Circle Game, continued

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck):
I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.

James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner):
...Whose car are we gonna take?

"The Town" (2010)

That much thought went into my decision to ride a bicycle across the country. Depending on how long you've known me, your next comment is likely - "The planning stage was a feat of overthinking for the books." Depending on how long you've known me...

I've written profusely about this adventure, and will do so many more times during this 50th year anniversary, Good Lord willing and... All that. We intend to return to the bike trail in Eastern Colorado, camping near Eads and looking eastward across the Plains, as I did so many years ago. Return with the love of my life, the dogs, and the memories of a transformative road that led to...now.

Camp, Day One, Bigfoot Country

There were so many adventures, so many days of wonder and exploration, of finding that I could accomplish something wonderful if I let myself. I've told the story of Jeffrey City, WY and the unabashedly flirtatious teenage girls ("Long Time Gone"). "On Gossamer Wings" put the ride into a life's context.

I wrote two pieces about the late Charles Kuralt ("Preparing for the Road to '76" and "On the Road To '76") and his years-long journey to see an America most people either drive past, fly over or live in without noticing. Right now I miss Charlie, for the balance we desperately need as we are on the road to '26.

Glen Griffin makes a second appearance in "Like a River." Barbara Beck gets a paragraph in "It's the Mileage." Both figured far more prominently in the ride, and in where the "ride" took me afterward. than would be suggested by how many words I've granted them. 

Barbara and I kept in touch, met for a ski week in March 1977, and dated briefly after I'd moved to Colorado later that year (she was a student at DU). This is where the "intellectual exercise" of crafting life themes mentioned previously (Circle Game) collides with Alan Jackson's "Here in the Real World." When hearts get broken... Not fun enough. Not fun at all. But, stick with me. Shit continues to get real, and it's cool.

Glen...

I knew how to ride a bike when I started Bikecentennial, and the months of hockey coaching had given me the legs to begin the journey. Glen taught me how to be a cyclist, how to suffer in the saddle and not make a thing of it. How to solve problems on the road and make light of them. How to tell bike stories that involve you, but aren't about you.

We were in a camp in the Tetons. I'd been in an accident the day before and suffered minor injuries. He prescribed beer, a lot of it. A second group of riders asked if they could share the site with us, and then settled down to have a brew of their own. We were swapping stories, life on the road kinds of stories, and one of the new arrivals turned to me.

"Do you know who he is?" he asked, pointing at Glen.

"Glen."

"He was the road racing champion of California a few years ago."

No wonder I had such a hard time keeping his wheel. He'd told a bunch of race training stories, but never that he'd won a thing.

Some readers, especially those five of you non-family members who know me best (that's an inside joke) are now saying, "Wait a minute. That's a great story but do you really expect us to believe you sat around telling stories with people you hardly knew?" Yes. It was that kind of transformative experience.

Years later, as a bike patrol instructor... The echos of a thousand B76 miles in Glen's company - ha, in his wake - resonated as I tried to teach by example, to impart not just skill but the true love of spending a life on a bike saddle. Show, don't tell. 

We kept in touch for several years after, went skiing together (and he showed me some very interesting M-1 Abrams prototype photos). He sent me a wedding present in 1980, a stained-glass lamp he'd made. I still think of him often.

In Kansas, I learned a valuable lesson about saying "Yes." I was camping, alone, at a rest stop when a pickup truck pulled up. The gregarious, cowboy-hatted obvious rancher got out and struck up a conversation. He was delighted to hear the story, had a million questions and invited me to toss my bike in the back of the truck and join them for dinner at their nearby farm. Whenever I think about him and his very Kansas manners I regret saying no. It's what introverts are inclined to say, and this encounter helped me to say yes more often in life, if only occasionally.

The East Trailhead, Yorktown, VA

Ah, the painfully shy introvert side of me - it took an awful thrashing. People would just walk up to me, or us, and strike up conversations. By us, I mean other riders whom I'd befriended, which in itself was a miracle. We got used to the repetitive questions - most of us used up two sets of tires and, yes, the saddle sometimes made us ache - but tried to be good natured about it. I learned...humility.

My parents and younger brother drove down to Virginia, to pick me up after it was all said and done. I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel when my mom caught sight of me. Her three steps toward me covered the fifty feet in nothing, flat. I had had an adventure. She had worried every day. I would only understand when I had kids of my own. 

I returned home, and enrolled in the police science school at the Rochester Institute of Technology, intending to transfer the credits to Northeastern, to graduate there with my Class of '77 as I had promised my parents. A course in Creative Writing sounded like fun, and it was. It gave me the chance to write a few essays about the summer I'd just experienced. It gave me something far more valuable.

The prof asked me to read one aloud, the story of a rider who was killed on the road. I had passed her group as they gathered at the local police station shortly after she'd died, and then encountered the woman's entry in a guest book. Someone had placed an asterisk next to the writing, noting that she had passed on the highway nearby.

I wrote about the anguish of losing someone to a road accident, how it made us all feel vulnerable. How the bright sunshine of enthusiasm and zest for life contained in the guestbook writing had made it all seem worse. How looking at the beauty around me was muted every time the sound of a vehicle approached from behind.

When I finished, there was silence in the room. The professor said she had encountered one of her assistants weeping at a copier. She'd been given the task of making copies, and had read the essay as the machine droned on.

I think it was the first moment I realized that, perhaps, I might explore being a writer. I had written from my heart, and touched someone.

A little over a year later I found myself in Denver, alone. I'd long since said good bye to Barbara, who returned to California and enrolled at USC. I was working a nothing job that allowed me a small apartment, with an occasional chance to ski. Police departments were hiring, but I was very slowly learning how to answer their oral board questions. It was a painful, often embarrassing process.

I was driving near Washington Park, looking for a place I would visit for one of our client insurance companies - yet another small change case where I interviewed someone on disability. There were crowds standing along the roadway within the park, so I stopped to investigate. Anything to delay a work assignment I hardly relished.

It was a bike race, the 1978 Red Zinger Washington Park Criterium. It was the day I truly fell in love with Colorado.

Less than a year later, I got a call. Maybe the call.

"This is Sergeant Christenson, of the Greenwood Village Police Department. We're ready to hire you. Go buy a gun."

To be continued...