CYCLES CHAPTER 8
I woke at the crack of dawn; no bears, bums, or park rangers had come by to attack or ticket us. I was unreasonably nervous. I felt like a child who didn’t want to get in trouble, I was still a child in many ways. I’m older now and don’t yet feel like a completely grown man. Matt woke up as I was stuffing my sleeping bag back into its stuff sack.
“What time is it?” He said, wiping his eyes.
“I think it’s like 6:30.” I said as I rolled my sleeping bag like we were eluding the feds.
“Looks like you’re ready to go.” Matt said, smiling at my demeanor.
“I just don’t want somebody coming by on a morning walk.” I think I was mostly afraid of the embarrassment. I didn’t want to enter into an awkward conversation with a neighborhood resident or anyone else. I’d judge myself too much and act even weirder, and not defend the triviality of our actions. If they thought it was something to complain about, I would fail in asserting myself, and then succeed in berating myself for a list of my crimes against myself and the world going all the way back to cheating on my oral alphabet memorization test in first grade by pretending to look up to think when I was really looking up to where the R-S-T-U-V section was posted above the chalkboard. It’s like they were asking me to cheat. It’s like it was really a test to see if I was smart enough to look up at the wall. So, I didn’t want to spend the morning rehashing my life of crime.
“Is the bike still there.” Matt asked leaning up on his elbow, eyes still squinted.
I froze for a moment. What if the bum, bear, or park ranger took the bike? We’d be screwed. I knew we shouldn’t have slept on the path.
Matt crawled over, unzipped the tent and peeked out. “Yep. Still there.”
I finished fastening the belt around my sleep roll.
“So you want to just get breakfast in Vancouver? It’s just down the hill and across the bridge.”
“Yeah. That sounds good.” I said.
Matt smelled himself. “Fuck, I stink.”
“I know, so do I.” I said.
“You imagine if somebody did poke their head in this tent?” Matt said, letting a laugh. “They’d probably run away.”
“Good bear repellent.” I added.
Within minutes, we had everything packed and the bike ready to go. We rolled it out to the street. Our legs were wet with morning dew. We got on the bike, clipped in, and rolled down the hill, Matt breaking on the hairpin switchbacks. We reached the bottom of the hill without encountering a soul, the perfect crime. Who knows? Maybe the neighborhood was deserted after all.
It was a bit cold coasting down the hill. I wished that I’d left my fleece on for the ride. It was quiet except for the sound of the morning air rushing by us, the tires on the concrete, and the freewheel singing tickity, tickity, tick. The sun was quickly rising higher. We caught a good view of its rippling, golden glow on the river. The towers on the bridge gleamed like swords placed by gods.
Our maps pointed us to a grocery store. We bought more cheap bagels and enough sliced turkey for a couple sandwiches each. We sat at an iron picnic table in front of the store and ate our turkey sandwiches. We were struck by the number of Asian people. More than half the people we saw going in and out of the store were Asian. Matt said that his father had mentioned that Japanese men work in Vancouver during the week, then fly back home to their families in Japan on the weekends. I found this to be a shocking way to live ones life.
We rode through the city on our way to the U.S/Canada border. Vancouver was clean, it was like a hi-definition city. Buildings that were miles away had crisp lines unhindered by haze. Flowers lined a lot of the streets. We wondered if this had anything to do with the Asian influence. We didn’t want to stereotype, but it was both the cleanest city and the largest Asian population we’d ever encountered.
The border crossing was uneventful. It was more like crossing through a toll booth. We showed our Driver’s licenses and rode on through. Ah, the good ol’ days.
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This isn’t the complete Chapter, just trying to get from here to there. The mountain is coming, meeting and riding with our first random adventure bicyclist and so much more. Feel like the last couple thousand words have just been a riding log summary... trying to keep it interesting while simply putting my head down and moving forward. ONWARD! Fix it in the next draft, just get a draft out.
