VANCOUVER EPIC

paul and i started the day at the elysian on w broadway, paul -- more sensitive to the double-edged effect of caffeine than even i am -- having been inspired (against his better judgment but most certainly by aid of my encouragement) to jack himself up before our ride after a double espresso on commercial the evening before had him mumbling about needing to do some hills at well past eleven.

a cup of drip costs as much as an espresso drink at elysian, so i opted for a double americano, which i did my best not to immediately empty while i waited for paul to sip his shot. elysian's cafe on broadway is l-shaped, with the menu, register and espresso machines directly across from the entryway and a line of stools set up under a ledge in the front window to one side of the door. the space recedes back into the interior of the building from the end of the bar. it ends at a cement wall decorated with a large digital print of several dozen brown women sorting green (coffee) beans. the photo is well placed, and its effect is expansive -- and not just because the spatial perspective of the photo is the same as the room's as seen from the end of the bar. the women in the photo are seated at their work in nearly the same configuration as the customers enjoying their product at the ten or so tables in the bottom of the l. sorters and sippers alike looked happy, but i made a point of reading the caption of the photo in hopes that it wasn't only decorative. for better or worse, it was just descriptive, though the simple juxtaposition imposed by the picture is probably more stimulating than any half-assed agenda that the cafe might have tried to push through a cleverly written statement. it's reminder enough not to raise an eyebrow at paying $2.50 for a drip coffee -- although the beans for sale at the counter were from intelligentsia, and you can't help but wonder how much margin happens between british columbia and chicago.

paul finished his espresso, and i, excited and because what the hell i was on holiday (that's how i pretend to imagine they'd say it in canada), chased my americano with a good measure single shot. out the door but before setting out for our goal, we hopped onto the bicycles and backtracked a few blocks to city hall. after all, every epic needs a prelude. plus, i like to make it a point to read a few historical placards while i'm in town so that my trips aren't just new iterations of drinking (coffee) elsewhere. vancouver city hall was built some time in the 1930s on a hill across false creek from downtown. canadians are bold. rather than build their municipal center at the center of the city, vancouverites chose to position their city hall where it would command southern views from the city center. there's a clock at the top of the tower. a clock trimmed in red neon. it was 10:30 already: well past go getting time, so we went.

we took cambie st across the water into downtown, where cambie turns into smithe, which we took for a few blocks before zig zagging our way to 99 and the entrance to the stanley park causeway. destination: horseshoe bay. even though i know the northwest and just generally knew better, when paul announced our plans i pictured a long, sandy beach covered in sunning crabs. more likely that the bay took its name from its shape and not the native fauna, horseshoe crabs after all not being native to british columbia. whatever. there'd be enough to look at on the way to not require me imagining anything past what we would pass. the first of that -- and of the hills -- was in the park.

the causeway runs out of the west end of downtown vancouver into stanley park, then up through the park and under the viewing platform at prospect point to the base of the lions gate bridge. paul was too polite (i can't imagine it was timidity after the espresso) to pass the two women riding side by side in the bike and pedestrian avenue in front of us, so our climb through the park was slow and easy, the causeway also being the least steep of the few approaches to the bridge. the ladies ceded us the left before i gave myself the chance to impose ourselves on them and, luckily, just as the view of north vancouver was opening up through the trees.

and then the bridge. the view of the north district and the mountains behind it was as striking as it had been the night/morning of the dance party at prospect point 36 hours earlier, but with the decidedly different and special magic of a cool and intermittently overcast late summer morning in the northwest. the headwind and the vista were, very literally, nearly enough to lose me my self control. i'd only crossed the lions gate once before, that time too on bicycle, but i'd switched my pedals from the fixed gear that morning to put them on something with gears from paul's magic garden bicycle basement, and the long bridge descent quickly reminded me of my near crippling fear of high speed coasting.

paul and i, sadly separated by eight hours on amtrak, are of a piece. bikefag be praised, we both struggle with straddling our identities as fixie hipster douches and ironic road racists, one unnecessarily high end performance bike shoe in each world. while neither of us actually race, we do love a good ride, and it's tough, as such, to find good and sympathetic company in either of our cities. while visiting a bike cooperative in victoria two years ago, i came across a decal for sale that i'm sure was meant as a sneering joke but that fits paul's bike-style perfectly. i ended up getting the "my other bike is a colnago" sticker for a friend of a friend in portland, but that was before paul had been to the police auction. i asked paul how much his fluted-diamond tubed vintage colnago had cost him, and he lamented somewhere in the range of 600. "but i had to pick up a bunch of other stuff, too. they came as a package." oh canada.

not wanting to be sold short, i had paul put me on his charming 80s yellow pinarello, which, but for the brake cables running out the tops of the old hoods that put me in constant danger of carelessly snagging my left hand and veering out of control when i went to wipe my face, more than suited my needs, ability and aesthetic pretensions.

beyond a short series of off ramp turns and lane changes at the north end of the bridge, our route took us onto marine drive, which moves traffic from north vancouver to the west and all the way to the bay. past the easy rolling of marine through the shopping centers in west vancouver, the road hits a pretty and posh residential area that affords riders a beautiful view of vancouver's southern peninsula across the burrard inlet, but the price of the view is very much the end of the easy rolling. as marine heads further into the west bay, it turns into series of closely spaced up and downhills that were a frustrating challenge for me, the under experienced shifter. it would seem that the west hills anywhere are the west hills everywhere.

paul consistently dropped me on every ascent as i consistently dropped my chain trying to master the nuances of the pinarello's friction shifters. we weren't, however, put the shame of being passed: the kitted-out west van dentists and their cervelos were all of them already headed back towards town. the serious weekend warriors start early and do their coffee at the bay. i would venture to guess that the manhattan to nyack circuit runs something similar, and that paul and i were probably in a similar suit to the handful of brooklyintes that make that trip on any given sunday. i'm sure that the return trippers looked at paul and i with reciprocal scorn, both of us in our black three-quarter lenghts, paul with his u-lock in the back pocket of his vintage jersey and me with my shoulder bag over my v-neck tee. it might be time to retire the fixed gear altogether: vintage bike road rides are definitely the new ironic hip.

i caught up to paul halfway up one of the more serious inclines on marine, and his throes weren't, unfortunately, just from the climbs: my "what's up pauly?" was answered with a retch and a brown glob spat up on the roadside. i apparently shouldn't have encouraged his caffeination, especially since neither of us had thought to fuel up on anything substantially caloric. but paul didn't seem all that put out -- minus the return on the espresso, the hills just bring on the gags per his telling -- and we fled the scene before any of the well-heeled denizens of the west bay had a chance to level any accusations of our smudging the beauty of their neighborhood.

marine finishes its course into horseshoe bay in grand style with two long downhill charges separated by a flat stretch that's home to the west bay yacht club, where paul and i would have stopped to refuel had we remembered our jackets. déclassé, i know, and what shameful incapacity! oh well. and also alas, because once we rolled into the bay we'd already made a tacit agreement to avoid however possible having to go the backward direction on those declines. good thing we took some time to take in the scenery. i bought a couple of postcards and a dozen stamps to post the cards i'd already written. i also paid ten plus tax for the sunday times. oh canada. at least we'd have the puzzle at lunch. fish and chips: it's the bay. and we needed the sugar from the ketchup. no horseshoe crabs, but the fir lined mountains coming down to meet the ocean won the day for british columbia. ligia oancea knows what she's singing about.

there's really no way but up from horseshoe bay unless you're taking the ferry to bowen island, so paul and i were forced up to re-catch marine before being forced to make a decision on our return route. at the roundabout before the hill to the yacht club paul steered us onto the exit that led to the intersection of the sea to sky and trans-canadian highways. "the highway's graded, so we'll just have to climb to elevation and won't have to deal with the ups and downs over and over after that." i didn't understand why we'd want to ride on grates, but paul had done well hosting the ride up until that point so i was happy to put my faith in canadian benevolence to get us home. it turned out that the climb onto the trans-canadian wasn't anything more demanding than what we'd already done, and once we were on the highway i was welcomed beyond all happy expectation to a completely unexpected surprise. the trans-canadian has a three meter berm...and is marked for cyclists. there's a bike lane on hwy 30 in portland as far as sauvie island, but there's no high speed road that would compare to this. oh. fucking. canada. and hey big ring, i'd forgotten about you.

dear downtown vistas, i left my heart in canada. the mists were rising again along the water, and the city seen from the highway ridge had me wondering about someday riding the number one all the way to calgary. it was smooth going for several miles (i was tired and couldn't think in metric any longer) until we exited back into north vancouver and had to find our way back onto marine. if the pinarello's vintage brake hoods were cause for concern before, that was nothing compared to the terror they wreaked on my hands bombing back down to the water. not only was i coasting fast and loose down a steeper slope than anything else we'd done that day, but i'd not brought my gloves on my trip, and the grating on my thumb joints was enough to have me ask paul that we do a zig zag instead of directly connecting the dots by the quickest route. we got there. no collisions. and that was less my fault than for the conscientiousness of north vancouver's sunday drivers.

i'm only in town for four days, and who knows when i'd be able to take this ride again, right? so, instead of taking the lions gate back south into the park, paul put us along the water going east. apparently there was another bridge. we got there after passing at least two stands of weekend fresh fish markets and being drafted by two forty-somethings for two miles along the railroad tracks that connect the rest of canada to vancouver's north side granaries. i get cranky for those sorts of things, but paul reassured me against railing too hard on our guests. "it's nice for them to try to hang with the young guys." i'd be 29 in a day and a half. if for nothing else, it was nice to be reminded that there's older than that.

the other bridge is awful. it's a part of the number one, so we could have probably exited directly onto it. the iron workers' memorial bridge they call it, because a catastrophe took however many iron workers to their deaths there during its building. it's no less of a horror now, at least on a bicycle. i was ahead of paul by that point, and after about half of the ascent (it just rises and falls for a little over a quarter of a mile each way) i'd committed myself to just looking at my pedals until i felt the tension quit, but a hundred rotations in i couldn't help but look up and see how much pain i had left. the bike/ped way is only a few feet wide, and traffic was raging past on our left. keep smiling. at least the descent didn't make that too hard, especially since the trail that connected the southern end of the bridge to whatever road took us back to east vancouver was an under maintained asphalt trip delightfully reminiscent of two years of cyclocross failures.

the v-neck was soaked. a half century was about all my underfed hipster douche legs could take. paul reads minds, and read mine uncannily that afternoon. i haven't any idea what road got us back to east hastings, but as the city buses started passing us i knew we weren't far from back in town. paul rolled us up to the astoria, unbidden, for our post-ride purchases. we waited in turns with the bikes outside while the other one made his buy. twelve something for a sixer of pabst? after the times and the postage, i couldn't afford to stay in character. my game was cheap and domestic by that point. and, in that vein -- and by the way -- couldn't one of my friends find me a canadian to marry?

beers in the bag and a dozen blocks to strathcona park for sunday soccer. no, i wouldn't be playing, but i wasn't going to move from that grass for anything for the next few hours. the sun had finally beaten the clouds in that day's battle, and self-prescription and the end of the puzzle were all i needed. it didn't hurt that the shirts were coming off either. "you're from portland? i LOVE portland." tell me something we don't know. and massage my cramps out while you're at it. hey, i mean, we're both standing guard for thee, true north strong and free, even if i haven't yet taught my quads the anthem.

[can't picture it? pauly plotted a map.]