Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I checked off Idaho without quite setting foot in it; my bus passed through the panhandle, on a trip that ultimately let me off in Coos Bay, Oregon. I ran a 4.8-mile race there, spent a couple of nights on a mattress on the floor of a Presbyterian church there — it was listed as a youth hostel, but what it was, really, was a floor — and then switched to a $25-a-week room downtown. This one had windows, and was actually quite spacious.

I toured a sawmill in nearby North Bend, then rode a bus to Cottage Grove, where they were hosting the Bohemian Mining Days Half-Marathon. I signed up for it, and when I asked about budget accommodations, the race director and his wife insisted I stay at their house. I did, and ran in an absolutely idyllic race the next morning. It was cool, with a misty runner’s rain falling intermittently, and the course was point-to-point and perceptibly downhill, and it was a pleasure from the start to the finish, and I notched 1:54:46 for 13.1 miles. Afterward I got to talking with another runner, and he turned out to be from Coos Bay and on his way home, and I got a ride with him.

What a perfect weekend.

And so on.

In Great Falls, I’d come close to teaming up with another fellow and continuing my trip in a car. We’d met on the bus to Great Falls, and bumped into each other a couple of times in the few days I spent in that town. (While the race had been canceled, they had a wonderful rubberized track in a public park, an ideal running surface.) I forget what had brought my new friend to Great Falls, but it hadn’t been the promise of a footrace, and whatever it was proved insufficient to hold him. He was ready to head west, and wanted me to join him.

In a car. He went shopping and bought one and showed it to me with pride. It was his idea that we would split the driving and share the expenses and see something of the country together. The idea was not entirely without appeal, and in the end there were just two things that stopped me.

First was the car. It looked okay, and the engine sounded all right to my untrained ear, but it was hard to overlook the fact that the door on the passenger side was held shut by a few loops of wire. It wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios in which that could prove problematic.

That was the bad thing about the car. The good thing was that it was equipped with automatic transmission, which would come in handy during my friend’s stints behind the wheel. Because, see, he had only one arm.

That I gave serious consideration to climbing into this rolling death trap tells me more about my state of mind than I’d prefer to know. And how could I disappoint my new friend? Suppose, like that brave chap in the Iowa City youth hostel, it wound up taking him five years to get over it?

In the end, though, I found a way to break the news to him that I’d go on leaving the driving to Greyhound.

In Coos Bay, I found myself considering not a car but a bicycle. I had encountered cyclists in the hostel there, catching a few hours of sack time on the floor before resuming their two-wheeled journey south. It seemed I was on the very route favored by bicyclists seeking to cross the country north to south, the direction of choice because of the net decline in elevation. I wouldn’t start at Washington’s border with British Columbia, nor would I keep going all the way to Tijuana, but I was on Route 101 already anyway, so why not hop on a bicycle and share the route?

A couple of things helped dissuade me from this course. One was the appearance of the cyclists — the ones I met at the hostel, and those I saw zipping by on the highway. They all looked exhausted, and if they were having a good time they were careful not to let it show.

It struck me, too, that it wouldn’t be all that relaxing to have a constant stream of cars and trucks coming up behind me. Bicycles, unlike pedestrians, were required to go with the flow of traffic, keeping on or near the shoulder and relying on motorized traffic to avoid running them down. I wasn’t that happy with the thought of trusting the good judgment and quick reflexes of a driver I couldn’t even see. Suppose he was drunk, or wired on amphetamines? Hell, suppose the poor sonofabitch only had one arm?

If I went ahead, though, I’d have to buy a bike. And that brought to mind the last time I’d done so.

It was back in the early spring of 1967, and I was in Ireland. I’d been married, and living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the marriage was starting to fall apart, so I flew to Dublin to Think Things Over. (Does a subtle pattern begin to emerge? Oh, shut up.)

I spent a month in Dublin, finishing a book I’d brought with me. (My third book about Evan Tanner, it was set in Eastern Europe, with a pivotal sequence taking place in Latvia, and in a bookstore on O’Connell Street I managed to buy a copy of Teach Yourself Latvian . The bookseller must have been astonished to see that one walk out of his store.) I lived and worked in a bed-and-breakfast in Amiens Street, where I learned as much about chilblains as I did about the Latvian language, and then I left Dublin with the intention of getting to West Cork and Kerry.

I hitchhiked, with very poor results; just a week or so earlier a hitchhiker had pulled a knife on a motorist and forced him to drive out of his way, and that was enough to constitute front-page news in Ireland. So for a week or two drivers were stifling their more generous impulses, and it took me forever to get to Wexford Town, where I bought a bicycle.

What a mistake that turned out to be. There wasn’t a level patch of highway anywhere around, and I was always either walking the bike up a hill or clinging to it, terrified, as it sped downhill out of control. I was lumbered with a heavy backpack, which didn’t help, and the skies, while all of this was going on, were dealing out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of rain.

I did this for a few days, and wound up in Enniscorthy, a nice enough village but one whose charms wore thin by the third day. The only thing that kept me there was a reluctance to get back on the bike. I tried to sell it to my landlady, whose son greatly admired it, but she was canny enough to wait me out, and finally I told her she could have it outright in exchange for the lodging debt I’d already incurred. She agreed, and I left there feeling I’d pulled a fast one.

And here I was actually contemplating the purchase of another bicycle. Coastal Oregon wasn’t as hilly as County Wexford, but neither was it as pancake-flat as the North Dakota Marathon. Nor was its climate anything you could label Saharan. Rain, when it came, was never a great surprise.

Buy a bike? No, I don’t think so.

I wonder why it never occurred to me to walk.

Not in races, I was doing fine running them, and in the shorter ones I could get from the start to the finish without hearing from my knee. But why, when I had reached a point where risking my life on a bicycle in highway traffic, or with the one-armed man from The Fugitive, seemed like a viable alternative to Greyhound, did I never even consider the notion of getting from one place to another on foot?

You’d think I might have tried it for a day or two. Looking back, I can’t imagine I’d have walked from Coos Bay all the way to San Francisco, let alone Los Angeles. But I might have walked to Bandon, a coastal village twenty miles or so south of Coos Bay. I had to stop there to pick up my mail, and it would have been no great challenge to spend a day walking there. If I liked it, I could walk some more the next day, and the day after that.

But it never even entered my mind. When I left Coos Bay it was on a bus, and when I left Bandon a day or two later it was on another bus.

I spent a week or so in San Francisco; my cousin Jeffrey, who was living north of the city in Santa Rosa, kept a pied-à-terre on the edge of the Tenderloin, and he let me stay there. It was a chance for me to find out what Mark Twain meant when he said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.