Just a Little Bit Cranky: Back when I had hair

1976. Me, Bruce Taggart and Mark Johnson.
A shakedown ride for our West Coast adventure.

This is kind of where it started. We rode from Seattle to San Diego after high school graduation. Bruce, in fact, had just finished 11th grade. I look at this now and wonder: "What were our mothers thinking?"

We took the train out to Seattle and biked 1,800 miles in 28 days, with a few days off. That's an average of 64 miles a day -- way, way beyond what I'm doing today. I was so young and callow that, one day when we met a rider who said he was a meteorologist, I asked, in all seriousness,"So you study meteors?" We survived aggressive logging trucks, and I lost my travelers checks -- remember those? -- and had to go to a bank to get them canceled and get new ones. And I hit gravel in the gutter and fell on one of our last days, or was it our very last day? Mark leapt over me and his pedal gouged my back and a quick-thinking pickup driver threw my bike in the back and took me to a nearby hospital, where I got stitches. I think we went to Bruce's grandmother's house, our endpoint, and then came back and finished the ride without bags. Is this right?

Bruce rode an early portion of this current trip with me, and Mark plans to join me in Michigan. Forty-three years later.

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To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: JON'S MDA DRIVE

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So I had a little scrape with the law. I suppose it was inevitable. Actually, "scrape" is too harsh a word for it. "Discussion with an officer" is better. He was really quite nice about it.

In tiny Grandy, Minnesota, population 100, I needed a break, and a place to stay. I could have ridden 5 miles out of my way, for a hotel or campground in Cambridge, and then 5 miles back to my route the next day, but I hate to give miles away like that. So I went into Grandy's one business, a bar, The Brass Rail, and ordered a soda and fried potatoes. There was a guy whose tattooed arms bulged out of his vest at the next booth, and I asked him if the gleaming white motorcycle parked outside was his. He said it was, and that he loved it, but though he works for AT&T in LA, he keeps the bike here, in Grandy, his hometown, because it's too hard to keep a motorcycle in LA, and too dangerous to ride one there.

He asked about me, and I told him about my trip. I said I was looking for a place to stay. He said, "There's a picnic table over by the post office, why don't you just put your tent up there." He told the waitress about this idea, and she brought it to the bar owner, Rod, who said that would be no problem. He called the postmistress at home just to be sure, and she said it would be fine. So I thanked them all and went over and set up my tent.

The post office was a little building at the edge of a park, by the baseball diamond, and I put the tent up on one side, not hidden, but out of plain sight. I was inside the tent rearranging things when I heard a voice. "What do you think you're doing?"

I looked out and saw Officer Johnson -- khaki uniform, bullet-proof vest, wraparound sunglasses set up on his head. Pretty well equipped for a town of 100. Though maybe was a county deputy.

"Um, I'm setting up my tent."

"This is not a campground. There's a campground down in Cambridge."

I told him that would be 5 miles out and 5 miles back -- 10 extra miles. I told him Rod at the bar had thought this would be OK, and that he had called the postmistress, who had no problem with it.

He asked for my driver's license, which I handed over. He called it in, got some kind of response -- it could only have come back clean -- and gave it back. He asked where I was going. I told him New York City, from Astoria, Oregon, with a stop in Milwaukee. He said, "How does your wife feel about this?" My wife? What does that have to do with my camping problem? How does he even know I have a wife? I said I'd done a lot of long trips, and that she accepted it.

I said I'd gone 2,000 miles on this trip to date and that I was raising money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I offered to move my tent out of sight, if that would help, and I gave him one of my cards.

He studied it and asked if somebody I knew had muscular dystrophy.

"I do," I said.

This seemed to change him. He thought a moment. "OK. I'm not going make you move your tent."

"Thank you," I said. I reached out to shake his hand, but he said, "I don't shake hands," and put out a fist. He wouldn't shake hands, but he would fist-bump. So I bumped it.

"I can't promise you that another officer won't come around and ask you these same questions."

"Sure, " I said.

But he must have called it in, because nobody else stopped.

I got up early and rode to Osceola.

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