Not Burning Gas

[pdub]

This one is for folks who like to read. I mean real long long things with lots of words, like novels.

It does have a flow, but not a real end, except I finally stopped riding the bicycle. The Forrest Gump thing - "I think I'll go home now....."

I'm sorry, but ... no I'm not at all apologetic. I rode a bicycle entirely too far entirely too many times, and that has a lot to do with the life that I have now. In a convoluted trail, that bicycle put me where I am today, but that's another long story.

Just bear in mind, this won't suit everybody in that it's a whole lot of words. I don't like to read long things myself, but at an earlier age I was able to write long things.

Basically, here's where peewee came from.

http://www.weeville.com/bikecolumns.htm

[Barry Donovan]

so you are "rusty forrest"?

and you are well over six feet and weighed 135 pounds at one time?

or is this story someone elses.

When I am 5' 9" at 135 ...I think I am gonna die.
2600 miles is a long day.

[pdub]

so you are "rusty forrest"?

and you are well over six feet and weighed 135 pounds at one time?

or is this story someone elses.

When I am 5' 9" at 135 ...I think I am gonna die.
2600 miles is a long day.

That name would be mine, intact and true.

And in fact I'm 5 feet 7 and at about closer to 150 lbs now, tiny beer belly included.


Those stories are mine, told as the truth.

[pdub]

Let me try to clear this up. I rode a bicycle too far too many times and wrote stories about it in a local newspaper and an opportunity came along where the folks at the place where I worked needed somebody to write training guides, and they knew I already knew how to write from reading the newspaper articles, so I got the job and that was a great whole long time ago. So here I am doing what I do for a living today.

Does that make sense? I doubt it. I don't think I told it very well.

[Barry Donovan]

I understood, good stuff.

and before computers influence of picking a subject and "blogging".

for some odd reason, I thought your nick was a joke to your height (I thought you were some giant for some reason- sorry about that)

everything extreme we do catches up.

[pdub]

No, I'm no mystery. I'm peewee (lowercase)

[Caveman Tony]

Peewee, what exactly were you doing for a living when you were riding a bicycle all over creation? And how was the pay?

[pdub]

Peewee, what exactly were you doing for a living when you were riding a bicycle all over creation? And how was the pay?

I was driving a lift truck on a shipping dock in a paper mill in South Carolina. The pay by the hour was the highest in the area, which is just about true wherever a paper mill is. The South was all about textiles, where you had a whole lot of people in the plant doffing the looms and stuff, and that pay was menial. Those are all of the jobs that went to Mexico or wherever, where the natives are more than willing to work for practically nothing, and the industry stays afloat.

In a paper mill, by comparison, there are far fewer people involved in making the product and in the glory years, the paper machine was virtually printing money. It was a union environment and the company had no problem agreeing to three-year contracts that had 10% raises every year. I hired on in 1976 because my daddy was already a manager there. I walked in, no interview or anything. Nepotism was rampant. My starting pay was $4.44. In 1994 when I was offered a salaried job my pay was about $17 an hour, having made it a good ways through the line of progression via attrition.

The paper industry is dying in spades, it's a buggy whip scenario on the Mayan calendar. Because of the internet and the fancy new things where you can download and read a book on a book reader thing. And newspapers either going out of business or going online.

Looking back, I don't know how in the world I financed all of that bike travel, other than maybe the Big Man was looking out for me. I was going through an ugly divorce, paying child support and credit cards and a car payment while I had moved back in with my parents because I had no other viable option.

They say you can't go back home, but I did it. And I can sure identify with that saying. Sure you can go back home, but it's not going to be the same. That was a miserable time. 30 years old, living with my parents again, paying money to a female human being who didn't deserve to be consuming oxygen. She would call me and say she needed her child support early this month because she needed to get her hair done. After about 6 months I did some soul searching. I have to do something, something, anything. I'm going to explode.

If I had said, "Mom and Dad, I'm going off in the car for a few days, I don't know where," that would have raised flags. Weird. But if I am going on a bicycle trip, that's different. Remember, I was 30 years old at my parents' house, but I was 16 again. That's why you "can't go home." It's...wow that was a bad time.

As for money, when I was coming up on the Big Trip from South Carolina to Utah, and writing about it in the newspaper and this was bound to happen. I had worked for the company long enough to get 4 weeks of vacation per year, and I took them all in a row. The guys on my shift knew full well what I was planning and they picked vacations avoiding the time that I needed to be off for the trip. They were kind to do that for me.

But I didn't have enough money to do it. Had some squirrelled away, but I knew by calculation that it wasn't quite enough. I bought a square on a football board at work. One of those grid deals where there are a hundred squares and some one person wins the pot on the final score of the game. It was a $5 board, a square costs that and the pot was $500. I was watching the game, it was Clemson versus somebody. I watched it on TV. In the final minute of the game there was a strange twist, Clemson kicked a field goal after a fumble or something with a few seconds left to go, and my numbers lined up. I won the pot. $500.

There it is, I had enough cash to take the trip.