"Scenic" isn't enough to describe California. On the AIDS Ride, there would always be a range of mountains plastered against the horizon, an ocean to the right or fields stretching away to eternity. From a cyclist's point of view, that also means there were plenty of climbs, usually with a team of AIDS Ride crew to cheer us on with bullhorns and the ubiquitous Clif bars. Here I am somewhere on the ride. We went by so many pleasant seaside communities with marinas that I can't remember which one this was. Santa Barbara, maybe?

It's been a week since I flew back to New York, this being June 1998, and I'm only now shaking off California time and the wonder and craziness of the ride. Two-thousand six-hundred cyclists riding from San Francisco to Los Angeles along back roads, many of us adorned with photos of people we'd lost to AIDS. We raised $9.5 million for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Community Center's AIDS programs. (My total was $2810, from about 100 sponsors.) Much of that will be used to buy drugs for people with AIDS who can't afford them. For me, the ride is about Mark DeRose, a cyclist I'd only known a couple of years, but whose voice I still hear on the phone, cracking a joke or giving me advice on organizing rides for our Fast and Fabulous Cycling Club in Front Runners. Most people reading this might know Mark as the tireless organizer who put together the cycling events for Gay Games IV in New York. Mark had come on the first two New Hope rides, our flagship club ride that takes place every year on Memorial Day weekend. On the first, in 1996, he was well enough to join the ride, though he had lost his speed and endurance to the disease. On the second, he supplied me with maps and a rainbow flag, but couldn't make it himself.

Mark couldn't tolerate protease inhibitors, and in the summer of 1997 he was in and out of St. Vincent's Hospital with an inoperable, AIDS-related intestinal tumor. I spoke with him on the phone occasionally, and a couple of other riders and I made a point of visiting him in St. Vincent's, where he looked like any other person in the last stages of AIDS - thin, haggard, still in denial. The hospital let him go home to die, and his partner, Gene, wouldn't let him come to the phone to talk because it tired him so. In September, to no one's surprise, he was dead.

In December, his cycling buddies -- principally Paul Sullivan and Katie Marion and a dozen or so others from the Five Borough Bike Club -- got together to remember him, with both a memorial service at St. Luke in the Fields and a cyclist service over the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee. (Gay men have no monopoly on early death. Paul, the director of the annual Five Borough Bike Tour and a bike geek if ever there was one, was in his mid-40s when he died of diabetes in September 1999. I've added him to my pantheon of men to memorialize.)

That cold, blustery December day, we sang hymns in Fort Lee park and then rode back a bit beyond the bridge's first pillar, Mark's ashes in tow in a baby trailer behind one of the bikes. Someone had brought a basket full of rose petals -- for "DeRose" -- and after a round of "Danny Boy," Paul threw Mark's ashes into the cold wind and each of 20 cyclists threw a handful of rose petals after him. The wind scattered a column of petals into the air, the sunlight catching a thousand shades of red and pink. To this day, I don't think I've ever seen anything more beautiful. Mark was with me on the California ride. He'd been on the Boston to Provincetown Ride with us in 1996, and I'd taken a photo of him fastening bikes to the roof rack he borrowed for us from the Five Borough Bike Club. It was a good photo of him, so I put it in a plastic case along with my drivers license, a few phone numbers, $30 and the cue sheets for the ride, and he and I were off. If there was a monster hill, Mark was there to urge me forward. If there was a long flat with a headwind, I'd say, "Mark, let's go for it" and put my head down into the wind. As in life, he was always ready with a quip or an opinion.

Everyone, even the bike racers doing the ride for training, knows someone who has died of AIDS. And everyone finds their own meaning on the ride. For me, it's about Mark, of course, but it's about riding, and it's also about observing the riders and spectators. One Day One, for example, before the ride has even left, I see a gaggle of young women cracking up on seeing the inside of a portapotty, which is adorned with both urinal and potty, and I gather that their sheltered existence has allowed them to avoid portapotties until now. I take a few photos of riders who have adorned their helmets with various accoutrements, including Energizer bunnies and Gila lizards (presumably neither are alive). The best one I see features a Ken doll on his back and what could only be Barbie giving him head, from the position of each. A heterosexual rider, I have to assume. This is a phenomenon unique to the AIDS Ride, as far as I know; certainly I have never witnessed bike racers or triathletes with Barbie dolls sucking Ken's nonexistent dick atop their helmets.

Then there's my San Francisco hosts, Allen Foster and Gerry Brague, who have roused themselves from a Sunday morning's slumber to make it to Fort Mason to see me off. They take my photo; I take their photo. "Wow, with the Safeway in the background, what a memory!" Gerry gibes. Since I ride at a faster pace than most AIDS riders, but am never the first to leave, my morning rides are usually a nonstop recitation of "on your left." Eventually slower riders develop their own responses to the call. One young woman responds with "Oh, no!" and a young, presumably gay, man says, "All you men say that." I try to have a big enough breakfast that I can skip the first rest stop, which is usually jammed with riders. The day's ride itself usually produces plenty of visual excitement, overtaking boys with nice butts and calf muscles. I encourage lots of riders as I go by, but make a point of commenting to those muscled guys somehow - "Nice job!" or, especially if we're climbing, "Keep it moving!" or "Almost there!"

Every day brings some novelty. Early in the ride, one pit stop overlooks a vast reservoir, with reams of wire fence stretching over the hills. Another time, we have a two-mile descent winding down among hills still green from spring rains. There's the pit stop located in a depressed rural village that consists of a few ramshackle houses, a general store and a Quonset hut masquerading as a church. In Paso Robles, the third night of the ride, we stay at Midway Fairgrounds, with a fake downtown right out of the Wild West and shuttered concession stands with appetizing signs reading "Ice cream" and "Cotton candy." (I do develop sugar cravings on the AIDS Ride!) In Oceano, almost to L.A., we stay at an airport. One of the riders finds a local newspaper that carries an article requesting pilots not to land the day we are spread out across the runway. I hope all of them have read that story.

I'm tenting with Steve Wheeler, a Front Runner from New York, who is a constant source of jokes and anecdotes. He does snore a bit, but he's really fun to have around, and he knows a big group of San Francisco riders. We've formed a little tent community of S.F. and N.Y. riders, maybe six tents in all, so it's always easy to find somebody to have dinner with. Even if dinner is usually some slop over rice or noodles. One day, maybe ten miles out of the lunch stop, I begin to bonk. My legs seem to be getting heavier and heavier, and riding just seems like a huge effort. I stop at a grocery store and find something to eat - peanuts or trail mix or something - and resume the ride, feeling a little better. The lesson, I discover, is that the ride dinners are not giving my body enough protein to continue day after day at the pace I've been going. That night I buy a jar of peanuts and snack incessantly in the evenings. Several times, I find riders I know; there are a few New Yorkers out there, and Steve Wheeler has given me the New York jersey, a plain affair of red and white that nevertheless is made by Louis Garneau, the same company Fast and Fab has used for our jerseys. One day I buzz past a woman rider stopped at the side of the road and call out "You O.K.?" She replies "You got a pump?" I do, and come to her rescue; she turns out to be Audra Farrell, one of the riders on the Fast and Fab e-mail list. Another day I ride in a paceline with Vance Walker, who is training for the Canada Ironman, and a couple of his triathlete buddies. The ride rules state that drafting is reason enough to get thrown out of the ride, but I don't think any of the ride volunteers or crew would know a paceline if they saw one. Yet another day I ride with Steve Wheeler's friends from San Francisco. I meet Glenn, who lives in L.A.; he's the friend of Les Jones, a fellow triathlete from New York, who has told him to keep an eye out for me. I paceline with complete strangers and recruit a few New Yorkers for the e-mail list.

All in all, a fun experience and one I would do again. I haven't added up the miles from my cyclometer, but ride staffers told us it was 576 miles. Maybe a more meaningful way of measuring the distance is in bananas -- I ate two at every breakfast and at least four more in the course of the day, which works out to 42 bananas in seven days. Miss Chiquita here was adamant that we eat our bananas. No more banana envy here.