T-677. Getting Out....t-????

Well, here's the sad truth.  Getting ready to get out of Detroit took all of my attention and time.  What will it take for us to get out for 6 months if it took intense concentration and two full weeks to get out for 6 weeks.
......
here's another sad truth.  It is today, November 9, 2011.  It has been five months since my last post.  When we were in  Wyoming, we has no regular access to the internet.  We did some work towards getting ready for the big trip, though.

For one, we purchased a bike ready tent....or so we thought.  This little, light weight tent, purchased from Cabela's at the mother store, in Nebraska.  It weighs less than 5 pounds, even with a rain fly.

Yay!, we thought.  We know from previous experience, that we want to travel as light as possible.  Our previous tent weighed more than 9 lbs.  It had an enormous rainfly, where we could store panniers, wet shoes, and more...

So, here comes the big test of the new streamlined, super lightweight tent.  We were at an utterly amazing event which takes place yearly in the far reaches of the Snowy Range.    Under a completely  moon lees sky, at nt nearly ninne thousand feet in elevations, people come from all over the country, bring the huge and often hand made telescopes to look deep into to time and space.   Wes and I were the absolute neophytes, asking very stupid questions like "is that blurry thing a nebula?" The 17th Annual Wyoming Under the Stars (find em on Facebook) had about 300 amateur and professional astronomers, who were so pleased to show their 60" telescopes.  These kind people let us peer through their prized devices (10 feet long, carried on trailers behind their cars to this mountain meadow up near Fox Park, Wyoming), then answered our newby questions in the pitch black.  It was quite curious to have conversations with people whose faces could not be seen.  No flashlights or other illumination was allowed in the camp.

We wobbled our way back to our tiny tent, past the many RV's and big tents.  Our minds were full of the gigantic reach of the universe, or the vast and glorious spray of the Milky Way we could see with our naked eyes above our head.

Images of immensity disappeared immediately.  First of all, only one of us could move at a time.  Wes crawled in, then I wangled myself in.  First, hard and cold reality.  When we laid side to side, we were touching the tent walls.  Even laying on our sides, we had but a few scant inches to the walls.   This is a very bad omen.

In the event of rain, you NEVER want to touch a tent wall, unless you want to transport water to the inside of the tent.  Clearly, this tent was not going to work for a long bike ride, where it is certain that there will be some wet and miserable nights.

Second hard and cold truth: In such a confined tent, we could not move.  We couldn't roll over, adjust our pillow, fix our covers, etc without wakng the other person up.   Which of course meant that we woke each other up all night.

Fourth hard and cold truth:  Our bodies are far less forgiving of sleeping/not sleeping on the hard and cold ground.  In the past few years since our last bicycle tour, we have car camped.  Car camping allows all sorts of luxuries like extra pads and extra blankets and big roomy tents.  We woke up  the next day sore and miserable and worried.

The rotten little tent (RLT) we could replace. What about our creaky, cranky backs and muscles?  Further investigation was in order.  A few weeks later, we tried campy in the RLT again.  This time we were in the beautiful back country of Little Granite Canyon in the southern part of the Gros Ventre Mountains.

After a wonderful swim in the hot springs, a fantastic sunset over the twisted spires of the hoo-doos of that mountain, and a long campfire in the dark, we crawled into the still too small RLT.  This time, we had an extra Thermarest pad and an extra foamcore pad.  We also had a better down comforter that required less shifting.  (we no longer use sleeping bags, finding it warmer and more intimate to share a down comforter and a ground cover than wrestle inside individual bags.  Purists are probably aghast at this.)

Result:  the RLT was still too damn small, but we were not sore from the cold hard ground.

So here is what we learned.  We are going to have to face the reality of carrying a bigger tent, better or more padding, and a better comforter.  Already, we can see our future as the "Beverly Hillibillies on Bikes" re-surfacing.    Oh well, we always were slow and comfortable on the bike.  I guess we still will be..only more so.

T-693: The Detroit Virus

The reason we are going to cycle across America has nothing to do with needing to get out of Detroit.  On the contrary, we want more and more to stay.  Our friend Craig describes Detroit has having "dysfunctional charisma".  That is certainly true.  Is there a place that has more immanence, in which the future is more present?  Or that the past has more painfully marked?

 We moved here in 1989, one of the first to catch the Detroit virus.  We fell in love with it, with its potential, with its stark and beautiful contradictions.  Since then, we have transmitted it to a number of people.  They come to work at Matrix, or with Detroit Summer, or with the Mercy Volunteer Corps, or some organization working at street level.  They find what we did: that is possible---nay required---to do really important work here that makes a real difference in people's lives and the shape of the city.  Also, that is possible to find a whole bunch of people doing similar transformative work.  Care a lot about food?  You can be at the center of movement building a new food system tomorrow. 


Detroit is the first rural city and that is part of its charm.

Want to shape the way different ethnicities work together?  Come and do the work tomorrow.  Do you want to live in such a way that culture and cultural expression is imbedded in daily life.  That's the way we roll in the D.  Once you get a taste for it,  once it gets under your skin, you will find yourself staying or wanting to return over and over. 

Want to break away from mindless consumerism, me-firstism, and deadening conformism?  Come on down.  There's hardly a store where you can spend your money.   You won't long survive without social capital in this environment where being connected and having relationships is the truer form of currency.   And to what will you conform  in this wilding ecosystem?  There is no monoculture, just the bumptious biodiversity of a vibrant ecosystem.

None of this freedom is free, of course.  This is the city of do-it-yourself.  And that means policing your own neighborhoods,  organizing your own recycling, creating your own recreation leagues,  cleaning and mowing your own streets.    You will pay taxes and wonder what you get for your investment.

You'll have daily contact with people this culture serves not at all.  Everybody here is just trying to make a way out of no way and some of the choices are terrible.  There is no doubt that Detroit will give you a daily dose of ugliness to go along with its freedom and social vibrancy.

I don't think you ever recover from the Detroit virus.  Every where else seems pale and innocuous and inhospitable by comparison.  We love/hate/need this place.  It is a power spot whose vibrations are both thrilling and exhausting.

No, we prepare to ride, not to run away from Detroit, but to run towards our selves and in so doing, run on a purer fuel when we return to the exasperating, endearing, delicious, delightful wreck of a city.

T-699: Be With It

Wes came bouncing in a little while ago, soaked to the bone.  He had cycled to the Mass General Auditions earlier in the evening.  As it had all day, as it had been predicted, thunderstorms came rolling in. 

While I was pacing the floor and anxiously calling his cell phone, Wes was blithely cycling home in the rain and dark.

When he arrived, he was ebullient.  I told him I would have come and picked him up.  Why didn't he have his phone on?  I was worried.

He didn't quite laugh at me, but almost.  The rain was warm, the night quiet; he knew the way home.  It was clear he was going to get wet, but so what.  That's all that was going to happen.  He was going to get wet.

My worry was a form of rank chicken wimpery--- a kind of piddling fear of the ordinary that is part and parcel of modern life that makes us feel so small and jittery.  It keeps us from joy, from being.

Abike, you are where you are.  It is necessary to just be with it.  Feel the heat if its hot, the wet if it rains, the dark if its night.  Living in our modern boxes of cars, offices, and homes where all the air is still and warm and utterly predictable, I have forgotten the exhilaration of experience.

I remember riding my bike in a ferocious storm.  At first, I was huddled and hurrying against it.  It soon became clear that I was not going to get home before the storm let up.  The best I could do was let go.  It wasn't long before I could enjoy it.  I drove screamingly into puddles, my legs akimbo, with the audacity of an eight year old. 

In my current life, I am an excessively cerebral and emotional person.  I create and live in challenges that tax those two functions.  Being outside, living outside, as one does while abike on tour, has always reminded me to be in my body, be with my body.

I am amazed and jealous of people who seem to be fully in-carn-ated.  They are "in the state of being in their body."  I know we all are in our bodies all the time, but I have learned to shut that transmission line down. How often have I come up from some deep engagement and realize I have been holding my back and shoulders rigid to the point of stiffness.  As I write that now, I remember to release the hunch in my upper back.

What's worse is that I LIKE being physical.  I like being in movement, especially rhythmic movement like swimming, or cycling, or walking.  But I don't do it with any regularity when I live in the city.  Is it because I don't value it?  Is it because I let my sloth and my fear create a toxic stew of inhibition?  Is it because I am overly committed to being productive nearly ever moment of my life and walking...even though I like and it is doing me good....does not feel productive?

Well, that's a rotten form of  putrid delusion.  Let's hear a prayer for the end of petty fears and foolish inhibitions.  I was told years ago by my best friend's father, who though drunk, was right.  I was running to get out of a little sprinkle of  rain.  He laughed at me and said, "I don't know why you're running away.  You're not so sweet you'll melt."    As they say in Detroit, "True that."   I haven't melted yet, but I have surely avoided the rain like I might.  Enough.

T-701: Ghost or Live?

In a few short hours, I am going to be leading a sort of Eco-justice tour of Detroit with my friend Rich Feldman. We will be leading teachers and others to some of Detroit's amazing places on both the horrific and the wonderful side.  We will see abandoned factories bigger than some towns in the West.  We will see wonderful productive farms in the middle of the city.  We will see places where the earth is reviving and places where it is screaming.

When we first moved to Detroit, we were very unnerved.  It was so foreign in ways we couldn't understand.  We couldn't understand what we were seeing; we couldn't identify any of the plant life; we couldn't make heads or tales of where we were.  In every other place we have lived, the landscape provided the internal map that told us where we were. 

In the West, the horizon is always present and it took a simple glance to know which way was West or East.   In Laramie, the Snowy Range is to the West.  A hundred times a day, I would look to those granite peaks and ponder the light or the clouds or the approaching thunderstorm.   In Houston, the horizon is defined by the outcrops of buildings, but more important is the crosshatch of bayous which tell you where you live.  We lived just off Chocolate Bayou, and could follow its serpentine mugginess all the way to downtown.

A series of hills and dales defined Reading, England.  In essence, one had to walk downhill to go downtown.  To get the campus, one followed the Kennett River from the Thames River.  In Salt Lake, essentially a big bowl, going down sooner or later led you to the center of town.

This was not the case in Detroit.  Not only did the city not have the mathematical regularity of Salt Lake, where an address of 630 East 800 North told anyone and everyone that you were six and third blocks east and eight blocks north of Temple Square.  Nor did it have the cow path logic of either Rock Springs or Reading, where the roads followed the lay of the land.  In Detroit, there were  grid streets and spoke streets,  curving streets, and freeways, none of which seemed to relate to any specific features of the landscape. 



The Rouge befoe the canal was cut making Zug Island. 
Baby Creek when it was still a navigable stream. 
It is now a concrete tube. 
You can see a remnant in Patton Park.



When we traveled outside the city, which we did and do often, we were struck by the complexity of the landscape in Michigan.  There are lots of hillocks and potholes, creeks, streams, ponds, lakes, swamps, marshes, big lakes and, of course, great lakes.  None of that complexity seemed present in the city.  It itched at me like a mosquito bite.  Where did the water go?  How could all of Michigan all around the city have such a multiplicity of water features and the city have almost none?



That led me to maps first, then historical maps, then 19th century histories, then to various archives where I found out that the land in  Detroit was just as watery and complex as anywhere in Michigan.  There were seven streams in the city which have been largely buried, including one navigable river.  There were multiple wetlands and a few good sized lakes. 

 

Because Detroit grew in spurts, first around the opening of the Erie Canal and second around the auto boom of the 1910's and 20's, its landscape was put to the service of the land speculators without much thought or planning.  That is why to do this day, houses and businesses must run sump pumps day and night.  They are sitting smack in the middle of a wetland.  Detroit regularly gets 30 inches of rain each year.  The water will go where the water will go, house or no house.  Why is anyone surprised when Brownstown floods?  It sat underwater for millenia.  Pushing dirt around doesn't change any that.

So now I am going to lead people around the city and if I do my job right, give them eyes to see where they are.  When they see phragmytes, they should know that there is water within 6 inches of the surface.  When they see certain kinds of poplars, they should know they are near a stream side.  I want to show them where Baby Creek, and May Creek, Parrents  Creeks and Connor Creek are proving that water always wins.  Try to cage them, or cover them or turn them to sewers, they have a way of resurfacing anyway.    I will show them the fifteen manhole covers which mark the confluence of the Savoyard River and the Detroit River.  I want them to see the hill in downtown that shows the course of the river.  I want to help people see the place within in the place.

Phragmites, coal slag, and heavy industry...
this is what Baby Creek has become.

I am glad to do, but I also grieve.  There are places where the earth is screaming with the abuse perpetrated on it.  At the confluence of Baby Creek, the Rouge River, and the Detroit River lies the man made horror of Zug Island.  In another time, it was a rich wetland carved by an oxbow of the Rouge River.  It was not an island at all.  Now it is a toxic wasteland, reeking and repugnant.  It is not alone.   There are so many places where the land has been subject to rape, then abandoned to try and heal itself as best it can.  There are places where it is still being actively abused, as near the steel plants downriver.

It is wearing on the soul to hear the cries of the land.  It is enervating to make my eyes turn away from what was and should be (and can be) one of the planet's most fertile environments.  I do what I can change to help people to see what could and should be, but I have been pumping my aquifer much too long.

I need to hear the earth simply sing.  I need that healing and wholesome voice to remind me of the connection of all things.  I need to hear the voice alive.  The shriveled ghost of a voice of Detroit's earth and water I both honor and share, but I need the roar of the earth alive  to keep the transmission going.   Let the song begin.

T-704: Why So Long

 

When we were younger, we could close the door on our current life, count our pennies and head out.  It's going to take us nearly two years to extract ourselves this time.  This is a testament to way work and life in your middle years serves to bind one.

Nearly all of us have chosen to buy a house.  This is one of the tightest and thickest of cords.  We were lucky in that we were able to get a wonderful house for a very small amount when we moved to Detroit.  This is one of the city's great blessings....life without a mortgage!  Although a number of our friends bought houses near the top of the housing bubble and are underwater in the mortgages, the amount they owe is far less than anything they would owe in the suburbs.   And they have a bigger, better house.



Wes' dream and our debt



Although we don't have a mortgage on our house in Detroit, we do have a mortgage.  For the past eight years, we have been building a cabin in Wyoming, on land that has been in my extended family since the 1890's.  This cabin, which is Wes' fondest dream, has been a major effort and major cost for years.

Because of our great discomfort with debt, we have built the cabin slowly, paying for a specific system piece at a time.  We paid for the land; we put in the well; we paid for the septic system--inch by inch, step by step.  However, when it came time to actually put up the structure, we had to have cash on hand.  We drained our savings and eeeek!.....took a second mortgage on our house in Detroit to pay for our cabin in Wyoming.



This freaks out both of us.  I HATE being in debt and feel heavily the weight of its obligation.  We have been making extra and occasionally double payments to get out from under this debt.  In the past two years, we have reduced the debt by 75%.  The cabin eats our recreation budget...we haven't been to New York or Toronto to see theatre since we started the cabin project.  We are pushing hard to get rid of this debt.

Wes cannot retire and we cannot jump on the bikes until we are mortgage free.  Mort-gages-- the measurement of our death--holds us down and keeps us working, even when our souls and interests are leaning elsewhere. 



I look at my friends raising kids and paying mortgages.  They have the harried, worried look of  a rat caught on a treadmill.  This does not mean that they don't love their kids, or their houses, or even their jobs.  It's just that they can't stop...ever.   I can see them wear down in the effort.  I can see the spark that each of them had in their twenties, their dreams of transforming the world dwindle down. The fire doesn't go out, it just stays their like a pilot light waiting to be lit.



We have banked our flame through all these long years of building a company (which I think is analogous to raising kids...lots of time and worry and money to create a strength for the future) and securing a home front and setting aside some money for our old age. 



So now the old folks are trying to get the kids through college and on their own.  The bike ride across the country is, I suppose, our version of  a red convertible speedster.  We want the wind in our hair, the endless to do list reduced to the basics.  What shall I eat today?  Where shall we camp?  Should we stay in this beautiful spot or move onto the next one?



The cliche of
 modern life

I so admire the young people streaming into the city and setting up a new way of doing things.  They are not consigning themselves to treadmill.  They are not putting their heads in the tightening noose of a long term mortgages.  They are building systems of food and exchange of goods that are simple and direct...but perhaps not secure.  Even more encouraging, they are not making the drop out mistakes that all us "back to land" types made in the70's.  They are engaging in the creation of a new system.  It looks more free from here.

 In thirty years, will these new urbanists be free to follow their dreams?  Will they feel the pressures of their days as strongly as those of us who came of age during mid 20th century?  Will they be free to go?  Will they even feel the need?





T-705: The Price of Freedom

You know it's bad when you are the architect of your own oppression.  I certainly have been and it causes me endless consternation.  The person who set up the particular trap that I find myself in is me.  It is true, so true, that worst oppression is self oppression.  What made me set up and maintain this particularly binding set of snares?

As I try to untangle this particular Gordian knot, I see several strands.  Part of it is the legacy of my family culture, in which we were taught, over and over, not to seek or trust help from "outsiders."  Family business was family business.  Of course, this is a typical protection tactic for families with something to hide.  One of the messages I remember clearly---and fight to "unhear"---is that no one cares about you or your concerns. I distinctly remember being told that people did not and could not like me.  I was on my own.

Wes got a dose of this message as well, though delivered in a different fashion.  His family's meta message was that his family owed him nothing, not even attention.  When he was 18, he was to leave and not come back.  His parents conveyed to him that they would feed and clothe him until the age of 18, then they were done.  One of the amazing...and to my mind, sad...facts of Wes' life is that his parents never saw one--not one...of Wes' plays.


 So from our family culture, we both got too big a dose of  "Don't ask nobody for nothing never."  This combines with the general Western ethic of  strident super individualism.  Throughout the West, and very strongly in Wes' family, is a strain of libertarian anarchism.  This version distrusts systems and the people in them.  It has meant that 3 of Wes' five brothers cannot bear to work for someone else and in fact have disdain for people who subject themselves to the workaday world. 

It is less pronounced in my family, being as they were Roosevelt (said like choosevelt) democrats.  While there was volunteerism and even political engagement, there still was a strong ethic that you make your own way.  Seeking help is a sign of weakness.  Giving help is required.  Asking for help is unacceptable.

Now match those system strictures with a chosen profession that absolutely requires collaboration and public engagement.  This is certainly the case with all not for profits, which are after all, public entities which exist to provide public benefits.  It is built into the DNA of not for profits that there will be multiple publics: those that give and those that receive.

In the ethic of the West, standing alone is standing free.

How many times would another person, with a  different internal makeup, have sought the help of others---of volunteers, of donors, or funders---to achieve a specific company goal.  All too often, Wes and I have defaulted to the "if we want it done, we'll have to do it ourselves" position.  

Because we are "strangers in a strange land"---despite living in Michigan for 25 years--we haven't had the regular and reliable social structures many people and organizations use to build social capitol.  We don't have family, or school, or historical connections to serve as scaffolds of support.  That we have built relationships rooted in neighborhood and ethics and social engagement is a greater tribute to the rich culture of community life in Detroit than it is to our organizational ability.

So it turns out, we have been trapped by our own freedom.  We run our own lives, it is true, but it is also true that our lives run us.  As we look to travel again, it is necessary to give up the freedom of self determination to gain the freedom of self determination.  Transferring the power of choice and yet not expecting anyone else to bear the self imposed burdens we created for ourselves is the trick I am trying resolve right now.  I am confused by this, and so I am going to do what I so seldom do...ask for help.  What would you do?  What would you suggest?

T-706: Let Me Out of Here

The last few days have been proof positive about why we need to go. I have been working constantly to create a new budget format for Matrix.  As usual, I have made the task so complex that is taking me forever to do.  At the same time, we are in the midst of a major clean-up/clean out at Matrix, moving everything out of the basement and numerous storage nooks. It is being inventoried or removed.  All of this was made much more necessary and urgent by the standing water in the basement.  I at first thought it was a leaking basement due to the recent heavy rains which caused a leak in the ceiling (and brought a squirrel into the building.)  But no, it was the hot water heater giving up the ghost and dumping water all over the basement floor and ruining a number of puppets, props, and costumes.

Note the permanent stress lines
on my forehead

To add to the fun, (I originally wrote "funk", which may actually have been the right word), Saturday was Neighborhood Beautification Day...as well as Wes' birthday.  I had to leave at 7am to work with a crew to clean  and landscape our grounds.  We also were putting in 3 new raised beds.  What was originally supposed to be a 3 hour task, stretched to 7.  Although we did get all the work done, and removed the piles of detritus which has been building up during the clean-up, I returned home after 2pm, dirty and tired.  I was hardly in the mood to create any kind of birthday for Wes.  But I did, sort of.  We had a fire and cooked kielbasa and had tres leches cake.  Wes was a good sport about it, but I know he once again felt like 2nd banana to the endless requirements of running Matrix.

Sunday was a nice day, but I was sore and tired and still had more of that damned budget to do.  Monday was work at fever pitch to get ready for the Budget meeting last night.  Yesterday was the Budget meeting: it was intense, but went well.  I finally got home around 9:30 last night, after starting the day with a 14 mile round trip bike ride to participate in yet another required collaboration for youth serving agencies.

It has been like this for years and years.  I count it a light month when I work less than 210 hours on the clock.  Sometimes, I have more than 100 hours of  "comp time" in a given month.  When I leave for Wyoming in a few weeks, I will have amassed more than 400 hours since October.  To put that in perspective, that is equal to nearly 3 months required time.   Of course, that time expires at the end of the fiscal year, so I never burn it off...even when I go away.  Same with my paid vacation.  After 20 years, I have five weeks paid vacation.  But even when I am away, I am still writing grants, attending meetings by conference call, working on planning.

Being the "boss" of a small organization means that its survival is constantly in my hands.  I must always be attending to building future work and support while making sure that what is going on now is working, while maintaining a whole host of relationships.  This is not just my life, but the life of every Executive Director of a small not for profit.  Emotionally, it feels like constantly being the Plate Spinner of old vaudeville days.  There are about 10 poles, each with a plate spinning.  Constant attention will keep them all going, but a slight break in concentration will start the plates wobbling, then soon falling to the ground. Picking up the pieces is much worse than keeping the plate going.  Of course, picking up one fallen plate means other plates start wobbling or even falling.

The challenge is finding a way to keep the plates spinning by having multiple spinners.   This is much easier said than done.  I am looking for/training/preparing a batch of spinners to keeping the plates in the air while Wes and I are abike in, yes, just 706 days.  It will take that long to prepare for transition.

In the meantime,  I'll just keep spinning and dreaming of a different kind of spinning...of pedals on a journey to revive my body, mind, and soul.

T-712: A Long Way to Go

So today I took my first longish ride.  I needed to go to Polarity Therapy at Our Lady of Rosary Church. This is an energy based body work is offered as a community service by the Polarity Center, which believes that healing work should not only be available to those who can afford to pay. I have been using the service for at least 5 years. It has helped me immensely.

 I needed to 5 miles each way.  Typically, I got a late start.  I needed to go the five miles in 30 minutes.  This is a brisk, but not unmanageable pace.  It is necessary to keep pushing.

Our Lady of Rosary (aka Our Lady of the Freeway)
is a social justice catholic church by Wayne State

I have been slowly but surely switching over to bike as my primary means of transportation.  This process was in place before we made the decision to take the Portland to Portland trip.  The ever increasing cost of driving (on our bodies, on the earth, and on our wallets) combined with a scary wreck that totaled Wes' truck facilitated this decision.

I have found living without a car in Detroit far easier than I thought it might be.  It is in fact, much easier than it was when I tried it in the early 1990's.  The city is much more pedestrian and bike friendly than it was those years ago.  Detroit is good city for biking.  Despite the almost complete disregard for bikes held by most drivers, the streets are quite empty.  It is possible to cruise backstreets with nary a problem, save avoiding the potholes and broken glass.  It is pretty flat.  There are a lot of trees.

The Hub is one of great places of Detroit, where biking is a
means of  remaking the spirit of the city.

I was struck, again, by the way  rhythmic movement promotes meditation.  I easily slipped into a reverie state when biking, even while biking in the city.  On my way back, I stopped at the City Cafe in Tech Town had a great sandwich while listening to the staff fuss at each other, while I fiddled with my new phone.  I then bopped down to The Hub, the great bike shop in the Corridor.  It began as a community volunteer effort about 10 years ago. I stopped by to get a new rear-view mirror.

It was a classic "nothing is as easy as it looks."  Getting out the remains of the old mirror,  and finding the right combination to get the new mirror to situate took nearly an hour.  The bike tech kept apologizing, but between the biking and the polarity, I was feeling so content, the fiddly, fussy problem didn't make a dent.

I was able to watch the passing parade come through the shop.  In the time I was there, there must have been at least 30 people in and out.  Young, old, all sorts of colors and shapes.  A pair of highly tattooed Euro-hipsters slid in.  The one with long, unkempt, blonde braids asked to trade work for parts.  They struck me as part of the Crusty Tribe, especially as they announced they had just come to Detroit a week ago.

Immediately after they left, two young girls came into the shop.  One was wearing a hijab and had fancyish mountain bike which kept throwing its chain during shifting.  Not only did the staff adjust the cable on the shifter, he also explained how it worked and to fix it in the future.

Next was an older gentlemen who looked life a 1950's jazz musician, complete with a pork pie hat and pleated pants.  Improbably, he was riding a hard tail. I wondered if he got it from his grandson.  A tall elegant man next brought in a beautiful, magenta Schwinn Le Tour from about 1976.  Everyone oohed and aahed over this great American bike.  The only female staff came out and shyly flirted with this tall fellow, who must have been at least 15 years her elder.  Both were flattered by each others' attention.

In comes another fellow wheeling a battered mountain bike.  As the staff begins to tighten the back axle, the man yells, "NOOO...it ain't straight."  Sure enough, the wheel wobbled at least 20 degrees as it barely turned on the axle.  Could it be straightened?   Not without great effort, but the staff went to work tightening rusty and loose spokes, making a way out of no way, finding a way to keep it going against the odds.

Shortly, there after a couple looking for a specialty  item. They were referred to another bike store in the city. In and out, people flowed into to this somewhat gritty community bike shop in the heart of the Cass Corridor. When at last the mirror had been installed, and I was on my way out, one staff member sighed at me wearily.  "I hope it rains....maybe then we'll get a break and can do some repairs."  In the time I was there, all were constantly making repairs, juggling multiple demands and personalities in quick order.  I suppose he meant he wanted to work quietly and meditatively on a single task.

I jumped on my bike and sped off through the city where nearly all the traffic lights were out. Drivers were obviously a bit alarmed at having to negotiate every intersection.  I was reminded again about the beauty of biking.  The sky was blue, the air was cool, the miles smooth.  By the time I made it back home, I had ridden 12 miles, but had seen the richness and variety of community life in our city.  I am sore tonight, but glad to feel parts that have been in disuse and unseen.

T-713: A Journey is a Story

I don't know if other bikers do this, but telling a long, ridiculous story in multiple installments, is always a feature of our travels.  During the Nova Scotia trip, when we were moving from  Quebec to Vermont, we spent the whole day going towards a single peak called Mont St. Gregoire.  All day long we travelled towards it, never getting closer, always on our left, then suddenly it was on our right, though we had no awareness of passing the mountain.



These are not the original Alice and Herbert,
but they remind me of them.



The name of the story  became "The Legend of Mont St. Gregoire", a mysterious mountain where what you seek stays just beyond your reach.  Because I was carrying an old boy scout bag proudly marked with the name Monte Boyle as my handlebar bag, Monte became our major character.  Monte was a classic innocent abroad.  He was travelling with his faithful companion, the Electric Dog.  The Electric Dog came into the story when one night after stowing our bikes at camp and walking into town for a local festival, with Chazz excited and quivering on the leash.  As we walked by a family, the little girl suddenly stopped and pointed at the glowing silver dog and asked, "Daddy, is that an electric dog?" 

Monte was the adopted son of two hapless farmers, Herbert and Alice, named after two turkeys (yes, real turkeys) we met while travelling in Northern California.  They loved to be petted, but got so excited that they hyperventilated and passed out.  Monte came to be their son through the machinations of that not so famous but oh so glamourous torch singer, Googie Nordrocks.



The benign face of the government at work.

 In the course of travels through Nova Scotia, stopping at all manner of community events, fairs, and festivals, we came across the Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor.  Apparently this was his job in the summer--make the rounds of community events, cut ribbons, shake hands, and be the silent, benign face of the government. We were tickled that they pronounced his position as "leftenant govnor". 

It wasn't long before it became clear that Monte Boyle was the love child of Googie Nordrocks and the Leftenant Govnor.  They had met during one of Googie's ill fated tours of Nova Scotian festivals.   Googie could not be burdened with a child---after all stardom was surely just around the corner--so she tricked Herbert into thinking it was his child.

We told this story through multiple installations, through the miles and many ridiculous adventures.  We tell it to this day.  Googie, particularly, has become a favorite character.  She was, after all, the inventor of the Big Finish.  Her influence is seen all over popular music.  When you hear a singer craning and swooping up to an over the top finish of a song, you have heard the mark of Googie.  She is insulted to this day that she could not figure out a way to copyright this signature element.   With her greatest fan and manager, Bonky Hugoment, the two live on and on in our imaginations and storytelling.

It is not only these fictional inventions that endure.  How many times have we told the chestnuts of our bicycle travels.  We still laugh until we cry telling the story of poor Chazz bungied to the back of Wes' bike like a dead deer and flying down the mountain on the back of that bike with nary a complaint or howl.  Cars pulled to side of the road to see this sight. 

These stories provide the architecture of our life and identity.  We know who we are by the stories we tell.  Our stories place us in the world and give the world back to us.  When we remember Herbert and Alice, we remember the hitchhiking trip we took that led us to meet those turkeys, all the permutations of the story they inspired, the travels where they became Wes and I's alternative identity.  (Yes, it's sad but true, our alter egos are hyperventilating turkeys.) 

A new journey not only brings new miles, it brings new stories.  And with new stories, a new sense of self.  The writing begins again in just 713 days.

T-714: What Kind of Comfort?

I spent a few hours last night looking at various kinds of bike trailers.    When we first started touring, such devices did not exist.  However, they have become ever more popular and we are actively considering using trailers on the next trip.

When Chazz was old and could no longer run alongside the bike, we bought a baby bike trailer.  We would try to get him to sit in the trailer so he could still go with us.  He absolutely hated it.  It was an insult to his dignity and he would try to jump out whenever he could.  As arhritic as he was, sitting in a stupid baby trailer, looking out the plastic windows, was more uncomfortable.

However, we found we could tote a whole bunch of produce from the market, without making the bike top-heavy.  It would end up at home without being smashed.  Once the bike began rolling, the trailer added very little drag.  Paniers alter the geometry of the bike and change its center of gravity.  Their best advantage, however, is that they force the rider to choose only the essentials. 

But we would always have all sorts of junk hanging off the paniers...today's drying socks and dishcloths, an easy to reach windbreaker, the most recent groceries.  When we got to camp, the paniers were removed so they could be rooted through.  Packing up became a daily ritual after breakfast.  It had to be done right, with the heavy items below and thoughtful placement of liquid, easy access, and degree of grunge.  (You really don't want your sweaty, stinky clothes next to your food or clean clothes)

One thing is certain, long distance bike touring does not qualify as cushy.  There are a lot of days where you
just aren't as clean as you would like to be.  Sleeping on the ground day after day can give you what we call "hip pointers"...the sore spots that develop from placing your weight on hard surfaces.  You better pray that you don't get a heat rash, or jock itch, or saddle sores.  Riding a bike when every motion sends a searing bite through through your tender parts makes a long, long day.
The days of ecstasy are few and far between.  Many days are a pleasan

The smell of the wild roses
and salt sea was intoxicating

t sort of drudgery, neither exciting nor painful...making miles to the next stop, next camp, next meal.  Some days are hellish.  Pushing your loaded bike up a 8% grade from 4000 to 8000 feet in elevation in the searing heat is not fun.  It is just plain hard work.  Finding a decent camp in the pouring rain, then barely sleeping because a brush of the tent side will bring water pou
ring in, makes for both a miserable night and a miserable next day.  There are times when the mosquitos are so thick, you can't help but breathe them.

But there are moments of pure transcendence, when the bike, and the land, and your body, and all that is merge into a blessed wholeness.  Biking becomes a pure joy that is animal, spiritual, and intellectual.  These moments are unforgettable.  I remember cycling the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, following the nearly abandoned sea line highway.  The sea roses were in full bloom and stretched for miles and miles. 

The sweet smell mixed with the tang of sea air.  The sky was blue, and there was a slight tail wind. Up and down the hills, roaring through dips and valleys of the sea road, a song zinging through my brain as I loved the way my body felt on the bike.  I could not have been happier.



On the Going to th e Sun Road,
 we were glad to be going up instead of down.

 Another Zen experience like this happened just after we had finished climbing the Going to Sun Road in Glacier National Park.  Going to the Sun is unnerving experience.  A narrow two lane road switchbacks over the spine of the Rockies.  There is no shoulder and there is sheer cliff going up on one side, sheer cliff falling down on the other.  The Park Service only allows bikers on this road a few hours a day.  You have to get up well before dawn to begin this climb.  There is not stopping on this rugged trek, because cars and even worse trucks and RV's, begin over the pass at 8am.

We had just made the top and could feel the anxiety start to slip away.  We were greeted by the sight of alpine lakes.  Soon I was surging along this top country, all systems on go.  Before long, I left Wes in my dust, as I bob and weave my way through that stunning scene.

Now, I am sitting on a plump leather couch.  I see wonderful art on the wall.  But my body is always kind of uncomfortable and I am self concious about the belly pooch that is holding up this computer.  I long for the wholeness of grace within my body.  Early on I learned to be in my brain and silence my body until at long last, it screams at me in its hunger or stress.

I want the comfort of feeling fully alive, of joy in the moment, of feeling strong and skillful, swathed in beauty.  That's the kind of comfort almost nonexistant in the life I am leading now.    I must remind myself that comfort is not necessarily a function of ease.  Comfort is the result of wholeness.

T-715: Middle Aged, Middle Class, and Middle Brow

Part of what is sending us out on this trip is the feeling that we have become entirely too Middle Aged, Middle Class, and Middle Brow.  When I look back on the start of our marriage and our early years, when we vigorously cut an individualistic path through the world,  I wonder how much of our life has been settling down, and how much of it has been settling.



We have great neighbors and live in a great house.



When we first bought our house and started our company, we were no longer kids.  I was thirty five and Wes thirty eight.  Setting roots felt like the strongest, bravest thing we could do.  We saw our work in Detroit as part of the wave of transformation that surely was just around the corner.  It was exciting to live in a historic house, in a reviving neighborhood, making work that we believed in, even if we were supporting the work far more than it was supporting us.

But as the years have rolled by, we have become deadened by the sheer force of exertion.  We push through our long days, with barely a chance to look up.  Dinner so often is the quiet companionship of two people reading the paper together, happy that no one is making a demand, even for conversation, on them.

We pay our bills, we do our work.  There is little which takes us out of ourselves, little that forces us into new patterns of thought.  We are not particularly unhappy, but we are very, very tired.  The exhaustion makes us choose the familiar, the safe, the ritual.

How many more times can we go to Panera for Sunday breakfast and read the paper?  Does every Saturday have to be a lockstep of chores and shopping, with the occasional delightful fillip like last Saturday's performance by Heritage Works?

When we were travelling, every day presented a challenge.  I remember watching a pageant in Nova Scotia which celebrated the Loyalists journey from the United States to become citizens of Canada.  I remember thinking that I didn't even realize that there were a lot of people in the United States that were opposed to the American Revolution.  Of course, this is patently obvious...just not apparent because nothing broke through the incrustation of habit.



 

A sensible car for sensible people like us

This morning, as I was riding my bike to work, I was pre-occupied because I had to drop car keys

at a shop to repair our car which developed sudden and alarming electrical problems yesterday.  I was reminded of all those years when we lived without a car and how life was both much simpler and much more complicated.  We navigated big cities and small towns without a vehicle. 



Wes, god love him, would take a city bus in Houston, whose bus system was at least as bad as Detroit's is now, to go recycle.  I would organize our shopping trips to get the lowest price within walking distance.  When we lived in Salt Lake, we would wait until Wes got his "blood money" (cash for giving his plasma), go to the Dee's for a hamburger, then walk to stores to get the supplies for the week.  We must have been living on $600 a month.

Now, we don't clip coupons or worry much about whether something costs a nickel less.  We have insurance, and a washing machine, and think about the piles of chores which lurk about every householder's heels.  But do we ever just go lay in sun like we used to?  Do we ever let our selves go watch and wonder and discover the boundaries in our minds.  Not much, not much.  As the fenestrations of middle class life have grown around us, bit by bit by bit our souls have shrunk as our guts and butts have grown.   Enough.











T-716: Wireless or Free

I have spent the last four hours trying to download new email software for my now antique Palm Centro phone---without success, I might add.  It raises the question as to how we will communicate when we are on the trip.  I must admit I assumed that we would be taking a cell phone and some sort of computer on the trip.  I have been thinking about getting a tablet or some other super light weight computer to go with us.

This would be the first time we have been on the road with this capacity.  The last major trip we took was the Nova Scotia trip.  We took the train to Montreal, then cycled to Vermont, Maine, the southwest coast of Nova Scotia to Halifax, then back to Quebec City via New Brunswick and the Gaspe Peninsula.  It must have been 1998, because I was still trying to write my final report for the Arts Centered Education grant.  I remember trying to find a pay phone to call Gary Anderson from the fishing village of Lunenberg and to let him know that I would be mailing (not emailing) it.  I finished the report at a small library and paid to print it, then mailed it back to Detroit.  Pure Shaun ridiculousness. 

All of this is a testament to:  1) the inexorable timeline of the trip....one has to leave for the trip even if one's work is not done (with me, a constant problem); 2) how long it has been since we have taken a long trip; and 3) how ridiculous it is to stay tied to your home when you are travelling.

The thought of taking electronics on bike is somewhat daunting.  The first concern is the weight, especially of a computer.  Dragging around extra pounds is a bad idea...though one we have tested over and over, and always found to be a bad idea.  (sidebar: on our England trip, I actually started the trip with a 3 lb picture guidebook to England.  I also was carrying and knitting a 4ft x 4ft lacy baby blanket which I meant to have sent before we left.  I perceive a pattern here.) 

The pleasures of the camp (?)

When we were on the Canadian Rockies trip, during which we had to rig a milk crate on the back of Wes' bike to carry Chazz ( a story for another day), one hostel owner told us we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies on Bikes.  This moniker is only too true.  Far be it for us travel without a coffee pot, or a spice kit, or a cook stove.  We love the pleasures of the camp, and want to be able to make full  meals at the end of the day.  We want to go to dinner or the theatre when we come to towns.  We need clothes for that.

Other bikers are decked out in lycra; they huddle in scrawny lightweight sleeping bags on the ground.  They wander through towns in their Spandex, and gobble cold food.  They travel long distances and they travel light.  To our eyes, it looks like all the pleasures of a forced march. 


 We want to go slow, stop when we want to, and enjoy both the scenery and the company.  We really are tourists on bikes rather than bicycle tourers.  Going this way asks us to just be present where we are, to be alive to the world whereever we may be. 



Would you even want a computer in these conditions?



This brings back the question of staying connected to the larger world.  It is necessary to carry a cell phone, I suppose.  It is almost impossible to find a pay phone anymore.  I wonder about charging them, especially in the wilderness or far reaches of the road.  I suppose one doesn't.  I can't imagine there would be much service anyway.

The computer is another question.  I have assumed that I would post to this blog while abike.  I wonder how it will affect the trip?  I wonder if it will make me anxious about conditions like the three day rain we rode through on both the England and Canadian Rockies trips.  Despite our efforts, did anything we have stay dry? 

I wonder about it making us self-conscious.  One of the great pleasures of travelling is disconnecting from the constraints and worries and to-do lists of everyday life.  It is a positive value to live super simply.  Will a computer and an obligation to communication undo that?  Is it worth it?  I don't know.







T-717: The Trip Before the Trip

Truly one of the pleasures of travelling is thinking about travelling.  We have already begun that part of the journey.  We are well into the debate about the route.  Should we go to San Francisco by train, then up the coast to Portland?  What if we take Canadian Rail  all the way to Victoria, then go down to Portland to start the trip?

A typical Canadian Shield landscape seen on the train

We seem to have settled on that choice, for two reasons.  Years ago, we had a fantastic train ride from Detroit (actually Windsor) to Toronto, then across Canada to Jasper, where we began a 1000 mile bike ride across the northern spine of the Rockies.  The train ride was wonderful for two reasons.  First we were able to load our bikes (and dog) onto the luggage car with breaking it down or boxing them (unlike American trains).  Second, the trip through the wilds of the North Woods around the Great Lakes was spectacular.  We entered deep woods the first night of the ride.  We were in the forest, surrounded by great masses of  rocks, water, and trees all the next day, all the next night, and well into the next day.  We called it the land of Big--big water, big trees, big rocks.  It is the land of the Canadian Shield, wild and remote to this day.

We were surprised when the train stopped twice, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  One time, passengers entered the train from a lonely cabin on the side of the tracks, the great national rail line acting like a whistle stop.   A few hours later, the train stopped again to board a group of canoers and their boat.   Some miles later, they left the train again, having used the train to make a portage.  This pleased us enormously.  Can you imagine Amtrak being so personal and adaptable?

Wes and Chazz in the hills above Jasper, Alberta

We were able to jump out with the dog (our much beloved Chazz, still in his puppyhood) in towns like Manitoba and Winnipeg for a quick walkabout.  We could even stay in the baggage car to visit with our dog. It was clear that the VIA rail truly was the spine of the country and used to meeting the needs of a far flung and outdoor loving people.

Decision 1: Canadian Rail to Victoria, then to Portland by Wes' birthday on June 11.
One of about a thousand more to make.

T-718: Inspiration and Encrustation

We learned in Flint that it is necessary to engage.  The powers that be are perfectly happy to have people like Wes and I drop out and pursue our artisanal, utopian dreams.  Our disengagement with the economic system does absolutely nothing to disrupt the "raping and scraping" ways of modern capitalism.  I learned that there is a  class system in this country (how did I not know that?)  I learned that there is no justice without economic justice.  (how could I have called myself a progressive and not know that?---I would come to know that it is planned that way.  Our ignorance is necessary for the system to work.)

I also learned that every act of voice is a political act.  All art is political, whether it is conscious or not.   I also learned that when art is used to shape reality, it can be a hot and powerful tool, which can burn both the wielders and those closest to them.  I am only now understanding the limits and destructiveness of that powerful tool.  It has taken 25 years to learn this.  I am still learning this.

When I moved to Flint, I was shocked.  At first the shock was how damn cold the place was.  Having been raised in Wyoming, where winter runs from October to April, I thought I was winter tough.  I was wrong.  I landed in Flint on January 2, 1986.  That night, the temperature dropped to -15F.  -15F in Flint is about 1000 times colder than -15F in Wyoming.  The wet cold with ice knocked me out.  I was unprepared in everyway for Flint...and not just for its temperature.

Getting the job in Flint was so unexpected.  Out of the blue, on the basis of interview which veered off the topic and onto my specialty of collective playwriting, a job was created for me at the University of Michigan-Flint.  When it was offered, we had to go to an atlas and find Flint on the map.  Even more unknown was the topic to be discussed by the new play--the birth of the United Auto Workers during the Flint Sit Down Strike.

My ignorance of the location of Flint was dwarfed by my ignorance of the UAW and the Sitdown Strike.  I had never given one thought to the union and had never heard of  the strike.  To land there, on that frigid January morning, was to begin a journey which would radically reshape my life, my work, and my beliefs.  

One thing to remember is that 1986-7 was both the 50th anniversary of the SitDown Strike and the year that General Motors laid off 40,000 people in a town of 100,000.   At the moment when the town wanted to celebrate its great victory which led to the establishment of the American middle class, the world's largest corporation who controlled this company town, in one fell swoop, wiped out the middle class of this town, the first and worst of the bloodletting that has not stopped to this day.

In the course of creating this play, I met the 70 and 80 year olds like Victor Reuther, who against enormous odds in the middle of the Great Depression, changed the whole game for American workers.  This was a straight up tale of victory....but it was held against the brutal backdrop of layoffs and disinvestment.  You couldn't see the one without the other.

I worked with a hodge-podge of theatre students, mostly the children and grandchildren of autoworkers,  who did not know this history and could see no future for themselves in the auto industry.  They and I learned together, were changed together, and were radicalized together.  We saw the injustice of a system which uses people as pawns and can easily and callously destroy lives in the name of private profit.  We saw how systems were devised to ensure the benefit of the few against the security of the many.

Like so many neophytes and converts, we, and particularly I, went too far.  My mental and physical health was damaged, my marriage nearly destroyed, and relationships within the school and in the program stretched to breaking point.  We...all the participants of the Collective Playwrights Workshop...(I was not old enough or mature enough to be anything but a peer)...became revolutionaries.  As so often happens, the revolution first burned those nearest and dearest.

T-719: Roam and Home

For the past 20 years, Wes and I have been very committed to the idea and practice of "home."  Most of the ideas of what "home" should be arose during our period of "roam."  I remember long conversations on the bike when we were touring England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, that I now know formed our life ethos.  While we were living in England, I had come across the ideas of Ruskin, who, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, immediately saw the life and soul killing trend of materialist capitalism.

John Ruskin

He preached  (or at least, I made out that he preached) a commitment to artisanship in all things: that life is uplifted when we are surrounded by the making of art.  Also, that art is a practice and process which can infuse every action and every craft.  Art is a way of being, of making, and understanding.  That is why baking bread is every much an artform as painting a picture.  That is why gardening is art, as is making a home.  When individual, conscious, positive attention is given to the creation of anything, it is imbued with a spirit not at all present in that which is mass manufactured.  That is why any handmade artwork is always better than a reproduction, even of a masterpiece.

This commitment to the personal, the individual, and the handmade has imbued every part of our life and work.  It is how we have chosen to teach, to create, and to live within in our home.  Two other huge elements shaped our understanding of how to live life.



In the Red Desert, not far from where I was raised.

 We both come from a place where humans do not dominate the landscape.  Always, we have known the voice, the power, and the beauty of the living earth.  From our earliest days, we have known that what is of the earth, must return to the earth, and we must be carriers and caretakers of that journey.  We are natural born children of the earth. As such, we eschew the chemical, the plastic, the manufactured as much as possible.  We started eating and making whole foods, for instance, in the 1970's.   My house, my clothes, my garden: all natural, no chemicals, no plastics.

When Wes was a very young man, he chanced to take a bike ride across America with a man who worked with Timothy Leary at Harvard at the beginning of the 1960's.  Wes was a lost young man recently fired from a hateful job in a lumber mill in Montana when he chanced to give Robert a place to sleep on his floor.  Robert was cycling across the country alone, by way of itinerant monk.  Traveling without money, scrounging places to sleep, eating very simply, and when absolutely necessary, doing manual labor to earn a little cash.  Life was consciously and purposely reduced to its most essential elements: thought, movement, conversation, sleeping, and eating.  The two stayed up all night talking.

The next morning, Wes, as only Wes could do, left his meager possessions to his friends in Montana, jumped on his ten-speed racing bike, slung his mountain back pack on his back, and left to journey with Robert.  Bicycle purists are shuddering at this thought.  Racing bikes are ill equipped for long distance travel, being both uncomfortable and flimsy for the pounding miles.  The last thing you want to do is carry something on your back, especially a large and bulky pack, while crouched over the handle bars.  But then, as now,  Wesley was rash and extraordinarily pain tolerant .  Planners of the world, like me, cannot imagine walking out the door without a list, such freedom/thoughtlessness is overwhelming.

He spent the next months traveling the country with Robert, during which he developed a profound distrust of the money system.  In reality, Robert probably gave Wes the words and conceptual framework to understand what was already there.  The goal of modern capital is to create a new form of servitude.  By tying people to ownership, especially through the power of debt, it can be arranged that people will willingly send the majority of their earnings to the keepers of capital.   Wes's own proto anarcho-libertarianism fused with Robert's anti-establishmentarianism.  When I first met Wes, he had no bank account, no drivers' license, no insurance, few possessions.  But he had travelled all around America and Europe as a self-propelled nomadic.  He valued and created experience.  I fell in love with him the night he told me of his travels.

We saw in each other our much longed for travelling partner.  We roamed throughout the eighties, hitchhiking and biking throughout the United States and Europe, talking endlessly about the right way to live.  The travels taught us to live without taking, to use as little as possible, to avoid debt and stay away from the  traps of modern servitude, and to commit to surrounding ourselves with the handmade, the indigenous, and the natural.  Being on the road, with nothing, taught us how live a thoughtful life  It taught us to be conscious about our choices, and cognizant of their impact.  It took moving to Flint, Michigan, however, to teach us that was not enough.

T-720: The Commitment is Made, Let the Wrangling Begin

The decision has been made.  In 720 days, Wes and I will begin our 60 Soul Search on Cycle.  For years and years, we have been talking about taking a Portland to Portland run by bike...and doing it on Wes' 60th birthday.   We will do this to mark a transition our life and to harken back to our first years together.  It will mark the end of the years of Massive Work, where both of us regularly worked 60 hour weeks and did little else, giving ourselves wholly (and destructively) to our jobs.  It harkens back to the first years of our marriage and youth, where some of the happiest days of our life were spent on long distance bike travel.

An assessment is in order.  Where are we now?  Still both embedded in our work. Both overweight by at least 40 pounds, which is is much worse on me because I am full foot shorter than Wes.  Both suffering from chronic stress. Both feeling the damage of this 20 years of intense work.

I feel-- already-- the exuberance of making this change.  Because I can see an end---in 720 days--which is, after all, not around the corner---I can feel the burden begin to lift.  There is a lot to do to get ready, especially for me.  It is easier for Wes.  He will retire from teaching in one year.  That is clean and clear.

I, however, am the founder and Executive Director of Matrix Theatre Company.  It is a constant effort to keep this complex little operation going and growing.  I am deeply embedded in entirely too much of its operations.  Extricating myself and ensuring that company will survive is a bit like separating conjoined twins.  The good news is that I have been applying the cautering iron in several areas for several years.  But still...

The other issue is that we live in a house with animals, in Detroit.  There will be many arrangements to be made to ensure their and its safety during our long journey.

And then there are many, many details about the biking itself.  Previous tour experience tells us to travel from West to East.  We know we want to take a train to the West and start from there.  Wes wants to buy equipment at the beginning of the trip, to which I am utterly opposed.  I want to get everything working and tested before we leave.

This is an old tension between us.  I am the careful planner; Wes loves the symbolic, extravagant gesture.  He creates 10 tons of work to avoid 1 ton of work.  I plug along forever.   Let the dance begin.