Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 28 (June 13) – Spot the T S Eliot quote

…in today’s update. First person to submit correct answer wins a masterful sepia-toned water-color sketch of the NorthWest coast, just as soon as I get it dry and pick the pine needles out of it. I forgot to mention yesterday that we passed through Petaluma, holy shrine for me (as egg-lover) because it is the world epicentre of the egg. Produces more than anywhere else. (It’s also where Nolan, my beloved opera-collaborator, lives, tho’ alas he’s in Italy with his family right now.) In Petaluma posters announced a concert featuring Eddie Money and other oldies including a Fogerty-less ‘Creedence Clearwater Revisited,’ which sounds oddly demure compared to ‘Revival.’ In Petaluma we also saw a man walking, a puzzling sight in California until the orange-red item he was swinging lightly in one hand made sense of it all. It was an empty gas can.

Gentle reader, apart from news of Joe’s coccyx (much improved) and my dead-leg (improved, and now living & partly living), I have spared you medical bulletins. After all, this isn’t Scott of the Antarctic. Lost another man today. We ate his dog, with the last of the caramelized onions. But even a more modest adventure has its trials. I managed to wedge my right foot under the bike (the foot doesn’t feel too bad but I haven’t seen it lately – that’s what camping does to you – to report on how it looks) and I acquired an earache in my left ear, the port-side or ocean-side ear, strong enough to prevent me from chewing anything. Pain mild until chewing began. Was contemplating a future of sipping clam chowder through a straw. Earache seems to be receding, unless it’s just the ibuprofen I’ve been taking.

Despite the same savage wind as before, we had some spectacular biking today – punctuated by overpowering blasts of the salty-apricot perfume of golden gorse blossom on both sides of the road – past tempestuous, sunlit beaches, but most notably through a redwood cathedral lasting many miles and putting to shame all manmade cathedrals except the Sagrada Familia. And nothing in the Sagrada Familia, or at Chartres or at the Acropolis makes one want to give each pillar a human name, as each of the great old redwoods seem to require. They call forth a kind of tender, tearful awe as if coming face to face with the ancestors – which in a sense they are. Reduced by their scale to the size of a tree-shrew, it’s with tree-shrew eyes that we gaze at them.

Reached at last the Crescent City campsite, to be greeted by a gorgeous, shaggy, white ‘Native American dog’ (a breed reinvented using Malamute and other strains) and the finest hydrangeas I’ve ever seen. Our pitch is in a grove of young redwoods only a hundred or so years old; Joe speaks of finding a redwood to hug and I’ve been warning him that a redwood small enough for him to hug may be an underage redwood, with who knows what hell to pay from mature tree-huggers. Joe made us his usual fine meal; I as usual blundered off into the dark with the pots & pans, dishes and cutlery, to wash them at the nearest bathroom. I was able to chew the meal without pain so I think the earache alarm is over. Now to see what it’s like to sleep within a redwood grove, on ancient leaf-mold.