Territory

The rural bike commuter faces particular challenges that a rider in a more built-up area does not. For instance, alternate routes may be hard to find and considerably longer than the primary route. which is already long enough, thank you.

This morning, the bridge that connects me to the rest of my world was closed for "a minimum of two weeks," according to the bulletin on the town website. It is undergoing much needed and long delayed repairs.

The river is small and not that deep, but the bottom is irregular, with silt, sand, boulders, mud, and leeches. I'm not excited by the idea of wading across it, carrying my bike over my head. I might try it if I was wearing chest waders, but then I would have to lug the waders for the rest of the ride, or stash them somewhere near the river bank and hope they were there when I returned in the evening.

The first alternate route idea adds about 10 miles at either end, going up Green Mountain Road to Ryefield Road, to Route 25 west, to Route 16 south. It's not a nice ride once you get to 16, which has heavy traffic and no shoulder for part of it. To make it worse, the narrow part is being rebuilt, which will be great for the future, but has the road torn up and traffic snarled now and for the next couple of months at least. So even if I put the bike in the car and did a park-and-ride from The Blot (Ocean State Job Lot), I would have to sit through the inevitable delays at the construction zone.

Another alternative exits the same way as far as the 25-16 junction, but continues straight into Center Ossipee and cuts through to a back road out of the village, to go over into Tuftonboro. It adds even more mileage, and a lot more hills. When I was 30 years younger I would do it just to do it, but I felt like I had more time, I know I had more energy, and I was oblivious to the toll it was taking on my marriage. I have none of those advantages now. As part of a park and ride it would put me in an area of roads I haven't ridden in years, where I have scouted out no parking places.

I drove through it on my way home from a semi-emergency dental appointment this morning. That's what got me thinking about territory. From 1988 through the late 1990s, that was familiar ground. From May of 1988 through September of 1989, I lived on Tuftonboro Neck, so all my rides were based from there. Even after moving to Effingham, I continued to ride extended versions of my commute or training rides using those roads. I could absorb the changes incrementally as people built things, or tore them down, or logged. Seeing it transformed after years unseen I felt dispossessed. Not that I ever had any control over it, but at least I felt like part of the scene when I traveled through it on a more regular basis.

I should be used to the feeling of dispossession after growing up with it. Every time we moved, we had to learn our way around a place. Then we would leave it, and that local knowledge became obsolete. Because we lived in Annapolis, Maryland, three times, we got to study it in more detail, but it still changed in the gaps. And it was mutating rapidly when I hightailed out of there ahead of the first tsunami of character-obliterating sprawl in 1987. Any time I happen to go back to a place I inhabited before, I can usually see some outline of what I knew -- perhaps even pockets of surprising familiarity -- but I view it as a ghost. The same is true for places I would regularly visit. Summer residents up here feel territorial about the places that most of them only see for a couple of weeks or a couple of months in one season of the year.

Another alternate route uses another system of roads I used to frequent and no longer do. In April I took a ride through some of the unpaved roads near me, not thinking I might need to consider them as transportation routes. The ruts on the Class VI unmaintained portions were pretty deep. I made better time on my bike than a bunch of off-roaders were making with their trucks and Jeeps. But it would add another eight or ten miles to each end of the commute because I would have to go so far to get to another river crossing.

There used to be a snow machine trail that crossed the river on a wooden bridge, well short of the full traverse through the Pine River State Forest to the Granite Road in Ossipee. It was a favorite mountain biking segment. The loose surface of glacial till, and short, steep climbs onto an esker make it a poor prospect for the commuting bike I would want to have for the more refined surfaces on most of the rest of the route. I could see it adding an hour to each end of the ride, no matter which alternative I choose. Heroic and committed it may be, but it isn't practical.

How practical is rural bike commuting anyway? It can be hard to justify, except that I only put gas in the car once a month, and I'm forced to get beneficial exercise when my personality is otherwise pretty slothful. If I had to depend entirely on dietary discipline I would be screwed. So I'm saving petroleum, saving other people a parking space, reducing air pollution by an infinitesimal amount, and easing traffic congestion in an area that chokes on traffic in the summer. It's not as bad as Cape Cod, but it's bad enough, especially with this year's construction projects.

It may be possible to sneak through the Elm Street bridge construction if I go out early enough in the morning to nip through before they start, and return after they finish up in the evening. That's if they don't take the decking right off the bridge. However, as long as I didn't have irate workers chasing me, I could see tiptoeing across on a girder more readily than slogging through the leech-infested stream below. I'm not kidding about the leeches. They've muckled onto the hull of my scruffy old kayak because they could detect my body heat through the thin fiberglass shell.

If I could get at tall trees on the river bank I might set up a Tyrolean traverse. Talk about impractical. And the banks aren't high enough to build some sort of primitive rope and plank bridge. The shore front is private, so I would have to get landowner permission even to try. I hate talking to people any more than I have to.

Even a knocked-together ferry boat would sit there vulnerable to tampering or pilferage when I wasn't using it.

The next two weeks (or more) will be interesting.