Chris

An episode in which we ride bikes, look for gold, and make new friends! 

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Featured photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Z6Y339WoTdg6nZYn6

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August 28th, 2024- California Day 5

We met Chris on a hazy California morning just after dawn. We lingered in a Mariposa parking lot as he pulled up with a trailer full of e-bikes and his biking partner, Ira. I was still longing for another hour of sleep, and the rest of our biking group didn’t present any better. We intrepid explorers looked drowsy at best. Chris, in contrast, was brimming with life. As our tour guide, he busied himself with retrieving helmets, filling water bottles, and packing sack lunches. He chatted cheerfully as he did so, enthusiasm boundless. His build was athletic, lean muscles hard-won by rock climbing in Yosemite. Rock-climbing, we would learn, was one of his favorite pastimes. I would later find his name being discussed in an online forum of rock climbers. In the climbing community, the most passionate climbers are often affectionately called “dirtbags.” It turns out that Chris Van Leuven was one of the most highly-regarded dirtbags of them all. The forum members fondly swapped stories of Chris’ climbing exploits, which sounded simultaneously risky and terrifying to an outsider like me. To the dirtbags, they were tales of daring adventure. In their community, they called him Spaz.

Spaz had a good-natured, infectious smile topped with dark hair that was always a little untidy. His eyes revealed a thoughtful mind. His shoes were notable, a foam Croc-like construct that looked like golfballs glued together. I was half convinced the shoes had swallowed his feet. When somebody asked him about the strange slip-ons, he laughed. 

“Everybody makes fun of my shoes, but I like them! They massage my feet when I walk. Sometimes I wear them climbing!” 

I looked at the foam golfball shoes with more respect after that. If you could wear those things while climbing an impossible granite mountain, maybe they were okay after all!

A garbage truck loudly clanged through its weekly ritual with a nearby dumpster as we waited in the parking lot. The noise seemed excessive so early in the morning. Chris remained unaffected, even when we discovered that the battery of one of the e-bikes wasn’t functioning. Without skipping a beat, Chris rolled the defective bike back up into the trailer. 

“I’ve got another bike at my place! It’s just down the road. I’ll just go get it and we’ll be on our way,” he promised. A spark burst in his eyes, and he turned to Ira. “You should tell them your bear encounter story! It’s a good one,” he assured us. “You’ll love it!” 

And with that, Chris was gone. 

While Chris retrieved the new bike, Ira stepped in. Ira partnered with Chris for the bike tours, hauling the trailer and the snacks for easy access along the route. Ira was an older man, a little stooped, but brimming with just as much life as Chris. Ira had two passions in life: telling stories and finding gold. The passions often intertwined as Ira relayed narratives of complicated gold searches while passing around small vials of sparkling gold flakes. We were fascinated with the gold as it danced in their glass confinements. We felt as though we had been transported back to the Gold Rush, courtesy of the real-life prospector leading our bike tour. Ira told us gold stories while we waited, but I was eager to hear the bear story. In time, he obliged us with it. I don’t have enough time to relay Ira’s bear story here, so you’ll have to come back to our blog next week to read it! 

Soon, Chris had returned with the fresh bike. Excitedly, we packed up our saddlebags, straddled the bikes, and looked at our fearless leader expectantly. 

“Don’t forget your helmets!” he called. With fanfare, he handed out helmets to each of us. They were the funniest helmets I’d ever seen. Mine was light blue with fluffy white ears attached to it. Tyler’s tan helmet had even bigger ears than mine. Another woman in our group got a helmet with long braided pigtails sprouting out of the top. They were at least two feet long! She was delighted with the helmet. 

“My hair never grows this long!” she said, twirling the braid in the air. “This is great!” 

With that, our group took off. The lady’s braids trailed out behind her like Superman’s cape. I wanted to giggle, but I didn’t really have the right. I had fluffy ears on my helmet, after all.

Chris’ bike tour took us on the prettiest backroads imaginable. Gravel crunched under our tires, alerting the attention of some black Angus that lay in the shade. They flicked their ears towards us, lazily regarding the flock of bikers rolling by. Clearly, they had seen this before.

Once we had left the confines of Mariposa, it felt as if we had been transported to another world. Rolling yellow hills became the backdrop of our journey. They mirrored the endless stretch of the sky, occasional clouds represented by hardy oaks dotting the plain. Agriculture abounded in the open space, new herds of cattle grazing at every bend of the road. The vast yellowness was astounding. I had never seen such a color. It wasn’t the sad brown of dead grass. It more resembled the shimmering gold of wheat. It was quite lovely. 

At one scenic high point, we parked our bikes for photos and water. The bellowing of cows echoed off many hills. A small blue pond winked up at me from far off. The silence was interrupted by the rumble of a car’s engine. Seeing it approaching, we dragged our bikes to the edge of the narrow road. Ira, in the chase vehicle, did his best to pull over as well. The road was awfully small, however, and by the time the driver approached us, it was clear that she was agitated. She pulled to a halt next to Chris, window rolling down with a whine.

“Why do you have to park right here?” she barked, no greeting in her voice. “Can’t you do this somewhere else?”

Chris tried to explain. “Well, ma’am, this is one of the best roads for a tour, and-” 

“No,” she cut him off. “This road is too small for this. You need to go somewhere else. Do you understand me?”

I would have been livid, but Chris just smiled gently. “Yes ma’am. Sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am.” 

She huffed and pulled away, gravel rocketing from beneath her tires and dust billowing into the sky. 

We all looked at our tour guide, alarmed at her curtness. He simply shrugged. “Sometimes people don’t like the tours.”

I was impressed with the way that he handled the situation. He was unphased and polite for the entire interaction, never wavering in his demeanor. As we continued our ride, we learned that this is just how Chris was. He was extremely kind, preferring to make friends with everyone instead of enemies. And indeed, Chris had many friends. One of Chris’s friends owned a draft horse farm. On our bike tour route, we stopped near the pasture for a chance to look for horses and get some water. Later, we crossed a small bridge and parked our bikes to walk a dry creek bed. Chris promised that staurolites (rocks with natural cross shapes) could be found in the creek, but our search was really just a chance for his companion Ira to look for gold. (We only found a dead bat suspended in a discarded fishing line. No gold, unfortunately.) Our tour route later joined with a bike trail that ran through Mariposa. The trail also happened to run past a bike shop whose proprietors were friends with Chris. They had just returned from a camping trip, but when Chris navigated our tour group into their driveway, they welcomed us like old friends. We received an impromptu tour of their shop, filled with dozens of expensive, impressive bikes. Upon noticing a sizeable scrape on his friend’s knee, Chris asked about it, launching us into a colorful conversation about bike crashes and significant injuries. Our bike tour ended at a local coffee shop, where, again, Chris was friends with the owner. She joined us for the conclusion of our tour as we all sipped our drinks under the shop’s awning. It was companionable, friendly, and uncommon. It left an impression I’ll not soon forget. 

Chris’ community of friends stuck with me for the rest of our day. As we drove through Yosemite, I found myself wondering, “What does it mean to be a friend?” When we toured an old mining town, I found myself wishing I knew more about the people there. Life is defined by the relationships we have. Humans were meant to live in community. Why else would solitary confinement be such a brutal punishment in prison? The human brain suffers when isolated from the companionship of others. Perhaps I wax poetic here, but is it possible that our society is suffering from isolation? We no longer buy our groceries from the small-town grocer. We no longer borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbor’s house. Our friends live online, our conversations are reduced to text threads, and our interactions are full of anxiety at best. What happened to the kind of world that Chris still preserves? Do we really have friends?

That night, we did something a little spontaneous. We still had a long while to drive, but we had become road-weary and irritable. Mimicking Chris, we pulled over the car on the side of the road. We abandoned our carefully-laid plans and need for efficiency. In their stead, we made peanut butter sandwiches and enjoyed a brilliant roadside sunset in the Sierra Nevadas. It was companionable. It was friendship. 

Thanks, Chris. 

Bike with Chris: https://www.yosemiteebiking.com/ 

Chris is also a writer! Find some of his articles here: https://www.chrisvanleuven.com/ 

The Bodie Ghost Town: https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509