wait for something to happen. Nothing does, so I figure I’m not sick, just overcaffeinated. I have one more weapon in my arsenal: naproxen. I take two. On an empty stomach I should feel better in under twenty minutes.

And I do. So much so that I take a fifteen minute pull. I ride on the white line, the only smooth pavement on these oil-and-chip roads. I get ahead, not by much, but enough for Mike to send Tom up to tell me to slow down.

We pass through, or by, Ocean View, so that’s another one for the Stomp, but we never see the ocean. Tom says that the houses down here have their own style of crappiness.

Somewhere in the eighties is a rest stop in the grass by the side of the road. We’re fed from the trunk of a club member’s car, but it’s good enough. I plunk myself down in the shade next to a healthy stand of poison ivy. A rider has propped his bike against a tree in the middle of it. When he comes back I tell him he might want to move his bike. Too late, though. He’s allergic. The rest stop team hunts around for something to wipe his handlebars.

We learn that the Shore Cycle Club has only forty members. Before we were annoyed at the lack of support; now we’re impressed that they’ve managed this much.

Mike and Tom have their quotes for the day. When we near one hundred miles I figure out what mine will be. But I can’t say it until we pass one hundred.

When we do I ride next to Cheryl. “I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

I knock her helmet with my fist. “Lead with your head and your legs will follow.”

“What?”

“Lead with your head and your legs will follow. I always knew you could do a century.”

By now we’ve decided to go to Cape May for dinner. Tom says there are showers in the Lake Nummy bathrooms.

We finish with 103 miles. Only half a dozen cars are left in the parking lot.

My leggings are still hanging off the bed of Tom’s truck.

It’s already nearly 4:30. Jack must be just finishing lunch by now. I give him a call and he passes the phone around to Sharon and Nora. Sharon tells me there’s a ghost at the restaurant. Nora tells me we’ll need two eighteenth century parties, one before I start and one when I finish, because life was so different between the beginning and the end of the 1700s.

I gather my stuff and head to the shower. It’s a funny little setup: there are two spouts and two buttons. Push a button, get twenty seconds of water. At least it’s warm.

Cheryl comes in and takes the shower next to mine. From my stall I hear sighs of relief at finishing and in getting clean.

I pull on the long-sleeve t-shirt from today’s event. It’s thick enough to sop up the water dripping from my hair, which I leave curly and loose. I don’t think anyone has seen me dripping wet and curly before. Maybe Tom won’t recognize me again.

He does. “Oh no,” he says, “Now people are going to think we’re together.”

Huh? Oh, the shirts. “I thought you liked me.”

I ride in Tom’s car down to Cape May. Tom knows how to get to the Parkway. From there I let my memory take over.

My parents had a house near the lighthouse for ten years. I used to go down for long weekends. My father and I would go birding or we’d ride our bikes (this was back in my pre-Freewheeler, Raleigh Grand Prix days). My mother would roast on the beach. Jack, if he was with me, would be miserable, save for the time we went down there with a handful of college friends. That was the weekend Chris’ windshield wipers wouldn’t turn off and I realized I’d lost some of my hearing. We were in the Nature Conservancy dunes when Jack and Anne heard the flute on the beach. I heard nothing. But I digress from my digression. My parents sold the place eight or nine years ago; it was getting too expensive to maintain. My sister and I were bummed about that, but we had no say in the matter. We weren’t the ones paying for it.

“Go straight until you see the liquor store,” I tell Tom. “Colliers. That’s right. I forgot. Now go right. There’s Della’s. You can get anything there.” Swain’s Hardware is still in business too. And Mangia Mangia. “I think we ate there once.”

We’re heading west on Sunset, past the Nature Conservancy’s Cape May Meadows. “You can make a left here if you want to see the house,” I tell him as we approach Sea Grove. But he says he wants to catch the sunset and that we can look for the house on the way back.

Sunset at Sunset Beach is something I always refused to witness because of the flag lowering ceremony. I don’t do jingoistic, ceremonial, symbolic patriotism, and this ceremony, where they sing “God Bless America,” would make me laugh or retch or both.

But here we are, parking and walking towards the beach. There must be a hundred people here. Bad recordings of over-the-top Yankee Doodleism are blaring over loudspeakers. Cheryl and I go into the tacky gift shop to use the bathroom. I’m held captive as Ethyl Merman (probably) belts out “God Bless America.” I don’t think I can deal with this.

I last fewer than two minutes before I tell Cheryl I can’t stand it any longer. “I’m going for a walk.”

I stride away at my commuter pace, down Sunset, away from the beach. I call Cheryl. “I’m going to look for my parents’ old house. I’m really near it.”

“Where are you?”

“On Sunset. I’ll call you when I’m done. It shouldn’t take long.”

If I can just remember how to do this. I remember doing it once, in bare feet, with Anne, after we’d walked from the lighthouse to Sunset Beach along the shore. If I can reconstruct that, I can find the house. If there's enough light I can get back to the main road by the time Tom is finished taking pictures.

Cape Avenue is on the right. I turn in. There’s the lake on the left. I went jogging around it once; the wind was in my face the whole time. Stay straight, I think. Is that the little roundabout? And Harriet’s General Store? Boarded up, still. It must’ve closed ten years ago now. We used to get the Sunday paper here. Now how did we get here? Straight across, I think. Cape Avenue. OK, now what?



Ahead are the dunes, and it hits me: I miss this place. Princeton Avenue. Keep going. Yale. One more? The road ends here, turning into Lincoln. Perfect. A few blocks more.



It’s 6:30, not quite dark. There’s West Lake Drive again, and the church we could hear singing from on Sunday mornings. The house isn’t on this block. Not the next one either. Wait, there it is. The trash can boxes with “308” on the front. Yep. Overgrown. Dark. Nobody’s here. No “for rent” sign either.




I pull out my phone to take a picture. Crap. Voicemail. I didn’t even feel it ring. It’s Cheryl. “Where are you? We’re done. Tom is waiting on Sunset at Lighthouse.” I take two pictures, quick and probably blurry, and call her back.





“I’m sorry. I thought it would take you guys longer.”

“We got out fast.”

I tell her to meet me on the circle. I take the lake drive, leaving a voicemail with my parents along the way to tell them the house is still there. I take off my jacket; I’ve worked up a sweat.

Cheryl and Mike see me from a block away. I climb in. “You walked all this way?” Cheryl is amazed.

“I walk fast.”

“Yes, you do. Show us the house.”

“Why? I didn’t want to bother you guys with all of that.”

“It’s part of your life. We want to see it.”

So I show them, and then we drive down Coral to Lighthouse to Sunset, where Tom is waiting.

He’s trying to remember the name of a restaurant on the pedestrian mall. It pops out of my mouth before I have a chance to double-check my memory: “The Ugly Mug.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“I ate there once.”

My parents had a rule about driving into town on a Saturday night: Don’t. That was during the summer. It’s October now; it probably won’t be so bad. But we’re in a long line of traffic. To our right is a strip of stores that were forever changing hands. At the end is a restaurant I don’t remember, but there are three parking spots open.

“Pull in here. We’ll never get a spot in town.”

By the time Tom parks we’ve checked the menu. It looks edible without being outrageously expensive. Maybe these are the off-season prices.

I look back at the road. I see a line of cars streaming out from Sunset Beach. We’ve made the right decision stopping here. We even get a table right away. Cheryl runs back to the car and returns with the bottle of wine left over from last night.

She raises her glass. “Cheers.”

Tom and Mike raise their glasses. “Cheers.”

I raise mine. “To the end of Crazy Season!”