Thanks for the memories

Two years ago today (Sunday) was our first rest day, in Missoula, Montana. I needed another patch kit and more inner tubes. We had ridden 612 miles in 7 days. Today the hardest thing I did was pit two pounds of cherries and bake a cherry pie. I didn’t even have to pick the cherries – my son and daughter in law did that, from the tree in their backyard. (Thanks!)

Day 7 had been a 103 mile slog through nonstop rain, the last 50 miles into a headwind. My new bike was now broken in. Sunday was the day to clean the gunk of 103 rainy miles off the bike, relube, and get ready for another week (and another, and another…). We had crossed the continental divide for the first time by then. I wrote my two essential lessons about mountain riding:
1. Don’t worry about the top, it will be there when you get there;
2. Keep your feet moving in circles and all will be well.

I don’t have to look back at that blog entry to remember the day. It is one of those days that is burned deeply into my memory. It was cold and wet but it ended with a hot shower, a warm sweatshirt, pizza and red wine. We slept in a dorm for the second night in a week – the only time we would do that all summer. It was a day marked by camaraderie, as four of us stuck together to gain strength from each other, so we could take whatever nature dished out. Five miles from the end, we picked up a fifth. He was at the roadside fixing a flat in the pouring rain and told us to go on. We didn’t. We rode in together. It was exactly as Greg had said on the phone sometime in the spring: The days you remember won’t be the 70 degree and sunny days. Those will all run together. The days you remember will be the ones in which you faced adversity and overcame it.

We had already had our first night sleeping indoors on the solstice, in dorms at Gonzaga University. We covered the quad with drying tents and sleeping bags. Gonzaga is in Spokane, home of U. Utah Phillips, the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest. While he is best known for his recordings of the IWW Songbook, I have a warm spot for “The Goodnight-Loving Trail”, about life on a cattle trail in Texas in the 1800s. My friend Cripps introduced me to the song.

Cripps worked at the Whole Earth Co-op at the same time that I worked at the Willy Street Co-op. Whole Earth was one of the last of its kind. In lieu of a cash register, they had a cigar box and a spiral notebook. When you finished shopping, you toted up your goods, wrote the total in the notebook, and put your money in the box, making change yourself. We, on the other hand, had gotten our first cash register at St Vincent de Paul, and replaced it with a fancy one that ran on electricity (instead of a hand crank) when that one died. We were the first in town to have an electronic scale. The city weights and measures inspector told us he wouldn’t decertify our old scales, but he advised us to replace them. While they were inaccurate, they consistently cheated the store and not the customer. That wasn’t illegal but wasn’t a good way to stay in business. The new one had a calculator in it, so you could type the price per pound into the keypad and it would calculate the total price. (I know, all scales do that now; but back then it was a big deal. Scales had a chart with a range of prices and you found the price per pound and read along a red line to get the total. Since the ones we had were pretty old, the prices were low enough that you often had to multiply to get the real price.)

Cripps (remember Cripps? This is a story about Cripps) and I sometimes spent the night in the same house. One night I heard bass laughter coming up through the floor below me. I looked at my partner and she noted my surprise – “That’s Cripps”, she said. Cripps had a tenor voice but a bass laugh. Cripps’ partner was a woman from West Virginia. She taught me a line that I use to this day. You know how there are people you’ve seen around, maybe even know by name or have talked to, but you’ve never been introduced? Someone might ask, “Do you know Cripps?” And your reply might be, “I know who he is, but we’ve never been formally introduced.” Her reply was, “We’s howdied, but we ain’t shook.”

Another night Cripps and I were the last two awake in the house. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his autoharp and U. Utah Phillips songbook. I made myself a cup of tea and joined him. We sang our way through the book, but the first song we sang together was “The Goodnight-Loving Trail”.

One afternoon, too soon after that, Cripps got off the bus downtown, stepped out from behind the bus, and into the path of a bus coming the other way. He died that night. The song, and this post, are dedicated to his memory.

Wednesday Night’s Greatest Hits

Since we don’t have group rides this year, every Wednesday night I pick a ride and go. This week held scattered showers. I checked the radar and there seemed to be a hole in the storms. It corresponded with a favorite ride that isn’t on this year’s calendar. I checked the archives and found a cue sheet and headed out. It looked dark in the distance but that didn’t seem like a reason not to ride. I remembered this week two years ago and hit the road. If I can go 100 miles in the rain, what’s 20 or 30? The darkness seemed to stay in the distance and the roads were dry. About ten miles in it started to sprinkle. The sun was shining so I kept riding. The sun disappeared and the rain came harder. It was cooling off. A dense cedar tree appeared at the roadside and I took cover until the rain let up. There was thunder in the distance (in the direction I was pointed) so I took a shortcut back to my starting point. In the car on the way home it rained hard enough that I considered pulling over to wait for it to let up. The wipers on high were barely keeping up.

The front is rolling through. Time to cut this ride short.

Future archeology

Turtle Island 06053023

We have long known of the mound building civilization that existed some 2000 years ago in the center of the Turtle Island land mass. Recent discoveries have unearthed another mound-building society some 1000 years later in the same region.

We have had difficulty understanding this latter society, as they had abandoned prior forms of record-keeping for primitive electronic storage using systems that changed every few years and which were irreconcilable with each other. We have unearthed a plethora of different and incongruent storage devices and a myriad of incompatible operating systems. This society apparently thought they were creating long term storage solutions, but creating new ones constantly. We found mounds of discarded computing devices, each with infinitesimal differences, but enough to make them discordant. As a result, it has taken us years to decipher their history.

Only recently have we been able to uncover the history of these strange people. They subjugated the peoples of Turtle Island with a rapidly expanding imperial society based on the premise (that would be quaint were it not barbaric) that only humans with light-colored skins were actually humans. After the genocide of the native peoples, they “imported” darker skinned people as slaves. Once they ended abject slavery, they continued the process of subjugation of normal-toned people until the collapse of their civilization during the realm of King Trump III. They called themselves “white” and considered white to be associated with purity. Everything with color was considered inferior. Since very little of the natural world was white, the entire planet was considered inferior and ripe for subjugation.

The society was built on the exploitation of Gaia’s resources, discarding goods as rapidly as they made them, only to replace them with new goods. They apparently worshiped their discards. We recently uncovered a vast temple in the western portion of Turtle Island. The temple was built on a mountain of trash and is estimated to have held upwards of 10,000 people for their religious fests. The ground was said to burst into flame with the intensity of their rites, or perhaps from the release of methane from the decaying filth. Our translation of records reveals they referred to it as “Shoreline Amphitheatre”.

We have found smaller mounds on individual homesteads. Archeologists first thought these were burial mounds in emulation of the previous society of mound builders. They were almost exclusively long, narrow mounds, rectangular in shape, located near their dwellings. They contained vent pipes to the surface. At first, scientists hypothesized that this was how they buried their dead, and that the vents were placed in the belief that the souls of the dead were still alive and needed air to breathe. When we analyzed the contents of these vaults, we found them to be almost exclusively decayed fecal matter and a primitive paper. Current thinking is that these people literally worshiped their own shit.

Euro-American burial mound. Note white vent pipe at right.

The society collapsed during the reign of King Trump III. While they generally worshiped whiteness, images of the Trumps depict them as a bizarre orange-hued people. Perhaps this is why they were worshiped. During the Trump reign, all of the excesses of the “white people” came to a head. Extraction of minerals from Gaia came at breakneck pace. Huge pipelines were constructed to transport their primitive and filthy fuels. The trash piles grew more rapidly than ever before. The waste from their extraction of minerals piled higher and higher. The planet’s waters were defiled at a record pace. While they no longer enslaved their darker-skinned peers, they now locked them in huge warehouses, whose purpose has not yet been definitively discovered.

Gaia’s wealth was held by a tiny oligarchy. The majority of the populace seems to have had no purpose beyond consumption of the goods produced. As the goods were produced primarily by robots, the people could not afford them, lacking jobs and income. Greater numbers continued to be warehoused in an apparent effort to stave off rebellion. Finally the system could not sustain itself and the society, as it were, collapsed. Rivers were fouled in some regions, dried up completely in others, and overran their banks in still others, inundating the cities. The climate varied wildly, with droughts and floods simultaneously in different regions. The irreplaceable minerals, the very flesh of Gaia’s body, ran out.

In a last-ditch effort to save themselves, they attempted to colonize other planets. Their transport systems were so slow, and carried so few people, that most of the would-be colonists died en route. The rest apparently killed each other soon after arrival.

A society based on consumption had consumed all it could see, all it knew how to use. The planet was gashed, horribly disfigured. This ushered in the dark age, as Gaia healed its wounds. Only recently have humans once again come to recognize that we are part of the web of life. While this seems blatantly obvious to any five year old, the Trumpians (as we’ve come to know the dominant society of this entire era of mass exploitation and consumption) held themselves above Gaia and separate from the web of life; their inferiority complex manifested in a false aura of superiority, which nearly destroyed our home.

Happy Father’s Day!

I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to be a parent to be fulfilled. I’m one of those people who thinks you have to be fulfilled to be a parent. It is fine to not want to be a parent – and even better not to be one if you don’t want to. Your kids will know.

I realized early in life that I didn’t want to be my dad and it was no better to be my anti-dad. I had to learn how to be me and be a dad. That took until I was 40.

I also want to acknowledge those who never had a dad. Maybe you had a father, one who provided DNA, but not a dad. Wil Wheaton says it better than I ever could, so go read this.

For those of you who are dads, happy day! I had a great day and I hope you did, too. I started with the laundry and breakfast (the usual Sunday) and then picked strawberries at our CSA farm. They’ve been growing organic vegetables for about 45 years and I’ve been buying from them for about 45 years. In 2016, they were named “Organic Farmers of the Year“. While you might not be close enough to buy from them, check out community-supported agriculture in your neck of the woods. There are plenty of excellent farmers out there. CSA, for those unfamiliar, is a way for the community to help capitalize farming and share some of the risk. We pay upfront for the season (there are variations), since farmers face major costs at the time of year when they lack income. If it’s a great year for strawberries, we get lots of strawberries. If not, we may get a lot of spinach that year. Each week is a new adventure and a lesson in seasonal eating.

When I got home I picked some rhubarb to go with the fresh strawberries. Strawberry season is short here (maybe three weeks) and there is not always a good overlap with rhubarb. I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie, strawberry-rhubarb sauce, a smoothie, a gallon of frozen berries, and my wife made strawberry shortcake. The pie still has to cool. We had a Zoom lunch with the kids and my daughter-in-law’s father. Later we re-enacted becoming a father, without the kids.

I am not a fan of single-use kitchen gadgets. One doesn’t need 37 assorted knives. An 8 inch French knife (nowadays known as a chef’s knife), a good paring knife, a serrated knife to cut bread; most of the rest are superfluous. I will admit I like a few single-use items – a strawberry huller and a cherry pitter come in pretty handy. A good rolling pin and a pastry cloth. You can tell I like to bake pies.

The Summer Solstice seemed like a good time for the New Glarus Ride. I wrote of it last year. The wild roses were in bloom this week. Dougherty Creek Road was newly chip-sealed. The sound of pea gravel striking the underside of a carbon fiber downtube is not one of my favorite sounds; but it beats the ride of many years ago when the chip-seal was so fresh that I had to throw away my tires after the ride – they were thickly coated in tar and gravel that I couldn’t get off. Usually they use oil instead of tar. The climb at the end of Dougherty Creek (up to Prairie View Road) required staying in the saddle. Luckily, most of the climb is after the turn onto Prairie View. I love when the road name tells you about itself.

The ride ends near a pizza parlor. They have good pizza and 80 beers. I looked over as I rode past. No masks, tables too close for comfort. I passed. I’m not ready to eat in a restaurant yet, not even outside. Maybe if the servers were masked and the tables farther apart. The next day I mentioned this at work, and all of my co-workers agreed – they aren’t ready, either. I guess working in a hospital does that to you.

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Wild roses on Prairie View

The long and winding road – nothing beats a downhill S-bend!

Next weekend would be the beginning of Co-op Camp Sierra. Camp is virtual this year, like much of life. I’ll probably drink my morning coffee out on the front porch, as we would at camp. The ride back home to the Bay Area after camp follows the route from this song by Kate Wolf. (The title is misspelled in the video – it’s “Pacheco”.) Mentioning Kate Wolf requires a shout-out to Nina Gerber. Nina was Kate’s accompanist until Kate died, then branched out. She always played the right note and, more importantly, knew how to use the silence between notes. Highly under-rated by the general public, she is highly sought-after by other musicians.

from coopcamp.com. Not the porch for my morning coffee, but for afternoon fermented grape juice.

I am not a (your denial here)

When Richard Nixon declared, “I am not a crook”, we needed look no further than the vehemence of his denial to find the truth.

Likewise, when Amy Cooper said “I am not a racist”, we knew at once she is a racist. (Amy Cooper, for those who don’t recognize the name, is the woman who called police to tell them “An African American man is threatening my life”, knowing full well that a predictable outcome would be that man’s death at the hands of the police; and knowing full well that her claim was a lie and is documented on video.) We know that Lisa Alexander is a racist. She called the police because a Filipino man was stenciling “Black Lives Matter” in sidewalk chalk on the retaining wall of his house. Since this is a wealthy area, he clearly didn’t belong there. Only white people can be rich enough to live in Pacific Heights.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal (6/15/2020), a recent graduate of Monona Grove High School was in the school as a member of the football coaching staff. He was stopped in the hall by a police officer and a hall pass demanded. The coach responded that everyone in the school knew him. The officer is quoted as asking “what someone new would think about seeing ‘a big black guy’ walking around the building”. I suspect the officer doesn’t think he was being racist, merely acknowledging the possibility of racism in others. But if you care more about a white person possibly being made uncomfortable by the presence of a black person than you do about that black person, that’s racist. If it is the black person who needs to adjust/accommodate, that’s racism.

About 45-50 years ago I saw and heard U. Utah Phillips ,”the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest”, for the first time. He lived in Spokane, Washington, which has since become a stronghold of racists of the blatant variety. To paraphrase, Phillips admitted to racism and told us that anyone who denies being a racist is clearly a racist. To be a white person in the US (or anywhere on earth) and deny racism is like being a fish and denying water. It is the world in which we live. That both makes it hard to see and impossible to be separate from. But we are not fish. We can look for it within and without; and we can fight it within and without. We can live as anti-racists, not mere deniers of racism. When we say or do something racist, we can call it that; not a “mistake”, not “the wrong words”; and not claim that we can’t be racist because we have a black friend or co-worker.

While I can’t find video of Phillips talking about racism, here’s the next best thing:

Bicycling magazine ran an essay about racism in bicycling. That was the prompt for this entry. Responding to one of the racist comments wasn’t enough. The writer, the former Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, is identified as an attorney and a gender non-conforming queer Black woman. She says “Bicycling cannot solve systemic racism in the United States. But systemic racism can’t be fixed without tackling it within bicycling.” Almost as interesting as the essay is the comments section, including “‘Systemic racism’ in America is a complete myth – as false as the claim that ‘people of color’ are being oppressed.” (As of this writing, 29 people have “liked” that comment.) Other commenters think discussing racism has no place in the world of bicycling. We should just talk about spending money on new stuff. Luckily, those comments are not going unanswered.

Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald, to whom I often turn as a voice of reason, put it this way when talking about what to say and not say when you commit a racist act:

“I won’t insult your intelligence by saying ‘I am not a racist’ because I know I am. As a white person in a society where every institution is geared to advantage people like me, it is literally impossible for me to be anything else. In that, I am like a man in a male-dominated society. He cannot help being sexist, his good intentions notwithstanding. Saying he’s not sexist is like a fish saying he’s not wet.

“Many of us as white people struggle with that. That’s because we process racism as a loathsome character defect, when really, it’s the water in which we swim.

“No, the question is not whether we are racist, but what kind of racist we will be. Will we be the overt kind, whose behavior marks her from a mile away? In many ways, her very obviousness makes her the least dangerous.

“Will we be the racist in denial, who thinks that because he doesn’t use racial slurs and eats lunch with a black guy at work, he’s all good? He’s ultimately the most dangerous, because his racism is reflected in implicit bias but otherwise hidden, even from himself.

“Or will we be the racist in remission who knows good intentions are not enough, that he must consciously commit not simply to being non-racist, but actively anti-racist?“

Can someone help me out here? It seems that, by definition, to take up arms against one’s government is treason. I guess that the confederacy wasn’t trying to overthrow the US, just secede from it. But still, why would we name our military bases for the generals that took up arms against us? And why, years later, would our own president be opposed to changing those names? He has already said that he doesn’t like losers and he like veterans who weren’t captured. You’d think he wouldn’t want to name a bunch of military bases for a bunch of losers, but by my count, 10 US military installations are named for confederate generals. Of those, 6 surrendered, 2 were killed in battle, and 2 were captured – they all sound like losers to me by the president’s definition.

As for the title, I owe a debt to Lou and Peter Berryman for “(Your state’s name here)”.