Yesterday was balmy compared to most of the weather we've had in NYC for the past few weeks. In fact, the afternoon high temperature of 11C (52F) was about the same as that of a couple of days last week in Florida.
The funny thing is that it actually seemed chillier in Florida. Perhaps my body had acclimated itself to warmer weather--or to the expectations of people who live there. To them, it was cold.
For me, it was a day filled with more of that diffuse but austere winter light Bill and I enjoyed the other day.
So where did I ride? Here is a clue:
I can't see defoliated trees in the Nutmeg State without thinking about the "Connecticut quarter". Of course, the ride was better than that coin: That 25-cent piece, like most money, is worth less and less every year, while the joy of a ride does not depreciate for me.
Not even after seeing the Greenwich Veterans' Memorial against such a stark background.
Part of the joy was, of course, that I was doing a ride I don't normally do at this time of year. In spite of the mild weather, not many people, cyclists or otherwise, were out. The good thing about that was that I saw little traffic, even at the highway entrances by the state line or in New Rochelle or the Bronx.
After 140 kilometers of riding and a good dinner, I was happy, to say the least! So was Arielle, my Mercian Audax.
I certainly had reason to give thanks yesterday.
Just after I posted, the friends who'd invited me for dinner called to say that the start time was pushed back--from 2 to 5 pm due to an "emergency". Whether it was in the kitchen or elsewhere, nobody said. Not that it mattered.
I didn't mind. You see, after I posted, I glanced outside and was treated to a picture-perfect late-fall morning: The sun, totally unimpeded by clouds, mist or anything else (well, nothing that I could see, anyway!), set the last red, yellow and orange foliage aglow and burnished the brown leaves with a warmth, to the eye anyway, that felt like brick fireplace just starting to spread its heat.
It was so beautiful, I didn't care about the temperature--which stood exactly at the freezing mark. How could I not ride on such a morning?
Or afternoon? Arielle, my Mercian Audax called, and I hopped on.
Well, I felt so good The brisk air braced my skin and I saw almost no traffic anywhere. In fact, in this normally-busy shopping area, I saw no traffic at all!
Now, if that picture
or this one
looks familiar, it's because the shopping area and the "Connecticut quarter" tree are, in fact, in Connecticut--Greenwich, to be precise. I felt as if the town, the hills I climbed on my way in, the roads and the world were mine, all mine. OK, I shared--with a few other cyclists I saw.
I don't normally boast (really!). But I couldn't help but to tell everyone about the ride I took--140 kilometers (about 85 miles) round-trip.
The food was great. And I felt absolutely no guilt about how much of it I ate. I'll be eating some of it today-- there were leftovers for everyone--and I'll get to re-live, for a moment, a fine Thanksgiving Day.
Tomorrow we're supposed to have torrential rains, courtesy Tropical Storm Bonnie, ready to slam into the Carolinas any second now. To me, it's one thing to start a ride with the possiblity of rain, or even in a shower. But riding in a hurricane or monsoon is beyod the limits of even my insanity!
So, I am happy I embarked on today's ride. For the first time this year, I pedaled to Connecticut and back. True to other predictions I heard, I saw very little traffic, even along Boston Road in the Bronx or in downtown New Rochelle or by the state line. Almost anybody who planned to travel this weekend is already at his or her destination and will probably return tomorrow afternoon and evening.
Aside from the light traffic, today's ride was a delight in other ways. For one thing, I rode Arielle, my Mercian Audax, again. (The flat just before the state line on my return trip wasn't her fault!) And while the temperature reached 33.3C (92F) in downtown Greenwich, the heat didn't feel oppressive until the last few kilometers (out of 125) in the Bronx and Randall's Island. That may have had as much to do with my relative fatigue (I wasn't drop-dead tired!) as with the weather.
But what I found most enjoyable was the light of this day: the kind one might see, depending on where one is, on the cusp between late spring and early summer. Thin wisps of clouds dissipated the sun's refulgence to make it reflect the former, but that light was bright and warm enough to signal the arrival of the latter. I especially noticed that light around the trees by the war memorial in Greenwich.
Those trees reminded me of one of the loveliest coins ever produced in this country. In the late 1990s, the US Mint inagurated a series of quarters, or twenty-five cent pieces to the rest of the world, commemorating each of the fifty states. The Connecticut quarter is my favorite:
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| US Mint Image |
Anyway, I noticed something else rather interesting during today's ride. Quite a few people were riding bikes. Some were families; others were on social or training rides. Most of the riders in the latter category were men; most were on road bikes and the rest on mountain bikes. Fixed-gear bikes were conspicuously absent.
On the other hand, I saw a few riders on fixies yesterday after I crossed the city/county line into Nassau County on my way to Point Lookout. Not as many as I might see in Williamsburg or even my neighborhood of Astoria, but enough to be noticeable. One reason might be that the terrain on the South Shore of Queens and Nassau County is completely flat, while there are some hills in Westchester County on the way to Connecticut. Also, the riders seem to be a bit older in Westchester than on Long Island and, at least from my observations, fixie riders are younger than other riders.
Whatever...I had another great ride today. What else can I ask?
Someone--I forget whom--once said that there are two ways to hate poetry. One is simply to hate it. The other, according to the wag, was to read Alexander Pope.
I would agree that there's no hope in Pope. But even he couldn't do the sort of damage Joyce Kilmer caused. After reading Kilmer, you might find yourself hating trees as well as poetry:
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who ultimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
After that last stanza, is it any wonder that it's so difficult for a poet to get a grant, much less to sell volumes or his or her works?
It just figures that Kilmer attended the school from which I got my B.A.: Rutgers. But, interestingly enough, he dropped out after his sophomore year because he couldn't pass their required math courses. Then he transferred to, and graduated from, Columbia. (So much for the superiority of the Ivy League, right?)
Kilmer and his poem are like one of those awful songs from some absolutely wretched band that gets under your skin and circulates through your body and mind no matter how hard you try to get rid of it. And "Trees" came back to me when I saw this yesterday:
Such a classically autumnal arbortoreal form can make even an industrial-style campus that was built during the post-industrial era, like that of my main job, seem like a New England idyll. Marianela, my old LeTour III, felt right at home in it:
She, at least, resists comparisons to trees. For that matter, so do Arielle, Tosca and Helene, my other bikes.
Perhaps I've been too hard on Kilmer. After all, it is pretty difficult to make something that's about a tree yet more, or at least as, beautiful. I've tried, and I know I've failed to do that.
Here's something that depicts a tree and is quite lovely, if in an unexpected way and place:
I feel that it's the most beautiful coin ever produced in this country. Maybe if I had too much time and money on my hands, I'd try to enlarge it enough to use as a front wheel. It's certainly more attractive than those carbon-fiber tri-spoke wheels!
