29 June 2013
"This made the ride. The bear was great, but..."
Wait, what?
Slow reaction time. Me and my camera. I didn't get there first.
Where?
Tunnel Road, coming out of Bloomsbury.
Wait. Go back before that.
To Buckthorn then? That's worth telling. It was before the bear, though.
Just go back to the beginning.
To when I woke up? Eight emails from my boss?
Don't blog about work. Go forward. Go to the start.
Milford, then.
I got there early, ten minutes after 8. Driving in from Bridge Street I could see the mist over the Delaware, so I went over to take pictures before getting my bike ready.
Tom -- well, Ron on Tom's phone -- called as I was walking back. "We're gonna be about 20 minutes late."
"Okay. Hey, ask Tom where it was we peed last time."
Pause. "Okay."
Pause. "He says the deli."
"Thanks." I looked over my shoulder and saw the bakery. That must have been what he meant. Or not. Anyway, it looked open.
We had time to go over there, smell, drool, use the bathroom, talk to some dude in the parking lot about bright bike lights, go back to our parking lot, and then pedal up Church Street to Spring Garden along the river.
Jack H said, "The waterfall is up there," so we went looking for it. First, mullein growing on the outcrop.
Jim liked the little waterfall.
"Can you get the top?"
"Sure."
We went back to the parking lot again. I was about to call Tom when he pulled in. Jackie was in the car too.
"Okay, Jim. Jackie's here. Things just got real." She's another one of those effortlessly strong people.
A snippet of conversation:
Jim said, "This is Mr. Garmin. Mrs. Garmin is in my car. It's a woman's voice because I can't stand having a man tell me where to go."
It was hanging there. Tom caught it before I could: "I'll tell you where to go."
We were seven: Tom, Ron, Jackie, Jim, Jack, Lynne, and me. Tom said that most of the climbing would be after the break. He was making it sound bad, but said that there wouldn't be anything too steep. I wasn't worried. I studied the route last night. I made a cue sheet. I'm less freaked out when I know where we're going.
At one and a half miles he had us on our first climb, which lasted about a mile. As soon as we were done with that he hit us with another one, Shire Road, one and a half miles this time. Flying down the other side of Shire made up for it, though, even though there was a patch of lumpy to make Jim grumpy. I coulda fried an egg on my rims at the bottom of that one.
From there things were relatively calm. We got a good look, from a distance, of the Fiddler's Elbow hill.
Fiddler's Fucking Elbow
Although Tom and I offered everyone a chance to do it, nobody took us up on our offer.
Would you have gone?
Um.
Anyway, you were saying?
Instead we went in the opposite direction, down Roxburg Hill.
Across from Roxburg Hill is Roxburg Station. We stopped a few times for pictures. Tom had his good camera, one with a decent zoom.
That'll be important later.
From Foul Rift into Belvidere we were doing the Castner Murders Ride in reverse.
We didn't stop at Thisilldous Cafe, which was kind of a relief, considering that I'd written about the place last time, "The waitress poured water with a little coffee in it." Instead we pulled into the first place we saw, Skoogy's Deli.
"Big muffins and a clean bathroom," I reported.
Rhetorically, Jim said, "What else do you need," but before I could tell him what else, he'd answered himself: "Coffee," we said in unison.
And it wasn't bad, poured over a cup loaded with ice. There were tables inside, too.
What flavor?
Banana. Big tops. Reminded me of the Stanton General Store.
"Now comes the hard part," Tom said.
"Aren't we done half the climbing?" Jack asked.
Nope. There would be some big ones headed our way.
First, though, we had to get out of town via Tom's aunt's old place, across from an overgrown orchard. Up the hill from that is where his grandparents used to live.
We were near Buckthorn when I switched into my granny gear. Every time I switched out I had to pop right back in again. Buckthorn was three miles of climbing, no real breaks.
It was there that I saw the first cicada wings on the ground, heard them in the trees, saw them flying, and tried to get a picture of one in the grass at the top of the hill. I was leaning over my bike to do it. The pictures were blurry.
What is that?
Shut up.
Someone asked, "Are we at the top yet?"
"The top of this one," Tom said.
There was a next one, shorter, before a swooping descent under a canopy of trees and then a wide-open view of the next wall of green we'd have to get over.
Asbury-Bloomsbury Road, over the Pohatcong Mountain. Up and halfway over, we turned west onto Mountain View, where we could view the next mountain. And view we did, stopping several times in a vain attempt to make the pictures come out the way we were seeing the landscape.
Still doesn't work.
We knew it wouldn't. At the end of the road the group had stopped. Somebody told me, "Get the fence."
Aha!
We went into the valley landing uphill of Bloomsbury. Between Bloomsbury and Milford there is only one flat-ish way home. We weren't taking the flat-ish way. We were instead taking the easiest hilly way up Musconetcong Mountain, on Tunnel Road.
Tom and I were musing about the name, figuring it had something to do with the rail line that ran under the road, when we rounded a corner and saw the bear. It was maybe fifty meters in front of us. "Stop!" we called out. Not to the bear.
We did what any reasonable 21st century person would do in this situation: we pulled out our cameras. That thing I said before about Tom's zoom? Here's his zoom:
This was between the two of us commanding, "Outa the way, Jack!" as he circled in front of us. If the bear were to head our way, it'd have picked off Jack first. Tom said, "We don't care about you, Jack. We care about getting pictures."
My zoom isn't as zoomy, and I didn't use it for the first shot.
Here is is again, in post-production zoom. I'd rather have had its face in the picture, but, hey, if you're gonna get a picture of a bear, you're pretty safe not getting a picture of the business end.
The bear did turn. It looked over at us before sauntering into the woods behind the guardrail.
The thing about Tunnel is that, while it's never steep, it doesn't end.
Ever?
I told Jackie that it would, just to keep her spirits up. I told Ron that after Tunnel "it'll be all net."
The all net is Sweet Hollow: a three-mile curvy descent with a creek on one side and forest all around. There are a couple of roads that branch off from it. Both go back up the hill. Keep that in mind when this next picture scrolls into view.
I was nonplussed. "Tom, when you and I are on a ride together, we have a special juju when it comes to these things."
Jim and Jack had gone ahead. I rolled in as they were rolling back out, ducking under a wire cordon.
"Nope."
I'd be damned if I were going back up to the top of Musconetcong Mountain. Tom pondered walking across the upended ladder.
"I'm not doing that," I declared, and looked past it at the bank of the Hakihokake Creek.
I walked upstream for a few paces, lifted Miss Piggy, and, shoes on, stepped into the water. This was not the first time I'd crossed this creek under similar circumstances. The water was cold around my lower calves. "This feels great!"
To my right, Jack was already most of the way across, walking barefoot, tossing his shoes across to the opposite bank.
Everyone else followed me. I stopped to take pictures. Jackie passed me, climbed up the bank, and helped everyone else get across. I was too much of a shutterbug to be that generous.
Plus, I wanted to scout a path through the woods back to the road, since this was my brilliant idea in the first place.
We carried our bikes among the ferns, dead leaves, and skunk cabbage back to the road. Those with Speedplay cleats did their best to get the mud out.
I was still laughing. "This made the ride. The bear was great, but..."
At home I washed the mud off my shoes.
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