Jacob’s preferred gear shop is the Port Townsend, Washington, Goodwill. He’d recently sold his Volkswagen sedan and now the bike is his transportation, which suits him just fine. Not built for speed, not lithe, not pretty, a size too small, but hell-for-stout, as the builders say. Instead of cycling-specific shoes with stiff soles and ski-binding-like clipped-in pedals favored by seasoned touring cyclists to allow for more power transfer to the cranks, Jacob’s bike is outfitted with stock flat BMX-style rattrap pedals that accommodate his running shoes and hiking boots. Jacob-like his house-builder father, handy with a Skilsaw-fashioned a plywood rack behind the seat and bolted two milk crates to it side-by-side. The red Specialized Hardrock says Milwaukee Tools on it because his dad, Randy Gray, age sixty-three, won it in a raffle. The important thing is the wave, the ride. After all, he figures, bikes are like surfboards-you don’t always have the perfect one for every condition. Ideally for a journey of this scale he’d ride a large, but the medium is what he has to roll with. The bike is heavy and too small for Jacob’s athletic five-foot, eleven-inch frame. Those years have been few and difficult, unlike the long years of my ancestors in their wanderings.” Jacob answered, “My life of wandering has lasted a hundred and thirty years.
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