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.