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| Port Townsend |
I started road riding in 2012. A friend convinced me to buy an old road bike for $150 bucks. He told me he was planning on doing the Seattle to Portland ride that year. I said I’d do it to. As of that date, the longest ride I’d ever done was 20 miles in high school. The Seattle to Portland, or STP as its more commonly known, is 204 miles. We were going to attempt that in one day.
I remember a lot of rides from that summer, the STP being one of them. But the first ride that felt truly big, like I really accomplished something, was when I rode from my house to Port Townsend by myself. It felt epic, as if I was pushing boundaries that I didn’t know I had. In the years between then and now, I’ve ridden thousands of miles. Fifty miles is not an epic any more. But I still have found memories of that feeling, that success. I retraced that route this year.
The first twenty or thirty miles can be described as enjoyable and nondescript. They existed. I pedaled, the bike went forward, and the pair of us (that is, the bike and I) followed Clear Creek Road north to the Hood Canal Bridge.
I have a love/hate relationship with the bridge. The view from the bridge is incredibly beautiful. Mountains and islands and sea and sky are all around you as you traverse this narrow strip of concrete and steel between peninsulas. Pictures taken from the bridge are tranquil affairs where one imagines sitting peacefully watching the waves lap the shores on either end.
In practice, riding over the bridge feels like a fight, like you’re earning your way across through violence and grit. The sound of cars rushing over the steel deck grating is a sonic assault. The shoulder is riddled with gravel and wood chips and other debris. There are bike tracks over expansion grooves that would swallow the tires of an unwary cyclist. I came out the other side of the bridge with my ears ringing slightly, dazed but not knocked down.
HW 104 rises gently from the bridge, rolls a few times, and drops you off at Beaver Valley Road. This is where the two rides diverged the most. In 2012, Beaver Valley Road was something I survived. My body ached, my legs were tired, and I wasn’t 100% sure how far from Port Townsend I was (this was before I owned a smart phone). I remember getting into my drops, those curved sections of road handlebars, in an attempt to find more speed. I spun my legs violently, desperately.
A small group of cyclists rode up to me.
“When we saw you in the distance, your cadence was so high we thought you must be flying.” He trailed off without adding, “But it seems you’re not.” It was implied. I hung on to their draft as long as I could, but found myself slipping off the back. Dropped. Tired. Alone again.
As I rode along Beaver Valley Road this year, I was trying to make my bike come alive. I realize it sounds odd that I was trying to make a machine come to life. And I guess that turn of phrase isn’t exactly right. But its close. My bike was designed to go fast. It was built for it. When the speed rises, when the road starts to fly past and blur in the periphery, it feels more and more at home. The bike feels taut, like a bow drawn back. It thrums with the speed and the whirring of the chain and the road slipping under its wheels. It is as if the bike spends the majority of its existence dormant, and only finds its true existence when traveling at speed. Have you ever held a ringing tuning fork up to a still tuning fork only to have the still one begin to ring? It’s a little like that. The bike sings with the song of the road. And I was trying to make it play that sound.
There is a hill that leads into downtown Port Townsend. It is a sweeping left hand turn framed by cliff rising above your left, a cliff falling to your right, and beyond that the blue waters of Port Townsend Bay. The bike doesn’t require any pedaling for this part. Gravity takes you down, lets your tired legs rest. In 2012, I rolled down that hill triumphant. I won. I made it. And the hill rejoiced with me, guided me down, wrapped me in victory garlands made of sea breezes and presented me a trophy of sailboats bobbing on placid seas, sunlit and idyllic.
I rolled to a stop by the yacht club, sat on the shore, and exalted in the thrill of being alive.
This year, I took a different road into town. The Port Townsend branch of the Olympic Discovery Trail drops off SR 20. It is hard packed gravel and dirt, and riding it on a road bike feels slightly adventurous. The gravel changed the tune of the bike, altered the whir to a grind. The trail cut through the woods before rolling along a cliff and the bay. Wild flowers encroached on both sides of the trail, painted the world in oranges and yellows that danced in the breeze. The trail ended in the Port Townsend shipyard, the wildflowers contrasted by rusty cranes and grinder sparks.
In both cases, my lovely wife picked me up. In 2012 my infant son grinned at me. In 2018, my six-year-old son and my four-year-old daughter smothered me in hugs before we flew kits on the sandy beach of Fort Warden.
They were good days.
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