Biking to Fish Lake- Part One

"Adventure is just bad planning"

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Elliott

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. Thanks for being here. I am so happy to announce the first pocketful of prose swag. Check out the stickers my daughter Anna designed for me. Aren’t they amazing? I love them. I want to take a moment to thank my paid subscribers and let you know a sticker will be coming your way soon. If you are not a paid subscriber and just want a sticker, we can probably make that happen too. Thanks again for all of your support. If you like the post, please take a moment to click the heart or share with a friend who you think might enjoy it. They can have a sticker too.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Warning. Trail Ends Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point. This is the sign my kids and I come across on our bike ride to Fish Lake today.

We come across the sign after we are eight miles in on our eleven-mile bike ride to the lake. I do some research as I write this post and learn that beginner bikers should aim for five-mile treks. I realize that wiser folks would probably research this before the trip. I learn from a friend that Roald Amundsen, Norwegian explorer, used to say, “adventure is just bad planning,” and this hits a little close to home.

I am not a novice biker. I often bike to work or around town. I am slow on my bike, but it is not because of lack of skill or athletic ability. My bike is not fast. She is designed that way on purpose.  My bike is a cruiser that is made for coasting. She is really fun to ride. Unlike other bikes where you have to awkwardly hunch over, you can sit upright on my cruiser. She is so comfortable, made for pure, slow pleasure. She has three speeds. At some point, the cable that kicks these speeds into gear broke, so now she really only has one speed. I love my bike. I found the perfect bamboo basket for her, which makes her look like a bike worthy of photographing, a bike perfect for jaunts to the farmer’s market or picnics in the park. The only problem with the basket is that it can’t hold much. You see the issue here. Bike baskets are meant to carry things, and my bike basket can’t really carry things, but it is so darn cute. It can carry a few things. You just have to be careful. It’s perfect for a baguette or a trip to the farmer’s market as long as you don’t go crazy and buy too many zucchinis. I have a tendency to sometimes carry too much. I have loaded my basket up with too many things, too many peaches, too many books…Yesterday, I carried a badminton set because you never know when you will need that. Needless to say, my bike basket has broken on more than one occasion, and I am used to wood gluing it back into presentable shape.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash (My bike looks a little like this except she is yellow and has a really comfortable seat. I guess I haven’t loved my bike enough as I have few pics of her, and she is currently in the shop to become a three speed once again.)

My bike suits me perfectly, and because I bike frequently, she is in pretty decent condition. She even has a cupholder for my mug of tea. My kids, on the other hand, haven’t biked much since we moved to Spokane. They choose to walk or bus most places. When we lived in Madison, they biked all the time because Madison has wide inviting bike lanes and paths. Spokane is less inviting in terms of biking. So, I guess they are biking beginners, and I should have planned a more reasonable excursion. But go big or go home, right?

We find ourselves on the Fish Lake trail facing this Warning sign because this week I told them I wanted to go on an adventure with them.

I am missing them.

Last week, I wrote about motherhood as a shifting landscape and about my kids growing up. I touched lightly on this causing me some grief, but I said I wasn’t feeling sad or nostalgic about it, I was just noticing it, and that was true. This week, though, my feelings feel like they are flowing a little faster, and one night when Anna and Seabass are both sleeping over at friends’, I start crying as I am watering my garden. I am not sure why I am crying, but I think for the first time in a long time, I am feeling lonely.

Dan and I have moved twice across the country with our kids. Both times were at the start of summer. Dan was starting a job, and I was looking for work and helping our family adapt to our new lives. We knew barely anyone, and we didn’t know any other kids their age. My kids and I were everything to each other. It wasn’t all that different during Covid. While these times were challenging, and I was desperate for some alone time, and there were a few times when I cried at night because I felt so overwhelmed, there was also something sacred about these moments, and sometimes I miss them a little.

Anna and Bass, a few or more years back on Bass’ heirloom bike

You can miss people who are right in front of you, I guess.

I find comfort in the way Robin Wall Kimmerer describes motherhood in Braiding Sweetgrass. She writes about Paula Gunn Allen’s book Grandmothers of the Light. The way of the Mother is one where “her spiritual knowledge and values are all called into service of her children.” As children begin their own paths, mother must turn to the well-being of the community, “a net that stretches larger and larger.” I embrace the idea of my ever-widening net, but today I think I’m seeking something else.

I’m craving an old-fashioned outing with my kids, so I set a date and give them the choice of a hike and milkshakes or a bike ride and picnic. Bass, of course, chooses a bike ride and milkshakes. I tell him we won’t be able to get milkshakes, but I will pack a smashing picnic, or at least as much as my dear basket can carry.

The morning we are scheduled to leave, I, of course, underestimate how long it will take me to get us ready for the trip. I take my promise of a smashing picnic seriously and buy fresh bread and burrata from a local bakery. Burrata cheese is a plump ball of mozzarella with soft fresh curds inside. If you have never tried it, amend your life immediately.

captioPhoto by Sebastian Coman Photographyn...

I bake cookies with little balls of chocolate chip espresso dough that I have saved in the freezer, and I pack a water bottle for each of us. The kids are sleeping over at friends’ houses, and I am wishing I had organized this differently so that they could be home helping to get us ready for our trip. Once the supplies are taken care of, I move to the garage to fill the bike tires with air. I know that there is a chance that at least one of their bikes will be out of commission; it’s been so long since they have ridden. Sure enough, Bass’ bike, a family heirloom, that used to belong to his dad and his uncle, has a deflated inner tube. As luck would have it, we happen to have two other bikes in our garage, one which was intended for Mateo and one which a friend gave us thinking Anna might want it. The bike intended for Mateo is only slightly smaller than Bass’ bike. Bass is short for his age. It just might be crazy enough to work.

I manage to get air into the tires of all the bikes we will be using. Since we are not starting at home, I have to load the bikes in and on our car. We have this bike strap contraption that holds two bikes on the back of the car. It served us well in Madison when the kids were younger. They often biked to elementary school with Dan, and I picked them up on my way home from work. However, as they have gotten bigger, their bikes have gotten bigger, and while coaster bikes are so comfortable, they are kind of beasts, and these beasts do not want to be contained on a flimsy bike rack. It is nearly impossible to get the colorful beauties into the straps.  They seem to want to go everywhere else other than on the bike rack. They bump into each other and me, and by the time I finish I have already broken a sweat and am covered in grease. It occurs to me for a brief second that perhaps recreation is not supposed to be this hard, but I dismiss that fleeting emotion. I have the bikes loaded on the car, and I’m not giving up now.

I pick up the kids for our excursion. They fill me in on their sleepover adventures.  I don’t tell Bass that I have brought him the bike that was intended for Mateo. Instead, I tell him that I have brought him a BMX bike because his bike is out of commission. “Cool,” he says. “Why do we have a BMX bike?” I divert the conversation back to the sleepovers.

We make it to the trail and manage to get all the bikes unloaded. Unloading the bikes is almost as difficult as loading them. As we start riding, Bass looks at me and says, “Mama, this is not a BMX bike, this is just a bike for a small child,” and I can’t argue with him there. I laugh and say, “You are a trooper,” which I realize is just a euphemism for “Yup, that bike is ridiculous.”

Anna’s bike fits her perfectly, but she makes it a mere 15 feet before her tire goes flat, so we have no choice but to turn around. At this point, a wiser person would probably call it and choose to spend the day in a different capacity. The universe clearly seems to be encouraging us to make other plans, but the universe did not load those bikes on my car. I did, and I have no intention of quitting now.

We make it home and we unload Anna’s bike and replace it with the other bike we happen to have in our garage. We make sure the tires have plenty of air. We also grab Anna’s portable speaker, so we can listen to tunes while we ride. Seabass makes himself a peanut butter and jam sandwich even though I have packed a picnic because now it’s almost one, and he is starving. His hunger reminds me to grab the blueberries from our farm share and pack them as well.

We make it back to the trailhead and go through the process of unloading everything again. Anna realizes that her borrowed bike does not have a basket which means we have reduced our carrying capacity to half. Everything is now riding on my delicate bamboo basket. We sort through our things to see if we can consolidate. We decide to keep the speaker and the badminton set. We are practical people.

Still, my kids laugh when they see the burrata. It is packed in a flimsy plastic container full of water.

“Why would you pack it like that?” Anna asks. It is in the cooler which was supposed to be nestled in Anna’s bike basket. It seemed safe enough. But now our situation has changed. I start to take out the cheese and put it in my backpack, and both the kids look at me like I have finally lost my mind.

“No way,” Seabass says. “You can’t put that in there,” and he is right.  It is not a good idea to put a flimsy plastic container full of cheese curd juice in my backpack.

“Why don’t we just leave the food here and eat when we are done biking?” Anna suggests. She is trying to be helpful, but she does not seem to grasp the 22-mile plan, and it occurs to me for the first time that I have not shared this plan with my kids.

“I think we are going to want this food,” I say. It is my first wise act. I hoist the plastic cooler over my arm.

“Can’t you wear it across your shoulders?” Anna asks, and I can, and it is much easier. Anna carries the backpack, and my basket tolerates the badminton set.

We get back to the trail, and we start biking. From the start, we are not biking in sync. Anna is many feet behind us. In fact, she is so far that the music cuts off because I am carrying her speaker in my basket, and she is carrying her phone which controls the music in her pocket. She is so far from us, they have disconnected. I am slightly frustrated because we have just started, and we have a long way to go. I don’t understand why she is being so slow, but I refrain from saying this. “Are you okay?” I ask instead.

“I am not used to biking.” Here I refer back to my post adventure research which suggests starting with a five-mile ride. Anna’s feelings are valid.

“Also, the seat is really uncomfortable.”

“Do you want to switch bikes?” I offer. I imagine she’s exaggerating a little, and I am eager to get a move on. I give her my bike and then sit myself on her bike and discover a whole new layer of empathy and wish I had a whole another layer of padding. Empathy is sitting on someone else’s bike seat. The seat is positioned at an odd angle, so everything feels so much harder than it should. Not to mention it is narrow and uncomfortable and makes my bike seat seem like a cushioned throne in comparison.  I watch Anna coast on my bike with envy as I form a new understanding of why people wear those ridiculously cushioned bike pants.

Needless to say, biking even a few miles under these circumstances would be challenging. Let alone, twenty-two miles. The trail is beautiful, with ponderosa stretching endlessly on either side of us. Yet, for some reason, none of those pines are shading the trail. We are biking in full sun during the hottest part of the day. Several gray-haired bikers pass us by and wave cheerily. They are decked out in their biking regalia, riding bikes that seem to fit them and traveling almost twice as fast as us.

“I think I could run faster than this,” Bass says.

“I think we might be able to walk faster than this,” I laugh. I have been laughing a lot today.

A family rides by, and a small child, several years younger than Bass smiles at us. He is riding a bike similar to the one Bass is riding. I laugh harder, and Bass starts to laugh too.

“We look so stupid,” Bass says, and Anna and I crack up in agreement.

Now that we have switched bikes, and I have agreed to bear the brunt of the butt buster, Anna is keeping pace with us. She asks us what music we want to hear. I choose “Freedom” by Jon Batiste. Seabass chooses “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone, and we bike and laugh and talk. When my butt feels like it can’t take it anymore, I tell the kids that we should take a break, and we eat the cookies I baked this morning along with the farm share blueberries.

“Are these the same cookies you made with the almond extract?” Anna asks. I substituted almond extract in my last batch because I didn’t have vanilla. The cookies are good, but not as good as they usually are. The flavor is powerful. “I think they are delicious,” Anna says. I can’t argue. They taste amazing.

We share the blueberries. “I think these are the best blueberries I have ever eaten,” I say, and the kids agree.

“Not a mushy one in the bunch,” Seabass says. “Are we close?” he asks when we have finished the berries.

I check the GPS. “Only 20 more minutes,” I say, though I know that can’t be quite right. Maybe 20 minutes for the gray-haired crew that sped past us earlier, but it will probably take a little longer for us. Not to mention that it occurs to me that the GPS was telling me how to get to the Fish Lake Trailhead, not to Fish Lake, which means the lake is probably a good 40 minutes away, if we were riding bikes that actually suited us and not, butt buster and non-BMX bike.

I ask the kids if they want to turn around. Anna says, “We’ve got to get to the lake now.”

We keep going, fortified by espresso cookies, blueberries and laughter. Things are going smoothly. Anna even sees a bald eagle perched right next to the trail, and her scream of enthusiasm is so loud, that Bass and I see a bald eagle flying way. At mile 8, two thirds into our journey, we are feeling good, sore buttocks aside, until we hit this sign posted on a chain link fence blocking the entire trail.

I can’t quite see what it says, but it does not look good.

As I get closer I can make out the red letters of the sign, Warning Trail Ends Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Anna says.

And I’m curious folks, what would you do in this situation? Would you find a way to keep going, or would you heed the advice of the sign and turn around? Is this situation familiar or foreign to you? Do you research intensely before an adventure, or do you jump in like me and ask questions later? What is your relationship with adventure, and where do you think it stems from? I would love to continue these conversations in the comments.

Part II of this story will appear in next week’s pocket, I promise.