K. traveled light, with a small duffel bag of clothes, a helmet and some toe-clip pedals. From the depot Union Station, we motored to a coffee shop Echo Park, so K. could change clothes and suit up for the Ridazz midnight bicycle tour of the dormant movie palaces that once lit up the hard streets of downtown Los Angeles. It was only a ride of 18 miles or so, which would serve as a nice tune-up and "leak test" (to use racing parlance) for the next night's epic adventure in the inhospitable and hostile high desert.
At the Pioneer Liquor in Echo Park a couple hundred of motley "Midnight Ridazz" gathered on their bicycles. Their numbers overwhelmed the liquor store's parking lot, and many of them hung out in the street, until cop cars gathered. It was an exercise in somewhat organized anarchy, with these art-damaged eastside cyclists killing time before the ride by discussing each other's costumes (there was a Charlie Chaplin or two, some Clockwork Orange droogs and a Young Mr. Lincoln. et. al) and drinking beer in preparation for a ride through the dark streets of the sundry third world neighborhoods that housed the architectural marvels that Los Angeles eventually neglected and ultimately abandoned in its rush for white flight and a gerrymandered power center closer to Beverly Hills than the actual center of the city. It was like LA cared so little about its history, it forgot to even tear it down.
The police presence was a weird co-efficient to the entire ride. The Ridazz would commandeer intersections on Sunset, Figueroa, Hill Street, Exposition, Hoover, Washington, Virgil and others, with a rider or two swooping into the intersection and stopping, creating a micro-barricade to stop traffic as hundreds of bicyclists rode through the intersection against red lights. It was an impressive piece of interpretative choreography, played out nearly every time traffic signals conspired against the critical mass..
By the time the ride hit the ghetto-ized neighborhoods near USC, the coppers had gotten wilier and more disturbed, and had employed a helicopter to buzz the gathering with a sweeping spotlight. It was as if Norma Desmond was once again ready for her close-up.
At MacArthur Park on 6th and Alvarado, the police cruisers had taken to their little p.a. systems and had warned the riders that if they insisted on disrupting the mechanized and electronic traffic flow, their bikes would confiscated, "unless your name is Lance Armstrong."
I told K. that if the police swooped down into this group, that we would haul ass into sleepy neighborhood streets, as I was in no mood to argue with law enforcement about the abuse of the concept of zero tolerance and civil liberties, Lance Armstrong or no Lance Armstrong. After all, we had a ride the following night that was of far bigger existential importance...
The next day the drive from Los Angeles to Lone Pine was equally scenic and somewhat ominous.... once we were north of Palmdale and Mojave, the lipstick reds of the hillsides were smeared and muted from a diffused sunlight warped from clouds bouncing off of the Sierras. K. pointed out the Joshua trees bivouacked along the highway -- and that was the ominous part, as the trunks and fronds of these yuccas were bent and buoyant, twisting in what were rather howling winds. Indeed, a travel advisory was in effect and posted on the electronic displays often reserved for Amber Alerts..
I told K. that this did not bode well for the ride later than evening... In retrospect, my concern was understated...
As we listened to Lou Reed's "Transformer," I had a flashback of a whiteout between Lone Pine and DV that once enveloped my automobile ten years ago... In 1994, I was on a lonely love-sick road trip and during my attempt at asphalt-assisted psychic therapy the howling sands off of the Owens Lake bed blasted the paint of my Pontiac like God was playing paintball. Owens Lake was a once fertile oasis transformed into a barren playa by the Coyote Gods and Capitalist Druids of Los Angeles... it was once an abundant and majestic body of water, replete with steam ships, paddle boats and port towns (long since abandoned...) The winds were so fierce that day I could not see a fucking thing and stinging blizzard of sand just cranked up resolve and informed my id to just power through the resistance... All these years later, the irony of a cabal of Los Angeles-based civil engineers changing the water tables so LA could have its population explosion and movie palaces was not lost on me as K. and I drove on...
The ride started out harmless enough. A couple of miles in, I saw the rattlesnake on the edge of the highway and was startled. K. was right behind me and it spooked her too.... Neither of us noticed that its backside had been crushed and the reptile was a docile piece of road pizza. As the sun crested behind Mt. Whitney we passed the port town of Keeler, where less than a 100 years ago the steam ships were loaded with silver off of burros, and then paddled across the Owens Lake, where other transport would be waiting in Olancha. While K. adjusted her seat height, we posed for pictures at an abandoned gas pump in Keeler and then continued east as the sun dropped anchor and the moon rose like a lazy ping-pong ball.
Twenty miles in, and everything seemed situation normal... but as we passed the Darwin turnoff and began climbing towards the Panamints, I managed to propel myself away from a groups of riders K. and I had fallen in with. Assisted by a tailwind, I was by myself on a road that was lit by the moon and as open as a wormhole. It was too dark to see the cyclometer, so I have no idea how fast I was traveling, but I was racing with -- and howling at -- the moon. I was as big as the universe and as small as the sand stinging my face. I was quick as a rattlesnake, but I was hyper-alert about how lickety-split tire tracks can smash your back. It was utterly exhilarating..
And then....
I turned back around to see how K. was faring. Then it hit me. The winds once in my sail were now in my face and they were as fierce as they were frigid. We both wore long sleeve jerseys, but the wind cut through the fabric like the proverbial witches' teat in a brass bra.
Halfway into the ride (at the turnaround point near Darwin Falls), we were able to score a vest for me, and a windbreaker and some wool socks for K. The entire last half of the ride was into the wind and the sandstorms... 37 miles of bone-numbing cold and slow going... the winds were so fierce, one could not even coast when going downhill...(!)
Just like ten years ago, when I was confronted the mother of all siroccos, I was again mentally working my way through a break-up. I welcomed the cold, brittle resistance. I probed it and taunted it, asking the heavens, "Is this all you got? Is this the best you can do to keep me from where I want to go?"
K. did not share my zeal for anything that would make life or the ride any more difficult. Still, she crouched over, made herself low and relatively aerodynamic and continued to poke a hole in the cold desert air. It was a grind. We made it back to Lone Pine at 1 in the morning. Back in the motel room, we ate cookies and drank Fosters out of containers the size of oil cans. And we slept.
The next morning we drove to Fontana to watch IndyCars. Life doesn't get any better than a weekend like that... no matter what it throws in your face and no matter how unexpectedly...
