Wait, Where’s My Ride News?

One of the most wonderful things about doing the Climate Ride was the support. The ride is directed by Blake Holiday - he wears his name well - and supported by about fifteen other ride leaders, each with a specific role. Our meals were catered. Our gear was trucked from campsite to campsite in a Penske truck. Every morning at breakfast, Blake stepped us through the ride for the day in a friendly talk laced with jokes and encouraging tips. And then you filled your water bottles, pumped your tires, and rolled out with your friends for another stretch of stunning California scenery.

I’m home now. I want every day to start with Blake giving me a pep talk that has me laughing into my coffee, and then going over the challenges and pitfalls of my day. Mile 37, turn right at the bridge, watch the gravel! It would be quite thrilling if most days could start with a leisurely twenty mile ride with 50 of my friends before work, to the first water stop.

I remember on the bus up to Fortuna the Saturday before the ride started looking around and thinking how healthy everyone was. This was a subset of humans fit and strong enough to consider cycling 320 miles over 5 days. Lucky folk. Also driven to push their bodies, and motivated to take up a challenge for a great cause. As I got to know more people on the ride, I realized many of them were already working in the environmental industry - movers and shakers, young people with incredible energy, and veterans of decades of pushing for climate action and bike advocacy. As the hospice nurse in the crowd, I felt a bit like a fish on a bicycle, but then halfway up the endless Leggett Hill I met a cardiologist from UCSF and we talked work for a bit and I remembered that the disparate pieces of my life actually fit very well together.

I still felt very like the newbie athlete I am around this group. There was Kip, our ride photographer, whom I discovered had run the Boston Marathon course from finish to start and then turned round and ran it from start to finish! Not only that, but at the finish, he beat Lance Armstrong! That’s a lot of italics, I know, but I think he earned it. I asked him what possessed him to do such a thing. He had a convoluted story about it, but essentially his answer seemed to be because I could.

There were also a lot of veterans of previous Climate Rides, like Dave Howes, on his 10th ride and about to turn 70, and Evan, affectionately known as Rider #1, who had been the first person to ever sign up for a Climate Ride when it was conceived. Every time he rode by me (which was often), I would think Rider #1! and it gave me energy to go on.

Another thing that gave me energy to go on were the endless snacks and giant meals. I probably consumed half my body weight in food over the 5 days. On Century Day, Blake cautioned us to put something in our mouths every 45 minutes, whether we felt like it or not. I couldn’t quite meet that goal, but I definitely ate every hour. There was a giant table of snacks for us to take in the mornings and water/snack stops every 20 miles or so. And it worked. I didn’t bonk once.

But let me tell you what it felt like to actually be on the ride. Many moments stand out in my mind. If you have read previous blog posts, it won’t surprise you to hear that as I rolled out of the campsite on the first morning and headed down the quiet misty early morning road, I spontaneously started to cry. An uprush of emotion that all the months of training and fundraising had brought me to this moment; that I was actually doing the Climate Ride. This happened numerous times on the ride, usually on a mad downhill rush, or a moment of crazy beauty. There were many hours on the road to think. I was in the happy situation of belonging to a team, but a very small one - Climate One had only 2 of us to start, then Greg joined, and on the last day a few of our alumni. So I had familiar people I could ride and hang with, but I also mingled a lot and met new folks. And I rode alone as much as I wanted to. I thought about the patient I was dedicating my ride to, a young woman with young kids in her last days. I sang favorite songs to myself and thought about my life and how I would like it to be going forward. Sometimes I was just taking in the scenery, smelling the sea air, and oh yeah, trying to stay alive as aggressive motorists thundered by leaving about six inches of space between us and their F150s. We had been warned that the folks between Pt. Arena and Gualala were not very well disposed towards cyclists. This proved eerily true. But we all survived.

I’m going to publish this and finish part #2 of the ride when I can. For the moment, I just want to honor the fantastic ride organizers and my fellow riders who had done this event before me for their phenomenal support and love along the way. There are not too many things I do that I can really say are pretty immediately life-changing, but this is definitely one of them. Roll out!

It’s All Over Bar the Riding

Where to start? It’s tempting to describe the Climate Ride moment by moment from Sam, the first friendly face at 8am on Saturday morning who told me where to register, where to bring my bike, and...but no. That would get really tedious, really fast. So I’ll start where I am: near dinnertime on day #2 at Caspar Beach Campground just south of Fort Bragg. I’m sitting in my campsite by a little stream surrounded by daisies and buttercups and young redwoods decked out with their sweet spring light green tips. I rode 128 miles in the past 2 days and I feel on top of the world. Also pretty amazed. I rode how many miles?! Is this really me? Riding the Climate Ride??

Tomorrow is the possible century: that is one of the things foremost in my mind. Will I be able for it? How will I feel at Mile 70, the deciding point? Yesterday I rode 70 miles, more than I have ever covered in one day. As I spun into camp, feeling like a million bucks, Blake the ride director high-fived me and I blurted out that I had just ridden longer than ever before. Last night during the evening talks, he said he had been told that by a few people and asked us all to stand up. We got a round of applause. Welcome to the spirit of Climate Ride! 

Someone asked me as we rode today why I had joined a team to ride (lots of people do it solo). I heard myself say “I wanted to belong.” As mildly pathetic as that sounds, I reflected afterwards on how true it was. Newly post-divorce, living in a new town, and without a lot of the community I had been part of during my marriage, last year I was consciously looking for something to be part of. Then I got on a road bike for the first time, and it just all sort of unfolded. Seven months later, I’m riding 320 miles over 5 days from Fortuna south to San Francisco with a bunch of strangers, several of whom are fast becoming close friends. As my mum used to say, stranger things happen at sea. But not many of them.

The night before the ride started, 125 of us piled into the back patio of the Eel River Brewing company for a pre-ride dinner and feast of locally brewed beer. Knowing only one person (whom I had met all of once), I found myself at a table with some folks who quickly proved excellent dinner companions. My favorite was Ken, the founder of a cool environmentalist organization (Environmental Working Group) that certifies organic and environmentally friendly products. As we downed some excellent local brews, he was heard to announce: “It’s all over now, bar the riding.” Hit my funnybone. We were all a bit nervous and punchy. Months of training, some serious fundraising, and here we were, the night before the ride. It felt like that moment when the pilot of your airplane announces over the PA that if anyone is not traveling to New Delhi, it’s time to leave the aircraft.

Along the way, there have been many more laughs and moments of absurdity, thrill and a surreal sort of joy. One of them just happened. I’m sitting at my wooden campsite picnic table, writing this and listening to Gregory Alan Isakov, and Lac, one of the ride leaders, comes by with a tray of caprese salad hors d’oeuvres. I’d been eyeing them at the camp kitchen earlier and I’m really hungry. Dinner is in five minutes, he says gently, as I take little hit of mozzarella/tomato/basil. Seriously? This is camping? Well, yes. Camping Climate Ride style. If you have ever clipped into a road bike in your life, or even if you haven’t, I earnestly entreat you to consider taking part in this event. It’s a cliche, and the same could be said of any random bend in the road of the day, but it WILL change your life!

The Idiocy of Living With a 20 Year Old Car

A patient of mine has a young son. He knows that his mom is dying. When I asked how he’s dealing with it, she told me how he will tell her things he is sad about: trivial things, matters it is likely easier for him to pour his sadness into than the imminent loss of his mom.

When I have been visiting this patient, working sometimes in vain to manage her symptoms, I often drive away with frustration and despair as my companions. Some days it is too hard to carry the weight of it, the futile endeavor of trying to make her comfortable, increase her quality of life, buy her a little more time with her kids. I have noticed that on my drives away from her house, the idiosyncracies of my 20-year-old car become less endearing than usual. In fact, they handily become the target of my frustration and sense of failure.

Take the absence of a driver door handle. The cable that controls these handles tends to snap when your Jag is more a couple of decades old. The first time it snapped, my mechanic found me a new door handle in a junkyard. Okay, it wasn’t quite the same color as my car, but it worked and I was so delighted to actually be able to open my car door like normal people again. Then that cable snapped. I wasn’t about to plunk down another $350, so I decided to live with the quirkiness of it. No big deal, to just leave my driver side window open enough to reach in and open the door from the inside. Okay, it may look to a lurking cop like I am breaking into my own car, and yeah, on rainy days the driver’s seat gets wet, which is more than a minor inconvenience since the leather also has a big gash into it so rain gets into the foam of the seat and really soaks me if I unwittingly sit on it. But hey, small price to pay.

The trouble builds when I have to drive on the freeway. Since the electric window controls are also broken, I can’t put my driver side window up and down from the inside. (Are you still with me? This is getting sort of tedious, I know, but persevere, there IS a point to the story.) So if I have to drive on the freeway, it gets really noisy and on cold days, really cold. Jessie and I have devised a sleek and streamlined solution to this problem that I feel speaks to our innovative problem-solving natures. When we need to drive somewhere with the windows closed all the way, so we can actually hear each other speak, she gets in the passenger seat. I stand outside the car and I lock the driver door, which on old Jags means all the windows close. When the windows are closed all the way, I quickly UNLOCK the door, turning my key just enough to unlock but not bring the windows down. Then Jessie leans over and opens the driver door for mom from the inside. I gracefully enter my car and we drive away, quietly chuckling at the absurdity of our lives. At least we never have to describe to anyone, we both think, the ridiculous measures we have to resort to just to drive around and hear each other talk.

I think my point here, started long ago up there in the first paragraph, was that sometimes we are dealing with stuff that’s too big for us. So we put it on smaller stuff. That way it’s easier to deal with. I’m about to head off on my Climate Ride. With the bookending weekends, plus Memorial Day, I will be gone for 10 days. More than one of my patients may die while I am gone. This is almost unbearably difficult for me to consider. One way to deal with this is to get really really mad at my car for being such a heap of junk. It uncomplainingly drives me around all day long, starting up without a sputter every morning (this has not been true of all my cars, thus I am secretly grateful every time it is true of a vehicle I own) and really asking very little more than periodic coolant and motor oil top-ups (bit leaky on both counts). And yet I can get verbally abusive at the lack of door handle or the way the cup holders don’t reliably hold cups when I turn a corner (hot coffee in the lap more than once).

Still, better than having to face up to the fact that when I return to work on May 29th, some of my patients may not be around to welcome me back.

Catching the Last Poem

Last Friday night, I had a ticket to hear David Whyte, the wonderful West Yorkshire poet, read from his work at the Unitarian Church on Franklin Street in San Francisco. I had been looking forward to it for weeks. A poetry reading by a beloved poet in the city? Quite the rare treat. Plus coming at the end of a rough week at work, it seemed like the perfect antidote. What better way to forget about the two emotionally wearing visits I had done back-to-back Friday afternoon than to listen to Whyte read from his gently profound work?

By 7:30, the church was full and the air of expectancy palpable. It reminded me of the Billy Collins readings I had been to: a large crowd, sort of like a small rock concert, nothing like the usual spotty showings for poets. Whyte has a following. He is deservedly beloved. When his wife came out to introduce him, and the sound system proved her introduction untenable, he walked up the central aisle and attempted to use his clip-on mike to allow her to make the introduction. That didn’t work either. The minutes dragged on, as they tried to sort out the sound problems. I felt for them.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to suffer my own issues in the pew halfway down the church. The emotional toll of the difficult visits I had made that afternoon did some very rapid and unexpected catch-up with me. I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable to a strong attack of grief. I watched David Whyte, one of my poetry heroes, up there on the church altar trying to figure out the sound system, and I pretty rapidly realized that I could not tolerate being in an audience of several hundred, trapped in a pew, listening to a reading, when what I really needed to do was escape and be alone.

I had a vision of the cool windy city streets we had glimpsed on our way from our car to the church. I discovered I very much needed to be outside, walking those streets, with no particular goal or destination, just in the fresh air, alone, with nobody around. Feeling like there was very little time to lose before the reading got underway and it would be rude and disruptive to leave, I leaned across to my friend, made my excuses, told her I was okay but needed to go for a walk and would catch up with her afterwards. And I left.

The steep streets of the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of San Francisco were indeed cool and windy, as the city so often is. I thought longingly of a coffee shop, some anonymous Starbucks (usually anathema to me, but few places more easy to blend into the crowd). Van Ness was a mess of roadwords. No coffee shops in sight, just car dealerships and dark office buildings. I walked uphill to the triangle of churches that make up Cathedral Hill. At this point, I had begun to sob uncontrollably. I was grieving the imminent death of a beloved patient. I had had a profound visit with her that afternoon, during which we discussed what might come after death (white light? Something more wonderful than our poor imaginations could conjure?) She had wept, and I had been grateful her eyes were closed, because I wept too, holding her hand, hoping she would not open her eyes because she hated crying and had told me she didn’t want me to cry about her death either. How not to cry about this? I had driven from her visit directly to another very difficult visit not a mile away, with a young woman who had young children. There had seemed no way to adequately deal with these two visits before heading out to hear David Whyte. Now, it was time to deal. The emotional clock had struck.

I found a stone bench outside St. Mark’s Cathedral. There was nobody around. The city is a curiously and sometimes reassuringly anonymous place to be when you need to have a good cry. Nobody really gives you a second glance. You can sit there on a stone bench and sob in full daylight, and nobody cares. This could seem awful, but it was a relief to me. I didn’t want anyone to notice my distress. I just wanted to sit there, in the center of the giant teeming city, and feel the grief and try to figure out ways to soothe myself.

Eventually I found them. I listened to some favorite songs in my earbuds. And soon I felt ready to go search out that cup of coffee. I found the most excellent little Italian deli on Franklin, with tons of fantastically authentic Italian delicacies. The real Italian barista seemed to sense my distress, as he offered me some free cookies. I really appreciated it, but it just made me want to cry again, so I made my escape with his cup of excellent coffee, and sat on the steps of the Unitarian church listening to Nathaniel Rateliff, and thinking about my two patients. When my coffee was done, I went inside, sat on the floor at the very back of the church, and was just in time for David Whyte’s last poem, a compellingly gorgeous reflection on life and the journey and what happens along the way and what it all might mean.

Despite the exquisite nature of his work, I knew I could not have tolerated the whole reading. Somehow, in the face of the deaths of younger people, all the wisdom, all the philosophy,  all the gorgeous poetry in the world was not enough. All the walls we have raised fall down. All the defenses crumble into rubble and rubble’s dust. When you are sitting at the bedside of someone who is facing their imminent and untimely death, there is very little that prepares you for what to say. You just have to rely on instinct. Sometimes all you have is silence, active listening, loving touch.

The reading ended. I rejoined my friends and was grateful to be driven back home to Marin. One day, I hope to go see David Whyte read again, and maybe catch more than just his last poem.

Riding Fool gets Popped for Cresting Hill

So I head out on my training ride at 8:30 last Sunday after the usual three hours of lying awake wondering whether today’s the day I get run over, or fall on my head from not clipping out fast enough, or maybe get chased off Highway One and into Tomales Bay by the Angels storming by on their Harleys.

It’s a gorgeous day and I meet up with my riding buddy in San Geronimo. We head west from the San Geronimo Valley to Olema, where a sudden rain squall puts a dent in the lovely downhill to the town. This was not in the forecast. WTH? It is somehow the first time I have ever biked in the rain since taking up the sport last October. Yes, that would be a lot of rain dodging on my part. But I don’t happen to like the feeling of being soaking wet and shivery while I ride into the headwind. Seasoned riders might call me a rain wimp. I can take it.

The rain stopped and we loaded up on caffeine at the Olema Deli and headed through Point Reyes Station and out to the Nicasio Reservoir. We had decided to add a few miles to our ride by what Emma-Louise terms an “out and back.” This generally means you ride up some crazy hill and get to the other side, only to turn around and ride back up the hill from the other side, all so you can add some miles to your ride. I understand the rationale. I just balk at the double-hill aspect of the whole endeavor.

I am not one of those people who subscribe to the time-weathered philosophy that the climbing of the hill is the main point and getting to the top is really irrelevant. When I am riding up a hill, I really quite desperately want to be at the top so I can freewheel down the other side laughing and shouting “Yes! I did it!” The whole toiling up the grade...not the point of the thing for me. Maybe I’ll never be a philosopher.

Anyway, we’re climbing the hill that leads into the Hick’s Valley and I’m thinking longingly of the stop at the Cheese Factory where I can have a snack, a drink, and maybe even lie in the soft grass for a while listening to the geese. I’m near the top of the hill and there’s a layby. In the layby is a parked SUV, and I can hear aggressive music blasting out from it. Next thing, I see the driver and they are sitting out the driver’s door and they are pointing something black and shiny directly at me. My first thought is: am I about to be shot? My second thought is: why? What have I done? Does he maybe hate cyclists? Does he particularly hate cyclists who cycle up big hills and almost make it to the top?

As I’m having these thoughts, I can hear the person in the SUV yelling, and I have the mad thought that if I am indeed about to be shot for the heinous transgression of cresting a hill, I should at least try to dodge the bullet. After all, I’m the single mom of a 16-year-old daughter who just went to her junior prom last night, and I really need to get home to her so I can hear all about it.

I’m about ten feet from the SUV, feeling like I really might be in the last moments of my life, and still having the idea that I should weave on my bike so as to dodge the life-ending bullet, when I realize the driver is a woman and the gun she is pointing at me has a lens and a shutter. As I ride by, a bit wobbly on my bike at this point, she’s shouting “Yeah! Nearly there! Keep going!” I smile, really weakly, and I even call out apologetically “I thought that was a gun!”

But afterwards, it got me thinking. If I had been riding the backroads of my native Ireland, i NEVER would have assumed that black thing someone was pointing at me was a gun. It just would not have entered my consciousness. I’m not a paranoid person. I’m sort of the antithesis of paranoid. So why did I jump to that? Oh, right, it could have to do with those two words: MASS and SHOOTING.

Has it really come to this? An Irish bicyclist who would be hard pressed to tell you when she last clapped eyes on a gun is riding her bike up a hill in bucolic West Marin and a photographer is taking pictures of her and she thinks she’s about to be shot?

The good news is, I made it to the Cheese Factory. I had a good draught of coconut water and my sandwich. I laughed quietly at myself for making such a crazy assumption, even as I felt a little foolish and quite a bit sad for what it said about the society we are living in. And then I rode another 30 miles with Emma-Louise and when I got home, I got the full skinny on the junior prom.