Notes From Underground

Colorado and Wyoming Backpacking part 2

2007-09-05T03:40:44Z

more pictures

Colorado and Wyoming Backpacking

2007-09-05T02:30:32Z

So I don't feel much like writing anything right now, so here's a whole bunch of pictures from my August backpacking trip:

Type your cut contents here.

My neighbor thinks it's hot outside

2007-08-01T21:58:45Z

Sustainable Energy

2007-04-21T23:03:14Z

A couple of months ago, I attended a symposium at the University of Michigan that offered a lot of food for thought about the global energy future. There are a lot of people that are working on the problem of supplying the world's energy needs for the next century, and beyond. But the energy supply is only a problem in as much as there is likely to be growing demand for many decades to come. In terms of energy supply, the problem is getting the energy to the people that want it, but there will be no shortage of energy sources for centuries to come, even if we have no further technological advances. We have enough resources to power the growth and development of human civilization for as long as it is likely to exist using existing technology. But we have to make choices about what we want our power supply to look like, and inherent in that choice is a decision about what we want our planet to be like. The decision that we have to make has everything to do with the emission of carbon gases. Now I know that I'm not going to convince any global warming skeptics about anything. The science of the greenhouse effect is there, and the empirical evidence of a precipitous rise in average global temperatures over the last half century that is altogether unheard of in, in terms of magnitude and speed, in at least the last million years is clear. I will say no more about this issue in this post, except to direct interested parties to the recently released United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

The IPCC report is very conservative as far as main stream climate science goes. So if you are not convinced by the UN estimates, you must either have a pretty strong counter argument, or you aren't going to be convinced by chunk of glacial ice hitting you in the head.

In terms of looking at the world's energy future, and the decisions that we have to make as a global society, I thought that Nate Lewis' presentation at the symposium presented a pretty good picture of the reality that we are facing. If we wish to create a world that is able to meet the global energy demand without emitting enough carbon gases to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentrations above 350 ppm, and I hope that we are, we have to look at the entirety of the problem. We have to look at the total world demand for energy, and look for solutions, maybe a whole group of solutions, that can address the entire problem. I suggest that anyone that has any interest in the topic of the energy supply to check out Nate Lewis' presentations. The first link is to a video of his presentation last February at the University of Michigan. The second is a presentation that he gave at Cal Tech a couple of years ago. It's basically the same presentation, though the Cal Tech version is longer, and the Cal Tech version offers more information about Lewis's own research into photovoltaic energy production:

U of M symposium

Cal Tech Link

Let me point out that any of the possible solutions to creating a sustainable energy economy include a heavy emphasis on energy conservation. This is a problem that can be solved by technology, but technology alone is not enough without the will.

Charter Schools

2007-02-16T23:08:57Z

I just attended a conference on corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the University of Michigan, and I was really frustrated by the people that they got to fill out the last panel of speakers. There was a guy from IBM that basically presented a list of the corporate green-washing programs that IBM is donating to, which are a bunch of non-profit charities that the company is donating a few million dollars to here and there. This is the exact opposite of what corporate social responsibility is supposed to be. CSR is all about corporations incorporating ideas of sustainability and social justice into the fabric of their day to day operations, and making them part of the very foundation and strategy of the business. All business decisions should be considered through the lens of CSR. What the IBM guy was talking about was just charitable giving, which is completely extraneous to the concept of CSR.

The other two speakers on the panel were promoting companies that are, in my opinion, conducting business that is exactly the opposite of CSR. The first speaker was shilling for a charter school company called KIPP. KIPP operates around fifty charter schools in cities in states around America that have favorable charter laws. KIPP only operates in places where it can get a lot of per pupil funding, and where it has broad legal latitude to educate students in any way that it sees fit. But that's all a lot of talk, and it's neither here nor there. The real issue here is that charter schools are designed to take students away from public school districts. When charter schools succeed in enticing students away from their local school districts the state gives the money that would have gone to the public school to the charter school. Yes, they use that money to educate students. Yes, their students tend to attend college at higher rates than the average students in the districts from where they are drawn. Yes, KIPP is a non-profit organization (though many charter schools are run for profit). But the point is, the main reason that charter schools out perform public schools is that they are freed from the legal constraints that public schools have to deal with, many of which are in place for very good reasons.

Public schools are required by law to educate every single student, including disabled, mentally challenged and developmentally impaired students. Charter schools can educate anyone they like. Charter schools can set arbitrary entry requirements or deny access to students that might be too difficult or costly to educate, especially disabled or learning impaired students, who are far more expensive to educate than other students, and who require far more time and resources from educators.

Public schools have large fixed costs. They have property and buildings that need to be maintained. They have contracts with unionized teachers that need to be honored. They have legacy costs associated with retired teachers on pensions and health insurance. They have school buses to operate. Charter schools are often free of any of these kinds of fixed costs. They often rent buildings. They don't necessarily have to provide busing. Their teachers are rarely unionized. They have no retiree pension or health care obligations to address, and they may selectively choose to only hire young workers to keep insurance costs down. They don't have to provide busing to students.

Public school districts are permanent institutions. If the state or local funding for a school district declines, it is still required by law to provide education to every single student. If a charter school finds itself unable to make enough money, it can simply close it's doors and leave the community, or it could lower it's enrollment.

Public schools are evaluated on the basis of the state and federal government mandated standardized tests, and one of the remedies that is prescribed by federal law for schools that have low average test scores is conversion into charter schools. But many charter schools aren't legally forced to administer the mandated standardized tests that public schools are judged by. Charter schools can really teach students important information, instead of acting as glorified test preparation institutions, as many public schools now do.

Given all of the advantages that charter schools have over the public schools that they compete with, it isn't surprising that they have, in many cases, greatly outperformed their public school counterparts, especially in extremely impoverished areas. But many charter schools have underperformed the public schools that they have competed against. Not all charter schools can meet their advertised expectations, despite the advantages that they typically have over traditional public schools.

As I have explained, public schools have large fixed costs and legal mandates to educate all students to a specific level, and these costs and mandates do not disappear when charter schools come in and siphon off the best students and the funding that they would have represented to the school districts from which they came. As more and more charter schools pop up around the country (KIPP operates around fifty, but it is planning on doubling that number in the next few years) they put more pressure on public schools to educate their students and maintain their facilities on a shrinking budget. The best charter schools provide outstanding education for a very small number of students, while the rest of the students suffer as their school districts fall further behind. This is not corporate social responsibility, it is a kick in the teeth to the taxpayers and their children.

Best News Conference Ever

2007-02-02T16:01:59Z

The Boston Police Department is obviously populated by a group of idiots, considering their overreaction to a bunch of Light Bright units that were placed around the city. To actually get the bomb squad out to detonate a children's toy is just going a bit too far. And then the news media was even worse. Fox, CNN and the other cable outlets were going into hysterics talking about the explosive devices that had been found around the city even after it had been determined that they were in no way bombs, or even fake bombs. The city of Boston and the media basically created this story out of nothing and then they got upset when the people that were arrested for the alleged crime of planting fake bombs (which these devices clearly weren't) refused to talk about their case. I, for one, think these guys gave the reporters exactly what they deserved.

Invalid video URL.

Michael Pollan on the modern diet, current theories about nutrition, and other good stuff.

2007-01-29T23:07:52Z

A good article from the New York Times

NY Times Article

2007-01-26T02:21:11Z

January 25, 2007

Can Polyester Save the World?

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

WOKING, England

JOSEPHINE COPELAND and her 20-year-old daughter, Jo Jo, visited Primark at the Peacock Center mall here, in the London suburbs, to buy presents for friends, but ended up loaded with clothes for themselves: boots, a cardigan, a festive blouse, and a long silver coat with faux fur trim, which cost £12 but looks like a million bucks. “If it falls apart, you just toss it away!” said Jo Jo, proudly wearing her purchase.

Environmentally, that is more and more of a problem.

With rainbow piles of sweaters and T-shirts that often cost less than a sandwich, stores like Primark are leaders in the quick-growing “fast fashion” industry, selling cheap garments that can be used and discarded without a second thought. Consumers, especially teenagers, love the concept, pioneered also by stores like H&M internationally and by Old Navy and Target in the United States, since it allows them to shift styles with speed on a low budget.

But clothes — and fast clothes in particular — are a large and worsening source of the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, because of how they are both produced and cared for, concludes a new report from researchers at Cambridge University titled “Well Dressed?”

The global textile industry must become eco-conscious, the report concludes. It explores how to develop a more “sustainable clothing” industry — a seeming oxymoron in a world where fashions change every few months.

“Hmmm,” said Sally Neild, 44, dressed in casual chic, in jeans and boots, as she pondered such alien concepts, shopping bags in hand. “People now think a lot about green travel and green food. But I think we are a long way from there in terms of clothes. People are mad about those stores.”

It is hard to imagine how customers who rush after trends, or the stores that serve them, will respond to the report’s suggestions: that people lease clothes and return them at the end of a month or a season, so the garments can be lent again to someone else — like library books — and that they buy more expensive and durable clothing that can be worn for years.

In terms of care, the report highlights the benefits of synthetic fabrics that require less hot water to wash and less ironing. It suggests that consumers air-dry clothes and throw away their tumble dryers, which require huge amounts of energy.

But some big retailers are starting to explore their options. “Our research shows that customers are getting very concerned about environmental issues, and we don’t want to get caught between the eyes,” said Mike Barry, head of corporate social responsibility at Marks & Spencer, one of Britain’s largest retailers, which helped pay for the Cambridge study. “It’s a trend that we know won’t go away after a season, like a poncho.”

Customers “will ask ‘what are you doing?’ ” Mr. Barry said, noting that 70 percent of Britons shop at his chain. “So we’re doing a lot of thinking about what a sustainable clothing industry could look like in five years.”

Consumers spend more than $1 trillion a year on clothing and textiles, an estimated one-third of that in Western Europe, another third in North America, and about a quarter in Asia. In many places, cheap, readily disposable clothes have displaced hand-me-downs as the mainstay of dressing.

“My mother had the same wardrobe her entire life,” Ms. Neild said. “For my daughter, styles change every six months and you need to keep up.”

As a result, women’s clothing sales in Britain rose by 21 percent between 2001 and 2005 alone to about £24 billion ($47.6 billion), spurred by lower prices, according to the Cambridge report.

And while many people have grown accustomed to recycling cans, bottles and newspapers, used clothes are generally thrown away. “In a wealthy society, clothing and textiles are bought as much for fashion as for function,” the report says, and that means that clothes are replaced “before the end of their natural life.”

Dr. Julian Allwood, who led a team of environmental researchers in conducting the report, noted in an interview that it is now easier for British consumers to toss unwanted clothes than to take them to a recycling center, and easier to throw clothes into the hamper for a quick machine wash and dry than to sponge off stains.

He hopes his report will educate shoppers about the costs to the environment, so that they change their behavior.

There are many examples of how changing consumer priorities have forced even the most staid retailers to alter the way they do business.

Last year Marks & Spencer — Britain’s mainstay for products like underwear and shortbread — decided to go organic in its food business; it now sells only fair-trade coffee and teas, for example. Many executives regarded the shift as a foolish and risky decision, but the store found that sales jumped 12 percent. The store learned a lesson that executives think will apply to clothes.

“Morally, we know more sustainable clothing is the right thing to do, but we are more and more convinced that commercially it is the right thing as well,” Mr. Barry said. In fact, marketing the “green” value of clothing, even if costs a bit more, may provide an advantage over competitors.

Part of the problem is that neither manufacturers nor customers understand much about how and when clothing purchases degrade the environment, since these can occur anywhere from the harvest of cotton or the manufacture of synthetic fibers to how — and how often — the garment must be washed.

“We’ve got fantastic standards when it comes to food, but it is all brand-new when it comes to clothes,” Mr. Barry admitted. “We have a lot to learn.”

In their efforts to buy green, customers tend to focus on packaging and chemicals, issues that do not factor in with clothing. Likewise, they purchase “natural” fibers like cotton, believing they are good for the environment.

But that is not always the case: while so-called organic cotton is exemplary in the way it avoids pesticides, cotton garments squander energy because they must be washed frequently at high temperatures, and generally require tumble-drying and ironing. Sixty percent of the carbon emissions generated by a simple cotton T-shirt comes from the 25 washes and machine dryings it will require, the Cambridge study found.

A polyester blouse, by contrast, takes more energy to make, since synthetic fabric comes from materials like wood and oil. But upkeep is far more fuel-efficient, since polyester cleans more easily and dries faster.

Over a lifetime, a polyester blouse uses less energy than a cotton T-shirt.

One way to change the balance would be to develop technology to treat cotton so that it did not absorb odors so readily.

Also, Dr. Allwood said that “reducing washing temperature has a huge impact,” speaking of a significant drop from about 122 Fahrenheit to 105. Even better, he said, would be to drop washing temperature below normal body temperatures, but that would require changes in washing machines and detergents.

The report suggests that retailers could begin to lease clothes for a season (just as wedding stores rent tuxedos) or buy back old clothes from customers at a discount, for recycling.

But experiments along these lines have faltered. A decade ago, Hanna Andersson, an eco-conscious American clothing company, tried offering mail-order customers 20 percent credit toward new purchases if they sent back their used garments. This “hannadowns” program was canceled after two years.

People hope “we’ll find new sources of energy, so we won’t really have to change much,” Dr. Allwood said. “But that is extremely unlikely.”

To cut back the use of carbons and make fashion truly sustainable, shoppers will have “to own less, to have less stuff,” Dr. Allwood said. “And that is a very hard sell.”

And so Marks & Spencer is thinking about whether its customers will be willing to change their buying habits, to pay more for less-fashionable but “sustainable” garments. After all, consumers have shown a willingness to pay more for clothes not made in sweatshops, and some are unwilling to buy diamonds because of forced labor in African mines.

On a recent day outside Marks & Spencer on Guildford High Street, where everyone was loaded with shopping bags, Audrey Mammana, who is 45, said she was not “a throw-away person” and would be happy to lease high-end clothing for a season. She would also be willing to repair old clothes to extend their use, although fewer shops perform this task.

But, she added: “If you cut out tumble-drying, I think you’d lose me. I couldn’t do without that.”

Happy New Year? And what the hell is an olecranon anyway?

2007-01-19T05:02:02Z

New year's eve was not so good this time around. The night started off nice enough. It had been raining pretty steadily all day, so I donned my rain gear when I left my apartment. Jen and I met early in the evening at the state theater to see "Copying Beethoven," a movie that I'd been hoping to see for several months. The movie wasn't bad, but it didn't quite live up to expectations. After the movie, we headed to the Arbor Brewing Company for a light meal and a few beers. By the time we left ABC, at a little after nine, the rain had completely subsided. We headed to the new "Metro Cafe," where my sister was to be performing on the piano. My intention had been to only stay for a little while, and to head to a party several miles out of town at around ten. But an hour and a half, and a couple of big glasses of scotch later, and I was still sitting at the bar with Jen, Katey, Anthony and others. Jen remarked on how drunk I looked, but I didn't feel too intoxicated. I jumped on my bike a little after eleven, expecting my cell phone to ring at any moment with Dom or Mike wondering where I was. I stopped at the Main St. party store to pick up some beer, before riding out on Liberty St. towards the country. I didn't put my rain gear on, as the weather appeared to be clearing up. The moon was shining brightly through breaks in the clouds, though a few flashes of lightning could be seen in the distance. I rode a couple of miles down Liberty, past Maple and Wagner. I was nearing the Thompson's house, out next to Zeeb, when a big storm came crashing in out of nowhere. The rain came down steadily and the wind really kicked up. The visibility dropped so much that I passed right by the Thompson's house without seeing it, and had to turn around. I arrived at the party soaked. I joined the smokers that were standing around in the garage to avoid the rain and pulled out a beer. I heard someone shout inside the house: Dan's here, and he's drunk. But I still didn't feel very drunk.

Most of the revelers were gone by two in the morning, when Mike invited me outside for a New Year's bowl. I'd been smoking too much pot recently, but I figured I'd have a few tokes, if only to honor the holiday. We went back in to watch television for a while, but Mike soon had to go to sleep. He offered to let me sleep on the couch, but I wanted to head for my parent's house, which I was watching, along with their dog, while my parents and younger sister were in California. When I got back on my bike the sudden squall that had drenched me on the way to the party had ended, but the clouds had rolled in and completely blotted the moon from the sky. I was out miles beyond the nearest street light. But riding in the dark isn't usually a problem for me. I have a head light and a tail light, neither of which are bright enough to illuminate the road, but they at least make me visible when I'm riding at night, which is my main concern.

Only a few cars passed me as I rolled down the darkened country road. I hugged the edge of the road as best as I could to stay out of the way of traffic, and I concentrated on riding in a straight line, as my head was still buzzing from the weed I smoked with Mike. I didn't notice the debris in the road until it was too late. It was hard to make out the dark tree branches that were lying on the dark pavement, but I'm sure I would have seen them if I was paying a bit more attention to the road in front of me. When I did notice that there were objects blocking my lane I was only feet away from them. There was probably enough time for me to swerve into the opposing lane to get around the obstruction, but my instincts told me not to ride into the middle of the road, where speeding traffic might be approaching. So I gripped my handlebars tightly and tried to ride foreword, not even knowing what I was about to run over. I made it over the first limb or two, but it was a large branch that had fallen in the road, and one of the limbs was too large for me to get over. My bike stopped moving foreword as it hit the branch, but my momentum carried me on, right over the handlebars. I caught my fall with my arms, but my left elbow impacted hard on the pavement. There was an immediate pain in the back of my arm, but I chekced, and found that I was quite able to flex the arm and move my fingers. It couldn't be broken, I thought. So I picked my bike up and started to ride again. As I leaned foreword into my handlebars and put weight on my left arm I felt a lot of pain, so I shifted most of my weight to the right side, and was able to continue to ride on.

I didn't have to apply the breaks until I got to Wagner road, but when I squeezed the brake lever the pain in my arm swelled, and as my weight shifted foreword as I came to a stop, the pain got even worse. Perhaps my arm was injured a bit worse than I had initially thought. I thought it might be a good idea to go to the hospital to get my arm checked out, but I was convinced that it wasn't broken. Sure it hurt like hell, but I was able to move my hand, flex my arm and whatnot. I didn't want to go to the emergency room for what might only be a sprain or a contusion. So I decided that I would keep on riding towards my parent's house. I had to get some sleep before going to inventory at work on New Year's Day. I thought I might go to the hospital after work if my arm was still bothering me then.

As I rode through town the pain in my arm was growing worse. There were many more stoplights and turns that I had to make, which required me to shift more weight to my left arm and apply the brakes more often. As the pain overwhelmed me I decided to ride on the sidewalk, which is something that I never do, even when I'm required to by law. I didn't realize it, but I turned off of liberty and started heading towards my apartment, even though I was intending on riding to my parent's house. After a few minutes, I noticed that I was going in the wrong direction, and I corrected my course. But my arm was still bothering me, so I finally just stopped and tried to assess the situation. I felt the back of my arm, above the elbow, and found that the swelling had become pretty bad. I tried to feel my bones to see if anything felt out of place. Something was moving and scraping on the back of my elbow that didn't feel right. I was about a mile away from home, but I decided that it was time to head for the hospital. I headed up State St. and resigned myself to my fate.

I locked my bike to a traffic sign near the emergency room and walked inside. After going through triage I was sent to have X-rays taken. Then I was sent to a small room in the ER after a wait of around a half hour. I was very apologetic to everyone in the hospital, as I still thought that my arm probably wasn't broken. I had gone to the ER when I had severely bruised my ankle when I was slammed to the ground while playing schoolyard football back in high school. I still feel guilty about wasting the doctor's time with such a minor injury all of those years before. That was one of the reasons why I had been reluctant to head for the hospital in this situation until the pain became too much. But after a wait of an hour or two, a guy from orthopedics came in to put a plaster splint on my arm. He informed me that I had indeed fractured my elbow, and that it would most likely require surgery. I was absolutely shocked. My plastered arm was placed in a sling and I was sent on my way at some time around nine in the morning on New Year's Day. I unlocked my bike and walked the two miles back to my parent's house, as the buses weren't running on the holiday. I arrived at my parent's house after ten in the morning and headed straight for bed. I feel asleep immediately, but only for about an hour. My alarm woke me at eleven so I would be up in time for work.

I actually drove one of my parent's cars to work, as I was left with no other choice. I didn't even punch in when I got there, expecting to be sent home as soon as I arrived. Everyone that I passed at work inquired about my obviously injured arm, and I felt myself obliged to tell the story of my bicycle accident over and over again. I started to get really sick of it, so I responded to questions about my arm with the simple phrase, "I fell off my bike." My boss didn't stop me from working, and I didn't ask to leave. I helped Phil with the cheese inventory, as I always do, and then I sat down and stopped working. There was nothing else for me to do. The kitchen staff was engaged with the usual cleaning tasks, but I couldn't do much with only one arm. My boss saw me just sitting there, but didn't say anything. I figured that I would be sent home if I sat for twenty minutes, but nothing was said to that effect. Finally I went and filled out a few pieces of paperwork for my department and announced that I was going to go home. I wanted to just crash out and go to sleep, but the Rose Bowl game was coming on that afternoon. I had been anticipating the game for weeks, and there was no way I was going to miss it. So I stayed up, and then drove my parent's car over to Dom's parent's house to watch the game.

I scheduled an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon on January 3rd. A resident explained that I had fractured the tip of of my ulna, which is called the olecranon. That's the end of the elbow joint, and the place where the triceps muscle inserts on the lower arm. The surgeon told me and my sister, who drove me to the appointment, that he wanted to operate on my arm the next day. That suited me just fine, as I knew I would not be allowed to do much with my arm for at least two months after the surgery. The sooner he operated, the sooner I would be back to work, and more importantly, back on my bike.

I arrived at the hospital at around seven in the morning for my surgery. I was taken to a hospital bed within a couple of minutes after I had checked in. I stripped and got in a hospital gown, and was hooked up to several different electrodes. An IV tube was threaded into a vein in my hand, and I had a long talk with three or four anesthesiologists about the possibility of totally numbing my arm. Apparently my surgeon doesn't like to do that, as the area that he was going to be operating on is right next to several major nerves, as well as major blood vessels. If my arm was deadened, the surgical team wouldn't be able to ascertain if the surgery resulted in any nerve damage. And the whole process of anesthetizing my arm sound uncomfortable in the first place. It involved the use of an ultrasound device and electrodes to locate the proper nerves in my arm. When the doctor finally arrived he said that he didn't want my arm to be numbed, but they could go ahead and do it after the surgery was over if I wanted. I said that I would rather not, if possible. So the anesthesiologists went ahead and administered the general anesthetic, which sucked. Someone told me that there would be a burning sensation as the stuff was pumped into my veins. It wasn't so much a burning as the feeling of liquid death running down my arm. That isn't surprising, as general anesthesia brings you pretty close to death. If the doctors didn't keep your lungs pumping artificially, you would die of asphyxiation when anesthetized.

I regained consciousness in a large recovery room a couple of hours later. My arm had already been covered in a new plaster splint and the surgery was over. The surgeon was long gone, off operating on someone else. I sat for what seemed like a long time watching a monitor that displayed my vital signs. I noticed that my blood oxygen levels were low. The attending nurse advised me to take deep breaths. She said that my oxygen saturation would probably never reach 100%, as I had been a long time smoker. After a while I was wheeled into another room, and my sister was brought in to see me. Soon I was instructed to change into my clothes and told to leave. The hospital had reserved a room for me, in case I had to spend the night after the surgery. But no one even asked me if I was interested in spending the night or not. It was just assumed that I would be leaving immediately. I wonder if I didn't have a conversation about leaving while I was still drugged. I remember a nurse giving me an injection of morphine and phentanol. It's quite possible that I was awake and drugged for quite a bit longer than I remember. Before I knew it I was clothed and being wheeled through the hospital to my sister's car. We drove to several pharmacies before we found someone that could actually fill my oxycodone prescription. At one stop I almost walked into the wrong side of an automatic door at a drug store. Then I went back to my parent's house and hung out with my sister and Jen for a while and watched an old Pink Panther movie.

The pain got a lot better pretty quickly. A week after surgery I was out of the splint and totally off medication. The doctors had prescribed enough oxycodone to last a couple of weeks at fairly high dosage, but I only used it for a couple of days. They removed the staples from my wound yesterday, and I'm slowly gaining mobility in my arm. But I won't be able to ride my bike or go to work for at least a month and a half.

And now for some fun pictures:
My arm in a splint before surgery

My hair, which I hadn't cut or trimmed for three and a half years

I shaved my head after the surgery, as I couldn't tie a pony tail with one hand

My sister, My parent's dog and me after surgery

My wound two days after the splint was removed. The bruising was a whole lot worse the day before.

Here's an x-ray picture of my arm after the surgery. There's a whole lot of metal in there

Pinochet's Dead!

2006-12-10T21:41:06Z

Let the world rejoice that another scum bag mass murdering tyrant has left the face of this planet, I only regret that the legal system was unable to bring him to justice in his lifetime.

Fuck the Police!

2006-11-17T16:38:57Z

Okay, this is some serious bullshit right here:
The story goes, a 23 year old man was using a computer in a UCLA computer lab. The staff did a regular check of all of the people in the lab to make sure that they all had student identification cards. This man did not have an ID. The cops were called ot remove him from the lab. He refused for a long time, but eventually consented to leave. As he was walking out, one of the cops put his hand on the man's arm. The man then refused to leave and became angry, yelling, don't touch me!... etc. The cops pulled out a tazer and shocked him, which caused him to fall on the ground. When he didn't stand up they shocked him again, and again, and again, and again. The fucking cops can't get away with this bullshit. They had no justification to use the tazer in the first place, as they guy wasn't physically threatening the cops. But to shock the guy over and over again? These cops should be fired and prosecuted.

Some kid in the lab recorded this on his camera phone

Here's an article about it

Fucking Pigs

Down to the wire

2006-11-08T07:02:15Z

As I prepare to go to sleep early on this post election morning, it would appear that the Democrats are about to capture both houses and a majority of the governorships. In some ways, that's pretty awesome. We shouldn't expect to see any more tax cuts for the rich, or any further erosions of our civil liberties. If another supreme court justice steps down in the next couple of years, the Dems should be able to block any new neocon candidates that Bush might nominate, though they could have blocked his previous nominees if they had been willing to stand together as a party, which doesn't bode well for their actions as a party in future judicial appointment decisions..

But I expect to see two more years of government getting next to nothing done, other than support for the status quo in our foreign military adventures, bloated spending bills with tons of pork tacked on, and a whole lot of general governmental corruption. In two year's time, the Democratic party will have little to show for their new found position of moderate power. This plain vanilla party is going to have a hard time making a case to the American public that they deserve to be the party of the next president, seeing as they don't have a very coherent platform right now. They won because the country is dissatisfied with the way that the Republicans are running the country, not because Americans actually want the Democrats to be running things.

If the Democrats insist on continuing to define themselves as the party that isn't the Republican party, they aren't going to gain many new voters in the next election. In fact they'll probably lose a lot of swing voters that they picked up this time when people realize that the modern Democratic party doesn't have a plan to move this country foreward, any more than the Republicans do. When Americans see that the Democrats are just going about business as usual they will develop the same anger towards the Democrats that they demonstrated for the Republicans in this election, and Democrats will lose any tactical electoral advantage that they briefly gained.

I would much prefer to have seen the Democrats lose both houses of congress by a slim margin, so they could continue to blame all of the country's woes on the Republicans. If that had been the case, there probably would have been a huge backlash in the next election cycle, with Republicans losing the presidency, and both houses of congress by significant margins. Now I see the Democrats' chances of controlling the legislative and executive branches in 2009 as no better than even.

So hooray for nothing. Once again, we get the government that we deserve.

Gonzo of cycling- August 2006 Part 1

2006-11-01T04:06:01Z

Type your cut contents here.
Part 1

This is the story of the bicycle trip that I took in August 2006. I’m sure some of this is a bit incoherent, and most of it is probably going to be pretty boring to most people.

Saturday, August 12
    Woke up at eight in the morning. I was pissed because I had overslept by two hours. I had some great ambitions for the day’s riding and I wasn’t sure if I could make the distance I was hoping for if I got a late start. I quickly scrambled some eggs and vegetables and threw my clothes on before heading to the garage. I had packed everything the night before, which kept me up until the wee hours of the morning, and contributed to my sleeping through my alarm. I jumped on my bike, rolled out of the garage and headed north. Before I had even made it to the other side of town I realized I had forgotten an important item. My father had given me an antique miniature pocket compass as a college graduation present. I’d worn it, hanging from a ragged hemp necklace that I had fashioned for it on every bicycle tour that I’d ridden on up until that point. It was a bit of a good luck charm. I decided not to backtrack a couple of miles to go get it. Too bad, I was going to need a lot of luck on this bicycle tour.
    I was riding my old beat up touring bike that I had purchased five years before. The frame was still in pretty good shape, but the wheels had seen better days. The front and the back rims were deeply grooved from years of heavy touring and training rides. I was riding on the cheapest tires that my local bike shop had in stock at the end of the last winter, when I had ditched my snow tires. My whole drive train was new, so at least I knew that was solid. But just about everything else on the bike was a little suspect. I hoped that my recent run of bad luck was over though.

    I’d had so many unfortunate bicycle incidents in the past week that I thought my ill luck must have been exhausted and that nothing could possibly go wrong on my tour. On the Sunday before I left I was doing a century and a half training ride.   I was riding down the Dixie highway somewhere between Detroit and Monroe on a particularly rough stretch of road. There was no shoulder and half of the road was completely missing. The pavement had been replaced by a network of concrete and asphalt patches that made for a horrible ride. In the interest of saving my wheels I was riding down the middle of the lane. There was a fair amount of traffic traveling in both directions, so it was difficult for cars to pass me. One motorist began to tap the horn of his SUV impatiently as he waited to pass me. Often times I’ll flip off drivers that act like that and then shout a string of profanities, but I’m trying to work on being less mean spirited, so I just waved instead. After a few more seconds the SUV was able to pass me. As he pulled even with me I gave him a thumbs up and a big grin. The driver and the shotgun passenger just looked at me grimly, but a backseat passenger took matters into his own hands, or mouth in this case. He leaned out of the window and spat at me. He missed, but it was the thought that counted. I dropped my cheery façade, waving my middle finger at the car and shouting the profanities that I had been holding back. But then they were gone.
    Several days after the prior incident I was out on a normal morning training ride. I had cruised through Dexter and Chelsea and I was on my way south down M52. Instead of continuing down through Manchester, Clinton and Saline I decided to cut the ride short and head home on Scio Church. Just after I turned for home I heard a tell tale metallic ping that I’d heard many times before. A spoke had let go in my rear wheel. Every time that I’ve blown spokes in the past it has been during a major tour, when my bike has been loaded with a ton of gear. This was the first time that I’d blown a spoke on my normal road bike, which has lighter weight wheels that don’t react as well to broken spokes. The wheel was so bent out of shape that the rim was rubbing hard against my break pads twice on every revolution. It was like trying to ride down the road with my rear breaks fully engaged. I slogged my way home at a paltry twelve miles per hour on the flats and a near walking pace on the up-hills. Luckily I wouldn’t be taking that bike on my tour, so I just tossed it in the garage and left it there. I’ve wanted to get a new wheel built for that bike anyway, so this will finally give me a good excuse to get it done.
    The last pre-tour incident occurred on the day before I was supposed to leave. I was out running errands and picking up items that I would need for my tour, riding around on the bike I would be using for the trip. I stopped by a bike shop to get some things and headed north on Packard. Two blocks away my tire ran flat on me and I had to walk the bike back to the shop to fix the tube. I had neglected to bring my pump with me and had to use one of theirs. The gash in the tube was one of the largest I’ve ever had, but it fit nicely under a patch and inflated just fine. I completed the errands, but the time spent messing with the tire was time that I was expecting to use to pack before going to work, thus I ended up packing late into the night.

    I rode north on Pontiac trail, past Tasha’s parent’s house, past the site where my sister’s former house once stood, past German park, and well beyond. Through the outer northern suburbs of Detroit I rode, and on to the St. Clair river. The area immediately north of Lake St. Clair is pretty nice. There are several small, harbor towns and some extensive wet lands, which are unfortunately in the process of being dominated by the invasive aquatic weed, Phragmites australis, which is replacing most of the native cattails. As you go north on the St. Clair river things start to get a bit ugly. By the time I reached Marine city, and the ferry that was to carry me to Canada I had a good view of the towering power plants and factories to my north on the American side of the river, as well as some of the industrial plants and power plants on the Canadian side. Having biked through the area in 2004 and having camped illegally in the shadow of one of those power plants on the American side I already had a bad taste in my mouth about the area, but I was soon to learn that I had actually seen the good side of the river on that trip.
    The border crossing was a breeze. I waited around ten minutes for the ferry to arrive, and the trip across the river wasn’t much longer. The border guard asked me the prerequisite questions and waved me through. She was all business and quite a bit more gruff than the Canadian border guard that I had dealt with on my way into Alberta in 2003, but not unpleasant.
    I continued to ride north, passing the coal power plants on either side of the river, and a Canadian chemical plant that was set a good way back from the road. Further on I reached a heavily industrialized area that was populated entirely by massive chemical cracking towers and smoke stacks of various sizes and descriptions. The chemical plants lined both sides of the road and stretched on for miles. I was riding into a moderate headwind that carried the smell of benzene and various other unidentified noxious chemicals to my nose. I was huffing and puffing to fight the wind, so I know I got a good dose of whatever they were cooking in those plants. It was probably no worse than smoking a cigarette, but I got a pretty good headache as I rode on, and I’m not a person that is prone to headaches at all.
    Before too long the chemical plants were behind me and I was in Sarnia. It didn’t seem like a bad town really, but from the waterfront parks you could look south and see the horrible chemical plants and the distant power plant smoke stacks to the south. At one such park I stopped to fill my water bottles. There was a sculpture of abstract human forms that framed the view of the chemical plants to the south. The sculpture was located next to some children’s play equipment and a plaque that said that the park and the sculpture were dedicated to the children of families that had been destroyed when parents had been killed in the chemical plants. I wondered how many people had actually died there, but the sign offered no indication. I would read in a Toronto newspaper a few days later about an explosion in a similar chemical plant in another part of Ontario.
    I got a bit turned around on my way out of Sarnia, going down a couple of dead end roads and having to back track a bit, before finding a road that would lead me out of town. On the way out I stopped under the blue water bridge, which carries traffic from the US to Canada. I would have crossed into Canada there, but they don’t allow bicycles to ride over it anymore. The bridge stands right at the point where the St. Clair river opens into Lake Huron (well technically it’s the point where Lake Huron flows into the St. Clair river, but one doesn’t often think about lakes flowing into rivers, usually it’s the other way around). The view out onto the open water in the late afternoon was breathtaking. Now the stated purpose of my trip was to begin, to ride the outer portion of the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan circle tours. I’d biked the inner portions on my tour in 2004. Someday I’d like to bike the coasts of all of the great lakes, as well as a lot of other places.
    I continued to ride north for a couple more hours along the shoreline road, which was rarely close enough to the lake to offer a view of the shoreline, before finally stopping to camp at a public campground near Forest, Ontario just as dusk was about to set in. I had failed to reach any of my intended destinations for the evening by a considerable distance, but I’d put in a lot of miles and I was relatively satisfied by my progress. As usual the shower was the highlight of my camping experience. There is nothing like a good shower after a long day of biking, although a jump into a cold lake isn’t too bad either, but the campground was situated a bit too far inland to make that practical.
    On my way back from the shower a group of middle aged and older people invited me to sit with them by their campfire. They provided me with beer and we sat and chatted for an hour or more. There were three couples, and all of the men were or had been employed in the petrochemical industry in some capacity or another. The conversation turned to the blackout of 2003 at one point, and I noticed that these people referred to electricity as “hydro”, and to power lines as “hydro lines”, even though the electricity in the area was not generated by hydroelectric plants. I would find that people all over the region use similar slang, and that it is so pervasive that official documents for some of the provincial park campgrounds refer to camp sites that have electrical outlets as being “hydro” sites. One of the women mentioned to me that her son was employed as a bike messenger in Toronto. It looked like the group would be sitting out by the fire for a good long while, but I had to head back to my tent early to turn in for the night. I looked up at the stars as I walked back and marveled at how many were visible so close to some relatively big cities.   Sleep did not come easy that night. A bunch of drunken college kids were camped next to me and they chatted at an elevated volume deep into the night. Some other nearby campers finally told the kids to shut up, which they gradually did and eventually I did finally sleep.

Sunday, August 13
    Despite the poor sleep that I had had the previous night I was up and riding before seven thirty. The morning was quite cool and damp, but the sun would beat down all day from the cloudless sky and it would grow quite warm as the hours wore on. My day’s riding took me through a largely flat agrarian landscape. I was usually about a quarter mile to a mile from the water’s edge, and the lake was often just barely visible from the road. The farms ran right down to the lake in most places in that area, which was a rather unusual situation for most parts of the great lakes in my experience up to that point. In many places in Michigan the lakefront real estate is far too valuable to be occupied by farmland. There the land is usually divided into small plots for the cottages and summer homes of the rich.
    I got my first flat tire of the tour as I was cruising down the road. When I pulled the tube off for inspection I discovered that it was the patch that I had placed on the tube two days prior that had failed, rather than a new puncture. I slapped a new patch on over the hole, put the tube back on the wheel and kept going.
    It was a very easy day of riding, with the flat terrain and a very light tail wind. I was cruising along comfortably in the mid to late afternoon, when I came across Macgregor Point Provincial Park. I had intended to ride for at least a few more hours that day, especially with the wind at my back. But the idea of camping at a park right on the coast and getting a chance to relax and take in the sunset was appealing to me. At 115 miles the day’s ride wasn’t exactly a short one, but I would come to regret not putting a few more miles in, as a good tail wind can be hard to come by, and should always be taken advantage of on an extended tour.
    After setting up camp, showering and gorging myself with granola I walked down to the beach with a National Geographic magazine and my ipod to await the sunset. It was still before seven, so I’d have a couple of hours to wait. I sat on a rather uncomfortable wooden bench on a beach at sunset point. The bench was my only option, as it was a very rocky beach that would have been even less comfortable to sit upon. After finishing a few articles in the magazine the sun was dropping low on the horizon. I left a while before the sun was actually going to set. The sky was afire with reds and yellows, but the clouds that were brilliantly lit by the sun’s dying light were also threatening to obscure it’s final passage beyond the lake’s horizon. I didn’t feel like sitting on that uncomfortable bench to await a partially obscured sunset.
    Before heading off to sleep I poured over my Ontario road map to plan out my next ride. I would have some choices to make. I was going to arrive at the Bruce Peninsula the next day, which forms the outer edge of the Georgian Bay. I had heard that the peninsula was one of the nicest, most scenic places in the bay area. There was also a ferry that went from the tip of the peninsula to Manitoulin Island on the northern end of Georgian Bay. I had considered taking the ferry, which would cut off at least a day of riding around the outside of the bay. But I felt like I was making pretty good time as it was, and I wanted to ride all the way around the outside of the bay anyway, if only to complete the circle tour. Having written off the ferry I still had to decide if I wanted to ride around the peninsula or just cut it off completely. It looked like a ride to the tip and back would be around seventy miles, which would occupy at least a half day of riding, though there were options that would allow me to ride through part of the peninsula without going all of the way to the tip. As I put the map away I concluded that it would be best to skip the peninsula altogether, as I was still uncertain about how I was going to travel around the eastern side of Georgian Bay without getting on freeways. In the absence of noisy neighbors sleep came far more readily to me that night.

Monday, August 14
    I was up and riding a bit after sunrise again. The terrain was still quite flat for a good bit of the morning, though it did start to get hilly as the day went on. I had heard about some rather large hills in the area, so I was getting ready for a couple of big climbs in the early part of the day. I got another flat tire in mid-morning. Again the patch had failed. I slapped another patch on the same spot, and again the tube seemed to hold the air just fine.
    As I neared Owen Sound, one of the largest towns that I had come to since passing through Sarnia, I dropped down a rather large and steep hill, which ended right at the edge of the downtown district. I was flying along in the mid-thirty mph range as I approached the first traffic light and had to get on the brakes quickly.
    I stopped at a CAA office to ask about directions for cycling around Georgian Bay and to see if they had a more detailed map that would indicate if there were alternate roads that ran near the highway around the edge of the bay. I got a fairly detailed map, which showed absolutely no secondary roads that paralleled the course of the highway for many miles. It looked like I was going to have to detour a few dozen miles inland of the route that I had intended to take around the bay. The roads I would have to take looked to curve and wind about quite a bit as they ran through the hills and lakes of the back country. I was worried that I would lose a whole day of riding trying to navigate my way back to the coastal route that would take me around Georgian Bay. This meant that instead of turning to the north and following the coast line at the end of the day I would have to ride further east and south to set myself up for the overland trek of the next day.
    As I headed out of town I came upon another huge hill at the opposite end of town. This time I would have to climb. For a while the terrain continued to be hilly. There were a few more big climbs, and another huge descent, where I almost topped forty miles per hour for the first time since riding the Pacific Coast, three years before. But things flattened out after a while, as the road hugged the coastline a bit more closely. I passed in the shadow of some pretty sizeable ski hills that ran almost right down to the water, but the road skirted around the edge of those.
    I got another flat tire and finally decided to do away with the tube altogether. It was clear that the patches weren’t going to hold with so much weight, and such a large cut in the tire.
    Towards the end of the afternoon I came across a bike shop in a small beach resort town. I stopped in and purchased a bunch of energy bars, some new tubes and a new tire. I was concerned about my cheap rear tire and how it would hold up to the rigors of touring. It was kind of fun to live on the edge and see how far I could push the components of the bike, but the tire wasn’t looking very good, and I’d been stranded in the past by tire failures. I just folded the new tire up and packed it with my gear. I was going to try to finish the tour on the old tire, but I liked having the security of the spare.
    I was heading for Orillia, which was situated near a couple of provincial parks, and it was a good place to start heading north for my detour. I had the choice of riding on the numbered secondary highways which took a slightly circuitous route, but tend to be good for biking because they often have good shoulders and more even grading, or I could cut off a few miles by taking some smaller back roads that were slightly more direct routes to Orillia. In situations like these I often repeat a line from Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Rings” like a mantra. Short cuts make for long delays, short cuts make for long delays… Funny, I rarely take my own advice.
    As I turned onto the back roads rain started to fall. It was nothing serious, just enough to soak me as I rode along. I came to one of the last back roads that I would take before returning to the numbered highways, Horseshoe Valley road. There was a relatively long climb up to the intersection before I turned onto the road. As I made the turn, thinking I had reached the end of the climb, I looked ahead and saw that it had only just begun. The road just went up and up, and it looked to get a bit steeper near the top. I dropped down into my lowest gearing and just spun the pedals as I inched my way up at around five mph. After ten or fifteen minutes I neared the summit. It hadn’t been a particularly horrible climb, but I was already well past the century mark for the day’s ride, and it was still raining. At the summit there was one of those road signs that I’m so fond of. I love those little yellow signs with a picture of the silhouette of a truck driving down a steep triangle. It has long been my theory that a person can verifiably calculate the amount of joy that a touring cyclist is experiencing at the top of a mountain summit by multiplying the percentage number that is listed for the gradient by the number of miles of the gradient. In this case there was no mileage listed, as the climb hadn’t been more than a half mile, but the sign indicated that the gradient was 8%. Unfortunately there wouldn’t be much joy for me. At the end of the down slope there was another big climb that would begin immediately.   I stopped at the summit of the first hill briefly and wolfed down an energy bar before beginning the quick descent. On the way down I got moving pretty quickly, and it was a harrowing ride in the rain, but it was just a straight drop, with no turns or switchbacks. The next climb was shorter than the first, but it got really steep really fast, and the angle of the ascent never changed, it was just a straight line right up the hill. I could feel sweat pouring down my face, mingling with the light rain that was falling as I crested the summit. This time the sign indicated a 10% gradient.
    It was pretty up and down for another five or six miles, although there weren‘t any hills that were quite as steep or long as the first two climbs. The rest of the ride was just enough to keep my quads burning until I reached the numbered highway again. Then it was just a quick shot into Orillia, where I stopped to get a sub and briefly got lost on my way out of town towards the provincial park campground that I would be staying at for the night. As I was regaining my bearings and trying to figure out how to get out of town I noticed that my speedometer had stopped registering speed and distance at the 127 mile mark of my day‘s ride. I played with it for a few minutes but couldn’t get it to work again.   I headed for a major road that took me south and east, over a causeway that crossed the large lake at the edge of town.
    As I arrived at the campground the sun was starting to come out again.   I played with my speedometer for a few minutes before setting up camp and showering and was able to get it to work by totally resetting the memory. The cumulative mileage for the trip had reached 381.9 miles before the thing crapped out on me. I figured I rode at least three miles, maybe more, after the distance had stopped registering.

Tuesday, August 15
    I headed due north on secondary highways, past an Indian Casino (or “First Nation” as they call the tribes in Canada) until my progress was blocked by a freeway. I backtracked slightly and continued on some real back country roads. The route twisted and turned over some really beautiful, and often heavily forested terrain. There were a lot of short steep climbs. Quite frequently it was apparent that the terrain was molded over the shapes of boulders and exposed seams of bed rock. A light morning shower passed over me and doused me slightly in the lovely sunny morning. After a few hours a pretty major headwind started to blow. It became difficult to progress at any kind of a decent speed on the ungraded back roads as I fought the wind, but I struggled on. I noted that the road often took the worst possible route over the hills, so as to make the climbs as steep as possible.
    As I advanced I heard exactly the sound that I didn’t want to hear. It was the ping of a broken spoke. There was nothing I could do about that though. I never carried the proper equipment to replace broken spokes. I was just going to have to continue on and hope to find a bike shop somewhere along the way. The next big town was Sudburry, which was still a couple of hundred miles distant.
    By and by I reached the town of Gravenhurst, which was decently sized. I thought there was a good bet that there might be a bike shop, so I rode around the town, looking around. I finally arrived at a Canadian Tire store which, despite the name, are ubiquitous hardware stores that can be found throughout Canada, much like Sears in the US. The store didn’t have the tools that I needed to fix the wheel, nor did they perform bike repairs, alas. But an employee did inform me that there were a couple of bike shops in the nearby town of Bracebridge. In the store’s parking lot I pulled a map from my bike to try to figure out how to get to Bracebridge, when a nice older man came up to find out what I was doing. He turned out to be a bit of a cyclist himself, and he gave me good directions to get to the bike shop that he frequented in Bracebridge, the big purple one at the edge of town. I took the route that he suggested, which took me along some beautiful and quiet scenery, past the Taboo golf course, which was prominently advertised as the home course of the pro golfer, Mike Weir, for whatever that’s worth. His directions were quite clear and easy to follow and I easily arrived at the Ecclestone bike shop. http://www.ecclestonecycle.com   I rolled right into the repair shop and Ian was quickly working on the broken spoke. After fixing that he noticed that the cassette housing was messed up, so he swapped that out. He confirmed that my rims were indeed in pretty sorry shape, but I had no intention of waiting around to get new wheels built. I mentioned that I would like to acquire the tools that would allow me to pull the cassette off myself, so that I could switch out spokes when they break in the future, as spokes are sure to break sooner or later. He didn’t have everything that I would need on the shelf, so he went into his own tool kit to get the tools for me that I would need! That had to be about the coolest thing that a bike mechanic has ever done for me. Ian was really cool. After I paid for the repairs,and the labor, which seemed to be discounted to me, Ian loaded me down with free water bottles and stickers and stuff. That had to be about the best bike shop experience of my life. I would definitely recommend anyone that finds themselves touring in Ontario to check that shop out.
    Ian had shown me a good route that would take me to my intended destination, Perry Sound, where I hoped to rejoin highway 69 which runs along the Georgian Bay coast. North of Perry Sound the road shrank from a four lane expressway to a two lane highway, where bikes are allowed to ride. The roads that he sent me on were quite scenic, and they would have been a blast to ride on under normal circumstances. But the ride was a bit difficult as loaded down with gear as I was. The road continued to cut through and over the bed rock and boulders as the road I had been on in the morning had, but now the hills were getting much taller. If anything, the rocky terrain was growing more prominent. My feet were killing me after all of the climbing of the last two days. I have some pretty crappy low end MTB shoes that I’ve been using for the last couple of years, which are a slight improvement over the shoes that I wore for my cross country trip in 2003, which were a half size too small for me. The screws that I had used to install the cleat in my left shoe were too long so they ended up sticking slightly into the bottom of my foot. For shorter rides up to a century in length the screws don’t tend to bother me much. But they were starting to become excruciating on this ride. I finally stopped at the top of a hill and applied a couple of strips of mole skin to the inside of my shoe to try to keep the screws from digging into my foot. My foot still hurt quite a bit when I put my shoe back on, but I could no longer feel the screw. I would later realize that the mole skin was actually causing more harm than good, causing the pressure point on my foot to be even more significant, but that realization wouldn’t come for several days.
    I hit Perry Sound at right around the century mark for the day‘s ride, with my legs burning from the difficult riding of the day. It was getting on towards dinner time, and I thought I might stop for a bite to eat in town. I tried to stop at a chips shop in town, but they were just closing down for the night. These little chip shops are everywhere in the more populated areas of Ontario. I imagine they are modeled after the English fish and chips stands, though the Canadian versions always advertise fresh cut fries, and they serve poutine, which I doubt the English have ever heard of. I don’t know why fresh cut fries would be superior to their less fresh brethren, but it must make a difference to Canadians. The shops remind me of the little stand alone espresso shops that are all over the place in the Pacific Northwest.
    I ended up settling for some fries and a milkshake at a dairy queen at the far end of town, where the service was slow due to a large crush of customers. I couldn’t believe how many people were going there for dinner.
    I was back on the road for a couple of more hours after dinner. The terrain was spectacular and barren as I rode on the highway north from Perry Sound.   The folds of the bedrock had become the dominant feature of the terrain. There was really very little soil at all, between the big ridges of rock. There was just enough in places for the coniferous trees to cling to flat areas and crevices in the rock. In between the rock ridges were expansive cattail swamps and streams. There were hardly any cross roads between the isolated communities that were separated by dozens of miles in many cases. Aside from widely scattered motels and gas stations I passed very few signs of human habitation for quite a while.
    Dusk was setting in heavily when I entered Pt. Au Beril, where I knew there was a provincial park. I took a wrong turn when I got into town and ended up riding three miles down a residential street that dead ended after winding along a rocky bay. As I rode along I passed below a decent sized eight point buck that stood on a commanding perch above the road. I wondered if it was a real deer, as I’m not sure when exactly in the year buck deer get their antlers, but it sure did seem lifelike if it was a fake. Near the end of the road a local resident informed me that I was going the wrong way, so I headed back to the highway.
    I finally reached the Sturgeon Bay Provincial Park as the last fleeting light was fading from the sky. There were no attendants present at the entrance to the campground, so it looked like I was going to be able to camp for free. I quickly pitched my tent and ate a hasty meal before setting out in the dark in search of shower facilities. I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. That was one of the most mosquito infested campgrounds I’ve ever seen. I walked the entire campground, finding only outhouses. Discouraged, I was about to head to bed without a shower, but I stopped by the campground office and found a map that indicated the presence of showers on the opposite side of the road from the campground. Even inside the shower there were tons of mosquitoes. I washed hastily and didn’t bother to even clean my riding clothes. It was an hour after dark by the time I laid down in my sleeping bag, and I was asleep rather quickly, despite some noisy neighbors.

Wednesday, August 16
    I was still a bit sore from the previous day’s ride when I awoke and I didn’t exactly feel refreshed. The mosquitoes returned right on cue to torment me as I broke camp in the morning. I was back on the road a little after seven, at my usual time.
    Again the scenery was spectacular. The exposed bedrock stretched on for miles and miles. I never had a glimpse of Georgian Bay as I rode along, but there were numerous smaller lakes and streams along the way.
    I stopped for breakfast in a town that was so small that it barely existed after putting in around forty miles of riding. The waitress left me sitting around waiting to pay my bill long after I had finished my food. I had picked up a newspaper to read, but I was ready to go. Despite the shoddy service I gave her a decent tip before heading back on the road.
    I passed south of Sudbury and onto the highway that would take me west, along the northern shore of Georgian Bay and the rest of Lake Huron. All that I really saw of Sudbury were the smokestacks of coal power plants in the city as I rode by. Before I was out of view of the city I got a flat tire. As I patched the tube a local that was out for a bike ride, traveling in the opposite direction stopped to see if I was okay. After confirming that I had all of the requisite equipment to patch the tube she explained to me that I would have to get off the highway for a fifteen mile stretch a small distance ahead. I thanked her for the info as she took off to continue on her ride. A couple of other cyclists stopped briefly to see if I was okay before heading on.
    With the tire fixed I continued down the road. I detoured off the highway successfully and got back on without any problems. After a bit of late afternoon struggle my ride concluded at Chutes Provincial Park. The campground was situated above a quaint little waterfall that could just barely be heard from my campsite when the roar of the trucks on the nearby highway wasn’t audible, which was rare indeed.

Thursday, August 17
    I was up and ready for my last day in Canada (I hoped). The winds were really light but they were mostly behind me as I set out in the morning. Before noon I came across a couple of touring cyclists, the first that I had seen since leaving home on this tour. They had thick French Canadian accents and their names were Jean-gee (that’s how he pronounced it, and the gee was with a hard “g”, as in ghee, but I didn’t ask what the spelling was) and Natalie. The French pronunciation of Natalie is so beautiful I just wanted to kiss her right there. And we were talking about bike equipment on the side of the road and Jean-gee mentioned something about his panniers and I just about wanted to kiss him. That was the first time I have ever heard someone pronounce that word properly. When I was touring through the US in 2003 I had tried to convince several of my American touring brethren that it is a French word, thus it should be pronounced as the French would pronounce it, with a silent “r”. While many acknowledged that the word was indeed French in origin, they continued to use the bastardized English pronunciation: “pan-ears”.
    Jean-gee and Natalie were traveling from Whitehorse, near the Alaskan border in the Yukon territory to their home in Montreal. I didn’t mention that I had spent a night in Whitehorse once, twelve years before. But I had been traveling by car on that particular vacation. They were heading south, through Manitoulin Island and taking the ferry across Georgian Bay. I wished them good luck and we parted ways.
    An hour later I came across a solo touring cyclist. Her name was Carol, or something like that. I know her name started with a C at least. She had a pretty thick Maine accent. She had been traveling with three friends from Fairbanks, Alaska who had just left her the day before to head south through Michigan on their way home. She was continuing on the northern tier route because it would take her more directly to her home in Maine. She seemed pretty disappointed to be by herself on the open road, but I tried to offer my philosophy on why it’s so great to tour alone. I’m not sure if she bought it, but I’m quite convinced that she was going to do just fine by herself. She had that air about her of a tough minded independent woman that could get anything done that she set her mind to, rather like my aunt Joyce.
    Later that day there was another solo touring cyclist, who was heading to the east like all the rest had been. I was surprised to see so many in one day. His name was Reece. He had been traveling by himself from Vancouver and was only a couple of days away from his final destination, which was a town that was out east of Sudbury. Reece sounded like he was doing pretty well out there by himself, but I was the first touring cyclist he’d come across in all of the time that he’d been on the road. I assured him it was because he was on the trans-Canada highway. If he’d dropped a bit south and gone through the northern US he would have come across plenty of other cyclists. But I’d come across four in one day, so they can’t be all that rare in Canada.
    As I rode on the wind shifted around. It wasn’t behind me, but it wasn’t hindering my progress much either. I was getting closer and closer to the United States. The ride was going pretty well, other than the usual complaints about soreness in my feet, hands and ass, but that almost goes without saying. When I determined that I was about an hour away from the American border I pulled out my ipod. Beethoven’s ninth was the order of the day. I timed the beginning so that it would end around the time that I entered into the US again. I had first heard the symphony in it’s entirety when I was biking west in 2003, crossing the border from Minnesota to North Dakota. The music had made the ride seem so monumental, it had been a truly special day and it marked the moment of my conversion to being a real classical music fan from being a curious dabbler. Of course much of North Dakota was just as flat and boring as Minnesota, and the head winds were just as brutal. But it was a milestone at least, that proved that I was indeed making progress despite the unrelenting westerly winds that fought me every day in the plains.

Gonzo of cycling- August 2006 Part 2

2006-11-01T04:04:34Z

Type your cut contents here.
Part 2

    The symphony carried me into the Canadian city of Sault Ste. Marie. I continued to ride toward the bridge to the US as the final movement progressed. I was on the bridge, climbing to the top of the Canadian arch as the last notes drifted through my headphones. The music hadn’t quite carried me all of the way to the American border, but it had come damn close. I guess I can’t fault Beethoven for making his symphony a few minutes too short. How could he have known to what purpose his greatest masterpiece would ultimately be put. He didn’t even survive to see the advent of the first true bicycles. But I have no doubt that he would have tacked a few extra bars on for my sake had he only known. As I climbed the arch on the American side of the bridge I saw that it was going to be a quite a while before I would be able to get across anyway. Traffic was backed way up at the border crossing. So I got in line behind all of the cars, even those that had been passing me as they went along on the bridge. We were all going to have to wait there together.
    It was slow going up there. The cars would advance thirty or forty feet and stop for a minute or two. I started and finished listening to a new symphony as the line crawled foreword. I got out of the saddle and walked the bike to save my rims from the constant breaking in the stop and go traffic. We weren’t moving fast at all whenever the line started and stopped moving, but I wanted to limit the wear and tear as much as possible, even that little bit. I guess I could have just ridden down the shoulder of the bridge and bypassed all of those cars, saving myself a good hour if I wanted to. Several strangers marveled that I didn’t cut past the cars when I recounted my long wait on the bridge in the next couple of days, but my decision not to cut was both altruistic and self serving at the same time.
    When riding my bicycle I constantly get yelled at, spat at, and even have things thrown at me. Usually people are the rudest when the road is clear and they have no reason to resent my presence for any reason that I can determine. My decision to wait in line on the bridge with the cars was an act of goodwill. I was trying be generous and kind to the motorists that were stuck on that bridge with no place to go by casting my lot with them instead of taking an easy cut in line. And my hope is that I made a few friends up on that bridge by not cutting in front of all of that traffic, or at least that I avoided making a few more enemies.
    After a while I did finally reach the customs officer at the end of the bridge. He took my license, but he told me to not even bother with the copy of my birth certificate that I had been keeping along with my emergency cash in my smelly, unwashed money belt, under my bike shorts for the last week. I just about pulled the thing out and threw it at him anyway. I hate wearing that stupid money belt and it pissed me off to find out that I didn’t need to bring the thing along after all.
    I exchanged my remaining money while buying some supplementary food supplies at a gas station at the end of the bridge after being sent on by the border guard. I then headed for a campground near the far side of the American town of Sault Ste. Marie.
    When I got to the campground my new temporary neighbors took an instant interest in me. I chatted with one guy who was staying in one of three sites that bordered mine. The guy from the next site over came over to talk too. The two of them had come up with their wives to camp together. All four of them were older retirees who had been coming to that same spot to camp for a week or two every summer for several years. The second guy mentioned that he had some good venison sausage that he would like to share with me. I wanted to say no, that I was a vegetarian and that I would prefer not to eat the food that he was offering. But my sense of obligation and my obedience to the rules of hospitality and to the etiquette that is required of a person that is offered hospitality by a host overrode my dedication to trying to avoid the unnecessary slaughter of animals. And the fact that the sausage was made of an animal that this man had hunted himself made things a bit less tricky from my ethical standpoint. He brought over a bag that contained several slices of sausage. He handed the bag to me and instructed me to take several slices, which I did. He lamented that I didn’t have anyway to refrigerate the meat, as he would have happily given the rest to me. I agreed that it was indeed a shame. A third neighbor from a different group of people came over and chatted as I finished eating my meal. He was an older retiree too, who was camping with several of his children and their families.
    After taking a shower I was invited by the two couples with whom I had initially spoken to come and sit by the campfire. We sat and chatted for around an hour before everyone started to head for bed. I was more than ready to sleep by that time.

Friday, August 18
    I was up early in the damp, dewy morning and was almost ready to go when the guy with the venison sausage woke up and came over with the rest of the meat. He gave it to me and instructed me to eat it soon, lest it go bad in the heat. I took the meat without much argument. It was my intention to dispose of it in a trash can some hours later, but I thought it would be more polite to just take the stuff and not make a fuss about it than it would be to reject his gift. His wife came over and they both bid me farewell as I started to roll away. She told be to be careful out there on the road in that concerned way that only a woman who has raised young boys can. I said I would, but that I didn’t have much control over the situation on the road. “I’m just like Scarlet O’Hara” I said, “I always just depend on the kindness of strangers.” They were generous to chuckle at that stupid line as I headed away. I didn’t realize how prophetic I was being at that moment.
    Every surface was wet with the morning dew, but the air was clear in the city, down by the confluence of Lake Huron and Lake Superior. I biked past a big hydroelectric plant on my way to the road that would lead me south, out of the city. My route took me through the downtown business section, where I looked around for a bike shop. It was too early in the morning for a bike shop to be open, but I always look around for them when I’m in towns that look large enough to support them. I saw a little shop that had an old bicycle in the window, as well as some assorted athletic uniforms, but nothing that looked like a bike shop to me.
    There was a decent hill that climbed up from the lakes on the way out of the city. As I ascended the air started to grow thick with fog. The fog became progressively more opaque until I reached a plateau at the southern end of town, where you couldn’t see more than thirty yards ahead of you on the open road. I was thankful that there was a bit of a shoulder on the back country road that I was riding on, because cars weren‘t going to be able to see me in those conditions until the were almost on top of me.
    I headed south through Pickford, the childhood home of Sommer, an old friend. There wasn’t much to the little town, just a bit of a business district and a high school, and a lot of farm land. South of Pickford I headed east on some even smaller back country roads. I wanted to get as close to the eastern tip of the upper peninsula as possible. I was trying to complete the circle tour of Lake Huron after all, so I wanted to ride as much of the shoreline as I possibly could to make the whole thing semi-official, if only for my own piece of mind. I was going forty or so miles out of my way to get to southeastern Lake Huron shoreline, when I could have just shot straight to the southwest to St. Ignace from Sault Ste. Marie, cutting off a lot of unnecessary riding. I hit the shoreline several miles to the west of Detour, which was the easternmost point on the mainland Lake Huron shore of the Upper Peninsula. I figured I had gone far enough to the east and started heading westward.
    It was a really beautiful area, there along the lakeshore. A lot of the development rights to the land near the shore had been purchased by the Nature Conservancy, so the terrain was covered with nice second growth forest in most areas around there. There were several areas where the road overlooked lovely views out onto the lake, which were not obscured, as the fog had burned off hours before. I stopped for a bite to eat on the side of the road in a place with a nice view. It seemed like a good spot until the road construction crew came through to grind the road surface and fill in cracks with hot asphalt strips. I headed on, I still had a good way to go to get to St. Ignace, which was still well short of my intended destination.
    As I rode on I felt something funny in my rear wheel. There was a bit of a bump in each revolution. I looked down at the wheel as I rode on to see if it had gone way out of true. It had a tiny wobble to it, but nothing serious, nothing that looked like it would cause a perceptible sensation as I was riding along. So I stopped to look more closely. The tire appeared to be intact and all of the spokes were in good shape. Maybe the road was just constructed with bumps at regular intervals, I thought. I got back on the saddle and started to ride again, but I didn’t go more than one hundred yards. As I started to ride foreword, and before I had gotten back to full speed again I heard a metallic ping come from my back wheel that was unlike any noise that I had heard my bike make before. I stopped pedaling and the wheel revolved one more time. A metal shard broke off the rim and scraped my leg as it came around, the brake pad went inside of the whole that was left by the metal shard and I came to a stop. As I stood on the side of the road looking at my splintered wheel in disbelief the tube spontaneously punctured and all of the air was released from the wheel. I had gambled and lost. The rim was totally trashed.
    I stood with my bicycle on the side of the road and stuck out my thumb to the passing traffic. I was glad that my bike had broken down where it did. Twenty miles earlier I had been on tiny little back roads that were little trafficked. Had I broken down there I might have waited a long time for a car to come by.   I have only been forced to hitchhike a few times in my life, but I have always had fairly good luck getting rides quickly. This time was no exception. I was on the side of the road for less than five minutes before a car stopped. A station wagon, carrying a guy and a dog pulled over to see what was wrong. The guy said he was only heading to his home in Cedarville, which was a couple of miles away, but he would take me that far at least. I expected to have to hitch several rides to get to a bike shop, so I wasn’t concerned that this one was only going to take me a short distance.
    I sat down in the shotgun seat, which had previously been occupied by the dog.   The dog plopped down right on top of me, apparently taking me for a new piece of furniture. The driver tried to get him to move, but he wouldn’t budge. I didn’t care, and I told him as much. He said he worked on the freight ships that sail in the Great Lakes. He had just gotten off a boat and was on his first day of shore leave. The guys on the boats call him Lance Armstrong because he always brings a bike with him on the boats so he can go out riding when they reached a port. It didn’t sound like he was a recreational biker or anything, it was just a practical mode of transportation for his particular situation. In any event I was glad that this member of the bicycling fraternity had stopped to give me a ride.
    His wife was home at his house in Cedarville and she mentioned that a bike shop of sorts had opened in the next little town over. So the guy and I got back in the car, this time without the dog, and we headed to the store that she had described. It was a kind of backcountry outfitters shop that specialized in kayak tours and happened to do a bit of bike rentals and repair on the side. They didn’t have a replacement rim that would fit my bike though, and the bike mechanic wasn’t going to be in for a few days. The proprietor of the shop, who happened to be a former Ann Arbor resident, pulled out a phone book for me and I started making calls on a cell phone that my driver provided. There was a bike shop in St. Ignace, but the guy that answered the phone didn’t seem to know much about bikes. I asked if he had a 700c rim in stock and he had no idea what I was talking about. He started looking at the sizes that were printed on all of the rims in the store when I told him not to waste his time. I’d be on my way to St. Ignace shortly if I couldn’t find a better option, but it sounded like this guy wasn‘t going to be able to help me even if he did have the right wheel in stock.
    I made another call to a bike shop in Sault Ste. Marie that yielded better results. I talked to the mechanic at the shop, who said they had a set of old 700c touring rims that had been taken off a trek 520 many years before. They were in new condition, but the guy said they were so old that he would give me a break on the price, and he would build me a new set of wheels overnight if I could make it to the shop that afternoon. I thanked him and told the good news to the guy that had given me a lift. I asked if he could give me a lift to a major road so I could try to hitchhike north, back to my starting point of earlier that morning. Instead, he offered to drive me all of the way to the bike shop. No way was I going to turn that offer down, but I did my best to grovel and be gracious and indicate just how grateful I was. We stopped back at his house to switch cars, as his wife’s new chevy was more efficient than the old station wagon that we had been riding in. We stuck my broken bicycle on a bike rack and headed off.
    The ride back was relatively short, compared to the nearly half day that it had taken me to get to Cedarville by more circuitous and indirect back roads. We couldn’t find the bike shop in the downtown Sault Ste. Marie area, though we knew what street it was on. We stopped into a clothing store to enquire about the bike shop, where we learned that the shop we were looking for was in fact the little storefront that I had seen on my way out of the city that morning, the one with the old bike in the window that wasn’t well marked and didn’t really even look like any bike shop that I had ever seen. The interior didn‘t fit my image of a typical bike shop either. Half of the store was taken up by clothing racks that were stocked with sports jerseys and the like, but there was a long row of bicycles, most of them used kids bikes, and a small work space in the back of the store. There was an older guy working on a bike back there, so I walked up to him. Propped on the ground were two rims. He said they were the ones that would be used to build my wheels. They had come off of his son’s bike, purchased in 1989 when his son was in college. The guy never explained why the rims hadn’t been built into wheels for the bike. The mechanic said he was going to be coming back to the shop late at night to fix a screen printing press, at which time he would build my wheels. I was told to come back at 9am the next morning to pick up my bike. He told me to leave my cell phone on, because there was a chance that he would open the store as early as 7am. If he got there early he would call me so that I could get my bike and get an early start.
    I walked out to the car of the man that had brought me back to Sault Ste. Marie and asked him to do me one final favor. I needed a lift to the campground at the edge of town that I had stayed at the previous night. I was now carrying all of the gear that had previously been strapped to my bike, and I didn’t want to haul all of that stuff a mile and a half by hand. He got me to the campground and we parted ways. I handed him enough cash to fill up the gas tank of the car, even though we couldn‘t have gone through more than a couple of gallons that day and thanked him profusely for helping me out. He drove away and I went into the office and registered for a campsite.
    I camped right next to the spot that I had occupied the previous night, but all of my neighbors had left. I sulked as I sat around and read and wrote in a notebook for most of the afternoon before heading for bed a little after sunset. My mileage for the day had been a little over 66 miles, just below half of my average up until that point. I hoped to do some long rides to get my average back up over the next week.

Saturday, August 19
    I was up and ready to head into town a little after seven in the morning. I started to walk out of the campsite, towards town with all of my gear in my hands. But I could quickly tell that it was going to be a really uncomfortable walk if I was going to carry my gear all the way into town. So I stopped at the camp office to see if I could ditch my baggage there for a couple of hours while getting my bike. They said it was fine to do so, so I headed off.
    I reached downtown around eight, but I still hadn’t heard from the guy at the bike shop, so I stopped at a restaurant that was serving a breakfast buffet. I picked up a copy of the Detroit Free Press on my way in and I sat down, eating and waiting. I wolfed down several plates of scrambled eggs and French toast, relishing the opportunity to load up on real food. I finally got a call from the shop around eight thirty. I finished eating and walked around the corner and down the block to the bike shop.
    The guy had built the wheels using my old spokes and hubs, so the tab for the repairs was pretty small. And the labor cost was pretty low too in my estimation, considering that he had done a wheel building job overnight that my local bike shop would have made me wait a week for. Considering the ease with which I had been able to hitchhike to the bike shop, the speed with which the mechanic had built my wheels, and the small amount of money that I had paid, the whole experience was about as painless as it could have been. Sometimes the kindness and generosity of people can be enough to restore your faith in humanity, for a few moments at least.
    I went back to the campground to get me gear before heading south out of town. With my bike reloaded, I started south on the same roads that I had traveled the previous day. The morning air was much drier than the it had been the day before, and there was no fog as I headed through the farmland towards Pickford. South of Pickford I kept going straight to Cedarville instead of heading east as I had on the day before. I saw no reason to go back on all of the roads that I had ridden before my wheel splintered, as I had almost made it to Cedarville, just coming a couple of miles short in the end. And I would save myself a couple of hours by taking a more direct route.
    At Cedarville I turned to the west, at which point rain began to fall from the sky lightly, but steadily. As I rode on I passed a couple of recumbent cyclists going in the opposite direction. They had fairings on the backs of their bikes that looked like they were designed to hold gear, but they were so small that I concluded they couldn’t be touring very far. We didn’t stop to talk.
    Shortly after I passed the recumbent the rain subsided slightly, so I stopped to munch on some energy bars. Next to where I stood eating, an SUV with bikes mounted on the roof pulled into a driveway. Soon afterwards a couple of female cyclists with matching jerseys pulled in behind the SUV, and then some more cyclists came in behind them, and another SUV with bikes on the roof. Looked like a supported tour with sag wagons to me, and it appeared that several of the participants in the tour had given up in the rain and taken the free ride in the support vehicles. No one stopped to talk to me, so I remounted my bike and headed on. I never really take the initiative to stop and talk to people on supported bicycle tours, and they rarely have bothered to take the time to talk to me when I’ve been on my own style of bicycle tours.   That’s fine by me, as we might as well be a different breed of cyclists. And it makes sense that people on supported tours wouldn’t be as eager for the company of another touring cyclist as people on solo, or small group unsupported tours usually are. People on supported tours have lots of other people to talk as they ride along, and they typically don’t travel for nearly as long or far as unsupported tourists do.
    The rain grew heavier and the sky grew darker as I approached St. Ignace. It was really a miserable ride for a while there. I considered stopping under a highway overpass at one point, but there was no way of knowing how long it would take to wait out the storm. I could end up standing there for hours waiting for the rain to stop, so I pressed foreword. The terrain was mostly forested for that leg of my ride. There were a few homes here and there, and a few farms, but mostly it was state forest land. The ride became more pleasant when the rain started to slacken, which was about halfway between Cedarville and St. Ignace.
    When I reached St. Ignace the rain had stopped almost completely. As I cruised through town I was finally starting to dry off a bit, so I stopped in a grocery store to resupply.   The rain continued to hold as I got onto Highway 2 and passed out of town. Highway 2 was the road that had carried me from Wisconsin to western Montana in 2003.   I had biked a small stretch of Highway 2 that summer, before turning north for Tahquahmenon falls, but I hadn‘t been on the majority of Michigan section of the road since a family trip in my pre-teen years. I had used highway 28 to cross most of the Upper Peninsula in 2003, which is a road that follows the Lake Superior shoreline more or less.
    Leaving St. Ignace, I looked behind me to see the mighty Mackinaw Bridge, spanning the distance to the Lower Peninsula. Passing the bridge marked the end of Lake Huron and the beginning of Lake Michigan. I had completed my half circle tour of Lake Huron, which completed one of the circle tours that I had begun in 2004, but I didn‘t stop to mark the milestone. I had another circle tour to finish before this trip was done.
    I had hoped to make it to Manistique by the end of the day, but the sun didn’t want to stay aloft long enough to cooperate. I knew soon after getting on Highway 2 that I was going to have to set my sights on a closer destination, but I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to be stopping at that point. At least the rain looked to be done for the day and the sky started to brighten a bit to illuminate the nice views of the lake that could be had along the side of the road. There were several sections of the road that ran right along the sandy shoreline of Lake Michigan. I imagine that you would see a lot of tourists stopping on the side of the road to go swimming in fairer weather, but it wasn’t much of a day for sunbathing.
    It was getting dark by the time I passed Gould City, which was a rather optimistically named settlement, considering it’s apparently tiny population. By then I was about ready to pull off the road and pitch my tent. There was some kind of state park that was a few miles off of the main road, which had been mentioned in my AAA book. But I had been seeing signs for many miles that advertised for a private campground with full amenities, camping cabins and a putt-putt golf course in the shape of the state of Michigan. The place was mentioned in the AAA camp guide. I made up my mind to stop at either the private campground or the state park, depending on which one I came to first.
    I came up to the private campground that had been so prominently advertised, and found that the place was absolutely deserted. The grass was overgrown, both on the campsites and on the putt-putt course in the back. The camping cabins were boarded up and closed and there was only one light on in the entire campground. The putt-putt course was still there, but it was in worse shape than the rest of the campground. The office in the back of the property looked like it was in good shape, but it didn’t look like it had been open in some time. AAA had apparently failed to do their homework on this one, because the place had clearly gone out of business. There was a small restaurant on the next piece of property over from the campground, which looked like it was still open. There were a couple of cars and motorcycles in the parking lot at least, though the place looked dark. I walked up to the restaurant door and found it to be locked, though the sign on the door indicated that it should still have been open at this hour. I peered through the window into the dimly lit dining room. There were a only a few people sitting inside, all were at the bar in the back of the room. A woman behind the bar noticed me at the door and came out to talk. She said that the campground had been closed. I pleaded with her to allow me to camp there anyway, pointing out that I was traveling on a bicycle, that it was dark, and that we were in the middle of nowhere. She grudging told me that it would probably be okay for me to pitch my tent there, but she said she wished I hadn’t even bothered to ask her. She said that I should pretend that I had never talked to her if anybody gave me grief for staying there that night, which I readily agreed to do. I was glad that I had stocked up on water at a roadside park a few hours earlier because there was no running water or bathrooms on the abandoned campground, nor were there any electrical outlets for me to charge my cell phone. A few lingering rain clouds sprinkled water on me as I set up my tent at the back of the campground, as far away from the road as possible, under a pine tree. Despite the fact that I was coming off of a rest day I was completely exhausted by the time I slipped into my sleeping bag.

Sunday, August 20
    It was damp and cool as I awoke in the gray morning, but it looked like the rain of the previous day would not return. Cars were pulling into the parking lot of the restaurant that I was camped near, and a few people looked long and hard in my direction as I was loading my bike in preparation to leave. I was worried that someone would come over and question my presence there.
    My legs didn’t feel like they were in very good shape as I set out. I was moving along fairly well, but the pain began to return much earlier than it normally did. Early on in the ride I came across an older guy that was touring on one of those Australian built touring tricycles, who was traveling fully loaded in the opposite direction. We stopped and talked for a few minutes. He said he was a veteran bicycle tourist, having done a coast to coast trip many years before. He was out on a two week trip around the northern Michigan area with a couple of friends, who soon came along and joined us on the side of the road. They all marveled that my daily average mileage was twice what they were doing, and then we parted ways and headed in our separate directions.
    Early in the day I passed Manistique, a little town with several hotels near the waterfront, some industrial lumber factory of some sort and a casino. I regretted not making it there the night before, but my previous day’s mileage had been more than adequate to increase my daily average, so I wasn’t too upset.     By the time I passed Escanaba the wind was starting to blow in my face a bit and my legs were really starting to hurt. I was not having a pleasant ride at all. In Escanaba they were holding the UP State Fair that weekend, so there were a lot of people in town, and a lot of traffic. I was cursing everyone in my mind, the people, the cars that were cutting me off and zooming around me, the crappy little city… Outside of Escanaba I stopped for a little while to rest my legs and try to regain my composure. I had left highway two, which continued on to the west, out of the state and all the way to Puget Sound. While I would have been more than happy to stay on that road for a couple of weeks, my path was to the south, and I hoped to be in Wisconsin by nightfall.
    When I got back on the road after my little rest stop my will was strengthened, but my spirit had not been reinvigorated. It was just going to be one of those days that you’d rather forget, though it was a rather nice stretch of road to ride between Escanaba and the Wisconsin border. It rather reminded me of a lot of stretches of road on Michigan’s Lower Peninsula Lake Michigan shore. It was cottage country, interspersed with a good deal of park land. There were lots of campgrounds on the lakeshore that tempted me with their siren calls, beckoning me to cut my ride short for the day and end my suffering. It would have been so easy to just stop at a little over the century mark to lay about on the beach for a few hours before sunset instead of pushing against the wind for the rest of the afternoon. I ignored the temptation and rode on.
    By and by I reached the twin towns of Menominee and Marinette that straddle the Michigan/Wisconsin border. It was just about sunset as I rolled into town, and I still had no idea of where I was going to camp. I was fifteen miles away from the nearest campground that was listed in my AAA guidebook, and I had passed that place over an hour before. The place struck me as the kind of northern coastal town that would have a RV park somewhere in the city. I stopped for some food in Menominee and asked if there was any kind of campground in the city.    A patron in the store said that there was a some kind of RV park in town. He gave me some vague directions that involved turning near a Kmart and a Taco Bell. I thanked him, assuming it would be easy to find the place even though he had failed to make my route clear to me. I rode through town looking for the businesses that he described, but not finding them. Finally as I neared the downtown district a couple of road signs indicated that I should turn off of the main road to get to a river front park and campground. I turned off of the main road to try to follow the signs to the park, but I couldn’t figure out where the campground was supposed to be.
    I found a large municipal park on the Lake Michigan shore. There was a marina and a broad open space that had a long row of picnic benches and electrical boxes that looked like hookups for RVs. But there were no sign that indicated that the place was a campground, and there were no people in the park at all, let alone campers. This did not look like the campground that had been described to me. It was a wide open space that was set across from the business district. I would be clearly visible if I camped there, and I figured that I would probably be harassed and forced to move by the police before the end of the night if I stayed. I was very close to just setting up my tent despite my concerns, but I moved on after a few indecisive moments. I kept my eyes open for any sign of a campground, but there was clearly nothing in the lakefront area. I made up my mind to head for the state border and continue south. I would find a place to camp illegally on the outskirts of Marinette if I didn‘t stumble across a suitable place to pitch a tent along the way. In any event, I wanted to get off the road soon. The light was dwindling quickly. I figured I had less than a half hour before it would be too dark to ride without lights.
    Heading out of town, I came up to a bridge that crossed the river into Wisconsin. As I began to bike onto the bridge I looked down below and saw a Kmart. And just behind the Kmart I saw a parked RV. I stopped on the bridge and turned around. Right in front of me on the Michigan side of the river was a Taco Bell that I hadn’t even noticed as I passed it.   This clearly had to be the place that I had been directed to.
    I biked into the Kmart parking lot and continued on behind the store. To the left was an industrial area. Right in front of me was a foul smelling waste water treatment plant. To my right was a public boat launch area, and just beyond that was the entrance to the campground that I had spied from the bridge. Luckily for me, the campground was upwind from the water treatment plant, so the smell wasn‘t half as bad as it could have been. I was terribly relieved to be off of the road for the night. It was really close to being dark when I pulled into the campground, and it would not have been fun to try to stealthily hide myself for a night of illegal camping as I had been intending on doing.
    The campground was tucked away neatly, almost right beneath the bridge into Wisconsin, right on the riverfront. It was nicely landscaped with lush green grass and the bathrooms were pretty good. It wasn’t a big campground, and I could see why AAA wouldn‘t bother listing the place, what with the proximity to the major river crossing and the water treatment plant. The front office was closed when I rolled in, so it looked like I would get to stay the night for free if I could leave early enough in the morning to avoid detection by the campground staff.
    After showering and eating I headed for bed. A family was yelling and fighting as they tried to remove their boat from the water at the public boat launch, which made it impossible to fall asleep at first. A man was shouting at a woman to keep the kids out of the way and the woman was at the edge of bursting into tears, complaining that she couldn’t deal with the kids or handle the situation. Finally they were gone and I drifted off to sleep.

Monday, August 21
    Someone had arrived to staff the campground office by the time I was rolling in the morning, but they didn’t stop me as I headed out. I crossed the river into Wisconsin and cruised through Marinette and onto the roads beyond. I quickly found myself on a major four lane road with very heavy traffic, a lot of trucks, and hardly any shoulder. I wasn’t going to have to stay on that road for very long, but I wasn’t very happy to be there.
    I stopped after a short while to have a look at my tire. The guy that built my wheels in Sault Ste. Marie had installed a new tube in my rear wheel, which began to leak slowly as soon as I left the shop. It was a slow enough leak that I hadn’t bothered replacing the tube yet, but I was having to pump the tire up at least a couple of times a day.   After confirming that my wheel was still holding air, I turned from the major road that I was on to some back roads that first traveled through some forests and extensive wetlands, before cruising through several sleepy little towns along the coast. It was a nice, scenic country ride until I began to approach the suburban outskirts of Green Bay.
    I didn’t get a great impression of Green Bay when I rode through it, but then, I didn’t pass by Lambeau Field, which is really what the city is all about anyway.   I saw a lot of industrial factories and smokestacks and the like near the waterfront, and a rather uninspired looking downtown area. In Green Bay, and everywhere else in Wisconsin that I traveled , for that matter, there are numerous little corner bars all over the place. Just about every bar has a sign for Old Style beer, PBR or Old Milwaukee. I wonder if people in Wisconsin actually drink that swill, or if the signs are holdovers from a bygone era. I guess a lot of people in Michigan drink it, so why not Wisconsin, where it‘s brewed?
    I would have just cruised on through town without stopping, but I decided to pick up a sub at the far end of town for lunch. While at the sub shop, I checked out my road map to try to determine a good route around the Green Bay Peninsula. I wasn’t going all of the way to the tip, but I figured I might as well ride around the lower portion, just to see what it was like. I thought I might go to Sturgeon Bay, which is more than halfway to the end of the peninsula, before turning around and riding south along the Lake Michigan Coast. There was a big road that ran all the way to Sturgeon Bay from where I was, which looked like it would be the most direct route. It was hard to determine what kind of road it was by looking at the map, though. The way it was drawn it looked like it would either be a fairly major four lane road, or a real expressway. Sometimes those intermediate kinds of roads prohibit bicycles, sometimes they don‘t. I figured I’d get on the road and try my luck, because I hoped to make good time for the rest of the day, and I didn’t want to be slowed down on back country roads.
    I picked up the road that I had seen on the map just a couple of blocks down from the sub shop, where I had stopped at for lunch. Almost immediately the road turned into a major freeway, though there were no signs indicating that bicycles, farm vehicles and such were prohibited. I went along for a couple of miles until I reached the first exit. I would have stayed on the road out of principal, but I had learned my lesson in Chicago in the previous year. A lack of signage will not save you from angry threats by police officers when you ride on roads that prohibit bicycles.
    I found a nice back road that ran close to the coastline of the bay through some rather fancy suburban communities. It more or less paralleled the freeway that I had intended on traveling. It eventually ran up a huge hill, before ending back at the highway, which was now reduced from being a major, limited access expressway to just a four lane highway. I rode north on it for a while before stopping at a cross street to mess with my rear tire again. I was coming to a construction zone, and I figured it would be better to have everything on my bike in working order to avoid having to stop in a construction zone.
    While I was pumping my tire up a woman approached on a bicycle. When I confirmed that I didn’t need any help she asked all about what I was doing and where I was going. She was a PR director for a local cycling club, and she said she had done some touring herself in Wisconsin’s Sagbraw, a big, annual mass bicycle tour around the state of Wisconsin tour in the mold of Iowa’s Ragbrai. Sagbraw is a five day event that draws several thousand bikers each year. But it pales in comparison to Ragbrai, the five day even that draws upwards of fifteen thousand touring cyclists. We talked for a while, but I was anxious to get back on the road. She told me that it wasn’t a good idea to ride on the highway that I had intended to take. I almost argued with her, as I generally consider high speed roads with broad shoulders to be the easiest places for bicycles to ride for a number of reasons, but I could tell she wasn’t going to take my position seriously. She was one of those bicyclists that always tries to avoid major roads due to an irrational fear of cars. I thought to myself, that it is that attitude that is holding back the bicycling community and keeping us from effectively countering the motorists that yell and try to intimidate cyclists. If we are going to take the roads back we can’t be too timid to ride even the most heavily trafficked road ways. I took her advice despite my convictions though, because she said the construction on the main road went on for a good long while. She pointed to a road that would supposedly take me all the way to Sturgeon Bay, so I headed that way.
    I was cruising deep into farm country. It was all rolling hills and small dairy farms for miles. Many of the hills were dotted with large wind turbines which were catching a good stiff breeze out of the west. I wasn’t sure that I was heading the right way, and a quick glance at my map confirmed my suspicion that the road I was on would not take me to where I wanted to go. Furthermore I was riding right down the middle of the peninsula, rather than the Green Bay coastline, as I had intended. But I had already traveled so far inland that I thought it would be silly to backtrack to get back to the Green Bay coast. I picked out a new route that would take me to the Lake Michigan shore well south of Sturgeon Bay. I was disappointed that I was going to have to cut the extra distance off of my ride that day, but I was nearing the century mark, and I still intended on turning south and making it past Manitowoc before dark. That was a long way to go, and I didn’t need to mess around and travel north just so I could say I made it to Sturgeon bay when my real destination for the day was far to the south.
    I weaved my way through several more miles of rolling farm country before reaching the Lake Michigan coast and heading south.   As I headed south the road stayed pretty close to the shore. I stopped at an old fashioned ice cream parlor and soda fountain in Algoma, a quaint looking town right on the waterfront. The proprietor of the shop complained the business was horribly slow. Indeed, I had noticed that the nice sandy beach had been all but deserted as I rode into town on that sunny afternoon in the mid-eighty degree temperature. The town had a kind of touristy feel to it, but there weren’t any tourists. In the store there was a miniature gray schnauzer that reminded me of my family dog that had died when I was ten years old. The dog did a few tricks, including finding and fetching dollar bills that were placed on the floor.   I only stopped for long enough to wolf down my milk shake and to get my water bottles filled before hopping back on my bike and continuing south.
    South of Algoma, and on south through Kewaunee it was all farm country along the waterfront, interspersed with occasional luxurious looking mansions. The sun began to sink toward the horizon, and I realized that I wasn’t going to make it beyond Manitowoc by nightfall. I wasn’t concerned though, as there was a state forest campground some ten miles north of Manitowoc, near Two Rivers. I passed two big nuclear power plants on my ride that day, the second was only a couple of miles from the campground. Near the power plant there was a sign for some kind of nuclear power museum or visitor center of sorts that looked like it was geared towards kids. I had half a mind to go down a check it out, if only to look for a way to vandalize the place, but it was getting on in the evening, and it was after the business hours that were listed on the sign. I should make it clear that I am not absolutely opposed to nuclear power. If we had a good plan for storing nuclear waste in this country it would seem like a fairly good option, at least in comparison to coal or natural gas plants. While I would like to see wind and solar become the primary sources of electrical power in the future, I understand that there are several drawbacks to wind and solar, in that they don’t work when it is dark and the air is still. Thus a supplementary source of power will always be necessary, and nuclear should be that supplement.   That being said, I had to believe that the nuclear visitor center had to be some kind of propaganda campaign that needed to be rebutted by a realistic assessment of the American nuclear industry, which is a dilapidated mess that is badly in need of revamping.
    Not long after I had passed the nuclear plant I entered into the state forest. Compared to the vast tracts of publicly owned forest land in northern Michigan I could only look on this state forest as a bit of the a joke. It was no larger than some of the smaller Michigan state parks, which are \a fraction of the size of Michigan state forests. Of course Michigan state forests are also clear cut mercilessly on a basis that is altogether too regular. It looked as though this state forest was not maintained as a tree farm, at least not the part of the forest that was visible from the road.
    When I arrived at the campground I asked an attendant about the thunderstorms that had been predicted for the area. During my approach to the state forest I had looked back and seen some rather large thunderheads forming many miles to the north. The attendant confirmed that there was a chance of thunderstorms that night, but that they weren’t too likely. Just the same I staked my tent down extra well and adjusted my rain fly to prepare for potential precipitation.

Gonzo of cycling- August 2006 Part 3

2006-11-01T03:59:08Z

Type your cut contents here.
Part 3

Tuesday, August 22
    The storms that I had feared the night before had not arrived. I awoke in the clear morning and headed southward again. Soon I had passed through the small town of Two Rivers and the larger city of Manitowoc, which bills itself as the maritime capital of Wisconsin, a title that I consider dubious, as Green Bay lies to the north and Milwaukee to the south. Both of those towns have significantly industrialized waterfronts and both cities are quite a bit larger than Manitowoc.
    South of Manitowoc, as the suburban terrain was transitioning to rural I saw a guy walking a bike up a steep driveway, riding away from the road that I was on. He looked to have a big hiking pack on his back, and he was wearing an outfit that looked a lot more casual than the outfits of most touring cyclists that you come across. He had not a single centimeter of spandex on his body. At first I thought he might be a homeless guy on a bicycle, but I decided to stop and investigate.
    When I pulled up to see what he was doing, he told me that he was in fact a touring cyclist, and that he was climbing the hill to get to a park to see if he could find a trail or bike path that would take him into town without having to ride on the road, which he feared because it had very little shoulder. I argued that he would be better off on the road, on which the traffic was pretty light, even if there was no real shoulder to speak of. We chatted for a few minutes. He said his name was Don, and that he was on a bike tour out of Marquette, in Michigan’s upper peninsula, where he attended college at Northern Michigan University. I marveled that he was able to tour while carrying a heavy hiking pack on his back, and even more so when he told me that he was doing close to one hundred miles a day. While I don’t find that distance to be all that astounding in and of itself, even for a loaded bicycle tourist, it’s quite a feat to do that with all of the weight on your back. Don was heading north, so we parted ways. My next stop would be Sheboygan, a nice town, but the people of Wisconsin have always misspelled it‘s name.
    Sheboygan seemed like a rather quaint little city. It was a sleepy seeming place with lots of shady, tree-lined avenues. It would be a nice place to raise a family, I thought. All through Sheboygan I looked for a place to stop and get a bite to eat, but nothing jumped out at me, so I stopped at a gas station on the southern edge of the town. I sat down at a picnic bench outside and ate a big junk food meal while looking at my map. It looked like there was no single road that would take me along the waterfront all of the way to Milwaukee. I was going to have to turn back and forth along little country roads to avoid the freeway. But it looked like it could be done, so I didn’t worry too much.
    When I was back on my bike and heading back to the street I saw another cyclist go by in the direction that I was riding. He clearly wasn’t touring, but he was on a road bike and wearing the whole spandex get up. By the time I was on the road and riding south he had an advantage of almost a minute, but I decided that I was going to try to catch up if possible.
    As soon as I was on the road I was climbing. There was a nice little hill on the way out of town that furthered the guy’s advantage, but I was climbing hard, so he didn’t gain too much on me. Back on the flats I could tell that I was pushing a faster pace than the guy I was chasing. I was doing about 18 mph, which was the fastest pace that I had ridden since the second day of my tour, when I’d had a nice little tail wind to help me. For about a half mile I was gradually biting into the lead, bit by bit, until I saw the cyclist ahead of me slow significantly for a few seconds before starting back up again. Seeing him slow down, I only pedaled harder, and now I was just a couple of hundred yards back. I soon found out why he had slowed so much. We were passing a huge coal fired power plant and there were train tracks that crossed the road and ran into the power plant. The pavement around the tracks had been heavily indented, doubtless due to the passage of endlessly long trains of overloaded coal cars. I slowed down a bit as I approached the tracks, but I was not interested in coming to a stop like the guy ahead of me. I didn’t want to stop and allow him to regain his advantage. My wheels hit hard as I crossed the tracks and the rear tube blew out, jettisoning it‘s air almost instantly. I stopped on the side of the road and got my tools out.
    As I removed the old tube and pulled out a replacement I saw the cyclist dwindle and then disappear in the distance. I would be hard pressed to catch him now, but I might still have a chance if I did quick work. I soon had the tire back on and I pumped it up as fast as I could. I stowed everything away and got rolling quickly, but I soon realized that something was wrong. I looked down and saw that there was a bulge in the side of the tire. Again I stopped and saw that the bead of the tire hadn’t seated itself properly in the rim. I had to deflate the tire and pump it up again with the pump that I had buried in one of my panniers. I had no chance at all of catching the other cyclist now. As I began to refill my tire a car stopped to offer assistance.   An older man stepped out of the car, I thanked him and told him that I wouldn’t need any help. I wanted to get the tire pumped up as fast as possible so I could get back out on the road and get going, even if I couldn’t catch the guy ahead of me. I felt invigorated by the chase that had only just turned out to be fruitless. I wanted to get out and ride as fast as possible once again.
    The man said he had a better pump that would fill my tire much faster than the little pump that I was using. He went to his trunk to go pull it out. I wanted to tell him not to bother, that in the time that he spent going through his trunk to find his pump I could have my tire full, even with my little pump, but that would have been rude. So I waited as he pulled a floor pump out of his trunk. As he brought it over he noticed that the tube had detached itself from the body of the pump, so he had to play around with the hose for a couple of minutes to get the thing to work.   Meanwhile I just stood there and bit my tongue, as I glanced back at my idle pump and bicycle on the side of the road. Finally he got the thing back together, though he had to hold the hose in place to keep it from slipping back out. The pump was indeed much faster than the one that I would have used otherwise, but I had lost several minutes waiting to use it. Having given up all thought of the chase, I asked the man if he knew of a good route that would take me into Milwaukee. He mentioned a rail trail, at which point I should have cut him off, thanked him and been on my way, but he offered to let me have a look at a good county map at his house, which was just a little way up the road. I decided to take him up on the offer. It would be nice to have a look at a better map.
    There was a large sculpture that marked the entrance to his driveway on a lovely forested street. He had a long drive that ran through a veritable sculpture park amidst the trees. At the end of the drive was a good sized home with nice, if dated architecture. It had been a huge house when it had been built several decades before, but it was quite a bit smaller than most modern McMansions. The man opened the door for me and I walked inside. There was so much art inside the house that one could say the walls were more plastered with it, rather than decorated. It was a nice place with big picture windows looking out on the lake and a big airy kitchen and dining area that was enclosed by a glassed in porch, which was pleasantly lit by the afternoon sun. The man said he could never afford the place now on his income, but it hadn’t been too expensive when he’d purchased the place back in the sixties. He said he was a sculpture dealer by trade, which I could only gather must be a pretty lucrative business to be in, if it allowed him to live in a place like that. I doubt I could even pay the tax bill on that kind of property, let alone the mortgage.
    The art dealer had to shuffle through a big pile of maps before finally finding one that had good detail at the county level. He pointed to the map and explained a route to the next town, Cedar Grove, which was at the edge of the map. He didn’t have any maps that would be useful for getting the rest of the way into Milwaukee, but the rail trail that began in Cedar Grove was supposed to run all of the way into Milwaukee.
    Now let me say a bit about rail trails. I generally consider them to be the worst possible place to ride a bike. In one sense they are good, because they get more people out on their bicycles that might not otherwise ride because they are afraid of taking their bicycles on the road. But rail trails must invariably cross roads at regular intervals. When rail trails cross roads the right of way always goes to cars, so bikers have to come to a stop to allow motorized traffic to pass, which slows down the progress of the bikes. Also, motorists usually operate under the assumption that sidewalk traffic will yield in all situations to traffic on the road. I often see cars cut in front of pedestrians in cross walks that have the right of way, and refuse to yield to pedestrians at stop signs, even though pedestrians are always supposed to have the right of way. So rail trails can be dangerous because cars usually don’t have stop signs to impede their progress at trail crossings, and it is doubtful that motorists will be paying enough attention to notice that a trail is crossing a roadway. Also, rail trails are used by pedestrians, skaters, dog walkers and all kinds of bicyclists of varying levels of competence. You find families riding on rail trails, little kids riding to the park, or in small groups, people on mountain bikes, cruiser bikes and road bikes. Most of the time the speed of bikers on rail trails has to decrease to a relatively slow speed to accommodate for the great variety of uses that the trail is being put to, which makes such trails useless for anyone that wants to travel any kind of significant distance in a reasonable amount of time. If these trails were constructed with much wider surfaces to allow for easy passing and elevated grades to avoid intersections with roads they could be safe and speedy ways to get around for cyclists. But as they are now, they are actually much slower and more dangerous surfaces for experienced cyclists to travel on. Thus I almost always shun trails in favor of roads.
    Many people that ride on rail trails will drive their cars to the trails with their bikes. This completely undermines the beneficial environmental aspects of cycling as a form of transportation, as it leads to a situation where people feel that they have to waste fossil fuels every time they decide to go out and ride their bikes. Without rail trails some of these people would eventually learn to ride on the road and discover that it is much less daunting than one would at first imagine, as well as being a much more efficient way to travel. The very presence of these people on the roads would inherently increase the visibility, and thus the long term viability of cycling. Visibility is absolutely key to making motorists more aware, and in the long run more accepting of cyclists and their rights to present on roadways. The more bikes that are on the roads the safer it is for all cyclists, even those that choose to ride on rail trails. In the end the only people that benefit from rail trails are motorists, who are spared from the minor inconvenience of having to change lanes to pass cyclists every once in a while, while cyclists suffer due to being self segregated from the vast majority of the roadways, and trail cyclists are endangered because they choose a form of cycling that makes them much less visible to the rest of the community.
    Now that I have espoused my long held negative opinions of rail trails, and bike trails in general, I must admit that I got on the rail trail in Cedar Grove. I did it because I was hoping to get to Milwaukee as fast as possible, without having to stop constantly to consult a road map that wouldn’t provide me with very good information about the small roads that I would have to travel on otherwise. This way I could get on a single path and stay on it all day without having to stop and think. I wasn’t thinking with a clear head because I had been traveling for the most part on semi-major highways for the previous week in a half, which are the kinds of roads that don’t often have railroad crossings. Usually roads of this size are elevated or sunk below rail grades to avoid crossings. I mistakenly envisioned every single back country road as being engineered to avoid crossing the rail grade that the trail was built upon, which would make for an easy ride without many stops. Also, I assumed the trail would take the lowest, most level route possible, as rail lines usually do, through the rolling country side. I envisioned a nice, easy, rapid transit to Milwaukee, though I don’t know where this vision came from, given my accumulated experiences with every other bike path that I had ever encountered. I don’t know where these silly misconceptions came from.
    When I got to Cedar Grove I looked around for the trail head. The sculpture dealer had described it as beginning right next to a cemetery. I found what looked like the trail head that I was looking for, but there was a warning sign that looked stern enough to keep me from getting on the pathway. I continued riding south, thinking that the trailhead was still up ahead.   Outside of the town, and back in open country I was riding on a bridge over a railroad. I looked down at the rail line below me and I saw that there was an asphalt path that ran along next to the tracks. That was the path I was looking for. So I got down off of the bridge and crossed a field to get onto the trail. I had to squeeze my way through an overgrown hedge to get onto the path, but I made it without great difficulty.   A sign indicated that I was riding on the interurban trail, which was the one that I had been looking for, which would take me to Milwaukee. At every intersection with a roadway there were more of those warning signs that had scared me away from getting on the trail at it’s beginning. They were there to keep people from accessing the power lines that ran along with the trail and the railroad, but they were written in such a way as to make it sound like I wasn’t allowed to be on the trail at all. I wonder how many people have avoided using the trail after reading the stern warning. Well it was probably to their benefit if they just used the road instead.
    At first the trail conformed to many of my expectations. It was a nice flat surface, and there weren’t too many cross streets for a while, so I was able to keep my pace relatively high. But then the cross streets began to come more and more frequently, causing me to stop more and more. Eventually the trail left the rail line and continued to follow a row of power lines for several miles. Then the trail disappeared and the signs indicated that you should continue riding on the road for some time. Then the trail reappeared and branched away from the road. Now the trail ducked into a suburban neighborhood, twisting and traveling with quite a bit of light climbing and descending. From this point on the trail would cease to be anything like my a priori vision, and start to look a lot more like my nightmare of typical suburban bike paths. Yet I continued to stay on the path for many more miles. The path cut back and forth through neighborhoods and over large hills that could easily have been avoided by taking a more logical and direct route. Often the path would disappear and the signs would direct cyclists over suburban streets, only to rejoin the trail several hundred yards later. I constantly had to stop and start, and I constantly had to slow or take evasive maneuvers to avoid pedestrians and slower cyclists. I was amazed to see that there were many people on road bikes, wearing spandex, who were actually riding on the trail, as I was. The ride was becoming so frustrating that I couldn’t imagine trying to ride that trail more than one time. But these people looked like they ride the trail on a regular basis. What fools!
    I finally abandoned the trail. I figure I turned a two hour stretch of riding into three hours by staying on that damned trail for so long. After exiting the trail, I headed in my own direction through a suburban neighborhood. I found a semi-major rural roadway that looked to be traveling southward, in the general direction of Milwaukee and decided to follow that road. It was mid-afternoon, the start of rush hour and the traffic was a little heavy. There was no shoulder to speak of, so I was forced to ride in the roadway and slightly impede the cars around me. I got a lot of dirty looks, but I didn’t care. I was just so happy to be away from that cursed interurban trail.
    Soon I was on the outskirts of Milwaukee, heading on a route that would skirt inland around the downtown area. This seemed like the best way to go about trying to cross through Milwaukee, as the city is divided by a river that runs into Lake Michigan. Along the river is a rail yard and large industrial area that is crossed by only a handful of large bridges. Most of the bridges looked on the map to be major highway bridges that would not allow bicycle traffic. I remembered my ride to catch the ferry from Milwaukee across Lake Michigan to Muskegon the previous summer. I hadn’t had to ride through the city to catch the ferry, but I could tell at the time that there were no small roads near the Lake Michigan waterfront that I could use to cross the river. So I was determined to avoid the waterfront area this time around. Riding along the outskirts of the city I saw a lot of sprawling, impoverished neighborhoods. At times it reminded me a bit of Detroit, but there was nowhere near the amount of crumbling, failing neighborhoods that you find in the Detroit area. The poverty was bad, just not as bad.
    After quite a bit of city riding I did reach the river. I was a couple of miles inland from the lake, as I had intended, but I still had to search around for a while to find a bridge over the river. Once I did make it across I started heading southeast, toward the coast. I picked up 32 and traveled near the waterfront through neighborhoods that I remembered from my previous trip through the area. I had hoped to make it past the Illinois state line, so as to stay at the Illinois Beach State Park, where I had camped the previous summer. But I realized that I would never make it that far before dark as I approached Racine, south of Milwaukee. There were a couple of campgrounds in the Racine area though, so I was glad to learn that I wouldn’t have to ride in the dark to get to my destination that evening. It was starting to become typical for me to arrive at a campground in the shadow of a power plant, and this night was no exception. This time I would camp out near to a coal fired power plant. If I had made it to the state park in Illinois I would have camped next to a nuclear plant.
    As I entered the campground I passed by a self registration area, which I avoided using. There were few people in the campground on that late season weeknight, and I thought I might get overlooked if I didn’t go ahead and pay of my own volition. But my hopes were dashed when a campground host came to my site to ask if I had intended to pay in an accusatory tone. I took a very defensive attitude with her, as if I had been about to go and drop my cash off after setting my tent up, when in reality I had no such intention. I handed her my twenty dollars and went to take my shower before heading off to bed.

Wednesday, August 23
    I tuned into NPR morning edition as soon as I awoke, as I usually do when I’m in range of a station. The weather report mentioned a chance of rain, but the skies were quite clear as I set out that morning, and anyway, they didn’t make it sound like a big deal on the radio. I headed south through Racine and Kenosha. They are two relatively nice little cities. They probably serve largely as bedroom communities for Milwaukee and Chicago, but they seemed to have enough character to be considered real cities in their own right.
    Then it was on to the Illinois border. I didn‘t like the look of the towns around the Wisconsin/Illinois border, but Zion was a bit nicer, several miles south of the border. As I headed south I passed through the ugly town of North Chicago, a heavily industrialized and impoverished area, before getting into the way upscale northern Chicago suburbs. I was riding on Sheridan Avenue, which is a fairly major road that runs all of the way into Chicago from the Wisconsin border. When you get to the very rich town of Lake Forest there is a bike trail that runs alongside Sheridan road for several miles. There is a sign on Sheridan that indicates that bicycles are not allowed to ride on the road at all. I had ignored the sign the previous summer when passing through, and I saw no reason at all not to do so again this time, so I stayed off of the bike path. After a while Sheridan ducks into the winding tree lined streets of Lake Forest proper, which is filled with mansions. Bicycles aren’t allowed on any of the streets of Lake Forest, but I made a point of riding right through the middle of Lake Forests on the streets, as I had the previous year. Who the hell are those rich bastards to try to ban bicycles from public roadways? I had half a mind to ride up and down every single road in that town.
    After Lake Forest is the community of Highland Park, which is only slightly less ostentatious in it’s overt displays of wealth than is the Lake Forest community. In Highland Park I started to see lots of other cyclists on the road. Most of the cyclists around here were riding on expensive, high end road bikes. The first cyclist that I saw was riding ahead of me on a triathlon bike, cruising along at a good clip. I upped my pace a bit and was able to keep up with him. But there were a lot of intersections in the area, and he was maneuvering through intersections with stop signs and red lights with the confidence and determination of a highly skilled and experienced big city cyclist that has no regard for traffic laws whatsoever. I was at least trying to politely adhere to most of the traffic laws, though I might have been behaving a bit more like the guy on the triathlon bike if I wasn’t riding around on a big, heavy, unresponsive bike that was simply too large to squeeze through some of the holes he was getting through. So he kept pulling away and I kept pumping and hammering away at the pedals, doing a decent job of keeping up. But my water bottles kept falling off of my gear on the back of my bike. In addition to the two bottles that kept in the cages on my frame, I had two spare bottles that were held on my rack by the bungee cords that were holding my tent and big water bladder on. I hadn’t arranged the bungee cords in the best way that morning, and they were allowing the bottles to slip out due to the high speed of my pursuit and all of the rocking and swaying that my bike was undergoing. I rearranged the bungee cords and bottles, which secured things quite a bit better, but by that time the triathlon bike guy was long gone.
    Despite the escape of my pursuit target, I continued to push my pace as I traveled through the Chicago suburbs. I cruised into Glencoe at a good clip and decided to turn off onto the steep, winding road that is clearly marked with a sign that prohibits cyclists, once again as I had the year before. An older, gray-haired couple had honked their horns at me and told me to get off the road the last time I had been on that street, so I was determined to ride it again in an act of defiance. This time there was a construction crew doing road work on the street. A worker shouted “no bikes!” as I passed by. I shouted “too bad!” in response as I continued on. I’m such a rebel.
    On through Winnetka and Wilmette, I rode. I passed the stunning Baha’I House of Worship, that I had greatly admired as I passed through the area in the previous summer. Then it was on into Evanston and past Northwestern University. Beyond Evanston things get a bit more urbanized. Population density grows significantly as high rise residential buildings begin to grow near the waterfront. Now that I was in Chicago proper I started to see bicycles everywhere. I stopped at a local organic grocery store to stock up on supplies. I had intended on stopping at the Whole Foods Market in downtown Chicago, but I felt better about stopping at this quaint little store, even though it’s shelves were only sparsely stocked with items. I cruised on toward the downtown area, picking my way through traffic and doing my best to keep up with the other bikers on the road. There were lot‘s of other bikers to pass and keep up with, so it was easy to make myself feel like I was constantly racing. I kept my pace high as I cruised through Chicago, passing as many bicyclists as I could on the outskirts of the city, where it is possible to keep a decent pace up. In what seemed like no time at all I was entering the financial district, where things began to slow down a bit. It was afternoon traffic and I was having trouble getting around all of the cars with all of my gear and my big panniers sticking out so far. Everywhere there were messengers and other cyclists that wore messenger style outfits, with messenger style fixed gear bikes, who easily ducked around and between cars, skillfully maneuvering through the traffic. I fought to keep up, but I was at too much of a disadvantage in the slow, technically difficult terrain. Riding in Chicago was just so exhilarating. I was overcome with the desire to move there and become a bike messenger as soon as possible.
    Soon the financial district was behind me and I was back to moving at a good clip through the more lightly traveled streets of the southern portion of the city. I worked my way toward the waterfront as I pushed on. My legs were tired from riding so hard all day, but they still had a lot of juice left in them for the ride. I came to Lakeshore Drive, which was less of a freeway at this point, south of the museum district. But I still didn’t get on. Even though it looked like a road that might be open to bicycles I didn’t want to take any chances. I remembered the asshole cop that had threatened me when I had accidentally found myself on that road the last time I was riding through Chicago. I crossed Lakeshore Drive and came to the waterfront park that covers much of Chicago’s lake shore.   I started riding on the bike path that runs the length of the park, despite the bad experience I had had with bike paths in the Milwaukee area. I wanted to follow along the waterfront as best as I could, knowing that I would eventually reach the southern end of Lake Michigan, when I would have to turn to the southeast, and eventually to the northeast on my way through Indiana, and on to Michigan. I knew I wouldn’t miss my turn if I stuck to the lakeshore. The shoreline park gave way to high rise project housing and then to some rather down scale neighborhoods of row houses and small apartment buildings. Finally I came to heavily industrialized area as I neared Indiana. I knew from traveling by car along the highways in that area, and by train, that the northern Indiana Lake Michigan shoreline was not a very nice looking place to be, so I didn’t expect to be treated to the nicest bike ride that I’d ever had. Thus I was not at all surprised by the massive industrial wasteland that I rode through as I traveled down US 12, a highway that I have traveled on extensively in the state of Michigan. After passing a freight yard, I passed a Casino, situated right next to a highway exit, and amidst the apocalyptic industrial scene. Next it was a massive Cargill plant, and then a huge, sprawling petroleum refinery, complete with a mile of massive storage tanks. Then as I continued on into East Chicago I started to pass by the giant steel plants.
    I stopped at a beat up looking dairy queen to get a milkshake in a run down looking neighborhood in East Chicago. I sipped my shake as I sat on the curb of the road in the shade while I looked over the map. I was listening to NPR, which still was predicting a slight chance of rain for the evening, but the sky was still totally clear as the sun beat down. I decided to push on and try to make it to Warren Dunes State Park, some fifteen miles beyond the Michigan state line by nightfall. I would pass by the Indiana Dunes National Park on my way, but I didn’t want to stop and camp there. If I made it to Warren Dunes there was a chance that I could make it all the way to my home in Ann Arbor in one huge ride the next day.   If I stopped short of Warren Dunes I would have to stay on the road an extra day, which seemed unappealing to me.
    As I was putting my maps away and finishing my shake, the woman inside the DQ called out to me. She wanted to know where I was riding from, and where I was going. She seemed really interested in my travels, and was concerned that I would be biking through the city of Gary shortly. She warned me about how tough a place Gary is. I thanked her for the warning, but looking around the neighborhood I was in at that moment, I couldn’t imagine Gary being much worse. She asked if I had heard about the two cops from that area that had been killed bicycling recently. I said I hadn’t and she filled me in with the details. She didn’t know the whole story, but she explained that two cops were riding some sort of bike marathon when they were run over by a truck in the last two days.
    I checked the news when I got home to get the full story. There was a group of police officers and retired police officers that had done several long tours to raise money for a charity that provided for the families of police officers that are killed in the line of duty. The officers rode in a big pack, followed by a large support van that carried all their gear somewhere near the Indiana/Illinois border (it’s touring for wimps, but at least it’s bicycle touring). The van had a big bright sign warning of bicyclists ahead, as well as flashing lights to warn traffic approaching from behind.   They were traveling on a big four lane highway that was described as being straight, with clear sight lines in the middle of the day. Apparently the bright flashing lights had not been enough of a warning for a semi-truck driver that was approaching from behind. The truck failed to slow down or pass in the open lane and it plowed right into the support van, sending that van flying foreword, into the group of bicycling police officers, killing two of them and injuring another 3. One of the dead officers had had a long career in Gary, Indiana. What horrible irony that police officers that were raising money for the families of dead officers would be killed themselves.   In most cases like these the driver will get off with a slap on the wrist, if there are any criminal prosecutions at all. I’ve heard of several cases of drivers running over bicyclists due to negligence, or even drunk driving, and getting off without any jail time at all, or even a suspended license.
    So I rode on into Gary. The steel plants continued to dominate the shoreline in the distance. The city of Gary is really an unpleasant place, with the poverty and the heavy industrialization, it combines the worst aspects that a city can embody. Soon after passing through Gary, US 12 begins to run closer to the lake shore and the massive steel factories. After traveling beside the factories for a while I came to the lightly developed, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. It was rather nice to ride through there for a while, away from the great smoke stacks and foundries. After riding through the national lakeshore area for a while the industrialization began again, with another sprawling steel plant, followed by another section of undeveloped national lakeshore. Whoever had developed that area had apparently been unable to make up their minds about what kind of zoning they wanted. Soon after passing that last industrial plant the terrain turned rural again and the temperature dropped quickly. I was approaching Michigan City, Indiana, and dark clouds were gathering on the northern horizon.
    The wind started to pick up as the clouds sailed in overhead. So here is that rain that NPR had been talking about all day, I thought. I almost welcomed the coming precipitation, as it had been a hot day. I thought a light shower might be just the thing I would need to refresh me for the last push into Michigan for the night. I figured I was an hour and a half away from my destination. When the rain did begin to fall it was no light sprinkling. Big heavy drops were driven into my body and my face, driven painfully by the gusting wind. I initially took off my sunglasses so that I could see in the falling rain under the darkened sky, but I put them back on to protect my eyes from the pounding precipitation. I could hardly see anything, with or without my sunglasses. The heavy rain felt like it was on the verge of turning to hail. Soon the water was building up on the road, creating massive puddles, and visibility had dropped to very low levels. I was concerned for my safety in those conditions so I pulled off the road to shelter under a roof at a gas station.   I stood outside under the roof, amidst the gas pumps waiting for the rain to subside a bit, but the rain only fell faster and harder, and the wind only whipped up in ever greater gusts. I was still getting soaked as the rain came in sideways. Every few minutes the wind would slacken for a few seconds, allowing me to hear the distant wail of tornado sirens, and then it would whip up again, carrying the sound away from my ears. I finally decided to prop my bike against a wall and go inside the gas station. The store attendant was nice enough to allow me to stand inside to wait out the storm, which plastered the window with rain in growing fury. The storm reached a crescendo, when it became impossible to see out of the windows due to the volume of rain that was being blown against them, and when water started running in rivers beneath the closed door of the gas station store.
    The winds slowed and the rain fell with less intensity after I had waited for a half hour, but it was still coming down pretty hard. At that point I felt that I had no choice but to leave. The storm might continue that way for hours, but it was going to be dark in around an hour and a half, which was exactly how long I thought I had to ride to get to the state park. So I walked outside and mounted my bike in the pouring rain. I would learn the next day that the storm had knocked out power to some 30,000 homes in northern Indiana, though no tornadoes had actually touched down.
    After biking for about ten minutes in the rain I was not a happy camper. I spotted a motel on the side of the road and stopped in to enquire about rates. The proprietor said he could offer me a room for the night for forty dollars, but I didn’t want to pay that much. I asked if I could just set my tent up on his property for the night, which he was totally opposed to. So I headed back out and got going again. The rain was starting to slow now, though rivers continued to flow through the streets. As I rode on I looked at every empty lot or clump of trees as a potential campsite. I couldn’t help thinking about stopping and setting up camp every single minute, but I kept driving myself foreword. When I crossed into Michigan I knew I still had some distance to go, but I decided that nothing was going to keep me from my destination.
    I began talking to myself, as I sometimes do at the end of a long grueling ride. I goaded myself, and chastised myself every time my thoughts turned to stopping on the side of the road. I shouted at myself like a drill instructor, urging my tired legs to turn with the strength they had demonstrated hours earlier on the streets of Chicago. I fought and grunted and probably scared a couple of people that I passed, as I fought on in the dying light. I turned off of US 12 and onto the Red Arrow Highway, not too far away from my destination. The rain had completely subsided now and the setting sun could be glimpsed through a break in the clouds over the lake as I traveled north along Michigan’s western shore.
    I was pumping my fist in the air and shouting out loud when I finally arrived at the entrance to Warren Dunes State Park. It was late enough in the evening that I thought I might be able to get into the campground for free without being noticed, but there were attendants in the booth at the campground when I entered. I opted for a rustic campground, which saved me twelve dollars, but I decided to pay two dollars extra to use the showers in the modern campground, even though I could have easily showered without anyone knowing the difference. The rustic campgrounds were at least a half mile further into the park, over rough dirt roads. The rain continued to hold off as I set up camp and ate, while the night grew completely dark. I grabbed my clothes and bathroom kit as I walked down to take a shower, over the long dirt road that lead back to the campground office and the main campground.
    Soon after returning from taking my shower and slipping into my tent, the rain began anew. It wasn’t the hard pounding driven rain of the evening’s storm, rather it was a persistent light shower that did not relent for the entire night.

Thursday, August 24
    I awoke when my alarm rang at 5:00am. The rain was still falling, and it wasn’t light enough to see outside yet, with the thick clouds blocking out the predawn light.   I had hoped to get on the road before six to get an early start on what I expected to be my longest day of riding, not just on that, but of my entire life. I couldn’t tell exactly, but it looked like Ann Arbor was around 150 miles away if I was to head directly home. But my intended course was not to go straight home. I would need every second of daylight to make it home before dark. I decided not to break camp in the early morning rain and to wait to see if it would taper off as the morning grew lighter. Every minute that I waited was extra time that I would have to spend riding in the dark. But that sounded like a better option than riding in the rain at that point.
    An hour and a half later and the rain had still not subsided, but it was light enough to see outside, so I exited my tent and began to break camp in the rain. I was ready to set off at my usual start time, before 7:30. The rain did start to slacken almost as soon as I began riding. I got back out on the Red Star Highway and headed north again. I passed yet another nuclear power plant that morning. It was an old plant that had been permitted to operate for 40 years back around 1970. Now that it was reaching the end of it’s life, the plant owners, Consumer’s Energy, had sold the place to a new company that was trying to secure a permit extension that would allow it to continue operating for decades. It seems horrible to me that they would continue using these old power plants, many of which have not been maintained as well as they might of, as evidenced by the corrosion problems that were experienced at several plants in the region in the last couple of years. Why can’t they use the most recent technological advances to build new, safer power plants instead of risking disaster by continuing to run these outdated facilities?
    Soon I was entering St. Joseph, a pleasant waterfront community composed primarily of white people that borders Benton Harbor, an impoverished industrialized black community. There were big riots in Benton Harbor a couple of years ago when a Benton Harbor resident was killed in a car that was being chased by white police officers. Seeing the contrast between the affluence of the white community and the poverty of the black community next door, I could see why someone might want to riot.
    When I crossed the bridge into Benton Harbor, over the St. Joseph river, my circle tour of Lake Michigan was finally complete. The circuit of the two lakes that had begun at that very site, two years before was finished. Now it was time to head for home. I turned to the east and rode through Benton Harbor. I wanted to reach a real, numbered highway that would carry me all of the way across the state, but I would have to back track to get to the nearest east-west highway, which was US12. I hoped to not have to travel south to pick up US12, which would add several extra miles to my ride. I wanted to take M60 all of the way to Jackson, which ran a parallel route to the east and north, several miles north of US12. That route would save me a few miles, but I would have to spend a good deal of time riding on small roads in the countryside to get to M60. So I started cutting to the east on small back country roads hoping to reach M60 without having to drop too far to the south. I was riding virtually blindly, only being able to keep a vague idea of my eastward course as I traveled along roads that forced me to track to the north and then back to the south to continue in the direction that I wished to travel. Again the old Tolkien adage returned to my mind and I decided it would be better to head a bit south to get onto the highway which had a course that I was certain of. If I continued to the east I would be traveling on back roads for half of the day before finally getting to a major road.
    So I headed south and east to get to the highway before I got too lost out in the back country. My new route would be a bit longer, as the crow flies, but perhaps a bit shorter in terms of time, I hoped. Along the way I stopped at a fruit stand to purchase some good Michigan blueberries and peaches, which I polished off almost immediately. Soon I was on M60 and cruising along. After riding for a good while my rear wheel began to feel funny, yet again. I pulled off the road and inspected everything. First I looked at the spokes, which appeared to be in good shape. Then the rims, which also looked to be fine. Finally I looked at the tire, which appeared to be on the verge of failing. It looked like almost all of the rubber along the centerline of the tire had been worn away. The tire was nearing the point of complete failure that I had only seen a tire reach once, on an empty stretch of highway 2 in the middle of Montana. So I pulled the old tire off and replaced it with the tire that had been folded up inside my pannier since I had purchased it on the third day of the trip in Ontario. At first I couldn’t get the tire to seat right in the rim. The tire had creased a little bit due to being folded up for so long and the bead didn’t want to stay in place at one point. I pumped the tire up once, saw that there was a problem, and released the air again When the tire was filled a second time the bead still refused to seat itself in the rim. So I had to release the air again. When it didn’t seat the third time I decided to try riding on it. Perhaps it will seat itself as I go along, I foolishly thought. So I started riding foreword, but it wasn’t easy going. The wheel wasn’t very round with the tire sticking out like that. After a rather slow and jarring half mile I stopped again to see if there wasn’t something I could do I thought a new tube might be of some help, and to my surprise, and for no apparent reason, it seemed to do the trick. The bead was now firmly seated in the rim and the wheel was relatively round again. I had lost an hour to the tire repair, but I was back rolling again.
    All day long I kept trying to push myself to make better time, and all day long I continually failed to increase my speed by any significant amount. It was becoming quite apparent that I was going to be riding until after dark that night. It was just a matter of whether I was going to finish on Thursday night, or early Friday morning.
    I passed south of Marshall, where I have relatives that would have provided me with a warm bed for the night, if I had decided to stop. But I didn’t want to take the easy way out.
    I felt like I was passing the same podunk little farm town over and over again that day. Early in the morning I had passed many fruit farms, which are prevalent all along the Lake Michigan shore. But the interior of the state is dominated by corn, wheat and soy. Corn fields were followed by corn fields and yet more corn fields. The towns were mere blips. The countryside seemed to stretch on forever, and I always seemed impossibly far away from home, though I was confident that I would make it home if I just kept pressing on.
    As the sun sank low on the horizon and dark clouds began to darken the sky to the east I began to be bombarded by tiny winged ants. Some species that was widely dispersed throughout the area had apparently chosen that particular afternoon for the mass nuptial flights of the reproductive males and females, and being poor flyers in general, the ants were too slow to get out of my way as I rode through the open fields of middle-southern Michigan. Every few minutes I was brushing dozens of flying ants from my body as I rode on. I stopped about ten miles outside of Jackson to stock up on food. I was glad to see that they carried power bars in the store (though unfortunately not cliff bars), and I bought several. I never buy power bars when I’m at home, as they are owned by Nestle and are vastly inferior to independently owned, Cliff bars, which are made with organic grains and soy. But there are a lot of things that I am willing to purchase when I’m touring that I would never purchase under other circumstances, like dairy queen products for instance. I gobbled a couple of energy bars as I pushed on towards Jackson as the afternoon light grew dimmer and dimmer.
    As I reached the outskirts of Jackson I saw lightning shooting from the dark clouds that had been looming threateningly before me for hours. It looked like a massive thunderstorm would impede my progress for a second night in a row, but I had to keep pushing foreword in hopes that it wouldn’t be as bad as it looked. The streets of Jackson were soaked. The storm had come through and doused everything, but I had been almost untouched by the evening’s precipitation.
    By the time I made it through downtown Jackson and on to the eastern edge of the city it was almost dark, but the storm looked to be getting further off in the distance. I had turned my light on and was wearing it on my helmet now, more for protection than to illuminate the street before me, as it was still light enough to see out on the streets. I had attached my old headlight to one of my panniers to serve as a tail light. I was ready for the night ride. My odometer indicated that I had already traveled over one hundred and fifty miles, and I was still a good forty miles away from Ann Arbor. I thought I was going to be able to make it that night, but I’ve always found it difficult to maintain a good speed in the dark, especially on streets that I’m not too familiar with. I often ride through Jackson on century rides, but I always use a route that takes me far to the north, and then far to the south to increase the distance. On this night I wanted to use the most direct route to make as short a ride as possible, which would carry me over some roads that I had never been on before, and others that I had only biked on a few times.
    As I rode eastward out of Jackson I paralleled the freeway as closely as I could. I intended to arrive in Chelsea at a point about two miles north of I-94, where I would pick up Jackson road, which would take me into Ann Arbor. I could have taken a route that would have taken me even more directly to my apartment, but heading a couple of miles south of the freeway, but that would have taken me on Scio Church road. Scio Church is a small, lightly traveled, hilly road that I consider ideal for cycling in most circumstances, but it sounded dangerous to ride on such a road in the middle of the night, when motorists wouldn’t expect to see any other cars, let alone cyclists. I also wished to ride the flattest route possible to make it easy on my aching legs, which made Jackson road the ideal choice.
    My course took me first along the north side of the freeway, then south side. Near Grass Lake I entered a small lakeside community. There were several emergency vehicles that were blocking the road with all of their flashing lights turned on. I looked to see what the problem was and I saw that a car had run into a garage at what looked like a very high rate of travel. The car was all mangled and the wall that it had impacted had crumpled in upon itself. Perhaps the car had just been going too fast I thought, as the street was a narrow winding lane that could hardly be traversed safely at speeds above 20 mph. Traffic was backed up on the street in both directions, as they couldn’t pass by the emergency vehicles, but I squeezed right on through.
    Later I crossed back to the north of the freeway again, and into the Waterloo area. I didn’t know the roads around that area at all, but I thought I was keeping myself in an eastward course, so I continued on. I knew that I would eventually cross a street that I was familiar with, even if I started heading in the complete wrong direction. I know some of the more major streets that outline the area pretty well, it was just the smaller roads in between that I had no knowledge of. Eventually I pulled out the metro parks map that I had been carrying, totally unused since the first day of my trip, as it only covered south-eastern Michigan. The metro parks map was pretty detailed, and I was able to find exactly where I was on that map, and confirm that I was going in the right direction. I continued on and eventually found myself in Chelsea, exactly where I had intended to be.
    I was now a little over fifteen miles from home and heading onto streets that I knew fairly well. I picked up Jackson road and continued on. The air was damp from the passing rain and mist was rising from the wetlands and rural terrain. My helmet light cast a conical beam before my eyes, obscuring my vision of the road. At least the light made me visible, even if I couldn’t see very well. I glanced down at my speedometer periodically and confirmed what I had expected. My pace had dropped to around twelve mph and was staying pretty close to that range. When I was concentrating on riding fast I could easily push it to fifteen or sixteen mph for stretches, but I was spending most of my time concentrating on the road, and the traffic that was present infrequently. Riding fast in the dark is a skill that I haven’t been able to master yet.
    I felt a bit of relief as I passed Baker road and entered the outskirts of the Jackson road business district. There were lots of lights in the parking lots, and even street lights for stretches, so I knew that it would be easier for cars to see me on the road. After passing Zeeb road, I stopped for a couple of minutes for a quick breather to steel myself for the final home stretch and to move a full water bottle from my rack to one of the cages on my frame. When I started to pedal again my knees were in horrible pain. The constant motion and endorphins that my body had been producing had masked the aching in my knees and muscles that had set in over the endless hours in the saddle. Now my body was starting to rebel, having tasted a moment of relaxation. I was almost home, less than a mile from the city limits, but my legs didn’t want to do the little bit of work that it would take to finish the job.   I rode on and just let the pain course through my body. Eventually the repetitive motion made it easier to ignore how much I was hurting.
    I pushed on as hard as I could, knowing that I could always stop for a while somewhere in town to rest for a few minutes if the pain became unbearable, and knowing that I would only have to suffer for a few more miles until the whole trip would be at an end. I turned south onto Stadium, and then took the detour down Maple to avoid the construction that has been going on for what seems like years. From Maple I turned eastward onto a safe section of Scio Church that has a bike lane, and is lit by street lights. I turned onto Main street and then followed it to the left at the next traffic light. I was on my home street now. As I came up to the entrance for the Bush’s Value Land supermarket I saw that an SUV was pulling up to turn onto Main in front of me. It’s an intersection where I have almost been run over on several occasions, so I’m always wary when cars are exiting the parking lot. I made a point of pointing my light directly at the driver’s side window of the SUV in hopes that he would see me approaching. The truck continued to roll toward the intersection, never coming to a complete stop. I was only feet away from the intersection myself, and I couldn’t tell if the SUV was slowly stopping to let me pass, or if it hadn’t seen me at all. I was almost directly in front of the SUV, and surely close enough to be illuminated by it’s headlights when the driver accelerated forward and started driving right at me. I slammed on my brakes and the truck missed me by inches. The only way that the driver could have possibly not seen me is if he/she wasn’t paying any attention to the road or anything outside of the vehicle at all. That kind of shit really pisses me off, as I was using every bit of my concentration to keep from getting killed and trying to make myself visible on the road, while this yahoo is out there cruising around on the streets with his/her eyes fucking closed.
    Having avoided being run over by the slimmest of margins I was now virtually home. I turned onto the driveway for the apartment complex that is adjacent to mine about one hundred yards away from the driveway that had almost been the site of my demise, yet again. I rode to the end of the apartment complex parking lot, and entered the lot of my own apartment complex. I pulled into the below ground garage and rolled my bike into the storage cage. It was 11:30pm. My odometer indicated that I had traveled over 194 miles that day. The total for my entire trip was 1745 miles over thirteen days. I had a quick bite to eat in my apartment while I watched sports center and then took a truly enjoyable shower before crashing in my bed a little after 1:00am.

Dick DeVos is satan

2006-09-21T16:22:06Z

So the Republicans in the state of Michigan have rounded up the most evil looking man I have ever seen run for public office. You can't see it in his photographs, but when you actually see him talk in his campaign ads you can see the evil in his face. He was the CEO of Amway, that venerable institution that makes it's money by getting normal Americans to harass their friends, neighbors and coworkers into paying service fees to order discount mail order products as part of a pyramid scam. Amway doesn't make it's money selling the goods in it's catalog, most of the profit comes from the service charges. Amway has also globalized, introducing it's scam to dozens of other countries. I heard a news report several years ago about how Amway had become so pervasive in one African country that the national economy had collapsed because no one was actually doing any jobs anymore, they were just selling foreign goods to one another through Amway. And while Amway used to sell goods that were mostly produced in the United States, they have sent a lot of their jobs and production offshore in recent years. DeVos defends the offshoring of Amway jobs as a way to save the jobs of the handful of Americans that his company still employs. Okay, I'll buy it I guess, but he is selling himself as the savior of the Michigan economy and blaming the current governor for not attracting more jobs to the state. That's a tough claim to make, that the governor is personally responsible for the economic conditions that lead to Michigan companies moving their jobs overseas, especially coming from a man that actually is directly responsible for sending several thousand Michigan jobs abroad.

Okay, so here's the kicker. Yesterday this devil, I refer to DeVos as the devil, came out in favor of teaching intelligent design in Michigan science classes. Here's a quote from a Detroit Free Press article:

"I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design -- that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory -- that that theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less."

By using the term "many scientists", I can only assume that the devil meant "a few whack jobs on the fringe of scientific circles". And I can only assume that he takes the term "viable alternative theory" to mean "unsupported pseudoscience that has been largely discredited". If he were to use any other definitions for these terms one would have to assume that he just isn't informed enough about these issues, and that politicians shouldn't be making the curriculum decisions that school boards have been created to make.

As evil as DeVos is, I don't think he is a stupid man, nor does he strike me as someone who let's religion determine his world view. I have to think that his support of intelligent design is a ploy to appeal to the ignorance of Michiganders, and I fear that he can only succeed using such a strategy.

Well folks, if you live in the state of Michigan now would be a good time to draw up some kind of escape plan. Paddling across Lake Huron toward Ontario would appear to be the most viable option at present, as Ohio is little better than Michigan, and we all know what Indiana is like.

Gore is talking the talk

2006-09-20T05:35:10Z

It looks like our old friend Al Gore is really starting to say the right things when it comes to environmental policy. He's addressing the environmental concerns that he ran away from in his 2000 presidential campaign with abandon. And with his recent speech http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/washington/19gore.html?ref=science he's starting to deal with some of the concerns that I had with his recent movie on global warming. After seeing "An Inconvienient Truth" I walked away wondering where the solutions were. His whole movie was about the gloom and doom of the greenhouse effect, which has already been well documented in countless other sources, and which was summed up nicely in an extended cover story article in National Geographic in the last year. I liked the film, but a key element was missing. He hardly addressed any possible solutions to reducing America and the world's CO2 emissions, which I considered to be a wasted opportunity. He treated the call to action as an afterthought. Now it looks like he is going to present a comprehensive strategy for dealing with global warming. If he keeps this up he is going to get my vote in '08. And I really hope he does, because I don't want to throw away my vote on a third party candidate that is willing to deal with the tough environmental issues that the big parties have refused to touch.

And I love this quote:
“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”

Right on Al! Tell it like it is!

I'm out of here

2006-08-12T03:45:45Z

leaving early saturday morning. Should be in Canada by saturday night. Not coming home until I round Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. Be back in a couple of weeks.

Say it ain't so Floyd, say it ain't so.

2006-08-10T15:45:45Z

I'm tired of giving you the benefit of the doubt. I feel cheated, but you're the one that was doping. Who would have thought, a junkie menonite?

It's a sad world

2006-07-25T02:25:08Z

These are pictures of Israeli children signing artillary shells that are destined to fall on the neighborhoods of Lebanese civilians. What kind of sick parent would allow or encourage this kind of behavior? Hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been killed in Israeli attacks in the last week. How many more must die to quench the Israeli thirst for blood? They will turn the entire country to rubble, and in the end they will only have bred even more terrorists. Israel kills 10 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians for every one Israeli civilian that Hezbollah or Hamas kills. But Hezbollah and Hamas are called terrorist organizations by the American government and Israel's military is supported by billions of American tax dollars. We might as well put our signatures on those shells alongside those Israeli children's, we bought the damn things.

Ants

2006-05-13T19:28:23Z

Interestingly, E.O. Wilson, the greatest living authority on ants, partially attributes the great success of ants over the last fifty million years to the evolution of glands that produce fungicides and anti-bacterials. Of course these chemical countermeasures alone are not the only secrets of their success. Wilson lists as the most important innovation the life habits of the ants, their position as the dominant terrestrial insect predators (leaf cutter and harvester ants notwithstanding). But they presumably would be unable to succeed in their evolved lifestyle to the extent that they have, or to live in their densely packed colonies without the advent of some form of defense against infections. For further illustration of the importance of antibiotics in the lives of eusocial insects, Wilson points out that both eusocial bees and wasps raise their larvae in antibiotic impregnated cells. He doesn't mention whether or not termites, the only non-hymenopteran eusocial insects, employ any form of antibiotics.
Why am I mentioning these arcane details about the life histories of eusocial insects? Well I have always thought that these highly successful and nearly ubiquitous insects employ social structures that are more similar to human social structures than those of any other species, though there are enough notable differences to make the comparison quite strained. The vast differences being noted, I've always imagined that we can learn a great deal from the strategies that eusocial insects employ to allow them to succeed as densely packed colonies, for the human species will need a multitude of strategies to allow us to continue to survive as dense urbanized populations. One of the most important issues that densely packed populations need to deal with is hygenic conditions, which is an issue that grows in importance relative to increasing population densities. How does a population keep parasites and diseases from exploiting conditions that will allow them to spread rapidly from host to host once they initially infect a population? Absent the ability to sterilize every conceivable surface humans have increasingly relied on antibiotics over the last 3/4 of a century or so. But as our use of antibiotics has increased we have found our bacterial antagonists to be ever more adaptable at evading our defenses. One antibiotic after another has grown nearly useless for fighting disease causing bacteria. So why are the ants able to ward off disease with their antibiotics for millions of years when humans have met with only mixed results? How do they deal with bacteria evolving resistence to their antibiotics? Do they change the formula periodically? Do they apply them in a way that is more effective than methods that humans have used?
Another thought is that environmentalists and others that are generally skeptical about western medicine have tended to shun antibiotics. In the past I have generally supported this stance, in that I've always advocated for using antibiotics only in extreme life or death circumstances, and not as a prophylactic against possible infections as they are often employed, or as constituents of antibiotic soaps and cleaning products. Perhaps this is a shortsighted view of the situation though. It seems that ants spread their antibiotics throughout their nests with what seems to be great success. Perhaps epidemiologists should investigate antibacterial behavior of ants to understand how they defeat drug resistence in bacteria and employ similar techniques to control infectious bacteria in our own environment. If the ants are to be our model, perhaps I should be less harsh in my estimation of drug companies in the future, or about the behavior of doctors in over prescribing drugs.

Art or Insanity? You decide!

2006-04-10T02:50:57Z

http://cgi.ebay.com/Ray-Johnson-Apathy-Mongers-Kvelling-Me-Softly-vithVerbs_W0QQitemZ7405986627QQcategoryZ554QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Check out this listing on ebay, and other listings by this seller. I don't know if I should be impressed by the creativity or apalled.

mayorbrotherdan @ 2006-03-11T05:18:00

2006-03-11T10:18:02Z

I guess I saw the beginning of the end for my grandfather two and a half years ago. I rolled my heavily burdened bike into my aunt and uncle's yard in Santa Monica after months of travel. My grandparents happened to be there, visiting for the weekend. My grandfather had gone in for a CT scan a few weeks earlier for some reason and a tumor appeared on the scan. Not an unexpected occurrence for a seventy six year old man that had smoked for more than half his life. I don't know if it was the glare of the afternoon sun or perhaps it was just my imagination, but he looked like he had aged quite a bit in the six months since I last saw my grandparents at my college graduation. He and my grandmother were not quite as quick to smile and the burden of their new found fears was palpable. In the coming weeks I would drive them to several doctor's appointments and the growing consensus was that surgery would be needed.

In the hospital they cut his chest open and sliced off a sizable chunk of his lung and part of a lymph node. Early tests were promising, and there was hope that the cancer would not return after a round or two of Chemo. In the mean time he would have to recover. After the surgery he immediately developed a frequent and nasty cough that hurt him horribly. It pained me just to listen, let alone to see his reaction. He refused to eat the hospital food; I tried to get smoothies or other easily digestible foods at the stores in the area around the hospital, which he also did not eat. I regret to say that I was bit harsh in reproaching my grandfather, both for not eating his food during his recovery and for not blowing into the plastic device that was supposed to help him regain his lung capacity. He certainly needed encouragement, but who was I to tell him what to do? Grandchildren are supposed to respect their elders, not chide them. At home his recovery was slow. He hardly left the house for weeks, except to go on short walks down the street at the insistence of my grandmother and myself. The doctor recommended several walks a day, of increasing distance. We were lucky to get him to walk to the next driveway once a day. He was given vicadin for his pain, which seemed woefully inadequate to me. That stuff had never seemed very strong when I'd taken it. But it heavily affected my grandfather. After watching television with me for a couple of hours one afternoon he stood up to go to the kitchen. But he didn't make it very far. As soon as he was on his feet he passed out and fell foreword. He was totally unconscious and couldn't even extend his hands to break his fall. I stood only a couple of feet away, but I was helpless to try to catch him as he toppled like a felled tree. He was unhurt, but the doctors took him off of the opiates soon after.

A few weeks after the surgery I was on my way home. He was able to walk far enough to get from the car to the train station, and then to the train. I quickly said goodbye to both of them as grandma predictably stuffed a wad of bills in my pocket. I could have lingered a few moments and savored the opportunity to be with my grandparents before hopping on the train. But my thoughts were focused on the crisp fall air of the midwest, two thousand miles away.

A little less than a year later my grandparents came to Ann Arbor for my sister's Bat Mitzvah. His cough was nowhere near as bad, and they had let him discontinue his chemo treatment for a two weeks so he could travel. His complexion was awful and he had no energy. Was it the chemo or was he still recovering from surgery? I was only with my grandparents for a handful of hours while they stayed in Ann Arbor. I spent far more time with my cousins, aunts and uncles.

A year and a half later I was in Los Angeles for my cousin's bar mitzvah. In town for only forty eight hours, I didn't have much time for anything. I did drive my grandparents to the synagogue, but did not sit with them at the party. Again my grandfather received a brief reprieve from the chemo, but he didn't look very good. He commented that none of his old suits fit him anymore, and he did indeed look bloated and noticeably heavier. The next day we all looked at pictures of the family from the bar mitzvah party with my grandparents and relatives. We all made fun of the silly expressions on peoples faces which inevitably can be found when a dozen people are asked to stand still for a group photo. My grandfather laughed uproariously at the pictures for minutes on end. It pained him to laugh so hard with his lungs so ravaged by cancer, but it was good to hear him taken uncontrollably by the humor. He was always a man of humor, a natural born laugher. He would often laugh so hard that other people couldn't help but laugh at his laughing, and then he would laugh all the harder at the people that were laughing at him. I don't remember saying goodbye to my grandfather when we left for the airport. Long farewells didn't seem to be the order of the day, as we'd only arrived two nights before. But that was the last chance I had to talk to him in person. I'd like to think that I would be able to say something meaningful and memorable, given a final chance to speak with someone. I'd like to think I'd be able to sum up a relationship of twenty six years in a few parting comments. But I'm sure I was at a loss for words, as usual.

Six months later and my grandfather began another round of chemo. At one point he had appeared to be cancer free, not too long after the surgery. But now, new tumors formed despite the chemo. The doctors changed dosages and medications. He entered experimental trials. Nothing stopped the progress of the disease. He was heavily weakened by the time he began the final chemo regimen. At one point he was rushed to the hospital for a blood transfusion when the drugs made him anemic. Soon after that his cough became more and more frequent and more painful. He coughed so hard he gave himself a hernia. There was nothing the chemotherapy could do, he was too weak to mount an immune response. They gave him morphine to fight the pain, but that did nothing. He was coughing day and night. The decision was made to send my grandfather to a hospice. The gave him dilotid and some other strong medications that briefly improved his condition enough to talk to family members from time to time and a few friends that came to see him. But there was no doubt that he was at the end of his rope.

My initial reaction when my father said he was buying plane tickets to San Diego was reluctance. I couldn't just ditch my job for several days without giving any notice. I couldn't board an airplane again to fly to the coast, not six months after my last flight out west. But I consented in the end.

We landed after noon on tuesday and headed straight to the hospice. My grandfather was slipping away ever so slowly. He hadn't moved at all or opened his eyes since sunday. His body had shut down and all that was left was his painfully labored breathing. His breaths came highly irregularly, with infrequent pauses of several seconds coming every minute or two. At every pause in my grandfather's breathing I too caught my breath momentarily. "Would this be his last breath?" I wondered each time. Sometimes it almost seemed as if he was just asleep. He was always a big snorer, and he had sleep apnea. I had seen him sleeping on the couch in front of the television countless times. But the sound wasn't quite like the sound of his snoring, and now his mouth was slack, and wide open as he fought for his breaths. For some reason I was reminded of the rock monster in the movie, "The Never Ending Story." The sound of his breath was reminiscent of the gravelly voice of the rock monster, and I projected my feelings of futility and impotence as I was unable to do anything to help. After the Nothing had come through to wipe out everything in the world the rock monster sat and lamented that he couldn't save his friends. "They look like big strong hands," the monster said. And my grandfather's hands did look like they were big and strong. Though they would never grasp anything again.

We stayed at the hospice for five hours, going back and forth from a lounge area to his bedside, where one simply couldn't stand too long. Time stood still and raced ahead all at once. There was no change in his condition. We all decided to get some dinner around six. Each of us, my grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousin, sisters, mother, father and I said goodbye to my grandfather, who didn't show any sign of responding. We headed down to the Whole Foods, which was just a few blocks away. We were in the same neighborhood as the hospital that had performed my grandfather's surgery two and a half years before. I had gone to that same Whole Foods at least a half dozen times as he had recovered in the hospital.

My extended family sat at a couple of tables inside the grocery store, eating our dinner next to the check out lanes. Just as we finished eating my uncle took a call on his cell phone. It was the hospice, my grandfather had died. Everyone burst into tears and hugged each other, right there in the middle of the grocery store. We all sat there sobbing for what seemed like a half hour. All I could do was question why we continued to sit there with so many people staring at us. Didn't anyone else feel that this profound moment of mourning was a bit too private to be shared with all of the hipster kids in downtown San Diego? After a while a collective decision was made to mercifully leave the confines of the Whole Foods and head to my Grandmother's house.

I was up early the next morning. I had to get out of the house. I had to feel the sun on my skin. I had to run until I couldn't stand any more. I ran to the west in a familiar route. I had gone this way many times when I was staying with my grandparents after the surgery. As I ran Cowle's mountain loomed ahead of me. This time I didn't turn back when I got to the freeway. I kept on going towards the mountain. By the time I got there my legs were burning and I was already beginning to slow. I pushed foreword and ran up a steep road at the base of the mountain. The road ended, but I was nowhere near the trail that went to the top of the mountain. I decided to just scramble up the side of the mountain in the hope of cutting across to the trail. I found little animal paths through the scrub brush and cacti. At first I ran until my lungs burned, and then I could only walk as the paths became steeper and harder to follow and the footing became more and more precarious. I flushed out a couple of startled coyotes as I advanced up the hill. My legs were scraped and bleeding when I finally reached the trail I knew I would eventually find. With a clear trail in front of me I now resumed my running. I was about a quarter mile from the top of the trail and a few hundred vertical feet from the summit. I ran until my legs would carry me no higher and slowed to a walk just thirty feet from the summit. Looking out over the landscape that unfolded before me at the summit I could see sprawl in every direction. New subdivisions filled all of the spaces between the old neighborhoods and golf courses. New highways connected all of the new developments to old highways and older parts of the city. The eastern boundary of San Diego reached to and up the mountains that were off in the distance.

The run back down was easier on the lungs, but almost more difficult for the legs. Erosion had made the footing rather difficult at high speed in some places. Leaping from one rock to another was often required to get down washed out switchbacks. The descent would not be at all technical at hiking speed, but I was running down hill as fast as possible. At the bottom of the mountain my feet and ankles were quite sore and my quads weren't feeling great either. I couldn't worry about the pain though, I had a few miles to run to get to my grandmother's house. My return was much slower. I plodded along, struggling to keep picking my feet off the ground. I had to walk a couple of times, but I got back to the house.

Several more cousins came to the house that night. We sat around and joked and talked. Surprisingly little conversation centered around my grandfather, and I felt bad that we didn't talk about him more that night. Several of us had to drive to various stores to purchase provisions for the next day's wake (or whatever jews call the party after a funeral, shiva I guess). As we were about to leave my grandmother warned us that my aunt and uncle's car was in the way, which happened to be a volvo. "Be careful," she said, "your vulva is blocking the driveway." Everyone burst into laughter at that. My grandmother always had a tendency to mispronounce words like that. But I doubt she really knew why we found that particular slip so funny.

I was up and dressed early for the funeral the next day. I discovered, to my horror, that the suit that my father had brought for me from my parent's house was an old suit, which I had purchased five years ago, when I was about twenty pounds lighter. I was able to squeeze into it with surprisingly little trouble. But it was not the black suit that I had hoped to wear. The suit was a mix of purples and blues, which were relatively subdued, thankfully. But black would have seemed more appropriate. As my family often does, we had a bit of a late start.

The service was nice and short, which was good for my sister and I, because we had to catch a plane three hours after the scheduled starting time of the funeral. Mercifully the casket was kept closed (I think they may always be kept closed at Jewish funerals). I was asked to be a pall barer, and I just lost it after we slid the casket into the hearse. Something about feeling the weight of my grandfather's body as we carried him away made the finality of the situation more apparent to me. The emotion overcame me all of a sudden as my sister and I quickly said our goodbyes. As the funeral party followed the hearse to the cemetery, my sister and I headed to the airport, and back to Michigan.

Guns don't kill people, Dick Cheney kills people

2006-02-13T06:59:18Z

Okay so our Vice President didn't kill his fellow hunter by accidentally shooting him Saturday, but he sure did wound him. Despite over two thousand American casualties in Iraq and over thirty thousand Iraqi casualties, this would have been Cheney's first "confirmed" kill. Oh well, maybe next time Dick. Incidentally, I am totally in favor of Cheney and Scalia going on duck hunting trips in the future.

mayorbrotherdan @ 2006-02-02T02:10:00

2006-02-02T07:10:10Z

The state of the union is strong, we are told. We are told this every year. I'm sure LBJ made that claim in 1968 with thousands of hippies, veterans and disaffected youth marching on the streets of America. I'm sure Nixon made that claim in 1974. And Hoover in 1930.

Bush says he wants the nation to be innovative so we can compete with India and China. He wants to improve science and math education by increasing the number of AP classes. No mention was made of money to be allocated to achieve this goal. And even as he suggests strengthening science education at the high school level, he has been slashing our nation's funding for primary scientific research for the last two years. In this year's speech he asked congress to double the funding for basic scientific research in computers and nanotechnology. If he is so passionate about pushing the sciences, why has he been cutting their funding for the last two years? And he asked congress to enact a complete ban on cloning, even though many of the most important medical breakthroughs of the coming decades are likely to come through cloning and harvesting of stem cells at the blastocyst stage. I guess we'll just have to write off any opportunities for Americans to advance innovation in medical sciences.

Perhaps what Bush really wants is innovation in the area of health insurance. He pushed one of his favorite pet agendas, private health savings accounts. Whenever Bush talks about this program, which he wishes to expand, he fails to go into any great amount of detail. In truth, you are only eligible for one of these tax sheltered accounts if you enroll in a high deductable health insurance program. If you can save enough money in your account to cover the deductable these insurance plans are pretty good. If not, you're in trouble. But they are also a convenient tax shelter for the rich. Many elements of these insurance plans and savings accounts are highly regressive and they provide incentives for insurance companies to cherry pick enrollees that are healthy to minimize risk to insurers.

Of course Bush counted off his yearly list of countries that he doesn't like, opting not to refer to them as an axis of evil this year. Of course Iran and North Korea made the list again, along with Zimbabwe, Syria and Burma. I guess Venezuela will have to wait until 2007.

Bush took pains to paint anyone that questions his rationale for going to war in Iraq, his current strategy for executing the war, his trade policy or his diplomatic efforts as defeatists and isolationists. Sounds like an exciting preview of the Republican rhetoric in the coming election cycle.

One of the biggest sections in Bush's speech was on cutting America's dependence on oil (he didn't even say "foreign" oil this year). He suggested several ways that he hoped to do this. He mentioned new battery technology and fuel cell cars. He also pushed ethanol, NUCULAR, and "clean" coal technology. The problem with fuel cell cars is that you need a source of hydrogen. Most hydrogen is currently produced by stripping it from hydrocarbons in a catalyzed reaction. But we can't produce hydrogen this way if we are going to end our dependence on foreign oil. And if we did have a large scale, oil free method to produce hydrogen for cars (there are ways to do this theoretically) we would need to invest heavily in infrastructure to deliver the gas to customers. We're talking tens of thousands of new gas pumps to be installed nationwide. Battery technology for hybrid cars is nice, but hybrids still need a source of combustible liquid. Ethanol could be used instead of fossil fuel derived gasoline, but there are many drawbacks. Most American ethanol has come from corn. Corn is a very energy intensive crop. It requires the earth to be tilled, fertilized and watered and the crop to be harvested before it is chemically processed to convert it into ethanol. In the past, the process of growing corn and converting it to ethanol required more energy to complete than the burning of the resulting ethanol produced. Now the process is more efficient and there is a net gain in energy. But replacing the amount of energy that is contributed to our economy by petroleum with energy derived from the harvesting of corn, switch grass or any other crop source would require an unthinkable amount of acerage to be converted to ethanol production. We would have to level all of the sprawling suburbs that we've been building on prime agricultural land for the last few decades and convert much of the acerage that we now use for food crops to fuel crop production. The only way we could produce enough calories to keep three hundred million americans alive and to keep their cars running would be to totally eliminate the meat industry and to convert highways and roads back into agricultural land and chop down what remains of our state and national forests. We'd have enough fuel to power our cars, but no roads to drive them on.
Bush also pushed Nuclear power. He's been talking about build new nuclear plants for years. But America has largely exhausted much of our Uranium resources. There are two ways for us to acquire more fuel for nuclear power when our domestic sources have been depleated. Import uranium for foreign sources (which would be just as bad as importing oil, wouldn't it?), or reprocess the spent uranium that comes out of our power plants. But American law prohibits us from reprocessing uranium because the reprocessing cycle produces weapons grade plutonium (wouldn't terrorists love to get their hands on that, and that's what Bush is most concerned about, right? Nuclear weapons in the hands of foreign terrorists is the single greatest threat we face. Wasn't that what Bush said in the 2004 debates with Kerry?). Bush wants to repeal this law, but circumventing it would be more his style. As it is, we have no long term nuclear waste storage site. I don't think we should be expanding nuclear power until we can find a good place to store the waste. In somewhat related news, all American nuclear plants are decades old. They were initially given licenses from the department of energy to run for several decades before they were supposed to be decomissioned and replace with new plants. But no permits have been issued to build new nuclear reactors since the three mile island incident. So the department of energy has started issuing permits to the old nuclear plants to allow them to keep operating. I feel safe, how about you?
And we can't forget clean coal. There are three kinds of clean coal technology. There used to be a tax break on the books for old fashioned coal burning power plants that burned chemically altered coal. The law was written very poorly though. It failed to mandate that the chemically altered coal burn any cleaner or produce any less emissions than normal coal. So energy companies exploited this loophole and padded their profits at taxpayer's expense while they continued to spew emissions of soot, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and mercury into the air. This law was supposed to expire several years ago, but who knows if it did? The other types of clean coal technology fall under the heading of coal gassification. The coal is chemically processed to produce energy and the carbon dioxide that is produced can be trapped and stored. Currently the carbon dioxide that is produced is allowed to escape to the atmosphere, but the process is cleaner than burning the coal (in theory the carbon dioxide could be pumped deep underground into wells, where it would not seep out into the atmosphere, in theory). There are several coal gassification plants in the U.S. and around the world. They are economically viable, though more expensive to operate than traditional coal burning plants. The clean air act stipulates that power companies choose the cleanest possible energy production technology when building new plants, so technically any new coal plant must be a coal gassification plant. But the EPA has told power companies that they don't have to follow the law when building new plants. The EPA claims that gassification plants are "alternative" technology and aren't covered by the law. It seems to me that alternative technologies are exactly what the clean air act was supposed to promote, but then, I'm not a government official. So, on one hand we have Bush pushing coal gassification technology as an alternative to oil. On the other hand we EPA under the Bush administration telling power companies not to use coal gassification technology. Sounds about right to me.

So I don't know. There is no coherence to this post and I don't really feel like spell checking at this point. I'm tired, I want to go to sleep, but I had so much more to write.