Bikes Are Freedom

Bikes really tie it all together: fun, friendships, relationship, mental health, transportation, and work. The day after I last wrote, Jesse and I took a good hard look at the pandemic situation locally and made the very difficult decision to go back on complete isolation from others. Even the local hospital was getting very full and my dear friend and cardiac nurse now Covid nurse was suffering under the emotional burden of so much death and suffering. Despite there being almost no evidence of outdoor spread of Covid when keeping a reasonable distance, we desperately did not want to be part of the problem, and decided to give up our few luxuries – a once a week hike with a friend, a bike ride once a week with another friend, and outdoor band practice with one dear friend for Jesse. This small change has definitely had an outsized impact on my happiness – I really miss my friends! Now that numbers have come back down and so far we are not seeing much of a post-superbowl bump we are looking at *slightly* relaxing these restrictions again.

We have been filling this time with as much joy as possible and mostly that means bikes! We’ve done two three day bikepacking trips locally in the last month. In January we practiced multi-modal adventuring by combining bikepacking with peak bagging. Over the years I have ridden my bike past the sign for Madulce Peak and looked longingly at the obvious trail traversing the hillside.

This little adventure starts with almost 20 miles of climbing and we then set up a basecamp at Bluff camp. Bluff is our most common backcountry camp because it is one of the few year round water sources here and it is directly on the fire road — a bicycle friendly corridor across swaths of Wilderness where bikes are otherwise not allowed. We had some extra time in camp so Jesse and I followed the stream to as close to the source as reasonably possible. I’ve almost always treated (with pills) or filtered my wilderness water, and one of the few times I didn’t I ended up with Giardia. I’ve been a hardcore filterer since then. We talked about how there were no cows or humans above this water source (the most common sources of Giardia, to my knowledge) and I mused: “water is life, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being afraid of water” and as a result we decided not to filter water taken from this source.

Up and at ’em the next morning we left our camping gear behind and pedaled up and over Big Pine, down the back side, stashed the bikes, and started hiking up Madulce Trail. The first part of the trail quickly became lined on each side with two different species of very prickly shrubbery!

Despite the photos above, overall the trail was pretty good up until the last half mile or so at which point we found ourselves sidestepping up very steep and loose terrain where we eventually followed our noses to the summit. If a proper trail existed from the summit ridge we were determined to find it for the descent. We found an apparent footpath and followed it carefully until it disappeared on us just short of where we had originally lost the main trail. We were easily able to re-find the nearby trail from there without ever resorting to butt skidding.

The hiking portion ended up taking us about 5 hours and then we still had many miles to cover back to camp, but we happily made it back in time for dinner. The fire restriction on backpacking stoves has ended, so we enjoyed a hot dinner!

Back to reality. Just kidding, bikepacking is reality! But we did come back to the house, and reading the news, and doing chores. But really what is there to say about the news? The fact that an attempted violent coup is ok with a significant percentage of Americans? That the Blue Lives Matter folks showed their true colors by murdering and otherwise greatly harming police in the Capitol? Oh, that’s collateral damage to save a “stolen election” with no evidence to support that? Uh huh.

Moving on. Here in Santa Barbara I continue to try and do what I can to move the cultural, social, and political needle in the rational and caring direction. Jesse and I both continue to actively volunteer with SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) by monitoring city and county meetings. For months I’ve also been teaching a young woman in my neighborhood how to ride a bike. Her mom is an immigrant that works long hours and she is otherwise cooped up in an apartment all day doing Zoom school. After a couple months of parking lot practice she developed the confidence and skills for road rides which means we can ride to the beach and the bike paths there!

Oh and it was new bike day last month!! Her name is Sube (Spanish for “she goes up”, and her color “sublime”).

I’ve also started a new job! I am working part-time for a very small nonprofit COAST (Coalition for Sustainable Transportation) and helping with their Safe Routes to School program. Normally this is taught in the classroom, but Covid. So I am teaching 40 minute Zoom classes on how to safely navigate riding your bike on the streets to 5th and 6th graders. It’s fun and easy work for me given a lifetime of teaching experience. Bike are freedom! It’s what I always tell kids to try and inspire them to ride. And it’s true. Through this work I also meet up with a group of neighborhood kids for an “after school bike program” once a week. This work is really challenging me as I have limited patience for kids who can’t follow rules and behave in a safe and considerate manner and this program includes kids from some of the more unstable and challenging homes in my low income neighborhood, which means they don’t necessarily have the skills and support network to behave as I would like them to behave. Knowing how much these kids need us and a safe supportive afterschool activity, I am doing my best to be patient and stick with it.

I’m also still gardening! Tomato plants form last year are still producing, and new starters are popping up! I’ve also got lettuce going and finally my beets are making more than yummy greens!

At some point in the last month I was also sick for about ten days, which reminds me, many of you have asked for IBS updates. Ugh, it’s complicated. The initial very restricted diet markedly improved things and I slowly added foods back in, as recommended. I really seemed to be onto something sustainable, there were certain foods I still avoided for the most part (beans, cruciferous veggies, …) and I maintained improved symptoms for months. Then for no apparent reason things started to get bad again. Frustrated I went all the way back to full FODMAP elimination and after a few days it seemed to help some, but not as much as the first time. A week or so into that my stomach went topsy turvy with near constant nausea, things stopped moving through my system and I had a complete loss of appetite. Fatigue was a constant. Remember that water I drank two weeks prior? Could it be? Did I get Giardia? Got tested – nope! It couldn’t possibly be Covid right? Our household is one of the most cautious I know. Get tested for Covid, nope. After the first couple days of this I took MiraLAX for a few days, finally moved things along, but never really felt better. After almost 10 days I finally started to feel better and regain my appetite and energy over the next week. I suppose I’ll never know, but I sure am glad to be feeling better. No verdict on the current state of my GI as it relates to my IBS, but I’m trying daily Metamucil, even though I’ve always figured I get lots of fiber in my largely vegetarian diet, and I think of Metamucil as being for those dealing with constipation, I’ve also been told that it can help regulate the diarrheic form of IBS. I’ll report back!

After months of no travel and a month of no friends, my wanderlust was rearing its head in a big way. I desperately needed to ride on some new to me roads and trails, but we still want to stay “local” so I planned a big three day weekend ride from our door heading the back way to Ojai and then up into the mountains above and beyond Ojai, finishing the loop back around along the coastal bike path.

Day two proved to be much more challenging than expected. While I think the day was under forty miles, we spent the majority of the day doing steep climbing, grinding along with a loaded bike in our smallest gears. We had beautiful views of Chief Peak from almost every direction, since the road traversed around its northern flank.

In Southern CA the distance required to be covered each day is basically dictated by water availability. We finally made it to our second camp which luckily had water flowing; however, one of the recent windstorms had toppled many trees throughout the heart of the campground with many questionable looking trees still standing. There was wind that night and we actually decided that the safest place for our tent (and one of the few flat spots) was under an already downed tree. Our rational was that it fell with a lot of force and was pretty happy with it’s current position, so maybe it would help protect us if another tree came down? We didn’t have a lot to work with, so we went with it, but it was definitely a nervous noisy windy night.

The final leg was almost 70 miles to get home! Fortunately many of those miles were downhill, but we did have to tackle a very steep 4-5 mile paved climb, and then almost 30 flat miles into a headwind for the final leg. Jesse graciously allowed me to draft him those final miles. We were home by 3pm on Monday, exhausted and pleased. If you made it this far, wow!, and thanks for reading. If I would update more often I wouldn’t need to ramble on for so long! Oh and I’m still making a radio show, if you want to check it our here: More Banjo! Who knows what adventure is next, but we’ll keep playing, loving, and trying to have a positive impact on the world around us!