Food!

[Ed Note: This was to be published on July 25, 2022. It is in my “drafts” section, which leads me to believe it was never published (and I can’t find it in the published section) – probably because I forgot to push a button. Here it is, over a month later. Happy reading!]

Our rest day is in Northfield, MN, which feels like a home away from home. My daughter went to school here and we stayed here in 2018 during the coast-to-coast ride.

When my daughter was in school and I came to visit, we always went to dinner at Chapati, an excellent Indian restaurant in the Archer House, a 19th century hotel. Alas, it burned in 2020 and is now a hole in the ground awaiting redevelopment. I was told that plans have been approved to replace it with another hotel with retail on the main floor. I don’t know if the restaurant will return.

With that option gone, I had Saturday dinner at The Ole Store, where I had an excellent polenta with a Spanish red wine and a blueberry tort for dessert. Blueberries and basil pair well together so, if I can still find fresh peaches and blueberries when this tour is over, my next peach/blueberry pie will include fresh basil.

Over dinner we shared storm stories. Some folks only saw it in the distance, some waited out lightning in a convenience store and got great photos and videos. No one saw the wind I saw, which was apparently an isolated event along the ridge I was caught on.

Breakfast Sunday was at the Brick Oven Bakery, a favorite of mine for many years for its excellent coffee, pastries, and oatmeal. I was up at 4 AM due to a series of texts from Scotland. My COVID-afflicted daughter was trying to reserve a hotel room in which to quarantine, and the credit card company didn’t want to honor the charge. Try fixing that at 4 o’clock on a Sunday morning from across an ocean.

I killed time until 6 when the café opened; but they don’t serve breakfast until 7, so I had to be content with a cortado and a pastry for the first hour.

Lunch had to be at Tanzenwald Brewing Company, where I heard live honky tonk with my Sunday afternoon beer in 2018. I stopped at the Downtown Bike Shop (where our mechanic, Anders, used to work), then at another shop in order to replace my cue sheet holder, which had been damaged in the Devil’s Tower windstorm and finished off in Saturday’s windstorm. (While the Devil’s Tower windstorm was pretty impressive, it didn’t hold a candle to the wind I faced outside of Veseli, MN on Saturday, a wind I will never forget.) [ed note: 18 hours later, on a beautiful Sunday morning, it’s hard to believe that actually happened just 20 miles from here.]

I also stopped at the Just Food Co-op, where I picked up some Just Coffee to replenish Anders’ supply – he provides us with Moka Bialetti coffee at picnic. Just Coffee is a co-operative out of Madison, WI, and provides a special blend with the Just Food Co-op label – since Anders and I both have ties to Madison and Northfield, it seemed only proper.

Between breakfast and lunch I replaced my chain and cleaned up the bike after Saturday’s excitement. That, of course, required a ride into town to make sure it shifted properly with the new chain. While I have lived without a chain master link tool for many years, I have to admit it comes in pretty handy. The Park MLP-1.2 is a keeper.

Next week we ride through Wisconsin after losing two riders and adding 11 more as well as a new mechanic. We will cross the Mississippi on highway 61 (where “God said to Abraham, ‘kill me a son’/Abe said ‘man, you must be puttin’ me on’/God said ‘no’/Abe said ‘what?’/God said ‘you can do what you want Abe but/The next time you see me comin’ you better run’/Abe said ‘where do you want this killin’ done?”/God said ‘out on highway 61’” – Highway 61 revisited – Bob Dylan), ride the Sparta to Elroy trail – the first rails-to-trails conversion in the US [don’t tell anyone but I might take an alternate route], ride through the beautiful Devil’s Lake State Park, cross Lake Wisconsin on the Merrimac Ferry, then continue on to Manitowoc where we will cross Lake Michigan on another ferry.

Featuring the great Sam Lay on drums, Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Al Kooper on keyboards, and Bob Dylan on Acme siren. I thought it was a cheap child’s toy, but the Acme version is sold as a musical instrument (and made by the maker of the Acme Thunderer – a really loud metal whistle).

Bare Necessities

Growing up, I was taught that the necessities of life were food, clothing, and shelter. Going to work, I found those definitions changing. This is another story alluded to in an old post – “a story for another time”. Here we are, in another time.

So what are the bare necessities in my book, and how did I find them? My first full time job was in a restaurant – preparing food for people. My first “career” was in a grocery co-operative – providing basic food via the Willy Street Co-op. I was pretty sure food counted as a basic need.

After 10 years I left the co-op and moved to Northern California, where I was Maintenance Director (then Financial Manager and General Manager) of the Twin Pines Co-operative Community, a community of 79 families that jointly owned an 80-unit low-income housing co-operative (the 80th unit was a rental reserved for an employee and I was the sole renter for part of my time there). I learned that the Silicon Valley was not filled with Yuppies. Before it became the Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was The Valley of Heart’s Delight, a vast area of fruit orchards. Now I knew why the supply of apricots had dried up back when I was in the grocery biz – the orchards were being ripped out for factories, office buildings, and housing. (The apricot supply has since recovered somewhat.) There were people who worked in those factories and were the secretaries in those offices and who fixed the fancy cars of those over-priced engineers. They were the people I worked for, and they needed a place to live. Yup, housing made my list.

I’d always had a side job or two. While at Willy Street I was a volunteer programmer at WORT-FM, a listener-sponsored community radio station. I was a patient advocate at the Near East Side Community Health Center, and I was the local representative of FLOC (the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, a farmworkers union started in the tomato fields of Ohio – they later merged with the UFW). In California my side job involved co-operative housing in Nicaragua.

In Nicaragua I found that the Matagalpa River (where we cleaned up after a work day) was also where everyone did their laundry and drew their drinking water, as well as where towns discharged their raw sewage. We found a mountain spring, had the water tested, built a dam and a pipeline, and supplied pure water to the houses we were building. (Fred Colgan deserves the lion’s share of the credit for that.) While we weren’t big enough to set up a sewage treatment program, we dug outhouses so sewage from our little community would not go straight to the river.

When my second visa expired I moved to San Francisco and became a plumber (after a side trip for the Mole Poblano tour, o quiere decir La Vuelta de Mole Poblano). It was pretty clear that clean water and sewage treatment made the list of bare necessities, so I made my living doing that. I mostly did residential service work, but also some remodeling and work in bars and restaurants. I used to tell people that my job involved hanging out in gay bars at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Life being what it is (and a story that I probably won’t bother telling here unless shelter in place lasts a really long time), my plumbing career came to an end. I became a college student and then an occupational therapist. Before I became a patient, I had never heard of occupational therapy. My sister (a Speech and Language Pathologist) defined occupational therapists as the people who come up with a simple commonsense solution to a problem; a solution that seems obvious in retrospect. Then she’d realize that she hadn’t though of it. When people ask me what the difference between a physical and an occupational therapist is, I sometimes say the PT’s job is to make sure you can move around, and my job is to make sure you can do all the things you want to move around for. It is a job that varies widely depending on the setting you are working in; and the lines between what I do and what my PT partner does are sometimes pretty blurry. (If you really want to know the gritty details, I have a 13 hour online course for you. Someday I may be able to do it live again.)

I saw firsthand how much access to healthcare depends on money, and how the US, unlike most industrialized countries, lacks a healthcare system. (I work in a hospital that provides care to all regardless of ability to pay – but that doesn’t mean they don’t get billed later, and it clearly affects the care they get after discharge.) Other countries have a healthcare system. We have an insurance system. Healthcare was now clearly on my list of bare necessities.

A common thread running through these, and made clear by our shelter at home situation, is community. I realized I had found my personal definition of the bare necessities: food, housing, water and sewer, healthcare, and community. I hope my list is complete because I’m closer to 70 than to 60 and I probably don’t want to start another career now. I’d like to pretend I had the forethought 50 years ago to build a life based on the necessities and pretend that my life and career trajectory was planned. Never mind, I don’t even want to pretend that. This was a case of going where life led me, then looking back and seeing what the path looks like. Or, as Robert Hunter said:

There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night…

Le Tour de France/La Vuelta a España/Il Giro d’Italia

The French tour has been postponed and is now scheduled from 29 August to 20 September. The Spanish tour is still scheduled from 14 August to 6 September, but there is talk of moving it to the fall. The Italian tour is being run in a virtual format and the real version may be moved to late fall. The World Championship is also scheduled in the same timeframe as the rescheduled tours.

I think the only answer to scheduling anything right now is “Who knows?” I know of one cycling event scheduled for June that is still scheduled and another in July that has already been canceled.

Stay safe out there…ride alone and enjoy the scenery.