Tag Archives: bicycle touring

2

Leave a reply

Minnieville, VA contains nothing, save for a strip mall, housing developments, a burrito restaurant, and a large plot of open land between one property and a residential development, with a tree line on one side that allowed for excellent camping.

It was my first time setting up the tent. It was dark. I had my iPhone flashlight to illuminate the area in which I was to work. Only slightly helpful since two hands are necessary for pitching a tent and one is needed for holding the flashlight… I managed, and it wasn’t until I had it up that I bothered to find the directions. Mostly I was surprised that no one from the nearby housing development called the police on me, or came to investigate what I was doing. Maybe no one was home, or perhaps the light flashing all around me wasn’t as apparent as I thought. I was only too grateful to have what was essentially a home, and a cozy comfortable one at that, for the night.

The next morning, dewey and cool, I took my time making coffee and breakfast, and breaking down camp. No one bothered me once again, and once the sun was able to spread itself over the shorn meadow, draping the world in a pale golden light like a fine, loosely woven piece of linen casting its shadow—but a shadow which lightens rather than darkens—and its gentle warmth began to seep into the earth, and seep into my clothing and, thus, seep into me, all the world seemed to be a most delightful place, and I felt confident cycling away from camp that morning.

It was about seven or eight miles outside of Fredericksburg that I ran into her, nearly literally, as I was careening down a hill and around a corner—another cycle tourer, and a Belgian at that! Who would have thought? She had just finished eating a sandwich and was stuffing the last bits of a bar of chocolate into her mouth when I stopped just past her, the surprise, looking back, apparent on her face. We talked for a bit, and a bit more, and then, more or less, road together into Fredericksburg, where she had a WarmShowers host and I had not a clue—typical of me at this point of the journey.

I spent a fair bit of time at a cafe resting, messaging the one other WarmShowers host in town, and pondering what to do next. I then spent another thirty minutes, well after dark, cycling around southern Fredericksburg looking for a suitable place to camp, to be eventually found, tucked away, again, along a wooded edge of a field, though this time by an elementary school.

I awoke to a heavy fog obscuring everything but for the vague border created where the tops of the trees across the field meet the sky, like a piece of paper roughly torn, smoothly ragged at the break. There was too a picnic table, maybe twenty yards distant that I was able to make out faintly. The only things to break the fog were the sun, and that took some doing, and the wail of the train horn, which punched through like a piece of rebar through a skull, as it passed through the city.

I made excellent time cycling into Richmond from Fredericksburg, even considering the thirty minutes or so I spent at an old farm, which in times past was the site of a bloody Civil War battle, The Battle of Fredericksburg, at Slaughter Pen Farm (fitting name, no?). From Fredericksburg to Richmond is nothing but nothing the whole way. I seemed to be cycling through a wasteland, desolation on all sides of me. Tree stumps, tree limbs, dusty, dirty everywhere, yet no machines or man visible. Who might have committed such acts, and why? The utter pointlessness of it all like a poison pit in my heart. Further on, after leaving Petersburg on my way to Alberta I would see more of the same with signs: 9, 10, 11 or more acres for sale. FOR WHAT? A sea of dead trees and dead earth for miles all around me. Absolutely nothing of value left. This, I thought to myself, is the nadir of humanity, and yet for some I’m sure it is near an acme, an inverted acme to be sure, but an acme nonetheless, like a film negative turned upside-down and inside-out. Flesh and blood, but no heart to pump it—a quagmire; a cesspit…

Richmond, though, is beautiful.

1

Leave a reply

The day began early, in the pre-dawn hours. In the pre-pre-dawn hours, even. All night under the willow tree restless sleep, tossing, turning, gazing through the knotty web of branches arcing above and around me, cocooned, roofed in wood and vegetation and cloudy sky.

The morning came in a thick fog and pale colors of lilac, lavender and rose; ducks and geese silently gliding into and out of the mist like wishes or ghosts. And then the sun came, slowly, a brilliant orange-gold disc burning a hole through the mist beneath an arch in the Roosevelt Bridge, and reflecting, dazzling like sparks, off the windowed buildings on the banks of the Potomac opposite. Soon after, the tip of Washington’s monument pierced the fog, pointing skyward toward something, or nothing, greater than itself.

It was during this period of world-awakening, beneath a hail of bird song that I made breakfast and coffee after my first night camping, and packed my gear in the muzzling cold and eruption of horizon fire, the sun stabbing forth like a lance on the water’s surface, eventually mounting my bicycle and moving off through a mysterious world of half-veiled objects, and people materializing and vanishing in and out of existence.

The going was peaceful and easy, cycling south on the Mt. Vernon trail, along the Potomac, until I cleared Alexandria and the hills began to pick up in frequency and intensity. This stayed fairly constant for the next couple of days into Fredericksburg—an uneventful two days save for the meeting of a fellow cycle-tourist just outside of Fredericksburg, and the difficulties of learning how to pitch my tent in the dark which falls like a cold, heavy curtain so quickly now. The actor in the play finally removed from his audience, his costume, left to himself—a respite. However, I’m jumping ahead.

It was during my first evening of camping that I met him, early, about three-thirty or four o’clock he came sauntering down from the trail, beneath the willows through the tall grass: Werner, the Swiss. A more peculiar man I’ve never met to the best of my recollection. Dressed in multiple layers of various loosely fitting articles of clothing, he says that he lives in NW D.C.. That could mean under a bridge for all I can fathom, though he did give me an address.

His choice of topics for discussion ranged from the artist Paul Klee, to the swan he observed on this stretch of the Potomac all summer long, to commercial and residential development here and in Switzerland, to his travels around America on a Greyhound bus ($99 for ninety-nine days, though he only rode for eighty-three) many years ago. He spoke of the Matterhorn as a glistening giant covered in ice and snow, and in the evening with the moon above it, glowing like a great flashlight in the night sky, illuminating even more vibrantly this most illustrious of European peaks. His excitement over my journey sparkled frenziedly as he told me I would have the most wonderful of times. Eventually he made his way across the Key Bridge, back to his abode, whatever that be, in the fading light, the darkening night. A solitary swan without a partner. In need of no partner. Utterly sublime.