Day 04: Deerfield, MA to Pittsfield, MA

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The day’s ride started great, became hellacious, got great again, then ended in surreal misery.

I ate a banana and a Kind bar before heading out, but after an hour I was getting hungry.  Luckily, the little town of Conway was just ahead.  When I got there, I was dismayed to discover that there was no there there.  Just as I was about to give up hope, I saw that the dilapidated church at the corner had been turned into a used bookstore (every little village west of 495 seems to have at least a couple of these stores, which I can only assume are money-laundering fronts for some sort of underground hipster crime syndicate).  Joy was replaced by dismay once again when I found that Café Moldy-Book was closed on Mondays!  The only day I would ever need them to be open!  What sort of nonsense is that!?

I tried to get a WiFi connection to search out any nearby food, but failed.  I choked down a Clif bar and re-mounted my bike a rather unhappy fellow.  I cruised away from the “town center” leaving a wake of obscenities behind me.  Moments later, I rolled around a curve to see a dilapidated Sunoco station that had been turned into a little general store.  (I suppose Yankee ingenuity dictates that dilapidated things must be turned into other dilapidated things just for good measure.)  At least I’d be able to get some Gatorade and stock up on snacks. 

Upon stepping into the cramped and cluttered store, I immediately smelled frying bacon.  Yes, bacon!  Off to the side, wedged in amongst an ancient display case and shelves of Stovetop Stuffing and Corn Flakes, were three mismatched tables with about a dozen mismatched chairs and almost as many mismatched people.  Local old-timers were taking up most of the spaces, but I was directed to an empty spot and was soon feasting on strawberry French toast – although, I wasn’t certain at first there was any actual French toast under the mounds of fresh strawberries eclipsing the plate!  As I wolfed down my pile of deliciousness, the two geezers at the table I was sitting at peppered me with questions while at the same time keeping up their banter with the other regulars (the main topics were a re-conditioned (presumably dilapidated) freezer someone recently got working, the Triple Crown results, and who was bringing in hay and when).

It was an awesome breakfast amid excellent and entertaining company!  I silently took back all the mean swears I said about this quaint little town, and was grateful the hippie café hipster snowflakes  couldn’t deal with Mondays.

A few minutes after leaving the Sunoco Breakfast Bistro, it began to rain.  A chance to use my nifty new rain gear!  I stopped, dug out my rain shell and suited up.  I’d checked the radar while I was eating and there was a big band of nasty clouds heading through.  Once geared up in my waterproof regalia, I pedaled about five times before the rain instantly stopped. That was the entire extent of the deluge.  I kept my rain stuff on out of spite and ended up getting soaked with sweat.  Sometimes you just can`t win.

My morning of easy riding came to an end as I entered serious Berkshire country territory.  Here I was confronted by a series of ridges running north to south.  The rest of the morning and the bulk of the afternoon consisted of going up, up, up, then down a little.  Up, up, up, then down a little.  I was usually walking my bike by the third up.  The climbs were relentless.  If this wasn’t bad enough, I was apparently smack dab in the middle of the Great Mid-Massachusetts Food Desert!

Without a restaurant, store, or unattended pie cooling on a window sill in sight, I was forced to subsist on nuts and berries foraged from my handlebar bag.  And, you’ll be shocked to hear, there was a complicating factor (there`s always a complicating factor!).  My insane GPS was intent on sending me down every single dirt road it could find.  I didn’t even know that many dirt roads existed in Mass!  More annoying was the fact that even though they were bumpy and slow, they also had the most pleasant scenery.  I decided this was a fair trade off, stopped trying to outwit my diabolical GPS and resolved to just do what it told me.  It had me right where it wanted me…

I was a toodling down, or rather UP, a quiet road in the backend of nowhere when the pavement ended and an innocent looking dirt road took over.  I sighed and pushed on.  A mile farther on there was a sign – a bad sign.  It informed me that the selectmen of Backendofnowhereville had voted to no longer maintain the road from that point on.  I was too far along in this route to turn back, and the road looked okay to me, so I sighed and pushed on.  A few bends later and the un-maintainedness became more pronounced.  I had to dismount and steer my bike around a few sizeable mud sinks.  And then it got worse.  I was now even more invested in this increasingly primitive path and definitely couldn’t turn back.  Predictably, I sighed and pushed on. 

The “road” soon became little more than two muddy ruts through the vegetation.   Pretty: yes; conducive to getting across the country in a timely fashion: no.  After almost two miles of bushwhacking, I emerged on a real dirt road – I never expected to be so happy to encounter a dirt road on my bike.  I hopped on and was off like the wind (assuming a wind that is sluggish and slow moving).  In a few hundred yards there was a house and the road ended.  Huh?

My mentally challenged GPS was pointing me toward the woods.  As I got closer, I saw that the primitive version of the “road” continued into the wilderness.  Oh, hell, no!  I turned around, followed the actual dirt road until I found pavement and never left it again.  Now all that was left to do was continue going up, up, up.

I came across a campground a 3:00 and was tempted to call it a day, but I was determined that I was going to make my intended destination no matter what.  I groaned and pushed on.  By 6ish, I was finally rewarded with a sustained down, down, down.  It was glorious!  At the bottom of this effortless ten minutes of coasting was a friendly rail trail.  It was flat, and paved, and flat, and, most importantly, flat.  I had endured the crucible and it was sunshine and roses from that point on.  What a great way to end the day!  Or so I thought.

For some reason, I had thought the state park was near the end of the bike trail.  Turns out it was six twisty, uphill miles away.  Ugh.  Nothing to do but grumble and push on.  Then it starting getting dark.  Darker than it should have for the time of day.  That’s when the rain started.  I wasn’t falling for that old gag again, and so I left my rain jacket securely under the cargo net where I'd stowed it earlier.  The deluge I was expecting earlier that day unexpectedly arrived in force.

Visibility was reduced to somewhere around four inches, and I pushed on, wending my way through a maze of back roads unable to trust that my sociopathic GPS was sending me where I wanted to go.  After an hour of battling my way through the wind and rain, I arrived at the gate of the Pittsfield State Forest in full darkness.  That`s when things got weird.

As I was attempting to find the tent sites, I was startled by a strange creature on the pitch dark road.  It was a woman who had clad herself in a black garbage bag so she could take a stroll in the dark, in the rain, with no flashlight.  Then she started talking to me and I realized that she was a nutcase.  My initial suspicion was that she was some kind of homeless person squatting in the park, but she was apparently a camper who was “doing research at a nearby library.”  A gregarious nutcase, but a nutcase nonetheless.  She seemed more than happy to carry on a lengthy conversation in the rain, in the dark, in a garbage bag, with a complete stranger who couldn’t be altogether sane to be on a fully-loaded bicycle in those same conditions (sans garbage bag, of course). 

The only thing that had sustained me in the final hours of the day’s ordeal was the promise of a hot shower waiting for me at the end of it all.  The comfort station near the gate didn’t have showers, so I asked Bag Lady if the bathroom near the campsites had them.  She informed me that there were no showers, and my will to go on was all but extinguished.  I found a site, set up my tent in the never-ending downpour and spent a restless night soggy and disheartened.

If nothing else, at least I’d reached my destination as I'd vowed to.

What I Learned: Plan on taking two days when riding a bike through the Berkshire Mountains, and, more importantly, never trust information from someone dressed in garbage bags. 

Distance Today:  51
Total Distance:  168