Davis, CA --> San Francisco, CA
I woke with a smile on my face and a spring in my step. This morning was the one I had thought about more than any other. The night before I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t figure out if my squirming was due to the intense anticipation or the lumpy corn soil beneath me. The day would be short and consist mostly of gentile rides through orchards and vineyards followed buy a cruise by the bay to a ferry station in Vallejo, where I would board the big boat for a trip across the bay to Fisherman’s Warf.
So I rolled out of the corn field as inconspicuously as I could and hopped on the bike. It was a beautiful morning, mild enough to keep me warm but not so much as to even break a sweat. I spent most of the morning rolling through rows of fruit trees. It was as peaceful a thing as I had ever experienced in my life.
Soon I reached the outskirts of the bay area. The buildings of the city started closing in and before I ever got a chance to say goodbye, the vast fields of my journey had disappeared. I stopped at a grocery store, which was one of only a handful on my entire direct route, and grabbed a gross amount of chocolate chip cookies and a half gallon of Lucerne Milk. I ate as many cookies as I could and downed the entire half gallon, then headed out on my way to the bay.
With the milk sloshing around in my stomach I worked through the final few Napa hills outside Vallejo, for one of the most redeeming views of my life…..the Pacific Ocean!!! I nearly couldn’t believe my eyes. With less than ten miles left in my entire journey I took in every second with a type of photographic accuracy.
As I rode the last few miles on of all places, Georgia Street, my senses were alive. The end had almost surprised me. After toiling so long I had become insensitive to ideas of beginning and end. I was content with my toil and its sudden end was overwhelming. I rolled slowly through the town center of Vallejo and down a final hill to the bay. I pulled into the ferry station and clipped out. I leaned my bike against the terminal and stepped off….. I had finished! CLIPPED OUT!
It was noon so I walked in the terminal and bought my ferry ticket for 2:00 PM. The cashier read the smile on my face and asked me in a tone of curiosity where I had traveled from. I said it aloud, “ I rode from Pueblo.” I had traveled so far that she didn’t even know where I was talking about anymore so I just read her the numbers off my computer…. “1700 miles.” As the excitement started to sink in I thought I would celebrate by throwing on my casual shorts and putting my bike shorts away for good. I pulled my shorts out of my panniers and went inside to change in the restroom. It felt so good to get out of those bike shorts. I was so fed up with them that my loose gortex felt like silk. I walked back out of the terminal to bring my bike around to the docks where the ferry would arrive…….but no bike was to be seen, NO BIKE! That’s right, my wallet, my phone, my clothing, my food, my bike and everything in it and on it was gone! This was all that I owned in the world, a tool by which I had just learned to live by and survive by, that bike was a part of me! All that was left was my bike gloves and my helmet. I had only been gone about 90 seconds so it was near. I felt like I could smell the damn thing. I ran out into the street, looked in all three directions that met the bay. I grabbed a cyclist rolling by and yelled in his face, “Have you seen a red road bike with black saddlebags!?!” He began speaking slower than Christmas. “ Well …….lets see….I saw a ….a…a.. bike ….a….a…a few hours” I interjected, “Listen man I talking about now!” He was talking to slow I had to move on. I ran back into the terminal and told the cashier that my bike had been stolen and that she should call the cops. I was thinking to myself that the cops wouldn’t even care. This was California; most police could care less about the most recent murder let alone my little bike. By now a small crowd had gathered were my bike had been. A lady I had talked to earlier who was dropping her daughter off at college was screaming over and over “somebody stole this man’s bike, that’s awful! Awful! Who would do that!?!” As if I wasn’t hearing these things enough in my head I heard them from her again.
A little more than a minute had elapsed since I had seen my bike gone and no more than two since it was stolen. I was running out of options quickly and I was just about to take off in a full sprint down the street when a man in a small black Honda with a pair of bikes on the back pulled up and yelled franticly through the window,
“Yo buddy are you missing a bike!?!” AN ANGEL! Angel Gary to be exact. “ Yes !!!” He told me to get in the car and I wasted no time, jumping through the front passenger window. He had taken off through the red light of the intersection before I ever got my legs into the cab of the car. I had landed on a huge pile of thick rope but I didn’t have time to think about why it was there. I was ready to battle. The man began to explain his ordeal;
As he spoke I kept thinking that his story was going to end with, “so we’re going to beat the shit out of these guys that have your bike!” He said he had been driving down Tennessee street to the Ferry Terminal when he saw this “big fat white pasty bastard hauling ass on a red bike with black side bags” at the time he though it was an odd sight but his suspicions weren’t confirmed until he pulled in the lot and saw the matching gloves and helmet on the ground. So this wonderful man spun his Honda around in pursuit of our pasty fat friend. When he found him again he was riding for the entrance to an apartment complex at full steam. Gary, my new best friend, pulled up next to the thief and yells through his passenger window (pardon my French), “ HEY Mother Fucker GET-OFF-THAT-BIKE!!!” At that point the fat thief sprang off my bike and ran as fast as he could into the apartments. Gary said my bike crashed into the curb and into some bushes. Gary tried to through it on the back of his car but couldn’t get it on top so he drove back to look for the owner (me).
As Gary is telling me this story we have driven almost a mile down Tennessee Street and my bike is coming into view. The wheels were still spinning in the air and the saddlebags were still open from my search for my shorts. As I crawled back onto my bike I could hardly believe what had just happened. It was only a few minutes ago that I was basking in the glory of my completed journey, and here I was another mile down the street with the chance to finish my journey one last time…. redeemed. It reminds me of a story Eric Larsen, a professional expedition leader, told me once about his journey to the north pole. He arrived at the pole in the middle of the night and set up camp, he would rendezvous with a Russian icebreaker in a few days to be shipped home, but until then he would wait at the pole for their arrival. When he woke in the morning his GPS told him that he was a mile away from the North Pole. Confused and tired he walked north to the new location and made camp. This happened seven times on seven nights. Turns out that the ice was floating beneath him and he was simply a traveler on the large floating bricks of ice that surrounded him. I felt like the ice had shifted beneath my feet as well. As I rode back to the ferry station I counted my blessings and had a truly peaceful moment to thank God for the good fortune that I had experienced over the last 16 days. I rode the entire span without a flat, without a single drop of rain, and without a solitary detractor, besides this dude who tired to jack my bike whom I never met.
When I got back to the ferry station Gary and I had some coffee and talked it up for the next 2 hours until my ferry came. Gary was a Japanese American whose parents had been interned during the Second World War. He was a U of C Berkley graduate and claimed that it was this influence coupled with his family’s internment that brought him to see injustice and act upon it. He said just as a carpenter sees the world with a hand and a hammer a Berkley grad sees the world with justice and injustice. He said it like he was bearing a great burden like perhaps Superman or a Supreme Court Justice would, but my feelings told me that this might have been the first act of kindness that Gary had done in a while and that maybe it helped him as much as it had helped me. The interconnectivity of our lives is astounding; Gary had driven 2 hours that morning from Sacramento to cut palm leaves off some trees in downtown Vallejo (explains the rope in his car) but had forgotten his climbing spikes so he decided instead to get some coffee at the ferry station and thus three men intersect, one a victim, one a thief, and one a vigilante. Soon enough my Ferry arrived so I said goodbye to Gary, I got the check.
With my bike and myself safely on the ferry I was able to relax and enjoy my ride into Port. I watched the bay area float by; past Angel Island, Alcatraz, and underneath a bridge or two. Sail boats circled the ship riding the cool blasts of wind that drift through the Bay.
When San Francisco came into sight I could hardly hold back my emotions. I was so excited I wanted to jump over the railing and swim to shore. The ferry finally docked at Fisherman’s Warf, a few hundred yards from my hotel The San Remo.
I walked my bike down the market streets to the front of the old Victorian hotel, the oldest in San Francisco. The hotel sat atop the oldest Italian restaurant in America, Fior d’Italia. I walked the stairs to the lobby of the San Remo and checked it. The hotel had community bath with individual bedrooms. It operated like a tremendous household. In my opinion there is no better place in San Francisco. I washed up, put on my best, went out to walk the streets of San Francisco for the rest of the afternoon.
I took a nap in the park below the cannery at Ghirardelli Square, where my brother had asked his Fiancé Morgan to marry him only a few months before. I went to the Market on Pier 39 for a feast. I ate at the bar and had a great conversation with the bartender, Shannon. He was a cyclist himself and had nearly been killed a few years ago in the Bay when he was hit head on by a car at night. The driver fled the scene and Shannon had spent the better part of the decade paying off his near $100,000 medical bills. On a lighter note Shannon told the entire Market Bar about my Journey, which lead to a few free Anchor Steam Beers ( the father of the modern microbrew).
After dinner, I watched the Seals, hundreds of them, on Pier 39 for a few hours. At dust I strolled home to the San Remo to get to bed early so that I could have a full day in the Bay Area the next day. Outside the San Remo is a large market scale, very accurate as it had measured the exact weight of my bike earlier that day. I stepped on…. Even after all that brew and the feast I had that night, I weighted in at an astounding 155 pounds, Nearly 25 pounds lighter than when I started the trek. I looked thin in the face but the rest of my body was an image of strength and efficiency. I had cut what little excess there was, then spent weeks burning through about 15 pounds of muscle that apparently was not efficient. Maybe the best shape I have ever been in? I would have fun gaining it all back.
Day: 65.5 miTotal: 1708.5 mi
Elev. Climbed: 400 ft
Elev. Difference: -400