BUILT FOR TWO

Since she’s thus far lived about four years longer than the average American woman, and had to deal with aggravating post-shingles nerve pain in her left arm the past three years, you couldn’t blame Ethel Marks if maybe all she wanted to do nowadays was putter around the house. Or knit a sweater for one of her 11 grandchildren. Or pop another pain pill and call it a day.

The 84-year-old Eugene woman has other plans this summer, however.

“It’s the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Marks says of bicycling in Europe. “I just love it.”

Marks and her son, Steve Marks, a 1974 South Eugene High School graduate who now teaches elementary school in Chelan, Wash., will fly out of Portland on Sunday, and land in Tallinn, Estonia, 27 hours later.

It will be the fifth European bicycling trip for mother and son in the past 30 years, since that first trip across Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece in the spring of 1981. This will be their first trip, however, on a tandem bicycle.

Steve Marks, who biked all the way across America, from Eugene to Boston, with a friend in the summer of 1976, decided he wanted to bike across Europe five years later.

“I’m going to go to Europe, mom,” he recalled saying.

“Can I come with you?” she asked.

“I thought she was kidding,” Steve Marks said Thursday, discussing plans for their latest venture at his mother’s northeast Eugene home. But she wasn’t. She got serious and began riding her bicycle daily to prepare.

Subsequent mother-son trips would come in the summer of 1987 (England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Austria), the summer of 1999 (Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia) and the summer of 2004 (Poland).

Four years later, just before the summer of 2008, they were set to bike across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea in Eastern Europe, when Ethel Marks, then 81, discovered blisterlike marks on her left forearms. She was diagnosed with shingles, also known as herpes zoster, a viral infection of the nerve roots that first appears as a rash and is most common in older people. Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox and can lie dormant in one’s body for decades. The rash clears up in weeks, but is often followed by a nerve pain known as postherpetic neuralgia that can last years.

“It’s like somebody taking a knife and stabbing you (up and down the arm),” Ethel Marks said, describing the pain.

She’s undergone three steroid spine injections, tried Licoderm patches that only made the pain worse, tried acupuncture that didn’t help, participated in a pain control study at Oregon Health and Science University, even tried biofeedback.

The pain is better today, and she says she only takes one pain pill daily.

But she also said she was livid when she found out there’s a vaccine for shingles.

“I was told I wouldn’t have got the nerve damage if I’d gotten that shot,” she said. “That’s what makes me sick.”

Now, she tells anyone over 60 to get the $200 vaccination shot. “I tell them, ‘You’re crazy if you don’t!’ ” she said. She got one herself last year after she heard shingles cases can re-emerge.

Her doctor, Dr. Steven Yoder of Eugene, said he now tells anyone over 50 to get the vaccine, known as Zostavax, which is covered by Medicare.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 32 percent of Americans will get a case of shingles in their lifetime, and that climbs to 50 percent for those who live to 85, said Yoder, who has encouraged Ethel Marks to go on her bicycle trip.

“Oh, absolutely,” Yoder said. “You can sit here at home and have the pain, or go on the trip and have the pain,” he said he told her.

Mother and son bought the tandem bike they will pack on the plane Sunday three years ago from Bike Friday in Eugene. They planned to use it for the canceled 2008 trip, although Ethel Marks wasn’t too keen on the idea. She felt a tandem bike threatened her independence a tad.

“Now I think that’s fine. Because if we go up big hills, it’s not me doing the work!” she said, referring to her son riding in front.

They will be joined for most of the trip by another of Ethel Marks’ four children, Jennifer Marks Searl, 49, of Eugene, who will be making her first trek to Europe.

They have a hotel reserved in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital city, for a couple of nights, then the trio will set off on their bikes for parts unknown and plan to stay at bed and breakfasts, or rely on the kindness of strangers, who likely do not speak any English, and rent rooms in their homes. That’s the way they’ve always done it, Steve Marks said.

“You know how I communicated when I wanted eggs for breakfast one time?” Ethel Marks says of the 1999 trip, when they were in Prague, Czech Republic.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” she blurted. “And I got my eggs.”