14 September
OK, so Mike B has been nagging me for a year now to do this ride up in New York State somewhere, hours away from here. He says the scenery is worth the drive and that the view from the top of Bear Mountain makes the whole trip worth the time. And time is the problem. He says it’s an all-day thing. I’ve been resisting all summer, but now that I’ve had a taste of the lower Adirondacks I figure I can handle whatever Bear Mountain throws at me. So I give him a date in September and we start trying to round up some Slugs.
Nobody bites but me.
Then Mike sends us the elevation profile and tells us he and Theresa averaged 11.7 mph last time they rode the route. I don’t know what’s worse: that the hills knocked them back to a D pace or that he remembered their speed. “Have fun,” I write back.
He still has a few days to work on me, though, and in the end I decide that the only way I’ll ever get him to leave me alone about this is to go. Besides, I’m a sucker for a good view. Who can pass up passing seven lakes in a row?
So here we are at 6:20 a.m. in my driveway, Mike and Theresa making room in the back seat for me, Kermit, my backpack, and my breakfast. The heat index for Trenton will reach 99 degrees today; up at Bear Mountain it’ll be ten degrees cooler.
There’s nobody on the road at this hour, of course. The sun is barely up. We fill the time talking but there’s only one thing I remember from the trip north: Mike weighs his bike tires. Twice. Once just after he buys them and again just before he gets rid of them. They lost half a gram each over however many thousands of miles he put on them.
We stop at a Dunkin Donuts in Sloatsburg, NY, and I fill up on caffeine. I’d bought my own but I put too many grounds in the French press and it’s undrinkable. By the time we park at a trailhead a few miles away I’m starting to feel zingy.
It’s foggy. Storms had passed through here early this morning. The ground is a little wet. Mike is sure that it’ll clear by the time we get up the mountain. The weather reminds me of the Death March double reservoir rides. While Mike and Theresa get ready I walk across the street for a picture
We have no warm-up at all; it’s straight up a long, gradual hill. The road is Seven Lakes Drive. I have to get a picture of each one. That slows us down a lot, and I apologize, but Mike and Theresa say they don’t mind. Every time I tell them to go ahead while I take a picture they stop and wait for me.
There are a lot of motorcycles on the road today. “Motorcycles are like deer,” I call out. “There’s never just one.”
We’re not in any hurry. Somehow the conversation comes around to practical jokes. I have to tell the nose story.
It was my first year at Penn when it happened, but I have to start farther back in time. “Remember those disguise kits, those nose-glasses?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we had one, except the nose got separated. I don’t know what happened to the glasses, but we had the nose.”
We used to stick it in strange places all over the house. One of us – me, my dad, or my sister – would find it in one of our drawers or somewhere and move it somewhere else.
“Lake! Stopping!”
So my sister came to visit me at Penn, and my roommate and I caught her trying to stash the nose in my room. I snagged it and stuffed it in the door handle of my dad’s van the next time I was in his car.
I didn’t see it for a while.
Then one day around Thanksgiving I got a package, but there was no return address on it. I saw the postmark, though, so I knew where it was from. Inside was the nose.
“Lake!”
So I didn’t say anything, right? I have this plan. And my dad doesn’t say anything for a while either. I was going home once a week for guitar lessons – I’d meet the teacher halfway – and my dad starts to ask questions. “Anything interesting going on?” “Anything in the mail?”
“Nope.”
So my dad finally fessed up that he mailed me the nose. He even went to the post office and put a tracer on it. The guy asked him what was in the box, so he had to think of something quick, right, ‘cause he wasn’t going to say, “A nose.” So he said, “Theatrical make-up. Is this the same lake or a different one?”
“It’s a different one.”
“Stopping!”
“Do you wanna go down to the water.”
“Naah. I think I can get both in one shot.”
So it was Christmas and my grandmother was over. I came downstairs for breakfast and my sister came into the kitchen. “I don’t believe you.”
“What?”
“The tree.”
“Huh?”
“You didn’t see them?”
“See what?” I went and took a look. There were, like, half a dozen noses on the tree, all different, none of them like the original. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t my sister so it must’ve been my dad who did it.
So it was time for presents and I gave my sister the box, all wrapped up. She opened it and shouted, “You liar!”
My poor grandmother had no clue what was going on. My dad said, “I’ll never trust you again!”
My dad said that the nose was to be officially retired. But it wasn’t really. It turned up a few more times.
I told Mike and Theresa where I put it last, but I can’t tell you, readers, because my father reads this blog and he hasn’t found it yet. It’s been a couple of years (big hint!).
“The sun’s coming out!”
“Are we at seven?”
“I think this is a pond.”
That’s it for the lakes. Now we’re in the woods. Mike signals for us to make a sharp left, but the road is blocked off by a metal gate. We walk our bikes around it. The sign says that the road and tower are closed. “This is good,” Mike says. “We have the road to ourselves.”
This is the first big hill of the day. Mike says it’s easy, but the first part is steep. We know the hill will go on forever so we’re taking it easy.
It’s not long at all before I notice the fog. At first I think it’s just my glasses. I’m going so slowly and it’s so humid out here. But when I look over the rims I see that we’re riding in a thick fog.
Ahead of us bikers are popping out of the fog one by one, coming down the hill. I can’t see more than a few meters in front of me now. Mike points out some rocks to the left. “There’s supposed to be a view there,” he says. It’s a wall of white.
Now a tower emerges from the fog. We’re at the top. We rest our bikes on some rocks and walk to the edge. This is the view:
Mike is upset. He says I did all this work for no view, that the whole point of this ride was to get this view.
But I’m laughing. “This is worth it! I can bust on you for a year for this! First the view at Spruce Run and now this! This is great!”
We sit on a rock and talk to a pair of hikers who are also waiting for the mist to clear. Mike is convinced it’ll happen any minute. Every time there’s the slightest change he calls out, “It’s clearing!”
Mike stands on a rock, looking out across where the Hudson River is supposed to be. “Now you’re angry at me,” he laments.
“No, we’re not.”
“Do I look upset?” Theresa asks, on her back on the rock, knees up, eyes closed.
I take pictures.
We can see the mist blowing in front of us. Twice the ridge across the Hudson River appears,
but that is all. We turn back.
Mike wants to show us the view from the other side of the mountain. We start along the road again, downhill this time, but we don’t pick up any speed because we can’t see far enough ahead. He pulls us over to a clearing in the road. We see more whiteness.
Now we have to go back up the hill and down the road we came in on. As we descend the fog seems to lift. Now we can see a little of the valley beneath the mountain:
Mike says, “That’s one tenth of what you’d normally see.”
Almost at the bottom we do catch a glimpse of another lake:
Stymied by the gate at the bottom of the mountain access road is s a herd of motorcycles and a lone cyclist. We tell him it’s not worth the climb.
I’ve been hungry since the top of Bear Mountain. Mike says we’re just a few miles away from our food stop, but first there’s the matter of the Bear Mountain Bridge. There’s only pedestrian access on one side. We have to cross the bridge road to get there, and in doing so put ourselves on the Appalachian Trail for all of ten seconds.
The pedestrian walk is narrow and close to the edge of the open bridge. Mike rides across but I’m convinced I’ll get vertigo at the slightest breeze (something that started happening to me right around the time my hearing got worse). I’m already a little dizzy from low blood sugar and high caffeine. I dismount, stranding Theresa behind me. I walk across the bridge; Theresa half walks, half rides. We meet Mike halfway. I turn around. There’s Bear Mountain. Mike is miffed. “We were half an hour early,” he complains.
I turn around for more pictures.
We lift our bikes over the barrier, ride with traffic back to the foot of the bridge, and pedal into the park by a lake at the foot of Bear Mountain. Although it’s mid-September there’s an Oktoberfest celebration going on. We pass a table full of large bags of candy, including one of Swedish fish. I almost stop but that bag would be too much to carry.
We get soft pretzels instead. We sit by the lake and have our sandwiches and pretzels. Jack has been baking the bread; I’ve been making the sandwiches. We’ve decided that Jack is part of the team. He wants mile credits. I told him he gets anything over 100.
So far this ride gets the Hill Slug Seal of Approval. We only had one tough hill but the scenery more than made up for it, even though I didn’t get to see the best part.
But now, Mike announces, “We have thirteen miles of work ahead of us.” He promises it won’t be as difficult as the mountain, that the hills are easier, and that there are only one or two steep bits.
We can see a nuclear reactor across the Hudson River before Mike tells us to turn. He warns us in the nick of time as we turn to face a short wall of asphalt. Now the sun is coming out and it bakes us on the tar. At the top there’s a sharp turn to the right. Behind me Mike calls out that “it’s not over yet,” but it pretty much is.
Now the road is slowly going up in little spurts, but there’s no view, just houses and trees. The road ends at a T. Mike is confused. The street sign doesn’t match the map, yet there were no turns in between here and the last intersection. We flag down a car and ask where Queensboro road is. The driver points to the right. “It’s at the top of the hill.” Mike asks another question or two until it becomes clear we have to turn right and that we’re not lost. The driver makes a wavy motion with her hand: “But it’s, you know, hilly.” I smile.
The car turns left and we turn right. “You poop-head,” I call out to Mike. “You made us start a hill from a dead stop.” I have to zig-zag across the road until I can clip back in.
From there we go up. And up. And up some more. Each time I think we’ve got to be at the top there’s more hill over the crest. I’m not having fun any more. I’ll keep it to myself but I put a little distance between myself and the other two just in case I bitch out loud.
The sun beats down. No breeze at all.
So much for the Hill Slug Seal of Approval.
I pull off into a driveway to wait for the others.
Mike emerges from around the bend. “You lie,” I tell him. “You lie like Sarah Palin. I’m going to call you Sarah.” We catch a breather in the shade and move on, move up.
“We should be at the top soon,” Mike says.
“I don’t believe you, Sarah.”
We crest another hill. As before another emerges in front of it. Behind me Mike lets out a dry laugh. I tell him, “I hate you.”
At the next intersection I see a sign to the right for Harriman State Park. We’re almost home, but it looks like another long hill between here and there. I power up, knowing this has to be the last one.
The road levels off between two lakes. Now that the sun is out I can’t be sure I wasn’t here earlier today. To my right a guy is fishing. I chat with him while I wait for Mike and Theresa.
“Were we here before?”
“Nope,” he says.
So I take another picture. If these are two separate lakes then these are numbers ten and eleven. Plus the pond.
Across the lake there is a beach. Mike wants to go. “It’ll only add a mile and a half,” he pleads. But Theresa and I have had it, and we’re also running out of water. We seem to have talked him out of it.
Now the road is finally flat. I change my mind. “Is that the turn to the beach up there?” We turn in. There’s a huge parking lot, empty. We cut across and ride on a blacktop path along the water. On the sand are empty lifeguard chairs. A few people mill about.
Mike has found a soda machine with a curious sign: “Water is hot.” He feeds a few dollar bills into the machine anyway, retrieves a bottle of water, and pours it into my and Theresa’s empty water bottles. I take a sip. “Geez. You could make tea with this.” Not warm even. Hot.
The rest of the ride is downhill, back the way we started, for two miles of plummet. The road has been patched at regular intervals with shiny tar. My bike and my bones rattle each time I go over a patch, to the point where this thirty-five mile per hour descent is no longer pleasant. But finally the road smoothes out, just in time for us to see our parking lot.
We take our time drying off and cleaning up. Now the air feels every bit of 89 degrees. My legs and Kermit’s frame are coated with road splut from this morning’s fog. I bum a rag off of Mike to clean the frame.
On our way home Mike tells me that we have to do this ride again when the weather is better. I don’t know what I missed, he tells me. I have to see it. So until we make the trip back up to Bear Mountain, the nagging will continue.
