mile 182 Napeague State Park

As I sped through Napeague, I couldn't help but notice the interesting flora. There were forests of these dwarf trees everywhere. The land was real sandy, so I guess deciduous trees of greater size simply couldn't establish themselves there. I saw no sight of the ocean in that part, but the sound of distant waves and the smell of sea salt permeated this world. I only had 4 or 5 miles to go until Montauk!

mile 178 Amagansett

I left East Hampton early on Tuesday morning. I was trying to reach Montauk before the day's heat got to me. After 8 miles of riding, I had reached the Historic village of Amagansett. The village had a "pseudo-historic" touristy feel to it. As I biked through the settlement, I noticed a van ahead of me that was dropping of Hispanic people. It made at least a dozen stops before it drove away on a side road. I suppose this is a local form of concentrated car pooling? In any case, it was only 10 miles to down town Montauk. So I kept on riding.

mile 170 East Hampton

I arrived in East Hampton at around 8:30pm on Monday night. The last 5 miles were very tough on me. I had to stop 3 times to recover my breath and rub down my legs to get the blood circulation going. Once in East Hampton, I got a room in the Hampton Inn, and proceeded to get dinner. I walked over to the TownLine BBQ and ordered an entire rack of Ribs. I ate outside that evening. The ribs were awesome! But the real show-stealer was the scenery. Someone had planted a large field of oats right behind the restaurant. Being so close to the sea, there was the distant sound of waves, and a cool breeze that smelled refreshingly of sea spray. As the breeze swept pass the oat fields, the plants rippled and waved almost like the waves of the ocean. The diffuse, pink glow of twilight, the salty breeze, and the grain field "ocean" made everything seem surreal and magical. I felt as if I was no longer in this reality any more, but some kind of parallel universe found in Monet paintings.

mile 165 Bridgehampton

I arrived in Bridgehampton in very poor shape on Monday evening. A few miles outside of town, a blond teenager in a BMW convertible had chucked a half filled bottle of soda at me as he drove by. There were two girls in the car with him, and they all laughed as the car zoomed past me. I was too tired to make a fuss over it. I could barely keep riding due to saddle fatigue. As I rode into town, I saw a Carvel's Ice Cream shop on a small hill. So I did what any delirious cyclist would've done under the circumstances. I went and got me some ice cream! As I was eating my treat, I had the good opportunity of meeting up with Ruth, her daughter Patty, and Patty's son Matt. Ruth mentioned that she's afraid of going to NYC because of the summer blackouts. I thought it was a real good point, since the summer blackout of 2003 taught me just how quickly things could unravel in a large city without power.

mile 160

arrived in south hampton. mcmansions and nice cars everywhere. temp cooler now, im getting a 2nd wind! :-)

mile 155 Hampton Bays

There were a whole lot of yachts in Hampton Bays. Everything was so very posh in that town. Gleaming cars, huge houses by the shore, private yachts. There were mansions by the sea side where the owners hand artificially converted the nearby shoreline into a beach of their own choosing. One house had only round stones for a beach. Another had only white sands. Yet another had only shells. It was a feat of incredible opulence. I absorbed all of these images into my brain. I think the pain that was afflicting my body made me remember these things with more clarity. In any case, my body was near it's breaking point. I could no longer feel my legs or buttocks as I pedalled down the roads. My back was this giant mass of throbbing agony, and my arms and neck were on fire. My father called and asked me to quit. I got real angry and told him to stop bothering me. I regretted saying that almost as soon as I disconnected the phone. But I had to keep going, the day was near it's end and I had to make it.

mile 145 Don't grow up to be that bum!

As I was bicycling between East Quoque and Hampton Bay, I marveled at the surroundings. There was stretches of beautiful coastlines everywhere. The roads were magnificent, there was even a bicycle lane for me to ride on. As I road on the bike path, a huge Mercedes SUV came behind me. It honked like 3 or 4 times behind me for some reason. I was wondering why the car couldn't simply pass around me, since we were on a 2 lane road, and I was on the designated bike path. As I coasted to a halt by a stop light, the SUV came up right next to me and it's windows rolled down. Inside there sat a middle aged Asian woman with her son. She was actually pretty good looking as I recall. "Get off the road and let normal people drive" she yelled. I was very tired and in a lot of physical discomfort to argue, so I simply shrugged. Then the woman said something to her son in the Shanghainese dialect. Little did she know that I too was born in Shanghai. She told her son, "see him, don't you grow up to be like that bum." And with that, she drove the SUV past me.

mile 140 Westhampton

As I rode into Westhampton, my shoulders were feeling numb, as were my legs and buttocks. They felt numb because the nerves there were overstimulated by the pain and have by then ceased to relay additional information to my brain. Otoh, both my arms and my neck were badly sun-burnt and the skin was breaking own. I felt as if someone was stabbing knife into my spine every time I pedalled. There were lots of gated houses in Westhampton. The roads, the lawns, and municipal facilities, everything was exquisitely maintained. The cars were real nice looking too, lots of Mercedes and BMWs on the road.

mile 130 East Moriches

As I biked into the Hamlet of East Moriches, my back was hurting like hell. I must have twisted a muscle along my spine right before getting into Shirley. I was also running really low on food. I had consumed 4 muffins, all the beef jerky, and half of my dried fish. I still had 2 muffins and 6 Oatmeal bars left though. So with that in mind, I stopped at Cathy's Kitchen in East Moriches for some lunch. Her Eggplant Parm was really good. Cathy mentioned that she had to close the store early today due to the heat, that it was causing power outages in NYC. I had been pretty much out of communication contact with the city, and was real surprised to hear that. She told me to consider taking a break from biking today since the heat could cause more accidents for me. I thanked her for the kind words and kept going.

mile 122 "Homeless" in downtown Shirley

I rode for a few miles through the town and stopped by a 7/11. I really needed to get more water, I couldn't go on in this heat for much longer without it. As I entered, the store's Indian shop keeper looked at my bicycle and then at me and said "please, you have to leave the store now." I told him that I just needed to buy some water. He then told me to beat it, saying that homeless people are not allowed in his store. I left without another word. I understood how I must have looked. Sun burnt, dis-shelved, soaked in sweat with white rings of dried salt around my face and arms. In Eastern Long Island, I guess I really could've passed myself off as a homeless person! :P In any case, I stopped half a mile down the road and got 3 Liters of water from a hot dog stand.

mile 120 Shirley

I had barely limped into the town of Shirley. I was dehydrated and in great pain. I saw a woman mowing the lawn of a storage complex. I stopped right there and then and asked her for some water. Maddy was her name, and she came back with Jim and a bottle of ice cold spring water. Jim and Maddy gave me the spring water for free and warned me of possible heat stroke, they were really decent :). My scraped hand was festering under the heat. And after gulping down the cold water , I quickly applied alcohol patches and a band aid to the wound. Jim was telling me that he biked to work every day. He mentioned that people around here looked at cyclists as either crazy or as homeless people. I thanked them for the water and advice and was on my way once again.

mile 115 Caught in the heat

The 15 miles between Sayville and the town of Shirley was very hard on me. A combination of poor roads, 100 degree temp. had multiple muscle cramps forced me to stop often for breaks. During these breaks I drank prodigious amounts of water and took potassium tablets to reduce the intense pain of the cramps. I could no longer feel my calves. Even when I pinched my calve muscles, I felt nothing. The upper reaches of my legs, buttocks, and shoulders felt lanced through with pain. As I closed into Shirley, I had run out of water again. And near the outer limits of the town, a delivery truck passed very closely by such that I had to jerk away from the edge of the road. A piece of skin on my right hand was torn off by that abrupt move. I heard a small popping sound in my back, and my entire spine was suddenly arching in agony. It was so painful that I couldn't breath for a minute. But I kept on going.

mile 106 Sayville

I came to Sayville to refill my water empty water bottles. The sun was so hot that I had barely made it on the water that had on hand. While there, I met Carl, a fellow biker from Sayville. Carl had been bicycling for fun for the last 20 years. He said that we have plenty of resources, the government is just bullshitting us as usual. After getting water at a gas station, I was on my way again.

mile 105 West Sayville

I made it West Sayville as the sun really started to beat down on everything. This town had a lot of golf resorts and country clubs. I saw stretches of nice houses and cars. Not surprisingly, I was the only person out on the road. The weather was in truth too hot to safely travel in, but I still kept going.

mile 98 Oakdale

The town of Oakdale seem to be quite shabby. I didn't see much of anything besides residential houses there. The weather had heated up to 100 degrees and I was gulping down water like mad. I had started the day with 3 litters of water, by the time I reached this town, I had less than a liter left.

mile 87 Starting out on Day 2

On day 2, I left the inn at 8:30am. I had eaten 2 waffles for breakfast, and took 6 huge blueberry muffins along with me. The sky was pure blue...like sapphire. Within a few miles of riding, my calves started to hurt again. My buttocks felt really painful from the get go. I was initially able to ignore the discomfort.

mile 86 Bay Shore

I had made it to the Bay Shore inn for the night. My body was hurting so much that every step I took made me wince, but I was happy that I was still breathing. In any case, I had dinner that night at Happy Buffet, a near-by Chinese restaurant. The food there was in truth very plain, but in my euphoric state of mind, every morsel there tasted like ambrosia! I wolfed down 4 platters of food and like 7 ice cream cones. One waitress, Jin, came over and asked me if everything was ok? I told her of the purpose of my journey, and inquired about her experiences. Jin, like many Chinese immigrants, was working as a waitress and commuting to NYC every weekend. I asked her if she would consider just living up in Bay Shore someday on a permanent basis. She told me that the boredom of the town would drive her insane.

So later that night I looked over my bike. The earlier accident had damaged my frontal reflector and bell beyond all hopes of repair. The bike's rear gear-driller had been skewed out of alignment, that I was able to fix. Then I proceeded to check my own body for damages. The nether regions of my buttocks were bruised to the point of being blue and purple. My left butt-cheek had sustained a 2 inch wide scraping. Basically, when my bike crashed in the forest road, the friction of the seat mount had torn off a couple of inches of the skin on my behind. I applied antibiotic cream and band aid from my first aid kit, and went promptly to sleep.

mile 80 Battle with the God of Thunder

I was just several miles from bay shore as the thunderstorm descended with full fury. Riding alone through forested lands by the sea, I was hit by everything at once. The heavy rains caused a sudden drop in temperature from 100 degrees to around 60 degrees. I had been riding for 10 hours straight, and the sudden temperature drop caused my leg muscles to spasm uncontrollably. The darkened heavens sent bolts of lightening down all around me. It was a vision of fierce and untamed beauty. The winds of the thunderstorm were quite strong, and they somehow transformed the sound of the nearby sea waves. The sound of the wind and sea in concert was haunting, like the agonized wailing of hundreds of people.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightening struck a massive oak tree 30 yards to my right. At the edge of my vision, I saw the darkened silhouette of the tree's canopy as it was sheared off by the bolt from the heavens. The flash of lightening blinded me, the thunder was like a thousand rifles going off at once. An earth-shattering crack followed by the ringing deafness of my own ear drums. Something came a split second after the thunder, it was a blast of air. The air pressure was very strong and hot to the point of being painful. The air bubble enveloped the right side of my body and knocked me off balance. I fought for control as my bicycle skidded to a crash landing in a clearing by the side of the road. I took the picture then.

I admit now that I was probably hallucinating from fatigue, pain, and shock. But what transpired in my mind then seemed just as real to me as anything. I thought that I was fated to die just then. I thought that Thor, the god of thunder had wanted me dead. I imagined that the howling winds were the souls of countless Massapequa Indians calling me into the underworld. I got onto my bicycle and began pedalling hard. Pretty soon, both of my legs began cramping. The pain was savage and unrelenting, but I kept pushing onwards. In my disoriented state, I felt strangely disconnected from the pain, almost as if I was a spectator on my own plight.

A man should not be forced to contemplate his own mortality. Death, if it comes , should be swift and hopefully sudden. But there I was, on my bike, in the middle of nowhere, contemplating my own death. For one thing, life certainly did not flash before my eyes, that must be a Hollywood gimmick. But I did feel quite a bit of regret then, regret at not being able to keep some of the promises that I had made to myself and others. I would not be able to teach my kid cousin how to make arrows out of ash wood, obsidian, and turkey feathers. I promised him that two winters ago, when we crafted his first red-oak longbow together, but other things always took priority. I thought that I would not be able to give my mother a grandson as she wanted. I had promised her that last year when she was (falsely) diagnosed with cancer. I was greatly saddened by that thought. But most of all, I regretted never finding a woman who could love me in return. It was something that I had always wanted but apparently never had. The sadness soon turned into anger and anger became rage. I didn't want to die just then, and I pedalled even harder. Harder than I have ever pedalled in my life. I wanted life. I remember cursing aloud at Thor and Odin in the pouring rain, daring them to strike me down, promising revenge if they did.

It seemed like an eternity, but the worst of the storm passed as I came out of the woods in sight of the town of Bay Shore. To the Western Horizon, I can see the last rays of sunlight coming out of the edge of the storm clouds. I felt as if I had defied the will of the gods and wrested back my own life. It felt awesome!!!!!

mile 70 Babylon

As I rode through the place, I understood why most Montauk Century bike competitions began in the Town of Babylon. This place looked extremely prosperous! The buildings were as beautifully decorated as they were architecturally ornate. The roads were in superb condition, far better than what I had seen so far. Alongside of the town center, there were parks with a series of small ponds and walking paths through the pond. By this point, my leg muscles felt like pistons of blistering pain as I kept pedalling along. Storm clouds were converging overhead, and I saw a Free Mason's lodge by the roadside. I thought about just staying there for the night or to at least ride out the storm. But then I remembered that I had not yet passed the 2nd of 3 mysterious of the Masonic Guild. In any case, I rode on, ever mindful of the time and the approaching storm.

mile 65 Lindenhurst

There seems to be very little to the village of Lindenhurst. Basically just 2 rolls of houses on the sides of Montauk Highway. The roads were very poorly maintained, and my body was becoming unstable. Every pot hole in the road sent jolts of pain through my buttocks and up my back. I was riding in the forward control position. This position increases pedalling efficiency at the cost of back muscle fatigue. I knew I only had 15 miles to go before I reach my 1st night's resting place at Bay shore. So I really put my heart into it, I wanted to reach bay shore before night fall.