I am meeting the New Year in the heart of one of our great southern National Forests—the Osceola. It is a combination of pine forests and cypress swamps. At sunset the woodpeckers started up and then as the sun went down the crickets started and now the owls are calling to each other. Alone, in my tent, staring at the stars, I can’t think of a better way to usher in a new year. It is a moment to spend with myself as I ponder how to make my 50th year on this planet one of true growth and wonder.
I spent the day breathing deep the alternating scents of pine and cypress as I biked into the forest. At times the scent was so rich it almost felt like I could taste it on my tongue. It reminded me of the powerful scent of sage and chaparral from my childhood in Mission Canyon—part of the Los Padres National Forest.
As I get ready for sleep and my final push to the Atlantic tomorrow, I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year. May you find the time to be alone, deep in the heart of Nature, letting it talk to that quiet side of you that longs for its restorative conversation. You won’t be sorry if you do.
Inevitably, I end up staying at RV campgrounds at some point on my bike trips. They often have “primitive” facilities for tent camping and will usually let me camp real cheap since I don’t need a car pad. They’re OK. While not in the most awesome places usually, they tend to have pretty good amenities—hot showers, WiFi, and a laundry room. Also, they almost all have a take-a-book/leave-a-book section. And, oddly, almost all of the books in them are romance novels. Kind of sad and telling.
Imagine the lack of self-awareness and the level self-denial you have to participate in if you’ve trapped your wife in a mobile cage, dragging her around the country, while she spends her free time reading about rugged, handsome men that spend their time liberating women from some form of domestic Hell.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with some RVers the other night on the beach on Dauphin Island. They were roughly around my age (late 40s, maybe early 50s).The husbands were convinced I could not really enjoy bike touring and then proceeded to tell me all the luxuries that they have in their RVs that I am missing on my bike. They didn’t ask me any questions about my travels, they just wanted to point out how hard and inconvenient it all was. I just nodded and smiled.
Their wives, on the other hand, peppered me with questions about my trips and where I had been. They asked me about a bunch of National Parks and I had been to almost every one that they had on their wish list. I finally just said “How come you don’t go to them? They’re called mobile homes for a reason.” They wives just rolled their eyes and one of the men said that getting reservations at them is nearly impossible.
I’m sure they didn’t start their lives together like this, but along the way things happen. Children come along, mortgages have to be paid, careers built… idealism gets tempered by reality. But to have finally gotten to that point in their lives where they could chase those dreams again, unhindered by the reality of simply needing to survive, and be unable to do it struck me as really sad.
At what point did building a secure future become a numbness to their dreams. What was the turning point that made security and the status quo, no matter how unfulfilling, preferable to challenge and adventure.
Our culture of materialism has created an epidemic of stability junkies. They would rather live in the numbness of monotony than face the raw feelings of uncertainty and fear. That doesn’t mean that they don’t feel the pain of never fulfilling the dreams of their youth. They just keep it anesthetized with material comfort and the fantasies of change.
For him, it is to constantly feather his mobile nest with new gadgets while planning for that big adventure. Instead, he will wear a rut between his winter spot and his summer spot—never pulling the trigger on his dream.
For her, it is to go along with the facade and read her romance novels. Dreaming something incredible will change their lives (or at least hers) and then they will live those lives they fantasize about—quietly resenting the life she does have.
They sit in that RV, trapped as much as any prisoner, just instead of bars he has a new satellite dish and she has a “back massager” that she secretly calls the Highlander.
Sad.
And those are my Christmas thoughts as I do laundry in an RV Park in rural Florida.
On my summer vacation I:
… visited 7 National Parks and 24 State Parks;
… rode through 15 State or National Forests;
… read beside countless alpine rivers and streams;
… was hosted 12 times by amazing people;
… rode past dairies, vineyards, fruit and nut orchards, Christmas tree farms, wheat fields, oyster beds, and clover honey fields;
… ate an entire meal of wild blackberries that I picked in my camp and had raw oysters 100 feet from where they were harvested, served by the man who collected them;
… woke to the scent of both sun-roasted sugar pines and chilly, coastal estuaries;
… napped in the largest alpine meadow in the world;
… was snowed on;
… was afraid I might die of heat stroke;
… slept in a church, a whitewater rafting compound, behind a pile of CalTrans gravel, in a ditch on the side of a forest service road, and in a stranger’s front yard;
… saw thousands of miles of back country, often alone and in silence;
… got to see up close, and have alter my path multiple times, the largest snowpack in the Sierras and Cascades in an generation;
… got to meet, for the first time, the incredible kids of a number of my oldest friends;
… and had great conversations with, and was inspired by, hundreds of people I will never see again.
I was really fortunate to be able to spend the summer between my 1st and 2nd year in law school in Alaska studying environmental law and Native American law. It was one of the most incredible experiences in my life. When I went I brought my camping gear and my panniers and (knowing Alaska doesn’t have sales tax) bought an incredible mountain bike to explore and tour on while I was there.
Touring was possible because we had loooong weekends. Classes ended on Thursday and did not start until 5pm the following Monday. Thus every weekend was essentially a 4-day weekend—and that did not count the entire week off for the 4th of July. I was able to bike the entire Anchorage basin and much of the Chugach range around it. All over the Kenai Peninsula, and up the Denali Highway and both Denali National and State Parks.
I slept by streams so full of running salmon that you could almost walk across them on their backs and not get your feet wet. I rode little trails to go see immense waterfalls that the locals told me about. I stayed in Forest Service cabins that dotted the spines of mountain ranges throughout the state. I canoed through the Kenai Moose Preserve on the Swanson River Canoe Trail. But the thing I will remember most about my time biking in Alaska will be the bears.
The bears…
Not the bears themselves, actually. I saw bunches of them while riding and they either ignored me completely or they scooted off in the other direction as the sight of a human.
No, what I will remember about the Alaskan bears is the Alaskan peoples’ almost obsessive fixation on bears. Or maybe it was just in telling visitors scary stories about bears. Either way, to me, it was their most obvious trait: a seemingly, all-consuming interest in all things ursine.
I mean, sure, I expected to hear some stuff about bears when I got up there, but not to the extent that I was inundated by it. They seem obsessed with telling me about bears, but not just facts like the American Grizzly eats 90 pounds a day. Nooooo, they seem obsessed with bear maulings. I have yet to meet an Alaskan who does not have a personal story about an acquaintance who was mauled for any one of a number of offenses that practically required the bear to kill (leaving out garbage, walking alone in the woods, fishing, camping with food, camping with a woman who is menstruating, having a dog in the woods, camping without food, etc…). They would ask me what I had been doing since I got up there and then when I told them anything they would stop me and tell me how lucky it is I wasn’t mauled.
Seriously, anything I’d say and I get the same reaction…
“Shopping… and you bought peanut butter? Do you know how lucky you were not to be mauled?”
“I was in a Safeway.”
“I had a friend who was buying Capt. Crunch with Crunch Berries, you know how much bear like berries, and a solitary male mauled him right there in aisle 9. Horrible, if he hadn’t played dead he would wouldn’t have made it. People die every day up here.”
Which leads me to the second curious trait of Alaskans. Along with their omnipresent bear stories is the advice on how to avoid or minimize bear maulings. From my own observation of the Alaskan bear lore the only way to truly avoid a horrible death from a bear mauling is to leave the state, because from the moment you enter the state the clock is just ticking until you are eaten by a bear. But they have their own advice:
Lest you think I joke, I took these off a Forest Service Warning Sign at Denali State Park (which is directly across the Denali Highway from Denali NP).
1: Never surprise a bear (Duh)
2: If you surprise a bear, get out of the area as quick as possible. (Really? I was going to slap it a few times to keep it disoriented before I skipped casually away)
3: If a bear charges you don’t run, that will trigger its predator instinct and he will chase you, most charges are just bluffs. OK, a 900 pound grizzly is racing at me, snarling, and the rational mind I use to choose which retirement account will have the greatest yield for my golden years (if I am not eaten by a bear that is) will be operating and it will relay the advice “Don’t run, you will trigger its predator instinct.” Sure, that is what will happen while I’m hunched over in the woods taking a dump when Snaggle-Fang decides to charge me. Here is what will happen:
Bear sees Scott. Scott sees bear. Bear charges Scott. Scott’s rational mind disappears and instead the charging bear triggers Scott’s PREY instinct—the instinct that says “S**t, a f***ing charging BEAR!!!! RUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!” I forget my pants are around my ankles, I trip, plant my face in the ground and the bear has an easy dinner, but comments to itself that humans taste an awful lot like scat.
But that isn’t even my favorite piece of advice. My number one piece of advice is:
4: If a bear doesn’t stop and begins to maul you don’t struggle, play dead.
Sure. OK. Yes, good advice. As the bear eats me, pretend to be dead. I guess the easy part of this advice is that you only have to pretend for a little bit.
But that isn’t the end of the advice. It goes on:
If the bear continues and persists to attack you, stop playing dead and fight back viciously.
Oh really??
Sure, chief, gotcha!! How long do I wait while the bear eats me before I kung fu his furry a**? 3 mississippis, 5 mississippis? And I’m sure it will do a whole lot of good. I can see it now as I leap from the ground, beating the bear with my amputated arm and unleashing a can of whoop-a** on him. If I stand a chance at all fighting a bear fist to paw, I think my chances are better before I let him chew on me for a bit.
Given all of that, I would recommend anyone who has ever wished to bike tour Alaska to do it. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.
Just leave a will and expect to be consumed by a bear as you pretend to be dead in a Safeway shopping for peanuts.
There are times in your life when circumstances test your mettle and you find out who you are and what you are made off. It can be from facing many things: weather, terrain, a rough patch in life or, as history often captures, a monumental foe. It was this category, the monumental foe, that brought my moment of truth. Achilles met Hector on the plains of Troy, David stood up to Goliath in the Valley of Elah, and I faced the Nutria of Hell Island in a swampy campground in southern Louisiana.
If you are unfamiliar with the nutria, let me introduce you to them. They are large (12-20 pounds), semi-aquatic rodents—swamp rats. Their genus name is Myocastor which literally means “Beaver Rat.” Yes, that’s right, a rat the size of a beaver. In the taxonomy of the Princess Bride they would be a R.O.U.S.—rodents of unusual size. They were brought to Louisiana from South America for the fur trade, but escaped into the wild where they are currently doing a tremendous amount of damage to the wetlands of the southern US.
My encounter with nutria came when I did the ACA Southern Tier. While biking through Texas I shared a lunch with a West-bound tourist from Australia on the same route. As with any cycle tourists crossing paths, we compared notes and offered advice to the other for what we had just been through.
I told him about some great places to stay, some to avoid, and a few people I met along the way to look up. In turn he did the same for me. As I was approaching Louisiana, and it had been in my mind, I asked about alligators.
“How’s the camping and gator situation in Louisiana?”
He just shook his head and said not to worry, not an issue.
Relieved, I saw my final apprehensions begins to evaporate. That is until he amended his comment.
“No, mate, gators are no problem. Never even saw one on land. It’s not the gators that are a problem, it’s the nutria.”
Huh? What? Nutria?
I must have looked like a dog that heard a vacuum cleaner because he clarified.
“Swap rats. Big. Big as a dog. And bloody aggressive.”
WTF!?!?!
Dog-sized, aggressive swamp rats!! Why wasn’t this mentioned anywhere on the ACA maps? Seems like a salient point to leave out. Not faulting anybody, but that seems like something I would have mentioned.
We had lingered at lunch, and each needed to keep going to get to our campgrounds that night, so we said good-bye and headed on our way. Plus, after the nutria revelation I was needing a little time to reprogram in my head the swamp boogie man from an alligator to a dog-sized angry swamp rat. Yeesh.
To be honest, I didn’t obsess over them. But come on, DOG-SIZED RATS, your mind will go there now and again when you have hours of road time. The “bloody aggressive” descriptor wasn’t helping much either. Still, I rode into the swamps of East Texas and Louisiana enjoying it for its unsurpassed beauty and not a nutria sighting to be had. That is until DeRidder.
I got a spot in a small private campground just outside of DeRidder. It had a beautiful little pond with an island. The island had a bridge to it and an idyllic little gazebo on it. The gazebo was a perfect place to cook and eat dinner since it was dry and had seating. The owners said I could set my tent up anywhere on the property and had assured me there were no gators in the pond (the nutria revelation couldn’t completely kill that fear). I figured the island would be perfect as it was both beautiful and, with the gazebo, it would be easy to cook breakfast in the morning as well. Little did I know that this island was the bullseye in the center of one very possessive nutria’s territory.
It started like all horror movies start—slowly to build the tension. First I started hearing noises coming from the water. My first thought was “GATOR” and that the owners were wrong about them not being in the pond. That is when I realized—how could they know anyway? Gators have legs and this isn’t a zoo. A gator could have easily just moseyed in one night. But the noises were very slight and very intermittent at first. It could have been a fish jumping (did the pond have fish?). I started scanning the water for the signs of a gator but saw nothing as the sun began to set.
As it got dark, I sat in the gazebo and read with my headlamp. Once it was fully dark the noises returned and they were both louder and more frequent. I went to my tent, made sure it was zipped up, and then walked the perimeter of the island, scanning the water with my light. The noises seemed to anticipate me and when I did hear them, they came from directly behind me. I would turn quickly, but nothing was there.
Spooked, I was about to move my tent off the island when a thought hit me—snakes!?!? Isn’t Louisiana filled with all kinds of poisonous snakes? Do you really want to be stumbling around in the pitch black looking for a new spot to sleep with snakes everywhere? Great now I was between the horns of a dilemma—snakes or gators. Pick your poison.
I kept telling myself that the owner knew their property and that they said there were no gators in the pond so that it must be fish jumping for bugs. There were enough bugs out for them, that was for sure. So I decided against moving my tent (also decided never to camp next to water in bayou country again—rookie mistake). The final piece of wisdom that sealed the deal was that I reasoned, correct or not, I could probably survive a gator bite but not s snake bite. And with that iron-clad logic I went back to the gazebo to read.
It was about 20 minutes later that I heard something by my tent. I pointed my headlamp at it and caught my first sight of the nutria. Until that point I had forgotten about them. My boogie men were gators with the very new introduction of snakes. But when my light hit the nutria, who seemed to be chewing on my tent pole, it all camp rushing back. DOG-SIZED AGGRESSIVE SWAMP RATS!!!!Mother of God that was a big rat and he didn’t seem to mind the spotlight at all. Worried for my tent, I ran down and only at the last moment did he retreat into the water.
The tent appeared to be OK. Maybe he wasn’t chewing the poles (why would he be chewing the poles?). Maybe he was after my food. I took it up into the gazebo and then dragged my tent as close to the gazebo as I could. If the gazebo were bigger I would have moved it entirely onto the gazebo.
I then sat in the gazebo and listened to him circle me in the water for quite some time. They moan and whine as a sound—that isn’t unnerving coming from a dark swamp. The bugs were getting pretty intense and I was getting pretty tired after a long day of riding, so after about an hour I got in my tent. That appeared to be what he was waiting for, because when I got in my tent he came out of the water and made a bee line for it. WTF!?!?!?
I jumped out, screamed at him and ran back up into the gazebo. He went back into the water and started to circle again. After about 15 minutes, I went back to my tent. Wash, rinse, repeat…
After the third time I was sitting in the gazebo with my trusty pocket knife (reserved normally only for dissecting salami chubs and opening bottles of wine) and a good-sized stick I had found. I was straining to hear the nutria in the pond and slapping bugs off me. I don’t know where he came from, but I know where he lived—in my head.
This pattern went on for hours—charge, scream, retreat, and patrol. It was exhausting. A few hours before dawn the nutria finally went away and didn’t come back. By then I was reduced to a twitchy mess. I didn’t really sleep. It was one of those hot-afternoon-on-the-couch type of sleeps where every sound is incorporated into your dreams and you wake tense instead of rested.
I got up at first light, packed my bike, and left. I didn’t stay for breakfast. I didn’t enjoy the “idyllic gazebo.” I got off Hell Island as quick as I could and didn’t look back.
As I was riding out of DeRidder the words of warning came back to me:
“No, mate, gators are no problem. Never even saw one on land. It’s not the gators that are a problem, it’s the nutria.”
My encounter with the bane of the Erie Canal, the Canada Goose–better known as the Hissing Cobra Chicken.
I was biking along the Erie Canal Tow Path listening to Pandora and just zoning out. I was drifting back and forth across the trail singing out loud (something I do when I am on bike trips but at no other point in my life) when I heard an insane hiss. It scared the bejesus out of me and I slammed on my brakes. That was the categorically the wrong thing to do as, unbeknownst to me, I had gotten too close to a mother goose and her goslings. Just as I was swiveling my heard around looking for what the hell just hissed, I saw a pair of wings pop out of the high grass and then an angry goose charged me.
I’ll never make it as some sort of action-hero because I just stood there frozen. Moments like this teach us about ourselves. What I learned in this moment was that, apparently, my evasive maneuver when confronted with imminent danger is to think I might suddenly become invisible. Needless to say, it didn’t work. I just watched it rush me and then bite me on the back on my thigh.
And, man, it really hurt.
With the courage of a Spartan at Thermopylae, I abandoned my bike and ran across the trail hopping and cussing. The f***ing goose started honking and hissing and strutting over my bike–head swaying, wings flapping, devil-tongue vibrating at me. She stood over my bike like Hannibal staring down at Italy.
It was pretty embarrassing to loose all my worldly goods to a goose and worse to be held at bay by it. Every time I moved toward my bike it would flap its wings, jut its head, and hiss. As I waited the bite began to swell up. I was getting angrier and angrier as the welt rose and the goose gloated over its spoils. In this contest of mano a goose, goose was winning. I started looking for a stick or rock, anything, that might give me the upper hand and help run off this feathered menace.
Unfortunately, I could not find one and had to stand there as the goose pondered its next move. Only one animal was in charge of this situation and we both knew who it was. It is moments like this when you realize that any pretensions of machismo were just that—pretensions.
When I was in Alaska I biked all over the state and, because I am a cautious guy, I carried bear mace. I had envisioned how I would deal with a charging grizzly countless times. The scenario went something like this:
I would come around a bend in the trail and see the grizzly. The grizzly would turn and acknowledge my presence—eyes meeting, sizing each other up. It would strike an aggressive stance to display its dominance. I would remain unfazed and calmly remove my bear mace from its holder and release the safety. In soothing words, I would try to get the bear to move along. Unfortunately, my calm presence would not be enough to deter the bear and he would charge. With nerves of steel I would wait, refraining for discharging the spray so as to give the charging 1200 pound grizzly (yep in my fantasy it was of monster-size) a chance to save himself. All would be done with a smooth and efficient grace and I would only spray the bear as a last option.
Well, that fantasy died today. Not only did the goose freak me out, but it got into my head. I had dog spay in my pocket and was so frazzled I didn’t remember it. Not that I would have used it on a goose, but that I was so completely rattled that I forgot that it even existed (this does not bode well for a dog attack). There was no smooth and efficient grace. No steely nerves. No raw courage. Now I am convinced that if I ever had to deal with a charging grizzly I would probably scream, crap myself, and pass out.
The goose finally decided to show me some mercy. It turned and slipped into the canal after its goslings, shooting me one last tongue-waving hiss.
I jumped forward, got my bike, and raced away.
All in all, it was pretty humiliating. I had my bike stolen by a 10 pound goose AND it bit me. From here on out turkeys have a reprieve, I am only eating goose for the holidays.
Coincidentally, the welt was about the size of a goose egg.
Mule 