Issue #8: Seekers

Buddha Baldy

By Miles Cooper

Backside Baldy’s tough. Rising to 10,068′ above sea level, Mount Baldy is one of the peaks framing the Los Angeles basin. The vast Angeles National Forest’s San Gabriel Mountains, jutting up north and east of LA, contain a savage playground for all adventuring types. Ambitious road cyclists tackle the challenging finish to the Baldy ski lifts. Yet few riders make the eastern approach to Baldy via the unpaved forest road. There’s a reason. No matter one’s tire width, the rubber won’t be sufficient for all the extensive baby head rocks and skittering slate. The entry point, up the Lytle Creek drainage, from the map looks to be the easy part, before it gets steep. A few dilapidated broken-down cars along the side of the road tell a different story.

Sunrise in the San Gabriels.

While we had done our research, we underestimated the difficulty. As we made our way up the Lytle Creek drainage, terrain conditions had us alternating between riding and walking. The journey began a few days earlier in Big Bear. But the adventure, this narrative, could begin anywhere. This recounts a window into one journey, yet neither place nor time matters. That day we happened to push our personal limits up Baldy. And it was simply a moment, emblematic of adventures past, present, and those to come.

Violent beginnings

My riding partner and I met while running over 30 years ago. I started the friendship by punching him. Or he punched me. I can’t remember. I do know it was a Southern California high school cross country meet where shoulder jostling during a turn into the final straightaway escalated into feeble blows. Two scrawny runners simultaneously attempting to sprint and punch. After the race, we de-escalated, chatted, apologized, and said our goodbyes, not expecting to see each other again.

A little less than a year later I showed up for college rowing tryouts in Berkeley. Also there? My cross country course combatant. For the next four years we pushed each other, on the water and off. On that athletic and adventurer asymptomatic curve toward crazy, we were on the spectrum. Our practice supplements included a mid-season marathon, leading us to get thrown out of the boat for a race. After that we kept quiet, particularly about the full moon runs through the Berkeley hills to practice that got us up at 3 am…

Mid-morning caffeine, pointing in the Baldy Notch direction.

Both of us had bike backgrounds, mine as a hack, his racy. That led to a four-day ride down the California coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles along with two other rowers at the end of our first year. The next season saw a ride to Yosemite and back. There’s something about an adventure partner. Cycling is solitary, a journey into the pain cave, an opportunity to reach one’s limits and transcend them. And still cycling, at its best, is quite social. Riding with someone helps keep one’s efforts honest, and helps one work through the inevitable low point that comes with every journey. Riding also provides insight into who a person is and how that person interacts with the world. One can fall in with someone on a ride and immediately mesh. Or equally quickly learn to keep one’s distance.

Synchromesh

Rich and I meshed. As we traveled up Lytle Creek, we transitioned from riding to walking, walking to riding, legs going across the top tube, then back off. Slow going. Talking speed. Both of us are fathers and husbands now, with their attendant challenges and joys. Talking through them helped me. My inner imposter syndrome typically had me questioning myself, “How could I do better?” Objectively, knowing our family survived our daughter’s childhood cancer intact should tell me I was doing just fine, yet there was always better. Our daughter’s thriving now, thanks for asking.

Going up!

As an introvert, I find it takes a hell of a person to be better than none at all. Does that make me misanthropic, picky, or both? Regardless, I’m cautious about who I surround myself with. With Rich, there’s a wonderful balance between dialogue and driving each other. Talk, and silence. Spinning wheels unlocks the inner self. Albert Einstein said of the Theory of Relativity, “I thought of that while riding my bicycle.” Shake a snow globe and set it down, and the precipitate slowly settles, leaving the liquid clear. As an imperfect vessel, my day-to-day brain at points feels like that shaken snow globe. Digging deep during long climbs lets everything settle.

Digging deep on the Baldy climb meant breaktime. We pulled off the road into a vacant campground to boil water for mid-morning snacks and caffeine. Not many people made it back this far. Picturesque and ragged. I half expected to run into Walter White, cooking high-grade meth in a bucket RV. Or feel the shades of those killed by gunfire along the forest service road, it being a failed escape route following a botched 1980 bank robbery. Peter Houlahan’s 2019 Norco ’80 tells the story of the outgunned officers, and the subsequent militarization of our nation’s police and sheriffs’ departments.

Voices

Caffeine taking effect, we resumed the climb. Baby heads gave way to unrideable shale littered with massive pine cones. The air thinned. So did the conversation. Slower thinking. In my quest for stillness I encountered someone’s analogy, Oliver Burkeman’s, I believe, that fit a little too well. The thinking mind is like having a crazy man barge through the front door, then follow you around, narrating and commenting on everything. Riding hard, particularly climbing, seemed to exhaust that inner crazy. When that second voice becomes oxygen depleted, my mind clears. There is simply the journey. Tires crunched over rocks, a dangerously crisp downdraft knifed through clothes, the hunter hawk circled above. I’m no Dalai Lama, nor Thich Nhat Hanh. When I do dishes, my ever-questing mind does more than just dishes. The closest I currently come to quieting the mind comes through exhausting the body.

Deep blue skies, deep sand, deep thoughts.

That’s why time and place don’t matter. The impact does. So does the friendship. Yesterday may have been deep sand, tomorrow may be granite, decades ago roads; decades ahead, who knows? Breathing hard on shale, there is only now. Centered, we topped out at the Baldy Notch. A summer ski lift operated, dropping hikers and mountain lunchers at the peak. Shush — don’t tell anyone — we snuck in through the back. My ego had me waiting overlong at the fire road’s mouth, thinking those milling about must be eyeing us dusty travelers, marveling at our achievement. Not so much, it seems, when I overheard one comment he was surprised the lift brought bikes up.

Hanging balanced, mind and body empty, we stopped for real food at the cafe. Our dehydrated meals along the way had provided necessary calories, but little flavor. Next, the descent. Navigating mixed terrain takes total focus. I am a cautious descender, the majority of my titanium endoskeleton earned through rare descending overconfidence. Finding clean lines translated to action through inaction, and sometimes inaction through action, letting a slack front wheel and engaged limbic system lead the way. We passed Mt. Baldy Zen Center, where a successful Leonard Cohen stepped out of the limelight to serve and reflect with what he described as the Zen set’s Marines. I reflected on the mindfulness through line presented by Buddhism and Stoicism. The reflection itself demonstrated I am not in the moment. I have work to do, which is joyful in itself. If I achieve equanimity, enlightenment, what remains? The cognitive dissonance this creates for a Type A achiever tells me I have a long way to go. “And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer,” or so Die Hard’s antihero Hans Gruber tells us. Add Alexander to the list of people I am not.

Memento mori

The rollicking descent ended, ramping up rollers and more climbs along Glendora Mountain Road. A memento mori moment. The Stoic principle: Remember death. Embrace this moment, because it is the only one of its kind, and we could be dead in the next. There is only this. For all the adventures past, the now, and adventures to come, I am thankful to have found a kindred spirit in my questing. Thirty years is a long time, and it has flashed past. We may be riding together thirty years from now. Or, if one embraces the memento mori concept, I could be dead by the time you’re reading this. The mortality focus isn’t morbid. It helps me remember there are no ordinary moments. Brushing teeth, doing dishes, a hug from my child, climbing Baldy — each moment will never repeat itself, never be the same. And it could be the last time it ever happens. Treating each moment that way forms the practice. And for now, climbing’s crucible helps me in the practice. I am not yet ready for lotus position under the bodhi tree.

On the road again.