In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
Yesterday morning, before I went out to ride, I was listening to the radio while I sipped on green tea and ate some Greek yougurt (from Kesso) with almonds and a banana, which I washed down with an orange. While enjoying my breakfast, I was listening to an interview an NPR host conducted with a fellow in Inverness, Scotland who maintains the official website that records sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. The interviewer is clearly skeptical, to put it mildly, about the existence of "Nessie" and other mythical creatures like Bigfoot.
Now, because I'm the sort of person who takes a lot of things--even stuff that's more credible than, say, most of what Trump says in his speeches and tweets--with more than a few grains of salt,you might not expect me to be a believer. But how can I be anything else? I know for a fact that the Randall's Island Salamander and Point Lookout Orca exist. I can't not believe. After all, I made them up saw them and even photographed them, however crudely.
About the latter: I didn't see him (I think I decided he's male because he reminds me of a Pac Man!) yesterday even though I rode to Point Lookout. But could there be something else lurking in the waters by "the Point"? It looks ready to take over the bay, the ocean and even the land:
A clever creature it is: It showed up in the same part of all of that photos I took. I guess it's trying to make me believe that it was dirt or some malfunction in my camera rather than a sea creature.
A tech-savvy monster? Should we be scared? Does the Point Lookout Orca stand a chance against it?
Oh, no: It's following those folks home. And their little dogs, too!
No one will ever confuse Review Avenue in Long Island City with Route Departmentale 618 or the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and Tiburon. I had only one opportunity to do RD 618 and one other for the iconic California ride because, well, each of them is about 6000 kilometers away (in opposite directions) from my apartment. Review Avenue, on the other hand, is only about five kilometers away (at least via the routes I take), which is one of the reasons I find myself riding there at least a few times a year. Although it's gritty, to be polite, it is visually interesting. There aren't any really tall buildings there, which allows the sky to serve as a kind of diorama backdrop for the street that separates the First Calvary Cemetery Wall from the sooty brick and stone industrial structures. That same street also looks as if it's going to sneak in under the Kosciuszko Bridge, but it makes a sharp left and leaves that job to the railroad tracks and Newtown Creek instead.
Until a few days ago, the Kosciuszko Bridge was the steel-girdered span that looks like an Erector Set project left out in the rain and soot. It still is, but it's also that other bridge that looks like it's hanging by red and white shoestrings from a couple of concrete tombstones.
Talk about "build it and they will come": The new Kosciuszko is already congested with traffic--and the old bridge hasn't been closed! A second stringed structure is supposed to be constructed parallel to the current one in two years. I think cars are already lined up to get across it.
Actually, I rather like the look of the new bridge. And it's probably easier to drive, especially a truck, across as it doesn't have the old bridge's steep inclines and terrible sight lines. At the dedication ceremony, Governor Andrew Cuomo said he heard his father--three-term Governor Mario Cuomo--use expletives for the first time when he drove the family across the bridge. Neither bicycles nor pedestrians were allowed on the old "Kos". As far as I know, they won't be allowed on the new ones, either. Then again, the bridges are part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where you wouldn't want to ride even if it were allowed! The old bridge is falling apart. But some things endure:
I wonder what Joe was thinking when he painted his name on the wall of the cemetery all of those years ago. (Maybe he's inside it now!) I'd love to know what kind of paint he used: Anything that could withstand all of the fumes from the factories and trucks, along with the weather, must be pretty durable!
When I was living in France, I did a few things--some of them entirely laughable, in retrospect--to make myself feel as if I had "gone native", if you will. I didn't wear a beret: I soon discovered that, even then (more than three decades ago) only very old men and clochards wore them--or, at least, the kind they sell to tourists. Some farmers, particularly in the central and southwestern parts of the country, still wore the Basque-style beret, which has a larger diameter "crown" than the berets artists and wannabes perched on their crania when they smoked and sipped away their nights in cafes and bars. Ironically, I wore berets after I returned to the US. And I continued a few other habits as a way of asserting my Frenchness, or at least my French influences, in the face of the yahoo-ism of the Reagan and Bush I administrations. While in France, I purchased and wore a few things that were all but unknown in the US at the time. One was a wool French (Breton) fisherman's sweater. It was the genuine article, knit from heavy dark navy wool with cream-colored horizontal stripes and buttons on the left shoulder. Other Gallic accoutrements I acquired and wore included a sweatsuit, bike jersey and shoes from a company called Le Coq Sportif. Now you can see the tricolore rooster everywhere. But in those days, you pretty much had to be in France, or perhaps a neighboring country, (Remember: There was no Amazon or eBay!) in order to see, let alone wear, that quintessentially French emblem. Another thing that could mark you as a French person was driving a Citroen. Renault was still selling cars in the US; so was Peugeot, but their motorized vehicles weren't nearly as ubiquitous as their bicycles. For a long time, I resolved that if I were to buy a car or van, it would be a Citroen because, well, you couldn't get anything more French than a vehicle with a chevron badge. Well, Le Coq Sportif and Chevron have joined forces. The occasion is the 70th anniversary of the Type H van. If you watch old French films, you've seen those boxy mini-trucks driven by farmers and urban delivery couriers. You still see them in France. Since both companies have long associations with bicycle racing in France and other countries, it makes sense that their collaboration would produce this:
It's something else I saw for the first time in France: a mobile bicycle workshop.
