On the road with Burke: Day One - how I ended up sleeping in a ditch
Written By: Burke
On the Road, California - So, I’ve been meaning to start writing this stuff down for a couple weeks now, for what it’s worth.
I’m now chillin’ out in a very comfy apartment in downtown Los Angeles. I’ll be here til the end of this month, give or take a day or two.
I drank 2/3rd’s of a bottle of wine earlier today, hoping that it would get me in the mood to write something, but all it did was put me to sleep. I am now awake and sober and writing. I can no longer depend on alcohol to be a creativity kick-starter, which is a good thing since it means that I won’t have to become an alcoholic for the sake of being creative.
I’ve been on this bicycle tour thing-a-ma-gig thing for just under three weeks now, and so far it’s going pretty damn good. For those of y’all who’ve been asking how it’s going, I’m gonna try to catch ya up on the highlights and lowlights. And to make it easier on all of us, I’ll do it in four or five short-ish blogs rather than all at once in one long one.
I left Chico, CA on Friday March 2nd, at around 1 or 2pm. In the last couple weeks before leaving there I actually found a lot of new things to like about the town that made me kinda sad to leave it, which is the way it always goes. My last show in Chico was by far the funnest I’ve ever played there, at a punk rock house venue called the Langolier. I swear, it was like a damn gospel revival or something, a room full of people clapping along in time and singing along whether or not they knew the words.
I left Chico pedaling a beat-up-but-sturdy old Schwinn, towing a bike trailer loaded down with about 100 pounds of stuff.
I pedaled all day, stopping only to occasionally munch on a granola bar, banana, or peanut-butter sandwich. The landscape was miles and miles of the exact same thing, flat farmland. Not the most exciting thing to look at, but it was nice and easy riding cuz there were no hills and I always had plenty of room on the road shoulder. Plus I had a boombox tied to my trailer and I was listening to the Black Diamond Heavies, the Pogues, the Dropkick Murphys, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Outkast, Scott H. Biram, Husker Du, and Elvis Presley.
Before I knew it, it was 11pm, I’d pedaled about 60 miles and I didn’t even feel tired yet. I felt great, excited to be on tour and excited to be on my way to San Francisco. I called my buddy Dan, he asked me how I was doing.
“I feel great!” I said. “I don’t even feel tired yet! I mean, maybe I’ll feel different in an hour or two, but right now I feel like I could ride all night and be in San Francisco tomorrow morning!”
Dan said that was good to hear, and he asked me where I was gonna sleep.
I said that I didn’t know yet, but, um, I was hoping that maybe I’d just be able to ride all night and not worry about it….but, yeah, I guess that in an hour or two I’ll probably start getting tired and need to stop somewhere.
The problem is, I really wasn’t sure exactly where I was gonna stop. Obviously I had a tent and a sleeping bag with me and I was planning on camping out somewhere, but I couldn’t exactly see where I was gonna be able to camp out.
Ideally, I’d find a clearing that was behind some trees so that nobody driving by could see that I was there. Also, ideally this clearing would be on land that didn’t look to be privately owned, so that some farmer wouldn’t come out of his house in his overalls and chase me away with a shotgun.
This ideal situation was kinda hard to come by in the area where I was pedaling. Everything around me was flat farmland with very few trees, and all these farms were directly connected to houses that were apparently the houses of the people who owned the farms.
I told all this to Dan, and he said not to worry, that maybe I hadn’t found anything yet, but that I would.
And sure enough, only about ten minutes after I got off the phone with Dan, I came across a perfect camp-spot. A clearing right behind some trees, with no houses anywhere in sight.
But, silly silly me….I didn’t stop. I kept on pedaling by, because I wasn’t tired yet. I felt like if I stopped now I’d wind up just laying awake for three hours. So I kept on going, figuring, hey, if I found a spot here I can find a spot somewhere else, right?
Wrong. Wrong wrong WRONG.
About an hour later, I suddenly got really REALLY tired. And, of course, there was no good camping spot in sight. Once again, nothing but farms right next to houses.
Then, up ahead, a saw a big patch of trees and thought, damn, maybe this is a place where I can camp.
But, as I got closer, I saw that this area was surrounded by a fence, with a NO TRESPASSING sign.
But, dammit, my sudden tiredness had hit me so hard that I was sure that if I didn’t stop somewhere and sleep RIGHT FRUCKING NOW that I was gonna fall off my bike and hurt myself.
So, I saw that right in front of this tree area, right next to the road and outside of the fence, there was a ditch.
Not a deep DEEP ditch, but a ditch nonetheless.
So I said fuggit, and pulled my bike and trailer off the road and into the ditch. Then I stepped back onto the road and walked twenty feet or so and had a look at my bike and my trailer. And I saw that in this dark, twenty feet away, the stuff was invisible, so it looked like nobody’d be able to see me and mess with me if I was there.
So I went back into the ditch and went to sleep. I didn’t even bother to pull out my tent and sleeping bag. I just sat down on the ground, put a couple big jackets on, leaned up against my bike trailer and went to sleep sitting up.
Didn’t sleep too well, though. I kept waking up. I don’t think I actually ever slept longer than ten minutes at a time.
It was around midnight when I pulled into the ditch, and by the time it was 3am or so it had started to get really really cold. Plus, dew and condensation had gotten me wet and shivering.
So I gave up on sleeping, pulled my bike and trailer out of the ditch, and kept on riding.
Then, around 6am, I saw the most beautiful thing I had yet seen on this trip.
It was a little clearing, surrounded by some trees. It was not attached to any farm or house. It had a little creek running through it.
I stopped to look at it some more, to see if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.
I was indeed seeing it. And not only that, there was a bunch of empty beer cans on the ground, which was good because it meant that apparently nobody cared if people came and kicked it here.
So I pulled my bike and my trailer into the clearing, unrolled my sleeping mat and laid down.
It was just about as perfect as perfect can get. The sun was coming up, but it was still early so it wasn’t too bright or hot. Plus I was in the shade and plus there was a soft little breeze blowing. And the leaves on the trees were pretty and golden and there were birds chirping, and all that stuff. I’m serious. It was the friggin GARDEN OF EDEN, especially after that damn ditch.
I slept very sound, for about three or four hours, and woke up feeling like I had just spent a night at a $300 bed-and-breakfast.
Then I laid there and read for a little bit, then I got back on my bike and kept going.
To be continued…