Ain’t that peculiar?

I’ve ridden past this corner many times. Tonight I finally stopped for a picture.

I startled a pair of deer on a recent ride. Rather than run uphill away from me, they ran along the shoulder of the road for about 100 feet, then dashed across my path and headed down to the wooded creek bank. Trying to think like a deer, I imagined that they figured that if they were going to be pinned down somewhere, they wanted water and shelter. Either that or they’re just stupid, running across the highway in my path, instead of away from it.

I came around a bend quickly and encountered a pair of sandhill cranes. I braked and swerved to give them space. One paid me no mind. The other, with a few graceful wing beats, rose a few feet off the ground and soared 20 feet down the road, coming to rest in the road again. I was enthralled by how such a big bird could get airborne so quickly and gracefully, and come to rest so smoothly. Apparently it had realized I wasn’t a threat. Its partner was still strolling. Thinking anthropomorphically, I imagined the flyer was trying to be cool and pretend it hadn’t been startled. “I just decided to fly a few feet. It’s cool…”

Another red tailed hawk flew over head. I managed to keep both wheels on the road this time as I watched it soar by 15 feet off the ground. It helped that it crossed just ahead of me, rather than directly over head.

In my continuing Wednesday Night‘s Greatest Hits tour, last week I rode from Lodi to the Baraboo Bluffs, crossing on the Merrimac Ferry and climbing Devil’s Delight Road – short but steep enough to require switchbacks anyway. If any of you remember biorhythms (a popular schema in the ’70s), the theory posits that we have three rhythms that follow sine waves at different periods. If all three line up at the top of the wave, you have a great day. If they all line up at the bottom of the wave, it will be a bad day. Last Wednesday was one of those days. I had no energy. Every climb was a chore. Even going down was hard. There seemed to be headwinds in all directions. After climbing Devil’s Delight, I turned around and headed back down, short of the ridge and cutting at least ten miles off the loop I had planned. At least I got two ferry crossings in.

Luckily I saved the ride that is usually that week and did it tonight. The ride starts at Black Earth; if you see the ground being turned in the spring the reason for the name becomes obvious. The Black Earth Creek watershed contains incredibly rich, black soil – even after 150 years of farming. The route crosses the ridges multiple times, with five steep climbs. The person who wrote the cue sheet for this ride illustrated the climbs with evil grinning jack o’lantern demon faces. I felt much better tonight and the five climbs were great fun, as was the 5 miles along Blue Ridge Road, staying on the ridge until the 40 mph downhill. One of the ridges is occupied by the Camp That Must Not Be Named, where my daughter spent many summers and some winter weeks – and I was a counselor-in-training there 51 years ago. The route includes the “easy” side of Sutcliffe Road, meaning that the downhill side is the one where I have hit 50 mph on my steel bike. Tonight as I approached 50 mph I felt a little oscillation in the frame. Rather than just squeeze the top tube with my knees, I feathered the brakes. Either this bike feels less stable at that speed, or I’m just getting old.

One couldn’t ask for a better late July day for a ride…85 degrees (30 Celsius), dew point 59 (15 degrees Celsius), winds less than 5 mph, just enough clouds to give the place atmosphere, and the smell of corn ripening in the fields.

My post-ride beer was a timely one. I’d seen it in stores but hadn’t tried it. Since I forgot my church key tonight I needed something in cans, and voila!

While my guitar gently weeps

The song could have been written (but wasn’t) while listening to Peter Green. One more round from his guitar gently weeping. First is this BB King song, with an opening that sounds like Mose Allison could have written it – “I’ve got a mind to give up living/And go shopping instead”:

There is also a great 1968 live recording of BB himself available on YouTube; BB being the other great guitarist who knows it’s not the number of notes you play, but the soul you put into those notes. That recording also contains a great organ part and a horn funeral dirge. I’ve been listening to Peter Green all week. Slow blues may not be your cup of tea, but he and his guitar continue to weep with his own song:

It almost hurts to listen to Peter Green. He doesn’t play notes, he draws beauty and suffering from the instrument. His voice aches. But when the song is over, I feel at peace.

RIP Peter Green

The world lost one of its greatest and least-appreciated guitarists today. Peter Green (born Peter Greenbaum) has died at the age of 73.

Green replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1966. When a producer expressed dismay that Clapton had left the band, Mayall replied, “Don’t worry. We got someone better.” Lucille Bogan’s “Sweet Black Angel”, made famous by BB King as “Sweet Little Angel”, was recorded by Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Green on guitar.

Mayall introduced some of the best British blues guitarists to the world. Green, like the others, soon left to form his own band – Fleetwood Mac, with the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie (the only constants in that band’s long tenure). There he recorded his song “Black Magic Woman”. While most of the world associates this song with Santana’s cover version, here is Fleetwood Mac:

While Green was a phenomenal blues guitarist, he and Fleetwood Mac soon branched out, especially as they added additional guitarists. Here is Green’s instrumental “Albatross”:

With the album “Then Play On”, they went in another direction. Here is “Oh Well” from that album:

Green left Fleetwood Mac in 1970. Within a few years they had morphed into a phenomenally successful pop band; unrecognizable to fans of the original Fleetwood Mac. Green disappeared from the public eye after an unpleasant LSD experience in Germany. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and underwent electroconvulsive therapy. He resurfaced a few times over the years, including in the 90s with “Peter Green’s Splinter Group”.

After all those years, it was clear he still had it. He reappeared one last time with “Peter Green and Friends”. While he could no longer tolerate the ravages of touring and his voice was shot, his fingers still worked, as did their connection to his heart. Here, from 2010, is his cover of “Oh Pretty Woman” (not the Roy Orbison song but the A.C. Williams blues song made famous by Albert King).

Peter Green 29 October 1946-25 July 2020.

This post may have nothing to do with bicycles, but it seems like everyone has the blues these days and could use a dose of the blues as treatment.

Goals

Adude I follow recently wrote “Without goals, we’re just meandering through life.” I looked up meander and found: “(of a river or road) follow a winding course”. I decided I was willing to cop to that.

If I’m in my canoe or kayak, would I rather be on a straight shot down the Mississippi, or following a meandering stream? I’ll take #2. On my bike, would I rather be on a road that cuts straight through on a grid pattern, or one that follows the contours of the land, a meandering stream, switchbacks through the mountains, or just the contours of hills and valleys? Gee, I guess I pick #2 again.

Is life a journey or a destination? As a destination, I guarantee you the destination is death. If you want to get there, I know a shortcut. I’m in no hurry. I’d just as soon meander my way there, stop and smell the roses, check out the view from lookouts along the way.

From my meandering, I’ve learned a thing or two about the necessities of life. Growing up I heard “food, clothing, and shelter”. What got me to look at that was my meandering. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) I started with food – first in restaurants and then in a retail grocery co-op. I left there for a low-income housing co-op. From there I went to a third world farming co-op, then a plumbing company, and then to a hospital. And that’s just talking about work, not life.

Along the way I learned about gravity. Water under pressure goes wherever you want it to go. Otherwise it falls down. Natural gas, if not under pressure, goes up. A building, if not constructed so that each part “falls onto” the part below (with the bottom “falling into” the earth), falls over. In martial arts, “the force” is gravity, not something mysterious from Star Wars.

Welcome back. If you read the post at the link, you don’t need the three paragraphs I wrote and cut. So the necessities of life, in my view, are: food, housing, (clean) water and sewage (disposal), health care, education, and community. Not bad for a life of meandering. And life is like a campsite – you want to leave it cleaner and in better shape than you found it.

But what about goals? It would be nice to say that I set a goal to explore the necessities of life and build a career by providing for those needs, but that would be a lie. I meandered into these.

As part of my job, I write goals with patients every day. They have to be functional, attainable, measurable, and time-bound. Do my life and leisure pursuits have to be that way, too?

On the other hand, I rode my bike across the country a couple of years ago. That was a goal. It required training. Training required a series of intermediate goals and actions taken in order to meet them. So I’m not poo-poohing goals completely. But goals are like wishes – they may have unintended consequences. When I hear that someone is “goal-driven” I want to barf. Hell, even my car isn’t driven very often. I’d rather not be driven. I’d rather have goals that are in service to me than to be in service to my goals.

I once went through a 14 day workshop. It was an ordeal. At the end, I couldn’t say much except that I’d gotten through it. I was miserable much of the time. I had trouble keeping my eyes open. I later figured out that the combination of ceiling fans and overhead lights made my eyes burn, and closing my eyes was more to defend them than because I was bored and sleepy. A baseball cap made a big difference. I took the 14 day workshop another time, and this time it was to do more than survive 14 days closed up in a room with a group of people. Surviving 14 days in a closed room doesn’t mean much.

And what do goals mean? Climbing Mt Everest might be a lofty goal. Reaching that goal entails a lot of money and a lot of sacrifice by a lot of people serving you who are not going to reach the summit. It entails a lot of garbage being left behind on the mountain. It often entails people dying. “Everesting” is a big deal now – climbing the elevation equivalent of Mt Everest, but doing it where you are. (So you could climb a 1000 foot hill 29 times – plus a little more if you’re a stickler.) Does that mean anything? Only if it does. In other words, any goal has the meaning you bring to it. Sometimes we as a society give meaning to something (so we keep track of who can run 100 meters the fastest). But is the setting of goals just an indirect means of attempting to bring meaning to life? (My life is meaningless, but if I can just accomplish X, that will mean something.) So do we give meaning to a goal, give meaning to life, experience that life (and our goals) have no inherent meaning (unless you experience that they do), and go on from there? Or do we recall when Flakey Foont asked Mr Natural, “What does it all mean?” Mr Natural’s response was, “Don’t mean sheeit.”

from hipcomic.com. Copyright R. Crumb

Green

The word pales in comparison to what the eye sees. Corn, soybeans, hay, maples, oaks – we call them all green but they are not the same. A nearly infinite variety of greens greets the eye on a long ride (or a single view).

If one tires of green (and how could one?), there are the roadside wildflowers (some are weeds or invasive species) to add variety.

ox eye daisy

Queen Anne’s lace

tiger lily

chicory

sunflower

The fields of flowers defy the camera. The eye and brain can focus on each different flower (those above plus clover – red and white – more kinds of lilies, fleabane, and several whose names I don’t know) and take in the whole array, shifting focus from the individual to the patch in a way that a still camera can’t and would be dizzying on video.

I rode my age Sunday. When I turn 100, that will be a big deal. At 75 it will be a medium-sized deal. The only significance now is how late in the year I did it for the first time. Pre-COVID, the plan was to ride the Death Ride Saturday, about double Sunday’s ride. Riding my age should have come in April to be in shape for the Death Ride.

Have you ever noticed that TV sound effects people use the sounds of loons and hawks when they want to evoke wilderness, whether those birds are endemic to that locale or not? I must say, a hawk sounds much more spine-tingling when it crosses the road 15 feet over your head and lands in a tree on the other side. I advise that you keep your wheels on the pavement while you are trying to watch that hawk. No harm, no foul, as they say in basketball.

Leaving Lodi (where I stopped at a convenience store to buy two bottles of water) I failed to fully zip my saddle bag. I discovered it about 25 miles later, and knew that my money clip was missing. I figured that it could have fallen out immediately in Lodi (meaning either it could be turned in or my identity could be stolen) or it could have fallen out on miles of back roads, where it may never be found. After I ordered a new driver’s license and went to bed, the County Sheriff called to say my money clip with cash and license had been turned in.

I drove up to Lodi Monday (home of Susie the Duck) and discovered that the finder had taken only a $2 reward before turning it in. Since I was out and about in a motor vehicle, I continued to Brigham Park to clean our adopted highway. Once again, Busch Light beer cans were the winner for volume. For number of items there was competition from cigarette butts and those plastic markers highway crews glue to the road to show the painters where to paint new lines. FYI they don’t remain stuck forever but end up scattered along the road.

The irony award goes to a whisk broom and dustpan set. Second place goes to three Mountain Dew bottles, two Three Musketeers wrappers, and an Acucheck bottle all in the same spot. Honorable Mention to a “Pandemic Survival Kit”. The only thing remaining in the kit was the mask. I guess the owner doesn’t really think the pandemic is a hoax (hence keeping most of the kit), but tossed the mask to protect his/her conservative credentials. Speaking of which, the cashier and I were the only people in the convenience store wearing masks Sunday. Today masks become mandatory in all indoor spaces that are not your own house (in this county), but Lodi is in the next county. There are no statewide regulations here, thanks to a Supreme Court that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ruling class, with major investors The Bradley Foundation and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and a well-gerrymandered legislature. (If you ain’t from around here, the Court threw out the regulations from the Governor and Department of Health Services, and the Legislature shows no interest in regulations. Daily case counts are increasing rapidly.) (Speaking of the pandemic, the AP reported this weekend that the last words of a 30 year old man in San Antonio were “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.” He died after attending a COVID party. And just so you know the US has no patent on crazy, a group of bus passengers in France pulled the driver off the bus and beat him to death rather than don masks.)

When I die, if there are any ashes remaining after they scavenge me for parts, scatter them here. If there aren’t any, burn some wood and scatter those ashes. I grew up in a church that didn’t believe in transubstantiation. We drank grape juice, symbolic of wine, symbolic of blood; and ate cubed Wonder bread, symbolic of the host, symbolic of body. Therefore, wood ashes could easily symbolize my remains.

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  scatter a few on the other side of this stone wall

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  Scatter some more in front of this bench, along the roadside, and in the field across the road.

The wall is where we sit, out of the wind, to eat our potluck dinner after rides. The bench is where we cheer on the latecomers making their way up the hill. The spot, the view, and the climb (right to left) are among my favorites, and why we adopted this stretch of road. If you need a place to remember me, this is it. Lest you think I’m morbid, I plan to outlive most of you.