T-88: A Home on the Road, Bedroom Version

Getting ready to be on the bike for months on end, on a self-supporting tour, means thinking about making the lightest, most comfortable home possible.  Oh yes, and make sure it weighs less than 70 pounds total.  This has been a big effort that is not quite done.

 

In our house, we have a kitchen, a living room, a dining room,  two bedrooms, an office,  a bathroom, and a full basement where we wash clothes, store food, and watch movies.  I assure you we have filled every room with furniture, art, tchotchkes, and the detritus of daily life.  Nearly all of the functions of our life in our house still have to continue when we are on the bike.  We will still need to eat and sleep and keep ourselves clean and healthy.  There will be hours in camp that have to be filled with reading or writing or maintaining ourselves, our relationships, and our gear.

Because we will be travelling for months, through wide and varied terrain, through all kinds of weather, we also have to have carry a closet.  We know from previous tours that bike problems are an inevitable; we have to carry a tool chest as well.

How to do all this without overloading these two fat old slow souls?  How to manage the need for both comfort and lightness?  It also important to consider durability and ease of repair. Being on the road is necessarily dirty and sometimes quite rough.  More than once, we have slept in sites no one would consider a beauty spot--on gravel or in the pouring rain.  Clothing, tents, and sleeping gear will take a beating on trip like this.

So what's a soul to do?  I have thought long and hard about the problem of the bedroom.  

From this...

In tours past, we have each taken one pad, a sleeping bag, and threw them in a good tent.  Even in our younger, fitter days, we would often face a poor night's sleep.  Always, Wes is a better sleeper than me, able to sleep sitting up on a moment's notice and wake up refreshed.  Me?  Not so much.  Even in my comfortable bed, I toss and turn and smash my pillow and struggle to find a position that keeps my slight spina bifida hips and back from throbbing or going numb.   Then it is another effort to shut down the chatter in my mind. 

In the past few years, while car camping, we have discovered that sleeping together, under a down comforter is infinitely preferable to snarling up in separate sleeping bags.  We can snuggle and share body heat if it is cold.  We can throw off the comforter if we get warm.  Usually, it's both.  I sleep cold and want Wes' warmth.  Wes sleeps hot and kicks the covers off his feet.   Ok.  So we want to use a down comforter instead sleeping bags. 

 But down comforters are usually surrounded by white cotton, a terrible choice in wet or dirty conditions.  So now we need to find a way to protect the comforter.  Solution: a double silk liner bag  (from Campmor) which will keep the comforter clean and somewhat protect from damp.  On a really cold night, we will be able to get in the liner for increased warmth.  Good.  What is the weight and size cost?  Oh my.  More than 9 pounds.  Even compressed the bag and liner are 21 inches by 8 inches by 6 inches.  Big.

We choose to keep that weight and size in recognition that we have to sleep well or we will not be able  to keep up the cycling day after day. 

The bedroom is not done.  We still need a bed and a bedroom.   We choose to take two pads EACH. Wes will take two closed cells, and I will take a closed cell and a Therma-rest pad.  More weight, more bulk.  Add two more rolls the same size of the comforter roll.  Weight cost: 4 pounds for Wes and 5 pounds for me.  Weight so far: 18 pounds.


To this...

Finally, looking at our tent, we have several choices.  The big cabin tent we use for car camping is obviously wrong.  The small tent we bought last year for the bike trip, although light and small, was extremely uncomfortable.  The few nights we spent in it were miserable, sleepless, body-aching wrecks.  The tent we took on the last bike trip won't do either, with its broken zippers and holey floor. 
That sets me on a search to find a tent.  Light, strong, roomy, easy to set up, able to survive big winds and big rain.  We have even found ourselves in snow.  After look, look, look, we are thrilled with a great tent from REI.  Good size with plenty of storage space.  Wonderful weight: only 7 pounds and very small package. 

We almost have a bedroom (although we are still debating what to do about pillows).  Size: total bulk of  21 x 25 x 6.  Whew!  Weight cost:  25 pounds.  These are big numbers.  Can we make up weight and size in other parts of our home on the road?

 

T-90 The Task of Readiness

We are down to the final quarter before we leave on our cross country bicycle trip.  From nearly two years ago, when we decided it was time for a major change in our life, until today, there has a been a flurry of activity to get ready.  When we were younger, leaving on one of these trips was a much simpler task.  We would save our money, end whatever marginal job we had, get rid of or store our meager possessions, then start.

Our first major trip, around the British Isles, was a lark by comparison to massive heaven and earth realignment we have had to do for this trip.  Comparison:

1983: We were staying in a furnished apartment provided for us by the University of Reading while I was on a Fulbright Fellowship.  We had a box of books, and two backpacks of clothes, and a basic camping set-up from our hitchhike across the country before going to Europe.  We owed no money and had no obligations after my fellowship ended.  We bought our bikes from a second hand dealer and crudely fashioned panniers out of cast off bags.

2013: We have a historic house, two cats, an autistic dog, a cabin in Wyoming, full time employment as a teacher, run a busy but always financially challenged community based theatre, have debt on the cabin, debt on a car, a whole raft of bills and obligations.  We are modern Americans, up to our eyeballs in stress, work, and complicated relationships. 

But we also know that this web is killing us.  We want a different way to be in the world as we enter the third third of our lives.  Teaching, long Wes' joy and passion, has become untenable in the face of  40 student classrooms, more than 200 students a day, 3 high stakes tests a year, and the constant drumbeat of blaming teachers.  It is clear that Wes' pension is daily growing more unstable.  Already there are taxes and fees and reductions of benefits that were not there just a few years ago.  It is time to step away from 4:00 am mornings and 12 hour days, and the weekends of grading papers.  It is well past time of always being exhausted, of having no time or energy for anything else--for friendship, for recreation, for restorative time spent in nature.  Wes is carrying around a big belly that distresses him, but stress still drives him to seek solace in food.

I am worn out from the constant worry and burden of Matrix.  It has been my dream and my deepest passion, but after so many years of "spinning straw into gold", I just want time to pay attention to myself.  Instead of always facilitating the creativity of others, I would like to facilitate my own creativity.  I really want to invest in relationships in a way that I have not been able.  The first relationship that needs some nurturing is my relationship to myself.

Like Wes, my body is showing the signs of a long burden.  I am no longer overweight, but have slipped into obesity.  I have lived with a feeling of constant shame and embarrassment because of my weight.  Because I am also perverse, that shame drives me to seek solace in sugary, fatty foods...which of course, starts the whole shame cycle again.   Enough.

Over the next few days and weeks, as we move to the final days of preparation, I want to look at all the structures and systems we are remaking in this effort to set ourselves free from the self-created and self chosen shackles we have created for ourselves.   Oh my.

T-360: The Healing Power of Fire and Water

Lake Michigan near Escanaba, MI

The Healing  Power of Fire and Water

June 25, 2012

Yesterday, when we finally got in the car after the giant strain to  get packed and out the door to Wyoming,  I  suddenly felt my neck.    It hurt!  I   could barely bend it.  I had apparently been clenching my  shoulders, neck, and jaw, unconsciously, while we were packing, and scrubbing, and checking and re-checking the pages of lists.

Who knows how long I had clenching?  For all I know, it could have been for months.  It could have been for hours. I was, and have been, so focused on the task,  that I blocked off communication from my body.  I know this is a bad, bad thing, but I also know that it is how I have survived, after a fashion,  in my day to day life at Matrix.

Oh boy, does it show, too.   It shows in the giant pouch of fat circling my abdomen and hips, the encirclement of daily stress and strain.  It shows in the incipient dowager's hump bringing my shoulders and my ears ever closer together.  It shows in my throbbing jaws which radiates tension across my skull.   It shows in my swollen and tender feet and gimpy knees which complain when I ask them to carry me just a little further.   I feel it most in my locked and angry hips, which cry out  in rigidity and sorrow every time I try to just let go.

I have learned, oh so well, to silence the complaints. That is not correct.  I have learned to not hear these complaints.  I have become the perfect Cartesian thinking automata.    Doing, as Marge Piercy so elegantly puts it, "what has to be done, again and again."

The life of the company, the task at hand at Matrix, has always taken precedent over everything.   Over my need for daily exercise, over regular meals, over time with my husband, certainly over time with my friends, over time spent bettering my community or my home.   I have let it become my be-all  and end-all.  It's been a pretty bad choice, one that I am trying to end.

And let me tell you, I am encountering resistance.   Almost everyday,  someone tells me the choice to go on this bike trip, to let the daily life of the company go, is wrong or dangerous or foolhardy or....

It may be.  But I am just self-aware enough to know that I need to heal my body and my spirit.  If the cost of that healing is death of my company, then my company is poorly devised.   I will do what I can to put it on a sure, self sustaining footing, but I can no longer offer my body up on that particular altar.

Other, more sensible people, with better body connection and better health habits, would never have let it get to this place.  But these are old and sinister ways with me, born in childhood, nurtured during my high school years, and perfected during my irrational march to completing my coursework for my PhD by the age of 25.

Achievement "out there" masked and substituted for the emptiness and sorrow "in here".   But now, years of therapy and anti-depressants later, I long for a sense of wholeness and safety with myself, within myself.

I glimpse it, here on the teeming shores of Lake Michigan, in the ever present rolling of the surf, in the whispering of the cedars and the birch. 


I see it in the licking flames casting a glow of warmth and gentleness on Wes' face as he stares into its dance.  I feel it in the rocking  pain at the base of my spine as I walk an excited Louie through  lush greenness of the JW Wells State  Park, way up on Green Bay. 

These little whispers are calling me to a deeper connection to myself, to God, to the universal divine, which asks me to honor its creation in me, of me,  through me.  I hear it, so slightly, so slightly.  I mean to hear it more.

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.