Trying not to ride off the Cultural Shelf

By Christopher Cudworth

In some places the Cultural Shelf is a geological reality.

On the western edge of the sprawling Chicago Metropolis is an ancient ridge of gravel deposited by receding glaciers 10,000 years ago.

Most people who live in region seem to have no sense of this geological fact, or the history of this part of Illinois, and its subtle glory. But those of us who run and ride on it can literally feel the glacial ridge as we cross from east to west in Kane County.

The highest points in the region, after all, are glacial hills. They rise 150 to 200 feet above the otherwise low, rolling landscape. One such hill is called Johnson’s Mound. The steepest grade on the road up and over this prairie kame is 9%. Not much by mountain standards, but enough to challenge the legs and make the false flats feel like nothing when you ride back out onto the road.

The Cultural Shelf

Beyond topography, there is a geopolitical ridge in our region as well. One might call it the Cultural Shelf. Of course the giant city of Chicago dominates state politics for better or worse. But where the city ends, resistance to the urban, liberal, Democratic regime that runs it begins.

Illinois is technically a Blue State according to political analysts. But Illinois has also had its share of Republican governors. The last good governor was probably Jim Edgar, the only Republican or Democrat that, in recent years, has not gone to jail for corruption of some sort or another. Of course the most famous Republican of all was Abraham Lincoln, and Illinois is called the Land of Lincoln. But by today’s standards he would be a Democrat: Freeing the slaves and combatting the so-called government intrusion claimed by the Confederacy were all liberal ideals. The Cultural Shelf also shifts tectonically it seems.

Expectations high and low

So the Cultural Shelf in Illinois is not one of mere politics, but of highbrow and lowbrow expectations. If you know how to look, you can feel the Cultural Shelf just as surely as you can feel the glacial spine that splits our region in two.

The road divides

One can only hope drivers take the sign literally

Riding your bike on the roads west of the Tri-Cities of St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia is an experiment in tolerance and the supposedly highbrow practice of sharing the road. There are even signs stating SHARE THE ROAD on every major county highways.

Another road sign says  CYCLISTS USE CAUTION, which is just brilliant, because the wording can apply to motorists as a warning to watch out for people on bikes and to cyclists as an instruction to use caution when riding.

The CYCLISTS USE CAUTION sign sits on one of the hilliest roads in the whole county. My Strava app lists the sequence of hills as the Burr Road Rollers, but what they really are is a product of some long ago glacier stalling out, leaving uneven piles of gravel in deep hills and pits. There are also little bowls of vernal wetlands here, and rare species of plants and frogs as a result. But it takes highbrow thinking, not lowbrow ignorance, to discover or appreciate these things. And it is symbolic in some way that the rollers sit precisely on the divide of the Cultural Shelf.

Backlash and backwaters

The county has for years now been buying up the most natural parts of our local landscape with $70M in funding handed to it through a tax referendum granted by the citizens of Kane County to preserve some of the better aspects of an otherwise egregiously abused landscape.

Once a prairie state, Illinois has but 1/10^th of 1% of its natural prairie remaining. Some tiny shards of that pristine land are found in Kane County. Most of it cowers along railroad beds or other remote spots where native plants like bluestem, compass plant and prairie dock grow, and even rarer plants, if they’ve been lucky enough to hold on. They literally escaped the plow.

Restoration

The remaining prairie is in restored remnants, placed there by volunteers in painstaking efforts lasting more than 40 years. I personally planted a 15’ X 15’ plot of bluestem and Indian grass back in 1973, working with a fellow student on a hot summer day when it seemed like nothing we planted would ever amount to much. The seeds we planted that day had been carefully prepared for the moment, frozen and set into pots for propagation and that we later shoved into the ground. Those plants are now part of a four acre restored prairie at the trailhead of the Great Western Trail, a bike and running path that now extends from St. Charles all the way out to Sycamore, 17 miles away. The prairie now serves as a kickoff for hundreds of runners and riders who may have little knowledge that their first steps pass through a couple of acres of plants with a 10,000 year history in Illinois.

Reversion

The point here is that the Illinois landscape has been undergoing a tiny but persistent reverse transformation in some places. Some might call it a regression of sort, for it flies in the face of the supposed progress that brought civilization and prosperity to Illinois 180 years ago when the landscape was first settled. Farmers used steel plows to tear up the prairie and turn it into sod for crops. Then they placed drain tile in the soil to siphon off the giant marshes. It worked too well. Within 30 years the prairie was gone, and with it went prairie chickens, upland plovers and dozens of other species of birds and animals whose very existence depended on the prairie ecosystem.

Nowadays the county is breaking those drain tiles, restoring water to ancient swales and magically, the plants that once existed there come back, like dormant souls. But the tendency in some quarters is still to label such places a swamp and turn them into retention ponds, the ultimate insult to nature. But a recent series of floods has made it clear that natural water sinks are vital to real water management. Illinois is reclaiming its natural history in some respects.

But the notion of restoring the prairie is a highbrow but backhanded slap at the somewhat lowbrow (drain, plant and harvest) initiatives that killed off the prairie in the first place. Sure, it was hard work being a settler. But couldn’t we have saved at least some of the land that early explorers in Illinois called the most beautiful they’d ever seen? The highbrow succumbed to the lowbrow.

Debts and assets

And here’s where that kind of thinking starts to get real tricky.

The natural processes that built the rich farmland in Illinois are the same processes prairies restorations are trying to restore. The prairie built the soil inch by inch over 10,000 years, and farming cast away that rich soil by feet in some places in less than 100 years.

Walking through a restored prairie west of Batavia where I live, there is evidence of this soil loss along a fenceline. The posts stand on ground that is two feet higher than all the land around it. Until just 10 years ago, this property was farmed, and as a result, for 80 years the soil either sank, washed or blew away. You don’t see it happening as it is occurring, but it does.

It would have continued that way until we hit clay, one must suppose. That’s the dynamic in Illinois and all around the world. We’re feeding the people and starving the land of its richness at the same time. Industrialized farming has not cured the problem. But the fact may be that we can only fool ourselves for so long. The soil itself is not inexhaustible,  we just like to believe it is during these times of seeming prosperity. Somehow the people who think most about the sinful nature of man do not seem able to connect that sinful nature to a propensity for destroying God’s creation. They simply don’t believe in it.

Why is that?

Dust Bowl lessons

We think back to the Dust Bowl on the Great Plains and how seemingly obvious it was that you can’t scratch up the grass holding the soil down and expect the resultant dry soil to stay put. The billions of tons of soil that blew around the plains for 10 years is evidence that human stupidity is damaging not only to the earth, but the people who live on it too. Dust Bowlers clung to their property (and their former prosperity) as it literally turned to dust, then more dust. People died by the thousands, choked to death by dust in their lungs. The land choked them to death.

It was lowbrow agriculture and greed that produced the Dust Bowl. IT was lowbrow thinking that drove the agricultural policies of the times, with false promises of riches, and slogans like Rain Follows the Plow that deceived people into planting the dry prairie.

Settle the Land was the goal. And how ironic. The middle of the nation ran up a big debt, in essence, to the land itself. And that debt, disguised as dust, even blew over the buildings of New York City at one point.

Cycles 

One could argue we’re stuck in a similar cycle today, with nowhere to go but deeper into our own till. Our extraction and pollution policies never fully account for the damages wrought by industry or agriculture. We privatize the profits and socialize the losses. This is lowbrow thinking at its very worst. Then we tack on corporate welfare contributions giving incentives to companies to promote jobs, only to see those jobs shipped overseas. It’s like an economic Dust Bowl. Future for the Middle Class (like the middle of America, the Great Plains) turned to dust and blew away, on the wind.

Making things worse

And where manufacturing was once 47% of the American GDP it now constitutes only 9%.

Sound familiar?

It’s just like the soil in America. We can see what was once there, and is now lost. Washed away from the Cultural Shelf, which sounds an awful lot like a Fiscal Cliff. Life imitates art.

Denial as a worldview leads to cliffs

Yet, we seem happier than ever to celebrate America’s lowbrow culture and policies.

Our politics, for example, are essentially divided over issues like guns (and denial that guns kill people) the Bible (a literal interpretation that results in a denial of science) and sex, marked mostly by a prurient obsession for controlling the sexual behavior of others.

As a nation we’re preoccupied with these issues yet 50% of the population seems bent on denying even a shred of common sense in defining them logically rather than emotionally, or religiously. That sort of ignorance is a straight path off the Cultural Shelf. A plunge toward idiocy.

It’s a country thing

Out past the Cultural Shelf the music on the radio changes to country music where laments over cheating wives and husbands, liquor and a strange brand of patriotism rules the airwaves. You can even haul your country music lowbrow worldview along with you thanks to satellite radio these days. That means the cultural shelf goes where you go.

Lowbrow drivers

More than one cyclist has encountered the citizens who live in lowbrow country, driving a red pickup with guns in the back and all too happy to buzz a cyclist…wearing lycra and riding inside the white line.

Fact is, when you ride out past the cultural shelf, you put your life in the hands of those who don’t give a shit whether you live or die. Because they think they own the road.

Yet the same guy who runs you off the road with his pickup tends to hate big government, which built the roads in the first place. So the whole worldview doesn’t make much sense. But that doesn’t matter to lowbrow thinkers beyond the heights of the Cultural Shelf. They’ll take simple thinking over highbrow reasoning and a skinny cyclist any day.

Lowbrow patriots

One of two bombs explodes during the Boston Marathon

Lowbrow thinking also tends to love the military over all else. Even God and country. Some people confuse the two readily, becoming terrorists for religion, or for nothing at all but their own aggrandizement and feelings of reconciliation. Others join racist militias, spouting conspiracy and exploding bombs in public places or clinging to guns as if they were representative of freedom itself. Those people, all of them, are lowbrow patriots.

Because the ugly fact about our militarized society is that more Americans have been killed on American soil by guns than all the soldiers in all our foreign wars combined. That’s a pretty lowbrow statistic, yet citizens who prefer living beyond the Cultural Shelf would say that’s the price of freedom. The 2nd Amendment is more important to them than human life. Selfish bastards don’t like looking up to anyone with standards. That’s the lowbrow way.

Even our movies celebrate lowbrow types with supposedly high ideals; gun runners, rum smugglers, dope dealers and vigilante cowboys new and old. It’s people who have fallen off the cultural shelf everywhere you look. The new American dream is a lowbrow worldview of “take what you can, any way you can get it.” It applies to Wall Street banksters as much as rural hucksters.

Not so smart

America is supposed to be better than this. But the proliferation of lowbrow thinking and the falloff in appreciation for considerate thought is on the upswing on every front. Even smartphones are apparently dumbing us down. Texting is gutting the English language and the Internet has cut attention spans, a phenomenon started by the supposedly smarter USA Today conversion of newspaper stories from long form to short tidbits. We saw it coming and we still didn’t do anything about it. And some political parties and certain partisan news channels really like low-information (lowbrow) voters who respond better to gut-level, visceral opinion than news or facts.

It’s like a game of chicken pitting a bike against a giant gravel truck. You know who’s going to win because stupid usually wins in such contests. Stupid has no conscience nor fear.

Mark Twain once said, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.”

Unsustainably lowbrow

That doesn’t mean the type of success bred by ignorance is necessarily sustainable. The Dust Bowl is a classic illustration of that, but so was the pollution rampant in the 1970s. We recovered with a liberal dose of humility and changes to our habits. But now we’re facing global climate change, and the lowbrow, off the Cultural Shelf thinking that drives climate deniers is the same brute force stubborn thinking that makes people in country music songs do stupid things.

A new Dust Bowl?

Toward the end of May I drove home from my daughter’s graduation in Rock Island, Illinois. The same windstorm that kicked up that killer tornado down in Oklahoma was blowing like crazy in western Illinois. Farmers had just tilled their drying fields and the dust kicked up by the winds swirled dust-filled mini-tornados everywhere you looked. My daughter was in the car ahead and could hardly see the road ahead at times, the dust was so thick. She got a little freaked out, to be honest, and called me on her cell phone. “Can we pull over?”

So we did, and I ran up to her car and looked her in the eye and said, “We need to keep going or this is going to catch us for real.” She glanced back at the black wall of clouds now shrouding the western horizon. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Actual photo of a New Dust Bowl taken in May 2013 in Illinois

We tarried on, keeping the speed around 50mph as wave after wave or dry brown dust blew so heavy and thick the taillights of the trucks in front of us looked like they were underwater. In the rearview mirror of the U-Haul truck I looked back at the giant black cloud and saw lighting flash red as blood in the clouds. It was a biblical-looking scene, like the rest of America west of the Mississippi River was being closed off for good. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Maybe the Left Behind folks were right after all. America was f’cked.

Finally the dust cleared up a bit and I called my daughter on the cell phone and told her, “Hit it.” We jammed the accelerator and rose up to 75 and got the hell out of that storm.

Parallels on the open road

Some people hate the sight of a cyclist on the road. It bugs their lowbrow worldview. 

It occurred to me at that moment that last summer I had ridden my bike from Dixon back to Batavia on country roads parallel to the road I was now driving. That day there was a tricky East wind that made the ride a lot tougher than it needed to be. But it was fun, and being out in the country on your bike is a feeling like no other. I had ridden back up the cultural shelf to my home on the ridge of the American divide. Surely the people who look out their car windows and think of cyclists or runners as nothing more than selfish, narcissistic nuts fail to appreciate the basic desire to both be in touch with the land and in touch with yourself.

50% lowbrow

One wonders, in a country where something like 50% of the population is chronically obese and another 50% believe in a dumbed down, literal interpretation of the Bible that even Jesus would not have liked, whether the cultural shelf has not already eroded right up to the banks of sanity itself.

Those of us who hear the shrill shriek of voices shouting at us to get the hell off the road, and who hear the gunning engines bearing down on us from behind know that truly selfish thoughts have more to do with aggression than intelligence or consideration. Surprise, surprise.

Cultural freedumbs

But we must draw our own conclusions and in turn, live our lives even in context of those who do not think like us, even those who appear not to think much at all, or at least want to. The freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution do not demand that people give much thought to how their supposed freedoms, like being a bully with their truck on the roads, can impact the lives of others. We’re as free to be dumb as we are free to be enlightened. The Cultural Shelf is proof of that.

We’re all just trying not to ride off the edge, or be driven off by others.

A ride with a daughter on Father’s Day

By Christopher Cudworth

“I might like to go for a bike ride,” she told me.

“Well, your mother’s bike is pretty sweet,” I replied. “It’s a Trek Navigator 2.0. A nice trail bike.”

We lost her mother to cancer in March. Emerging from that event has been done in fits and starts. Now my daughter wants to share some time with me on the bike.

The next thing I knew she was standing beside me in her post-college-girl getup. Green shorts and matching bandanna. A frat shirt from a fundraiser ever. Cruiser sunglasses. And off we went.

The last time we’d ridden together on bikes was probably 2003. She was 10 years younger then. 13 years old. Not yet a woman, but getting there

Now she’s 23 and making decisions in the world. Job hunting, successfully it seems. And making plans for her own place in the city.

The bike ride is even tempo and something like happiness kicks in as I watch her ride in front of me. Later she would say, “I did all the leading.” Because she knows a bit about drafting from watching the Tour and other bike races with me.

But this is a mellow father/daughter ride on a Sunday afternoon––that just happens to be the day of the year we call Father’s Day.

Branded Clunker

Her original bike was this 40 lb. clunker of a machine made by Eddier Bauer or LL Bean. Whatever. It is… Heavy, heavy. She didn’t like riding it, and for good reason. It is heavier than those Schwinn monsters from the 1960.

The Trek Navigator is much lighter, and rolls along smoothly. She points out scenes of interest with her photographer’s eye. She’s riding with me. And I’m happy. There’s something charming in her open riding style. Neither of us has helmets on.  Didn’t need them. She’s cautious and smart at the intersections of trails. Avoids crowds of people on the trail. She’s as good a rider as she is a driver. And she’s a good one.

At home she’s slightly tired and the shower beckons. It was a hot day and I’m sweating too. The dog greets us feverishly because God Forbid we’ve been gone for 30 minutes.

I hear the shower go on. The girl loves the heat but hates to sweat. She might move to Austin, Texas someday. All part of a bigger picture.

During the ride I heard her ask about riding other places. Places she’d like to go. Near and far. The bike can take you anywhere you want to go, daughter. Along with some networking, and a little luck.

Ride on, my daughter, ride on.

Lance Armstrong making reported comeback for 2013 Tour de France

By Christophe Cudowerth, Famouse French Cycling Journaliste

Well, we knew it had to happen. Lance Armstrong is making yet another comeback in time for the 2013 Tour de France.

If you haven’t heard about the comeback, it’s because Lance has been in stealth training mode, living like the Sylvester Stallone character in Rocky IV when the mythical Italian Stallion retreated to a cold, Spartan existence in the Russian wilderness, using old-time training methods to get in shape to beat the world.

Secret training methods

Lance Armstrong trains in the high Rockies pulling a sled with Chris Carmichael on board.

Inside sources say Armstrong hid in the northwest Rocky Mountains (get the pun?) riding steep ascents up and down while carrying burlap sacks of Colorado red rocks on his back to strengthen his already massive thighs and get him ready for what promises to be a mountainous Tour de France this year.

Watch out Bradley Wiggins. Lance is back. Tell your teammate Chris Froome to watch out for Lance too. He’s back. He’s pissed. And there’s no telling what the Too Tested Texan will do this time around.

How he got in

Armstrong gained a rare solo entry to this year’s tour by enacting a long-ago provision included in a contract with the UCI in which the cyclist and his lawyers inserted a provision that stated if he was ever banned from the sport for any reason, he would get a Mulligan, much like you get in casual golf games.

Recently Armstrong cashed in that Mulligan, written as it was on the back of a napkin from a French Hotel.

The stained napkin on which Lance Armstrong wrote the legal agreement that got him back into the Tour de France 2013

To the shock and dismay of the UCI and the Tour de France organizers, Armstrong showed up at a lunchtime meeting between the two cycling powerhouses holding that coffee-stained napkin on which the Mulligan agreement was scrawled. There were signs of bicycle grease on the napkin, and actual fingerprints from the parties involved who signed the unusual provisional agreement that will gain access for Armstrong to this year’s Tour. Those fingerprints were what gave the semi-legal document its credence with cycling’s top tier management.

No team? No problem

Of course Armstrong needs a team to actually compete in the Tour, and he knew that it might come to this some day, so he planned ahead.

Lance was wise enough to put a little asterisk at the bottom of the handwritten napkin that said his solo ride could be multiplied by 5 in the event of a team time trial event in the year of his Mulligan comeback.

Lance Armstrong Power Peanuts. Marshmallow laced with Protein and who knows what else.

Yet there are competing rumors that says former teammate and confessed doper Floyd Landis signed up to ride for Armstrong, who, lacking team sponsors, has been selling special edition boxes of Protein-Laced Power Peanuts to pay for his travel and hotel. Reportedly the product is selling well enough to set Lance up with a bright orange Trek Bike with the logo Power Peanuts on the tube. It looks pretty cool.

Armstrong may have signed up legendary American cyclist Alexi Grewal as well, who last year attempted a comeback of his own at the age of 50.

“It’s fun riding with Alexi,” Armstrong said in a Tweet sent round the world. “He makes me feel young again.”

Hatred a powerful engine

Tyler Hamilton: “I still hate Lance.”

The final cog in the Tour of American Legends is Tyler Hamilton, who has come out of his owned forced retirement to ride on Armstrong’s team. “We need a little hate on the squad to motivate us,” Armstrong admits. “Tyler brings that vital component to the Tour squad, if we ride.”

As for the lifetime doping ban that would have kept Lance Armstrong from competing in the Tour or any other bike race for the rest of his life, apparently there is enough pending television revenue riding on the return of Armstrong that the UCI and other governing organizations have agreed to just look the other way, just this once.

“C’mon,” admitted Pat McQuaid, President of the Union Cyclistes Internationals (UCI), “Aren’t you just a little curious to see what he can do? Especially after riding up and down the Rockies with those bags of rocks on his back?

Killing it on Colbert?

Others are not so enthusiastic. Many in the cycling world remain disgusted by the facts behind Armstrong’s doping confession. Some are petulantly angry that he chose to talk to Oprah and get half weepy about it rather than go on Stephen Colbert and get skewered for being a shallow, stupid lousy liar. But at least that would have been funny. Watching Armstrong squeeze his tight face to keep from farting under all that pressure spilling his guts on Oprah was less than comfortable for everybody watching.

So how will Lance compete in the Tour, given that his team will likely be nothing more than a loose coalition of ad hoc riders, all reformed dopers on other teams,  perhaps willing to pull for Lance when the going gets tough?

Should make for some interesting commentary, to say the least, from the likes of Phil Liggett, who is rumored to have Alzheimer’s disease and has been announcing this year’s race nearly six months in advance of the start of the actual event.

At least he can rave about the French Chateaus. Those are timeless.

 

We Run and Ride. So do you. Let’s share original thoughts.

Busy doin’ nothin’ till we run and ride

It’s great when you get on a training roll and time seems to expand to allow you the freedom and focus to ride or run everyday. But of course it doesn’t always work that way.

Busy Doin’ Nothin’

I had to fix a lot of things this morning
‘Cause they were so scrambled
But now it’s okay
I tell you I’ve got enough to do

There are also those times when training becomes impossible to accomplish. Life doesn’t just intervene. It dominates. You’re lucky if you get one ride in on the weekend and one run in during the week.

The afternoon was filled up with phone calls
What a hot sticky day, yeah yeah yeah
The air is cooling down

You’re so busy with other stuff that you can’t train. Can’t even think about racing. Racing without training is just needless suffering.

Take all the time you need
It’s a lovely night
If you decide to come
You’re gonna do it right

So you’re caught, for the meantime. Busy doin’ nothing.

Such was the case this past week, which kicked off with a giant fun party on a Sunday afternoon that lasted well into the night. My daughter finished college and she deserved a celebration and we had one. 80-90 people showed up, all ready to drink and talk and listen to national class bands and play beer pong.

Drive for a couple miles
You’ll see a sign and turn left
For a couple blocks
Next is mine, you’ll turn left on a little road
It’s a bumpy one

I found a pair of beat up drum sticks in the recycling bin this morning. Had no idea how much abuse a pair of drums sticks gets during a 1 –hour performance, but I pulled them out of the garbage because they’re a genuine keepsake. The group Gold House is going places this year, a gig on Warped Tour to be exact, and the fact that they played their tour set for 80 people in our basement had me so psyched it was hard to believe it was happening.

You’ll see a white fence
Move the gate and drive through on the left side
Come right in
And you’ll find me in my house somewhere
Keeping busy while I wait

But that meant no running on Sunday. Too much prep for the party.

On Monday it was everything we could do to clean up.

Tuesday there was a meeting after work.

Wednesday was supposed to be a date downtown. Then the weather turned nasty and that was impossible.

I get a lot of thoughts in the morning
I write ‘em all down
If it wasn’t for that
I’d forget ‘em in a while

Thursday was a walk with the kids and a little ritual of distributing my wife’s ashes on our favorite spot in a prairie. Dinner too.

And lately I’ve been thinking ’bout a good friend
I’d like to see more of, yeah yeah yeah
I think I’ll make a call

Finally on Friday morning the running shoes somehow got on my feet and I went for a 25:00 run along the river. It has been a week or so since I last ran that trail and the plant growth was evident. We went from spring to summer in that short span. Lots of rain.

I wrote a number down
But I lost it
So I searched through my pocket book
I couldn’t find it
So I sat and concentrated on the number
And slowly it came to me
So I dialed it

And I let it ring a few times
There was no answer
So I let it ring a little more
Still no answer

It’s been a week of being busy doin’ nothing. Tomorrow morning there’s a bike ride scheduled. 2+ hours on the country roads, far away from things that need to be done.

So I hung up the telephone
Got some paper and sharpened up a pencil
And wrote a letter to my friend

(Italicized lyrics from the song Busy Doin’ Nothin’ by the Beach Boys/Brian Wilson)

Singing along as we run and ride

By Christopher Cudworth

On a recent Saturday afternoon a band called What’s On Tap made it’s world debut on a stage perched at the edge of a wooded property where rose-breasted grosbeaks and purple finches sang background vocals in the trees.

The lead singer, rhythm guitarist and bass player were all cycling friends of mine. Each musician is in his late 40s or early 50s. They got the idea for this band while riding, then recruited a couple other musicians including a rocking lead guitarist and set about rehearsing for a year.

Formation

The group had fits and starts getting ready for their first performance. Everyone was busy with life and the lead guitarist had lots of other musical commitments.

But somehow it all came together. Their set included covers of the Black Keyes and the Rolling Stones. The band was tight, the singer capable and the crowd cheered after every song.

There were 50 or so band “groupies” hanging out at the party to see the world premiere of What’s On Tap. One pretty gal held up a sign that said, “I love the bassist.” She happened to be his wife.

Posterity

The rest of us used our iPhones to record the moment for posterity. One semi-official videographer held up what looked like a military grade weapon that was in fact a handheld digital movie camera to record the entire concert. “I think I hit REC…” he said.

Prior history

The lead singer has always been one of those cyclists who break out in song during our longer rides. He doesn’t always get the lyrics right while out on the bike. In fact he never has. I’ve run with him for 40 years since we were high school teammates in cross country and track. We ran in college together too, and lived in a cool little apartment at 1764 N. Clark in Chicago. Those were wild times. He was into grad school and I was into something else, running mostly, and we shared other things as well. Through it all he’d often belt out songs happily butchering the lyrics. The Police. The Eagles. Lucinda Williams. Whatever came to mind, or fit the situation.

Once we were walking together in Madison, Wisconsin during a celebration following the Badgers victory in the national hockey championships. We looked up to see the finest shape in a pair of white blue jeans we’d ever seen. Turning to each other simultaneously, we burst into song, a bit by the Talking Heads…”The world moves on a woman’s hips…the world moves and it swivels and bops….” AAAAAAAHHHH we laughed. Synchronicity.

And during the debut of What’s On Tap, he was spot on with lyrics, the notes. He was, in a word or two, reasonably awesome.

Good job, mate.

Standards

The arc from those long ago experiences running together as kids… to the present day has included weddings, the birth of our children and even a few funerals. We’re old, by some standards. Yet we’re young by so many others.

Riding makes us feel that way. Younger. Typically.

Running, not so much. It’s much tougher to run as fast as you used to once you turn 50 years old. Riding’s a bit easier if you use your experience and pedal with some degree of intelligence.

Kudos

I thought about all those things as my friends worked through their set of well-rehearsed songs. They played well. My singer friend did a very credible job on some very difficult songs. He even dedicated a song to a couple of us in the crowd. The lyrics go like this:

I see those girls go by dressed in their summer clothes…

“I see the girls go by dressed in their summer clothes…

I have to turn my head until my darkness goes…”

Then I turned my head to the comely woman companion who had joined me as a friend to listen to the band. She smiled, happily. It was a warm afternoon at the start of summer. We are the same age, or just about. And that’s good. The way it should be. You can still sing the songs of youth, or listen to them, without having to wish you could go back.

Because you can’t. It’s like pedaling a bicycle backwards. You go nowhere.

Pedaling forward

It is far better to pedal forward, and to pick up an instrument or a microphone and make the sense of the music you know how to sing. Reinvent yourself in the process. Dare yourself into singing your heart out in front of 50 or more people who don’t really know what to expect.

These things make sense together. We run and ride because going forward is the principal thing we know how to do. Singing as we go.

Tattoo you: more to the picture than meets the eye

For a long time I’ve sort of resisted the idea that tattoos are beautiful or necessary.

Yet a number of recent experiences have convinced me that something interesting and good may be going on with the entire world of tattoos. But first, some perspective.

NBA tattoos. Necessary or a sign of insecurity?

On NBA players, they often seem like overkill. Frankly, the whole NBA scene seems vain and inglorious. Despite its seeming height of popularity, the sport seems desperate for attention in all the wrong ways. The many-tattooed players are basically preening for each other like a bunch of battle-worn birds. Behind the scenes, the massive party logic and wild spending of the NBA, and NFL as well, has been exposed for what it is. A fragile and often lonesome game of magnified chance. Players given everything in life blowing through all limits to express their rage at good fortune. Some make it through. Others lose it all. Many proceed to live on the reputation of having been a pro athlete, which is supposedly everyone’s dream.

Down the road

But it makes me wonder what will happen to many of these tattooed players 30 years down the road, if they live that long. When their bodies sag or bloat as many do, how will those tattoos look then?

So many millions of people are getting tattoos that it is not merely imitative of characters in the NBA. Most tattoo wearers make careful choices about what they put on their bodies. Some women choose a demure place to get something significant. Some guys wrap their arms in dramatic style. But they can always cover it up for work.

Transformative meeting

Recently I met a gal in our workplace cafeteria who has a sweet-looking tattoo on her calf. It opened a conversation and it turned out we had something in common in cycling. She’s a mountain biker, and an apparently good one at that. I can make no such claim, yet it was interesting to learn that behind her sweet smile and our casual jokes there resided a person of considerable depth and strength of character.

She could kick my butt on the mountain bike trail or any other time she liked.

She also brought to my attention through a quick social media exchange that she has an entirely different layer of personality, discipline and athleticism as well. She’s a black belt in martial arts, with big honking trophies to prove it.

The entire conversation sort of processed through the tattoo on her leg, as if it were a portal into who she really is. And that’s kind of cool. Perhaps that also explains, in a sense, how tattoos really work. They reveal a bit of the chosen soul.

It may also explain the massive decorative flair of those NBA players. They’re almost trapped in those big bodies banging into each other. But if you go through the pattern of their tattoos, perhaps the real person might emerge. The one who’s not so processed into NBA mode.

The tattoos reveal the rest of the person lurking inside the person we often get to present to the world. Okay, I’m good with that. How about you?

What does a smashed turtle on the road really mean?

A smashed turtle should be a wakeup call to our own manner of existence.

At the tail end of a pleasant 25 mile bike ride this past Saturday morning, I was feeling good about the new bike fit and riding with a pair of riders who happened up behind me at a stop light 15 miles earlier and asked, “Where we going?

Riding with strangers is a dance of etiquette and panache. You need to fold into their pace and riding style and at the same time pull your literal weight against the wind when it’s your turn to lead. Then there are hills to cover, and road variations that can confuse the issues of who really is setting the pace.

But these riders were cool. We pedaled at at 20-24 mph up hill and down, sharing pulls and making 10 miles of rolling terrains down Keslinger Road headed west seem like the perfect place to ride. When they pulled off to head home I said, “Thanks. I rode faster than I would have alone, for sure!”

Giving props

That’s the perfect compliment, I realized. Because rather than saying something potentially selfish or self-centered like, “Hope you guys had a good time” or whatever, a compliment that pays respect to their respective abilities is the right thing to do. Don’t disrespect the peloton no matter how small or large it may be.

And that experience made what came next even more jarring. On the trip back to Batavia on Main Street, the road passed by a series of forest preserves and ponds. And as bad luck and nature would have it, there were smashed turtles along the road. I counted six in just 6 miles.

A snapping turtle that had crawled 800 yards from a glacial marsh winds up dead by the side of the road.

They were snapping turtles and painted turtles. Both are moving across the land to lay eggs in a remote spot where their eggs can hatch. Amazingly, those young turtles that do hatch will find their way back to water eventually. They’ve been doing the same routine for millions and millions of years. Forget Noah’s Ark. The really miraculous acts of nature are found in turtles and frogs and birds and insects that make humble but vital journeys every second of every day, and have been doing that for billions of years. Life is far more important and alive than a fable about some supposedly bearded dude that saved nature from a flood. That’s so freaking naive it begs debate. But in the stead of that longer argument, I submit the photos attached with this article. Smashed turtles are a sign that we human beings are truly disconnected both from nature and reality.

Disconnected reality

Our technology is responsible for this disconnection. We trust it to make billions of decisions for us every day. And when you are hurtling down the road at 60 miles an hour you cannot possibly appreciate the drama of a turtle crossing that road. So the tire strikes the turtle and crushes it’s carefully evolved shell. Another spot of road kill. Another unfulfilled mission. Another evolutionary decision made without much thought. Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s a part of how evolution works. The turtle might not have technically “made a bad decision” in a cognizant fashion but the combination of instincts that led it to a path across a busy road are now erased. The turtle’s potential offspring will never exist. And that’s how nature “improves” upon itself, if you want to call it that.

The harsh facts

Of course 99.9% of all types of living things that have ever existed are now extinct from this world. Some speculate that turtles and frogs, especially, may be headed down that dark road right this minute. Dozens of frog species up and down Central America are vanishing due to a persistent fungus that kills frogs.

So we live in a world full of random decisions. Yet as I looked at those smashed turtles it became evident to me that in a heartbeat, I could look just like one of those turtles with my guts spilled out on the road. All it takes is a texting motorist and bam, the bike and I are thrown 30 feet into the ditch. Worse yet, all it takes is one road rage incident and lives are changed forever. It’s very sad. People indeed have lost all connection to the value of life, their own, or that of others. But religion itself isn’t the cure. It takes both religion and common sense. The two often seem to avoid each other.

Human detritus

It happens. Give or take a few human lives, there are 600+ cyclists killed on the road every year. Compared to a speeding car, even the fastest cyclist clipping along at 30 miles an hour is still slow. The average serious cyclist rides half that fast. Then the number of riders who go much, much slower in traffic is massive.

But a slow rider is no more a target than a speedy cyclist. Same goes with runners. It’s not pace that matters, because that is obviously a relative factor in car/bike or car/runner accidents.

It’s all about attention, and arrogance. The idea that a motorist somehow “owns” the road over a runner or a rider is absurd to a bloody well insane degree. We all occupy this planet for a very short time. The notion that because you have to swerve for 2 seconds to get around a cyclist or a runner is somehow an inconvenience is a disturbing, disgusting form of hubris.

Remember, you’re not even safe in your car or truck. Millions of people every year die in traffic accidents. Evolution doesn’t care how smart you think you are. Evolution only “cares” in the sense that your decisions and your indecisions can cost you dearly. When you become a statistic, or turn someone else into a statistic, you are inextricably linked to a process that does not care whether you live or die.

Holy crap that hurts

You can deny it on a stack of Bibles or a holy Koran, but the fact is, God rather likes the evolutionary process. It’s a highly effective way to remind us that life is indeed precious, but only to the point where you an effectively protect it. At some point we all have to give up our lives, and life itself is a pre-existing condition. Cancer is as random as a traffic accident. A flock of hummingbirds crossing from the Yucatan to Texas can get caught in a storm and all be blown into the merciless waves.

What matters is our consideration of life. And consideration of others. Thats’ the real message of both evolution and God. Our brains make us capable of these distinctions. Let’s use them wisely. At all times.

And put down the smartphone. It’s really not a highly evolved form of communication. It’s merely a distraction from turtles crossing the road.