Glory be to God for dappled things, pt. 4

Heat-stroke-induced catatonia is rest, but it is not sleep. In fact, I slept for only three hours, kitted up at 6 am and walked out to the lobby to claim my continental breakfast.

(Aside, re: "continental breakfast". What is that supposed to mean? Is it supposed to refer to culinary traditions in Europe? Because I don't think donuts and Fruit Loops are the default morning edibles there. Nor is drip Maxwell House the preferred coffee-based beverage. I don't mind the breakfast, but please, just call it what it is: "Complimentary Industrial Sugary Shit Breakfast".)

Here in the lobby, I was accosted by one of the aforementioned cougars, purportedly around my age but entombed in the decaying flesh of a senior citizen. I could recount her dark life of trauma for you (and tell you her credit score) but why would I? Just to pass along the discomfort? Let me just sound the alarm: when someone matching the foregoing description, someone artificially blonde and with a raspy smoker's voice of the sort ordinarily used to summon the dead, purrs/growls, "Mind if I sit down?" in the Front Royal Super 8 Motel lobby... just say no.

I was rescued, incredibly, by a group of cyclists, five middle-aged guys from Lancaster County. They've been riding from Pennsylvania down to the bottom of the Shennendoah on Memorial Day weekend for fifteen years, and were preparing to cover the length of the park today, 115 miles, with someone's kind wife driving sag support. What an amazing, enviable tradition. PA long-distance cyclists: congratulations, and from the bottom of my heart, thanks for the rescue.

Two donuts and two styrofoam cups of coffee (viz., one Continental Breakfast) later, I headed out into the park and started a gentle uphill grade, relieved that my legs would still turn the pedals after yesterday. The park was wet, cool, quiet -- no cars for the first ten miles -- and full of animals.

I saw flea-bitten deer, strutting wild turkeys, ring-necked pheasants, assorted song birds (who, apart from specialists, can identify all the little birds anymore?), a black-and-white snake poised to strike on the inside of one of my turns, and some strange migration of millipedes, all crossing the road in parallel. The first pullout under construction was a millipede massacre. Hundreds of squished millipedes, lives cut short by construction equipment. Talk about dappled things...

And so it would go: animals live and dead, more often the latter. I saw dead baby opposums, dead squirrels (many, many), a dead fox, a dead groundhog, and a dead snake of the same species as the live one I saw earlier. It was good to have a reminder of my chances against the almighty automobile.

A woman I met at a rest area, a through hiker traveling from Georgia to Maine, saw a bobcat sitting on a tree limb just that morning, her first bobcat sighting on the AT. She and I guzzled chocolate milk together and talked about the teaching profession, from which she's recently retired. I hope I'm the type of person who hikes the entire AT when I'm in my sixties. Respect.

The Skyline Drive continued upwards for most of the day. 18 of the first 21 miles from Front Royal were uphill and given the exhaustion from yesterday and the lack of sleep, I was going *very* *very* slowly. Also, the Antares was starting to work its magic on my hindmost parts. Yeah, it's quite beautiful in the Shenandoah, with vistas this way, vistas that way, gradual slopes and steady, swooping corners, blah, blah, blah.

But my butt really hurt.

And I guess nature programed us to put butt comfort ahead of the finer aesthetic pleasures in life. (Maslow needs this in his pyramid.) So, my memory is just a series of ever-shifting pains, mostly centered on the butt area, as I made constant adjustments to my position on the bike.

One more encounter story before signing off. Memorial Day weekend was Rolling Thunder, and all of my riding was accompanied by Harley types booming past. My experience out there proved the good sense of Harley Davidson's sponsorship of a bike racing team. Not only do the Battley-Harley boys ride like they have motorcycle engines hidden in their bottom brackets, the actual Harley enthusiasts are extremely considerate to cyclists. First of all, I can always hear them coming. Secondly, when they do come by, they give me plenty of room. And finally, they're genuinely nice people. Along the Skyline Drive that day, no fewer than five bikers offered me cold bottles of water, and one offered me a sandwich. I also got the thumbs-up from a lot of riders. I think they realize, being out in the air and close to the road, what it means to fight an 8% grade for a few miles. They also realize what it's like to be constantly on the watch for cars.

So, shout out to Rolling Thunder.

More to come...

Glory be to God for dappled things, pt. 3

Where was I? Nature, poetry, religious ecstasy... heatstroke. Yes, heatstroke.

I suffered heatstroke once before, last year on a muggy day in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was also on the bike that day, and should have known something was wrong when I kept mistaking gargantua-homes for clubhouses and lawns for fairways. Except that's an easy enough mistake in Greenwich even when you're not delirious. There is nothing in the DC area that compares, wealth-wise, or power-wise even, to hedge-fund-funded Greenwich. DC is their hired help, the lowly service sector.

Anyway, I got lost in Greenwich, wandered in circles, pulled over and vomited into someone's bushes, and finally collapsed onto a lawn. Over the phone, my girlfriend quickly diagnosed heat stroke and told me to stay put. I felt my way down to the train station instead, but once inside, couldn't figure out how to swipe my credit card. Nor could I form the words to talk to the attendant. Did I want a round-trip ticket or a one-way pass? Where was I going?

How was I supposed to know? How was I supposed to solve these spatial-relations puzzles or answer such enduring paradoxes? Shall I resolve the mystery of consciousness and reconcile free will with determinism while I'm at it?

Eventually, I got on the right train and stared blankly for the sixty-mile return trip to New Haven, skin lobster-hued. The whole evening was spent gazing into space with not a thought in my head. Even the next morning, I didn't feel well, spoke little, and ate almost nothing. Lesson learned: heat stroke sucks. If you see the signs, do not dismiss them, as you will most certainly be tempted to do. (I kept insisting on the phone, in uncharacteristially crude language, that I was "not a pussy" and could continue on to NYC, my intended destination.)

If you feel heat stroke coming on, go to a cool place, take in some liquids, and rest.

So this time I took measures against rising body temperatures, cooling off first under a bridge and then in a general store, where they had a table set up, with old people sitting around it solving crossword puzzles. This was my first encounter with the folks of rural Virginia: hospitable, warm, and mystified as to why anyone would want to ride a bike on a hot day.

I started forming hasty generalizations about the people out here. I know the base of evidence is slim, and people are people, etc., but this is something that cannot be helped. My long weekend of meeting countryfolk yielded the following:

1. Old people out here are *great*. They have a lot of time on their hands. They all want to tell you stories about the past, about how things have changed, about their geneologies, about the formation of the park and how residents were kicked off the mountain by the federal government, how those who refused to leave had their homes burned to the ground. They use words like 'kin' in non-ironic, non-legal contexts. Very cool freakin' old people.

2. The young people here are like young people anywhere, except they reproduce earlier. I talked to a 4-months-advanced 21-year old in Front Royal whose 15-year-old sister was also expecting. According to her, this was not unusual.

While the elderly cling to the past, the youth just want to get out of their small towns and into the modern world.

3. Those between young and old... Hmmmmm. I don't have the kindest generalizations for them.

The women seemed a little too interested in me and looked a solid 15-20 years older than their stated ages. Obesity may have something to do with it, but it could also be the heavy smoking, drinking, and hard life that ensues when you're pregnant at 15.

Yes, I am impressed that you have a good credit rating. But no, that doesn't mean I'm into you. Sorry.

The men? Two anecdotes will have to suffice. On the third day of my journey I walked into a pizza-and-wings place in Front Royal and ordered their hottest wings: "suicidal". Next step down was "homicidal". Not sure why. Two giant flat-screen televisions were mounted on opposite walls. The first was tuned to CNN. The second was ESPN something-or-other (no, not the "ocho"!) featuring 800-horsepower 4x4 trucks circling around a course of mud. Guess where all eyes were turned?

Second anecdote. On one downhill section, which I was bombing in the high 30's, I saw a truck approaching from behind me, but couldn't pull over any further, as there was no shoulder. At the bottom of the hill, things widened briefly and I braked and pulled to the side to let him pass. My reward? The passenger leans out of his window, slaps the side of his gun-rack-outfitted pickup and yells "Asshole!" Why? Because I'm in lycra? Because that inflames his suppressed homoerotic tendencies? I don't know. I have a brief moment in which I contemplate entitling my blog post, "Fat, Retarded, and Packing Heat," but I think better of it.

Final observation. I saw some actual mullets, again, sported non-ironically as far as I could tell.

Back to the journey. Seven miles after the general store I am in a room in the Super 8 Motel in Front Royal, staring blankly at the wall. It takes me two hours to cool off enough to realize that time is passing and that I should probably force myself to eat something.

Two nights later, I would again stay in the Super 8, this time clearheaded enough to realize that the room has a television. Showing? Oh Brother Where Art Thou & Idiocracy.

More to come...

Glory be to God for dappled things, pt. 2

Most people don't think of the bike as a practical way to travel. While many of us have done centuries (typically, supported) or taken in 80 miles in a training day, we still won't go from *here* to *there* on a bike. We drive. We fly. We take a train. The exceptions are fully-loaded tourers and decked-out commuters. But what if you just have a racing bike and no racks, panniers, and such?

Truth: if you're not riding across the continent with Habitat for Humanity, you don't really need any of that stuff.

I planned my Memorial Day trip on a lark; I made reservations and got out the door in less than an hour, everything I needed stashed in a backpack fit for a sixth grader.

I left the city around 2 p.m., the same time as everyone else. Across the Chain Bridge and out through the suburbs, I flowed through the gridlock around me, lungs heaving, heart pumping, legs spinning. Around me, people sat motionless in their steel cages, blood pooling in their extremities. I imagined they were practicing zen techniques. Confined in expensive, high-powered vehicles, they were averaging the pace of an overweight jogger. How frustrating.

Virginia's tangle of asphalt ribbon represents a failed, decaying way of life. It's ridiculously resource intensive and it's hideously, hideously ugly. We are going to look back on this recent period of strip-mall-and-subdivision-development and cringe.

Yet there is an indescribable thrill in blowing through all the man-made ugliness at 20-24 mph under your own power: past the auto malls and gas stations, the chain restaurants and condo complexes ("Already Half Full!", i.e., still half empty), through the underpasses and by the quarries.

I went faster than traffic from DC out through the Manassas battlefields, where the road was still a parking lot. Then I took a right turn. Suddenly, no traffic. I stopped at a nearby gas station to refill my water bottles. Whoa! A southern accent I could barely decipher. Just like that, I was in a different Virginia. Red State Virginia. "Real" Virginia. A major improvement, aesthetically speaking, over Nouveau Riche Virginia.

Back on the bike now, I am hammering. The miles are ticking off and I'm deliriously happy. No more diesel fumes and honking horns. I'm gazing under green oaks, out at decaying farms and gentle-sloping hills. This countryside is speaking to me. Whose voice do I hear? Walt Whitman's? That "American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual". Just like this landscape.

Maybe it was the sight of Bull Run that brought Whitman to mind. Maybe because the fetishization of the Confederacy just annoys the hell out of me -- more on this in a bit -- that I recall the over-the-top line:

Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses.

In other words: kick some ass, Union.

But Whitman is not the voice of this place. What I hear is Gerard Manley Hopkins. What I see are the dappled things of Pied Beauty. "Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough." I see things "counter, original, spare, strange". I can't bring all of the lines to mind, but his words land like stones.

Now it's "God's Grandeur". The world does seem charged with the grandeur of God. Yes...

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

What language! What language! Who should be reading this? An old man. A superhero. Ian McKellan!

I look down at my arms and see goosebumps. Am I really having a religious experience? I'm not sweating. I have no appetite. The water from the gas station is still in the bottles, yet I'm not thirsty. Hmmmmm...

How does the poem go? It's an argument.

And for all this nature is never spent

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

So... nature's resilience proves God's sovereignty? The Holy Ghost freshens up the world overnight? After the suburban wasteland I've just ridden through, it doesn't seem like the strongest case anymore. This countryside exists because the people who live on it are too poor to despoil. The park I'm going to see tomorrow exists courtesy of FDR. The Holy Ghost had nothing to do with it.

My speed has dropped. My skin is dry and bright red. It's heatstroke.

More to come...

Glory be to God for dappled things, pt. 1

Conestoga left me with a wheezing, hacking cough, and on my following trip to New York it worsened. I returned to DC hung over, exhausted, and severely respiratorily infected. I also faced some irreversible and, as always, bewildering life choices. What to do?

Trial and purification... by bicycle.

Friday morning I plotted a four-day soul-and-body-cleansing route. That afternoon I would ride from DC to Front Royal. From there, I'd take the Skyline Drive down the Shenandoah to Elkton on Saturday. From Elkton back to Front Royal on Sunday. Home on Monday. Around 70-75 miles per day.

The trip would have been more fun with company, but fun was not the goal. This was a religious thing; it was about corporal mortification. I was supposed to reflect, have visions, or whatever. I sojourned alone.

As it happened, I made no life choices and failed to rid my lungs of invaders. I did find a substitute for the cilice, though. It's called a Fizik Antares.










The Antares is a brilliant invention, really, because it serves a dual monastic purpose. Not only does it mete out constant doses of pain, right up to your threshold. It's also an effective, if temporary, sexual disabler. Ride this baby enough and, like Origen of Alexandria -- who, according to Eusebius and Jerome, castrated himself to stave off sexual temptation -- you'll never have to worry about breaking that vow of celibacy.

More to come...