Coming Home To Another Fall Ride

Last week, during my trip to Montreal, I wrote about (among other things) the autumn light and air.  Well, today had a particularly autumnal feel--at least in part because the weather was colder than it's been in six months or so. When I was talking to my mother a little while ago, I joked that I brought the cold, and the season, back with me because I knew I wouldn't have any trouble getting them through US Customs!

Anyway, on a day so typical of this season, thoughts turn to foliage and red barns and such.  Well, the leaves are starting to turn brightly in local parks and fallen leaves stream along the curbs.  But there aren't a whole lot of red barns in this city.  However, in some neighborhoods--including my own--there are houses that provide a rather nice backdrop for the blaze of colors.

But I also figured that if I went a little north of the city, the colors would be even brighter and there would be an even better stage for them.  And Arielle, my Mercian Audax, was just begging to be ridden.  And I wanted to ride her.   The bike I rented in Montreal was actually pretty nice, but it still makes me appreciate Arielle--and my other Mercians--even more than I had before.

So, after pumping her tires and filling a water bottle, we were off to--you guessed it--Connecticut.

It was just past noon when I started riding, and I knew that it's starting to get dark around 6pm now.  Still, I figured, it would give me enough time to ride there, take in some autumn light and air in the Nutmeg State, and get home before dark.  Although I have lights, there are a couple of parts of the route I prefer not to ride in the dark.

I was riding against of the wind most of the way back--which meant, of course, that I was riding with it most of the way back.  The funny thing was that I didn't feel I was pedaling particularly hard on the way up, in spite of the wind that, at times, gusted to 35 KPH.  And I didn't think I was pedaling particularly fast on the way back.  Yet I made it back before sunset.

Really, I can't ask for more of a Sunday afternoon ride in the middle of October.  

When I got home, I felt invigorated, as I do after a good ride, but not tired.  I often feel that way after long rides on my Mercians, but especially Arielle.  Tomorrow, or some other time in the near future, I'll write about a possible reason.

Real Good Fall Twilight

It seems--at least in this part of the world--that the colors of October are celebrated more than those of any other month.

Reverence for the hues of that month are certainly just.  However, some of what I saw on today's ride left me absolutely stunned.

I saw this on the wooden bridge in the Randall's Island nature preserve:

Oh, but the visual feast didn't end there.  Barretto Point Park was closed, probably because of flood damage and weakened trees that might fall at any given moment.  However,through the fence, I saw this:

and this:

I know that the hues of autumn sunsets are particularly rich.  But lately it seems the skies are outdoing themselves.  I wonder whether it has anything to do with the recent storms.

My ride today was short.  But the name of this park, about three miles from my place, says it all:

This piece of real estate is in Rego Park, a Queens neighborhood that is currently home to thousands of emigres--many of whom are Jewish-- from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Russia.  It gets its name from the Real Good Construction company, which developed most of the neighborhood in the early 20th Century.

If you are visiting the neighborhood for the first time and it seems familiar, you've probably read Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.  The scenes with his aged Polish Jewish father are all set in the neighborhood, where Spiegelman grew up.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, today's ride was short but Real Good.

Cycling The November Sky

Here's what makes a November sky different from its October counterpart--or, for that matter, what we think of as a "fall" or "autumn" sky, or what stretches above and in front of us at any other time of year. The clouds are exactly that--clouds.  Even as they shift across the sky and reveal patches of blue backlit by the sun, like a skylight in a Romanesque cathedral, they fill the sky in layers, to the point that they seem to become the sky itself, and to define not only the light, but the wind and chill that come from it.


However, there is absolutely no threat of rain, or any other kind of precipitation.  One can feel just as confident of cycling under this sky as among Shakespeare's "darling buds of May" and not having one's skin moistened by anything that wasn't within his or her own body.  (Whether or how much one sweats depends, of course, on one's conditioning and the strenuousness of the ride.  Mine today wasn't very. )  The best thing about cycling under these conditions, at least to me, is that the light is nothing more or less than that:  it's not the glaring sunlight that taxes light eyes and fair skins (like mine) and it's not diffuse or "painterly," as much as I appreciate and even enjoy that sort of illumination.


This is the sort of light that makes the things--like foliage--that were described with "fall" as prefixes attached to them in October become autumnal in the truest sense of that word.

This may seem odd to some of you, but I find none of this depressing.  In fact, I quite enjoy it.   Now I'm going to sound like exactly the Europhile (or, more specifically, Francophile) snob some of the people with whom I grew up suspected me of being, or having become.  I think that autumnality or autumnalness (OK, if Sarah Palin can compare herself to Shakespeare, surely you can indulge me in this!)  is not much respected, much less valued or celebrated, in American culture.  I suppose it has to do with the notion that this country is supposed to be a place where one can start over and re-invent one's self, and its attendant value of youthfulness and novelty.  The mature sexuality of French or Italian women or the ironic sense of the English--or, for that matter, the ability to accept life on its own terms while questioning one's self that seems to be part of a Germanic way of seeing--is not valued in the same way in America as that of youthful effusiveness and ebullience.


The quality of autumnalness I'm describing is what you might see in western New England if you get off Route 7, or if you take the back roads of the Adirondacks or the routes departmentales of the Vosges.  I have done all of those things, on my bicycle; perhaps having done them in my youth shaped, in some way, my attitudes about cycling and much else in my life.


Will it lead me to be like this couple?:

They say that in the spring a young man's fancy turns to love.  As if I would know about such things!  But at this time of year, an older man's and, ahem, woman's fancies turn to...wait, do they have fancies?   And if they do, will they be realized under this sky?:

I suspect that some of mine will be.  However, I am sure that I will continue to encounter them, as I did today, from my trusty steed for all seasons: