Meat, wrapped in meat

Thank you Minneapolis/St. Paul for solving this.

Blessing

Waiting

It's not fun.

Driving off the spleen

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." – Heman Melville, Moby Dick




Years ago, I remember reading this passage, and to this day I knew where to find it when I was growing grim about the mouth.  Ishmael, heads to sea, I am not as specific about my escape, just that it happens.

Banding Least Tern Adults in South Dakota

I am sitting in an airport (yes, another airport), waiting for a delayed plane that will take me to Minneapolis via Chicago, and eventually one a 1000 mile bike ride through the Great Plains and to the edge of the Rockies.

Lunch at Voss'

It's been a long couple of weeks to be honest.  Emma and I drove out to South Dakota to deliver a truck, and to see how all of the operations were going out there.  In itself, this is an arduous journey, but as always, I like to go as over the top as I can. By the time Emma an I arrived back in Virginia, we were packing for a visit to CNY.
Mom and I left from Harrisonburg to visit with family and friends and to celebrate the graduation of my cousin Samantha.  I like visiting CNY because I can pick and choose my dates.  After years in VA, I am not prepared or even remotely interested in braving the cold and snow.  And if I am going to brave the cold, I think I may pick somewhere else.  As for late June and July, it's can be pretty hard to beat CNY's weather.

 

The View from My Grandparents' Grave Site

It's our custom to drive around while we visit to some of the foundational places in our lives to see if any changes have happened since our last visit.  The changes tend to be fairly drastic between my visits, which are fewer and farther between than my mother's.  That is the nature of change though – if you are there to watch it, it never seems as though much has changed.  Well, not until it has drastically changed.  If you don't watch it happen though, then even small changes are like slaps in the face.  I am happy to report though that all seems to be as it was, or at least close enough not to crowd out the nostalgia.

Now, before I start knocking hats off, I am headed west to ride for a few weeks.  Heading west to drive off my spleen.  I want to thank all of the folks that have supported the ride this year, and in years past.  It is greatly appreciated and I hope to make the most of this chance.  I hope to keep up with the blog again this year so stay tuned.

Little things

The holidays are often a time of reflection. Thankfully, you can find the answers to life's troubling questions in the damnedest places.

Reunions

Reunion (courtesy of Dictionary.com):

–noun

1.  the act of uniting again.

2.  the state of being united again.

3.  a gathering of relatives, friends, or associates at regular intervals or after separation: a family reunion.

The last day of college, spring 2001

I am always fascinated with words like this that are co-opted to mean something clearly related to the original meaning, but also clearly a reduction, such that the actual meaning is lost.  In this case, I would say that it's "uniting" that is the problem.  Does this just mean getting together in the same place at the same time, literally occupying adjacent space?  I hope not.

Reunions are somewhat bizarre. For example, whether it is the large, controlled-environment reintroduction of a high-school or college reunion, or the simple reconnection of old friends, these are rare opportunities where one can straddle time and live in two moments simultaneously.  Nothing and everything have changed.

The drive from Vermillion, South Dakota to Clinton, NY is not insignificant.  To add insult to injury, the route is not necessarily a jewel of the interstate system.  Still, it was going home.  I was on my way to Hamilton College, where I and the rest of the Class of 2001 had graduated 10 years before.  I realize that not many of my post-Hamilton friends comprehend the idea of a college reunion, but you must remember that our graduating class was smaller than freshman biology at many large universities.

We like to make ourselves at home

I don't know about you, but I had some amazing friends in college.  Unfortunately, I have become one of those friends that largely drops off the map for a while, popping up now and again on Facebook.  I guess it was hard since I took a drastically different path and ended up on the other side of the country right out of school.  Those are just excuses though, and the only way to change it it to change it myself.

At any rate, I was afforded 2 days with some of the old crew, and it was great.  I think that the last time that I saw some of these guys was at Ted Stewart's bachelor party in Boston!  And for some of the folks that I saw at the reunion, it was a full ten years!  Everyone looked great, happy, and pursuing their dreams.  I guess that is to be expected given the crowd, but it is always nice to hear it and see it firsthand.

Within moments of reuniting, we had assumed our personas from 10 years past (well a slightly larger, slower, less flexible, and follicly challenged manifestation thereof).  I am not sure what the record time is for befouling a dormitory common room, but I am confident that we were at least competitive.  The moment when I realized how quickly the room had become a sty was precisely when I thought about straddling time, existing in two spaces.  It was refreshing - and we did do the right thing (props to Calvin for spear-heading this) and did the lion's share of the cleaning ourselves rather than leave it for someone else.  That act alone is a sign that there is yet hope for us to grow up, perhaps by the 20th reunion we will have cleaned up our act, but I am not holding out hope.

Team Pace-Cloud - partial reassembly

As if that were not an amazing enough experience, I was fortunate to have another reunion of sorts immediately following the trip to Hamilton.  Slowly, the pieces of team pace-cloud were reassembling for the tour through Virginia.  Pepper and Bridget had agreed to route lead, and Tara decided that she would raise money and ride her home state of Virginia.  I was stuck.  How could I turn that down?  I looked at my calendar and realized that although the Hamilton reunion would keep me from doing the beginning of the state (I have to say that I was ok with missing Afton Mountain), I could race to Virginia from New York and make it just in time to ride into Blacksburg with the team!  Also, if I played my cards right, I could finish out the state of Virginia as well.  I just couldn't pass up the chance, and I am ever so grateful that I decided to do it.  As you can see from the photograph, our reunion was incomplete though.  Miss Liza Starr decided that sweating away in some hut in Cambodia was better than sweating away in some tent in Virginia...wait, I think she might be right!  Liza, no hard feelings, I wish you had been there, but if I were in your shoes, I would have done exactly as you had.  Never pass up a chance for an adventure to somewhere you have never been, you will regret the lost chance.

Although I had to be less "flexible" to straddle the intervening year since I had ridden with Tara, Bridget, and Pepper than the ten years at my college reunion, it was no less rewarding.  Here is the crux, what it means to be united.  We slid immediately into our positions and our old life from the road the year before.  I think it was a little bitter-sweet since Tara and I could not continue for the remainder of the trip, but "you can't go home again," I suppose.

I met my friend and now fellow BTUSFMS alum, Dan Nuckols, at a mutual friend's wedding.  Dan had been in the van, speeding back from San Francisco.  I could see it on his face, the loss, that nostalgic hollow face.  We talked a lot about his trip, about the 2010 trip, and what it means to "go home again."  A reunion juxtaposed with a separation.  I would say to all of the finishers for this year, as they decompress, that though you may not be able to go home again, you can visit.  Like I did in Virginia, in NY, in ND, as I will again whenever I can.  

Loose Ends

I have to confess that I have been working on this post in my head for longer than you would guess. I am not a morbid thinker, far from it, but, in this case, no matter how much I tried, I could not help thinking of what the end would be like from time to time. Anyway, these are some of my thoughts about the end of the trip and what it means to me now that it is over. I apologize if these thoughts seems scattered, but perhaps my previous explanation of this blog’s origins will earn me some leniency.


So I am sitting in a hotel room, approximately 5 days from the finish of the trip. This is a surreal feeling, but it does remind me of a poignant fable. Most of you have heard either the statement or perhaps the fable behind the statement. To paraphrase, simply an ancient monarch once asked his wise men to bring him a statement that was an ultimate truth. The wise men deliberated a long time, and when they were called in front of the monarch to produce this undeniable truth, they said simply "This too shall pass." We are never good at accepting this truth. The reality is, that we hope that the good moments will never end, and we believe that the bad ones will never go away. We grip onto our joys like so much sand, squeezing harder, all the while forcing more sand out, and we wear ours scars like badges of honor - scars we think shall never heal. We are wrong though, and the wise men were right, this too shall pass.

It is this thought that has followed me for the last few days, probably since the beginning of the trip, but the specter has loomed ever closer with time. I am not sure what it will be like for the others on the trip to move on beyond this experience. I would be a fool to think that I could imagine what it is like to walk a mile in another's shoes. For my part, I figure life is like following a thin thread through a dark room. You are never really sure where you are going until you have gotten there, and once you have finished there, you move on, grabbing another thread and blindly following it in hopes that it is the "right" way. So I feel like two months ago, I dropped the thread I was following in that dark room, following another for a time, and now, for better and for worse, I will have to search around for that lost thread from two months ago blindly in the dark…this too shall pass.

I am sitting in the airport in San Francisco now, three days from the end of the trip. I am still checking the helmet mirror I am no longer wearing, thinking of getting coffee for Tara when I wake up, of assuring Bridget that today’s ride will not be too bad (even though she knows she could do it regardless), of watching Liza say she’s tired and then watching her fly up the hill in front of me, and countless other moments that are part of the ether of memory now…this too shall pass. And that is the point right? Otherwise we wouldn’t call them moments, but even epochs, eras, ages, and eons end – we just measure time in smaller increments, but fleeting, though a relative term, is still fleeting.

I was somewhat surprised that I haven’t shed tears yet over all of this. I suppose that I had steeled myself against this inevitability. That is not to say that I am not sad that this moment has passed, but I am glad that I had the foresight to know that it would end, to prepare for it by drinking in every moment as if it were the last of the trip, taking the time to look up at every vista, to eat every single calorie I could, to laugh as often as I could, to share with everyone as much as I could, to just be as much as was possible. For those of you in the “outside” world, I imagine time passed much as it always does, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, until the two months had passed, just like the two before, and like the two after. For me, I was fortunate enough to be pulled out of that spinning, even if for just a little while, such that minutes, hours, and days fell into a singularity and time was compressed, squeezed down so tightly that it stopped – and for that both brief and agonizingly long moment, I was exactly where I wanted to be, exactly where I should be. It is not often in one’s life that he can say something like that, it’s a shame. This trip has taught me that if you squeeze time down small enough, split the atoms of moments, life will seem so much more full, as if those moments never ended, just merged. This idea does not fly in the face of the fable that I talked about earlier, in fact it distills the most poignant aspect of it – if time is fleeting, then make the most of it while you can…this too shall pass.



Now, as we scatter to the four winds, all fumbling in the dark for the lost or new threads we must follow, I cannot help but think about where we will all be. I don’t lose much sleep over this though. I can hardly tell where I will be in ten minutes, let alone in years, and if I cannot tell where I will be, then how on earth will I ever figure that out for anyone else? Have no fear fellow riders – I have a promise for you: if you exert one iota of the effort that you showed on this trip in your “real” life, you will be wildly successful at all you do. Go forth with eyes open to the beauty around you in everyday objects and scenes, go forth with the belief that you can change the world, even if it’s for just one person, go forth with the knowledge that you were part of something massive, much larger than the sum of its parts, go forth with the strength, both mental and physical, that you have harnessed here in this moment, go forth and never fear a hill, literal or figurative, there is always a lower gear, there is always the time, and there are always the friends to help you tackle it…this too shall pass.

I cannot thank you all enough for making this an amazing, life-changing experience – a moment that I will squirrel away and protect viciously through time. I will miss so many parts of this trip, but what I will miss most are my friends.



I tried to find some literature to add to the end of this final post, something that would tie together all my scattered thoughts…I failed at finding one thing, but I succeeded at finding more than one. I hope these end up meaning as much to you as they do to me:

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.



Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.



Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.



Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.



Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.



And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.



He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep



I Taught Myself To Live Simply by Anna Akhmatova

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,

to look at the sky and pray to God,

and to wander long before evening

to tire my superfluous worries.

When the burdocks rustle in the ravine

and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops

I compose happy verses

about life's decay, decay and beauty.

I come back. The fluffy cat

licks my palm, purrs so sweetly

and the fire flares bright

on the saw-mill turret by the lake.

Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof

occasionally breaks the silence.

If you knock on my door

I may not even hear.