Some days you just have to avert your eyes and fuck off somewhere. The Abyss will still be there when you get back.
Yesterday I distracted myself with our regularly scheduled Geezer Ride. Afterward I put some new tires (Hutchinson Caracals) on an old bike (Soma Double Cross), and this morning I slipped out for a couple hours of “me time” on chip-seal and singletrack before the thermometer could come to a rolling boil, fanned by the wind.
Being a huge fan of the venerable Hutchinson Python I bought the Caracals from Rivendell the instant they started carrying the brand. And ever since I had been dithering about which bike to put ’em on.
When I flatted the DC’s rear Soma Cazadero, I suddenly had a candidate.
The 700×42 Cazadero (510g) is a great tire for the trails around here, but it can feel like overkill for the road, even our roads, especially with sealant-filled inner tubes. And one of the things I like most about the Double Cross — a 54cm frameset with a longish top tube — is that with the right tire it can be as frisky as a young pup.
The Hutchinson Caracel
The plump 700×35 Caracal (487g) felt both lively and cushy on pavement at 30/35psi, and it wasn’t too shabby on the Elena Gallegos trails, either — just knobby enough for the most part, hooking up nicely in everything save for deep sand, where it tended to swim a bit.
The Cazadero just floats over the soft stuff like a magic carpet. I can ride that tire uphill through a sandy wash, though it can overwhelm the front end in the twisty bits if you’re not paying close attention, which frequently I am not.
“I wanna go there!”
“AIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!”
Etc.
I might relocate the Caracals from the Double Cross to the New Albion Privateer, because I’ve been wanting to see how that rig fares on an occasional off-road adventure. It has a pair of Soma’s The Everwear in 700c38, a fine setup for the road (their Shikoro is even better) but slicker ’n’ snot on a doorknob, not exactly the ticket for when the going gets dirty and sharpish.
Then again, maybe I’ll buy a set of Caracals in 700×40 for the Privateer, see how the old pirate dances with French shoes.
The Memorial Day Shopping Fiesta and Family Barbecue Getaway (Nothing to See Here, Move Along, Move Along) kicks off today with the murders most foul of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” and CBS News Radio, along with any remaining illusions that Americans live in a functioning democracy.
There is no truth to the rumor that the new national anthem for our next 250 years — or perhaps 250 days? Hours? — will be the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” reimagined by Black Sabbath. Or so we may hope, anyway.
One thing is certain: That cheery little ditty, along with an unauthorized Kid Rock cover of the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” will be in heavy rotation down in the Adolf & Eva Memorial Ballroom & Führerbunker. The lyric “Some rich men came and raped the land / nobody caught ’em” will be a huge laugh line for everyone save the slaves serving up the Big Macs and Diet Cokes.
Meanwhile, some good news: M-Day weekend gas prices are at a four-year high! But that won’t keep 39 million of us from cranking up the Family Yacht and burning a few tanks’ worth to spend time eating bad food poorly prepared and swilling tins of thin industrial lager with people we really don’t like all that much.
The Soma Double Cross takes five in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Last I looked go-juice was between $4.50 and $5 here in The Duck! City, which didn’t make AAA’s list of the top-10 Memorial Day getaways (the podium: Orlando, FL, Seattle, WA, and New York).
No worries here, bruh. I got my holiday shopping done early yesterday, before the ravening hordes could descend upon the grocery and strip the shelves bare like a cloud of fat betatted locusts. And today I ain’t driving nowhere, nohow, though I do expect to get out on a bike at some point. Yesterday was stellar in the Elena Gallegos Open Space; I saw only a few other trail users as I rumbled along on the old Soma Double Cross, and most seemed to be enjoying the wide-open space as much as I was.
Meanwhile, Republicans will be traveling home after shitting the bed in Congress. Here’s hoping their constituents have a few words with them about the horrible smell.
I was thrice blessed as I prepared to leave Bibleburg last Wednesday, an hour earlier than I had planned.
First, I had slept in a bed, in a room, not in my car parked in front of the hotel. I gave a thumbs-up to the stealth camper I spotted as I left to get coffee, for hiding in plain sight in the rain-drenched parking lot. But s/he got two thumbs down for being so obvious about it: a towel tucked into the top of a cracked rear window; clothing, water jugs, and other “not a guest here” hints strewn all over the front seats; and so on. Respect your adversary, dude.
Could’ve been a hotel employee, times being what they are. But still, style counts.
Second, the Starbucks across the road had that very morning begun opening at 5 a.m. instead of 6. Ordinarily I brew my own coffee on the road, but lately the hotels inflict these Keurig monstrosities upon us instead of mini-coffeemakers whose carafes can be repurposed for an AeroPress brew.
Pity that the smoke detectors dislike my little MSR IsoPro camp stove. “Outside use only,” kids. Just ask the guest in the Honda Hilton.
And finally, third: I was leaving Bibleburg an hour earlier than I had planned.
I always like leaving the B-burg, and leaving early is even better than not going there at all. I find myself in sympathy with my mom, who when we were transferred there in 1967 looked at downtown through a prism of memory from the 1940s and recoiled.
Yes, they let this work at the Gazette. I guess they really were libertarians.
Ten years later a colleague at the Gazette would say that anything east of Hancock Avenue wasn’t Colorado Springs, and mom would’ve agreed. I certainly did.
In my Gazette years I was living in an old Victorian carved into apartments at Cascade and San Miguel, right next door to The Colorado College, just north of what was still called “downtown.”
But when the O’Gradys first arrived we set up housekeeping east of Academy Boulevard, 3.5 miles into the prairie from my colleague’s Hancock border. Nearly six decades later, South Loring Circle feels almost urban.
The town goes ever on and on, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins. In this instance toward Kansas, not Mordor, though the differences between the two may be undetectable to political scientists. (Hint: Mordor had mountains.)
I’ve left the place more times than anywhere else, which probably says more about me than it does about B-burg. And this trip I was ready to skedaddle again after just four days. The rain, the postapocalyptic state of the roads, the endless high-speed conga line of traffic — two final tallboys of Starbucks and I was on my way.
• • •
It was hairy from jump. Pitch black and still raining, with fog to boot, and despite mopping all my windows and mirrors with a towel before leaving I was flying blind for a few scary minutes until the a/c defogged the glass. Not optimal when you’re merging onto I-25 from Briargate Parkway at 75 mph with a few thousand of your closest — and I mean closest, as in halfway into the hatchback — friends.
Paging Graham Watson. …
The weather remained gloomy. I didn’t bother putting on sunglasses until I was past Raton. Creeks had become rivers and rivers were inland seas. Ponds appeared magically like Brigadoon. Folks who parked their trailers in low-lying areas found themselves with rudderless houseboats.
There were enough sunflowers at roadside for a regiment of Graham Watsons, guarded by ravens perched on fenceposts. Lots of fat black cattle living large in the tall salad. I fought the urge to stop at McDonald’s and instead yelled “Go home!” at vehicles with Texas plates.
Skidmarks demarking various unscheduled off-ramps to left and right with “Damaged Guardrail Ahead” signs for headstones. A giant shitbox bearing a plate reading “IH8UALL.” Making America great again, one vanity plate at a time.
My Steelman puddle-jumper, sans puddles.
In six hours flat, with one stop for gas, I was back at the ranch. My training-log entry for the day reads, simply, “Nothing.”
But the next day I was on the old Steelman I’d hauled with me to Bibleburg, tooling around the sun-splashed Elena Gallegos Open Space, a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Home again, home again, jiggity-jog; the desert’s the place for this salty ol’ dog.
Shades of autumn in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
O, the weather outside is far from frightful. And the fires are mostly prescriptive. And since we’ve no place to go … even so, let’s just hold off on the snow for a while, if you don’t mind.
Fall rides are my favorite rides. While I occasionally miss aspects of Interbike — the paydays, the feasting and roistering on various publishers’ credit cards, the simply Getting Out of Dodge — I do not long to waste another week of prime cycling weather motoring to and from Sin City in a clattering Nipponese four-banger, with long miles of trudging from casino to expo and back again through the low-hanging clouds of Marlboro exhaust and Bud Light sweat.
On Friday I was muscling the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff around the Elena Gallegos Open Space when I came up on a couple mountain bikers standing about where I saw a good-sized rattler in the grass on Tuesday. So I stopped to see what was what.
They’d seen a tarantula hairy-legging it across the trail and stopped for a peek, so I had one too. Didn’t take a pic, because I always feel like some sort of half-assed journalist — or worse, a tourist — when I’m doing that sort of thing where people can catch me at it. But it’s always educational to see one of the critters who actually belong here in the Upper Chihuahuan Desert.
Speaking of things that go bump in the desert, thanks to everyone who lent an ear (sorry, no returns) to the revival of my long-dormant Radio Free Dogpatch podcast. I have no idea what’s next — I mean, shit, do any of us 10 days away from the pestilential erection? — but as soon as I do, you’ll hear all about it. Oyez, oyez, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
Things have been a little “Groundhog Day”-ish around here lately. On a loop, dully predictable, like customer-service hold music or the hourly news.
Thinking I might derive some mental-health benefits from taking a little road trip somewhere, I had the Subaru serviced. But then it struck me that I couldn’t think of anyplace a reasonable drive away in a 20-year-old car that would be a step up from where I already was.
Anyway, long stretches of the calendar had already been spoken for. A plumber was to diagnose and treat a leaky toilet. Herself blocked off a five-day visit to Aspen. Labor Day reared its capitalist head.
And finally, in-laws were inbound — Herself’s two sisters, the only survivors of a much larger expedition that, like Your Humble Narrator, just couldn’t seem to get buckled up and backed out of the garage.
Thus, lacking opportunity and inspiration, I’ve been trying to shake some of the dust off my local cycling routine, which over the long, hot summer took a two-wheel drift into a 20-mile rut.
It went like this: Get up early, have coffee, then some more coffee with toast, then a serious breakfast, and finally dash out for a 20-mile romp through the foothills before Tonatiuh started cooking.
This is fine, as far as it goes, which is not very; about 20 miles per sitting, according to my cyclometer(s). But after a while this sort of repetition devolves from joy into work. Exercise. Basically, gym class, which I always hated.
No wonder people get fat. Bor-ing.
So lately, with Tonatiuh having stepped away from the stove for a spell, I’ve been trying to mix it up a bit.
Last Saturday I joined a few other riders for a bit of paceline practice, zooming down Tramway to the North Valley and then drilling it out to Bernalillo and back. All told it was good for about twice my usual mileage.
Northbound on the bosque trail.
On Tuesday I cranked out a solo 42-miler, likewise down in the valley, but this time south on the Paseo del Bosque trail to just past Interstate 40 and back. I hadn’t ridden the bosque since March; half a year later the trees are starting to show hints of fall color, so I need to get back down there soon.
Yesterday I grabbed a Steelman Eurocross and did a quick hour on the trails in the Elena Gallegos Open Space. Hadn’t done that since mid-August.
Grunting up a few steepish rocky pitches reminded me that I needed to replace the bike’s chainrings, chain, and cassette. Not just from wear and tear, though there’s plenty of that, but mostly due to the mileage on its 1954 engine. Down with the 48/36T chainrings, up with the 46/34T! And the cassette will get four extra teeth at the fat end. Death to the 36x28T — long live the 34x32T!
Today various crucial segments of Your Humble Narrator were complaining bitterly about working conditions and threatening to go on strike, so I decided to take a lazy jog along our shortest foothills loop as a change of pace.
What? Hit the back button. Doritos? See-through mice? Holy hell.
Is this for real? A lactic-acid flashback? Or maybe the WaPo’s A.I. just filed the serial numbers off an abandoned Monty Python script to make the Limey boss-fella blow his breakfast gin out his snout.
Whatever. I think I just got a great idea for a Halloween costume.
Mad Blog Media 