Author: girl

back in the (bike) saddle along the Anacostia

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This past week I got back on my bike—Pearl—for the first time in over a year. I didn’t ride her at all in 2006, only 4 times in 2005, and not at all in 2004. In 2003, I did the Tour de Friends AIDS ride from North Carolina to DC, and rode Pearl all the freaking time. And, I only got her when we moved out here, in May of 2002. Which means that on average I’ve ridden her over 100 miles a year, but really I haven’t ridden her regularly in 4 years. Pearl is a Raleigh c500, a hybrid that I selected because it was light enough for me to carry up and down two flights of stairs in the apartment we were occupying that year. I’ve replaced the seat (with an old school Liberator that I’ve had for a decade now) and added handlebar extenders, but otherwise she’s just as I bought her.

Well, except for being covered with stickers. Pearl goes undercover as a beater bike, something that made me feel better about locking her to signposts in the District when I first bought her. At the time I started training for the AIDS ride, I had stickers from surf camp (the Surf Diva and Yoga for Surfers logos) and a ‘No Plot? No Problem!‘ one that I was dying to put to good use. Onto Pearl they went. Since then, she’s become a bit more political (NOW, Rails to Trails, a ‘Debbie Dick’ sticker from the Haring shop on Lafayette Street, bought just 2 months before it closed) and advertises the places she’s been (Canada, Chincoteague Island).

At any rate, I pumped up her tires, oiled her chain (I really should clean it before I ride her again) and took her out three times this past week. We are much closer to the trail system up here than we were in the District, which is nice; I used to have to ride several miles one way to get to any trail. University Park is located right at the base of the ‘Y’ made by the Northwest and Northeast branches of the Anacostia River, which means easy access to the path system that follows the tributaries. This week, all three of my rides were along these trails.

My first ride, last Wednesday, was up to Lake Artemesia and back, which took me about 45 minutes (it bears saying: I ride slowly). From my house, I was able to stay on neighborhood side streets until the College Park metro, and then ride down Paint Branch Road to the trail access point at Linson Pool. I’d heard from neighbors that the lake itself is a beautiful place to bike or jog, and I wasn’t disappointed. I spotted all kinds of familiar birds, including Tree Swallows using the nesting boxes, but no new ones (I was handicapped by not having my glasses, let alone binoculars or the bird book, so the likelihood of conclusively identifying something new was slim to nil). Nonetheless, I’m sure there are some relatively common ones around that I personally haven’t seen yet (the Wood Duck springs to mind), and I’m looking forward to going back up there for bird-watching purposes. As a ride, it was on the short end, but there are trails that continue past the lake that I can explore in the future. All in all, it was a lovely way to get back on my bike.

On Saturday, I took Pearl over to the new community garden to water my wee pepper plants (more on that later), and then made a loop back to my house on the Northeast and Northwest Branch trails. Riding along the river was lovely, and very different in a wide-open way from what I’m used to when riding the creek trails through woods. I saw barn swallows galore, but not too many other humans. I also violated one of the cardinal rules of biking and hiking when I made the transition onto the Northwest Branch, which is: ‘When greeted by a used condom at the trailhead, turn back!’ All’s well that ends well, I figure. The ride did end well; I ended up at my pond, and then had to face the climb back to higher ground. The steep hills right at the end of the ride are my least favorite thing about riding along rivers, but I can’t complain; cycling on the flats was getting a little boring, not to mention making my legs beg for a nice downhill break. Which I got as I cruised through my neighborhood back to my house (with the exception of the very last block, which is also uphill from the creek at the end of our street).

On yesterday’s ride I went exploring in a different direction, taking the Paint Branch Trail north from Lake Artemesia through College Park. I wasn’t super thrilled with the route and probably won’t ride it again. The trail itself was perfectly well maintained, it just wasn’t that interesting and the surrounds were quite suburban. The winding around to avoid the roads also made it hard to build up speed, so it felt more like a meander than a decent ride. But, I learned a bit more about my local geography, so that’s always good. And, I saw some fresh-out-of-the-egg (still brown and yellow like ducklings) goslings at the Paint Branch Golf Course, so that was a nice surprise. On the way back home, I stopped in at my new local bike shop and discovered that a guy who used to work at my old local bike shop—and fixed up my derailleur after Pearl tumbled off the top of a car—now works there. He recognized me, and once he made the connection I remembered him as well. So that was a pleasant surprise. While there I confirmed that, despite my fixation to the contrary, my front left brake pad does not in fact rub against the wheel (this was the purpose of my stop).

This coming week, I think I’ll ride over to Silver Spring on the Sligo Creek trail, and/or continue further north on the Northwest Branch trail. I’m planning to stick with hour long rides for a while, and build up to making a loop of DC on the trails (something I’ve wanted to do for years). I’ll keep you posted on how that works out.

back in the (bike) saddle along the Anacostia

5 year anniversary

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Today is the five year anniversary of when we moved to DC. I can tell you exactly where I was at this time five years ago: on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A few hours from now, I was pulling into a motel outside of Hagerstown, an hour or so away from DC. But before then, I was on the Turnpike and then I was on I-70. I have driven that stretch of the Turnpike many many times over the past 15 years. To and from college, and then to and from grad school. On that night, we’d been driving all day, and it was dark, and we’d been packing the truck until late the night before and we were tired; pretty much the same story as all the other moves from the Midwest to the East Coast or back in the other direction that we’d made before then.

I refer to that night, only half jokingly, as the time the Friends theme saved my life. I was listening to the radio, because I’d gotten tired of the tapes I had in the car, and I had the windows down (no air conditioning, since I was driving the Mustang), and it was a beautiful night. Coming over the mountains where I-70 drops down from the Turnpike to Maryland is my favorite part of the drive, the way the valley just opens up and you get this beautiful panoramic view of the area. That night, there was a bright moon, and after spending the whole evening with truckers, there was no one on the road but us. At one point, I caught a turn in the road just right and I was the only one there. I couldn’t see the headlights of the truck on the road behind me, there was no one coming in the other direction, and I turned off the car’s lights, just for a few seconds, just to see what it was like to be out there, in the mountains, with just the light of the moon. It was spectacular.

It was later, about a half hour down the road, when I had been lulled into a daze, driving out of habit. I don’t know if I was really asleep at the wheel, or just in a road coma, but I remember being jolted fully awake by the unmistakable sound of the intro to the Friends theme. I wasn’t really sure where we were, or how far I’d come from the earlier moment when I had been fully alert and convinced I could drive all night. But, clearly I couldn’t drive all night, and on a mountain in the dark is no place to be falling asleep at the wheel. So we stopped, and everything was fine. Well, as fine as they could be while staying in a $35/night motel, an experience that I won’t dwell on here.

I don’t think I’ve heard the Friends theme since then, but I can call it up and see the road appearing in front of me, the shock of having been drifting off, and the relief of realizing that nothing bad had happened.

So, happy moving-to-DC anniversary to us! And, thank you, Rembrandts, for making it all possible.

5 year anniversary

The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian

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I was disappointed by The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian. I have been awed by the strength of several of his past novels — Midwives, of course, but also Trans-Sister Radio and Buffalo Soldier — but I don’t find the quality of the stories to be consistent. I’m sure that’s more a reflection of me and which types of narratives I enjoy. Nonetheless, I have this sense with Bohjalian that when he’s on, he’s a narrative genius, and when he’s not, he’s Wally Lamb.

In this book, he wasn’t on. I’m going to veer from my general path of not spoiling books for future readers and talk about the plot. All of Bohjalian’s books hinge on tragedy, and frequently violence. In each, The Truth is contested, and in early books, this uncertainty is highlighted through the use of shifting first person narrative. It’s precisely because there is no single version of key events that the violence is usually not described in lurid detail, and this makes his books more readable for me. I probably should have put The Double Bind to the side when it became clear that the tragedy involved was a violent rape, which would have been when the jacket flap informed me that the main character rode her bike into the woods, had a terrible experience, and retreated from her friends and family, using photography as her only solace. Hmm, I wonder what the terrible experience could have been? Still, despite my distaste for violence against women as the hook on which to hang novels, I expected that Bohjalian was unlikely to treat the events in a graphic or voyeuristic fashion, and that aspect is true.

Nonetheless, I again should have stopped reading when Daisy Buchanan appeared in the narrative. Here I feel obligated to say: I don’t find The Great Gatsby to be the pinnacle of American literary achievement of the 20th century. I don’t even like the book very much. At all. I find the characterizations flat, the plot preposterous, and the ‘social commentary’ not witty or cutting or poignant or anything much at all. To revert 17 years in my analysis for a moment, the whole novel strikes me as boring and stupid. So, reading a novel that hinges inextricably on The Great Gatsby, was, for lack of a more sophisticated word, annoying. It’s true that The Double Bind is not a novel about The Great Gatsby: like Bohjalian’s other works, it’s a novel about loss, grief, dissociation, and healing. It just happens to use The Great Gatsby as the major lens through which these themes are explored.

So, what can I say? The novel is beautifully executed, as are all of his novels. I just wasn’t the audience, which I was too stubborn to accept as a reason to just take the book back to the library unread.

The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian

The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett

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I picked up The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett, at the library, as I’d enjoyed Bel Canto and not previously read any of her other stuff. I was a bit disappointed, truthfully. I know it’s a debut novel, and I tried to give it the tender consideration that such a thing deserves. Nonetheless, it fell flat for me. The changing viewpoints didn’t flow as well as in her later writing, which was a shame. Granted, there aren’t many writers who achieve excellence with a shifting first person narrative (several, but not all, of Chris Bohjalian‘s works do).

The book didn’t grab me. I kept waiting for the plot to become compelling, and it didn’t. As when I read Three Junes, I found myself treating each section of the book as a short story, strung together by shared characters. Perhaps that’s how Patchett meant the novel to be read, in which case, bravo! I don’t enjoy that narrative structure much; more when the vignettes are shorter, as with The House on Mango Street or The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Still, I mention those books as examples only; I didn’t love either of them, and I much prefer a short story collection with a theme such as Interpreter of Maladies or Strange Pilgrims, both of which are excellent reads.

In a nutshell, the novel is well-written and the prose flows. However, the plot didn’t engage me and the structure is one I find off-putting. So there you have it.

The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett

Virginia Tech shootings & my friend Jay

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These past few days, I’ve been touched in many ways by what’s happened at Virginia Tech. I keep thinking about my years in college classrooms, as a student and as a professor. The image of a 76 year old man blocking entry to his classroom stays with me, and I try not to dwell on wondering what I would have done, what my students would have tried to do.

Mostly, this week, I am thinking about the kid himself. I am thinking of all of the faces in all of the classes I’ve taught, and how no matter how old or serious or bereft they are, they all seem like kids to me, even when they are younger than I am by only a few years. In thinking about him, I am feeling awful for his parents. What a terrible way to lose a child.

When I was 18, my friend Jay shot himself. He’s not the only person I know who’s killed themselves, but he was the first. He was a couple of years older, and I hadn’t seen him since he’d graduated from high school three years before. But we’d been close, that year that I was a sophomore and he was a senior. Jay had a pickup truck, with a speaker on the top of the cab. We’d pile into the bed of the truck, and drive around town startling people by belting things out through the speaker, as you could without getting stopped or arrested in 1990 in a small town in Indiana. I was one of only a couple of friends who went to Jay’s house after his high school graduation; I remember his mother being so happy to meet us, and Jay being slightly sheepish. Jay’s younger brother had a developmental disability; I’m not sure if we even knew Jay had a younger brother before that day, but it was clear that he had learned to be protective of his family’s privacy. Later that summer, when I was staying with my grandparents for three weeks, I talked to Jay on the phone every few days. Not about anything in particular: the nothing he was doing in Indiana, the nothing I was doing in Ontario.

What I didn’t know about Jay back then was that he owned guns. The word ‘suicide’ was never spoken at his closed-casket funeral. His obituary says only that he died alone in his apartment, and that he was a member of the NRA. As in Virginia, it’s not hard to buy guns in Indiana, and owning several of them does not automatically trigger concern; at least, it didn’t back then. I should say, it doesn’t trigger concern for most people. I didn’t know that Jay owned guns. I did know that he thought more about death than the rest of us, even with our posturing and our various life challenges. He was the only one of us who wanted to sit through all of Faces of Death; the rest of us talked a big talk about being hardcore and disillusioned, but it freaked us out nonetheless.

I say all this because I’ve been thinking about Jay a lot these past couple of days. Jay didn’t kill anyone else, but I see him in the kid from Virginia Tech. This isn’t about guilt or blame or what might have been. For me, it’s about holding the weight of the reality of their experiences; it’s about the deep sadness that comes with knowing that whatever it is in us that allows us to face that choice and go a different way, they didn’t have it. If they ever had it, they lost it at some point and couldn’t get it back, the ‘it’ that keeps that path on the other side of unimaginable. I do know, though, that it’s not the kind of thing that returns with a phone call from a friend, or a ride in a pickup truck on a summer day, or because you realize, finally, how very much your family loves you.

In the end, I find myself wanting to say to the Cho family: I am so very sorry for your loss. Please know that you don’t have to face this alone.

Virginia Tech shootings & my friend Jay