Road work

December 31, 2023December 31, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

On Christmas Day Herself and I were chatting on the phone with my sister and her husband when the topic of New Year travel plans arose.

“Now, I know he never wants to go anywhere, but how about you?” my sis asked Herself.

Well. Sheeyit. It’s a true fact that I hate to fly, because air travel combines the joie de vivre of the DMV, the ER, and the county lockup with the airborne equivalent of a midsummer greydog ride from Bakersfield to North Las Vegas in the company of refugees from dentistry, flat-assed hookers, and a shoeless, flatulent freegan with facial tats, fresh from a FoodMaxx Dumpster.

But there’s more than one way to travel. And somebody sure put a ton of hard miles on the eight motor vehicles I’ve owned since 1977.

That was the year I drove from Greeley, Colo., to Burlington, Vt., and back again, mostly because I could. I had a used Datsun pickup, a friend who needed a lift to Wellsville, N.Y., and the promise of a couch to crash on in Burlington (Winooski, actually, but Burlington sounds hipper, though no hipsters ever proposed building a dome enclosing Burlington).

While I was in the neighborhood I took a spin up to Montreal to collect another friend at the Dorval airport, and landed a job as a dishwasher who also delivered pizzas to the local college kids. Or a delivery guy who also washed dishes. There was free beer and the kids tipped in weed; the memories fade.

Despite these perks it wasn’t long before I found myself light in the wallet pocket and motoring back to Greeley for a third friend’s wedding. I didn’t expect the marriage to last (it didn’t), but I’d already had a taste of what Burlington called “weather,” a “living wage,” and “Mexican food,” and it was either learn to like them or be elsewhere pronto.

See the USA in your Chevrolet (or Datsun, Toyota or Ford)

Maybe the Great American Road Trip appealed to me because I was late to the whole driving scene (no license until the end of my first year of college in 1972, lost it almost immediately, and didn’t slide back behind the wheel until I graduated in ’77). Or maybe it was that when I was a sprat my family nearly always took its vacations by automobile, to Montreal, Toronto, the Redneck Riviera, Iowa, Arizona, and the like.

Whatever. Turned out I liked driving places. I would drive somewhere at the drop of a hat and drop the hat myself.

After leaving Greeley for good I drove that Datsun to my second, third, and fourth newspaper jobs, in Bibleburg, Tucson, and Corvallis, Ore. In between relocations there were local digressions and adventures further afield, to Phoenix, Nogales, Riverside, San Diego, Flagstaff, Eugene, Portland, Ashland, Spokane, and Seattle. In California and Oregon I drove haplessly up and down the coast, mesmerized by the Pacific but unable to land a job of work within eyesight of it. Corvallis, a speed bump with a college on the wrong side of the Coast Range, was as close as I ever got.

A brand-new Toyota pickup took me away from Oregon and back to Colorado — another daily in Pueblo, then a chain of weeklies in Denver — and fueled by unemployment insurance from the latter I made one last run at California, annoying friends with couches in Santa Rosa and Ventura and mooning at the goddamn ocean like a fish who wished he’d never learned to walk, or drive. Still no sale. Back to Denver where a buddy had an extra room in a ramshackle house on the site of a former plant nursery.

With the unemployment insurance knocking up against the E on my fiscal fuel gauge, I coasted to a stop in Española, N.M. — and California finally gave me that long-awaited come-hither look. The Ventura paper, which had snubbed me some months earlier, decided I might do after all and offered me a job. Sorry, already got one, in Santa Fe, I replied.

Driving to ride

And thus the Great Bicycle Racing Travel Era commenced. From first Española and then Santa Fe I drove the Toyota to races in Los Alamos, Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Ruidoso, Moriarty, Las Cruces, Grants, Durango, Glenwood Springs, and Bibleburg. When Herself and I quit our jobs (mine in Santa Fe, hers in Los Alamos) and moved to Bibleburg the races were up and down the Front Range, from Pueblo to Fort Collins and all points in between, with occasional detours to outliers like Pagosa, Durango, Gunnison, and Salida.

Outdoor Demo 2005 — Working Outdoor Demo at Interbike.

By this time I was getting paid to watch other people race bikes, or make them, or sell them, so I was off to Boulder, Scottsdale, Monterey, Laguna Seca, Laguna Hills, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Casper, Seattle, Breckenridge, Bellingham, Bisbee, Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Prescott. I drove when I could and flew when I had to.

Some events, like Cactus Cup, Sea Otter, and the North American Handmade Bike Show, I visited more than once. Interbike I attended — was it really 19 times? — in two different cities (Anaheim and Las Vegas), for three different publications (VeloNews, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, and Adventure Cyclist), from three different hometowns (Bibleburg, Weirdcliffe, and The Duck! City), driving six different vehicles (three Toyotas, two Subarus, and one Ford F-150).

Come to think of it, when we closed on El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City back in 2014 I had to drive here from Bibleburg, scrawl my Juan O’Hancock on the paperwork, and before the ink dried scamper off to Vegas for that year’s Interbike. Afterward I roared back to spend the night in ’Burque before returning to Bibleburg — a 2,138-mile dash, all in all — to continue the back-breaking process of what I hope will be my last move ever, barring that final trip to the camposanto. Which will be someone else’s problem.

Sue Baroo and Steelman at McDowell Mountain.

I did skip five Interbikes — the 2007-10 editions in Sin City and 2018’s Grand Finale in Reno — the first because Bicycle Retailer and Industry News grew weary of paying me to remind the industry that its annual “Gathering of the Tribes” was primarily a vector for upper-respiratory ailments, cirrhosis, and other bad ideas, many of them involving bicycles, and the latter because not even Adventure Cyclist, which treated me to Interbikes 2011-17, would spend good money to have me perch upon a bust of Pat Hus at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, croaking, “Nevermore!” I wouldn’t pay my own way to Reno even if God promised to meet me at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino, forgive all my sins, and let me win a couple-three mil’ at blackjack.

Whenever I wasn’t motoring for money I would drive for free — to Wyoming to see Charles Pelkey get his head shaved; to Santa Rosa, Moab, or Truckee to ride bikes with Chris Coursey and Merrill Oliver; to Fountain Hills to pitch a tent and shred the gnar at McDowell Mountain Regional Park; or to Tucson, to ride the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Arizona Road Adventure.

For one 2012 outing I did without the automobile entirely, taking a leisurely three-day bicycle tour that started right at our front door in Bibleburg and looped through Penrose, Cañon City and Pueblo before heading back to B-burg.

There were occasional bouts of air travel, too, to Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, and Hawaii. Plus one daylong clusterfuck of a preposterously buggered U-turn from Bibleburg to DIA and back again (I was supposed to be flying to Sacramento for the 2012 NAHBS) that set me to hating on United Airlines via social media for months until the sons of bitches finally refunded my money. I spent about 40 minutes in the air and the rest of what turned out to be a very long 12-hour day split between two Colorado airports only to wind up right back where I started. Shortly thereafter I abandoned both air travel and social media.

Don’t Bug me

I’ll confess that my wanderings shrank dramatically in scope starting in 2018. We lost Mister Boo, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein, some equally dear two-legged friends, and Herself the Elder over the next few years. I broke an ankle but survived, though with the Bug in full swing I decided against physical therapy and out-of-town travel, even by car. Entrusting one’s health to the whims of strangers suddenly seemed unwise, especially considering what they’d done to the government in 2016.

My income dwindled from marginal to laughable, so I sat up, let capitalism roll on up the road, unpinned my number, and climbed into Uncle Sammy’s socialist broom wagon. I was expecting a Coupe deVille with color TV but it looks a lot more like Ghost Dancing, the 1975 half-ton Ford Econoline with the bald tires and bum water pump that William Least Heat-Moon herded around America’s blue highways in 1978: “It came equipped with power nothing and drove like what it was: a truck. Your basic plumber’s model.”

In 2022 I attended two celebrations of lives, but wasn’t paying much attention to my own. Suddenly 2023 was hitting the door running and I wasn’t going anywhere. So I suppose I can see how someone might get the idea I didn’t want to.

But I do. As it happens I have a new Nemo Dagger Osmo tent that’s only been pitched once, in the back yard. A copy of AAA Explorer landed in our mailbox yesterday. And Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster is going in for her 150,000-mile checkup on Jan. 4, 2024.

Eight automobiles down the long and winding road I’ve lost track of my own mileage, but I’m not worried about either of us. I don’t know where we’re headed next, but I refuse to believe it’s the junkyard.

For sure it’s not the airport.

Time travel

October 8, 2022October 8, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

• Editor’s note: It’s a gray, gloomy day here at El Rancho Pendejo, and Hal Walter’s road-trip tale has put me in mind of my own meditation from the spring of 2000, when the vile Crusty County weather had me thinking about snorting that long white line to wherever.

“I have been buggered to near death by the clock.” — Jim Harrison in “The Beige Dolorosa,” from the novella collection “Julip”

“How do I shut this alarm off?” my wife asked some years back. Her sports watch was cheeping incessantly, like a baby bird in a sack of crack.

“Like this,” I replied, snatching the watch from her, placing it on the kitchen floor and pounding it into a flattened silence with a claw hammer. We both laughed, but warily; killing time just isn’t that easy.

Still, when you see time limping along like it does in a snowbound April in the Colorado mountains, scraping the slush off its boots on the welcome mat of spring, there arises a murderous desire to put it out of its misery. So Shannon has begun hiding the hammers as I glare at the clock, as if I could will its crawling hands into picking up the pace, spinning me up some sunshine.

• • •

“We’re going to be late,” I warned my friends Hal and Mary as we dawdled first over stout, then over coffee, in a succession of Bibleburg bistros. It was my 46th birthday, and we were headed to Colorado College for a poetry reading by one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison. Harrison seems the sort to bark at nitwits who interrupt his work, and I wanted his autograph, not his antipathy.

Jim Harrison laid his Jim Hancock on my copy of “Warlock,” though it was not among his favorite works.

As it turned out, we were right on time, and Harrison was late. A student of Zen Buddhism with his own temporal compulsions, Harrison announced: “I’m not a long reader. This will be exactly 52 minutes.” A koan for a birthday present.

Frankly, I’d have settled for a little less light and a little more warmth. Spring brings Colorado the heavy snows that we used to get in winter like everybody else, and the way my mental batteries were running down under the gray-flannel skies had me convinced that I was solar-powered.

My last escape attempt, a mid-March road trip to a cycling festival in California, was too short and not nearly sweet enough. I’ve been contemplating another to someplace where the locals’ knowledge of snow is limited to what they’ve been able to glean from the Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can’t pilot a Toyota truck to the Virgin Islands, not even in four-wheel drive.

And then there’s the expense. The rising price of gasoline aside, it’s not always possible or desirable to sleep in a pickup, which lacks certain amenities — like a toilet, shower, sink, stove, furnace and elbow room, especially when the camper shell is stuffed fore to aft with a bicycle, a cooler full of beer and a day pack crammed with computer gear and drawing tools.

Even if you pack camping gear and spend your nights outside the truck, you’re doomed to an occasional Motel 666 if for no other reason than hygiene, an impulse that will cost you anywhere from $30 to $60 a pop, depending upon your ZIP code at the time.

So lately I’ve been eyeballing used RVs and wondering whether I’m old enough to own one. This is not unlike like cigar-smoking; you have to be of a certain age to pull it off without looking ridiculous.

Too, as a cyclist who has played mirror-tag with many a blue-haired land-yacht captain over the years, the notion leaves me feeling a little like a Lakota warrior applying to join Custer’s 7th Cavalry.

And the entry fee for the RV lifestyle is a high curb to hop — even an elderly, smallish Toyota RV can run from five to ten large, while free-lance cycling journalism pays on the small side.

• • •

In the essay “Going Places,” from his collection “Just Before Dark,” Harrison advises: “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse.” So with a light snow falling and the promise of more on the way, I jumped into my ’83 Toyota 4WD and headed north to talk to a guy who had a used, slide-in, pop-up camper for sale.

As I bounced crazily down our steep, corrugated goat path to the county road — this truck, which under a previous owner carried a camper, has springs apparently salvaged from a buckboard — I realized I’d forgotten my watch. A moment of dismay, then satori; I had more than enough time to make the noon appointment, and there was nothing of pressing urgency requiring a timepiece, so screw it.

So, after checking out the camper — affordable and nicely minimalist, with a cabover bed, a small sink and stove, a pedestal table and bench, and a furnace — I spent the afternoon idling around downtown Bibleburg, where it was not snowing, the roads were paved, and distractions were available in variety.

Drank a pint of Guinness and ate a burger in Jack Quinn’s; looked for Harrison books in the cavernous used-book store Gateways; sipped a tall Americano in a Starbucks staffed by two pleasant young women chattering away like magpies. Then I took my sweet time getting home, and not just because I was following a snowplow and an 18-wheeler up a slushy Hardscrabble Cañon.

Again, Harrison, in “The Beige Dolorosa” from “Julip”: “The clock is the weapon with which we butcher our lives.”

The character who writes this line on an index card — an academic rebelling against the tyranny of the clock as he comes to terms with a vastly altered life — then wraps his watch around the cord of his Big Ben electric clock and dangles both in the toilet, flushing and laughing.

He continues: “The damnable watch still worked. I put it on the floor, stepped up on the toilet seat and jumped, smashing the watch to bits. It occurred to me that I was getting a little excitable, so I took the remnants of the two timepieces outside and peed on them to complete the scene appropriately. I reached back in the cabin and turned off the light, the better to see the stars. They were so dense they made the sky look flossy, almost a fog of stars which had drawn infinitely closer to me than ever before, as if my destruction of time had made me a friendlier object for their indeterminate powers.”

Smash your watches. Pee on your clocks. Go look at the stars.

Taconook

October 26, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Well, now I know what I want for Christmas.

Start passing the sombrero*, y’all. I think you’re gonna need a big one.

* A tip of the hat to Adventure Journal, which agrees with me that “if Toyota was fun and not merely practical, they’d put this sucker into a production run.”

‘You went to bed with a functioning vehicle. …’

May 22, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Base camp at the overflow area in McDowell Mountain Regional Park, circa 2004.

Ken Layne kicks off this week’s installment of Desert Oracle Radio with a nod to a critter I know all too well — the “truck roach,” a.k.a. the wood rat.

Back when we were camped on that windscoured rockpile near Weirdcliffe in Crusty County, Colo., the deer, bears, ring-tailed cats, buzzworms, mountain lions, coyotes, and wood rats paid us regular visits. Once or twice the rats found their way into our laundry closet via the exhaust ductwork from the washer-dryer combo, which I then would have to disconnect and drag onto the deck so the furry little burglar could make his getaway.

On one memorable occasion, after we had relocated to Bibleburg, we drove back up to the Weirdcliffe place for a relaxing weekend in the boondocks. Herself dashed inside for a wee, and in short order I heard a screech worthy of a slasher film. An invading wood rat had managed to escape the laundry closet only to drown in the downstairs toilet.

But the pièce de résistance of our rodent experience centered on our 1998 Toyota Tacoma pickup, pictured above.

This outrageously expensive machine was practically brand new when one day it developed a hitch in its gitalong, an inexplicable stutter in its step. “This won’t do, not at all,” I thought, and lurched down Hardscrabble Canyon and over to the Toyota dealer in Pueblo that had sold me the thing.

The shop dudes said they’d have a quick look-see and suggested I go grab a bite of lunch. When I returned they were having themselves a huge hee, along with a haw or two or three.

Seems that when the young wrench assigned to my problem popped the hood, a giant wood rat leapt out of the engine compartment, then took a high-speed lap or two around the service bay before rocketing back into the truck somewhere.

The sonofabitch had been gnawing on the wiring harness, which explained the spastic nature of the vehicle’s operation. I got a new one of those along with some advice about various potions for discouraging peckish ratoncitos.

We never did figure out what happened to that particular wood rat, who must have been the most widely traveled member of his clan. I often thought of him holding forth to his grandchildren about the time he surfed a Toyota all the way to Pueblo and back.

Uncurb your enthusiasm

April 7, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

For the first time in nearly 35 years I am without a pickup truck.

Yesterday I sold the White Tornado, my 1983 Toyota 4WD long-bed pickup, to the auto shop that kept it and our other rice-grinders rolling long past their sell-by dates. The owner’s grandson needed something that was easier on the wallet than the giant pile of Detroit iron he’s been driving, and since Whitey needed work it seemed appropriate to let a family of mechanics adopt the auld fella.

Whitey was the sole survivor of a once-mighty Nipponese fleet, which not that long ago included another ’83 (a 2WD version with nearly 300,000 miles), a troublesome ’78 Toyota Chinook pop-top camper (dubbed the Pee-wee because it looked like something Pee-wee Herman might use to lure unwary children from a playground); and a 1998 Tacoma that was the last brand-new, showroom-floor vehicle we will ever buy.

The fleet, docked at Weirdcliffe. Not pictured: The Pee-wee.

And yes, I had them all at the same time.

One by one they all went west on me. The Tacoma we traded for my Forester. The Pee-wee we sold to a guy whose son needed a camper for fishing trips. And the 2WD ’83 went to the same folks who bought Whitey — they fixed it up for a young construction type who needed a work truck, and I saw it around town now and then for a couple years afterward.

I’ve had a truck since I still had hair, and it feels weird to look out the window and not see one up against the curb. But I got used to not having hair, and I suppose I’ll get used to not having a truck.

Maybe I can saw the ass-end off the Forester and drop a flatbed on the sumbitch.