Seven Lengths of Vermont: The Bike


The fifth in an eight-part series in which the author travels the length of Vermont, his home state, via various modes of locomotion.

I offered my name, but he did not reciprocate. I asked if this was private land or a National Forest campground, then stood there in my padded Spandex bike shorts, cold and tired and increasingly nervous, waiting for an answer. I asked again. He stared. It was a blank stare—not mean or malicious, just blank. The kind of stare a cinderblock would give you if a cinderblock had eyes. And if a cinderblock were drunk.

I’d come down one of the big mountain passes and landed at a pond, all silvery and smooth. It was only the first night of my trip, so I didn’t need a bath, but I did need a place to set up my hammock. I saw a bonfire on the far side of the pond and rode over to it. A little yappy dog accosted my ankles. A stack of cargo pallets waited beside the stack that was already burning. The man — Rolling Rock tallboy in hand, cigarette behind the ear — stared at the fire, or into it, and then at and into me.

After considerably longer than I felt comfortable with, my toothless host said that he owned this land and I could camp here if I liked. His voice had barbed wire in it. Cinderblocks, too. He was maybe sixty years old. Wore big boots. A pretty handsome guy if you looked past the teeth.

I knew that whatever I was getting myself into wouldn’t be easy to get out of, should it come to that, but the spot was beautiful, the pallets crackly and warm, and I was intrigued. My goal on this tour was to encounter Vermont, not its Essence or Immutable Being or any such nonsense, but its particulars, those people and places and certain slants of light and shapes of shadow that, when bundled together in the mind, become the tidy little thing I call home. If this man was Vermont—or some part of Vermont—engage him I would.

I thanked him for the invitation—he said, “No doubt”—and parked my bike beside some trees, then set up my hammock and returned to the fire with a smashed-up dinner sandwich. The dog jumped up against my leg, pawing and yapping and begging. I didn’t mind, but my host started yelling.

It wasn’t so much that he yelled, but how he yelled. It was like a chant, like he was entrancing himself to the rhythms of his own anger. Beggar, beggar, beggar! Bad, bad, bad! It was like he’d fallen down some deep black well and was trying to climb out, one word at a time, each word a rung on a ladder. Bad, bad, bad! Git, git, git!

I asked some question, something about the pallets, and he emerged from the depths for a minute only to fall back to the bottom. Hoping to shut the dog up, I wolfed the sandwich as fast as I could, but I couldn’t eat fast enough, and Toothless kept on.

A firefly blinked past, looking somewhat like a plane. It made me think how far away from home I was, out here in these mountains of a Vermont I’d hardly known.

The dog yapped louder.

Bad, bad, bad!

***

Over the course of a week in early June, I rode approximately five hundred miles on a bicycle. This was a new experience for me. Before this trip, I’d never pedaled more than thirty or so miles in a day. A handful of years had seen me on a bike a handful of times.

The route I traveled was designed en route, seat-of-the-Spandex-pants style. I rode from Ferrisburgh all the way to the dirt roads of West Halifax, Green River, and Guilford; then I zigzagged the east-central side of the state, through Woodstock and South Royalton and Hardwick, and quieter spots I’d never heard of like Simpsonville and Downers (I bypassed a place called Goose Green and have not yet forgiven myself). Once my initial supply of sandwiches ran out, I subsisted on various combinations of couscous, instant Folgers, granola, powdered milk, and hot water from gas station coffee machines. I bought one donut. I slept on a floor, in a shelter, on a porch, in the woods. I hit Canada at Derby Line, cruised a gravel path along the edge of Lake Memphremagog, and cranked my way south, against driving rain, all the way to my sister’s in Richmond.

By the time I made it back to Ferrisburgh, on the seventh day, my body was beat up and broke down and other things as well. My back and neck ached. My right knee was clicking with the regularity of a metronome. I had that deep bone-bruise sensation in my hands and all through my “keel.” And my legs felt weak and twitchy, like they might accordion out from under me if I were to use them for anything but pedaling.

More impressive than the body, though, was the mind—the bent, twisted scrap heap of a mind that I lived in and with for much of the trip (I’m thinking here of phrases such as “mind bender,” “sick and twisted,” “let’s throw some more junk on that scrap heap”). A friend who has done considerable bike touring informed me ahead of time that I’d probably want something called Chamois Butt’r for chafing and a set of Allen wrenches for tune-ups, and that I should expect all kinds of pains and small problems. He even lent me the panniers (read saddlebags) that his mother used on a tour of Europe in the ’70s. It was only my head—what would happen to it after consecutive eighty-mile days on the road—that he neglected to mention.

The afternoon that I arrived home I ate a pound of bacon and traced my route on a road map with a blue marker. I looked over the map: sixty-three village-cities, thirty-three creek-rivers, twenty-six lake-pond-reservoirs, ten counties. I had trouble keeping track of all the road kill, so instead I counted types: woodchuck, chipmunk, raccoon, garter snake, blue-black butterflies. Estimating the number of red, shirtless, pot-bellied men mowing lawns also proved challenging. I tried breaking it up into units—number of RSPBMML per day—but certain difficulties persisted: Weed-whacking included? What about red, pot-bellied women? Is a farmer mowing a hayfield a totally different category?

I taped the map to the wall beside my desk and wrote my stats in the corner. It wasn’t enough. I scribbled little notes all along the route with arrows pointing to precise spots: fish-delivery truck, dusty “creemee” stand, hand-size moth, lovely views, hell on earth! It still wasn’t enough, so I added more: vile egg water, $15 sunscreen, snapping turtle, Lower Podunk Road, quiet and undisturbed, Rockwell (as in Norman). I could see that I’d covered some ground, made my way through rich towns and poor, soaked in glinting streams, befriended a wonderful, hippie-ish woman who offered me a cabin to live in for the summer. I could think Vermont’s massiveness and irreducibility. But I couldn’t feel it. Not like I could when I was out there. Not as a scrap heap in my mind. Vermont the Particular was already sliding back into Vermont the Bundle, that comforting, easy myth.

A bicycle covers massive distances quickly—much as a car does—but on a bicycle you are out in the open, senses pricked to everything. This is perhaps obvious. It’s the implications of the observation that I find fascinating, and that my friend neglected to mention.

One cyclist I met near Lake Willoughby, an endurance freak who has traversed the entire country and often puts down 175 miles in a day, referred to car travel as “being in the cage.” When biking, you are decidedly free of the cage. Everything from the ants on the highway shoulder to the thunderheads building in the distance; from the smell of lupine to the smell of exhaust; from Brattleboro to Barton—it all comes in.

The result? Nausea. Scrap heap. A kind of trippy, overwhelming, kaleidoscopic experience. Barefoot, tweaked-out addict on the public library steps? Gentle old hunchbacked man arranging garden gnomes in little mulch nests? Child in a red T-shirt swinging on a tire swing with a smartphone in hand? Snapping turtle? Hand-size moth? Are these folks really all neighbors? Am I their neighbor? Or am I just a tourist, some fool who should get a real job, settle down in one town, stop rambling and observing and forcing myself to “take it all in,” whatever the hell that means anyway?

Bike touring is not a means of answering these questions. Bike touring is disturbing. And it is awesome because it is disturbing. Bike touring is Too Much—too many beautiful images and too many sad images and too many roads winding toward too many unexpected reversals.

***

When I finished my sandwich, the dog quieted down and jumped up into Toothless Host’s lap. T.H. was still drunk as a cinderblock, but now, instantly, he was tender, petting the dog with the hand not holding the Rolling Rock. We began to talk, and though the conversation veered into incoherence and repetition and long, unexpected pauses, it was indeed a conversation. And not just any conversation, but a good one, a conversation with a man from one of a million Vermonts I’ve hardly known.

We talked for an hour, talked about many things: how long it takes to burn twenty pallets; how you can heat your house through the winter on lumber-mill tailings; how nice the pond and mountains looked; how his ninety-eight-year-old dad and eighty-seven-year-old mom still live in an old house back near the pass road; how it wasn’t all that challenging to set up “perimeters” in Grenada during “that scuffle.”

“You know, I was in the service five years,” he said, “and there was only one guy I stayed in contact with afterwards, a good Irishman, a real good Irishman, my one real friend from all that time. And you know what? He blew his brains out.”

I said nothing, then something genuine and from the heart but completely trite. The stars were out, both in the sky and reflected on the surface of the pond.

“It traumatized me,” T.H. went on. “No, not traumatized, but made me sad. Yeah. It made me sad. And it still does. It makes me sad to talk about it.”

The dog in his lap snuggled down a little deeper. The night was cold enough to see your breath. There was no beer left. The last pallet’s embers were glowing their way into ash.



“It makes me sad to talk about it. Even right now.”

One minute you’re climbing a hill, the heat and fatigue and metronomic knee joint conspiring to take you out, finish you for good. The next you’re racing down six miles of smooth new blacktop, your body dissolved in cool wind and wide views. It’s a hilly state, and on a bicycle you can’t help but go up and down, up and down. The transitions between the two—between the up and the down—are often imperceptible. They happen in a flash. This might be the metaphor I’m searching for.

Or maybe this: One minute you’re scared of a man, hyperaware of your differences, your sobriety and his deep black well, your fixed-up teeth and his gaps and spaces. The next you want to put your arm around him, tell him something heartfelt that isn’t trite, or just let him know that you appreciate the invite to camp on his land, that you’ll be sure to stop in and say hello the next time you’re passing by, that you’d like to meet his folks if that’d be alright. He says no doubt, that’d be fine, and stumbles on home, leaving you alone with the bullfrogs and peepers. The moon is rising, the hammock swaying. The knots holding together Vermont the Bundle are loosening. The fireflies aren’t planes; they’re shooting stars. And this is only the first night of the trip.

Leath Tonino was born and raised in Vermont. In addition to working as a writer, he’s shoveled snow in Antarctica, tracked hawks in Arizona, and planted blueberries in New Jersey. This series first appeared in the Burlington, Vermont newspaper Seven Days.

Comments

  1. As a fellow Vermonter, also trying to unravel the true or various natures of our rocky spit of land, I adored reading this piece. So tender and so empathetic. Thank you!

  2. As a non “fellow Vermonter,” I as well adored this excellent writing from the heart of a true writer.
    More please…….

  3. My brother owns a ranch borinrdeg the east city limits of Burnet, TX where I keep an 8 dob to use when I visit. I have also observed and spoken at the Eagle Eye Observatory on Lake Buchannan where the light pollution is not as great. Hope the Orion Ranch is west of Llano. The skies get incredibly dark about 10 miles west of Llano!

  4. I’m not sure if I was ready to see citrusy Filipino cooncction and butterflied pig in the same sentence. I could have used a bit of advance warning there. I could have at least had a slice of bread first so my tummy would not be making these loud noises of envy right now.Glad it all went well and that Will is going to be fine!

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