HTML isn't my first language, so I feel mainly exhausted and a little proud when I converse in it ... so here I carry over from comments in Karen's blog ... we bicycled across the country before there was interwebs and cell phones and all that, before food was invented, and bike helmets weren't mandatory ... it was a crazy wild time; walking had barely taken hold of the nation; there were so few rules, you could do what you want, and only the next week would they make it illegal.
Bud Erikson, Montana, who was tickled to put us up in his father's trailer; he had "just put his father in a home;" he said he wasn't the least bit concerned that we might have stolen anything; he'd run us down in his pickup truck if we did.
Karen biking on the Montana plains. Could be the day I thought I was going to get my head blown off by a Dragon of the Order for flipping him the bird for not allowing me any lane, despite the road being visibly clear of oncoming vehicles for MILES; but he just yelled through the screen door of his RV into my head, feebly, "You're not supposed to be on the road ... you're not supposed to be on the road ..." til I stopped, set my hand on my hip, and he decided to speed off ...
Me and the Family Shields, Blackfoot Nation, in the ND foothills.
Is it Kenny Shields Sr. or Jr., and an aforementioned pony ...
Karen, see, the hoodoo behind your head is where the Shields were taking us with the ponies, from there, we wouldn't be able to see if the Lady Shields raided our bikes! That's me, so distrustful! But there were reports of hostilities on reservations that year, in addition to the tradewinds blowing backwards ...
What happens is, the intake hopper gets clogged with all kinds of new stuff coming in, and it takes a while to sort it out … you try to work these things through in an orderly fashion, first-in, first-out, but, hey, priorities change minute to minute. And at times it just really doesn't matter; the specifications are unclear, things are being driven by "push" and not "pull" – this isn't really a production facility, but more of an R&D, so if someone says "We have an overload of the magenta felt wool," or, if there's a fabulous one-off that's half boning and half see-through burn-out velvet on a diagonal across the peplum, you just kind of have to accept the wonder of it. It's what draws people in. They really don't come to gaze at the same American Standard they have in their own house and say, "That's the same one I got," however, I'm not meaning that you don't have to have that conversation, over and over again, just to keep flow.
How many gold star days can you expect when the only guarantee is it isn't going to be the same as the day before? Except, well, the secret is, they're all gold star. Variety is the spice of life and I live on that saffron. I am driven by variety-seeking behavior. Chasing the different, liquid, flowing, yet better a tumbling outrush of crystal, it's production, production, production, churning these entire rooms, back to front, turning it around, turning it over, turning it out. Sometimes the part of my brain that recognizes what things are just gets tired. Like that machine in post offices that reads the ZIP codes over and over again, picking up envelope after envelope on an arm, turning it a quarter turn, scanning it, and BOOM! … sorted … BOOM! … sorted … Except here it's not just ZIP + 4, in base 10, it can be anything. I buy a little time sometimes by saying "This … here's … an …" I'm not making a confession or an apology, you see, I'm offering this tip.
Turn of the bicycle wheel the multi-task, the draw-off, the side-effect, the trickle-charge, the spinning of flax of driving out brittle waste of making rope thread yarn both strong and flexible; spinning of memories ofstories meaning into useful rope of minimum deflection.
Y'see, you can't be counting on the bird standing in that precise spot, at which time the detonator could be engaged and then, KABLAM! the explosion chain reaction set in motion the apparati of action in motion the engagement of the cogs, precision of wham;
The winning apparatus didn't have to be complex, but straight and long and thin, like a thread, with a very small point of contact where the rubber meets the road. It wasn't about stationary and forever, it wasn't about reproduceability and economies of scale, it was simply about getting through, and in a hurry. Sufficient, just enough at precisely the right time.
It was about scanning the horizon, making observations summations the best course of action the narrowings, the single strategy of throw the egg basket into the car, we don't have another, so forget about your redundancies of backup the stoploss of holdback reserve of the just-in-case. Because it's not about the counting. Forget it forget it forget it; your second-guessing is serrated.
It's good to have a lariat loop at the end, such that you can lasso things and draw them to yourself, or inversely, draw yourself toward them. Hey, can I borrow …
I bring to the table the creation "To which nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away." This is where negotiations start.
"One can tell a gentleman by the way he treats those for whom he has no use."
I was raised to be a perfect Christian-style gentlewoman, except that we stopped going to church immediately after my First Communion. During the months of catechism that prepared me for that day, I had become so attached to Jesus that my mother had become jealous, and could barely see the project through. [Okay! I make is sound like it was all about me! Truth is, in Jimmy's catechism, the nun corrected him when he wasn't wrong, and that's why she wanted to pack it in for all of us.] After that she told me: If I wanted to get back to his house, I would have to ride there on my bike by myself. It was five miles. I'd have to do it without breakfast, if I was to take Communion. I longed to take the wafer every week. My mother grew up in a town where they could walk to church. They went four times a week, but she said she didn't like it. I tried biking to church, but I had misjudged the time, and being embarrassed of going in late, I pulled my bike under a culvert and skipped rocks across a shady creek, passing the hour, waiting to hear the cars trundle over the culvert once service let out. This wasn't going to work. Like all my other little friends I was forbidden to be with, I would remember everything about Jesus, and one day, when I was allowed to choose my own friends for permanent, he'd be there. Anyway, Jesus wasn't my age, he was a man. He was too old for me right then. I grew up on a quiet, wooded, dead-end road two miles out of town. Our neighbors were the kinds of families that wanted a quiet, wooded place for a reason, and these things were not to be mentioned, even though each family was defined by it, even though in most cases it was no one's fault. My family however, was normal. I learned, from the neighbors' sensitivities, there were a lot of things that couldn't be said. If I wanted to speak freely, it was best to do it alone. The place I grew up, it's not anything like that anymore. If I showed it to you now, you would just tell me I am lying about everything. Thing was, although I was too ungrateful to ever feel it properly, I was very lucky. Luck was always going to pour down on me, in my life, out in the world, so I was called upon to turn over my bounty to the family, as much as I could. My luck seemed to build up until someone pointed out its want of relief, for the sake of fairness, at least. I could do things without any effort; weed rows of the vegetable garden, dust, peel potatoes, do dishes, laundry, tend younger children ... lots of things. I did things without even paying attention. I could do these things and not even feel like I did it. You're just going to say I'm bragging, and that's not very becoming of me. Really, what I could never do, after all, is master anything. If I make such a boast, it is recalled to me some error or assist, some exaggeration, or any one of myriad disqualifications that mean that no, it doesn't count. Everyone is certain I will be all right in the end, given my massive luck, but I really had to find something that would finally count; something worthwhile, something better than nothing. Because really, it was a shame the way I wasted my luck.
"Wassssup!" He said in a wild-eyed shout, still well-modulated for being as close as he was. He was having a lot of fun, and it was bubbling over, effusive. It made me grin, but I didn't have anything to say. Why, yes, big fun is good. "Hey, hey, hey, let's rig something up here," he was saying, fidgeting with his oar to maintain position in the convections of thick mist. "How about crack the whip!" I had been conditioned to quiet amusements and observations of minute beauty over raucousness. Perhaps someone had told me I was not cut out for a whole lot of fun; I had to modulate it. Bets at home were that I wouldn't finish this trip, but I knew I would, and I had more things planned, even though I had come to think my heart would explode, right through my skin, if I ever had too much fun. Time and again, in other situations, I chose the less exciting option, as a matter of self-preservation. The people around me had always drawn the fun off of me, to help save me, I suppose. Dear people, but I began to really rather look after myself. I had been finding it a little hard to switch from "Why?" to "Why not?" "Sure!" I said. We were in no time bungeed loosely and moving in some semblance of coordination around and up. The indistinct whitishness of our environment had turned to sherbet orange with crevasses edging to purple shadows. Now we were careening through glowing gold meadows and darker grottoes with some kind of magnetic, gyroscopic allure, spinning free as I knew life on the bike, and then pulled back, into friendly collision or just a reorientation; 'round and round, then suddenly I was reeling into the kakak, front fork and big rings poised to wedge around its hull. Crunch! … Damn, I loved those rims … We were both laughing. The sprocket teeth had taken a bite out of the kayak's middle. "It should have been more explosive," Marcus said, pulling himself out of the sheathing, and throwing down some kind of powder. Ka-boom! It threw a light that was black and electric blue, and opened up the sky above. The kayak and bicycle made a marvelously sustaining fire that threw arrays of colored sparks as the molybdenum burned out of the alloy. We were drinking cognac that seemed barely worried after all we'd done. "There's really less shaking involved than you think," I heard him say. I was considering that this was the only time in my life I would be precisely here.
I was always "The Girl on the Bike." That was kind of my social unit, me and my bike. "Naw, thanks; I've got my bike …" was often a relief, but sometimes a wistful disappointment to say at the end of a get-together. Now, riding with these other kids, in a way in which we could converse, was strange. Where they took conversations at times seemed pointless and left me with a sense of awry; and now it seemed impolite for me to just dart away, they were bicyclists, too. Early in our trip, one said to me, "I'm so bored! How many more times can I sing through 'Row, Row, Row your Boat'?" I might have said aloud what was on my mind: "Why … are … you … doing … this, then?" Not long into the trip she had a hatred of me that I could not repair. Since I learned the word in a third-grade assigned text, "Serendipity" was an important friend of mine. The prescribed path of my life seemed bleak but Serendipity rushed in like a superhero and found me something new and interesting to think about! I waited and prayed to Serendipity to save me from the crushing indentured duty of my life. In time, I grew resentful of Serendipity, which seemed to bring me endless distractions and diversions, but not the kind of opportunity to really change direction. And now I was being pulled up into the sky by a friendly vapor that strangely did not bind my wrist; the pressure applied seemed scarcely equal to the sum of me and my bicycle. As I burst through the underbelly of the cloud, I was overcome with the delight of the experience, refreshed with a mist and suddenly poised in a standing stop in an irregular velodrome. I am used to seeing everything quite clearly but here the haze of wet mists concealed forms undelineated by color. I started pedaling, both to stay upright and to begin examining the place I was. Once I held the wheel of a sailboat on the same compass heading through 'pea soup' for eight nautical miles of Eggamoggin Reach, in which tankers would only begin to delineate themselves less than thirty feet off the bow, their massiveness instantly changing our purpose. My captain joked, or was he joking, that we would sail by smell; if we could smell fresh pine, we were to divert instantly to avoid running aground; only thing to guess was; was the smell from the left by degrees, or the right. Seemed the thing to do was take a general tour around the base of the cloud, banking a little, because it would be fun, and getting a feel for the structures around me. The surface of vapor was proving much more yielding than that of solids. Yet it wasn't detracting from my power. I could take vapor stairs without fear for my tires and rims, chew partially through striation forests and boulders of vapor, my spokes slicing curling splinters of mist like grated cheese. Hence, I came upon a kayaker, shooting down a wall that looked like a fluffy replica of the Spanish Steps. He stabbed his oar in and came about. Suddenly, he was the closest anyone has ever gotten to my face while I was riding ...
Is of T.B.C., for M.; and also of course, Karen, on a big anniversary of our big adventure, those were big, big days!
The clouds are shaped by the desert, the bottoms sanded flat from the press against the last bit of air before bottoming out on the ground. Aerodynamics … they say, for real power ratios, the most important part of an automobile, vis-a-vis "aerodynamics," is the undercarriage; and you see it in the clouds in the desert; they're flat on the bottom, and billow on the top. Seeing a depiction of a cloud in a Navajo blanket, I was confused again; the clouds are the same as the facades of mission churches – are they both offering rides up into the sky? I'm game. The cleanliness, the absence of the bric-a-brac of the East, changes my consciousness. Less to see, or is there, makes less to think about, or does it. Alertness is easier to tolerate, heightened. Life and death, dry arroyos and bosques flash flooded, wild diurnal temperature swings. Wait and watch. Rattlesnakes and scorpions. One time I watched the tops of tornado clouds from eight miles away; billowing upwards. We were bicycling across the plains and really didn't have any idea; we had thrown ourselves down in some sort of community park for the evening, pushing the pegs of our nylon tents into soft turf that matched the outfields in the park. I took a ride by myself around this town, my bike, unladen by the panniers I had stashed in the tent, felt like it was going to fly up, off the road, up into the air, a lift-off! And these clouds were billowing upward, like expanding clumps of cottage cheese curds. Substantial; you can tell by the way the light plays over them, the shadows cast in them despite patches of blinding whiteness. They look as solid as concrete is, maybe with a white plaster of paris finish, except constantly changing. Houses for dreams, a place for thoughts to inhabit, clouds are. It's different on the plains, a matter of perspective; clouds don't so much seem above, up in the sky, as next to you, when they're miles away, and you can see for miles, uninhibited by forests and structures and hillocks. I was dawdling by a field filled with farm machinery, combines and mowers and such, taking in the power of land-altering machinery and the brilliant colors, when I was suddenly overcome by how very far I was from the familiar – I wanted to get back to my camp, my trip-mates, despite the irritations of the day that I had been riding off the last half-hour. And the sun was setting. I had come to know how much daylight was left, in riding distance at a typical rate of speed, given the height of the sun. My companions generally deferred to me on where we would stop, because I could sense these things, because I was the first each afternoon to consider the issue, maybe because their ideas frustrated me, and I always told them why. You know sometimes when you just go on impulse; the object hangs so tantalizingly, so perfectly in your grasp, that not even stopping to think if you want it or not, you just grab it? There it was, a line cast down from a cloud. I grasped it, and there was a mutuality of cooperation as I cocked my elbow and it looped around my wrist; I was airborne, being drawn up into the cloud, my unburdened bicycle so light, bound to me by my footcages and the cleats of my Dettos. The tableau below looked, frankly, just as I expected; having taken it in on an Easterly push all day. I took in features we'd cover in the early morning; having, I guess, no doubt that I would be back in time for that -- my curiousity is always on; my panic for the familiar, not so much. I gazed up into the cloudmass that had befriended me, indistinct and rumbling, puckering, undulating above my head …
For a period of time ... no one said we were poor, but maybe that was the reason, we would have rice pudding with raisins for supper. That's all. I could eat them now, if that's what someone offered me, but I detested raisins reconstituted through heat -- I didn't think rice pudding was a treat at all (I guess they told us it was) -- and neither did my youngest brother Jimmy. We'd push the tacky rice around in our allotted bowls until the others finished ... they even turned the dining room light out on us, and left us to finish in the dark. Being the youngest, Jimmy could always create a diversion and then wangle out of the deal altogether, but I was always pinned to the wall. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I took the opportunity to dump the contents of my bowl into his. I declared I was done to the family, who were probably watching the last half of M*A*S*H. When he came back, he loudly decried what I had done. The family tried to force the logic on me that his bowl couldn't suddenly become doubly as full as it was. I pretended that was nothing from nothing to me. I think I didn't have to eat the pudding then.
I was bicycling to the store to buy some raisins my mother needed to make some kind of cake she had already started mixing.
"If you don't hurry the baking soda will go flat … don't you dawdle, girl!" I had a habit of dawdling as she saw it. The way I saw it, I had to pretend to be doing nothing until she wanted me to do something. Whatever I was doing, it was never all right with her.
"Come here and watch me make this cake. You'll never learn to cook. You could screw up corn flakes." This wasn't true; I got breakfast for myself, and marshaled my younger brothers through it as well, every morning while she was sleeping. Yet, she was the arbiter of the house's reality; unless something was being broken, nothing was happening when she was asleep.
It was a relief to get out, yet it was a rush errand. I made a game of racing my bike to the store. In my big finish, I ran up the curb cut, dismounting as I rode in, my body on the left side of the seat, then, unable to use the coaster brake in this position, I slammed into the brick wall right next to the door of the store. I chipped my tooth.
I ran in, got the raisins and brought them to the register, offered the bill that had been in my palm since I left the kitchen, and was presented with change. "There you go …" I raced out of the store, and the bagger boy ran after me. "Hey! You forgot your raisins!"
