The End of the Road

Anchorage

We did it. We hitch-hiked back to mile 74 of the Dalton with a new bike frame and a repaired brake and resumed where we left off.

We rode the road over hill and dale and the next hill and the next dale and on and on until Coldfoot, the last settlement/lodge/truckstop and midway between Fairbanks and Deadhorse. We picked up a box of food (mainly spaghetti and sardines) that we had mailed to ourselves there. The remaining 249 miles were strictly on our own.

The road was flatter and the weather drier for two days after Coldfoot until the climb up to the Chandalar Shelf. This was a stiff two mile incline which ended in a bizarrely beautiful wide treeless valley (There is a tree marked "The last spruce" at the foot of the climb) full of exotic brightly colored low-lying taiga plants. Some were dwarf willow and dwarf birch which had turned gold and orange with the mid-August onset of autumn. Others were some strange mint-like plant with blood red leaves. It stretched on in surreal vastness forever.

A few miles on we came to the foot of the Atigun Pass. This was five miles of continuous 12% grade, the steepest anywhere in Alaska. Seen from a distance it appeared as a diagonal line scratched into a mountain side in the Brooks Range. The pass was dark, cold, gloomy, with a fierce north wind, but we were elated anyway. My recollection was that the rest of the road was a nearly level 175 mile cakewalk into Prudhoe Bay.

My recollection was wrong. The next 125 miles were strongly rolling foothills on relatively soft gravel and dirt which required a lot of effort. Only the last 50 miles of tundra was level but by then the road had worsened and the north wind off the ocean had become strong and persistent.

The lands north of the Brooks Range are called the North Slope and are an Arctic Desert with only three or four inches of precipitation a year. Even so there are lots of ponds and streams in the tundra. This seemed paradoxical until it occurred to me that because of the low temperatures evaporation is very slow. When the freeze comes, evaporation stops. And because of the permafrost the water does not sink down into the earth. So it stays on the surface.

Also on the tundra were a family of muskoxen. They are astonishing animals. We were impressed with them. They seemed less impressed with us.

Eventually we persisted to Prudhoe Bay / Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay is the bay on the coast. Deadhorse is the "town" there.) From the unpeopled vastnesses upon vastnesses of the north we were plunged into a strange place, a settlement that is an oilfield, a company town, an industrial site, and seems to have only workers and no middle or upper class people at all. It has substantially no permanent population because the workers are rotated though there are generally six thousand people there at all times. It has no houses. Indeed, it has no real buildings because there is no way to lay foundations on the tundra. Unlike the rest of Alaska, the heavy work is done in the winter when the ground and the sea are frozen hard and heavy machinery can be used without bogging down.

Very much unlike the rest of Alaska there is prohibition of both alcohol and firearms. In the rest of Alaska, guns do not kill people, people do. Where there is big corporate money involved, as on the oilfield, such nonsense is of no interest.

We were much annoyed that we could not bicycle to the Arctic Ocean. The oil companies are unwilling to have people wandering around their oilfield unescorted. So we had to take a shuttle bus tour and got to take pictures of each other on the gravel beach and wade.

Then came finding a way back to Fairbanks. We had hoped to hitch-hike or, failing that, to take a shuttle bus. To our dismay, there was almost no traffic on the road. What little there was were truck company drivers forbidden to take riders. We found that the bus service had stopped for the season the week before. After eight hours beside the all-too-silent road we finally got a ride with the same truck driver who had picked us up when we had hitch-hiked from mile 74 with a broken bicycle frame and stuck brake. Ol' John is an angel in a Kenworth.

The next morning we were in Fairbanks.

What I Have Been Doing Lately

Briefly, in 2006 I bicycled from El Cerrito north and got as far as Kelowna, in southern BC. I had a scare that there was something wrong with my breathing and I went home and had a million tests done at UCSF Med Center. It turned out to be a false alarm.

This year I started out from Kelowna on June 6. I rode from Kelowna to the Cariboo Highway and followed it to Prince George. There I turned onto the Yellowhead and rode toward Prince Rupert as far Kitwanga and the Cassiar Highway which I followed to the Alaska Highway. That ended at Delta Junction and became the Richardson which I followed to Fairbanks.

Yesterday I got as far as mile 74 of the Dalton (after the Steese and Elliot Highways) when the top tube broke all the way through, just behind the head tube. I hitch-hiked about two hundred miles back to Fairbanks in a big rig to buy a new bicycle.

The lodging was all motels until I ran into a Swiss student named Florent Prisse at 100 Mile House on the Cariboo. He has less money so we have been camping, mostly bush camping, most of the time. We have been traveling together for about two months now.

There were constant mosquitoes and black flies and intermittent rain in BC. In Alaska, until yesterday, there had been constant rain and intermittent mosquitoes and black flies. Only the Kluane Country in the Yukon was both reasonably dry and only moderate buggy. And magically beautiful. Superlatively beautiful. Indescribably beautiful.

The Dalton has its moments but it is mainly a ball-buster. It is largely unpaved, frequently washboarded and potholed, until yesterday constantly raining, cold, and windy. Worse than everything else, it is an endless series of steep long hills. If we finish the Dalton, by no means a certainty, we will have earned whatever bragging rights go with it. I am told the Brooks Range has outstanding scenery if it is not fogged in.

A Belated Reply to Anonymous

"Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Buddhism for the Unenlightened":

Great read on buddhism, I am a Hindu and would like to get your take on that religion (for western folk cuz to me it aint no religion)"

On the theory that ignorance should be no bar to having opinions, I will venture to agree with Anonymous. Hinduism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word. If you believe about five or six things about Jesus, you are a Christian. If you believe about five or six things about Allah you are a Muslim. That is how we define those folks and how they define themselves and their respective religions.

Hinduism is not like that. It is more of a universe of shared assumptions, beliefs, and ways of believing. It is a world-view. To Hindus, the issue is not so much which gods one worships, but the world-view that there are lots of gods and that they create the universe in an immensely complex way that often requires elaborate religious rites and rituals. Hinduism is also an expression of Indian culture. India has been the source of wildly imaginative theologies and mythologies since the time of the repeated Aryan invasions millenia ago. To Americans, flying monkeys are bad childhood dreams from seeing the Wizard of Oz. To Hindus they are the Ramayana, a hugely important Hindu religious document that, to one Westerner at least, made no sense at all.

Hindus do not quarrel between the devotees of Rama and of Vishnu. All gods fit somewhere in the endless and endlessly flexible Hindu pantheon. Official Hinduism sometimes uses this flexibility opportunistically to claim Buddhist shrines as Hindu because Buddha is treated as one of the incarnations of somebody or another, as is Jesus an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods.

Where Hindu tolerance ends is with the denial of all their gods and of their world view. Which is to say there is a large red line dividing Muslims from Hindus. That line has been written in blood, lots of blood, mainly Hindu blood, since the conquest of most of India by the Mughals in the 1400's. Buddhists fared still worse. Buddhists do not believe in a god per se, unpardonable atheism to the Muslims. So the adherents of the Religion of Peace adopted the straightforward strategy of killing them all. The Muslim genocide of a large fraction of the Hindu population and of almost all of the Buddhists of India, thought to have been as much as a quarter of India's population, has been largely forgotten by everyone as being too inconvenient to remember. Even now, the distribution of Buddhists in Asia corresponds to the old borders of the Mughal Empire. Where Muslims ruled, no Buddhist survived.

Even now, the relative tolerance of the two religions can be seen in that, of the two main parts of what had been British India, almost no Hindus were allowed to stay in Muslim Pakistan. Over two hundred million Muslims live in India.

The black mark on Hinduism has been, and remains, the caste system. Though nominally abolished by the Indian constitution at the time of Independence, it is alive and well. And flourishing horribly. It is responsible for the distortions of hundreds of millions of personalities by the reduction of their self-conception to a small handful of the possibilities that human beings can have. For the Untouchables, it goes further, much further. For two hundred million human beings the caste system prescribes permanent servitude and degradation.

The most important human being of the Twentieth Century arguably was Doctor B. H. Ambedkar (1891-1956), a nationalist ally of Gandhi and leader of the Dalits, the polite word for Untouchables. Doctor Ambedkar took the clear-sighted and courageous position that Dalits could never improve their lives and their horrible situation in society so long as they believed in the Hindu religion that inflicts that misery on them. You can't rebel against an oppression you believe that you deserve. Accordingly Doctor Ambedkar began a revival movement to convert the Dalits to Buddhism which has some similar tenets as Hinduism but which includes no notion of caste. Doctor Ambedkar's movement for conversion of the Dalits to Buddhism has had, I understand, mixed success. Still, as the history of the Zionist movement among Jews, and the Civil Rights movement among Blacks in America, have shown, the only effective emancipation for oppressed groups is auto-emancipation.

While there is much to be said for Hinduism as a way of life, to the extent that it supports and even creates the caste system, it is one of the great evils in the world today. Whether there can be Hinduism without caste, is beyond my understanding. But it is clear that there cannot be caste without Hinduism.

A View from the Frontier

I broke my bicycle frame on the Dalton Highway today and had to hitch-hike back to Fairbanks to buy either a new bicycle or a new frame.

Upon returning I learned that, according to the Times headline, "the Russians have invaded Georgia". Startled, I read a few of the background articles and found a slightly fuller explanation, from which I have excerpted this paragraph:

When Western countries decided to recognize the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, Putin declared this a dangerous precedent that opened the possibility of a change of status for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The war of words grew hotter; Russians shot down a Georgian drone aircraft; bombs went off in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; Russian aircraft flew over the disputed parts of Georgia. Finally, at the end of the first week of August, the Georgians reacted and launched a major attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. They quickly overran much of the enclave, nearly taking the city. But the Russians returned with a ferocious counterattack, retaking the capital and upping the ante with bombing outside of South Ossetia.

Keep in mind that "the disputed parts of Georgia" is an oxymoron. From Moscow they are just as much "the disputed parts of Russia". That is what "disputed" means.

I have been out of town and out of touch for a considerable time so I do not know whether the Times and other Western media covered the Georgian invasion of disputed territory as avidly as they are currently reporting the Russian response. The article I have excerpted was buried four layers deep in the Times website. The current Times front page story as nearly omits the initial Georgian attack as they think they can get away with. This makes the story read like brain-dead anti-Russian propaganda. Is the Times, the Newspaper of Record, acting as a shameless mouthpiece for the Administration? It sounds like it to me.

Bush and I Arrive at Fairbanks

I am at a campground in Fairbanks. The Alaska Highway ended at Delta Junction. The road north from there is the Richardson. The Richardson Highway where it fronts Eielson Air Force Base, just south of here, was temporarily blocked for the arrival, and later for the departure, of Air Force One. (Grim-faced armed security guys on ATV's were combing the bushes. Not a good time or place for pranks or humor.) Bush is on his way to Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games and to beg for money.....

It has rained on and off, mainly on, since Tok four days ago, and all day yesterday. All part of the trip.

We are taking a rest day here, doing laundry, shopping for groceries, picking up packages from General Delivery, mailing food to ourselves at Coldfoot, and I am going to a dentist shortly to get a crown that has fallen out twice re-cemented. (Baruch Hashem it fell out before Fairbanks and not after.) Re-supply and repairs.

Birdwatching in the Yukon

Here is a list of some of the birds we almost certainly did not see in the Yukon but which The Yukon Bird Club insists are to be found there:
Brant
Cackling Goose
Gadwall
Eurasian Wigeon
Lesser Scaup
Surf Scoter
Common Loon
Eared Grebe
Northern Harrier
Merlin
Gyrfalcon
Sora
American Coot
Killdeer
Lesser Yellowlegs
Willet
Wandering Tattler
Whimbrel
Godwit
Red Knot
Ruddy Turnstone
Sanderling
Little Stint
Dunlin
Ruff
Long-billed Dowitcher
Wilson's Snipe
Red-necked Phalarope
Pomarine Jaeger
Mew
Glaucous-winged Gull
Red-legged Kittiwake
Murre
Northern Saw-whet
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (I kid you not!)
Western Wood-Pewee
Say's Phoebe
Northern Shrike
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Magnolia Warbler
Ovenbird
Dark-eyed Junco
Snow Bunting
Lazuli Bunting
Brambling
Hoary Redpoll
Pine Siskin

Always a Local Angle

In 1968 I was in Anchorage looking for a summer job and also for a way to avoid the adulthood seemingly implicit in having graduated from the University. Word spread through the small hostel where I was staying that a nearby bookstore had free doughnuts and coffee. With my usual gift for decorum I was down there in a flash, downing beignette after beignette. The occasion for the freebies was that a Republican candidate for senator was signing books he had "written" with a ghostwriter.

What I knew about Alaska politics was that in 1964 its distinguished Senator, Ernest Gruening, had been one of only two Senators to vote against Lyndon Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The Resolution was a response to reports of North Vietnamese attacks on the destroyer USS Maddox. It quickly became clear that the reports were false, but the Resolution, authorizing Johnson to fight the Vietnam War, was not repealed until 1973. To me, a Berkeley Bolshevik, this made Gruening a hero. Sadly the voters of Alaska thought otherwise.

I had assumed that Gruening had voted "no" both out of conscience and also because he had a safe seat. Running against an incumbent with a safe seat is the definition of a crank candidate. That is who I assumed the Anchorage businessman with the fake book and the real doughnuts was.

Out of curiosity and to draw attention away from just how many doughnuts I was downing, I got into a conversation with the would-be Senator. Which quickly became a debate. It was and is my judgment that I easily trounced the candidate on every issue we discussed. He was sputtering. I knew well enough that I was a 21-year-old loudmouth fresh out of college, and that anybody who could not handle me easily did not belong in any elected position, let alone in Washington. But doughnuts are doughnuts and they were on his tab, not mine.

The election was won by a Democrat who beat Gruening in the primary, Mike Gravel. On December 11, 1968 the other Alaska Senator, Bob Bartlett died. On December 24 the Republican governor appointed Mr. Doughnuts to the remainder of Bartlett's term.

His name was Ted Stevens. He is now the longest serving member of the US Senate, formerly the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, currently its ranking Republican, and has just been indicted on corruption charges.

Well-Being

I am pleased and amazed that I am able to have this good a summer at 61 years old.

The Boy Who Cried ".....

I feel like the boy who cried, "beautiful!" once too often and lost his credibility with the villagers. I have written and spoken so glowingly of the scenic delights I have ridden through that I feel I can scarce be believed when I tell you that Kluane in southwestern Yukon is by far the most beautiful. The St. Elias mountains are Canada's highest and arguably most beautiful. Lake Kluane is a preternatural aquamarine, apparently because of suspended glacial flour, or perhaps dissolved minerals. Lake Louise and nearby Peyto Lake in the Canadian Rockies in Alberta are similar. The latter two are justifiably visited by millions annually, and Lake Louise has a famous hotel on its shores where the Queen stayed. Kluane Lake in the past few years has acquired a nice RV park/campground on its shores (where I write) and is driven past by thousands, visited by perhaps hundreds.

I suspect that the disparity is due to the relative remoteness of Kluane and to the shortness of the summer tourist season. The area is not without recognition though. The Canadian Parliament has made it a National Park and UNESCO has made it a World Heritage Site.

From my tent I have a view of a beachfront of purple-violet Yukon fireweed and an almost oceanic lake of shocking aquamarine. At sunset, around 11 pm, the sky was violet and the clouds getting the last rays were burnished gold. It was a good day.

There are two of us. My traveling companion, whom I met on the road in British Columbia, is Florent Prisse, a 24-year-old Swiss architecture student who will start school in Lausanne in September. He is genial, strong and fit, and a formidable mountaineer and outdoorsman. He is however a neophyte bicycle tourist. I have been bicycle touring for 30 years and know all about it. We get along surprisingly well. His English is quite good, vastly better than my French.

We expect to emplane in Anchorage, he for Geneva, I for San Francisco, the first week in September.

The BC Lakes District

[Wordsworth - the Lakes Poet]

is so beautiful. Only a moment so i will be brief. Yesterday we got the triple -- rain, headwind, and hills. But am getting stronger and made it here tired but not beat, an important distinction. I now feel free to indulge my scarcely suppressed addiction to orange juice. I drank a liter when we got here last night. I am able to pace myself because the sun is up until after 9 pm and there is enough light to put up a tent until 10. So we have all day to c0ver our allotted 80 km per day. Gotta go.

From Prince George

Coming to Prince George was a fine day with a perfect beginning, a perfect middle, and a perfect end. Florent (of whom more later) and I started out with breakfast at a country diner near Hixon, a wide spot in the road north of Quesnel.

The conversation in the diner among ranchers, tow truck operators, local Indians, local loungers, was pure Canadiana. Both charming and illuminating. Who knew that ranchers have dreams of what they would like to do someday? This one wanted to ride a horse from Inuvik in the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. He was proud of being a 6th generation Canadian tracing his ancestry to Ireland. The tow truck driver was the son of a Polack. He mentioned that Poles whose last names ended in -ski had been landowners and those whose names ended in -sky had not. His ended in -sky. His tenant-buyer whose name ended in -ski had twitted him about it until she fell into arrears. Then he got his own back by happily evicting/foreclosing on her, for non-payment. The Indian held his piece about ancestry and origins. A lady whose business was organizing rodeos came by, had coffee and pie, and left a check with the obviously gay owner of the diner for somebody who was sure to come by just in the nature of things, for some horseshoeing he had done for the rodeo.

After breakfast Florent and I rode 90 kilometers to Prince George.

Along the way he had contacted friends of friends of friends of friends of his parents to whom he had been directed. They invited us to a dinner party at their home. The house was big and luxurious, the food elegant, the company charming, the wine good. Afterwards we all went for a dip in the pool. I kept thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the word 'halcyon'.

The friends of friends of friends were Roy and Marie Louise. Roy is a barrister who apparently represents substantial business interests, and Marie Louise is Crown Counsel, a prosecutor. The other sweet lady with big eyes and quick wits, there with her husband, was also a lawyer. A very nest of attorneys.

Later it occurred to me that the two conversations were separated not only by 90 kilometers but also by class and the membrane between country and city. Even so, the people at the diner were none of them poor and none of them alienated, except perhaps the Indian and the lounger. Nor were they ignorant or ill-spoken.

These reflections faded as the long northern twilight and the cognac turned the trees still in the light to gold and at last to silhouette.

Getting Too Old For This

[The Gov]

Yesterday I realized that my intermittent sense of being a stiff, sore, helpless, bent-over, fat little old man who could barely and painfully hold his obese body upright, came only in the mornings. It is not brought on by tiredness from bicycling, but is the stiffness brought on by inactivity, and particularly by the stiffness of sleeping with my back cold. Prolonged exercise makes me feel fine, even bicycling in cold and rain. I am at last becoming slightly stronger and developing the first hints of stamina.

This is great news. It means that I am not as nearly a cripple as I feared and felt. I am not way out of my depth in attempting this, I am not engaged in something clearly futile at which I cannot succeed. It also means I have a future as an early-elderly man in denial about aging. I can continue to do this, this year, and next year. I don't have to give up, go home, and take up bocce, golf, and television. I am still me.

Even so, it is not so long ago that bicycling only 75 kilometers in a day would have been a disappointment. Yesterday it was a success.

Into the North

There are signs, symbols, mental notes that accumulate. There begin to be spaces between settled areas. Then the settled areas become sparse, then widely separated. Then there aren't any except in the vicinity of ever smaller and more widely separated towns. The side roads into the bush become few, then rare. A note on the notices board outside a country store advertises to clean your house or cabin. The trees go from pine and spruce to spruce and poplar and occasional aspen. It is the beginning of the boreal forest. A beaver lodge. Igloos on the ice. .... OK, maybe not igloos.

The only town of any consequence north of here is Prince George, based on lumber and pulpmills. I was there last summer in the Pachyderm. My impression was that the grime left behind by melting dirty snow never got completely washed off the town. Maybe my impression will be better this time.

After Prince George there is land and not people.

Le Cochon

Just how much of a pig is Jacques Chirac? This former contender for leadership of the free world, and perennial pal of Yasser Arafat, appeared in Moscow to receive Russia's highest honor, the State Prize. It was awarded him by Russia's presidential stooge, Dmitri Medvedev. Chirac, in accepting the prize, praised Russia for "having chosen the path of democracy." The ceremony was attended by Russia's effective dictator, Vladimir Putin. The State Prize includes a million rubles, currently 27,000 euros.


Equally amusing, it turns out that in French, Putin's last name is spelled "Poutine". In Canada poutine is French fries with gravy, and is the cultural equivalent of nachos.

Cache Creek Not Necessarily a Casino

I have gotten as far as Cache Creek, the junction of the Trans-Canada and Cariboo Highways (route 97). I am astonished to discover that I have gotten old, fat, and out of shape. I don't know how or when this happened. I neither planned nor expected it. So I am following Harvey's advice on cross country running -- start slow, then taper off. Yesterday was hills and headwinds, but no rain. Today is a rest day.

Last night I connected the iPod to the little pc and watched an old movie in glorious black-and-white on a 7" screen. It was "All About Eve", a chick flick from the late 1940's. Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holme, and George freakin' Sanders. Bette Davis won best actress and George Sanders was terrific. Lots of good dialogue and good acting. Jack recommends.

From the Globe and Mail

I read an excerpt from a speech by Kevin Lynch, the Clerk of the Privy Council (apparently roughly the equivalent of the White House Chief of Staff) in which he said Canada ranked 7th in the world in worker productivity per hour. The list given was:
1. France
2. Ireland
3. Italy
4. United States
5. Germany
6. Sweden
7. Canada

I find it astonishing that France is first. Apparently when they aren't at lunch, on vacation, or on strike, they really are at work. The Irish on the job sober? The impulsive disorganized Italians getting more done than the Swedes? The US working harder than Japan? France and Italy both more industrious than Germany?

One needs stereotypes in order to think at all. The old ones are clearly crap. We need new stereotypes.

Business-like Italians? Shiftless Japanese? Gemutlichkeit Germans? World-beater French? Didn't-come-to-work-today Dutch? This is not going to be easy.

From Savona

Today was rain and hills. I enjoyed it anyway. There is something about the somber beauty of a dark rainy landscape that really does it for me, even if I am getting pelted by it.

Savona is on Lake Kamloops, between Kamloops and Cache Creek.

Blanche Dubois in the Okanagan Country

I had gotten only a few miles out of town before the rear tire went flat. This was both annoying and time-consuming because all the luggage had to be taken off in order to set the bicycle upside down. After replacing the tube and reassembling everything I found that the replacement tube wouldn't hold pressure either. I had three spare tubes and none of them were any good. Apparently they were all punctured at one time or another and I threw them in the attic with the intention to repair them later. Later never came, and I forgot about the punctures. So I patched and reassembled and pumped up, and patched and pumped and reassembled, and patched and pumped and reassembled over and over. And hours passed while I screwed around with it over and over, trying this, trying that. None would hold pressure no matter how much I patched them

I thought about how this seemed to be yet another delay in getting on with the bicycle trip yet it didn't feel like it. Fixing flat tires is not a delay in a bicycle trip -- it is part of the trip. The saying that the object of a trip is the journey, not the destination, is not just another annoying platitude when speaking of a bicycle trip. It is literally true. I didn't get frustrated because of the delay, but I did get annoyed when I realized the problem was that the patches I was using were NFG (a Navy acronym for 'No Darn Good').

It was surprising to realize that I am not actually in any hurry to get to Alaska. It would be nice to succeed and fun to brag about, but it doesn't truly matter. Bicycling through the beauty of the northern vastnesses is what I came here to do, not to reach anyplace. Just as I realized this, it sank in that the whole time I had been futzing with the bicycle tire, tube, pump, and patches I had had a fine view of Lake Okanagan and the surrounding mountains and hadn't until then thought to enjoy it. I smiled at myself, because enjoying the vista was a sign of an autumnal growth of self-acceptance and world-acceptance. I am not just getting old. At 61 I am also still growing up.

Getting old may be good for some things but not for others. At 61, finding a pinhole in an inner tube requires reading glasses. I simply could not have done it at all without them. The decline in my vision has passed beyond being an inconvenience. It is a genuine disability in the ADA sense of the word. Though the prosthetic device is cheap, readily available, and effective, I can no longer perform some basic functions in life without them. It is fair to say that, like other people my age, I am partially blind.

I finally accepted that, with bad patches, I could never succeed. I assembled everything one last time and was just about to begin hitch-hiking when the Mounties arrived. A troop of Canadians mounted on bicycles was riding up the grade toward me. One of them gave me a kit of the old-style, actually-work, type patches and glue. Dudley having Doneright, they rode away.

Soon the patches were on, and I was off. As I resumed my trip I reflected, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

On the Road Again - day one

I am at Winfield, just north of Kelowna. I got a slow start today. It took several hours to unwrap and then to re-assemble the bicycle. There was more time spent screwing around in Kelowna getting glue, food, and plastic bags and then repacking using the plastic bags. Finally I made it to Highway 97 and turned north. By then it was 3:30 in the afternoon.

l am being as unambitious as possible. I have come only 20 kilometers and have stopped for the night at Winfield, the very next town north of Kelowna. It has been raining all day which has dampened my enthusiasm. It doesn't seem cold but I could see my breath so it must be.

The Beginning of the End?

Continental Airlines announced that it would lay off workers, ground planes, reduce flights, to "reduce capacity", because of high fuel costs. One wonders where that will end. Has jet travel cheap enough for common people been just a function of cheap petroleum? Is it doomed to vanish? With higher prices reducing the number of travelers, and consequent inability to spread costs over a huge market, jet travel could be reduced to a niche for millionaires and diplomats. We may be nearing the end of what has been a brief golden age of global mass transit.

There are alternative technologies for ground travel. Are there any for air travel? Steamships can run on cleaned-up coal, but not airships. Back to steerage.