Since I've come to Florida, I think I've seen every kind of weather one can find when the temperature is above freezing. Today, I thought I was entering a path of sunshine.
Light and warmth threaded through those tree limbs and filled the sky as I rode the Lehigh Trail, which begins about two kilometers from my parents' house and extends for five kilos to Colbert Road, which leads to SR 100 and the bridge to Flagler Beach.
There are few things in this world that I love more than descending a bridge to an ocean I can see on the horizon
even if I turn right at the end of the bridge and pedal 50 kilometers straight into a 30 kilometer per hour wind that, at moments, gusted to 40 KPH.
I mean, how could I complain when my ride was filled with the wind, the light and the hiss of the ocean--which meant that they were filling me>
Like Flagler Beach yesterday and today, Daytona Beach did not lack for people walking along the sand on the warm day. At Flagler and Daytona, however, swimming was not allowed. No one was allowed even to enter any of the beaches along the 50 or so kilometers of Atlantic Coast between them.
After savoring two of mom's meatball sandwiches and polishing them off with some strawberries and a mandarin orange, I started my ride back. After the ride down, it was almost too easy: the wind I'd fought on the way down was blowing at my back. But that wind also brought something else:
gray clouds thickening ahead of me. The fact that I was riding about as fast as my body could move the ballon-tired beach cruiser under it meant that I could ride right into the rain.
Which is what happened after I turned left from the Flagler Beach pier onto the SR 100 bridge. After climbing away from the ocean and descending on the "mainland", a cascade dropped from the sky on me. There was no prelude of light showers gradually turning to rain; that storm dropped straight on me. It was like the "instant storms" that often soak this area, momentarily, late on summer afternoons. The difference was that this storm didn't include lightning and thunder. But it ended about halfway into the Lehigh Trail--about fifteen minutes before I got to my parents' house.
The rain that pattered the canal yesterday turned, for a time, into a barrage last night. When I woke this morning, raindrops were poking ephemeral pockmarks in the face of the water.
But, by the time Dr. Phil's show ended (Yes, I watched it with my mother and father.), the rain had stopped and the sun looked like it was trying to wedge itself between clouds. I got on the bike a while later, and the clouds closed ranks on the sun. Still, I managed to ride along some trails to the Palm Coast Parkway Bridge, where the scene changed just a bit.
Of course, when you see something on your left, you look to your right. Or is it the other way around? Who told me that, anyway?
In any event, I looked to my left and saw this:
I thought, for a moment, it was sea mist. After I descended the bridge and turned onto the Route A1A bike/pedestrian lane, it thickened faster than the makeup of a reality TV star.
The shrouded area is known as Painters Hill. It's a very lovely area where, on many a day, breezes skip across sea oats and other grasses and shrubs on the dunes that line the ocean. I would have loved to see how a painter might have rendered it in the light I saw today.
The Flagler Beach pier jutted out into water that dissolved into mist. The eponymous beach, about 10 kilometers south of Painter's Hill, was the only one open along A1A from Palm Coast to Ormond Beach. The area is still recovering from recent storm and the surf was rough. Nobody was swimming at Ormond, but of course, a few surfers flung themselves into the tides.
Finally, as I reached Ormond Beach, the fog began to dissipate and the sun that, earlier, had been trying to get a few waves in edgewise pushed some clouds aside--and shone through a light mist.
I must say, though, that I don't recall much, if any fog in my previous two dozen or so trips here. Certainly I had never before seen what I saw today.
So...where in the world is Justine Valinotti now?
OK, you know this isn't the Ponte Vecchio. Or the Pont Neuf. Or the Tower, Verrazano or Golden Gate Bridges.
For all I know, the local transportation authorities don't even classify it as a bridge. It doesn't connect countries, states or even two sides of a neighborhood. The houses on each side of this bridge are even considered part of the same development.
The body of water spanned by that structure looks like this:
Seeing that birthday party baloon floating in the effluvium surprised me more than seeing a creature that could have caused me harm would have--or, for that matter, almost anything else I might have encountered.
It's a canal, and from what I've gathered, it was used for irrigation, as it doesn't look terribly navigable. (Now tell me, who else uses phrases like "terribly navigable"?) It runs behind the house where I'm staying.
You've probably figured, by now, that I'm visiting my parents
in "The Sunshine State."
It sounds like a corollary of Murphy's Law: You escape from the cold only to run into the rain.
We might get more rain tomorrow. I might chance a ride, but if I don't, skies are supposed to clear--and the temperature drop--the day after. I wouldn't mind that.
Nor do I mind today which, so far, has included a leisurely lunch with my mother and one of her friends. It's fun, and part of my education!
Some of us have difficulty with authority figures. It might be the result of experiences with teachers, parents, clergy people or agents of the law. We might be scolded for talking back or other forms of defiance, but those who scold us sometimes tell themselves, and each other, that one day we will "grow up" and "grow out of" our distrust of people with power over us.
But some of us learn, as we get older, to be even more skeptical of anyone we're supposed to obey or "respect". I mean, how many--ahem--elected officials make you want to be a more compliant and amenable to those who have license--however they might have attained it--to make decisions that affect us? And, given the scandals we've seen everywhere from the church to the entertainment industry, what would persuade anyone to give more credence to someone just because he or she has a title, money or a reputation, however any of those things were acquired?
Of course, the question of who merits our obedience and respect has been around for as long as humans have organized themselves. Practically all philosophers, and more than a few poets, writers and artists have dealt with this issue, if obliquely. And past as well as recent events give us reason to wonder just who, exactly, should be obeyed, much less revered.
One such event occurred 75 years ago this month in Flagstaff, Arizona. The previous month, gasoline rationing had begun in the US. Interestingly, the reason was not that petrol was in short supply. Rather, rubber was, because the attack on Pearl Harbor a year earlier cut off most of the supply--and military needed whatever was available. Thus, it was believed that the best way to reduce rubber usage was to reduce driving. So was gas rationing begun.
Five different kinds of ration cards were issued. One, the C ration, was given to "essential war workers" (including police officers and letter carriers) and did not restrict the amount of gas they could use. In Flagstaff, one recipient of the C ration was a fellow named Reverend George Gooderham.
That didn't sit well with another Flagstaff denizen--one Perry Francis. But he wasn't just an ordinary citizen: He was the sheriff.
So how did Sheriff Francis express his resentment toward the Reverend? Get ready for this: He took the minister's bicycle.
A few hours later, the man of the cloth realized his wheels were gone and went to the local constabulary. The folks in the sheriff's office led him on for a while before "finding" his bicycle and returning it to him.
It's often said that there is honor among thieves. But what about cops who steal--from clergy members, no less?
Which will come first: a perpetual motion machine, or Donald Trump not taking credit for something?
Or a bike share program without theft or vandalism?
A little more than two years ago, I found a Citibike that someone attempted to camouflage with gold rattle-can paint. That bike was one of hundreds that have been stolen from New York's bike-share program during its four and a half years of operation. Most other large-city share programs have had to deal with prodigious pilferage; some, such as the one Rome had, ended because of it.
Turns out, municipal bike share programs aren't the only ones whose bikes are swiped. On its sprawling Mountain View, California campus, Google offers bikes for its employees to use. The problem,it seems, is that not everyone who avails him or self to that service is an employee--or remains on the campus after grabbing the handlebars.
It seems that some local residents view the bikes as part of "the commons" and "borrow" them in much the same way some folks "borrow" shopping carts from their local supermarkets or "find" milk crates nearby. Some of the bikes have been found on lawns of nearby homes, roofs of hotspots and even in a local TV commercial. Even Mountain View's mayor has admitted to riding one of Google's bikes to the movies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Google's bikes are adorned with the Lego hues of its logo. While this makes them distinctive, it hardly makes them impossible to camouflage. While Citibike and most other municipal share bikes are shaped differently from most bikes you can buy, Google's frames, with their sloping twin-lateral top tube, have a form similar to that of many European-style city or commuter bikes--including at least one from a certain company located at the other end of Silicon Valley. Thus, it wouldn't be too difficult to disguise a purloined Google bike.
That might explain why some have been found as far away as Alaska and Mexico, and why one turned up at Burning Man in Nevada while others ended up at the bottom of a local creek. It also explains why Google is now doing something that, frankly, I'm surprised they didn't do earlier in the program: They are attaching GPS tracking devices to the bikes.
Hmm...Can you imagine if supermarkets and dairy companies started implanting chips in their carts and crates?
