Ad Infinitum

Hunter stood before the assembled crowd of riders, describing the route ahead. “At New Brighton, you come off the train tracks and onto the beach. This is the best part. Riding on sand at low tide, you can let go of the bars, lean back, close your eyes, and just cruise all the way to Watsonville. It’s like flying.”

He was referring to the final leg of inaugural County Line Jamboree. This sadomasochistic vision, sprung fully formed from Hunter’s promethean forehead, started at the north end of Santa Cruz County, at the San Mateo County line, ran down the coast highway for 10 miles to Davenport, where riders were then obliged to take to the railroad tracks (or the gravel and swamp immediately adjacent to the tracks) for the next 10 miles into Santa Cruz, then for another similar stretch through Santa Cruz and Capitola before disgorging the now thoroughly rattled riders onto the beach at New Brighton for another 10 or so miles on the low tide sand to the Monterey County line at the Pajaro River. The event was timed to coincide with the king tides somewhere near Valentine’s Day, so that the low tide would be super low. Some treated it like a race, others an adventure, and there weren’t really any rules, except everyone had to ride one speeds.

The County Line Jamboree was, to put it mildly, a 40-ish mile exercise in suffering. The spin down the coast on Highway 1 loosened the legs up nicely, but then everything turned to shit once riders hit the tracks. Either choose the railbed itself - and get slowly battered into submission by the constant pummeling of riding on railroad ties - or roll the dice in the chunky gravel, the sludgy agricultural runoff, the blackberry and poison oak thickets, and hope for the best. Once riders hit town things got civilized, sort of, and there were bars along the way to numb the pain and gird wilting spirits. And then there was the beach.

That first year, 1999, we’d had a banger of a winter. A string of recent storms had heaved the sand into a deceptive state, and left piles of driftwood and fly-swarmed dead kelp all over the place. But by this time, some three hours into the ride, the anticipation of no longer having my kidneys pulverized by the relentless-seeming infinity of railroad ties was high. And Hunter’s words were still ringing in my ears as I dropped onto the beach. “It’s like flying…”

It wasn’t like flying. Not at all. Dehydrated and hallucinating, thanks to a few hits of some really clean liquid LSD I’d ingested on the start line, I felt like was alternating between trying to churn through quicksand or strugglefight my bike over the bones of my ancestors. Turns out the bones were driftwood, but still… I have a near crystalline memory of a small blond child with a pink plastic bucket in her hand running past me laughing as I bent myself over the cranks and ground a 34x16 gear at a painfully slow cadence across sand that was supposed to be smooth and fast. There were seagulls everywhere on the beach. It felt like they, too, were laughing. At me. The tire tracks of the riders ahead of me were disappearing as I followed them, the surface so soft that the tread patterns were smoothing back into featureless sand before my eyes. Checking myself against the hallucination, I noticed riders up ahead on the beach were in similar distress, humping too-high gears at too-low speed, weaving from the soft sand above the high tide line all the way down to the water’s edge, trying to find the elusive bands of firm ground and hopefully gather some precious momentum.

Like most truly masochistic endeavors, the County Line Jamboree became an instant classic, and enjoyed a couple decades of popularity, drawing ever larger crowds each passing year with its siren song of off-kilter suffering. For me, it was a one and done affair. I was in the process of moving to the mountains, and by the time I returned to the coast several years later I had sworn off one-speeding and was instead cultivating a diet of stress and self-loathing that didn’t align with the painful camaraderie of the County Line Jamboree.

And yet, here I am in Mexico, almost a quarter century later, learning how to read the sand all over again. Clear eyed, solo, sneaking out at sunrise to roll along the glass-smooth edge of the Sea Of Cortez. Weaving once again between the water and the high tide line, trying to feel the fast line through my tires. Older, slower, wondering where all the years went, and where and how all the wattage seeped away from my legs, but okay with that acknowledgement. A younger, fitter me would have sneered at this kind of riding as lacking in adrenal reward, as not speed/terrain/technically challenging enough to bother with, as Not Worth It. The younger, fitter me didn’t always see the whole picture. He didn’t understand what Hunter knew, what Garro knew, what Falconer knew, what so many others intuitively knew, always knew.

The riding here is, as it always has been, somewhere on the spectrum between totally sucky and fleetingly enjoyable. Rocks and sand in the arroyos, moondust in the doubletracks that scribble around without rhyme, reason or direction among the cacti and the thorny bushes. Dirt roads that are at times firm and fast, and at others devolve into an ankle deep morass of sand so soft that it sucks all momentum immediately from my wheels. Here, in this place, sweating profusely before 7 a.m in nameless, pancake flat gulches, I find a perverse joy in this kind of anti-fun. This is not why I ride, but then again, this is exactly why I ride. There is no goal, no destination, no dangling carrot of reward. The ride just is.

I pedal the sandy doubletrack until I stall, then push until I can ride again. A sneaky band of firm low tide sand reveals itself, a gift of timing and luck a hundred feet to the east of the truck-gouged talcum powder I am trudging through, so I take it. It carries me for miles until I get boxed in by mangroves and the sea. Follow my solitary tire tracks back. Repeat, repeat again, until it is time to head back toward town. 27 vultures. Eight blue herons. Three egrets. One coyote. One fox. Fishermen raise hands in slow-motion greeting. The quiet thrum of tires on hardpack sand, changing in tone as the sand softens and hardens beneath them. I lean back, close my eyes. It’s just like flying. It’s nothing like flying. It’s perfect.