I left Charlottesville about 9 a.m. and made decent time until, near noon, I tackled the first and worst of the day’s climbs on my way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Feeling spent as I climbed up into the town of Afton, I approached a yard with a sign advertising “Water for Cyclists propped against an old bicycle. I discovered that I had arrived at the home of the storied “Cookie Lady,” June Curry. She and her father, Harold Haven, well-known for their hospitality to cyclists, had been plying cross-country riders with sandwiches, lemonade and cookies since the Bikecentennial trail’s inception.
After I’d eaten generous amounts of the food the two offered me, I took a proprietary stance next to my bike and smiles for the camera, as Harold took a photo to add to their album of cyclists. Afterwards, I flipped through the albums from past years, past pages of smiling anonymous bikers, and felt a little disheartened to realize that my impulse to undertake this trip was not as original as I had imagined. I reconciled myself to the realization that while my journey had been done before, it was nonetheless for me an adventure, and unique to my own experience.
It was pleasant to find two familiar faces in the album — my cousin, who had inspired me to do this, and a college classmate. It is strange, too, to be united with these two, the disparate three of us given a common identity, “cross-country cyclist,” in this tidy collection of photos held high in a sleepy Virginia mountain town.
As I prepared to leave, Harold showed genuine solicitousness of my obvious trepidation. He recounted inspiring anecdotes about other bikers, women traveling alone, out-of-shape people who, surprising themselves, rode coast to coast. I was grateful for his kindness. Then, as he returned to his garage to continue working on a car, I mounted my bike and continued up the hill.
As I continued to climb, small farms dotted the rolling landscape around me. Cousins to the plantations further east, these plots differ most obviously by the manner in which they have yielded to the whimsical demands of this treacherous topography. Man no longer controls the land; it controls him, and humbles his efforts to tame it.
Twenty miles of tourist-traveled Skyline Drive left me lonely again. Alien spaceship RVs, piloted by people whose motives I couldn’t fathom, whizzed by, blithely unaware that we were ascending a 4% grade. I was very aware. A cyclist’s level of contentment is inversely proportional to the grade of his ascent, a little-known but highly proveable theorem.
Momentary bouts with depression were being replaced with greater self-confidence. The early American settlers spent 125 years exploring the mere 200 miles between the Atlantic coast and the eastern base of the Blue Ridge mountains, then in only 100 more years spread themselves across the remaining width of this vast continent. So did I move along much more quickly and with greater assurance once over the Appalachian’s front range. “Can I do it?” was replaced by “How long will this take me?” as the oft-repeated internal query.
I had a reprieve near the end of the day, as I got to coast down Vesuvius Hill, a steep hill that was 3.7 miles of sheer torture for a west-to-east rider, but which I experienced as a delightful descent.
I had targeted a campground which was near the bottom of the hill. When I arrived I found a well-stocked store and a friendly clerk who inspired my first attempt at cooking, such as it was. His recommendation was to fry hamburger, then break it up and add it to beef-flavored Rice-a-Roni. I added my own touch, canned tomatoes, and found it entirely edible. There was little that I didn’t find edible during the trip; my body was a calorie-burning machine, and I was always hungry.
Darned if, along about 8, Anthony didn’t show up. He too had stayed over in Charlottesville for a day.