Climb Ev’ry Mountain: Last Installment of the 2001 Bike Trip Letters

Guess what? There are a lot of damn mountains between Maine and Vermont. I suppose I should have paid more attention to the topographical features of the map.

As the crow flies, it was about 150 miles from Kennebunkport, where I had lunch on Saturday, to Barnard, Vermont, where I was headed (and where, not to keep you in suspense, I am now). That would have been fine had I been a crow, but on a bike it was pretty rough going: hill after hill after hill. So the last part of the journey turned out to be the most challenging.

I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time in Maine. The next time I do this, I’ll drive the bike to southern Maine and continue northward. I had a mid-day swim at Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunkport, then lunch at a local diner. (President Bush was in Genoa, so I had to leave my petition for release for all U.S. drug war prisoners with the assistant gardener…) I headed west toward Sanbornville, NH, with the goal of arriving in Wolfeboro, on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipesaukee (previously, I’d always thought that was a made-up name from a Sid Caesar routine, guaranteed to get a laugh; but now I understand it is a Native American word for “great spirit,” so please don’t write me in protest). Stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way and was able to indulge in a strange delicacy I hadn’t had since childhood: a soft coffee cone dipped in cherry. Mmmm. Central New Hampshire was full of long country roads periodically interrupted by very small towns. I passed up the community Pig Roast in Alton, since the proceeds were to benefit the Town Republican Scholarship Committee, and also the bean supper in Springvale.

By Sanbornville, already 40 miles from Kennebunkport, the sun was beginning to set, and I was getting mighty tired, when I turned a corner and saw a sign for Wolfeboro, 14 miles away. I headed up the hill and had the first mechanical problem of the trip – my bike chain slipped. I was about ready to cry, but I pulled over and managed to fix it, remembering what I’d read in the bike maintenance books I crammed before embarking. I was only sorry that I didn’t follow their instructions and pack some hand cleaner. When I arrived a little before nine at the very toney Wolfeboro Inn, where I’d made reservations that morning, I looked a sight, hands and face (since I’d kept wiping my brow with the greasy hands) like those of a mechanic who’d just crawled out from under a car.

Besides, they don’t get many people arriving by bike at the Wolfeboro Inn. I had to chain my bike to the gazebo.

I took a very nice hot bath, called home, flipped channels on the cable t.v. and went to sleep. Next morning I went down early for the free breakfast and found myself in line behind former Senator Bob Kerrey, which was a coincidence since I had watched a little bit of Deborah Winger in “An Officer and a Gentleman”

the night before. I declined to mention this coincidence to him, and in fact left him alone, but finding him in New Hampshire of a summer weekend suggests to me that he hasn’t yet abandoned his Presidential ambitions. (Or, possibly, he could have been in town for the Wolfeboro Classic Bocce Tournament, which most of the Inn’s guests seemed to be taking part in.) Took a swim in the lake and then headed west along the southern shore of the lake to Meredith, only about 25 miles away, but I was nervous about the mountains and had decided to give myself a less taxing day.

I’m not fond of New Hampshire, based on this trip.

The seacoast is full of bumper car pavilions, every third house is a converted trailer, and – I swear this is true, and I should know – there are at least as many motorcycles as cars on the road, and most of the people driving them aren’t wearing helmets. They ought to change the state motto (which adorns the license plates) to “Live Free AND Die.” Here we live in a country where felons, despite having paid their debt to society, lose their voting rights, and these New Hampshirites get to pick who’s President every four years, and even serve on juries. I was happy to cross the border the next day from a state with as many gun shops as churches from one which recognizes gay unions. (Though in fairness I should mention that one of the first sights I came across in eastern Vermont was one for a gun store, but it also sold antique dolls, so there you have the difference between the two states in a nutshell.)

Yesterday morning I woke up at six at the Inn at Mill Farms in Meredith, determined to make it to Barnard, about 75 miles away, in order to join my hosts, David and Sheila Rothman, for a dinner party that evening. (Home-cooked Indian food at the home of Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph, University of Chicago professors, a welcome shift from my diet of clam chowder and fish

sandwiches.) The day began inauspiciously with my using the inn’s hairdryer to blow-dry my one clean pair of socks, which I had washed in the sink the night before and then left on top of the air conditioner to dry. (By the way, don’t try that technique — you end up with very cold wet socks.) I then went out to put some air in the bike tires at a gas station down the street from the inn, holding a Styrofoam cup of complimentary coffee in one hand and trying to steer the bike down the steep inn driveway with the other, and ended up being propelled over the handlebars, coffee all over the place. Luckily the bike and I were essentially unharmed.

I got on my way, and biked all day, through New Hampton and Bristol and Danbury and Grafton and Enfield and Lebanon, NH, where I had lunch. Along the way, between Bristol and Danbury, on the appropriately-named Ragged Mountain Highway, I saw my first “Moose Crossing” sign, but no moose.

(Incidentally, in my 490 miles I have seen a zooful of animals on the road, mostly squashed, including raccoons, badgers, snakes and turtles.) When I crossed into Vermont in the mid-afternoon, the digital clock on the drive-in bank in Hartford said it was 99 degrees. I’d thought, since I never look at the weather report, that it was just my exertion making me so hot, but it seems I had chosen to bike seventy-five miles over the mountains in the broiling midday sun during the worst heat wave in this part of New England for some time. But I persevered, and the last ten miles of the ride – from Woodstock north on Vermont Route 12 to Barnard, where the Rothmans live – were the hardest of the whole trip, almost totally uphill the whole way. The Rothman’s driveway is a steep gravel affair, but I was determined, consistent with the foolish macho ethic that makes me proud that I never once walked my bike in almost 500 miles) to ride all the way up it. But at the crest of the driveway I foundered and fell off, dislodging one of my panniers, and as I picked myself up I was only happy that David (the back of whose white head I could see through his living room window) had not been a witness to this ignominious end to what, fifteen days later, remains a fabulous experience, one I would not have missed for the world. I am only sorry that I did not take five minutes to cross the bridge on that first Monday from Westerly, R.I. to Pawcatuck, Connecticut (where, when I was a kid, I could call my cousin Steve in the next state not only without using an area code, but with only five digits), so I could claim to have biked in all six New England states.

Tomorrow I get on the Vermonter, with the bike, and see the sights from a train window, Edith Wharton in my lap (“Old New York” that is — you know she’s not around anymore) and maybe Patty Griffin or Jess Klein in my ears, heading toward New York. For a would-be travelogue writer, I am not very good at describing natural beauty, though I have seen a lot of it in the last few weeks. Among the many images I retain are, surely, the blue and violet hydrangeas in season everywhere I’ve gone, but more often the people I

encountered: the shirtless old Yankee standing in his junk-strewn front yard who called out “howdy, neighbor,” as I came down the hill into Gloucester; the giggly teenage girls at the tiny general store in Madaket, who ran outside, leaving the place unattended, to gush over a new puppy in the back of someone’s pickup; the entirely obese clientele of the Friendly’s I ate in in Eastham, considerably reducing the gusto with which I addressed my Big Beef Cheeseburger and Oreo Brownie Sundae); the amateur haircuts taking place on two different front porches on the beachfront street of York Harbor as I walked back to the motel after an evening swim.

I had a lot of fun, and learned very little that could be characterized as insightful or profound. I found out the hard way that when you come across the city limits sign (“Entering Dartmouth,” or whatever) you can still be ten miles from the center of town, so don’t get too excited about it. Better to wait for the Rotary Club sign some miles ahead. (What is it that gives the Rotary this virtual monopoly? I want to know where the Bolivian Schachtmanite Mah Jongg Society has its meetings.) I set out to do this not only for the physical challenge, which I’ve met and feel good about, but to see other parts of my native region, being, in my bones, an ocean person. When you go to one place annually, ritualistically, like we go to Block Island, the drawback is you rarely go anywhere else. And there is a lot of anywhere else around. I have been struck by how many other people I have met in these wonderful beach communities – including some veteran world travelers — who have never been to the next island or next beach, and am evolving a theory that people often know least well what is closest to them. But that approaches the borders of profundity, and I’m not even sure I believe it, so I will sign off, until the next trip.

Gara