The other day, I got home just in time from my seashore ride. Just after I walked in the door, it began to rain. It's rather ironic, isn't it, that I spent a couple of hours riding next to an ocean but I was happy to stay dry?
Anyway, it's been raining almost nonstop ever since. And, I got to thinking about how bikes look when they're out in the rain.
I found this photo on a Flickr page. It was taken by Andre Wine in the Hardebrucke Station in Zurich, Switzerland. The next time someone tells you the Swiss are boring or don't have a sense of style, show him or her this photo.
Plus, I must say, I haven't done a lot of cycling in Switzerland. But what cycling I did was certainly memorable!
Anyway, the rain also brings me into the mood of this poem by Guillaume Apollinaire:
The poem, "Il pleut," or "It's Raining," can be translated thus:
It's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory
It's also raining you, marvelous encounters in my life, o little drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
Listen to the bonds falling off that bind you above and below.
Those last two lines are such an apt description of what I've experienced over the last couple of years--and the way I often feel when cycling. Especially the last line.
Still, I'd prefer that it stop raining, at least for a couple of days--and even if one of my bikes has fenders!
It seems that every year, on the first weekend of October, I take a bike ride to the ocean. Last year was an exception, as I was still recuperating from my surgery. But this year, without any plan to do so, I continued my "tradition." In fact, I never plan to do my autumn littoral ride; I just seem to take it just about every year.
I could attribute the seeming inevitability of this ride, and versions of it I've taken in other years, to the fact that this date is the anniversary of my grandmother's death, and the other day was her birthday. Now, as to what a ride to the ocean has to do with my grandmother: on the surface, nothing, as I never knew her to cycle and she seemed to have no particular affinity for the sea. I guess this ride is appropriate because I am utterly myself when I pedal along the shore, and my grandmother had as much to do with my development as anyone had.
Plus, about this time of year, the people you see at the beaches-- or along any stretch of seashore-- are a bit more individualistic than the summer crowds. That is especially true on a day like today, which featured what isn't most people's idea of "beach weather."
It's hard not to contemplate along this stretch of beach. Maybe that's why it's called Point Lookout.
The name of that place could also serve as a description of my annual early October rides by the sea: They get me into a contemplative mood. Or do I take them because I'm in a contemplative mood?
There was the one I took during my senior year in high school. On that bright, cool and breezy first Sunday in October, the sea and sand of Long Branch, New Jersey spread as far ahead and around me as my future.
Even though the same metallic rays reflected on the Atlantic waves as far as I could see, I knew there was something I could only imagine at the end of it; just as I had only heard, read and seen images of Portugal, Spain, France, England and Italy by that time in my life, I had a vision of my future that no one else had--or, for that matter, could or would imagine.
And, on either side of me, windswept outlines of footprints had turned into swirls that extended as far as I could see. If I could follow them, where would they take me?, I wondered. Then I realized there was no way I could have followed them; even at such a young age, I realized that I could not follow any example or path I had seen before me.
Still, I tried. I really tried, for a long time.
But on that day, after I had my revelation, the only thing that I could rely on--at least at that moment--was my newly-acqired Nishiki International, painted almost in the exact shade of the water I saw that day.
And the only certainty was that I would pedal it home--about 20 miles away--to the big meal my mother made every Sunday afternoon.
Rain, rain and more rain.
That's been the story of this week. The only variable has been the temperature: Up to midday yesterday, the air felt tropically humid and dense.
Since then, the raindrops have been needles of the chilly wind. I don't mind the sensation; it is a sign that autumn has begun.
Being an educator has meant giving up something I used to enjoy: the fall cycling vacation. Since I've begun to teach, I've taken weekend trips in the fall. One of my more memorable ones was a Columbus Day weekend in Vermont. The foliage was just slightly past its peak, and save for some rain on the second afternoon and a sudden drop from 54 to 15 degrees F that evening, the weather was great.
In some odd way, cycling in Vermont reminded me of cycling in Europe. Perhaps it had to do with being in the countryside, but within an hour or two (by bike) from a town where I could, if I wanted to, stop in a friendly cafe and enjoy a cup of coffee or some other beverage with local people. Plus, I found that even when the drivers left cyclists little more than elbow room when they passed, they were never really a threat or danger because they seemed to understand bikes and cyclists on the road. Some of those drivers, I'm sure, rode bikes at least sometimes.
I don't plan on doing a trip like that this year, mainly because I'm still nowhere near the kind of shape I used to be in. Some of the steepest climbs I ever pedalled were in the Green Moumtains. It seems that the roads there are older than, say, the ones in the Alps or the Rocky Mountains. The older roads aren't as well-graded as the newer ones and so can be even more difficult than the more modern thoroughfares.
Perhaps I'll take a trip to Vermont, or some other place, next fall. Meantime, I hope to take a miltiday trip this coming summer. And, I'd like to take the kind of trip I took for three weeks one September, from Italy into France, when I was working for American Youth Hostels. If I had taken the same trip in the summer, some of the roads would have been all but impassible with traffic and everything would have cost a good bit more. To be more precise, they would have cost then what they cost now.
Perhaps I'll do a trip lke that next year, or even sooner. Meantime, I'll enjoy some fall cycling here.
