Benign neglect was the prevalent parenting strategy when I was young and my parents were firmly in that camp. It was to my benefit. Any rules were random and inconsistently enforced. This allowed me to seek out adventures without much oversight and develop my own (often misguided) barometer of what was risky.
And so I hiked, explored abandoned mill sites along the bay, rigged up rope swings over rivers, and built rafts, sometimes with my buds and sometimes alone. At the age of 13, I bought my first proper bike – a red 10-speed Schwinn Continental – and my world was never the same. My radius of exploration went from five miles to fifty in one day.
Two friends also had gotten 10-speeds that summer and we quickly got bored of cruising the neighborhood parks. One of us (it could have been me) suggested that we ride the 75 miles of back roads from Tacoma to Mt. Rainier, spend the night, and coast back home. So, with our budget store sleeping bags on our backs, we pedaled towards the mountain. Our dinner was cans of chili wrapped up tight in the sleeping bags. I brought along a gas station map of Washington with the route outlined in pencil. We didn't bring a pump or patch kit because we didn't know how to fix flat tires.
We stopped at a fruit stand part way to Mt. Rainier and, it being a hot day, purchased three small watermelons. One we ate on the spot and the other two we hung below the bike top bars harnessed in our t-shirts. One splatted onto the pavement after riding a hundred feet so we stopped to eat it. The third watermelon made it ten miles up the road where whoever was hauling it got tired of the extra weight and announced it was time to finish it off. We didn't own water bottles so the watermelons were our Gatorade of the day.
After that, adventuring by bike became my dream. I used my State of Washington map to carefully plan a three-day trip heading north of Tacoma to my aunt's house. I planned to camp in city parks. She caught wind of it and nixed the idea, just like she would have done if ever one of her own four kids had come up with such a nutty idea. I later splurged and bought a road atlas of North America and began charting a route across Canada, fully intending to bike the continent on my own the summer of my fourteenth birthday. Lack of funds and an unexpected veto by my mom kept it from happening. Instead, I rode long day trips that summer in between my lawn mowing gigs.
Over the next decade my biking became more sporadic and eventually a thief got the 10-speed. My passion for bike adventuring resurfaced when I was in my early 20's. I was living in Hawaii and working at a bike shop. An employee discount on a Cannondale touring bike plus a dissolving marriage inspired me to fly to Alaska and ride to Oregon. This time I knew how to fix a flat tire. Along the way, I learned how to deal with mosquitoes, bears, dogs, and weird people. My long beard and hair helped scare away some of those dangers.
A career that combined the specialties of forestry, engineering, and hydrology then took up chunks of time that I could have otherwise spent traveling long distances by bike. Nevertheless, that salary funded mountain bikes and other necessities. My work initially centered on the cutting of trees, often in ways that were a detriment to the environment. Within a short time, I shifted to a career that instead protected and improved rivers to the benefit of salmon and people. Much of that work kept me working outside and in touch with wild places.
A dozen years ago, the death of my mom and frustration with a toxic work environment, propelled me to once again head out on a bike for months at a time. Touring gravel roads from Canada to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains turned out to be good for my spirit. The next summer I raced the route and then got sucked into other self-supported mountain bike races, such as the Arizona Trail, the BC Epic, Cross Washington, and Lost Elephant. Not to appear too obsessed about all this, I made sure I also pedaled routes in touring mode. Pedaling a tandem mountain bike shared with Pat has also kept me grounded and content with slower paces.
My last mountain bike race was on the Oregon Timber Trail in 2021 and it ended after only five days. I was feeling off leading up to the race. I'd been diagnosed with a blood cancer two years previous but it is of the type that doesn't require treatment until the symptoms become disruptive. The race super-charged the cancer symptoms and it indeed became disruptive. I ended up in the hospital for the first time in my life. Treatment of the cancer allowed me to recover but unrelated back surgery shortly after put me back in the hospital, this time flat on my back for weeks. Once released, I had to learn how to walk and bike again. That was a year ago and the recovery continues. I may never race again at a pace that I'm accustomed to but I'm learning to be content with being out there at all.
I became a board member of the Oregon Timber Trail Alliance this last year so I could help others expand their horizons about what is possible on a bike. My trajectory into mountain bike adventuring had been simply making a lot of mistakes until I got it right. I think there might be a better way so I'm organizing the first of a series of events that OTTA is sponsoring to instruct aspiring bikepackers about how to create their own adventures. Pat thinks this a fulfillment of prophecy foretold by an aging hippy from Santa Cruz, but that is a story for another time.
I'm also organizing a race of the Oregon Timber Trail for 2023 in order to create an opportunity for others to experience the thrill of racing long distances on predominantly single-track. I'll be tagging along in my truck to pick up those whose body isn't allowing them to finish. And also to dream about what I might be able to race in 2024. It will be cheap therapy for me.
I continue to map out fresh routes, for both the OTTA and to share directly with others. Maybe a 13-year-old kid with a newly-purchased bike will come across one of those routes, pencil it onto a map, and find his escape into the wild (with his parent's permission, of course).