Four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Nearly every woman I know was devastated. Hillary was the speaker at my daughter’s high school graduation. There’s a picture of the two of them shaking hands on stage. We kidded her during the campaign that she had a picture with the future president. Understandably, my daughter took the election results hard.
Fast forward a few years. My daughter was an intern at the Irish embassy in Washington. Joe Biden came to the embassy for an event. Lily was hanging out with Biden’s chauffeur. At the end of the night, the chauffeur let Biden know that someone wanted to meet him. After a bit of a wait Biden’s rather chatty), the former VP came over and posed for some pictures and chatted. You can imagine how she felt when the news broke that he’s going to be the next president.
As a parent all I can say is “THIS IS TOTALLY COOL.”
Big Nellie and I took advantage of awesome weather to ride to the White House to check out the celebration. The Mount Vernon Trail was packed. I was stuck in line after line of as many as ten bikes heading north.
Finally I made it across the river, around the Jefferson Memorial, and up to the Washington Monument. There were hundreds of people joyfully celebrating. Among them were a few Trump diehards. My advice to them, not actually given, would be “When in Boston, take off your Yankees cap.” (I once went to a Sox-Yankees game at Fenway. The idiot next to me wore a Yankees cap and was very vocal. Suffice it to say, I was covered in peanut shells, popcorn and beer by the time the game was over.)
Constitution Avenue was gridlocked. Cars were honking. I walked my bike through the wall of cars and rode up 17th Street. After a few empty blocks thanks to a police blockade, I came upon some more traffic. Nobody was moving. Kids were sticking out sun roofs. Horns were honking. People were waving banners out their car windows. Partay!
I managed to make my way over to Black Lives Matter Plaza (16th Street) It was absolutely jammed with people celebrating. I was wore a mask and a buff, doubled over. I could barely breathe. Just to be safe, I left to avoid too much contact. On my way out of the area, I could see hundreds of people walking toward the celebration.
Today was perfect riding weather. I rode The Mule to the county recycling center in Lorton, Virginia to dispose of some old motor oil and insecticide. The recycling center is next to the old Lorton Federal Prison and the massive mountain of trash at the county landfill. The prison was closed a few decades ago. The landfill keeps growing.
Yesterday I rode to Fort Washingtonin Maryland, It was a ride that involved several tough hills. Not surprisingly, my legs were not amused by today’s climbs on the way to the recycling station. A couple of the hills reminded me of the long grinding climbs that I did last summer in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California. Thankfully, I am near sea level hereabouts so I had no problem with oxygen debt.
I made it in one piece and did my civic duty, pouring about a half gallon of used lawn mower oil into the Vat of Grossness.
The recycling place is on an interesting road.
Maybe they should call the mountain of trash at the landfill Mount Doom.
For the record, Mordor has some of the biggest speed bumps you’ll ever see. They are more like tectonic bulges. You can really get a nice bounce out of them. The giant semis and garbage trucks practically moan when they go over them at 5 miles per hour.
For the record I didn’t call The Mule “My Precious” once.
My reward for a good deed done was the mostly downhill ride back, partly along Old Colchester Road. For about a mile, the roadway, newly paved, descends in a series of curves through a wooded area. 30 miles per hour through a tunnel of fall foliage. Ahhh.
The weatherman is calling for more near perfect weather for the next several days. My legs are going to fall off.
I spent the summer of 1973 watching the Watergate hearings on TV so I know a skunk when I see one. Knowledge in hand, I have been perplexed why, after such a train wreck of a presidency, Donald Trump has received 67 million votes as of this writing. What are these people thinking?
Then it occurred to me. Trump voters are like my father and Fords.
Sometime in my very early life, my father started buying Ford station wagons. We’re talking about the late 1950s here. My father’s car buying philosophy was simple: keep the car until the warranty expires then trade it in. This was important for two reasons.
First, we lived in the snow belt. If you ditched the car after a couple of years, the inevitable rust was someone else’s problem. Second, American cars of that era were, to use a technical term, crap. Let me give you an example. Around the early to mid 1970s, my father had a Country Squire station wagon. Andy Rooney once ridiculed buyers of this car as idiots because they paid extra, big bucks for the optional wood grain finish. This was actually a big piece of contact paper surrounded by $5 worth of plastic trim. Another feature of the car was that it got something like 8 miles to the gallon in the city and 13 on the highway. I am not making this up. It had an enormous engine that took forever to warm up on cold days. It accelerated like a manatee on land. The kicker was the dashboard.
I grew up in Albany NY (coincidentally, Andy Rooney’s hometown. He also went to my high school, but I digress.) The record low in Albany is -28F in January 1971, my sophomore year in high school. It is not unusual to have a few weeks of sub-zero temperatures every winter. Been there. Done that. One morning my father went out to warm up the car. As the interior heated up, a jagged crack formed right down the middle of the dashboard. Quality is job one.
We had to have a big car because we had seven kids and my father was a gardener. When the “wayback” was not filled with blocks of peat moss and shovels and such, it had huge cushions and a kid or three. (Seatbelts? You must be joking. My mom used to let us stand on the front seat of the car when we were little. I am not making this up.)
Another feature of this piece of automotive dung was the fact that it was so bulky that it was nearly impossible to parallel park. Guess which car I took my driving test in? The night before my test, my father set garbage cans up on the street and I practiced parallel parking between them. Clang! Clang! During the test, I put the car in reverse, looked over my shoulder and prayed. Perfect! I couldn’t do it again in 100 tries.
Day after day for my entire childhood my father would bitch about his crappy Ford station wagon. Yet every two or three years when the warranty expired, he’d trade his car in for another Ford station wagon that was, incredibly, even crappier than the one he had. (In the mid-1960s he bought a two-door Mustang instead. He kept it for a few months. We kids loved it but you couldn’t get a block of peat moss in it to save yourself. So he traded it in on another wagon.)
So why did he keep buying these shitboxes? My theory is that he bought Fords one after the other because lord knows Chevrolets and Plymouths could actually be worse. Sometime after I left home, he threw caution to the wind and bought a Chevy wagon. It was a vast improvement.
Now he may have been onto something. My younger brother once bought a VW Golf. Its transmission died the day after the warranty expired. I am not making this up either. (To its credit, the dealer honored the warrantee anyway.)
If you are under 30, I promise you that you have no idea how lucky you are Even the worst shit box on the road today is infinitely better than Fords on the 1960s and 1970s.
Which brings me back to the Donald. Why would people vote for him even after nearly four years of demonstrating that he is indisputably the worst president in U. S. history? I mean, I bet his hair cracks in half at -10F. People vote for him because they are afraid that any alternative is likely to be worse. I mean a new president could have hair that cracks at +10F. We can’t have that, now can we? It’s a variation on what Milton Friedman called the tyranny of the status quo.
Another month, another 913 miles of riding around in circles. Except for a single one-way 57-mile ride on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail that is. It’s inane to be doing this but it’s that kind of year, isn’t it.
After putting 676 miles on my Cross Check (which passed the 18,000-mile mark) and another 51 miles on Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, I switched rather cautiously to Little Nellie, my folding travel bike with little wheels. Little Nellie has been known to beat my lower back to a pulp so I have been avoiding riding it. I was considering selling it until, on a whim, I tweaked the saddle height and found a sweet spot. I can now ride it pain free. So it’s been my ride of choice for final 186 miles of the month.
So far this year I’ve ridden 8,655 miles. Getting to 10,000 is going to require some determination and a whole lot of help from the weatherman.
I also bought some new bike junk. I have a set of rechargeable blinky lights that are reasonably useful. They are be-seen lights, meaning they improve my visibility to others. The headlight will keep me from rear ending a parked car but I will use one of my more powerful Light and Motion headlights for nighttime navigation.
I also picked up a wind vest. It is bright yellow and has a big dorky reflective arrow on the back. The arrow points to the left. (The manufacturer makes a version for left side driving countries too.)
I also bought an Arkel Tailrider bag. This probably will replace my Carradice LongFlap , a huge saddlebag. The LongFlap uses leather straps that are a pain to open and close and it weighs a ton. The Tailrider is lighter and has zippers. I will give up some carrying capacity but I rarely maxed out the LongFlap. The rack on my CrossCheck has two levels which means I can use the Tailrider on the top of the rack and still attach panniers if I need to.
The new Eisenhower Memorial is now open for visitors. It is wedged rather creatively between the US Department of Education and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on Maryland Avenue SW in Washington DC.
The back of the memorial is a screen with a sort of camouflage netting. There are benches all around and large displays with statues. The displays are inscribed with Ike’s words, including a small excerpt from his remarks to the troops before D-Day and a piece of his farewell speech in which he warns of the military industrial complex.
His words are eloquent and his attitude humble. Whenever I see film of him reminiscing about the Second World War, I am struck by how truly saddened he is by all the deaths and suffering. This comes through in the words etched into the marble walls. Off to the side is a wall commemorating his postwar homecoming. He was just a kid from Abilene Kansas who aspired to a modest life as a policeman or a train conductor who ended up freeing millions from tyranny.
The ongoing tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic is overwhelming. We hear statistics day after day. Over 200,000 dead. Millions infected. They numb our conscience. So Bethesda, Maryland artists Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg acted. I asked her why and she said “We had to do something.”
So she designed an art project called In America. In a swath of grass 20 blocks east of the Capitol, she is planting row after row of white flags, one for each covid-19 death in the United States. She expects there to be about 240,000 of them from today until November 6.
A volunteer uses a template to place flags.
The orderly flags remind me of the white headstones in military cemeteries like Arlington and Colleville-sur-Mer. So clean. So white. So much death. How could this happen in America?
To drive home the point, on the western front of the installation is a set of over 300 white flags. To the side are 26 more. The 26 flags represent the total covid-19 deaths in New Zealand. The 300+ flags show the covid-19 deaths that New Zealand would have had if it had followed the haphazard response that occurred in the United States.
If only we had responded as New Zealand did
There is something about this particular part of DC that draws the sad and the bizzarre. The last time I had ridden a bike to this space was to participate in a BikeDC event shortly after the attacks of September 2001. A massive crowd of bicyclists stood somberly. We were there to show that no matter what we would carry on. We sang God Bless America then rolled off en masse.
Three years before that I attended the Tibetan Freedom concert in RFK Stadium across the street to the east of the flags. In the middle of the concert I went to the concession stand. I heard a loud BANG. Lightning had struck a person some 20 rows or so below my seat. (She survived.) The concert was stopped and the massive crowd was told to leave the stadium in the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
And so here I was again observing another sad and bizzare moment in history.
Volunteers are welcome to come and install flags. Sadly, there will be about 1,000 new flags every day for the duration of the display. Wear a mask and observe social distancing, of course. Or just come and bear witness.
I am out of clever ideas for riding in this pandemic. On Monday I left home thinking I’d ride out the C & O Canal to Great Falls. When I got to the turnoff to pick up the towpath I decided not to turn. Instead I rode up Rock Creek Park for a mile and then exited up the short hill onto P Street.
From P Street I headed east until I spotted a statue. Must be someone important, I thought. It was the Bard of Ukraine. Yeah, well.
After checking out the bard, I moseyed over to Q Street where I found a statue of the man who united the Czachs and the Slovaks to create Czechoslovakia. He died a couple of years before the Nazis invaded. Timing is everything.
Next I started riding across town on Q Street. A cyclist rolled past. His bike was adorned with touring items, a set of front panniers, a rack bag, a tin cup hanging off the bag, etc. At the next stop light he turned and realized he knew me. It was Joe, a #bikedc friend. We had bonded over tails our our separate cross-country bike tours and the post-tour afterglow we both experienced.
Joe guided me across town through a chicane at Florida Avenue. He pointed out the gun sensor (used to notify policy of gunfire) and noted that we were in the neighborhood where the notorious drug kingpin, Rayful Edmond, ran his operation back in the days when crack was king. (Mr. Edmond was sent to the big house years ago.)
A mural at a Q Street restaurant
We made it through unscathed then took on the intersection of New York and New Jersey Avenues, the infamous Dave Thomas Circle. It’s actually not a traffic circle. It’s just one of dozens of places where avenues and streets intersect to form a traffic triangle. It gets its name (albeit unofficial) from the fact that there’s a Wendy’s in the middle of the triangle. City planners have promised to fix this mess for decades. I suggest a well placed explosive device would be a good start.
Joe guided me off road across the circle using curb cuts. I am impressed that he pulled this off without eliciting a single honk from drivers. We were fish on a reef swimming past the sharks. Back on Florida Avenue, we made our way into a protected bike lane. It had flexposts on the left hand side. This was great. It was filled with debris and park vehicles. This was not great.
To our left were several brand new high rise apartment buildings. Joe said his good byes and veered off to his posh abode. I continued on past Gallaudet University. A few blocks later I passed the ghost bike (a bike painted in white) that marks where my friend Dave was killed by a maniac driving a stolen van.
As depressing as the site is, I am always buoyed by think of Dave. He was a splendid human being.
Florida took me to H Street and Benning Road. I crossed the Anacostia River and took the Anacostia River Trail all the way to the South Capitol Street bridge. I rode on the side walk across the bridge and admired the new bridge being built to my left. They can’t finish it too soon. The sidewalk is falling apart.
New and Old Frederick Douglas (South Capitol Street) Bridges
Back on the west side of the river, I turned near Nationals Park. I managed to ride through a whole mess of construction, around Fort McNair, and down past the Wharf. This area is normally a beehive of activity but the pandemic…well, you know.
I decided to head for home and ended up riding 40 miles. Not bad for someone just wandering around.
Return to Yorktown
Yesterday, my wife, daughter, and I drove to Williamsburg VA so that my daughter could check out the law school at William and Mary University. We stopped in The Cheese Shop for sandwiches. The inside was very crowded. Everyone wore a mask but I still was very uncomfortable. We ate our sandwiches outside in perfect weather. Then I took off on my Cross Check for Yorktown.
The view from The Cheese Shop
It’s pretty easy to find. You get on the Colonial Parkway and in 13 miles you’re there. What’s the fun of that. I used the Google and found an alternate route. The first three miles were fine but for the next five miles I was on a four-lane highway with no shoulder, Not fun.
I complicated matters by missing a turn. Or two.
Thankful for my mirror, I boogied on until I saw a sign for Yorktown. Yay. I followed the sign then kept going and was rewarded with a placid two lane country road that led directly to the southern side of the battlefield.
As luck would have it I came upon the earthworks behind which the good guys had been positioned while starving the Brits in their encampment along the York River near the town.
Earthworks at Yorktown Battlefield
It was near here (according to a road side sign) that Cornwallis surrendered his sword to Washington. (Cornwallis didn’t actually participate. He was sick. He send his second in command with his sword. The second in command didn’t know what Washington looked like so he tried to surrender to French General Rochambeau. Rochambeau set him right. Washington directed him to his second in command because protocol.
After this odd history lesson I rode past the victory monument, which is the eastern terminus to the TransAmerica bicycle route.
Using the Google again, I rode down to the beach along York River where so many cross country tourists have dipped their wheels.
I followed the river past the quaint town and along a bluff. This took me to the Colonial Parkway which made for easy navigation back to Williamsburg.
All of which is to say, if you don’t know where you’re going any road will take your there.
One of the very best things about living in the DC area is Rock Creek Park, a wooden canyon right down the middle of the city from north to south.
When I first moved to DC I signed up for a 10-mile road race in the park. It began at Carter Barron Amphitheater on the eastern rim in the middle of the park. I was unfamiliar with the park’s topography so I attacked the course with confidence. The course went down into the park then up the other side then down into the park then up the other side then down into the park… You get the picture. I was trashed at the finish.
Mostly I use the park for bike riding on the weekends when the main north-south road, Beach Drive, is closed to cars. I ride the Mount Vernon Trail to Georgetown where I pick up the Capital Crescent Trail. This paved trail takes me gradually uphill to Bethesda, Maryland. Then I ride east a few miles east before turning south into the park. For the next ten miles it’s gently downhill. The road follows the creek as it winds its way back to Georgetown.
The National Park Service operates the park. A few years ago they repaved Beach Drive. The smooth pavement makes for a sweet ride.
This time of year is the best time to ride in the park. The angle of the sun is low. The trees are turning. Leaves are falling like snow flakes. And the cool temperatures mean that you don’t end up a dehydrated mess (which is pretty par for the course around here in the summer.)
The park was quite busy today. I saw dozens of families with little kids picnicking near the creek, biking on the road, and hiking the trails.
Today, for the first time, I decided to ride with the big dogs. Normally, I get off the road near Pierce Mill, a mile or so north of the National Zoo. From here south, cars are allowed on the roadway. Today, however, I stayed on the road all the way to Georgetown. Traffic was light and the downhill grade helped me maintain 18 to 20 miles per hour.
About halfway to Georgetown, Beach Drive widens from two to four lanes. No worries. The light Sunday traffic left me with a lane all to myself for about two miles.
At the K Street overpass, cars were backed up from a traffic light near the Watergate complex. I diverted to the side path to avoid the wait. As I did I saw a tall red-headed woman running toward me. She looked familiar and sure enough it was my physical therapist. I didn’t ID her until just as I was passing her. She didn’t recognize me because she was focused on getting across an intersection without being hit by cars, scooters, bikes, runners, baby strollers, etc. Also, between my helmet, sunglasses, and Buff, my own mother could not have identified me.
The 15-mile ride home along the Potomac River was pretty splendid, even with a headwind. Having taken yesterday off from the bike, I managed to ride 51 miles today without the least bit of difficulty.
Today was the first day since the before times that we allowed our bi-weekly cleaning service back into our house. This meant that my wife and I didn’t have to spend a good part of the day cleaning. It also meant that we needed to get out of the cleaners’ way. Normally, we would go to a diner then a library. With that off the table (or booth) my wife made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Why don’t we drive someplace, I’ll drop you off and you can ride your bike home?”
Sounds like a plan to me.
So we jumped in my dusty Accord and drove to Purcellville, Virginia at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I would ride east 45 miles on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail back to Arlington. There I’d pick up the Four Mile Run Trail for a couple of miles before turning south on the Mount Vernon Trail.
With the pandemic still in evidence, the drive to the start was uneventful. I left my wife to check out the bakery at the trailhead. (Thumbs up on the eclairs, she reports.)
I expected the ride to be mostly downhill. It is. Purcellville is at 575 feet whereas the low point of the ride near National Airport is at 15 feet. Of course there are a few long grades both up and down along the way, as well as a few abrupt rollers to keep things interesting.
What I wasn’t counting on was the headwind. Having an invisible hand on my chest put a damper on my speed. I did do a few miles at 18 to 20 miles per hour but not as many as I had hoped.
The trails were not crowded at all, except for one group of eight old folks out for a meander. Old people suck. Oh, wait….
Anyway, a few minutes delay is not much to complain about.
I had two small energy bars left over from my 50-States Ride goodie bag. That’s all I ate. I was surprised that I didn’t bonk. I also drank two large water bottles. Maybe my modest intake is to blame for the cramps that came on during my post-ride stenosis physical therapy session.
Outside Purcellville I saw a momma and a young deer. They were too shy to be photographed. Later I saw a Dad with his daughter examining a box turtle that had inched onto the trail. My final critter of the day was a rather large groundhog that was standing at attention a foot off the trail in Vienna. It seemed not the least bit concerned about me as I rode past.
The trees are turning. I had hoped for more reds but today offered more browns and yellows. One big leaf decided to hitchhike on my front wheel causing a racket when it got stuck between my tire and fender.
I was sorely tempted by the breweries and brew pubs along the trail. There seems to be one every five miles or so. You could get a serious buzz on if you stopped at each one.
East of Vienna the trail is undergoing work. There’s a detour that I couldn’t quite figure out but once I got straightened away, I found it: a on-road protected cycletrack (two lanes, one in each direction). Well done. In Falls Church city, the trail is being doubled to accommodate traffic. (I wonder if people opposed the trail when it was being built, thinking nobody will use it. Can’t imagine what they’re thinking now.) The detour around the construction is on road and unprotected. There’s hardly any car traffic so no worries.
At the eastern end of the Falls Church construction is a new bridge that will take the trial over North Washington Street and do away with a dangerous at-grade crossing. It looks like the bridge is nearly done. It’ll be a huge improvement.
Back on the street near home, drivers weren’t allowing me to move over to make a left-hand turn. I kept riding straight and overshot my turn. Before doubling back I could see the line for early voting at the government center down the street. Yesterday the line extended nearly a half mile along the sidewalk. Today, it was considerably shorter but my wife says that’s because people were a bit more bunched together. These two days brought to mind the lines at the polling place on election day 2008 when the prospect of the first black president brought an incredible turnout.
It’s been a while since I did a point-to-point ride, the stuff of bike tours. DC-area trails are limited in coverage and connectivity but if you play your cards right you can ride 57 miles and do 54 1/2 of them without a big metal thing breathing down your neck. Not a bad way to avoid a cleaning crew if you ask me.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 