How Long Could He Hold It?

It boggles the mind to realize that on the last day of a three-week race, a lead of less than one minute in overall time (for the whole three weeks) is considered "insurmountable"--unless, of course, you're Greg Lemond or Tadej Podacar.

The one explanation I can come up with is from my own (admittedly) very limited experience with racing:  It's a lot harder to make up time than to lose it. Really, it doesn't take much to give up a minute or more to an opponent:  a flat tire or other malfunction, a slip or fall,  a miscalculation of an opponent's move--or simply a wrong turn.

At least, those are the things we hear about in race reports.  I wonder whether riders have lost races due to events that would be inconsequential in daily life.  

Specifically, I'm thinking of "nature calling."  If we're not racing, we stop when we find a place to "let go." But I suppose that's not possible in a race.

Or if you're being pursued by cops.  

On Saturday night, a 38-year-old man was riding light-less on a Yakima, Washington street.  A constable pulled up toward him, intending to talk to him about the dangers of what he was doing.  But when the officer turned on his bright lights, the man took off. 

After making a few turns, he ditched his bike and backpack and started running down a driveway.  He tripped on a low fence.  The officer threatened to use his Taser on him if he tried to continue his flight.

Then, according to the officer, the man put his hands up and exclaimed, "I just need to poop."

Later, when the police searched the bag the man tossed, the found three cell phones, brass knuckles, a pill cutter, $240 in counterfeit currency, more than 100 blue oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl, nine suboxone strips, two pipes, a scale, knives and some suspicious checks.

Oh, and the police discovered the guy had felony warrants for a Department of Corrections violation, possession of heroin and identity theft.

This leads me to wonder:  What if he'd just "held it" a little longer--and stayed on his bike? 

What I Thought About When I Didn't Have The Energy To Do Anything But Ride

While out for a ride, I stopped in a deli in Rockaway Beach.  A woman who, I would guess, has lived in the neighborhood for most, if not all, of her life chatted with the man behind the counter.  

"I don't understand how one person could go into a nightclub and just start shooting," the man said.

"I don't know what this world is coming to," the woman intoned.

"He's from Afghanistan, so right away they assume it's terrorism.  He said he hates gay people!", the man exclaimed.

The woman made the sign of the cross.  "They are God's children.  Didn't he understand that?"

It was one of those conversations I was tempted to jump into, but didn't.  I really couldn't have said anything that could have elucidated or even contradicted anything they were saying.  But I also had a perhaps-less-noble reason:  I was on a bike ride and that was all I wanted to do, besides buy a bottle of water and a bag of nuts in the deli.

I was riding, not only because it was a gorgeous day, but also because, after hearing the news about the shootings in an Orlando night club, I didn't have the energy to do anything else.  Perhaps that seems counterintuitive, but it was how I felt.  I didn't have whatever I needed to talk to anybody or to even locate, let alone process, my feelings about that tragedy--or the cyclists who were run down in Michigan or Muhammad Ali's last years, or about a few things in my own life.  The only energy that remained in me was the kind that propels me to ride.  Although it is mainly physical, it is not entirely so.

While continuing on my ride, I thought about those two people.  The man--whom I guessed to be younger than me, but not much, and from somewhere in Central or South America--seemed, in what he said, trying to cling on to some certainty because another he'd held was no longer valid or tenable.  The woman, who is probably a decade or older than I am and, from her looks, of Irish or some other northern European ancestry, seemed shocked because she thought she'd seen it all, but now she realizes there's something even more unfathomable.

When I stopped at Jacob Riis Park and stared into the ocean, I realized that they had both misunderstood something that I, until that moment, also misconstrued.  It's not a matter of what the world is coming to, as that woman lamented.  It's what people are doing in the face of such uncertainty.  Which relates to something the man said:  The shooter, Omar Mateen, may well have hated gay people and, as some authorities have said, been "self-radicalized".  But there are many young men like him who don't like gays or some other group of people or another whom they perceive as a threat or simply different, and who adopt extreme ideologies--whether political, religious or otherwise--because their experiences lead them to believe that what they have been taught are lies, or simply didn't prepare them for life.  Perhaps he sees the dream his parents had when they emigrated to this country as an illusion, or worse.  

Now, what I am saying about Mr. Mateen's mental processes is, of course, speculation, as I have never spoken with him and he is dead now.  But I have heard others in situations like his express similar feelings and, in my youth, I had times when I felt that nothing I'd ever learned, nothing I'd ever heard, could help me to achieve any sort of satisfying personal or professional life--or that those things were even possible.  Lots of young people have such thoughts and feelings.  Some find outlets for them; others turn their anger and anxiety on themselves.  At various times in my life, I did both.  But something--we'll probably never know exactly what--causes pepole like Mr. Mateen to tip into destruction of others, and themselves.

What's terribly ironic is that, in a way, he took out his frustration in exactly the way Donald Trump and his supporters are: by blaming people who are different from themselves, people they probably never meet in their everyday lives:  people they cannot understand.  They can only see such people as threats.  The difference, of course, is that Trump has the money and other resources to spark the resentments of those who feel that the world has passed them by and that those aliens, those icky gay men, are "taking over."  All Omar Mateen had was a gun.

His ex-wife has been talking.  He beat her, she says.  That makes perfect sense.  I have been in an abusive relationship, so I know that abusers abuse because they feel threatened--or they simply need for someone else to subordinate him or her self.  He was 29 years old and, I would guess, saw the future as a tunnel without light at the end of it.  He wanted to be a cop, but had been working as a security guard for nearly a decade.  That must have been frustrating, to say the least.

(I must add, too, that he was in Florida.  Law enforcement officials here in New York say that the majority of illegal guns on our streets are purchased in the Sunshine State and brought back along I-95.  It makes sense that in Florida, one can buy a gun in a Wal-Mart as easily as one can buy a fishing reel.)

Anyway...whatever his motivations, the world is moving on.  It will still be here, even if all of the nuclear weapons in the world are detonated and all of the ice caps melt.  But the question is whether or not it will be a planet humans, or other life forms as we know them, can inhabit.

I thought about that question as I was detoured away from the path I was riding on the Brooklyn side of Gateway National Park.

Look at the right side.  Then look at the left.  Then show this to someone who doesn't believe climate change has anything to do with burning stuff.

There'd been a brush fire along the shore of Jamaica Bay.  Flatbush Avenue, which the trail parallels, was closed to vehicular traffic.  We, cyclists, were diverted across the avenue onto the Greenway that skirts the South Shore of Brooklyn to the Canarsie Pier.  

Then I rode back home--into the wind, all the way, on Tosca, my fixed gear.  She was lively, but after a while, I wasn't.  But she got me home.   There were more reports of the massacre on the radio.  No news, except that a hospital spokesperson admitted that some of the 53 wounded would join the 50 who died in the Pulse nightclub.  

Spreading A Shawl Of Autumn

I love roses and sunshine and rainbows as much as the next person.  I mean, really, who doesn't.  Still, the kinds of light that really touch the core of my being are what one sees on an overcast day at the seashore, or on just about any kind of coast. (I love the sea and whatever borders it, though I don't consider myself a beach lover.  I never understood the point of lying on sand and frying myself. But I digress.)  I also love the soft, diffuse light one sees on overcast days in much of France and in parts of neighboring lands.  

I love just as much the shawl of clouds the November sky spreads over windows that lose their guile as they gain the depth of their own clarity, surrounded by splintered frames, bubbled paint and stone that is worn but not broken.  A long sleep, if not a dream, awaits.

Well, yesterday's ride offered me two of those three kinds of light.  I didn't get to France.  (How is it that the cheapest way to get to Paris from New York is by way of Moscow or Istanbul?)  But I was treated to the fine gravity of an autumnal littoral sky.

I encountered that scene in Laurence Harbor, NJ.  I hadn't really intended to ride to that particular spot, though it is more or less along the way of the ride I'd planned on taking, and the one I actually took.  And, as you can see, I got there late in the afternoon, not long before sunset.

Before I set out, I left enough food to last Max and Marley through the night.  I knew what sort of ride I needed to take; there were a few things I needed to sort out in my head.  I knew that I wanted to head out to the part of the New Jersey coast I cycled so often in my youth, when it seemed that riding was one of the few things I understood.  (Sometimes I think I don't understand a whole lot more all of these years later!)  I considered the possibility of riding late and checking into a motel or, better yet, a bed-and-breakfast, if one was open.  

Well, I started a bit later than I should have.  And, along the way, I found roads and bridges closed, some still damaged from Sandy.  So I found myself wandering through parts of Newark and Union County I know hardly, if at all, and, just before I entered Monmouth County, a road that, I thought, paralleled Route 35, until it didn't.  Then I wended through some county roads and residential streets in areas where suburban sprawl gave way to tightly-kept blue-collar areas where many homes have fishing boats in their driveways or yards.  None of the drivers honked their horns at me; women who were walking to and from neighbors' houses and stores, and men to and from VFW halls, waved and greeted me with "Howya doin"" and "Hopeyer having'a good weekend." I smiled back.

I did, finally, find myself pedaling along boardwalks and quiet streets where the lazy waves of the bay lapped against rocks, then sand, then rocks again.  I got as far as Ideal Beach in North Middletown, which was known as East Keansburg when I was a teenager. (Apparently, someone realized that having "Middletown" in a community's name was better for property values than "Keansburg" in that part of New Jersey.)  It's actually cleaner--if a bit more self-consciously "beachy"-- than I remember it from the days when we snuck there when we were cutting classes or otherwise looking over our shoulders, or simply didn't have any money.

Because I got lost (I can admit that now:  I'm a woman!), it took me nearly two hours longer to get there than I'd planned.  Oh, and I was riding into 20-40KPH winds all the way down.  Really.  So I knew I wasn't going to get to Long Branch before drinkers and drunks started pouring into and out of the bars and their cars.  Plus, I figured that if I would encounter even more damaged or destroyed roads, paths or bridges--and therefore need to take more detours--than I already had.  In fact, I might not be able to get to some areas at all.

So, sadly, I turned around and started riding back.  I figured I'd ride to the nearest train station--or at least the first I found.  That's how I found myself in Laurence Harbor. comforted by the November sky.

Oh, and my favorite flowers are lilacs.  Nothing against roses, mind you.  Just my preference.  Some might say that it's the flower that looks best under such a sky.