I spoke too soon (see installment 10). Someone or a force of nature removed my edits from the USMC insignia on the River Trail. So I’m issuing a call to peace vandals. Your help is needed. And your paint.

But enough for now on the fine arts. Let’s transport ourselves to Route 50 between Saratoga Springs and Scotia, a 21-mile stretch that leads to Schenectady’s north portal at the Mohawk River.

To tell the truth, I missed some of the sights along this route, mostly because I was in a hurry to catch a mid-day train in Schenectady. This is a city that use to be a real destination, at least before General Electric pulled its own plug and largely abandoned the area.

Even though two major east-west rail passenger services and a north-south one go through the heart of downtown, Schenectady is still much too quiet. It does have a beautiful historic district, though, with pretty good vital signs. (So why did I have to go there? Basically, the vicissitudes, or follies, of modern American rail travel. I was hoping to board the Amtrak Adirondack at the Fort Edward station, but it turns out that this station doesn’t provide checked baggage service, which is required if you’re going to bring a standard bike aboard. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I’d have to go farther south and catch the Empire or Lake Shore Limited.)

It was my own fault that I had to hurry. If I’d been a responsible bicycle tourist and got up at dawn in my cheap motel room near Saratoga, then passed up my habitual sit-down breakfast with bottomless coffee mug and morning paper, I would have had loads of time to cruise and lollygag the whole way to Schenectady. But no, as usual, I took my sweet time waking up and so had to pump like crazy to get to the station.

Whatever your daily biorhythms, you’ll find that Route 50 has good features. It passes by Saratoga Springs State Park, where woodlands and campgrounds surround the venerable spa where generations came to “take the waters.” And there’s the entrance to the Performing Arts Center, summer home to the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet. The orchestra is there only in August, so I came too early to hear a performance. But I thought back to concerts there years – decades – ago, and heard in my kind’s ear snatches of the LPs that were my daily bread when I was a kid, back during the reign of conductor Eugene Ormandy. The Philly had such big, rich sound, just what appealed to a kid who thought music began with Schubert and ended with Brahms.

The musical qualities of Route 50, though, are less appealing. Though the paved shoulder is accommodating, the roadway gets louder and more crowded as you go south, especially once you’ve passed through the charming old-style village of Ballston Spa.

One incident from this leg of the ride stands out in memory. Near Ballston I approached one of those acute-angled intersections that inspire drivers to do jackrabbit starts, and make bicyclists hit the brakes. A young woman in a sporty sedan zipped up to the stop sign, obviously intent on ignoring it; she looked over her left shoulder at me as I neared the intersection doing maybe 25 mph (or faster, since I was on a gentle downhill, and as I said, pressed for time). The two of us made eye contact, but that didn’t stop the woman from gunning it just as I got close. I had to brake really hard - as I hard as I could, given my hand-position on the brake hoods. The woman, of course, blasted down the road with no apparent regrets.

(Let’s pause for a note to all bikers who use classic drop handlebars: If your bars are equipped with “auxiliary brake levers,” an add-on that does have some advantage for kids riding on sidewalks, take them off and throw them away! The auxiliary levers don’t give much braking power, and if you apply them while riding at higher speeds, you may suddenly find yourself thrown over the bars – a classic “header” – because you’re too high in the saddle and thus have too high a center of gravity for your own good. Once you’ve gotten rid of the levers, learn how to hit the brakes from the hoods as well as from the drops, and keep your brakes properly adjusted.)

You may have experienced an intersection of this type. There may or may not be a stop or yield sign on the side road, but no matter: the motorist just floors it and tries to merge with the main flow of traffic without really stopping first, or even looking for oncoming traffic. And of course there’s a larger problem: Even in the best circumstances, too many motorists consider bicycles a marginal presence that should be segregated onto a path way off the pavement, preferably up in the woods or somewhere in the next county and truly invisible.

I am not exaggerating here; the existence of this attitude is one reason some biking advocates, notably the followers of writer-consultant John Forester, oppose the construction of bike lanes and segregated trails. These advocates fear that separate-and-unequal facilities will lead to bicyclists’ being thrown off the public roads altogether. Sometimes I think they’ve got a point.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 23:34 EDT

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The transportation corridors between Lake George and Albany are among the most heavily used north of Westchester. And they have been since before the days of James Fenimore Cooper, whose romanticized and racialized imprint still lingers over land and water – as at Lake George’s reconstructed, indeed reinvented Fort William Henry. But here The Last of the Mohicans won’t grip your mind for long, not with the tourist glitz that is today’s commanding presence.

Yes, Lake George village, with all its lights, cameras, and action, is a nice place to visit briefly but a better place to leave, especially for a bicyclist. And luckily, the towns and villages south of the lake have capitalized on this by creating a 17-mile, largely paved bike path that goes through magnificent woodlands and open spaces.

This bike route, well-mapped and marked, connects the communities of Lake George, Glens Falls and Fort Edward. The route’s northern section, labeled the Warren County Bikeway, follows the “Old Military Road,” a shaded path below congested Route 9 that makes you think of the very old days when colonial armies went to and from the original Fort William Henry and points north, like Ticonderoga. But after a half dozen miles, and then a slight detour onto the roads, the bike route becomes the Feeder Canal Park Heritage Trail, which provides a trip through the industrial history of several towns beside the Hudson River.

The Feeder Canal itself, which is still watered, goes through various abandoned and semi-abandoned industrial sites and a stunning series of locks (reminiscent of the spectacularly engineered “17 Locks” of the old Genesee Valley Canal near Nunda, NY) and eventually joins the Old Champlain Canal and its accompanying towpath/trail. The Champlain Canal, though, has become a marsh – still attractive, and certainly more of a wildlife refuge than it used to be.

This interconnected canal system then leads you to the edge of Saratoga County, and before you know it – partly because the roadways, unlike the slow-paced, moribund canals, inspire you to make time – you find yourself in Saratoga Springs. And only then do you understand you’ve made quite an economic journey, too. So few miles from the middle-class resort of Lake George, to the hard-luck town of Glens Falls, to the even harder-luck towns of Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, and then to affluence of Saratoga Springs, still banking on its Gilded Age legacy.

How to characterize these contrasting towns? Well, Saratoga Springs has the typical ooh-and-ah storefronts: designer clothing, you name it. And of course there are sidewalk cafes and restaurants, though the morning I was there, hardly any customers were around. But Fort Edward? Part of the reason I went there was to check out the Amtrak station; I was considering hopping a train to Schenectady and then catching a westbound train to Rochester for a couple days so I could finish some paid jobs. (In a future installment I’ll tell how I ended up biking all the way to Schenectady and catching the train there.)

Well, the Fort Edward station, a beautiful old building that’s being restored with grant money, is hardly ever open. You can board a train from the platform, but you can’t check baggage, etc., and so if you’re packing/boxing a bike you might as well forget it. But at least as you stand there admiring the architecture and pondering the history, you can reflect on what might have been and still may be. And so it is with the village of Fort Edward, which, like the milltowns of the Mohawk Valley or eastern and southern New England, is a survivor. Maybe because I was born and raised in the rundown industrial city of Niagara Falls, I appreciate the classic milltown’s rugged poetry, written in limestone and brick and the good faith of people who refuse to let their hometowns die.

Postscript: Just before I jotted this stuff down, I went for a ride on the Rochester River Trail from downtown to Genesee Valley Park. A few things struck me. Why haven’t they opened the trail under the west side of the new Anthony-Douglass bridge yet? Why are cycling improvements always the last things to get done, even though they’re the simplest and cheapest? Going further south: Why does the RPD continue to ignore illegal parking on Moore Road within GV Park? The few spaces provided there are supposed to be for park users, yet every time I pass through the area, I see that UR and Strong employees have hogged the spaces for free workday parking. UR parking staffers are aware of the situation, and so are the cops, so where’s the action? Ordinarily I don’t give a rat’s ass about parking – but here’s a situation where parkland is being abused and officialdom is looking the other way.

I saw great things on my ride, too: a wide selection of birds, including a great blue heron, and the oddly compelling phalanx of black (or European) alders along the northern stretch of Wilson Boulevard, coming visually alive in a reddening dusk. But the greatest sight was a paint-job. I noticed months ago that some jerk, maybe a ROTC type, had stenciled the Marine Corps insignia in two spots along the river trail, one near the UR Quad, the other almost at Ford Street. As an ex-Marine myself (heavy accent on the “ex”), I knew it was my duty to obliterate these guerrilla images, lest they corrupt the youth. So one night a few weeks ago, I took a can of gray spray paint and messed one of them up pretty bad. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough paint left in the can to cover the image entirely, so I said to myself that I’d have to re-arm and complete the mission later. But whaddya know? Some other anti-militarist came by and took care of it. Thank you, anonymous benefactor! This is the kind of rural pacification program that fits perfectly with the biking ethos.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 08:42 EDT

Updated: Friday, 24 August 2007 11:55 EDT

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I’ve tossed a few thousand words into cyberspace about my summer bicycling trip – but, as a few friends have pointed out, I haven’t dealt with the primary question. Why did I get on my bike in the first place?

Sure, I could have taken the same route by car (or approximately the same route by bus or train) and done the whole 1,000 miles in a couple of days, or a leisurely week by motoring standards. And to tell the truth, I would have seen pretty much every high point along the way.

But in these facile determinations lie the answers to “Why Bike?”

First, long experience leads me to believe there’s unbreakable link between biking and the human biological clock. Just as in music, it’s a matter of rhythm and tempo.

Whether by accident or technological limitation or whatever, the bicycle was designed to be a close extension of the human body. It’s not a cocoon like a modern automobile or truck. (Recall that early cars and trucks were pretty open-air.) It’s not just a multiplier of muscle power, it’s almost part of your arm-and-leg motion and your biological drive to cover distance. (Think long runs across the savannah.) And as such, it heightens your awareness of the terrain you cover, not just on fast downhill “runs,” but also in quiet moments as you roll past woods and fields and (let’s face it) strip malls and used car lots.

In a car, you’re mentally at your destination before you’ve earned the journey, and the distances are the psychological equivalent of stoop labor. On a bike, though, you may be thinking about a hard pull ahead – that monster hill or unplanned ten-mile detour – but fundamentally you’re right “there,” in the Zen sense that you cannot be anywhere but where you are, if only you’ll realize it. And because, if you’re lucky and realize this, your body has to go peaceably along with your mind.

Somewhere Thoreau asks the reader, What mode of travel is the fastest? His answer: walking, which he contrasts with the trains of his day. But Thoreau wasn’t posing a Zen koan; as with much of his work, he was making a stripped-down calculation. To be able to ride the train, he said, a person must work x number of hours to buy the ticket; but walking is practically free. So when you compare the hours of work required to support each mode of travel, then add these hours to those spent en route, you have to conclude that walking is fastest.

I don’t claim that biking is faster than walking, in this sense. But I think it’s competitive, and that it transmits similar wholistic messages and values back through our bodies and spirits. Biking may be an industrial-technological compromise. (It’s certainly not atavistic or romanticist – not in a world where, way off the First World radar screen, hundreds of millions of people either use bicycles as their primary transport or wish they could afford to.) But it’s still uses the same language as the one we feel in our gut, genetically speaking.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 13:58 EDT

Updated: Friday, 17 August 2007 14:00 EDT

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Hugging the west shore of Lake Champlain, the village (or maybe just hamlet) of Port Kent, NY, evokes better times. There’s one old estate in particular that overlooks the water, offering a spectacular view of Burlington in the distance. The building and grounds, laid out in a now seedy Victorian pattern, probably will fall into the hands of the condomeisters who’ve seized good chunks of the Vermont shoreline. Indeed, much of the New York side of the lake has given way to such development.

But when you hit Route 9 only a few miles from the lake, you pretty well leave the Orlando North ambience behind. There are workaday towns like Keeseville, and bits of curbside leftovers – including decaying motels, some of which have been converted to rooms-by-the-week, and all of which are visual essays on the first and second automobile epochs.

Some of the change from resort glitz to Adirondack hardscrabble comes from the effects of Interstate 87. When the “Northway” opened years ago, it became for most people the one and only north-south roadway between Albany and Plattsburgh. (It also entailed ripping off chunks of the “forever wild” Forest Preserve via a statewide ballot proposition, but that’s another story.) I would gladly live without I-87 and the rest of Interstate system, which like many other things done in the name of “national defense” has seriously damaged the continent. But at least I-87 siphoned off most of traffic that had clogged Route 9, leaving the latter to evolve (devolve?) into a road with a more human face.

In fact, I can honestly say that, excluding some short stretches on backcountry pavement, Route 9 was the finest bicycling road I found this summer. Why? Well, the scenery is unexcelled, for one thing. The western fringe of the mountains don’t get so much respect as the High Peaks or the central and southwestern lake regions. But I challenge anyone to find places more beautiful than the abrupt hills and tumbling creeks and rivers of the upper Hudson River watershed.

Even the town of Lewis has its charms. Though dominated by a quarry/gravel pit, this working class Adirondack community is a good place to spend a night. I stayed at a private campground, at a tenting site that was far enough from the road for comfort. If you want a short burst of civilization, you can pedal down to a combo (not condo) gas station, pizza-and-sub joint and grocery that functions as the town’s commercial nexus. The good folks there made me a decent veggie sub, and I even found a bottle of Lake Placid brown ale (brewed in Plattsburgh; cf. Saranac beers and ales, brewed in Utica) to wash it down.

This is as good a place as any to talk about accommodations. The cyclotourist has to be prepared for anything. I always pack a one-person shelter, of which there are many good designs on the market today; a super lightweight sleeping bag; and a small foam pad. Actually, for this trip I got a backpacker air mattress, only because it compresses into a much smaller bundle than good old closed-cell foam. But of course you’ve got to use some time and lung-power to inflate an air mattress, and it takes a little while to deflate and fold them up in the morning, too. Plus, air mattresses are a bit heavier than foam. So I think in the future I’ll go back to foam – I’ve found the accordion-style mats are cheap and ridiculously easy to deploy and pack up.

So where are you going to pitch your tent? Personally, after this trip, and after many past trips, I’m swearing off the public campgrounds. I dig the communal thing, the notion of the commons, etc., but the noise and congestion at these facilities have turned them into something quite unlike the wilderness experience.

For example, one night early in this summer’s odyssey, I camped at Selkirk Shores State Park, a beautiful spot northeast of Oswego, right on Lake Ontario. Some large group of yahoos (in the Swiftian, not the search-engine sense) was set up across a field from me; they hooted and hollered till 1:00 a.m., and – until I asked them to cease and desist, they even made late-night forays in a truck to fetch firewood from a well-thinned stand of mixed hardwoods behind my tent. Now, I don’t blame this hideous conditions on human nature; I think they stem from state indifference. Albany doesn’t see fit to keep park staff on site after 8 p.m. or so on weekdays; patrolling is left to the state troopers, who drive through every few hours. So there’s no pressure on the yahoos. I don’t want a police presence, though. I want the kind of supervision that a good ranger can offer – with a bit of friendly education.

But the beauty of the Adirondacks is that you can camp anywhere on state forest land for nothing, and without harassment. (As I remember the law, you can camp on one spot for three consecutive days without a permit. But be advised: this does not apply to Wildlife Management Areas and state parklands, only to designated state forest – not just the Forest Preserve of the Adirondacks and Catskills, but also the many state forests that dot the Southern Tier and other regions.)

Also, it’s a sign of the times that campgrounds with services, public or private, are damned expensive these days. The place I stayed at in Lewis cost $16 per night; state campground sites go for a little under $15; and one place in Vermont that I scoped out and rejected (it was essentially a sandy parking lot for RVs) went for $25! At that price you can get an inexpensive motel, a.k.a. dive. More about that option next time.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 23:29 EDT

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Despite a viewshed that most chambers of commerce would kill for (and probably have killed for, by the usual market mechanisms), the area just east of Burlington is standard Americana. As you approach the suburbs and the postglacial slopes above Lake Champlain grow steeper, you depend physically and psychologically on the gravitational pull to get you quickly through the overdeveloped mess. I happened to hit this zone at rush hour, and believe me, it was no lark. But despite its being Vermont’s version of metropolis, Burlington is really a small town, and you can hold your nose and get through the worst its roadways have to offer. And as I’ve said before, the city center is very bike- and pedestrian-friendly. (City Hall, in fact, runs a pedestrian rights/responsibilities program, with appropriate signage, etc.)

But even the heart of Burlington must cope with the Open Road’s ubiquitous monstrosities. Motorcycles, for example. I can tell you, after a couple thousand miles this summer on roads large and small, various post-adolescent noisemakers have driven me to distraction. These goddamn testosterone-fueled Guymobiles - crotch rockets and choppers, ATVs, and various road-legal “customized” trucks and sedans with aftermarket “tuned” pipes instead of mufflers – were always nuisances, but these days they’ve proliferated so much that, for bystanders, they’re like something prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t make jokes with contexts like that. But some combination of irony and outrage is necessary. I get depressed thinking about how America long ago forfeited the public highways to hyper-individualized modes of destruction. Look at the typical New York or New England town center, with woodframe homes and commercial buildings lined up close to the road, often within 20 feet, sometimes only at arm’s length. Loud, stinking motor traffic has squeezed the value – monetary and quality-of-life – right out of these old structures. The roadway is now the enemy, and building codes with ample setback requirements are the norm. I mean, who in their right mind wants to live next to thundering herd of pollution generators? But the setbacks and other accommodations to what’s deceptively packaged as “modern life” are forms of alienation, literal distancing from the “commons.” And they’re just what the bicyclist and pedestrian can counteract simply by doing their thing.

Well, it might seem that I’m digressing, avoiding the actual experience of my trip – but not so. The bicyclist’s mindscape is part and parcel of the journey; under pedal power, your body drives your thoughts to destinations not attainable by other means. You’re simply much more embedded in your impressions and reactions..

One last thought for this installment, this time from my home base. Last night, when the temperature and humidity were coming down after a near-90-degree afternoon, I got one of my frequent itches to walk up through Highland Park. But when I stepped into the arboretum at the high end of Meigs Street, I saw mountain bike tracks where they don’t belong – and bikes are legally prohibited anywhere in Highland and other county parks. Then sure enough, I saw the biker himself. Not one to be silent in the face of assaults on this beautiful park, even non-motorized ones, I motioned to him (he was plugged into a “personal audio device”) but he blew me off, then did a 20-mph schuss down a steep hill across from the reservoir. Then he pedaled back around to harass me for spoiling his idyllic experience!

You run into these barbarians every day, I know, but that doesn’t make the experience any less maddening. They think they’re harmless, even while they’re literally carving up the park with their knobbies and disturbing the atmosphere that draws so many walkers to the quiet paths. Much of the blame for these intrusions rests with the parks administration and higher up in the junta, though. The Monroe County Parks office is located right next to Highland Park, just off South Avenue; yet there are no patrols, docents, or even proper signs regarding permitted use. I think we need to get rid of two groups: the rogue mountain bikers and other park abusers, on one hand; and the King-Doyle-Brooks generation of politicians, on the other. Enough of budget cuts and looking the other way on a range of violations.

Next time: I rediscover the Lake Champlain Valley, north to south.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 13:44 EDT

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