Playing to All My Weaknesses

 

Delaware River at Lumberville, PA

11 September 2021

The second thing I noticed when I got out of my car at the parking lot behind the Bridge Cafe in Frenchtown was the giant spider web, most likely spun by a Neoscona crucifera.

The first thing I noticed was that I was cold. "Summer's officially over," Bob said as I pulled on a pair of arm warmers.

I'd taken Route 29 through Lambertville and Stockton to get here. Lining the sidewalks of both towns are piles of furniture discarded from Ida's flood. 

Today was Tom's annual Lying Bastard Ride, a hilly route in Pennsylvania that's shape-shifted over the years. The first one was in 2011, and it took us up a double-digit incline on a busy road from a dead stop.

He repeated the ruse in 2012, even though he had promised there wouldn't be any tough hills. When we collected ourselves and our lungs at the top, Dave C asked Tom, "How often do you get called a lying bastard?"

"A lot," Tom said, and that was that.

I never really want to do this ride. The Pennsylvania hills still wig me out. There's no rest, just up and down and up and down and up and down and I never know where I am ever. I avoided it last year by jumping into an extra glassblowing session. This year, no such luck. Too slow to be invited to join some of the Usual Suspects on the Sourland Spectacular ride, I committed to the Lying Bastard ride instead, where I was also too slow.

There was fog over the Delaware River.

I never remember much about this ride from year to year, but when we approached the first closed bridge, I recognized it right away. We've always been able to walk through it. This time, though, a pile of asphalt greeted us at the other end. It was only a minor inconvenience. 

We stopped at a part of Lake Nockamixon that I don't remember seeing before.

Tom had graciously eliminated the loop through Perkasie, where every street is at a 45 degree angle. We didn't go down to the marina on the lake, either, and we didn't see the WPA waterfall.

We did, however, encounter a second closed road.

Looking back on my blog posts from previous Lying Bastard rides, I see that the record for this ride is four closed roads. Oh well. We get points for chutzpah this time, though, because the piles of dirt were higher than usual.

I spent most of the ride at the back of the pack, and the rest of it off the back. There was a demoralizing climb every five miles, with annoying ones in between. The hills Tom chose today play to the worst of my abilities: short, sharp shocks with little rest in between. I'm better at the long, steady grinds. As I've written before, I'm a slow-twitch kind of gal. 

It sure was pretty up there in Pennsyltucky, though. And we ended the ride with a hair-raising descent down Red Hill Road. I recorded it on my Fly12, but it's too long to post on Blogger in its entirety. Maybe I'll put it up on YouTube eventually, once I run it through the editing software to eliminate the audio, which is Tom warning us to spread out and then five minutes of crunching over Ida debris.

I got a good look at the Delaware River on the walk back to Frenchtown. Ten days after Ida, the water is still high.

On my drive home, I stopped at Lower Creek Road, where it meets 519. There's a barrier up, and a sign warning that the road is closed. There's a gap wide enough for cars to get through, and I saw one leaving, so at least one homeowner isn't trapped down there.

I walked about a quarter mile. I felt as if I were on a pilgrimage to a sacred place, walking on hallowed ground, or what was left of it.

The asphalt, where there was any, was coated in gravel a few yards in.

The Wickecheoke Creek was back down to a trickle among a wide swath of rocks.

But the flood damage was immense. Asphalt chunks lay along the side of the road or slammed up against tree trunks. 

I stopped past the first set of cones and took a picture of the road ahead. We could ride our bikes here at least as far as my camera could see. It would be a dead end, of course, but Lower Creek Road is still a place of peace and maybe we need to come back once in a while, no matter what.