After breakfast we went back up to our room and packed up. Kate took charge and rolled everything up tight. She kept the green kerchief around her neck and every time I looked at her I could see her wet in the shower, her white tank top see-through from water and the green kerchief tied tight around her neck like a collar. As we walked out of the room Kate tucked the stuffed red crab she’d given me into the covers.

“He can hang out with his little friends,” she said. “Crabs do like hotels.”
We didn’t get out until noon by the time I’d wrestled with the climbing rope that I strapped the bag down with. I was getting better at tying the thing up, but it still wasn’t a science. I did it different each morning. I always used the same combination of knots: a bowline first, then a bunch of hitches passing from one side to the other, then the trucker’s hitch down the meridian to cinch the pack down. The trouble was I sometimes threw more hitches in, or started from the opposite side, or came around a different portion of the bag and if you don’t make sure it’s snug it will come loose in the wind.
The sun was shining bright and hot when we pulled out of the parking lot the hotel shared with a river tubing operation. Sunburned teenagers leaned out of the tube rental shed showing off their hemp and shell necklaces, and their red faces pulsed with hormonal excess. As we burned out of Phoenicia I looked up at the ridgeline high above us. It had been invisible the day before. The Catksills are dry 4000 ft mountains. I remember hiking there once, and the high deciduous canopy reminded me of a Chinese forest. Not that I’ve ever seen one. On that day I sat on a rock ledge, the woods spread out below me like a live carpet, and watched a hawk turn circles in a thermal. The mountains looked good in the mid-summer sun, pulsing green through the light haze.
We rode through the heart of the mountains on NY 28 to NY 30. The latter followed the edge of a lake for almost fifteen miles. It curved back and forth and flashed sparkling views of the water through the trees. I almost killed us again coming around one turn. The road was posted with yellow signs that depicted the different kinds of upcoming turns with arrows twisted in different shapes and then below them the speed suggested to ride the turn successfully. Those signs suck if you’re riding a bike because the speeds are meaningless and they just cause anxiety. A 20 mph turn can be done comfortably at 35 mph on a motorcycle because two wheels allow you a tighter turning radius than four, but if you’re going 35 and you see the sign, you think you might run off the road so you slow way down.
Maybe it’s just my inclination to follow rules that gives me trouble. I test the boundaries of any system I’m in, but I always stay in the system. I’ve been working for degrees like I was on a conveyor belt since I was about five. I don’t like to admit it, but I even take some kind of pleasure when I make a good stop at a stop sign and then I see a cop car. Like, yessir, officer sir, don’t worry about me. I’m a solid citizen. A law abider. Anyway those signs began to get in my head because the minute you don’t trust the sign, the turn turns out to be sharper than you thought and you end up braking halfway through, which is not a good feeling. Braking in the Turn. Album name for my next band.
Riding turns on a bike it’s best to just pick you’re line and ride it well without regard to the speedometer of the signage. It’s like skiing that way, or anything else in life for that matter. Keep your eyes well ahead of you in the direction you’re going, keep your balance over your center, and hold as clean a line as you can. Speed and safety don’t have a direct relationship. A close turn came up on me right before a narrow bridge that ran over the lake, and it was the kind that the suggested speed for cars, 15 mph, was probably about right for me too. As I started into the turn I was going too fast, around 30. About midway into the turn I saw gravel and dirt kicked up onto the road from an access road that came in from the right side at the end of the bridge. It freaked me out so I straightened the bike in the turn and braked. By the time I’d slowed down enough to feel safe, I didn’t have much room left in the turn and there wasn’t any speed left to give the bike stability. I needed to lean the bike over harder than usual and push some gas into it but I was too scared to realize that. As I brought the bike around gingerly I looked up through the turn and caught view of an eighteen wheeler barreling down the narrow bridge towards us. My eyes fixed on its silver grill and the bike drifted further toward the high marble curb. I could see the edge shining like teeth. When I realized how close I was to it, I jerked the handle bars to the left and gassed the bike instinctively. The tire barely missed the curb as I brought he bike around. In the meantime my eyes had fixed on the truck barreling towards me and the bike, following my eyes, had drifted too far toward the center line. I straightened out in time to miss the truck but the windblast crushed me in the full in the face and the bike danced two feet sideways.
The whole thing was a perfect example of the separation between rider and passenger. I couldn’t say anything afterward. I was sweating and breathing hard with the adrenaline pumping through me cold. And all the while Kate didn’t even notice the drama. She just sat back there with her head on a swivel checking the scene of the lake stretching way out into the distance toward the blue mountain ridge in the west. If she did notice that I had almost killed her, she never said anything about it and I didn’t either. It was the second time in two days that I thought I might end up killing us both, and this time it made me feel really irresponsible. Wisdom said I should come clean with her and tell her I wasn’t a real good rider and we should turn back. But Teddy Roosevelt once said, “If someone asks if you can do something tell em yes; then work like hell to find out how to do it.” Sometimes you just have to pretend your way into things.