Sometimes I ride down to the Canarsie Pier, as I did today. It's on the South Shore of Brooklyn, along the Greenway that connects Howard Beach to Sheepshead Bay and parallels the Belt Parkway as it winds along the beaches and coves of the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay.
At just about any time of year, in any kind of weather, at pretty much any hour of the day or night, people--usually older men--fish off the pier:
In my time, I've seen plenty of guys fishing off piers and bridges. The ones I see on the piers seem to have a mutual non-acknowledgment pact with cyclists. The ones on bridges, on the other hand, are often resentful or simply hostile toward cyclists. That may have something to do with the fact that on bridges, we tend to pass closer to them than we do on piers, as the walkways on most bridges (where cyclists usually ride and fisherman cast their lines) are only a few feet, if that, wide.
It seems that the worlds of cycling and fishing, at least in urban or suburban settings, exclude each other, whether or not by design. Sometimes I see men riding bicycles to their fishing spots. But they aren't riding to take the ride; the bike is strictly is a means of transportation and portage. As often as not, their fishing poles are strapped or even taped to the top tubes of their bicycles.
Perhaps some of those fisherman resent or envy those of us who are cycling for its own sake, or for training. After all, even if we have to put down payments on our bikes and pay them in installments before we pedal them, we have lifestyles--and, with it, access to the means, or whatever will get us the means, to buy a nice bike. Most of the fishermen (Most are male.) are poor and/or working class; many have families they are supporting in full or in part. And most of them, at least in this area, are members of racial and ethnic minorities. At the Canarsie Pier, as in other fishing spots in this city, they are usually Caribbean or Latino. On the other hand, most cyclists, including yours truly, are white. Even those who are Caribbean, Latino or from other minority group tend to be a bit better off, financially as well as socially, than those who are fishing.
Hmm...Could it be that this city's class structure can be delineated according to whether someone fishes or rides a bicycle?
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!
I don't get sick often. But it seems that when I do, I am ridiculously busy as soon as I get back to my normal routine. And so it has been the last two days.
Well, at least I got to ride to and from both jobs today, and the other day. Both days were full of fall colors and decidedly non-autumnal warmth. Yesterday, on the other hand, we had weather that was even less autumnal, except for the kind of light we had: Wind-driven downpours frizzed and soaked everything in sight so that even the reflections of sidewalks in the windows frizzed and soaked like cats dropped into swimming pools.
So...an unrideable day was sandwiched between two days of near-perfect riding conditions. I guess I'd rather have it that way than the other way around.
I was running a bit late this morning on my way to my regular job. So I barreled down streets--including a stretch of one that looked like a washbord and made me feel as if I were riding on one--like a moonshiner on a backwoods Southern road during Prohibition. I don't know whether it had to do with the vibrations or my blood pumping (or both), but felt as if the things that had been making me sick were leaping out of my body.
Even with all of the vibrations that shook me--and even though I was riding to work--I was enjoying the ride as if it were a foliage weekend tour in Vermont. Inside one of the rear baskets, I carried a canvas tote bag that contained my students' papers, a textbook for one of the courses I teach and a pair of black patent slingback high heels.
The only problem was that when I got to work and reached into the bag, only the left shoe was in it! I checked inside the bag and in the area surrounding the spot where I parked my LeTour and up the block: No luck. I didn't have time to re-trace my route.
So I was reduced (literally) to spending the day in the black flats in which I'd pedaled. They aren't bad-lookng shoes, and they're very comfortable. And, to tell the truth, they really weren't bad with my outfit, which consisted of a plum-maroon cardigan with gray piping over a lavender blouse, a flannel skirt in the same shade of gray as the pipng, and a pair of sheer pantyhose in that same hue. As one of my students said, it all looked "very elegant." But the patent slingbacks with three-inch heels would have given it a bit more pizazz.
Oh well. Maybe some kid along my route found that other shoe. I guess if the kid were mine, I'd rather that he or she found a middle-aged woman's dress shoe in size 11 wide than a crack vial or shell casing!
