puget sound, august 2002

A few weekends back I met up with my old friend EP and his large family in Winona, MN for his college graduation. He started college in 1992. he got a teaching degree,.. following in the path of his mom and step dad Al. Al was our middle school principal.

One time when I was 12 I named the middle school’s newspaper The Raider Review and I got to choose between a gift certificate to the mall or a lunch with the principal. I decided to go to lunch with Al.

We went to this piece of shit small town greasy spoon and had a decidedly easy-going chat for an hour. Today – 18 years later – it’s one of Al’s favorite memories of being the principal. He always asks me why I chose to have lunch with the principal and I never give him a real reason. My mom thinks that it was because I was receiving the honor of lunch with the most powerful man in the school.

EP has been with his wife J since 1993. He’s known her about a month longer than I have. I was the best man in the wedding. Since then she and I – and a revolving door of colorful others – have driven cross country and back, camping and partying along the way, to meet up with EP. Or to travel with EP to fucking fantastic locations.

EP and his wife J and I and youngest brother B biked – with attached bike trailers – and camped 240 miles of Puget Sound and the surrounding Olympic national park in 2002. It was incredible.

We biked all of our equipment from my Chicago apartment to the Amtrak station downtown and took the train – two nights in coach seats – to Seattle.

The train is a total head game. It’s like being locked in Old Country Buffet for two days:

You have four cars to roam [which you’ve instinctively mapped out – finding all dead ends – within the first 45 minutes] all in coach,..

an opened up windowed car for looking at landscape and chats with middle aged people [on their third marriage/fourth whisky at 10 in the morning],..

a convenience store/bar [where it doesn’t matter how long the line is, the convenience store guy/bartender takes his sweet ass time. It takes fucking forever and you’ve got no say in the matter. Because you’ve got nowhere to go anyway],..

and a smoker’s car. We quickly learned that the jet exhaust toilets on the floor below coach were ideal for exhaling bats of the trader green. I had fantastic chats with drunk middle aged couples while totally stoned. You choose your poison.

At night they showed movies. They would never tell you what the movie was going to be that night. No matter who or how many times you asked. I kind of appreciated that though,.. it created a low level of needed anticipation because you were so fucking bored [you can only read so many books, magazines, day old newspapers, Amtrak brochures, listen to so many CDs, try to take a nap so often]...

SO FUCKING BORED that you actually brought it up in conversation with middle aged drunks and your bored friends. Finally at dark they turned the VHS tape on to two 26” mounted TVs in the bar car.

One night it was harry potter and I fell asleep an hour in. The next night it was the Britney Spears movie Crossroads.

Crossroads is remarkably disturbing. I don’t know if it was made for 11 year old girls or if it was made for their fathers. There are several awesome shots of,..

Britney taking a shower with her full figure sillowhetted in the steam,..

Britney wearing this high engineered perfect tit scoop bra and kissing -- and about to agree to fuck -- this loser kid,..

Britney in a bikini rubbing oil on her hot, tight 19 year old body,..

There was this 10 year old loser kid sitting ahead of us who was fucking freaking out when Britney would change her shirt [while poorly acting out a scene about her friend’s most recent abortion… I think it was her 4th. Is that too many?] because the little motherfucker was seeing shit that was giving him 2” inches of manhood, and because his mom was nowhere to be seen to tell him to leave the room. J thought that he looked like he was getting away with something.

In this situation I’m going to believe that Crossroads was also made for middle aged suburban dads, 10 year old boys and two appreciative 28 year old men stuck on a damn train for two nights.

We got off the train in Seattle and biked to the downtown hotel that J had got us for super cheap. Smoked some shit, sat in the 7th story open air pool and went out to get some great thai and look around. Seattle is one of my favorite cities. We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island the next morning.

I learned pretty fast that bikers get preferential treatment in Washington. We get on the ferry first at a deep discount/we get off first. Every campground in the state is lawfully obligated to give bikers and hikers a spot even if they’re sold out. Because of this they have excellent walk in campsites far away from the RV parking lot. They’re usually thick and secluded, and sometimes on a bluff overlooking the sun set over the Pacific.

We rode over four incredible bridges. The first was the most intense because I followed EP towards the sidewalk edge and then back onto the shoulder of the bridge. J rode up onto the sidewalk and had to bike the distance of over 150 feet on a 20” wide “sidewalk” [with two panellier saddlebags]… with a three foot drop down to the roadway and cars speeding past on one side, and on the other side there was a handrail [overlooking a 200 foot drop] running at the same level as the frame of J’s bike. When we met up at the other side of the bridge, I walked up to the sidewalk and was horrified by the size of the walkway and low height of the handrail. And then I tried to think of all of J’s options while biking that entire 150 feet of bridge. I had to sit down.

I found that with the bike trailer attached to the back of my bike, that my top safe speed was around 28 miles an hour. My bike computer kept a very accurate read. I figured out 28 miles an hour the first time we came on a long descent that stretched over a mile. I let my bike – a full suspension Trek VRX mountain bike (very poor choice for the trip} – speed up to around 35 miles an hour. The trailer hitch began to violently shake at the hub of my back wheel, to the point where I was slowing down with the brakes and leaning back but strategizing and preparing for a violent bike crash. By 28 miles an hour the bike was controllable.

Bike trailers add a completely different physical balance to a bike. They’re a bitch to lean against anything, because combined the length of the bike and trailer is easily 10 feet long. And heavy. Getting going is slow, all wide turns, and real weight to stop when slowing to a traffic light. However, once the momentum is rolling, the bike and trailer are very fast, solid and gentle to maneuver.

Everyday we camped and biked 40 mile days through 10 mile wide valleys [which sustain constant 10 mile an hour headwind] and challenging foothills. I ate a lot of peanuts, drank a lot of Gatorade and tea, and always picked up a coffee.

Before the trip my apartment had been broken into and all 300 of my CDs,.. and all 50 of the DVDs my friend who worked for 20th Century Fox gave me,.. and all $9.87 of my laundry change in a pint glass,.. was gone. Some nimble little fuck broke in through the window above the back door and made off with my shit one Wednesday in June. I got a police report, reported it to the insurance, made a comprehensive list of the shit that was stolen, and had a $5,000 check cut to me within 48 hours.

So I outfitted my trip to the pacific northwest. I got all big money and bought two CB radios that worked as CBs and AM/FM radios and weather report frequency and it’s waterproof and easily clipped onto your handlebar. It was awesome. Sometimes we’d talk to children at campsites. We’d try to organize beer raids on camp coolers after dark. We’d ask the kids if their parents had beer?.. and if they did,.. what was their campsite number? Most of these children were around 8 years old. We adopted CB handles. EP was “Captain Insane-o” and I was “Maximus Sunburn.” J thought that we were misbehaving and didn’t make up a CB handle.

One time we were about bike from a campsite on the water, across a large/high bridge in an area called Deception Pass. We were on the water’s edge and I was looking at pebbles. I saw a small, smoothed over black pebble and put it in my pocket [I kept that pebble in my pocket for almost two years. One day it came up missing]. We took a couple of photos and began to psyche ourselves up for the ride over this enormous bridge. I turned on the CB radio and began scanning channels. I found a frequency with a mother telling her children to come up from the water to have breakfast. When they were done speaking I said “mommy! We’re about to ride our bikes across that big bridge!” A couple seconds later the mother said “be careful.”

Riding ten hard miles into a valley headwind is hard. It makes it even harder when you have the constant reminder of the tall foothill you’re going to have to bike up – once you actually get to it – on the distant horizon. Tedious, draining, bored riding calls for the morale boost provided by the classic rocks stations we picked up in the middle of nowhere. Classic rock like eddie money and zz top and van halen is a fucking boost when jammed on two small travel CB/radios while you’re tired and getting your ass kicked by a mountain. Sometimes we mess with the acoustics of the radios if we were riding alongside the wall of the hill blasted away for the road. If we rode in the same spots, and aimed the radio speakers in certain directions, we’d almost get stereo sound.

At night after setting up camp we left all of the trailers and bags and rode lighter bikes to a restaurant for steaks or fresh seafood. When you’re not paying for a car rental, gas or hotel rooms, you can afford steaks and fresh seafood every night. One night we were biking back to our campsite from the nearest small town [that was about 5 miles away] and a car pulled up alongside as I was racing down a hill at 40 miles per hour. The window came down and a beautiful blonde Canadian girl asked me in a normal voice, “where is the camp grounds?” I said “about 2 miles ahead” she thanked me, and they drove off. What was awesome about it is that we were speaking at a normal volume [the volume you use when you’re indoors], and we were moving at around 40 miles per hour.

We spent a couple of days in Bellingham and then took a much much nicer Amtrak Cascade train to Everett to meet up with EP’s younger brother B, who drove up from Eugene, OR to join our trip. I’ve know B since he was 6 years old. He grew into an All-Conference athlete and scored a touchdown during the high school state finals at Camp Randall in Madison, WI [where the University of Wisconsin plays]. I’ve seen the video of it at his parent’s place. Al is B’s biological father and EP’s step brother by marriage, because Al married EP’s mom.

We drove into the Olympic national park and ditched B’s car. We biked over 10 miles on the road winding along side a mountain lake. When we got to the guard’s post for the del sol hot springs resort we were told that reservations stopped in an hour and ten minutes, and it was over 8 miles uphill to the resort. B said that he’d do it, and we slowly followed. It was an ass kicker. Two hours later we reached the resort and B had already staked us a site. We set up camp and walked through a visually intense stretch of young tall white birch and florescent Kermit the frog green two foot high grass. At then lay the drive up to the resort parking lot. It was built XXXXXX and featured two large hot spring pools full of Europeans and Asians, one large lane pool and several freezing cold showers with pull ropes. The people at the resort told us that they hadn’t seen bikers in years.

For two full days and nights we smoked and hiked to mountain waterfalls, dipped into frigid mountain streams, and sat in the oily and fucking disgusting hot springs pools with Europeans and Asians. Nobody but the help was speaking English. It’s hard not to stare when you’re super fucking high,.. sitting in an oily hot springs pool in the midday sun with an 88 year old Asian man who is speaking Japanese to 7 or 8 other Asians sitting next to you,.. and a 58 year old fat German woman is sitting across from you,.. staring. You remedy this awkward situation,.. and cleanse yourself of this international bodily fluid run off ooze shit,.. by walking over to the shower and flash flood dropping cold water over your heated body,.. giving your whole shit a 20 second shock of mountain stream.

We biked down to the guard post in 35 minutes and said goodbye. We biked past the 10 mile mountain lake and I got some great action shots. That night we drove to a camp site on the shoreline of Puget Sound, across the bay from Seattle and 2 miles from the next morning’s ferry. J and I drove to the grocery store to buy food to cook out and a case of beer and bottle of wine and a four pack of wine coolers and two 6 packs of local microbrew. We decided to move the drinking to a picnic table out on the beach. B said that he’d carry the firewood and fire, and I watched him pick up and balance two burning logs with two dry firewood logs across 70 feet of sand to the fire pit,.. where he dropped the two burning logs and cracked a beer. We got piss drunk and I slept in the car because a camp boss picked up, and held onto, my sleeping bag,.. because,.. [???] I guess that the camp boss thinks it makes perfect logical sense to pick up a lone, bundled sleeping bag from a fully set-up campsite.

The next day we had to leave on the train at 3 pm, so we drove into Seattle’s downtown,.. near the train station,.. and parked the car. We check all of our shit into Amtrak and walked to the waterfront. We had been talking about, stressing over and conserving green the past couple of days because we were almost out. This was a legitimate issue. Trust me, you have to have weed to get through three days and two nights on that fucking train.

Our trip was blessed with good karma. The night before we even left Chicago to begin the trip, EP and J and I took a late ride through Chicago to the paved bike lanes along Lake Michigan. It was an early August clear summer night, which didn’t explain the 7 and 8 foot waves crashing up the bike path and against the flood wall. The force of the water was stronger than I’d estimated, and pulled with true force when I biked through it. Our feet were soaked. We rode back through the city.

Walking from the downtown train station in Seattle, we came across more and more foot traffic and hundreds of posted fliers directing us to motherfucking Hemp Fest. We had located the pot at the end of the rainbow. Within 10 minutes I bought everyone a brownie. We ate them and felt nothing. No jitters. We walked around looking at the booths and the kids and the belly dancers and the people with snakes and the punk midgets with tattoos and the live bands. EP and I bought the same sweet black hemp wallet for $5 each. I wish I’d gotten more. Mine is torn to shit and the company went out of business. You can’t even find Manastash on e-bay.

We split for awhile to gather supplies. I walked down to the large rocks on the shore and quickly found a west coast kid selling shit. He was engaged in a lot of small talk with the kids around. He asked me about what I’d been up to and I told him an abbreviated story of the entire bike trip, and our train leaving for Chicago in a couple of hours. He seemed genuinely interested. He gave me a nice amount of beautiful west coast green in an empty cigarette box and I re-joined my friends.

We walked back to B’s car and I started to feel psychic pushes from the brownie kicking in. EP said, “well I guess we’re going to find out what was in those brownies.” The shit then started to kick in and I saw a trail. Two Seattle cops came in off of the stairway and walked past watching us frantically try to gather any loose items we owned from B’s car. I began to question if we were on psychedelics or just weed. My paranoia began to fuck with me. I started to silently question if they were going to search our bags and pat us down at the train because of Hemp Fest. They hadn’t checked in Chicago, but it might be different here. I stuffed the cigarette box I bought from the beach into my jacket’s inside chest pocket and put on my sunglasses to hide. We carefully walked to the train and said farewell to B.

Nobody checked for shit. I found my seat and read three newspapers cover to cover totally stoned on a 8 hour weed brownie. The rest of the train ride EP, J and I had a casual leave each other alone approach, which was welcome and wise. The train ride back was long but manageable. Finally back in Chicago, we biked back to my apartment, they loaded up and drove back to Wisconsin, and I crashed.

So anyways, I went to lunch with EP’s step dad Al – the principal – when I was a kid, and now that we’re all adults, everything’s loosened up a lot. During my toast at EP and J’s wedding I told a story about how when we were in high school EP used to always snag a beer or two at a time from Al’s garage beer refrigerator, squirrel them away in hiding spots until he’d amassed 14 or 15, and then we’d drink them. Al’s taste in beer ran from Red White & Blue to Grain Belt. We’d each struggle through can after piss warm can of Red White & Blue because it was all that we could get our 16 year old hands on, and because it was the principal’s beer. EP’s mom – Al’s wife – always brings that one up, and reminds me that EP’s grandmother and all of his relatives [who apparently don’t really know him] were there. EP’s mom is that way though, you couldn’t call his house after 8:30 on any night of the week. She didn’t care who was calling, she’d tell you that EP could not come to the phone, and would please not ever call after 8:30 ever again.

Al makes inappropriate comments about women when it’s just guys around all the time. I was making fun of him for drinking a bottle Grain Belt telling him that even at 15 I knew that Grain Belt was cheap piss. Al said “you know, there’s only one thing better than Grain Belt beer,.. you know what that is? Two women at the same time.”

Later he offered me and a couple other guys a stick from the pack of this gum that looked like it had been in his pants pocket through the washer twice. I told him “I don’t want any of that.” He asked why, and I said “because your wife washed those when she was doing your laundry.”