Liar Liar

SAID I would write something for Phantom fans if I got the time, then I got the time and wandered off into the woods instead. Color me liar, liar, pants spontaneously combusting.

I put in a few days in the woodlot behind D1’s house. Knocked a few truckloads of rounds into quarters, loaded them into the ’49 truck, hauled them home, wheelbarrowed them down the hill and stacked them in the backyard. Then I saddled up the piglet and rode 500 miles in RI, MA and VT, roughly half of it off pavement.

I was planning to camp last night a little north of Montpelier, on Lake Elmore, but the forecast was calling for two days of rain. Half the state parks are closed for the season, the other half will close this week. Overnight temps are down in the 30s now, even at modest elevation, so I decided to call it good instead of roosting out in the weeds in a cold rain. Turned around yesterday and rode home.

Knocking big pieces into quarters that I can lift in and out of a wheelbarrow and a truck.

Once underway for the north, I rode a few jeep trails in Massachusetts. Some were nothing but rocks, others a pair of smooth dry dirt tracks like this one.

Also rode a short stretch of twisty single track, where blackberry brambles grab at your sleeves from both sides and you can hardly see where you’re going. Negotiating the rocky stretches and the single track occupy all your work space, it never crossed my mind to stop for photos.

Here I experience progress impeded around the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. Same thing happened when Will and I were up around there a few weeks ago, though it wasn’t this particular gate. I found that gate open this time. Posted by it was a sign that said you need a special kind of hunting permit to enter the woodlands around the reservoir.

What’s the worst that can happen. Somebody tells you to turn around? Gives you a ticket? I rode through the open gate and never saw anybody in there for miles and miles. No hunters, no ranger.

Came to another open gate after that, then another, and another, maybe eight or nine gates in all before I finally came to this one. Didn’t have room to ride around the gate even if I were to unload the bike and remove the side cases, so I turned around, found my way out to the blacktop and figured that was it for Quabbin. I scooted north for Vermont.

The piglet, by the way, loves the motorcycle-specific wet-clutch all-natural out-of-the-ground dead-dinosaur Castrol oil. She shifted without a hitch every time and it was easy to find neutral whenever I wanted to. On my last ride north she hated the Valvoline full synthetic and made a point of letting me know.

She threw me off into a ditch, if you recall, on an uphill right-switchback.

Tell you what, though: these are punishment-worthy Pelican hard cases. They do double duty as sturdy skid plates if you get going sideways. Which, on a dual sport, you’re going to. You just are.

My first stop on this ride was Molly Stark State Park in Vermont, west of Brattleboro.

They gave me a pretty site in a yellowing maple grove. In the morning, I got back onto the dirt trail about four miles east of there and turned north again.

This got me watching for a sign alerting me to fast turtles in the road. That I would hate to miss.

The world is made of stories. What’s the story behind this lift of pine boards? Somebody took the trouble to saw it, sticker it, stack it, then left it here to turn into compost. What were these boards supposed to be once they were nailed together? Did the person get sick, die, move away, go on a bender, change their mind, get deployed, incarcerated, go looking for Jesus, what?

It was a cold ride north from Molly Stark, fog banks in the low places and up on the flanks of the hills where slow air traps in the trees. My mirrors were fogged all morning.

I had an electric jacket with me but never felt cold enough to stop and dig it out and plug it in. It was the good cold I like, a wide-awake cold. After a few hours my hands were numb (the morning hadn’t warmed up as I had thought it might) so I pulled over to swap out my short work gloves for gauntlet-style mountaineering mittens.

With my hands warming up and the wind out of my armpits, I rode the dirt roads up to Woodstock, a town about a half hour north of where D2 Jenna and Jonny are building their ski retreat. Call it a half hour on asphalt, it might be 90 minutes or more off pavement.

I turned around there, swapped dirt for the blacktop, rode south and camped at the kids’ place for two nights.

Didn’t have a key to the building with me but there was nothing in the building I needed. I had stopped for drinking water at the public well outside the food pantry, three miles up the hill from the crossroad.

It was a church building originally, quarried and piled stone upon stone when Andrew Jackson was in the White House.

Lit the gasoline stove and made my old standby road dinner, beans and rice.

When I posted this photo to the family thread that evening, D2 noticed that the lid of my pressure cooker was giving me a dirty look, I guess for cooking the same old thing all the time.

Everything I know about camp cooking I learned from my friend Al Dente. Carry dry beans, bikers, not that canned mush. Start them soaking in a water bottle at breakfast, by evening they’ll be ready to cook just enough; just enough so they resist the teeth just enough. Cook the beans halfway, add brown rice, the rice and beans get done at the same time. Season with a little nutritional yeast.

Don’t keep your beans and rice on the heat so long they turn into gruel, like that boiled-down slop they feed you on Devil’s Island to break your spirit, or that Château d’If fare. Oh sure, you can live on it, but get to work on your tunnel while you can.

So the usual dinner followed by the usual evening. I contemplate the fire until after dark, crawl into my sleeping bag, read by a light that D1D1 gave me as a gift, then it’s time to drift off as owls hoot at one another in the trees, coyotes yip yip yip in the mountains.

First night there it was in the 40s and rained heavily in the wee hours. Second night was in the 30s and dry. There’s a bit of elevation, about 2,200 feet.

On this ride, I was reading Toni Morrison.

When I heard she had died I made a mental note to read her. Just to show you how mental notes go, she died in 2019. This is her first novel, figured I should start here. It was published 54 years ago when I was in what? high school? that can’t be right.

It’s a beautifully, perceptively written text. There’s clearly a remarkable intellect behind it.

Okay, next time—the Phantom! Unless this is me lying to you.

Tony DePaul, October 7, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA