Bridges to Deja Vu

There are at least a couple of different ways in which you can experience deja vu during a bike ride.


The most common way, of course, is to see familiar sights during along a route you've ridden before.  More often than not, that is a pleasant or at least agreeable situation.  After all, you wouldn't be doing the ride again if you don't get some kind of pleasure from it.


Then there is what I will call, for lack of a better term, situational deja vu.  Any number of situations or other experiences can repeat themselves during a ride. Among them are weather, road conditions, fatigue, exhiliaration or some emotion or another that you're dealing with.


Yet another kind of deja vu is, paradoxically, the most ephemeral yet the one that affects us most deeply.  It's the one in which we recall feelings or memories which may have come to us on rides very different from the one we're on at the moment.  Or we have expereinced those emotions during rides we did much earlier in our lives, or in places very different from the one in which we happen to be riding.


There are other ways, I'm sure, in which we can experience deja vu during a bike ride.  I've just mentioned three I could think of at this moment.  They also happen to be the ways in which I experienced deja vu on today's ride.


Although this is my first visit to, and therefore my first bike ride in, Florida in two years, every inch of today's ride was at least somewhat familiar to me.  I had previously ridden every crack and grain of sand my tires tread, though not necessarily in the sequence in which I rode them today.  But it seemed that the flow of sense memories was all but seamless.


It began when I crossed the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A1A:

Hannibal is said to have shouted "Excelsior!" after conquering the Alps.  Whatever he was feeling, it has nothing on the sensation I experience as I reach the apex of a bridge that connects the mainland to a strip of land along the sea.  At such moments, I feel as if I'm exhaling for the first time, whether the bridge is the one I crossed today, the one that connects Broad Channel to Rockaway Beach, the one I crossed over the estuary of the Dordogne river to the coast near Bordeaux or the one from Highlands to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. 


It was over that last bridge that I took my first long rides during my early teen years.


And that bridge led, like the one I crossed today, led to a spit of land that stands, almost defiantly, between the ocean and another body of water.  When you ride along Route 36 from Sandy Hook to Long Branch, the ocean is never more than two hundred feet to your left and the Shrewsbury River is no further than that to your right.  When you ride A1A from Palm Coast to Flagler Beach, the dunes of Painters Hill (such an apt name!) and Beverly Beach are practically at arm's length on your left, and you're separated by no more than the width of a grove or mobile-home "campground" from the Florida Intercoastal Waterway.


Even though this is Florida, I'll admit that today's ride is more beautiful than the ones in New Jersey or to Rockaway Beach.  But in the end, I enjoy it--and, more important, it matters to me for the same reasons as those rides, and the one in the southwest of France.  They all are bridges to deja vu.

The Tides, Coming and Leaving

Today I did another ride to Point Lookout.  This is the third time in the last four weeks I've done that ride.  So, as you might imagine, I'm starting to feel like my physical condition is returning, and I am therefore gaining some more confidence. 


The ride offers so much that I like:  seaside vistas, a laid-back feel and the opportunity to ride from city to small town and back again.  In that sense, it reminds me a bit of touring in Europe:  Because that continent and its countries are smaller than North America and the United States, city and country are closer to each other in the "Old World" than they are here.  So I could indulge my passions for art and architecture as well as for sunshine and fresh air and food.


In a way, you can say that today I channeled my Inner European in one small way:  the way I made my bike stand when I got to Point Lookout:

Obviously, I'm not doing a track stand.  And there's no kickstand on my bike.   So what's my secret?  It's one of those many tricks I learned in Europe:

If you lean the bike on the left pedal, make sure it's slightly behind the 90 degree position.  Otherwise, the bike will topple--unless, of course, it has  a fixed gear.


I've done this ride at least a hundred times before, and I'll probably do it that many more times, as long as I'm living within a morning's ride of it. According to Bike Snob, I'm in the same league as babies, dogs and designers.  Like them, I can be fascinated by everyday objects, or at least by the everyday.  So, when I got to Point Lookout, I watched the tide going out.  

People who live there can tell you when the tide comes in or leaves.  They remind me, in a way, of a rather old couple I met in Liborune, France.  The town is about 30 kilometres from Bordeaux and is situated at the point at which the Garonne river bends and begins to open to the sea.  I'd cycled from Paris via the Loire Valley and Aquitaine; my intention was to cycle to and along the sea.   It was late in the afternoon; I'd stopped by a riverside grove.  The couple were   taking a walk, as they did every day, he told me.  They'd asked about my ride and what brought me to their part of the world.  "J'aime ces pays," I said.


"D'accord," they replied in unison.  Then, suddenly, the woman tapped me on the shoulder.  "Regardez!  Regardez!"  

I turned to look at the river, which was swelling like a small tide.  The man explained, "Les marees vienent deux fois chaque jour":  The tides come in twice every day.  He took pride, not simply in knowing that fact, but in his intimacy with a place and life he clearly loved, and with a woman who shared his passion.


The tide left, and I did some time later.  Just a little way down the road from that grove, I picked up a bike path that paralleled a route departmentale to Bordeaux city line.


(Note:  I'm looking for a scanner I can use on some of the photos I took during that, and other bike trips.)