Free Willin'

The next stop along the journey was in Ann Arbor, Michigan where my brother Andy lives with wife Brigit, high school senior Molly and 5th grader, Will. Andy and I do a lot of work together because he just happens to be one of the top spinal cord doctors in the world. I gave him all sorts of credibility by breaking my back, creating our little horse and pony show. How’s that for brotherly love!

We started an organization about a decade back called the International Rehabilitation Forum. It’s a consortium of doctors, institutions and do-gooders from all over the world who are trying to advance the concept of rehabilitation medicine in developing nations. It sounds like Doctors without Borders, but those guys usually go into a country, do surgeries and leave. It’s incredible and necessary work, but it also leaves very little for post-surgical care or long time rehabilitation plans. That’s where these docs come in. They are either doctors from developing regions or Western docs who operate clinics in developing regions. Their work is as, if not more, important than the surgeons – just not as sexy, thus harder to get funding.

In June Andy, Will and I went to Turkey and along with the IRF’s Executive Director Sierra Loar, pulled off the first World Conference on Rehabilitation in Developing Nations. It was an unforgettable three days in the Cappadocia region in Central Turkey. (For a write up on the medical part of the conference click here. For the travel side of it click on the June and August posts in this blog).

I had a huge list of website updates to code from the conference, but I was getting stuck on several of them and we needed a team meeting - thus the side trip to Ann Arbor which isn’t exactly a bee-line from Brewtown to Charlottesville.

But the coolest part of the trip was that Will had become stable enough on a bike so he could bust out some training runs with me. Although a hand cycle is more efficient than a regular wheelchair, you’re still using arm power which means an average road cyclist can put me to shame. But with Will cruising on his mountain bike and me putting in some good hard miles we matched up almost perfectly. For three days we owned the Huron River Drive and he helped me get right back into peak form.

Oddly enough Andy lives near ‘Delhi’ park (pronounced DEL-high???) and we used their quarter mile double looped parking lot for drag races. I really didn’t have a place in Corvallis to practice sprints so the lot provided me with a perfectly-timed and long-neglected part of my training. After you’ve done all the mileage you really need to do some speed work. I was announcing the races in French, which Will thought sounded as ridiculous as goose-squak. I always got the early lead, but he crushed me on the curves then waited for me at the finish line with a fresh batch of trash talk. One time I called a fast start and got a nice lead, but come turn 4, he leaned on his two wheels, easily passed me and made me look like a fool. We laughed and laughed and in the end I was in great shape to take on the D.C. Marathon.

The thing that really sucked in Ann Arbor was that the baseball playoffs were in full swing and Will and I just love hanging out watching baseball. Although he hates the Brewers and I hate the Tigers, we are in complete agreement over one thing: The greatest player over the past 20 years has been Pudge Rodriguez. However many runs Bonds created in his bogus heyday, Pudge shut down three times as many. He’s got by far the best throw out ratio in baseball history and if that doesn’t impress you – well then you just don’t know squat about baseball. But the annoying thing was that if you’re a kid living in the Eastern Time Zone you don’t get to see more than an inning or two before going to bed. How the hell does that serve baseball? The sport is dying out among young people but they put their biggest games on when most of the young people in the country are sawing z’s. And the reason for this? Prime Time Ratings?? WTF? Sell a few cars and some beer and lose the entire younger generation. Nice job MLB – maybe you can up the royalty rate on Major League team names on Little League uniforms (yeah – they do actually charge Little League for using their team names).

The IRF meetings went great too as we put the finishing touches on the website, fulfilling some promises we’d made to the doctors in Kayseri. We even had dinner one night with a bunch of visiting scholars from Ghana, Andy’s main country of interest. Ghana had just won the World U-21 Soccer Championship – the country’s first international title EVER! No previous gold medals – even in track where Africans usually break in. Needless to say they were in a giddy mood and nobody laughs harder than a Ghanaian when they’re having fun!

Oh yeah – Dan called. India just slid up to an 85% chance…

Brewtown

I rolled into my parent’s house in Milwaukee and, after some hugs and breakfast, I plopped onto the couch and fell soundly asleep with ESPN on and the remote in my right hand pointed vaguely in the direction of their new flat screen. I stayed that way for the next 48 hours until my friend Toys, who would be joining me for the next two weeks, reminded me that I had a marathon to do in ten days.

With the help of Toys brother, Ox, I managed to get my tire replaced and have his mechanic check the alignment on the van which had become sketchy since the Bambi incident. When the mechanic looked under the car he experienced a massive gag reflex, popped his head up and said, "Yup, that's deer alright!"

I also had to run all over Milwaukee trying to find the specific tire to fit my handcycle's front wheel. I way short on training runs and didn't want to rest anymore before we headed out to D.C. In the midst of all this was brother Dan in Charlottesville telling me the Tibetans checked out my credentials and were more than happy to have me come. What started out to be a 40-60 chance of me being in India by Christmas was looking closer to 70-30. And if it were to go down, it would require me to create and knock down a monumental check list, all while in Charlottesville, a city I spent two days in 18 years ago.

A week in Milwaukee not only means hanging out with my parents, sisters, brothers-in-laws, two nieces and a nephew, it also requires several jam sessions with the extended members of The Khampas, a latently immature bunch of musicians who unfortunately got good at playing their instruments way too late in life. Had we gotten as good as we are now in our early 20’s we’d probably be junkies in L.A. by now. Instead most are responsible parents who do their damndest to squeeze out a day a week for rehearsals.

Toys’ house is the epicenter of this action since he’s a sound engineer with more gear in his crib than five bands need. His basement is a recording studio that can handle anything from a full horn section to a 10-piece guitar band with drums. The best day of the Wisconsin stint was a 12-hour session in his living room. Any number of fools both young and old (my nephew Tim even sat in with us) plugged in various instruments and played every single tune any of us had ever learned – with the exception of the gazillion Grateful Dead covers that most of us know. It’s not that we don’t still love that material, it’s just that it’s all we used to play and we really needed to move on. I’m sure that stuff won’t stay in the closet long, but it was nice to put it away for this trip. Ox looked at me after about seven hours sans Dead and said, “When did you guys start playing music people like?”

But the sobering fact was that I DID have a big race ahead so I needed to put in some miles. I managed to get in two nice long rides in Milwaukee before it just got too damn cold. One was a 30-miler up and down what used to be glorious Lake Drive hugging the shores of Lake Michigan. Budget cuts and time have made what was once my favorite training route into a road that could be substituted by the junk I would encounter in Old Delhi. The following day I humped it out to Ox’s house in the Northwest suburbs of Milwaukee along roads even more pock-marked than that. It reminded me of how lucky I’ve been to train in towns like Pullman, Portland and Corvallis. Nothing but wide smooth road shoulders along gorgeous stretches of the planet out there.

The Milwaukee stretch offered some really great R&R and, after the horrible disappointment in Portland, I was feeling good about D.C. But, alas there was plenty more road calling so I was off to Michigan. And no, my Mom was NOT pleased with the thought of me in India.

Black River Falls Flashback

With the van back on the road albeit much worse off for the ware (wrinkled hood, busted cooling system, deer stuff EVERYWHERE) I drove east and might as well have just fallen asleep until Minneapolis. Around Midnight just short of the Wisconsin border I was debating hauling through the night to Milwaukee when for the second time on the trip I heard:

“pffffffffffffffffftftftftftftftftft..ka bum ka bum ka bum ka bum ka bum”

When it happened on my hand cycle in Portland the streets were lined with people and I was rolling at about 19 mph. This time I was on a near empty highway going 60. My left rear had blown no doubt due to some abuse Bambi had given it the night before. By the time I exited the freeway the thing was shredded like one of Rush Limbaugh's pharmacy bills.

I pulled over a hundred yards on to the state highway and hopped out of the van to check the damage. I opened up the back hatch and started unscrewing the tire gear. The very first car to pass me up, circled back around and two Minnesota high school students whipped out their ‘Minnesota Nice’ and changed the tire in about ten minutes. In the past I’ve tried to change tires, but it’s just something I can’t do. I can’t get under the van to see where to stick the jack, and even if I make a good guess, I still can’t get the flat back in the car at the end of the job. If I try to lift that much weight my chair tips up on it’s castor wheels and I go shooting forward. Had they not bailed me out I probably would have had to call for my second tow truck rescue of the trip.

Sunday flat in the middle of the Portland Marathon.
Tuesday, Bambi takes me out of action with a belly flop.
Thursday, flat before I hit the Mississippi River bridge.

That’s three strikes right? I’m done right…

…PLEASE!!

I drove another blurry hour into Wisconsin and pulled over in the town of Black River Falls. The last time I pulled over in BRF was by a cop for speeding in 1981. I was driving up to Eau Claire, Wisconsin with my parents for my sister Barb's college graduation. I got pulled over by a chubby bald state trooper for what I later found out was a routine speed trap. I was only doing 70 in a 60 which back then didn’t mean squat - probably just a slap on the wrist. Unless, of course, you’ve got an outstanding warrant out. Which I did.

Just about eight months earlier I attended my high school baseball banquet. The Nicolet Knights were a damn good team that just missed the semis of the state tourney. Most of us had been together since we were 10-years-old so this was our final bash as a team. The banquet was at a bar and since most of us had already turned 18 we were of legal Wisconsin drinking age circa 1981. So we drank. Most of the parents did the same thing at that age so they thought nothing strange of it – in fact our two Little League coaches whose sons were two of our All-Conference players bought us beers.

After the banquet we headed onto the town and stopped at a Mexican restaurant (one block from our Little League fields) known for strong margaritas. Five of us downed a pitcher, then another and then, of course we got loud and were asked to leave as it was actually kind of a family place. We left, but not before hijacking a couple of the wide-rimmed margarita glasses.

As we were on our way to Milwaukee’s hip East Side, we got pulled over by two local cops who said one of the cars in our caravan had rolled a stop. Our shortstop who was a damn good ball player, but lacking in the social graces after two pitchers of margaritas started arguing with the cops which lead us to a quick sojourn to the Glendale, Wisconsin police station. They printed us and took mug shots and arrested us for shoplifting the margarita glasses - which they knew came from the Mexican Restaurant which was also kind of a cop hangout. I think with all the lawyers living in that town the DUI paperwork on the shortstop would have just been a hassle. One of the Little League dads came by, picked us up and drove us home telling us we better watch out when we get to college or they might kick us off the team for crap like that.

And so I never went to court on the summons and actually forgot all about it until nine months later when I was sitting on a bench in the Black River Falls police station watching my Dad haul out his credit card to bail me out of jail so I could go up to my sister’s graduation party that night.

I told my Dad I had nothing to do with the glasses and it was all a misunderstanding. He was trying to buy it but he was justifiably suspicious. Three weeks later I went to court, the cops had no margarita glasses to show the judge (whose son was also a Little Leaguer a few years younger than us) and the whole thing was dismissed. My Dad even got his bail money back.

BUT, I never stepped foot in Black River Falls again, until 2009 when I was just too damn tired to go on. I pulled into a neighborhood, unrolled my sleeping bag, tossed the drivers seat back and slept soundly until 8:00 a.m. I wondered what would happen if I got hit up on some vagrancy rap? Two strikes in BRF! Three strikes and they hire you to teach at the high school.

Bambi!

After some really great jams with Bill, I once again loaded up the van and he sent me off to Sandpoint, Idaho to crash with an old high school friend, Doug Faude. It’s always nice enough to hang out with the Faude clan, but this time it was for the first ever Favre vs. Green Bay game.

The fans in Wisconsin are plenty pissed about all of this but I’ve got a neat little Favre story that will keep me on his bandwagon for the rest of my life. Three months after I broke my back a journalist in Milwaukee wrote a story about me staking out on a new life after having been an extreme athlete for most of my previous life (I used to jump off big ladders into teacups for a living). Favre read the paper and was kind enough to send me a shirt, a hat and an autographed litho of him in front of Lambeau Field. Now that’s pretty nice eh? Well cheggit out – he sent it three days after he’d just won the goddamn Super Bowl! He was THE most wanted man in America and during that stretch of time - when he’s refusing calls from CNN and Good Morning America - he takes time out to send me this get-well package. So no, I don’t want to see him ever beat the Packers (which he’s done – errrr twice as of this writing), but I sure as hell wish the guy the best.

I met the Faude’s at Ponderay, Idaho’s famous ‘Slates Sports Bar’ and proceeded to see Favre mop up the floor with a defense he knows better than his wife’s eyes. The Packers had installed a new system since Favre had left, but what the hell does a system mean to a guy who’s been around that long. He sees players, finds mismatches and beats ‘em. No one’s ever been better at it.

The stay at the Faude residence was way too short, but I had to make some time if I was going to get to Wisconsin, fix the bike and get in a week of training before D.C. Inside this big marathon were going to be tons of little sprints. Doug sent me south following Lake Pond Oreille, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. When I wasn’t gawking at steep cliffs, I was getting rocked by 14,000 foot peaks in the distance. A few white puff balls broke up the big western blue sky and took me into the Montana Rockies though Missoula, Butte and Bozeman. The sun set behind me with the northern flank of the Washburn mountains that border Yellowstone just to the south.

I powered on through to Billings and made a dash for the North Dakota border hoping to camp somewhere before Bismarck. I wanted to get up early and catch a road-grub breakfast before driving the mind-numbing flatlands during daytime. My friend, Tom in Chicago loaded up my Ipod with something like 4000 Grateful Dead tunes so I had some old PigPen numbers grinding me right through the darkness. I was following a small canyon along the Yellowstone River when Bambi stepped onto the highway and stared me down.

Bambi was a female white-tailed deer that I’m guessing was pushing 220 lbs. I locked eyes with her and while slamming on my anti-locks, channeled this message:

“Listen honey, you know that if I swerve this car going 80 mph, it’s gonna kill me, so that’s just not in the cards. I suggest you scamper back off the road just like you hopped on it.”

Her glassy glowing red eyes filled with fear and her telepathy matched mine saying:

“Sir, you know I’m a dumb animal and even though I know I should be backing off here, there’s something in my breeding that just won’t allow me to do that. So while I’d appreciate the swerve on your part, I do realize that’s probably not what’s going to occur here. Sorry ‘bout the damage.”

Jerry, Phil and Bob dropped their axes and winced waiting for the impact – Pigpen and the drummers kept playing.

The interaction probably took about .9 seconds in real-time, but we really did have a nice discussion about it. And then Bambi, standing parallel to my hood, blew into more pieces than there are stars in the Milky Way.

In an instant my windshield was completely covered in green cud and I was calculating the odds that I would soon fly into a ditch. I kept braking and pushed wiper fluid like it was saline into dehydrated elephant. Soon enough I had a clear vein that I could see through. Amazingly, I was still on the road and the car was still running. Then I heard a loud thump as Bambi’s carcass slid off the destroyed grill and rolled under the chassis. Something caught on the muffler and dragged for another mile or so, just long enough to distract me from the fact that the temperature needle was slowly rising toward the H.

I was four miles from the town of Hysham and praying that I could get myself off the big road to some kind of repair shop. I slowed down to 35 MPH and waddled off I94 driving the final dark two miles to the lifeless hamlet of Hysham. The only lights on in town were at a convenience store, but luckily enough, the woman at the counter wasn’t a zitty-faced nimrod, but the actual owner. She took one look at my van, made two phone calls and within 10 minutes the van was being loaded onto a trailer.

The wreck driver took one look at the murder scene and declared the culprit van would have to do some time for this act. The closest shop was 30 miles away in Forsyth and it would be at least a couple days before he could get parts.

I couldn’t climb up into the truck, so the local sheriff who’d stopped by to see the mess offered to drive me to the motel in Forsyth. We caravanned along the state road with the sheriff telling me that he’d like to shoot more deer, but seems like they keep about 50 percent of the business in town afloat. "Deer accidents is big business ‘round here!" he bragged.

I woke up to a snow-covered Forsyth, Wyoming so thoughts of me getting my bike fixed and getting in a training run went out the window. Instead I plugged in my laptop and let my friends and family know what went down. Dan was sending me posts saying the India thing was progressing, but nothing for sure yet. I had the insurance company to deal with and was phone tagging with the mechanic who was nice enough to make a special run back to Billings for a new water pump and radiator. The good news was he said I’d be on the road in the morning. The bad news was that the insurance company called it an act of god and I was screwed.

I’d saved up enough money for gas & grub to D.C. and back, but it was a no frills budget. A grand full of repairs was going to end the marathon right there. I called my mom to tell her that I wasn’t going to make it to Wisconsin and she just laughed at me.

“What are you talking about,” she said, “You don’t just make a big plan like this and bail on it – your nieces and nephews will kill you.”

Before I could say I just didn’t have the cash, she had me taking down her credit card number and footing the bill. Not only is the marathon a series of sprints and pauses – it’s also a team sport. Nobody finishes one alone.

That night I went out into the sleepy town of Forsyth and discovered it was anything but sleepy. I found a sports bar with some first round playoff games going on and spilled a few with dinner. I also discovered I was a local celebrity. Not two bites into my burger the cook comes out and said, “Hey was that yer deer out on mile number 57? What a bute eh? Knocked her clean to hades eh? Nuthin’ left o’ dat one!” Then he pointed me out to two friends who both agreed that ‘Mile 57 was a damn good hit!’

When I asked the owner what there was to do in town, he snickered and told me to look out into the street. I rolled out the door and saw cowgirls, Indians, ranchers and farmers of all ages darting in and out of a half dozen bars. I chuckled, rolled my eyes then hopped out into the fray. Before I knew it I had four new best friends who goaded me into going back to the motel (almost two miles back!) and getting my guitar to play a set. When I got back to the bar I was handed a beer which I slammed pretty quick because I’d just pushed four miles. I strapped on the ol’ Epiphone and the bar tender turned off the tunes. I looked up to see a pile of lit locals staring at me. Only one tune came to mind. The set went like this:

• Momma Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys (learned for just such an occasion)
• Folsom Prison
• Big River
• I Weren’t Gone (one of mine written for just such an occasion)
• Runnin’ Down a Dream.

It was a nice little sing along for most of ‘em but I knew my book here was thin. That was a good enough stunt, so I took another free beer (OK, maybe 2… 4 free beers) then rolled back to the motel.

Marathon pt. 1

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