by Jim Malusa
It’s rough riding across the foot-wide polygons, whose borders are thickly ridged or wrecked in heaves like sea ice. I walk the bike west, toward the center, occasionally turning to watch the road and parked cars diminish with distance. Beyond the last tourists, the salt floes are much broader, three to ten feet across, with two-inch-high ridges between. The snowy surface is built of thousands of stalagmites less than a half-inch tall that crunch underfoot with a sound like knuckles popping. I could ride now, but even walking the bike leaves a track. So I carry it, not wanting to leave a mark that I myself wouldn’t want to find.
If anyone ever comes out here. I’m about a mile from the road when I hear rapid crunching and turn to see two familiar faces, panting and grinning. It’s my neighbors from Tucson, Rob and Jennifer. I’d forgotten that they would be returning from a Sierra hike and promised to look for me.
“We’ve searched half of Death Valley for you!”
After the ritual backslaps, I congratulate Rob on his remarkable tracking: You did it!
“No—you did it,” says Rob. “The last pit! Now, how would you like to come back with us to our camp? We promise pasta and wine. But you’ll have to pay with stories of your trip.”
I tell the truth: I don’t want the journey to end until I spend a night on the salt. Not that I’m sure it’s legal. When I picked up my permit, the nice NPS man simply told me that I had to camp two miles off the road. At the time, I had no idea that it’s against park rules to bring a bike onto Badwater—even if you carry it—or to camp there. (I’ve since learned better, to my sorrow, thanks to a dutiful NPS officer and my publisher, the Sierra Club.)
I promise my neighbors endless tales back in Tucson, and we part ways. The bike begins to cut into my shoulder. I pad the frame with my spare shirt. When it appears I’ve reached the center of the valley, I quit, lay out my ground cloth, and sit.
The sun goes down in flames without a sound. It’s a good thing Betty the hostess isn’t here, fidgeting in the silence. Quiet, I suppose, reminds her of death. But to be able to “hear the blood pumping” is to hear life, your own life.
I eat dinner and open a beer. Light my pipe and watch the smoke laze in blue reefs around my bag. No wind. When I stand I feel a thermocline developing: it’s colder at my feet than my head. All I need now is data: my thermometer says it’s 75 at my toes and 82 at eye level.
At 8 PM the moon is just a grin on the western horizon, two hours behind the sun. The cool light catches the ridges of salt that encircle my camp and extend to the mountains. A very crisp scene: the perfectly flat pure white floor of the valley, the black masses of the mountains beyond, rising 6,000 feet to the east and 11,000 feet to the west.
There goes the moon. The earth is spinning, and I’m pinned by gravity and good fortune. I think of the Seven Summits and the urge to leave Everest not long after you arrive—and how different this is, lying on a glazed sea of salt.
Everybody has a plan, something that may or may not happen—but that’s really not the point. It’s the plan that counts, the pleasure of possibility. You might hope to sail alone to the palm islands in a boat of your own design. To please your spouse in a remarkably athletic way or marry the right person the next time around. Or to sell your house before the plumbing goes and move to a carefree condo at the clean edge of a golf course until God’s call.
As for me, I wanted to pedal my bike to the lowest points on earth. To my everlasting surprise, I did.
Epilogue
I RETURNED HOME to mild fanfare. My wife threw a party honoring me as low-rider of the decade. We provided guests with the lowest entertainment possible: a game of limbo. Some time later, my friend Mark from high school interviewed me for his website as we sat outside a Tucson coffeehouse on Speedway Boulevard. The interview went fine, but I didn’t recognize my words when they appeared on the Internet. Sorry! said Mark, but the recorder had captured the sounds of Speedway, making it difficult for his mother to transcribe the tape. Much of the time she simply guessed at what I was saying.
Even so, the interview, “Adventures of the Ultimate Underachiever,” generated an immediate result. A man e-mailed me an article from the journal South American Explorer. Authored by Victor Ponce, it began with “Recent mapping by Argentina’s Instituto Geografico Militar has determined that the lowest point in the American continent is in the Grand Bajo de San Julian. . . .”
San Julian is not the low point I visited, Salina Grande, but another Patagonian pit about five hundred miles south. Before my journey, sources including the National Geographic map of South America had made the claim for Salina Grande, so there I went.
Of course, it was faintly depressing to have pedaled to the wrong depression. Once more consulting my fabulous Times Atlas of the World, I found the Gran Bajo de San Julian. The map indicated no point below sea level, but I’d no reason to doubt the existence of a deeper hole. Mountaineers occasionally fib about reaching a summit, but nobody bothers to lie about the pits.
I stared at the map of Patagonia. The Andes were crowned by enormous ice fields. Glaciers swept out of the mountains and calved into lakes that reached deep into Argentine Patagonia. The notion of pedaling past icebergs in the desert was alluring—but Patagonia’s dripping forests and brutal winds had permanently repelled me.
Yet it couldn’t hurt merely to plan a trip. Through no effort of my own, a logical route to the Gran Bajo presented itself: from the base of 12,700-foot Mount Fitz Roy, along the Rio Chalia and through a village with the unlikely name of Mata Amarilla, or “kill yellow.”
I paused, the atlas still open to Plate 121, and considered the village. There must be another translation, or else some very strange yellow killers. I could imagine them, drinking mate tea as a sheep roasted in the courtyard. I could even imagine their surprise when a man and woman rolled up on bikes, an old but sturdy couple on their second honeymoon, riding to the new lowest points on the planet.
Acknowledgments
I’ve been lucky. I was surely the slowest bicyclist ever backed by Discovery Online, and I’m grateful for their support (while it lasted). My deepest thanks go to editor Greg Henderson—the only one of the bunch who truly wanted to join me beside a salt pit for a beer and sour Skittles.
I’m glad, too, that Stephen Vivona and Frank Cook got me hooked on bicycle riding long ago. My high school and college English teachers, Ken Wright, Jim Potts, and Ed Abbey, did a wonderful thing: they made me want to write.
I traveled to the depressions alone but with plenty of help. Discovery’s Jodi Bettencourt juggled invoices and visas, and Doren Burrell assembled the traveling digital studio. Rune Eriksen of Telenor Satellite donated a phone and told me where to find the northernmost tree in Norway. Amina Elzeneing and Dr. Moustafa El Ghamrawy showed me the depths of Egyptian hospitality; Salim Ayoub did the same for Jordan, as well as telling me the true reason Arabs drive at night without headlights. I’m also grateful for those who took me into their homes, yet didn’t get a peep in the story: Doris Soto and Fernando Jara, Delphina and Scott Knight, George and Deb the Catgirl.
My agents, Ellen Geiger and Matt McGowan, gently introduced me to the art of writing a proposal. When it came time to write the book, I often ducked into Espresso Art or Ike’s until the sun went down, after which I headed for The Mint, The Surly Wench, or The Shanty. Not a one of them booted me for antisocial behavior. Peter Friederici and Mary Alice Yakutchik read parts of the manuscript and provided kind words when I needed them. Greg Henderson, Steven Hopp, and Barbara Kingsolver edited the first draft and wrote almost another book in the margins, doing their best to make it better. (They did.) Diana Landau of Sierra Club Books is the smart and patient editor I needed for the final push.
My trips and my story would have been very different if I didn’t hold in mind my true home. Wherever I was in the world, I knew my children were in good hands with my sister, Sue; the Black family next door; my tireless mother-in-law, Rosa; and my wife, Sonya—the grand prize winner for
my warmest thanks. The pits are pretty nice, but I know where my heart belongs.
Bicycle Touring and Books
My touring bicycle, a hybrid, has drop handlebars and 700 x 47 road tires. It’s a 21-speed with a 13-30 rear cluster, a 26-42-45 crankset, bar-end shifters, front and rear racks, panniers, handlebar bag, and a kickstand (in the desert there’s not much to lean your bike against). I can carry up to two gallons in triple frame-mounted water bottles, various loose bottles, and a water bag.
A Japanese touring bicyclist I met near my home in Tucson in the 1980s had a “ready-for-anything” tool kit that included a foot-long crescent wrench and a hundred feet of rope. This seemed to me excessive, and apparently he had come to agree—I still have the rope today.
This is noteworthy because it’s best to bring less and prepare more for your trip. A good bike is fantastically reliable, so long as it’s ready for the road with an overhaul, new cables, and new or at least not-old tires. If you feel up to the task, try taking your bike apart and putting it back together again at least a couple of months before your trip, so you’ll understand how it all works. You don’t want to pedal a mystery.
Even on long trips like those described in the book, I don’t bring special tools for the bottom bracket, headset, or wheel bearings. I do bring extra spokes (including a “fiber-fix” spoke) and a spoke wrench, a screwdriver, a six-inch crescent wrench, several Allen (hex) wrenches, a spare tube (but not a tire), a tube repair kit, an air pump, some odd nuts and bolts in case a rack loosens, a bit of baling wire, and duct tape. I also carry a pair of disposable latex gloves such as medical folk use, in case I have a greasy job to do. I’d rather drink the water I have than wash my hands with it.
Spontaneous omnivory is one of the pleasures of bike touring. For emergency food, I bring a few packs of ramen noodles (in a pinch, they’re edible without cooking), and otherwise rely on whatever the locals are eating. You’ ll be surprised how good fried gristle tastes after a day of pedaling.
If you’re keen on hitting the road, here are my recommendations for a bike trip abroad. First get an atlas; get the best one you can afford, look at the maps, and dream about baguettes or tortillas—or, if you’re going to Australia, white bread and Vegemite. You’ll want a good atlas also to find out a few things about when it rains and which way the wind blows. If the information is lacking, you might as well pedal with the sun at your back (south in the southern hemisphere, north in the northern) so you have a pleasing, glare-free view. And drivers coming up behind you can see you better without the sun in their eyes.
You might follow my pretrip training regime: riding or at least sitting on the bike long enough so it doesn’t hurt the butt, and a pedal to the drugstore to buy a big bottle of aspirin. Next, pack all the things you think you’ll need, then repack and leave half of it behind. You can always buy something you later deem essential. Then fly away (a bike in a box is free on international flights), land, assemble your bike, and pedal away. Not too far at first. After a week you’ ll be feeling better, or you’ ll hate me.
Either way, you’ll want something to read, like this book. Or perhaps one of the titles in the list below, all of which I’ve read, enjoyed, and now recommend. Original publication dates are given; check your library or bookstore for available editions.
AUSTRALIA
The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, by Tim Flannery, 1995Why slow and tasty animals tend to vanish after humans arrive on an island, even a very big island like Australia.
The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, 1987Eighteenth-century British authorities, looking to offload their less desirable citizens in a natural prison, give Australia a try—and never leave.
Cooper’s Creek, by Alan Moorehead, 1963Pride, excess baggage, and drunken camels foil the 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition, the first attempt by non-Aborigines to cross the continent.
ASIA
Cairo, edited by John and Kirsten Miller (in the Chronicles Abroad series), 1994A collection of excepts from novels, essays, and letters whose authors range from Naguib Mahfouz to Michael Palin.
Baghdad without a Map, by Tony Horwitz, 1991A journalist is caught in the whirlpool of bottomless hospitality that is the Middle East.
Sinai: The Great and Terrible Wilderness, by Burton Bernstein, 1979Travels among the Bedouin during the Egypt–Israel war(s) of the 1970s.
Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, by John Lewis Burckhardt, 1831Burckhardt, a Swiss, reveals the tradition-bound habits of the Bedouin. In doing so, he discovers their disgust with the fundamentalist Wahaby, who “propagates his religion with the sword.”
EUROPE
Imperium, by Ryzard Kapuscinski, 1994A bitter recollection of the Soviet empire in the direct prose of this Polish journalist.
Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, by Dominique Lecourt, 1978The terrible story of how Trofim Lysenko crippled Soviet biology.
The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia, by Oliver Radley, 1976An account by an English law professor of the Bolshevik crackdown on the peasant revolt in Tambov province.
The Russian Revolution, by Alan Moorehead, 1958The Bolsheviks triumph—barely—after Lenin’s return from exile. Moorehead’s a good storyteller, and remarkably fair for a man writing during the height of anticommunism.
Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, by Anthony Jenkinson, 1877Very early travels (1557–72) by Elizabeth I’s ambassador to the court of Ivan the Terrible; by turns breathless and amusing. Jenkinson reports: “They have many sorts of meats and drinks when they banquet, and delight in the eating of gross meats and stinking fish.”
SOUTH AMERICA
Attending Marvels: A Patagonia Journal, by George G. Simpson, 1934During a 1930 paleontology expedition, Simpson’s truck is constantly getting stuck; his cook wants to murder a crew member who foolishly complains of too much garlic; and the camp pet, a rhea, drinks kerosene and croaks—yet Simpson seems to enjoy both fossils and Patagonia.
The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin, 1839The twenty-two-year-old biologist joins Captain Fitz Roy for a five-year trip around the world that will change all of science. A quarter of the book is devoted to Patagonia.
AFRICA
Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, by Charles Nicholl, 1997A nice bit of research and personal travelogue that attempts to explain the young poet’s self-exile, and succeeds. “At dawn Djibouti is like a half-lit shower room. The steam condenses on you as you walk down the stairs. . . . You would do better, as usual, to follow the local example and dedicate the afternoon to khat.”
The Danakil Diary, by Wilfred Thesiger, 1996Summarizing his 1930 expedition into what is now Djibouti, Mr. Thesiger writes that the Afar “were a cheerful, happy people despite the incessant killing.”
Hell-Hole of Creation, by L. M. Nesbitt, 1934The lurid account of a 1928 expedition into “that black and savage country.”
First Footsteps in East Africa, by Richard Burton, 1856The polyglot Burton delivers on any subject, from how to kill an elephant with only a knife (cut the Achilles tendon) to the sexual habits of the residents of Harar: “Both sexes are celebrated for laxity of morals.”
NORTH AMERICA
Killing the Hidden Waters, by Charles Bowden, 1977Bowden takes the long view, back to when the Spaniards came to the desert of the Tohono O’Odam Indians, and “the cow looted the vegetation, the horse shattered ancient tribal boundaries.” When the pump arrives in the desert, something is lost as well as gained.
The Desert Year, by Joseph Wood Krutch, 1952Krutch serves up biology and philosophy in a way that captures the spirit of the Sonoran Desert without resorting to spiritualism. “What I am after is less to meet God face to face than to take in a beetle, a frog, or a mountain when I meet one.” Amen.
The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin, 1903In the desert she adored, the Mohave, Austin bravely wanders alone and in the company of herders, miners, and Indians. “For all the tolls a desert takes of a man
it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleeps, and the communion of the stars.”
The Desert, by John Van Dyke, 1901An art professor from New Jersey, Van Dyke wanted a good look at the air and light of the desert Southwest. After three years of wandering about on a pony, with a fox terrier for company, he wrote, “The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover.”
About the Author
After graduating from Catalina High School in Tucson, Arizona, Jim Malusa worked as fry-vat lid opener at Kentucky Fried Chicken, a steel bender at A&J Sheet Metal, and a deconstructionist at Cro-Magnon Demolition. He later attended the University of Arizona, which eventually granted him a degree in biology.
As a botanist, Malusa has published in academic journals such as Systematic Botany. He is proudest of his five-year effort to map the vegetation of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. As an author, he has ranged far and wide for Natural History magazine and The Discovery Channel, whose assignments included Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, the Atacama Desert in Chile, carnivorous flies in Panama, and Three Gorges Dam in China.