Connecting, By Bicycle

This post is about Andre Breton.  

No, I'm not referring to the author of Manifeste du surrealisme.  But the man I'm about to mention is something of a philosopher. 

On 6 September, the 50-year-old began a "prologue," if you will:  a ride from Fort Collins, Colorado to Bradford, Kansas.  From Bradford, he undertook his "real" journey, which he dubbed "Connecting My Grandfathers."

His maternal grandfather was born in Bradford.  According to his website, he expects to arrive in Waterville, Maine--the birthplace of his paternal grandfather--some time later this month.  Along the way, he saw, and anticipates seeing beautiful landscapes, and visits with friends and family members.

The 50-year-old Breton is a relative newcomer to cycling.  He bought a bike on impulse in 2010, on Saint Patrick's Day.  He said he was "guilted" into the purchase because he was living in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he was working on his third post-doctoral fellowship as a wildlife biologist.  "That community rides bicycle far more than any community I've encountered in the United States," he explains. 

Buying that bicycle might've been one of the best bits of timing in his life:  He had just broken up with a paramour and felt ready to do the same with the academic world.  Riding again for the first time since he was a teenager sparked "a massive fire" in him that led to racing.    "This is my ninth season, the last two years as a pro," he says.  "I got my butt kicked, but when else am I going to do it?"  

He's also taken some long tours, in North America and Europe.  All of those hours in the saddle, he said, helped him out of a depression.  "There are lessons you can gain on a bicycle in a short time that can teach you about your whole life," he explains.

His current ride is to connect his grandfathers.  The real connection, I believe, is the one he made with himself.  In a way, that's not so different from what the French writer did when he used his dreams to tap into his creative subconsciousness.

Andre Breton. Photo by Della Taylor, for the Potter Leader-Enterprise.

A Champion's Journey On The Blood Road

On this date in 1965, more than 30 US Air Force jets bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.  It was not such the first such raid, nor was it the first to be reported in the press.  After the attacks on this date, however, the State Department felt compelled to assert that these missions were authorized by the powers granted to President Lyndon B. Johnson with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964.

(Four decades later, newly-declassified documents would reveal what many had suspected:  The incident that served as the rationale for the resolution had not, in fact, happened.  Sound familiar?)

Anyway, I don't have to tell you about the carnage that resulted from the Vietnam War.  When I was writing about a Veterans' event for a local newspaper, I talked to someone who'd fought in Cambodia and still had nightmares.  He reminded me that more than 55,000 members of the American Armed Forces died there (not to mention many more Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Chinese, Russian, and other fighters).  "That's a whole stadium full of people," he exclaimed.  "Whenever I think of that war, I picture a whole stadium full of people getting killed."

One of those casualties was Rebecca Rusch's father.  He was shot down and killed during the war.

Today she is a firefighter and EMT in Ketcham, Idaho, where she lives.  But she is better known as "The Queen of Pain" for her exploits as a rock climber, white-water rafter---and mountain biker. 

Among her feats in the latter sport is a record for riding the length of the 228 kilometer Kokopelli Trail.  As if that weren't enough, she rode the 1800 kilometer Ho Chi Minh Trail, in part, to get to know her father better.  She was only three and a half years old when he was killed.

A full-length feature film about her journey, Blood Road, will open in the Sun Valley Film Festival on 15 March.  I won't be able to make it, so I hope the film makes it out my way soon!

Michelle Dumaresq: 100% Pure Woman Champ

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  

This day was first observed in 1999, one year after Rita Hester was murdered in her Allston, Massachusetts apartment.  She was killed just two days before she would have turned 35 years old.


Her death came just a few weeks after Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die on a cold night in the Wyoming high desert.  Their deaths helped to bring about the hate-crime laws now on the books in the US as well as many state and local statutes.  Moreover, Hester's killing--while not as widely publicized as Shepard's--galvanized transgender activists all over the world.

Because I am--at least to my knowledge--the only transsexual woman with a bike blog, I am going to use this post to honor one of the greatest transgender athletes of our era.

Michelle Dumaresq was born in 1970.  In 2001, she entered and won her first competitive mountain biking event--the Bear Mountain Race in British Columbia, Canada.  After she won two more races, her racing license was suspended in response to complaints from other female riders.  The cycling associations of British Columbia and Canada, after meeting privately with race organizers, tried to pressure her into quitting.  Of course, she wouldn't, and after a meeting with UCI officials, it was decided that she could continue to compete as a female.

Other female riders felt she had an unfair advantage.  Their resentment was, not surprisingly, based on a common misunderstanding.  Dumaresq had her gender reassignment surgery in 1996, five years before her first victory, and had been taking female hormones--and a male hormone blocker--for several years before that.  By the time she started racing, she no longer had any testosterone in her body (Biological females have traces of it.) and she had lost most of the muscle mass she had as a man.

I know exactly where she's been, as I also had the surgery after six years of taking hormones and a testosterone blocker.  A few months into my regimen, I started to notice a loss of overall strength, and I noticed some more after my surgery.  Trust me, Ms. Dumaresq, as talented and dedicated as she is, had no physiological advantage over her female competitors.

I remind myself of that whenever another female rider (usually, one younger than I am) passes me during my ride to work!

But I digress.  Michelle Dumaresq had the sort of career that would do any cyclist--male or female, trans or cisgender, or gay--proud.  She won the Canadian National Championships four times and represented her country in the World Championships.  That, of course, made the haters turn up the heat.  When she won the 2006 Canadian National Championships, the boyfriend of second-place finisher Danika Schroeter jumped onto the podium and helped her put on a T-shirt that read "100% Pure Woman Champ."

Ms. Dumaresq would have looked just fine in it.