Dear readers, are you familiar with the riddle about the chickens and the fox and the grain and the boat? Where you have to get all these entities across a river but your boat has a load limit and if you leave some entities alone with others unwanted consumption will happen.
Last week, amongst bicycle updates and cardboard box acquisition, I was reminded of this riddle. My touring bicycle (aka Greenie Meanie) and promised box were on the other side of town at a fabulously helpful bike shop. How lucky I felt to have that box--Mr. Bike had disinterred it specially for me from his basement--and how desperate I had felt before I had found it. I didn't have enough patience to walk across town, and I live car-free, so I just hopped on my trusty blue beater bike, one Fooey Bluey, and pedaled there.
Mr. Bike wheeled out Greenie and then carried out the box. "Where you parked at?", he asked. "Oh so here's the thing", I said, "I rode here on Fooey." So thusly I found myself across town with two bicycles and an enormous cardboard box. Walking home in multiple passes was a safe and time-consuming option.....
But I wheeled everybody outside, dragged the box out, and then tucked what I could of the box like a sail under my arm, mounted Fooey, and balanced my way back down the streets. I felt a decided tilt towards starboard, but righted my ship with some counter balance and we carried forth straight. I felt like an ant, rolling along with something twice my size.
Box left on porch, I then pedaled Fooey back to the bike shop. Time to bring Greenie home now. I drove a team of horses. Right hand went on Fooeys handlebars; left hand and the rest of me was astride Greenie. Giddy-up!, and we merged widely onto the street once the cars had thinned. Halfway home a friend leaned out his car window and grinned and called to me. "I SO cannot wave back right now!!" I called back all laughing and careful pedaling.
So you have this cardboard box big enough to fit a family of four, and you take your contraption, the thing that makes you fly and brings you so much joy, and you take off the handlebars and pull out the seat post and swear at the pedals and gingerly fit it all into that box.
My boyfriend Matthew, the ray of light that he is, had promised to bring me some hunks of foam leftover from a shipment to his lab to help pack the bike. Luggage handlers do not handle so much as lug, and I've cringed in the past to be reunited with a bicycle box all dented and holey. He had forgotten the foam on Monday, however, but assured me he would remember it Tuesday, and showed me the series of alarms he had set for himself. This set of alarms made me laugh so much I just need to share.
I'm ready to go to Mexico because I am ready to be done doing 100 squats every day. At the beginning of 2019 I made a little whimsical intention to do 100 squats/day until I left for Mexico. Which means I have logged 3,100 in January and 2,000 in February. (Good thing I didn't do them all at once!). The Yucatan trip last year was totally flat but the 2017 Oaxaca trip was mountainous and my knees and legs were insufficiently prepared, and I deeply want to avoid feeling that kind of anxiety, pain, and body-disapointment again. In addition to squats, my grey cold winter has been spiked with healthy gym endorphins and lots of indoor sweating. The journey towards the journey can be as rewarding as the destination of the journey itself, I'm finding.
When your card is repeatedly declined at check-in, then incorrectly charged, when you have to call your bank in the baggage line sheepishly, when all of this is to pay an exhorbinent bicycle box fee, and when your gift-for-your-host fudge is unwrapped and de-bowed by a security agent...then when Ms Ticket Scanner compliments your sharp short haircut, you just about want to kiss her. How stressors make accented the goodnesses that do come one's way.
I unfolded myself from the first leg of travel from the grey slushy Syracuse (ultimate destination coastal Tampico Mexico), and walked into the bright sky-lit sunny river of humanity that was terminal C of Chicago's O'Hare airport. A sign in the terminal for Starbucks advertised cold coffee brewed with Nitrogen, and I smiled a big smug smile to myself. For the next 26 days I will not need to think at all about Nitrogen: not plant %N measurements, not soil nitrate, neither N run-off, nor Biological Nitrogen Fixation. Definitely not nitrifying bacteria or fertilizer rates. No total N, no organic manure, no urea. I am going to take a break from the Life of a Soil and Plant Scientist and go ride my bike around some mountains. Hallelujah!
Reflecting on how sometimes all I want are my pairs of shoes to be neat and parallel, to make up a new recipe of popcorn flavoring (Thai curry anyone?), to be in my cozy home or up in my productive office. How life is when you see all day only things you've seen before, talk only with people you know and are comfortable with. When you know what to expect. How full of sweet ease and peace this can be. Or restless-making. And how it is to travel, to pry yourself off the couch of comfort and toss yourself into the seas of surprises. To be day after day in places you've never been before. To see only new things. To navigate a puzzling world that is not conducted in your native language. My cozy Ithaca life is enormously different from the life I get these next 26 days ... where everything from getting pesos from an ATM to deciding if I can trust a taxi to eating a fresh tortilla spikes wildly upward on the graph of emotional load. I feel I may appear outwardly all adventurous and brave but sometimes I feel just a humbled rowboat on a roiling ocean. I go forth knowing the lows can be intense and the highs soaring ecstacy.
Here's some details for you information-loving folks about this journey.
Bicycle partner: Friend Ellie. Previously cornell soccer player, world traveler, high-spirited, high-energy, and zany enough to want to join me for this.
Route: starting in Tampico, winding over the Sierra Gorda range, then hopefully to Guanajuato, and finally ending in San Luis Potosí.
Distance: 500 miles, or so, expected.
Timeline: I fly back to the north on March 18.
Why there: La Hausteca región (around the Sierra Gordas) is supposedly wonderfully diverse in plants and animals, and perhaps less touristy than other locales. The city of San Luis Potosi came recommended to me from a friend from Mexico. There's UNESCO sites in the region, and it seems not a bad idea to create a route just by stringing UNESCO sites together.
Elevation expected: something like 20,000+ feet of climbing (accounting for ups and downs) which sounds so outrageous I feel a little wonky even writing it out here.
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