The Descent of Woman, Or: Oh Holey Butt

(This is unfortunate. Here is an entry that should have been finished and posted last month: that bicycle ride from Wayne County back to Ithaca. But better late than never.)

May 25 2015.

Destination Bicycling is much more of an involved way to get back home. 

Involved in a way that is sensual, meaning senses participating more than just holding a steering wheel while under a seat belt. Instead sensations become perceptible thanks to the meditation of spinning along endlessly in the air.

To feel the air temperature change, dipping into a stream valley, like passing through a curtain and feeling the cold fabric of it brush against your body. The smells of a Laundromat, the honey suckle, the cows. 

To really know the wind. To have emotion for the wind, impeding my progress so thickly. In our houses and offices we can be removed. Look out the window and see the wind in the trees and know a storm is coming….completely different than grinding into it.

I wanted to bicycle back to Ithaca under my own power, to have awesome novel thoughts all the hours in the saddle, see my edge. To earn views and earn chocolate cake.

The ride started out powerfully, churning along at 14 mph (fast for me, #allsteel), from Canandaigua to Geneva. I lived in Geneva last summer, and returning there it felt recognizable but not familiar. It did not feel like I had embodied it as a home place. But I relished espresso and a second breakfast and rejoiced I was continuing on to my new home of Ithaca.

Midday, full sun, the adhesive air of pre-thunderstorm humidity. And the southern wind. I pointed directly into it, watching the leaves exposing their undersides in the flapping as I rode. The grain fields bending in huge synchronized dance numbers, the Memorial Day American flags waving vigorously. My pace slowed to grappling along at barely 9 miles an hour.

I was out of water.

I’ve stopped at places before, noticing someone outside and pleading for a water bottle refill. People have gone out of their way to get me ice. (With a bit of common sense, and excluding the hyper violence on the news, I choose to believe in a mostly nonthreatening world. Most of the time I get by excellently.)

There was a woman out gardening in front of her trailer home, and I pulled into her driveway hopefully. I called out my plea and she saw me and looked slightly perplexed, then started gesturing. Before I could stand my wits at attention, a throng of 17,000 terrible, gray, enormous, pregnant dogs rampaged from the side yard at me. The ugly kind of gray, bred for grumpiness, snarling and roaring and charging. I was on their rural plot of territory. I must die. The woman came to my aid--bless her; she was barking at them to get away and swinging her shovel, "they're breeders!" she explained to me. My bike became a shield and I spun with it, dancing in horror and fending off the dogs. But my butt—the only part of me offering a real purchase, padded in bike shorts and jutting out juicily--was too easy a target and I was chomped.  

Bitten in the butt by a dog.

That's a first. Well at least I've had my rabies shots. 

(after beating them with her shovel she finally dismissed them and did fetch me some plastic bottles of water, although a little wordlessly and, I assume, begrudgingly) 

I think next time I'm thirsty I'll avoid rural trailer homes.

Later: after the adrenaline receded. 

I pulled up at my aunt and uncle's place, surprising them in their afternoon projects. They fed and watered me, and we sat at the kitchen table as I consumed melon, and CHEESE, and bread, and peanut butter. I LOVE THESE PEOPLE I kept thinking inside, and want to tell them things! And share anecdotes. But all I could properly do was eat food.

Riding 70 miles in heat and unforgiving wind was a study in discomfort and also presence. I’ve done way more than 70 miles before, but usually in a group of others, where everyone is bonding together and encouraging each other on. The best way to go about it alone was to notice this house, to see that tree, to laugh at that road name. Not so helpful is to think, “so that was 2 miles…I just need to do that 10 times more.” 

The point where I’d reached the zenith between the lakes, where the ride into the southern wind was over, where I was just gravitating down towards the road running along Cayuga Lake…with the yellow road signs with the truck pointing down a triangle… the DESCENT. Flowing and flowing and not pedaling….I started to have normal thoughts again, cooling off enough that I could have thoughts. And then seeing the Ithaca 2 Miles sign….the arrival would have been more epic had I not been so tired.

But I can store it up and reflect on it later, drawing a little epic pride perhaps for when I need it.

To do something other than pedal, like to shower and eat sausage, was a change of pace after such single-minded focus. How fortunate that I could push my self this way on this day under my own volition….because for many people having to push is not a choice.

The earned lake views.

The earned, if very unattractive, chocolate cake. Note: best NOT to carry and serve in a.... bag.

Road.

Uncle's bike and niece's bike.

Pearls & Rain Pants (and Ithaca Fest!)

This weekend has been Ithaca Festival, perhaps one of the most notable weekends all year in this little city.  Blocks of downtown have been blocked off, a number of different music stages set up. Blues, folk, eastern belly dance, hip-hop….these fill the streets. Food trucks sell Cambodian pancakes, deep south grilled chicken, Mac N Cheese.

My Mansard roof is just one block from all this; from my window I can hear even the words to the music clearly, and see the food tents. I am positively gleeful to be living inside such a fantastic festival. Instead of waiting in line for a compromised blue plastic porta-potty, I can trot back to my very own bathroom. I brought friends up too, for ice water in this mugginess. I took breaks to make popcorn, to snuggle with Cat, to bake gingerbread, to nap.  And then down my stairs and out into the music again!

Saturday of the festival was thick with heat and humidity and I danced in the park, bare feet in the grass, until the rains came and I retreated up to my apartment.

I was in the parade Thursday, riding with the AIDS Ride For Life bicycle fundraiser ride. We wore matching blue tee-shirts and pedaled along following the bagpipers (which was a lot of fun). The other bicyclers and I looped circles around the banner, like a small smiling swarm of bees, avoiding getting run over by the following fire-truck. My chest got all swollen with happiness to see the faces of this city lining the sidewalks cheering on the parade. Glowing, eager faces. A high population of vegan faces, faces with many higher educational degrees, faces of professors, faces of professor children wearing paint.  

Unlike the wee town of Ontario parades I’ve accompanied my father’s cars in, this parade had no tractors but instead Planned Parenthood all marching in pink tee-shirts, and Save Seneca Lake! anti-oil group waving banners, and the local solar company.  Ithaca sure is a unique place.  And I’m happy to be living here.

I’ve spent the entire weekend padding about the festival, eating Lemongrass Meat On A Stick, running into just about everyone I know, and happily soaking up the music.  Sunday I finished out the festival with a high of newly-discovered band love. The gun poets. Can’t-hold-still hip-hop with poetry lyrics. Not jaded. Instead about life and appreciating and community and all to a fiercely grooving beat. I don’t know how anyone could be nearby and not be moving. For me it was involuntary, and I danced that glorious celebratory dance of existence. Dancing alone and not caring, but dancing with everyone too. Where the band knows they’re getting to people, and they have their souls on their instruments, and it’s this feedback loop of crowd upping band upping crowd. Little children wearing huge ear-muffs, highschoolers, the bottle-picking vagrant population, parents, students, everyone. Everyone moving and grooving together. All a heightened state of humanity.

Sunday morning I escaped the food tents and the crowds to be organist at a church for whom I’ve never played before. The United Methodist Church in Lansing, which wasn’t exactly convenient in time or location.  (#carfree) Their service began at the, erm, sprightly hour of 9am and choir rehearsal was before that as well. Nine miles away and up a hill….mercifully I discovered a bus that ran at 7am going partly in the right direction.

It was raining that morning. And cold. All the July sunny mugginess of Saturday had phase-changed into November.  Gray froth hung wetly over the land, and steam churned about the falls. The roads were dark with puddles. What could make bicycling in 7:30am cold rain worse? But wind. So I bicycled into a stiff north wind.

I’ve bicycled in miserable conditions before. I suppose that’s a thing to be grateful for having been such an incorrigible bicycler and traveler: that even if it’s a bit miserable now, it still won’t top the previous winners of misery.  So the pearls and the rain pants powered forth. I realized I was decidedly inward focused, because instead of watching much of the world go by, I was considering a drop of water sliding back and forth across the brim of my helmet. Right there in front of my face. Sliding to and fro with my left-right rocking action of driving into the wind. To and fro. It was like a hypnotist’s watch. Somehow this was incredibly irritating. My feet were cold, my hands were stiff and wet, I was pushing hard. But that droplet.  Grrrr.  I flicked it off.  Soon another formed.  I flicked that one off too.

And then. The smile once I turned downhill and out of the wind. The church in sight. Cruising…15 mph, 20 mph. YES. Oh, how earned that feeling was.

A country church. I arrived and cracked my cold hands from their handlebar grip and amazingly they warmed to play the pipe organ. A straightforward little instrument it was, two manuals, nothing fancy, but my feet connected effortlessly with the pedal board.  And within half an hour of warming up we were one.

Pastor asked if I could play “a little somethin-somethin-somethin” while people sat down before the prelude. What I call “filler” music, or “emergency backup” music. I hadn’t brought any, but was able to forage through the sliding piles of books around the organ and find something appropriate. “Noodle music”, as Mr. First Presbyterian Choir Director would call it.  I noodled away and watched the church fill.  And fill.

Every pew filled. The children brimmed all over the front steps for children’s time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a congregation with so many brightly flowered dresses or bow-ties or suit-jackets in such a long time. I do enjoy the Methodists. And with my experience playing for Methodists before, I know they especially resonate with the happy and “boom-chunk” music.  I had fun. I had so much fun in church this morning.  I charged the hymns right along and people sang lustily.

“We’re so glad you’re not doing only soil!” said one of the choir members, when they learned of my actual day-job.

I played Emperor’s Fanfare for the postlude, all big chords and trills and DAH DAH DAH deep pedal notes. This piece takes no small amount of concentration and it is a blast, in all senses of the word. I landed the final chord, and surfaced back into the world, and heard something I’ve never heard in church before. The people weren’t only clapping, they were cheering. Cheering and hooting. I was blown away. I loved all those Methodists even more.

Mrs. Alto was standing at my elbow all smiles: “You PUMP IT, girl!”