Against the Grain: Tales of a SAG driver…
Thirty years ago in college when we’d have as many as 10 or 15 playing Monopoly, we added new Chance cards. One of them read: “Take Acid for the first and only time in your life. Reverse life and go around the board backwards from now on.”
Getting that card changed America’s premier board game in chaotic ways no one could imagine.
Sagging Bike Virginia, backwards in a 4-wheel Titantic on Shane’s ever-tinier routes of asphalt, manufactures similar emotions. Driving the wrong way at the right time watching the joy in people’s eyes while they wince in uphill pain confirms all your personal mental muddle. Cruising Shane’s rustic routes backwards in one of our gargantuan moving mountains hoping that the stream of bicyclists all give you thumbs up – but during some hot, boring hours secretly wishing for a single thumbs down — you sit behind the wheel, sometimes in great conversations and sometimes alone, waving at smile after smile.
Over the audible roar of riders’ uphill inhalations, those smiles are inspiring. Or insane. The jury’s still out.
On the flip, a frown might mean that you the SAG are, as Dickens put it, “of use,” at least long enough to hand out a cold water bottle or wrestle with a slow leak.
If you’re cruising the route backwards early or late in the cycling day, you and your SAG wagon might easily miss a turn or two if there are no cyclists arriving at the corner the moment you appear from the other direction. Then you’re punching electronic buttons on a Smart Phone GPS, with your reading glasses perched over the steering wheel in hopes of discovering new details in the too-tiny map, while praying to remain ditchless and searching every side road for a telltale flash of spandex. But oddly, having someones in the cab increases the chance of havoc – especially if those cyclists have their own GPS units.
No cyclist whose bike or bones have retired for the day wants to be the chief map-reader, though all have the Type A personalities that compel people to sweat in the sun, rain and gnats for six hours and all have cell phone GPS, cameras, videos (and the phone numbers of grandkids, accountants and psychologists). It’s a paradox. People who micromanage everyone’s lives, juggle jobs, kids, dates and mates clam up when asked to interpret the best route to tent city. Graciousness syndrome becomes epidemic and the old-fashioned map is literally Dr. Death. With six women bound for their hotel in Harper’s Ferry, for example, their polite communal directions managed to send us – almost – back in Berryville where Bike VA had begun two days earlier.
Only a handful of Bike VA cyclists grow up fathoming a pick-em-up truck, by the way. The idea of riding in the back, for most, remains far outside the mental strike zone until the cyclist realizes that 98 is only two degrees less than 100 and the cab is full to overflowing. Or that the bus line is stretching to infinity.
Rarely do SAG drivers pick up anyone actually hurt – as in has left skin on the highway – and those cyclists, oddly, almost always want to continue on after getting patched up at a rest stop. There’s a bit of masochism in cycling of course, as the bicycling national anthem clearly states: “It’s a Sore Butt After All” (to the tune of “It’s a Small World, After All”).
Every now and then the SAG driver is required to interpret the news of the day and the rumor of the minute – which of course has flashed through tent city, all the hotels, 30 miles of strung-out cyclists on Pink, Orange and Green Routes, six rest stops, the lunch stop and four other SAG wagons – while truth is still back with Penelope at BikeSmart trying to fit its helmet.
We’re always looking for more volunteers? Some of whom SAG and some of whom TAG (the luggage.) Call Kim or Shane.
