Mountains

It has been the best of, and the worst of weeks. That Indian summer, whose non-arrival I was bitching about, arrived with a vengeance. The weather behaved as if commanded by a benevolent and well-disposed god, someone like me perhaps. Lovely cool nights, crisp and dewy mornings, warm, wind-still days and evenings that you could sit on the deck outside with only a light jacket and sip cold chardonnay without harassment from members of the insect kingdom. When we take the plump, but very eager dachshunds, for their twice daily walk, the wearing of short trousers would not be out of the question. The route around Fairy Lake (okay it’s a silly name, but that is what it’s called) that we walk them cannot be lovelier. The grass is still green, the flowers are still in bloom, the leaves are turning red and yellow, the ducks and darters are swimming about and the Canada geese haven’t yet pissed off to Florida or wherever they spend the winter. I even manage a few short evening rides, I have a favorite route along the York/Durham line, County Road 39 through the village of Zephyr, down Ravenshoe Road and home on the newly opened section of the 404, just an awesome way to end a day. So that explains the best of weeks, the worst of weeks is that I have worked my little tail off and haven’t been able to take time off to smell the hummus, let alone the roses. Now to be clear, I am not adverse to work, it is after all the activity that pays for all the other essentials, like motorcycles, food, mortgages and toothpaste, but it is hard to keep the nose to the grindstone when you know that this window can close at any moment and all too soon the backyard will be buried in a foot of snow.

From the Road to Zephyr 

But I am now making up for it… big time. I have kept a beady eye on that weather forecast, and the weekend is going to be just gorgeous. This is it, I am heading for the Adirondack. My original intention was to get a few hundred Km along the way on Friday afternoon, find a place to sleep and take a more leisurely route, but the pressures of work kept me at my desk until after 5 pm, so scrapped that and I am up at 6 a.m. on Saturday. I decide to kill a bit of time to allow for the sun to get a little higher in the sky, mindful that I’m travelling east into the sunrise. After my last experience I am taking note of the sun-in-eye factor and set-off by 7.15. It’s crispish, but not terribly, so I brave the elements without the Kermit coloured outfit. Somehow I feel that if it is cold on the ride I’m ok with that, dressing too warmly would be churlish and ungrateful. I take the motorway, 404 southbound, it’s already busy and soon run into some pretty thick mist, which is interesting in a scary way. I think I should call this post ‘Bikers in the Mist’, but then the mist lifts and it doesn’t seem appropriate anymore, and seems to lack a good ring to it.

I take the toll road, Highway 407 east until it ends and rejoins highway 7. Smooth concrete for a while, then blacktop. It’s a great road to ride if what you want is to get there fast, the traffic speed is 130 to 140 Km. Scenery wise it’s as ugly as asshole, but it is a thrill to ride, better than Redbull to keep your wits about you… you’d better be on the ball, the 407 will surely separate the quick from the dead. Highway 7 is a bit quieter, a lot slower at any rate and some construction. It gets quieter still and turns into Regional Road 3, a real farm road. It’s a pleasant ride, rolling hills, farmlands and a bit of forest, few nice twists and turns. The realization has, however dawned, my planned route to hug the shore of Lake Ontario along Highway 2 will not get me to where I want to be by nightfall. I need to take the fastest route through the Canadian portion of the trip and that means the motorway. I follow Regional Road 57 to Bowmanville and pick up Highway 401, heading east and going liked the clappers.

There are a lot of motorcycles on the roads this morning, I guess I’m not the only one that’s been following the weather forecasts. There is this thing with motorcyclists, we wave to each other, well not exactly a wave, it’s more like a nonchalant, awfully cool gesture of acknowledgement, left hand held at 8 o’clock, or maybe 10 o’clock, fingers slightly open. If the left hand is otherwise disposed, such as in engaging the clutch, etiquette is satisfied with a somber nod of the head. Of course we don’t wave with the right hand, that would entail letting go of the accelerator, which would just be bloody stupid, those things are spring loaded. So I’m doing a shit load of awfully cool gesturing this morning. In addition to the usual batch of old farts (and these days most motorcyclists are old farts like me), there are a large number of police persons on motorcycles. I have seen at least four groups of them. They look to me like RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police – actual mounted Mounties!). Probably on their way to something as this road is not policed by them, it’s an OPP responsibility. I tag onto the back of a group of six of them, at a discrete distance of course. They are riding in a tight formation, not staggered like you normally see with groups of motor bikers, but two by two, next to each other. They are doing a good speed, about 125 km/, even the Mounties can’t keep to the speed limit of 100 km/h. It is the safest 30 Km stretch I have ever ridden, around these guys the motorists are all minding their Ps and Qs. I go past them as they exit the motorway just before Kingston and a few wave to me, I do the cool gesture back. That is something, Mounties are reputed to have their sense of humor surgically removed before they can graduate from Mounty School, or whatever the training academy is called.   

Two hundred or so Km later, the 1000 Islands Parkway takes me from the 401 and through the 1000 Island Park. This really is a lovely part of the world, and yes, this is where the salad dressing gets its name from. I thought that the name 1000 Islands was a bit of an over estimation, but apparently there are more than 1800 islands, so maybe 2000 Islands would have been closer to the mark. According to http://www.gananoque.com/history.htm “The 1000 islands were formed almost 12'000 years at the end of the last ice age. Three previous ice ages also contributed to the formation of the islands and they actually form a connecting bridge between the Canadian Shield to the north and the Adirondack mountains to the south in New York State.” True as that is, the islands also form a connection between Canada and the USA in the form of a border post. The road takes me over a suspension bridge, just before the USA border post, and then another just after, almost identical. I have mentioned before that I love bridges, especially suspension bridges, but not why. It’s the elegant simplicity of design that gets me, the perfect balance between force and counterforce, it’s like arches and domes, the weight of the load actually makes the structure more stable. I sometimes wish that everything could be more like that, of course it isn’t, life tends to be bloody messy at the best of times.

1000 Islands 

There is a fairly long wait at the border and then the stupid questions posed by a guy trying to be a really tough dude, ‘Where were you born? Where are you coming from? When last did you visit the USA? What are you planning to do in the USA?’ The moron terrorists are no doubt picked out by this line of questioning. Nonetheless it’s nice to be back in the States. Interstate 81 is a good road to ride the blacktop is good albeit somewhat patched. I’m heading to Watertown and lunch, the name intrigues me, but sadly it does not live up to expectations. It has the air of a place that is struggling, too many of the homes look like fixer-uppers and there are no decent restaurants to be seen, eventually I am forced to eat at Wendy’s where the customers look like Walmartians. I get a really awful chicken salad, pencil eraser salad, really. Onwards and upwards, I am not here for the food, I am en route to see mountains, I yearn for the sight of mountains. I don’t know why it is, but there are two things I miss in Ontario, mountains and the ocean, the crashing waves on white beaches and soaring craggy cliffs. I will admit that where I live it is beautiful and I love that, but it is a tame beauty, a chaste, slightly flat, beauty. Sometimes I long for the wild balls-to-the-wall stuff that I once knew.

As the road leaves Watertown, I pass a church with a sign that reads ‘Hell has no exists. Heaven needs none.’ I cringe with embarrassment. I don’t care what you believe in, but this should make you cringe, even more so if you are a Christian. It speaks volumes about the Christian doctrine and volumes about the Christian version of God, and none of it is flattering. This is donkey psychology at its most simplistic, stick and carrot. So all the good deeds done in the name of God are nothing other than fear of punishments and reward seeking. It says that Christians are incapable of living moral lives and treating other humans with some decency without the fear of hell and the desire for heaven. It also relieves Christians of any responsibility to perform even the most rudimentary due diligence on what it is they are supposed to believe, simply because non-belief equals hell, it is enough to merely believe. Then consider that the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the whole universe with all its complexity and magnificence, can come up with nothing better than donkey psychology. These words make Him look like an insecure, mean spirited vengeful dictator, something like Kim Jong-un, that will give you free will, but if you happen to exercise it you are screwed, and I mean really screwed. But most cringe worthy is the smug schoolyard like taunt, the enjoyment at the idea of the suffering of anyone that is does not conform to your views – Chautauqua for the day – Sorry, I’ll get off the hobby horse and back onto the Boulevard.

I ride the NY State Road 3 East towards the Adirondack Park. It’s nice enough, hard shoulders, pavement well maintained, some reasonable curves, but lots of villages. You’ve barely get the speed up again up when you have to drop back to 30, (miles p/h of course, we’re in the States now). In between villages it’s a bit of farming, but mainly forest and some logging. I pass some inhabited, but very rundown places, even a few shacks made from scrap timbers and rusty sheet metal, reminiscent of the shanty towns in South Africa. Faintly I think I can hear the strains of banjos playing, a la Deliverance - plunka plunk... plunk plunk plunk. Happily I have no need to stop, gassed up in Watertown.

The villages thin out and it gets prettier, then a sign announcing that I've crosses into the Adirondack Park and all is well, this is utterly gorgeous, the word I'm looking for is sumptuous. The park is 6.1 million acres and larger than National Parks of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Great Smoky Mountains combined, larger than the state of Vermont. It’s a little different to the usual as 60% of the land is privately owned with about 130 000 permanent residents.  The park was established as in 1892 from a coordinated effort between private owners and government, mainly to conserve fresh water and timber resources. It was an experiment in a unique conservation model that appears to have been a success, though I understand that there are currently initiatives by NGOs to buy some of the private land in order to add it to the state portion so as to resolve some of the ongoing controversy about making use of those resources.

Sumptuous indeed

Lovely and successful though the park is, it has its nasty skeletons in the cupboard. Before the American Revolution / War of Independence much of what is now the park was the territory of the Iroquois people, who made the poor choice of siding with the British. Washington was not into forgiving them for this misstep and they were forcibly resettled in the Midwest, except for those that escaped to Canada where the Crown gave them some land, around the Grand River in what was then Upper Canada. And as for the spoils of war, did it go to the soldiers and their families that fought and died for independence? Hell no, it was sold to New York City speculators for the princely sum of 8 cents an acre.

I still haven’t seen much in the way of mountains, but get the feeling that I am slowly gaining a bit of altitude. There are lots of lakes with interesting names like Cranberry Lake and Star Lake and beautiful rivers. The leaves here are really turning red, more so than in Newmarket, perhaps it’s to do with the altitude. There is not much traffic and the road twists and turns in a most satisfactory manner. I even get to see a few deer grazing in a clearing, wondering if I’ll see a bear or a moose. It’s been a long ride to get here, but already it’s worth it…who am I kidding, it’s about the ride anyway. Tupper Lake Village is a reasonably large village, probably bordering on a small town, on the shores of Tupper Lake (of course). I stop at a gas station to consult my map, a real paper map for a change, should I take the NY State Road 30 south to Blue Mountain or go on east to Lake Placid. On the advice of another motorcyclist, I decide to go south.

Going up

It’s rolling hills and twists and turns and I am having the time of my life, almost forgot my quest for mountains, when I crest a hill and there they are….mountains! Okay, these are not the towering soaring mountains of the Rockies, or even the Table Mountain chain, but they are mountain no less. My heart leaps in my chest, I’ll soon be among them.  

Mountains! Well little ones.