Brood II Cicada, Delaware Water Gap (photo courtesy of Anne Mandal)
Raritan Valley Community College parking lot number 4 is quiet except for the sound of five FreeWheelers getting ready for a hilly metric century. A charter bus rolls in, collects a few women of a certain age, and pulls away.
Today I've got Plain Jim, Ron, Jack H, and Barry (who, by long ago opening his house for post-ride breakfasts, is responsible for the naming of the Bagel Hills). Five is a good number. I can keep track of five.
We put in a mile winding through Campus Drive to the one open porta-john and back.
I'm starting off easy, up Burnt Mills Road. It's only 8:30 a.m. but the cyclists are out in droves.
I have to stop at the corner of Black River and Vliettown for my mandatory hay bale photographs. This is at least the eleventy-billionth time I've taken pictures of this farm. No matter; it's never the same pile twice.
The guys don't mind my stopping a second time on Vliettown to get pictures. They're the ones that find this vantage point for me.
I like this the best.
We pass right by the Oldwick General Store and climb Old Turnpike to Homestead Road. I point to the ridge on our left. "We'll be there later, looking down on this."
Soon we're in the woods, gently ascending. We turn onto Hollow Brook and then onto Fairmount Road. At a crossroads I stop to check with Mister Garmin, Jim's trusty GPS, to make sure we're not about to head back the way we came. A passing cyclist tells us where we are without stopping. We follow him up Pottersville Road.
We've crossed Black River Road. Headed for Cocoluxe in Peapack, I'm in uncharted territory.
"I'm in uncharted territory," I tell Jim.
He replies, "Hic draconis."
"Hic chocolate."
"What is that noise?"
Hic cicadae.
At the top of the rise I stop to record them as a pickup truck passes behind me. They're as loud as the truck is.
On the blacktop are scattered golden wings. A live one smacks into my helmet. I start paying attention to the ground; every so often there's a whole one. Even though they're dead, I won't run them over. It seems wrong. And messy.
We turn left on Union Grove and left again onto Longview. On our left is the Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center, and then Hacklebarney State Park.
Cicadas.
Next, the road turns to dirt.
Not again. I checked njbikemap; I swear I did.
"All credit to Dustin," Jack says, "It might have been paved at one point."
"There's pavement underneath," I add. It's not too bad. It's no Pine Hill, anyway.
Jim says, "I'm going to have to start bringing my cross bike out to your rides."
"We might have to do this on the way back, too. I'm not sure." I know I have a repeated road in here somewhere.
"In this direction?"
"Opposite."
Cicadas.
Our next turn, Lamerson, is paved. We're still climbing. Jack says, "I knew there had to be hills around here somewhere."
Route 206 looks like a country road where we cross it. Our next turn brings us into Peapack, no cicadas. I'm trying to follow my cue sheet. Things aren't lining up. There's the end of the Peapack-Gladstone NJ Transit commuter line. I remember that from before. Where's the bakery?
Fortunately, Ron's memory is better than mine. "We went past this," he says. Much farther past than I remember, but my map app gets us there.
Cocoluxe is the Seargeantsville of the north country, with as many bikers but better coffee. First things first. I have to get a chocolate mouse to bring back to the lab.
While I eat a tiny scone so fresh the blueberries ooze in my mouth, I send Dale the audio file of the cicadas. She texts back that they sound like her tinnitus. Lucky her; mine isn't so musical.
I get a little screwed up getting out of Peapack. A map check and a quick turn onto a side street get us where we belong: up.
And up and up and up. Jack complains, only half-joking. "We haven't started yet," I tell him. "Bwa-ha-ha!"
Because our next turn, Hollow Brook, is something that Tom warned me about. He'd written,
The hill is kind of like Federal Twist where it starts out at a reasonable grade then gets steep towards the end. I did that hill for the first time with Ron a few weeks ago. You won't have to worry about your front wheel lifting up but you may have to shift down to the triple.
So that's what I tell everyone, more or less, as I shift into my granny gear. "Ron can coach us. He's been here."
He says, "It goes on forever and then brings you to tears."
"Oh, like a Wagner opera," Jim says, and zips up the hill as if it were a highway overpass.
The rest of us struggle.
Cicadas.
Jack and Barry tack. I stay as straight as I can and try not to hit the tackers as my feet spin faster than my wheels. I do keep both tires on the ground, though. Not the worst hill ever, but definitely the toughest this year.
Whatever energy Barry had a the bottom is spent by the top. This is the highest altitude we'll reach today, but we're in the woods. There's no view. "This would be great in the fall," Jack offers.
Our reward, besides not winding up on the same dirt road twice, is Fox Hill, the site of yet another in my eleventy-billion-photos-of-the-same-vista series. This time the wildflowers are blooming (zoom in).
Those are the Watchung Mountains in back.
No cicadas as we reach Old Turnpike. Barry is looking spent. "We can go straight back from here, " I offer, "Or go across to Round Valley." If we go across there will be two more places I can repeat the offer.
"You advertised the reservoir," Barry says. He doesn't want to disappoint us. We won't be disappointed, we assure him. He wants to go on. "We'll have more climbing," I say, "but no more of this Hollow Brook bullshit. The next one is gentle."
At the end of Hill and Dale Road, where it meets Rockaway, we stop again. To the right is our path to the top of the Cokesbury ridge, where we'll be high above the reservoir. To the right is a downhill course back to the college.
Barry's legs say no but his eyes say yes. We've all been there. Out comes the food, four FreeWheelers with their arms out: Gu, ShotBloks, electrolyte tablets. We make him eat.
It works. Rockaway and Water Street are so peaceful one barely notices the gentle ascent. A little more rolling up on Cokesbury, and thar she blows:
That little structure in the middle there,
that's pretty much where Eddie The Shoulder and I
were taking pictures last week.
We plummet -- it's always a plummet -- to Route 22. On Main Street in Lebanon is the Lebanon Luncheonette. I can never tell if it's open. It never looks open. Today the screen door is. That's a good sign.
They're not quite open. "The grill is closed but we can get drinks," Jim says. We chat with the cashier through upturned stool legs on the countertop. Last Sunday, after closing, she beckoned two desperate cyclists in for drinks. This is why I like stopping here.
We make Barry eat. He's up for the climb to the reservoir. My route has us going all the way around, back to Whitehouse Station. If we go up, look at the water, and come down again on Old Mountain, we'll shave a handful of miles and a few hundred feet of climbing. He likes that idea. So does Jack, who has been quietly jonesing for the view all day long.
This time we go into the boat launch and hang around.
"Wow," somebody says.
Last week nobody even thought of stopping here.
Is that a bird or a cicada? At this point I can no longer tell.
We double back. At the berm I put my camera up to the fence and take pictures without the chain links in the way.
Yeah, this is the eleventy-billionth time I've taken pictures at Round Valley Reservoir. Yeah, yeah, I know.
But this is the first time I've focused on the rock face opposite the berm, so there:
Nothing is really flat between Whitehouse Station and Raritan Valley College. We roll, mostly downhill.
The last insult is the parking lot. Jim has been reminding us of that little rise since we left this morning. At least we have a tailwind.
The parking lot is not quiet. What we here isn't the same as what we heard at Hacklebarney. It's higher-pitched and pulsing this time, so loud overhead that it's tough to hear ourselves talking.
It's got to be at least ten degrees warmer now. Maybe that's why they sound different. As for the pulsing, we're clueless.
Everybody leaves. On the ground near my car is a dead cicada.
The mouse is only slightly melted. On my way home I swing by the lab to put the box in our communal refrigerator. Two of the grad students are in the lab. I play the cicada recordings.
I'm still mystified by the pulsing. One of the students has the answer. That's why he's a Princeton MD-PhD student.
They want to know if there are any Brood II cicadas around here. Maybe; they're mostly up north, [the map only shows the most recent sightings; a few days ago there was one near Princeton]. "I think I might have heard some on River Road off of 27 last Saturday," on my way to last week's ride start. I'll have to go back and check.
At home I re-map our route on ridewithgps. Even without going all the way around the reservoir we still have over 5000 feet of climbing in 57 miles.
Next week Tom is leading a ride up in Belvidere. After that I'm hitting the flatlands for a while.
*****
Grover is my mountain bike. He's only ever been out in the winter.When Plain Jim reminded me and Winter Larry that his Purple Cow Ride would be Sunday, I thought it would be a good recovery ride after Saturday's climbing.
At the D&R canal parking lot in Rocky Hill, he gets four of us to sign in, a pretty good start for a new ride. He'll no doubt describe our pace as "stately." Grover doesn't have a computer; I have no idea how fast we're going. To me the pace is "whatever," which is exactly the pace I want.
I decide to be the sweep. It's only fair.
Every time I stop for painted turtles they stay where they are when we're there and talking, and when everyone else pedals on. But the instant they hear me clip in, they dive into the water.
This is the first time I've been on the towpath north of Princeton. We must be in South Brunswick now. The path has turned red, like it is at Six Mile Run.
This part of the towpath is more crowded than I thought it would be. We get passed by a lot of bikers; we pass a few ourselves. There are dogs and strollers, runners and walkers.
No cicadas.
Two of us have mountain bikes; three have hybrids. Although most of the path is smooth crushed stone, there are muddy spots, bumps, and rocks that make me happy for Grover's fat tires and shock absorbers.
More turtle:
Someone reports how many miles we've gone, and how fast. It goes in one ear and out the other.
Plain Jim, on a hybrid, decides to ride up to Main Street Cafe in Kingston. Grover's tires are too thick for me to want to ride on the road. I've done that before and the slow speed is torture. The Excellent Wife drives up to meet him and I follow.
Vern and his A-level pals are there. This is their regular Sunday post-ride hangout. Good ol' Vern. He always insists that he's not fast, and then it comes out that "not fast" means cruising at over 20 miles per hour on a century. Right.
There's one more thing I have to do before heading home. At River Road I turn right, roll down the window, and drive slowly until I hear them, across from the Masonic Temple. I pull into the gravel lot, grab my phone, and walk across the road to a chained-off driveway leading to a crumbling asphalt clearing in the woods.
If I can hear them from the road they can't be crickets, can they? What do you think? Listen.
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