Going Back Is Not An Option

I am writing, now, during the final hours of Donald Trump's presidency. I have no wish to analyze, interpret or even comment on it; really, there is much about it I'd prefer not to remember, at least now. 

To tell you the truth, I can't analyze or interpret or comment because I'm not thinking at this moment.  I'm not even sure that I can:  My mind's eye is projecting a stream of images, a riot of feelings, some related to personal experience, others coming from seemingly unrelated works of art.

About the latter:  One is a story I first read many years ago, and assigned in a few of my classes:  Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path."  The protagonist, an elderly black woman named Phoenix Jackson, trudges along the "worn path" through all manner of obstacles--as winter is bearing down--to get to town, ostensibly to procure medicine for her grandson who, as she tells the nurse who supplies it, never fully recovered from the damage to his throat caused by swallowing lye.  

What she encounters sees along the way is so real that it seems hallucinatory, or so hallucinatory that it seems real, depending on your point of view.  The nurse treats her with condescension and casts doubt on, not only Phoenix's story about her grandson swallowing lye, but even on the existence of the grandson himself.  But, perhaps, it doesn't matter whether Phoenix's story is actually true or the grandson is alive or ever existed in the first place.  One senses (or at least I sensed) that Phoenix had to make that journey, for whatever reason.  Or, more precisely, she couldn't not make it--perhaps she simply couldn't stay wherever she was.

A favorite film of mine, Cafe Transit  (released in the Anglophone world as Border Cafe), is full of characters like Phoenix. The film opens with Reyhan just having lost her husband and deciding to support herself and two young daughters by taking over his cafe, located on a mountainous Iranian road near the Turkish border.  

Because of its location, the cafe serves as a meeting and stopping-off point for people on their way to or from one place to another.  Some, like a Russian girl who lost most of her family members and who survived a sexual assault by a truck driver, have a definite destination:  She wants to be reunited with her sister, her sole surviving family member, in Italy.  Reyhan gives her an almost maternal welcome.  Others, like a Greek truck driver who takes a liking to Reyhan, simply can't or won't return home, whether because of some trauma (like the driver's wife leaving him) or because that home is gone.  

I mention all of this because while most viewers and reviewers focused (as I did, the first time I saw the film) on Reyhan's independence, I think she shared this with those other characters:  She was moving forward--on the road ahead, as it were--because, really, she couldn't do anything else.  For her, supporting herself and her kids wasn't about making a statement or defying the norms of her society:  Taking over that cafe, and making those meals (which you can practically taste while watching the film!) is her path.  

In other words, hers was not an act of defiance; she simply knew that following the norms of her culture by assenting to her brother-in-law's desire to become her second husband wasn't for her.  He wasn't a monster or villain--if anything, he's rather sympathetic, at least until the end of the film; she simply knew that her way forward didn't include him.  And the way forward was all she had.

So it was when I took  two of the most important bike rides I've ever taken.  One I described in "The Mountain We Climbed" and "Up the Col du Galibier." The other, shorter and less arduous, I took about a year later:  the last one from the apartment I shared with my former partner to my current life.  I had moved almost all of my stuff to my new place; I went back to pick up a few small things I'd left--intentionally, so I would have to take that ride?

I feel as if the coming Biden presidency will be like those journeys:  None of us knows what lies ahead; we just know that we must move ahead.  Going back is not an option.    

Right At The Cemetery, Nature Takes Over

In some parts of New England, upstate New York and the upper Midwest, nature is slowly reclaiming formerly industrial areas.  That makes sense when you realize that the Industrial Revolution first reached--and left-- the United States in those regions.

An afternoon ride I took on Friday reminded me of that.  I took a right at a cemetery on the Brooklyn-Queens border and followed a new link in the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway to a landscape that wouldn't have looked out of place in an Andrew Wyeth painting.

The Ridgewood Reservoir was built in the middle of the 19th Century, when Brooklyn was still an independent city.  Civic and business leaders believed economic growth had stalled because the Croton Reservoir, which supplied New York City, wasn't adequate, the Bronx River was too difficult to access and there weren't enough natural lakes and ponds on Long Island.  So water was diverted from nearby streams to the reservoir's location, on a butte that served as a lookout during the American Revolution and today offers fine views of cemeteries, the ocean (along the Rockaways) and the Manhattan skyline.  You might think of it as our version of Montmartre, without the cathedral or artists' studios.

The reservoir would see less and less use as a water source and would be decommissioned and drained during the 1980s.  Since then, various stages of forest have grown around the reservoir, and the area around it--Highland Park--has become a spot for in-the-know bird-watchers, hikers, runners and cyclists.  I say "in the know" because it's in an area not visited by tourists (or the sort of people who leave Manhattan only to go to Europe, or the hipsters who leave Williamsburg only to go to their parents' houses on Long Island). 

One day, it might become a full-grown woodland--and, if the Reservoir retains its water, you'll get a glimpse of the old Times Square.  I don't mean TS before Disney turned it into a mall:  I mean what it, and most of New York City, looked like before Europeans took it from the Lenape natives.  As long as the path is still there, I'm sure it will offer a relaxing ride, as it does now.

Riding With The People

Today Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed in the United States.  If I had Napoleon's prerogative of re-inventing the calendar, there are some holidays I'd do away with. But I'd keep this one.  Perhaps I'd restore it to his actual birthday, 15 January.  But I understand why it was moved to the third Monday in January:  It's easier to keep government offices, schools, banks and the like closed for three consecutive days than it is to close for a day in the middle of the week.  Also, who doesn't like a three-day weekend?

Seriously, though, there aren't many other people more deserving of their own holidays.  He truly was a martyr for a just cause.  But for all of his seriousness of purpose, he seemed to really enjoy himself sometimes.  At least, he looks that way in the photos I've seen of him on a bicycle--and there are more such photos than I ever expected to find.

Martin Luther King Jr rides bicycle with William Wachtel (the son of King's lawyer, Harry Wachtel) on Fire Island, NY, 3 September 1967,  Photo from Hofstra University collection.

I get the sense that riding a bike was, for him, a release from the rigors of touring, speaking and preaching--and the tension from FBI spies and CIA snipers lurking allies who became rivals when, among other things, he announced his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Also, from the photo, and others I've seen, riding a bicycle was a way for King to show that he was one of the common people.  When he was assassinated, in 1968, the dawn of the North American Bike Boom was just starting to flicker.  American adults  were, for the first time in half a century, mounting bikes and taking early-morning or after-work rides--or, in a few cases, riding to work or school.  Bicycles were still ridden mainly by those who were too young--or poor--to drive.  

I can't help but to think that those bike rides were at least one reason why he gave speeches that instructors (including yours truly) have used as models of good writing and effective communication for their students.  As lofty as his rhetoric could be, it reached all kinds of people:  Anyone could understand it.  In the above photo, he's on level with a young boy; when he rode a bicycle, he experienced the places where people lived in a way he wouldn't have if he were in a limousine.  And people saw him eye-to-eye--as, I suspected, he wanted to see them. 

Which, I believe, is a reason why he would call the the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic--or, more precisely, the President's inept or callous (depending on what you believe) response--as the racial, economic and social injustice that it is. He had an acute moral compass honed by, among other things, his bike rides.