Old Route Home

Today I took an older route back home, down an old main drag, and discovered I still like me some Mason.  This was where I would wait with Crazy Frank for the train, catching short hops down to the end, then back to refill our cups.  That one time, going all the way to Amarillo, is the matter of another blog, but cruising alongside those tracks, right there close to campus, stirs that memory.  If you want to hop on the train now, after having children, you actually might be a hobo and dyed-in-the-wool tramp.  There is actually no place to run alongside the tracks now to grapple onto those ladders.  Hopefully that will prevent more people from leaving their feet in their shoes.

Mason was not as bad as it seemed when I first rolled down it in the bus, after the reconstruction - it seemed way too narrow, and I discerned I might actually not be able to observe the give-the-cyclist-3-feet-to-pass rule.  But on my bike it was fine.  A little swervy to the edge where there's no true lane, but all and all fine.

The old route has me hang a right onto Mountain, past La Creperie, The Rio, Mama Said Sew, left past The Lyric, right onto Linden.  What a bunch of cool shops we have in this town.  The Red Table.  Cafe Ardour.  Then down past those sad-eyed Buddhistic ramblers at Homeless park, and the shelter across the way.  Should I feed them?  Dare I show up in the Veggie Caravan with day-old bagels, only to be potentially hounded every time they see me coming - like zombies with an insatiable hunger for food and money.  Yes, I shall have to do this at least once.  What they need is a garden to tend.  What about that space across the street next to the tatoo parlour?  I come to the intersection past the tracks, and note the new digs.  There are great places to sit here now.  I arc onto the Poudre Trail, pass under the tracks behind the skate park, and remember kids scooting out over the middle of the river on that bridge, in summers past, trying to find the best place to jump.


Behind the engine lab

I see a guy twice my age, with insignia on the back of his jersey, something like Atlantic to Pacific Crew.  His calves are like small boulders.  He has a strained look on his face, like he's doing a time trial.  He's really moving.  It makes me realize just how lazily I'm really going.  I look about, there's no hurry today.

I see the blue heron in the pond behind Lee Martinez, waiting.  I wish I had such patience.  Just stand there and wait, ducks quacking all around you.  I realize that one of the voices sounds more human, then see a guy at the other end of the pond with one of those bazooka cameras, talking on the phone, sounding oddly like a duck.

Before the bridge at Legacy Park

The Poudre River here at the bridge is a family place, a place where baptisms have occurred, and where I have seen the most frolicking.  The water this summer never took on the mad torrent it did summer of last year, with record snowmelt in the highcountry.  It had a mellow, inviting flow, and I finally realized what all those river gypsies had known all along - a cold, invigorating jump from the ropes, a swim in these waters, is strangely purifying.  Tubing this holy river may be better than riding this trail.  Now I glide over it's placidness, but I know it's coolness, and there may be time yet to jump before the cold winter sets in.,

I ride behind the wildland fire depot, where they are sometimes out doing crunches just as the sun is rising, past the fox hole where I saw a mom and her three cubs last spring, behind the cabinetry shop and La Familia.  I have never been to work so early that I beat a few people arriving to these places for work or to drop off children.  They are a few of the places I love to pass.  The cabinet shop has a wonderful blend of pine and cedar, and sometimes shellac, if you ride at the right time in the morning.  I hook onto College, northward, past the old grocery store, then the new, then the stonehenge place on Highway 1. 

Right here is where I saw a ghost last Saturday, late, actually Sunday around 2:00, dressed in tye-dye, and, amazingly, cowboy boots.  I'd felt a leading to give him a ride, and then sort of regretted it after almost an hour and he still couldn't figure out the house where he's been partying at.  He was lost, headed in the wrong direction, and underdressed for the night's chill.  Finally, finally we found the gated community where he'd left the brother he was so worried about.  He never thanked us, but as my wife pointed out, he did thank God. 

 

Thank God for the health to make this ride, whenever I want, snow or rain.  I am home with my family, and the sunset is beautiful tonight.



The Commute



 I once heard a professor say that, often, the best part of his day was his bike ride in - a hint of promise, sometimes clear thoughts - and that the pedaling set up a slow cadence that was to be the rhythm of the day.  A close second, he said, would be his ride home, unwinding after the day's tumult or successes, however big or small.  This professor lost his grant, so perhaps he doted on the ride a wee bit too much.  These rides can bookend that portion of the day where, hopefully, our imagination can fuel us, and change the course ever-so-slightly for the better.  Let us be prolific in our work projects, and our home projects as well.  I have been thinking lately about how each can influence the other in positive ways.

 




The commuter has to rise a little earlier, perhaps prepare a little more the night before, remembering keys, lunch, water bottle, an extra layer, that snack for the ride home, light and extra batteries in the Fall-Winter-Spring.  There are perennial items such as flat repair kit, tire levers, and legging ties. 

 Most revolutionaries, I believe, ride either motorcycles or bicycles, perhaps both, and drink matté – the real stuff, not the tea bag or premix – so also include mug, bombilla and bulk matté, if you are the type.

  

Tasted some Russian olives next to the pond





Off trail behind Lee Martinez



I aspire to be such a rider, battened down for the winter, ready to jump in the river with the river gypsies in the summer.  This year, after riding the trail and the streets for some twelve years now, I seem to be noting things for the first time.  Where the blue grama is more plentiful, most likely place to find a fawn, how much earlier to head out to smell New Belgium's wort just West of College, where the blue darner are most likely to cruise for gnats along the Poudre.  My rides have become more exploratory, and more on the the ride home, once a week, I like to cut down a new street.  The new scenery sometimes does me good.  I take inspiration in what some are doing to their front yards.  I like to see people out on their porch, playing their guitars, reading, drinking, talking, listening, observing.  Once I saw a guy decked out in kilt, tank, and tattoo sleeves, cranking on his amped guitar with a friend.  "Danny!" he hailed, fist pumping, then went back to playing.  To this day I have no idea who that guy was.  I am often too shy to approach people who apparently know me. 



At the bridge behind Lee Martinez farm

     I like to take a newer bike that a friend recently slapped together.  He salvaged a 70s era Gitano frame from the dumpster, made leather handlebars and seat, multicolored chain, and added the ever-handy rack.  I had him change it from single to three-speed for the climbs.  It is indeed a slower ride than my mountain bike, and perhaps that is why I've noticed things a little better lately.

My commute sometimes takes me down North College, past new lamps that I imagine will be illumined in the early morning, past the shops that I've ridden past hundreds of times without ever going in.  They are mere scenery.  New ones have emerged, though, that have caught my eye, like the recycled furniture shop just before the Human Bean.  More often than not I cruise down Hickory, past La Familia and left onto the Salyer trail, where the meadows lead up to the Poudre River at Legacy.  I come out of the woods behind Lee Martinez.  There is frost on the quackgrass, sideoats grama, and bromegrass that fill these meadows.  I canter away from the holy river towards the new museum and then up to the streets, around Daz Bog and over to Howes for the slow stop-and-go of traffic signals all the way to campus.  I favor this route now over the homed one along Remington, at least for the commute in, as I get to see others who have started the day before me.  The commerce of the day gets rolling for me.



Behind the new Discovery Museum

Occasionally I grab a coffee at the Mugs window at Laurel.  If there's time, a little reading at the benches before the home stretch through the oval and onward.  I would like to get to the point where I can hang at the coffee shop for at least half an hour before the work day begins.  There have been times where I've done this on a certain day each week, getting up an hour earlier than usual, more often in the summer.  On those days, more than others, it seems to get everything flowing, and gives something to come back to on the return home.  Somehow the thoughts of what I'm reading get blended with my rides, as though there is a certain silence or solitude meted out on the trail, enabling me to pick up threads of thoughts where I'd left them last time.  Some are loftier than others, but they commute with me just the same.  I will continue this, hopefully into Fall-Winter this year, and I will make sojourns to places I've yet visited.

The Sustainable Development Garden

Life might be characterized by hopping on different bandwagons, or caravans, as you realize that whole groups are in pursuit of something similar as you.  Once, alone and before my familial life began, I doted continually on Kerouac's Dharma Bums and On the Road.  But that romantic lifestyle did not take root.  I travelled by freight train to a few places, but the people I asked to share in the adventure either were too crazy to begin with, and chose wisely to begin settling down, or were made somewhat crazy by joining me.  All is disillusionment, and a constant thinning of the veil that shrouds our vision.  It was, I believe, a necessary phase, but everything I learned could easily fit on one page.

Now I find myself needing to write.  I have chosen to convey stories in this venue in light of the literature I have recently been drawn to, the places and people I have seen by travelling by bike, and putative mis-adventures of owning a bus which runs on veggie oil.  Nevertheless, these are a few of my caravans, and they fuel a particular perspective.



CSU Sustainable Development Garden



Two or three times a week I ride across campus to the CSU garden, powered by student and community volunteers.  It is a form of therapy to weed, which is my main focus. Others focus on the harvest, which supplies organic herbs and veggies once a week via their market stand.  It has been a year since I devoted such time to this place.  I have recently rekindled my relationship with this space.

As I write, situated on freshly mulched earth beneath a rusty pergola, the hops just beginning to show their golden hues, flea beeltes come onto my arm and mingle.  A lady bug larvae drops from somewhere right onto the page.  There is an ecosystem here.  There is a small agricultural ecosystem which has been sustained here for several seasons.  Without chemical inputs, without pesticides, students and community volunteers have nurtured vegetables, herbs, and fruit, sustainably, and in so doing contributed to the sustenance of all who came by the vegetable stand.  Many have gone on to run their own small farms, or contribute by ritual of planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting, all timeless.  Many stand ready to contribute in some way to the expansion of permaculture, stand on the precipice of starting perhaps a whole new community garden, or, just as important, revitalizing their back or front yards as a showcase of what is possible with our creativity, what we can nurture in terms of our edible landscape.

I have come here, by bike, sometimes walking, but not often enough.  With a friend I lazed about the perennial grass and ornamental garden recently, just adjacent to the vegetable garden, and there was a fox, undaunted.  It must have believed it had just as much right to be there as us.  It sat coiled, licking it's hindquarters, and regarded us cooly.  Later in the week, I sat at the koi pond, and while distracted by which fish had the most interesting markings, I failed to notice a small mouse sitting on it's haunches about ten feet away.  It rotated a small cherry around like that Mr. Peeples on SNL, eating most of it, small bits of cherry falling to the mulch.  It peered at me precipitously, ready to bolt at the first sign of movement on my part.  This is their landscape, edible, but it is ours, too.  Places such as these will exist as long as we have a need to grow good food, and to learn from one another how to do so, which is to say, forever. 

But this place will soon be replaced, putatively, with a new stadium for the CSU football team, with a special space for alumni, and a huge parking garage.  If this is it's fate, then I am fated to find new communal gardens to trek to, by bike or otherwise, to continue the growth that comes from gardening with friends and people soon-to-be-friends alike.  We have our backyards, and these are also places for us to learn, to feed our young and our brothers and sisters, but there is something different about these communal spaces.  This is our shared hobby, perhaps one of many.  On that subject, Aldo Leopold has said, "A good hobby may be a solitary revolt against the commonplace, or it may be the joint conspiracy of a congenial group.  That group may, on occasion, be the family.  In either event it is a rebellion, and if a hopeless one, all the better."

 

In 1991 I lived right next to the greenhouses and the Plant Environmental Research Center, of which the Sustainable Development garden is a part.  I walked or rode past it each day on may way to school and to work, a new job in the laboratory of Dr. Parviz Azari, now retired.  I was kindling for the first time a love of research, a delving into the unknown, even if just barely.  I regarded the gardens from afar, a nice place to look at, a backdrop.  But it is actually a living remnant of an old custom of nurturing sustenance out of our land.  How many places are there that we scarcely notice, on which something important is happening?  It is a living laboratory of soil fertility, entomology, and horticultural practice.  Some of us learn by doing, are propelled by the active practice of a communal activity.  Some of us come around slowly, slowly, and reach these conclusions only by action, by immersing ourselves and thereby gaining a skills-based literacy.  Ride your bike to the Sustainable Development Garden on Lake Street, bear witness to what will soon be replaced by the commonplace.  Eat of grapes and apples, help with the last harvest of squash and tomatillos, note the hops resting on their arbors and ripe for the picking, eat currant and raspberry.  Perhaps we will enable back yard gardeners and other community gardeners to take from what is seeded to propagate these fruits to new places, like tendrils spreading out over space and time.  Stage your own rebellion, and let it be productive and fruitful.