What you think about when you bike about 200 miles

Blind Faith in your leaders will get you killed. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tour, Brendan Byrne Arena/Meadowlands, 1985

Actually, the title of this post should be what I thought about when I was thinking about writing a blog post about my recent bike trip listening to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, 1975-1985 (a compilation of live performances) on the headphones.  But I figured if I shortened it, I could make a play on the title of that famous Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lying back in my recliner, which hasn’t gotten near enough use over nearly two decades, I remembered when I saw Springsteen live in 1985 and he uttered the statement which begins this post. Then I also remembered this is Veterans Day, probably not the best day for such a quote.

All of which makes sense in the strangest of ways because my day started, like most weekdays, with the 6-7 a.m. call in show on C-Span during which an Iraq veteran caller was irate because Springsteen was playing at some ceremony somewhere and the guy was pissed because Brooce! was an ardent Iraq War protester. As was I. Am I, since the damn war continues under different guises. That caused me to talk back to my television, asking, “Well, how many more U.S. military personnel would have been killed or maimed if Iraq War protesters had not risen up and helped elect a President who campaigned on ending it?”

What does all this have to do with my recent bike tour along the C&O canal towpath from Cumberland, MD to Georgetown, Washington DC, a 180-mile ride I pedaled with four comrades over a five day four night period last week in September? I’m not sure, but we sure experienced a tremendous amount of history on that ride. The construction of the canal, nominally between 1820-1860, was, in many ways, a forty year exercise in futility because the railroads had quickly become the shipping option of choice and efficiency. We saw some small towns bearing the scars of decades of a de-industrializing America, a subject Springsteen sung to more than once. We detoured one afternoon to visit Antietam, a bloody awful battlefield of the Civil War. And we ended our tour in the nation’s capital, where our elected officials and the bureaucracy surrounding them make the decisions to send men and women into battle, pursue global economic strategies which gut high paying domestic jobs and, with them, the American middle class, and appropriate tax dollars for things like, well, keeping up the C&O Canal trail through the National Park Service. In between and all around us were striking views of the Potomac River and its environs.

One night we even stayed in a Comfort Suites (leesburg, VA) where the staff treated us five bikers like royalty, after we had ridden a ferry across the river. They even helped us wash our bikes! Oh, and one of my pedaling mates, she was named Sandy, and of course, that Springsteen song was on the vinyl side I just listened to. Another night we stayed at a B&B which could have doubled as a fright house for Halloween, but the lone proprietor proved to be an eminently nice guy. Although his lodging resembled an army barracks, he called ahead to make sure the one restaurant within ten miles would stay open for us for dinner, drove us to a scenic overlook, then cooked up some bitchin’ pancakes (or was it french toast?) the next morning.

I had no big thoughts, revelations, mid-course corrections, or eureka moments pedaling all those miles. My head was down and I was concentrating on the trail, most of which had ruts, and exposed roots, mud puddles, fallen branches, and other debris. I read many more C&O towpath historical markers than I ever would have if I were traveling solo. In many ways, it was a flat (an elevation difference of 600-700 feet total and we were going downhill), unobstructed, tour through a rich, winding slice of America and its history.

I thought I would fill many journal pages with new ideas, descriptions, sentiments, and details, fragments of which later might become seeds for short stories or blog posts. Not so much. I do recall an aroma in the air for several miles several times of cider, perhaps the pungency of rotting apples, though we never saw any fruit trees. The highway and the railroad which paralleled the towpath constantly reminded me we were not exactly in the wilderness. Industrial ruins and even an old water wheel mill house were at times embedded in the woods.

Though I’ve been riding a bike as a adult since 1980 (I marked the year by writing a poem about my first really cool bike), and I completed two centurions back when I used to live and bike in Manhattan, this was my first “overnight.” I seriously love my saddle bags, which the three ladies I lived with  got me for Christmas last year, along with the contraption to hook them onto on the back of the bike (thank you, ladies!). Amazing how much stuff they hold. I thought a lot about how I am trying to substitute as many car miles for bike miles as I can at home. Even though I live in the heart of a city and everything is nicely compressed, it still isn’t easy. It was also nice to pedal so many miles without someone in a car yelling something stupid at me like, “YOU ARE NOT A CAR!” even though he was the one who didn’t see me.

I thought more than several times that I was gaining weight. That happened on one of those centurions I finished. When we reached the tip of Long Island, we completely and totally pigged out. That was after the probably 4000 calorie brunch we had at the halfway point in an IHOP. But no. I was at my same weight when I got home from the C&O trip.

Come to think of it, I did have blind faith in our leaders, Mark and Sandy Doumas, who last year had biked across the entire country – San Diego, CA to Richmond, VA. For all the biking I’ve done, I’m not much of a bike mechanic. I can change a tire but it would take me about five times as long as a guy like Mark. My friend Tom in the DC area helped me negotiate getting my car to my bike and put me up one night ahead of the trip and one night at the end. My sister-in-law made all the hotel arrangements. I didn’t even question. This may have been the first trip since college I went into expressly to “get beyond myself.”

Though I do question the wisdom of, and stridently oppose, the wars and overseas conflicts our nation is entangled in, none of which in my mind have a damn thing to do with our freedom here, I am nevertheless thankful that I live in a country where Bruce Springsteen can sing protest songs, my tax dollars support National Parks and Forests, and a veteran can speak his mind on the day he and his still-serving and fallen comrades are honored, a country which welcomed my father, who left a country with little if any freedom almost 65 years ago.