Riding Fool Accidentally Rides a Century

It’s been over a week since I rolled out my gate on my independent challenge Climate Ride. Four days later, I rolled back in my gate, tired but extremely happy. Thanks to my generous donors, I had raised over $2300 for climate action. Since then, my body has consistently felt like it got run over by a Mack truck. But the happy has remained. I am so thrilled I did the ride, and I will probably never do it again.

On any such endeavor, there are standout moments. Some moments stand out because they were funny or uplifting, and some for other reasons. Accidentally riding a century on day 3 was one of those. How do you accidentally ride your bike a hundred miles? I will give you a hint: it involves being a moron. 

I planned my ride down to the last detail. I knew the mileage of every stretch. I packed just the right amount of gear. And I booked the hotels months in advance: Jenner, Mendocino, Jenner. So the distances in miles for the four days were 64, 87, 87, 64. Perfect!

The Jenner Inn didn’t have a vacancy for the third night so I had to spend a hideous sum on a room at The Inn at the Tides. Still, I had always dreamed of staying there, and I reckoned now was a good time to treat myself. But strangely, when we rolled into Jenner on the first afternoon, I couldn’t find it. This turned out to be because it isn’t in Jenner. It’s in Bodega Bay, eleven miles to the south. Adding eleven miles to Saturday’s ride put me at 98. How I laughed.

One of my other favorite moments was applying chamois butter in the middle of the road. We were stopped at a roadworks red light north of Jenner and there were two trucks right ahead. It was Day 2. My body was protesting that it really did not want to do this riding thing again today and could we not just lie down for a few weeks. Some way in to the ride that morning, I had decided that after my loved ones, chamois butter was my favorite thing in this world. I just hoped the truckers were not looking in their rearview mirrors as I applied it. If you have never encountered this butter, I’ll just say this: it does not go on your face. 

Before I did the ride, people kept exhorting me to be safe. I ride a road bike in Marin, I know the dangers. But as the ride grew closer, the concern got more insistent. Several people asked if I had a will. Some wanted to know what I was leaving them in it. Like any fanatical road biker, I remained entrenched in denial. I’ll be fine, I kept saying airily. And no, you can’t have my jewelry.

But out on the road, the dangers of pedaling up Highway One were hard to ignore. Some of the bigger trucks passed so close I could apply my lipstick in their wing mirrors. The only problem with that scenario is I don’t wear lipstick. The RVs would come up behind me and crouch there, growling like cougars, waiting for a straight stretch to pass. I could feel their hot breath on my neck. Seriously: drivers of California, have you ever heard the term clearance? Do you have any concept of what three feet looks like? 

I thought that Day 3 would be the hardest day, but to my surprise, it was Day 2 that nearly did me in. For one thing, my legs let me know pretty early that they did not appreciate this weird new daily workout. Then there was the Jenner hill, followed by a number of lesser and yet very challenging hills. I would ride around a curve and see a small mountain rearing up ahead. I would pretend I did not have to ride up it, that the road somehow went around it. This pretense would last a short way up the small mountain, then it would fall apart. On one hill, there was a short stretch that just seemed vertical. It felt like riding up a wall. I really wondered what the hell I was doing. But then I reached the top and saw the view, up and down the Mendocino coast. I remembered what I was doing.

The other reason Day 2 was so hard was that mid afternoon, about two miles out of Gualala, a mad wind kicked up out of nowhere. We rode into it for a half mile, then it turned to crosswinds with gusts that just exploded at our bikes. On one scary downhill we both felt we could have been blown off. By the time we rolled into Point Arena a half hour later, we were exhausted and clear: riding on to Mendocino was just not safe. Nor was it feasible: google maps estimated 5 hours to ride the 28 miles.

We installed ourselves in the co-op market on the main street and considered our options. They were not encouraging. There is one bus from Point Arena to Mendo and it goes in the morning. We tried to book a Lyft. Nothing. We asked around: nobody was driving north. I even asked in the one bar in town. This was a big stretch for me. I’m the kind of person who hates to inconvenience someone to throw a life-raft to me just because I am drowning. But here I was in a strange bar in a strange town offering $60 to anyone who would drive us to Mendo. A beer-swilling bar patron called out that he’d do it for more, and what was I offering. Yeah, no. As the barmaid quietly pointed out to me, it was a bit dim to be asking a bar full of Friday afternoon boozers for a lift.

I headed back to the co-op and we trawled the Internet on our phones. July 4th weekend, no hotel rooms for 30 miles around. I made a pathetic sign on a piece of paper and we stood on the side of the road for a while. Lots of trucks and vans, no takers. I was beginning to think we might be sleeping in a field. Then a dusty black Prius pulled up. It was Nick. We had talked to him earlier down at the co-op, a sweet, friendly guy who seemed unduly perturbed that he couldn’t think how to get us to Mendocino. Now he had a plan.

This was where the day turned a little strange. Before stowing our bikes, Nick had to empty his car of a month’s worth of recycling. He politely declined any help, so we stood about watching as he laboriously tore up cardboard boxes and stuffed them with endless empty water bottles into a blue wooden recycling bin outside the co-op. Eventually, the car was empty enough to fit our bikes and after he had carefully wiped down his dashboard with a wet paper towel, we set out for Mendocino. 

For 28 long miles, I listened to him tell me about his health issues. They were legion, and I really felt for him, but I also longed to be stretched out on my hotel bed after a hot bath with dinner in my belly. Nick was in no rush. At one point, he pulled off the road to show us how the ocean at that spot appears to smile. It was all very lovely, but I caught Emma-Louise’s eye and I knew what she was thinking. Dinner. Bath. Bed. And please Nick, don’t be a serial killer.

Eventually we arrived in Mendocino. Nick drove us into the center of town and we reassembled our bikes, thanking him profusely. I tried to pay him with the $57 in my wallet, but he wouldn’t take a cent more than the gas cost. After painstaking calculations, he figured this was $2.16. I pressed my $57 into his palm but he would only take $2.16. 

I rode away from Nick with some very confused feelings. Relief, definitely, but also sadness that he was having such a hard time in life. I wished him good health, and happiness. Then, just as our hotel room was swimming into my hallucinogenic view, he pulled up beside us again. He had recalculated and gas had only cost $2.02. He wanted to give us fourteen cents back. I am not making this up!

We checked into our hotel and the lady behind the desk told use we could leave our bikes in a room off the reception. Life seemed like it was kind of returning to normal. We hobbled up to our room, changed into real clothing, showered, and headed down the town to have dinner. 

The Hillside Inn is a sister hotel to the Mendocino Hotel, but it has no restaurant so patrons are given a 15% voucher to have dinner at the Mendo Hotel and this is what we did. Imagine our surprise when we were tucking in to our giant plates of pasta and we looked up and Nick was standing by our table. He was holding my plastic water bottle. He was also holding a piece of paper with our hotel room number on it written in blue ink.

We warily invited him to join us, secretly hoping he would not, but he declined saying he had to get home. He had driven thirteen miles back with my water bottle. I felt bad. He disappeared off into the night to drive the thirteen miles home, and when we left the hotel after dinner, we left by a side door and scurried back to the Hillside Inn. I think both of us thought we might find Nick lurking in the grounds. I also think we have seen way too many horror movies.

After the trials of Day 2, Day 3 just floated by, despite being an unplanned century. By this time in a long ride, you get on the bike and your legs just start pedaling like that is what they do every day now. Because it is! Twelve miles south of Mendo, we met up with our friend Kendra who had driven up from Marin to join the ride. Emma-Louise sadly stashed her bike in the car and set off back to Marin to pick up her kids. Kendra and I set off.

I already had 135 miles in my legs. Kendra was fresh as a daisy. Plus she is a really strong rider. Feel free to go at your own pace, I told her. We can meet up at the next town. She said that was fine and then she promptly streaked off into the blue yonder. I watched her go with a little envy at her freshness. I had learned the importance of pacing myself. It felt to me that if I had to do a single extra mile, or arrive home a minute later than my goal of 2pm Sunday, I just wouldn’t be able to deal.

The ride south on Highway One from Navarro to Bodega Bay was stunning, stunning, stunning. The weather rocked it, 70s sunny and calm, and the hills seemed more down than up. I know that this makes no sense, but I was in a great headspace and that makes all the difference. Yes, I accidentally had 98 miles to ride instead of 87, but the scenery was so spectacular and the people we ran into so great and I was eating half my body weight in delicious food at every snack stop and really, life was excellent.

The Inn at the Tides was worth the extra 11 miles. It had a pool, and a hot-tub and a fabulous restaurant that looked out over Bodega Bay. I felt so lucky. I was heading into the home stretch, and we had all survived. 

This nearly changed outside of Tomales the next morning when Kendra was almost run off the road by a giant RV. Cycling a hundred yards behind her up gentle hill, I watched in horror as the RV passed too close by her and then left her so little space her bike wobbled dangerously over a huge drop-off. Both of us screamed at the driver but I doubt he noticed that he had almost just killed a bicyclist. Sobering. Some giant pastries and coffee at the Tomales Bakery were in order, and we rode the last 30 miles to San Geronimo quietly and carefully. Life is sweet. Neither of us were at all in the mood to give it up.

Like I said, headspace is crucial on a ride like this. As I rode down Nicasio hill into San Geronimo where Kendra lives, I realized that if I got off my bike for more than a few seconds, I would not get back on it. I would have to call my boyfriend and ask him to come pick me up. Five miles from home.

Kendra and I said a quick goodbye and she took a pic of me heading off to Fairfax. Some random biking dude had stopped and asked us directions to San Francisco. Ordinarily, I would have been happy to fill him in. But I couldn’t even explain to him: dude, I just rode 271 miles, if I stop and give you directions to San Francisco, it’s all over. He must have thought me kind of rude. Sorry random biking dude trying to get to San Francisco from San Geronimo last Sunday!

I rode in my gate at 2:22pm. George was there to meet me, a very welcome welcoming party of one. I made it! I kept repeating. I did it! George agreed, yes indeed, I had done it, and I was safe. He politely refrained from telling me what a wacked out nutter I was for having attempted such a thing and eased me to the couch where I decided I would stay for several months. And there I still am. Apart from having had to go to work every day this week. I still feel like my body was run over by an 18-wheeler. 

If I have one takeaway from my epic ride it is this: don’t ride alone. I’m eternally grateful to Emma-Louise and Kendra, and the other friends who started the ride with us on Thursday. Their company was crucial and even though I planned for it, I just don’t think I could have done it alone. Thank you riding buddies! Do it again next month? Yeah, no.

Let Go, Hold On Tight

When you are riding a roadbike downhill, you are going so fast you have to be aware of your surroundings every millisecond. You have to look out for debris in the road, for potholes, for ruts and glass and gravel. You have to watch for deer and squirrels. You have to check for cars behind you and cars approaching. You have to brake appropriately so you’re not too fast or crossing the median on a corner. You have to watch for stones and wet patches and sticks and cracks in the asphalt. Apart from that, you can really just zone out and get some thinking done.

Last Thursday’s ride, I found myself thinking about my daughter. She was in Paris, at the start of a 6-week backpacking tour of Europe with her boyfriend. This is really great and exciting and I am very thrilled for her and not at all terrified that my baby is six thousand miles away and I have no idea where or how she is most of the time. Plus France is recording its highest temperatures ever. It’s all fine, though, she’ll be fine. 

On the day they left, I drove them to the airport. We took her Jeep because it is really fun to drive and because while she’s away I’m secretly going to use it when I’m sick of my goody-two-shoes electric car. As I was tooling through Marin, I got a quick tutorial from Jessie on the quirks of her vehicle. Oh mom, she said, right as the car made a huge screeching sound rounding a corner, my car screeches sometimes. Not sure why. Then, because it was 94 degrees, I tried to put the driver side window down. As it went down, a weird coiled sort of cable snaked creepily up and then the window disappeared and I could not get it back. That’s so strange, Jessie said. It’s never done that before. She needn’t have worried. Being the driver of old Jags for so long, I felt kind of comforted and at home. Any more quirks? I asked her, secretly hoping for something extra quirky. The gas gauge is broken, she said. This was not the kind of quirky I had hoped for.

We drove to Oakland Airport with the freeway wind howling through the open window. It didn’t matter. The mood in the car was upbeat. The teens were heading off on an intrepid world adventure and I was  successfully ignoring the fact that I was about to say goodbye to them for six weeks and would have zero control over their destiny until August. Jessie turned the music up till it was loud enough we could hear it over the wind. 

By the way mom, she said as I pulled in to the departures curb, sorry about how messy my car is. I pretended not to have noticed. I’m good at that, because I have been doing it about her bedroom for years. We hugged goodbye on the curb, I told them seriously how much fun I expected them to have, took a couple of pics of them looking fabulously young and intrepid, and then drove away. I only cried for about fifteen minutes. 

Since they’ve been gone, I have been driving her car a lot. It’s just easier than dealing with the good-for-the-planet-but-how-far-can-I-really-drive electric car. Every time I get out of the Jeep, I take a few items of car trash with me. Bottles, ancient mechanic receipts, and tupperware containers full of science experiments. One was so bad I had to throw away the tupperware too. It was just too frightening to contemplate washing it out. Her car looks very minimally tidier now, but it’s still a work in progress. I just shut the door on her bedroom till she gets home.

The missives from Europe have been short and sweet. Mom, I just spent four hours trying to book a train from Amsterdam to Barcelona, can I use your card for flights? That was a yes, because the flights proved almost as cheap as train tickets and because I am a hopelessly unboundaried parent. Mom, the hotel lied about having WiFi. How will I know how much it costs to call you?  I told her to just call. She went down to the hotel foyer where the WiFi was at least sporadically available. We talked for a few exciting transatlantic minutes about all the challenges of navigating Paris, and how wonderful and fun it was. They climbed the Eiffel Tower. They were off to the Louvre. They got lost, and it was okay. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction that my daughter is finding her way on the other side of the world. 

Every morning, I light a candle for her safety. It burns during the time I’m getting ready to start work. Then I blow it out. I whisper be safe, Jessie and Alessandro, and head out to see my first patient. 

When you are riding a roadbike downhill, you are sometimes going so fast that in a strange way, as tightly as you have to hold on, you also have to let go.

Babe in the Headlights Goes Electric

For more than a decade, I have driven old Jags. When I say old, I’m talking last millennium. You know, when you say low mileage and what you actually mean is under a hundred thousand. The Jaguar XJ8s from the late 1990s are sleek, feline cars, classy, with relatively robust engines, and built like tanks. I mostly bought mine from my mechanics. Every time one of my cars was on the verge of clapping out, they seemed be selling one of their loaners. They were well maintained, and with ridiculously low resale value I could buy them cash down. Cheap to insure. They mostly started in the morning. And they guzzled fossil fuels like there was no tomorrow. 

Several events this Spring conspired to bring my Old Jag Era to a close. First, I totalled Jag #5. It was a random rainy day skid event, but when you only have Liability and you mash your front bumper and hood on a freeway onramp wall, your sleek feline vehicle is not worth repairing. Maybe not firing on all cylinders after the crash, I panicked and bought a replacement that Sunday from a private party in Sacramento. Not everyone is as honest as my mechanics.

So May rolls around and once again I have no car, yet my job entirely depends upon one. The citrus fruit Jag #6 was nonoperational outside my house, after I put $1100 into a new alternator, only to have the fuel pump fail as I drove it away from the shop. For the second time in a month, I was donating a car. This was humiliating, not to say weird. I had to go with a different nonprofit for the second donation. Who is this lady? Why does she keep giving us old Jaguars? Does she need help?

I have always said I wanted to drive my values and buy an electric car, and I’ve never been able to afford one. This Spring things reached a tipping point and I fell over into the bucket of folks who can make payments on used EVs with no money down. I looked at hybrids, and plug-in hybrids, but decided that if I was going to divest from the fossil fuel industry, I was going to leave gas stations firmly in my past. Two-thirds of California’s electricity comes from clean energy. We do the best we can. 

I’m not one of those people for whom it is thrilling to research new technology. I am one of those people who just want someone to tell them what is best to buy. And maybe come to the dealership with me to help me buy it. So I did my homework the best I could, but I may have glazed over a little at some of the details. Plus, in my defense, it’s hard to get good data out there from people who have been driving EVs for a while. Mostly it’s Tesla folks saying it’s great, you’ll never look back! You get over range anxiety really quickly! Uh-huh. Teslas now have a 200-mile range. Sweet, if you make $200k a year.

The first thing that overwhelmed me in my tentative internet research sessions was how many EVs there are out there now. Over 50 models. Oh please, could someone just tell me what to buy?

Every dealership website has these intrusive fake helper people, usually called Amber or Nikki, with whom you have a “chat” and they answer your questions (all except “please tell me what car I should buy?”) and make appointments for you to test drive specific vehicles. Then you talk to the dealers, and they have no idea who Amber or Nikki is, but they’re mad because she’s been giving out false information. Based on the fake helpers’ possibly false information, I decided that the Nissan Leaf and Volkswagen eGolf might be within my range.

So early one Saturday in mid May, I’m driving up to Santa Rosa to test drive cars. I’m white-knuckling it up the 101. I’ve never bought a car from a dealer. My mind was filled with the image of a hapless female being circled by sharks. Yet I was too proud to ask any of my male friends to come with me. I’ve got this! I’m raising a teen, how hard can it be to buy a vehicle from a used car salesman?

Salesman #1 was classic. I’m sure he was just trying to feed his family, but when the affordable 2015 Leaf didn’t work for me he went straight to a completely unaffordable 2018 model, such a great deal, leased car just returned...blah blah blah. Salesman #2 was bright, enthusiastic, and seemed honest. The awful truth is that you reach a point in your life where you are trying to buy a car from a kid who is young enough to be your son. I liked the eGolf. My possible son promised me earnestly it was a good fit for me. 

I bought my car on a Thursday night, driving north in the rain with my daughter after work to pick it up. I was in my friend’s Mazda, the fifth in a stressful patchwork of loaners I had driven over a period of weeks. I had reached the stage of depletion with the car-buying process where I just wanted to sign. Anywhere. Whatever. My possible son the dealer handed me over to a ‘finance specialist’ for the paperwork. They made me sit in the dealership waiting room with a terrible cup of coffee while they did stuff. What stuff? Steph Curry was on the giant TV, chewing his mouth guard in a close game with the Trail Blazers. He was maybe a little more stressed than me. But only a little. And he gets paid a bit more than I do.

In the Finance Room, my finance specialist was even younger than my son the dealer. He was also beautiful and very dapper in a dark suit with a vermilion shirt. I began signing papers. This is the clause that says if your car is damaged by a falling piano, you are only liable if it’s a Tuesday. Sign here, initial down here...I signed. I initialled. I tried to make informed decisions about the unnerving number of special deals, extra warranties, and monthly add-ons. At one point in the proceedings, vermilion shirt asked me what I did for a living. Not like he cared, just because things were terribly quiet in the room as I signed away my financial future. I’m a hospice nurse, I said. Oh, he said, staring at his computer screen with his beautiful fixed smile. That’s nice.

After all the paperwork, they led me dazed and confused to my car and gave me the keys. I shook hands with my son the dealer. I really wanted to thank him for making the whole ordeal less stressful than it could have been. But when I tried to do so, I mixed my metaphors. Instead of telling him I had felt like a deer in the headlights or a babe in the woods, I said I had felt like a babe in the headlights. They all smiled pityingly at me. Then they disappeared. I sat in my incredibly clean car and I wondered how to turn it on. No ignition!

I decided to start by pairing my iPhone with the Bluetooth. That way I could drive my new electric vehicle off the lot to soundtrack. Old Jags don’t have Bluetooth, they have cassette players. Pairing proved easy. Driving the car off the lot, not so much. I poked the Start button, with my key close by like they had said, and pressed the accelerator. Nothing happened. Seriously? I can’t get off the lot? I am NOT going back in there! I pressed a few more buttons randomly. Finally, I took the giant manual out of the glove compartment. Furtively searched the index for Starting the Car. It wasn’t there.

How to turn my electric car on was only the first of a very long list of things I should have been born knowing. And yet strangely, I was not. I have had to figure them out by a process of swearing inwardly and wondering aloud why the planet had to get mixed up in this climate change mess to begin with. Ok, maybe not so inward with the swearing. 

To start an eGolf, you have to press the brake. I thought about that as a metaphor. Putting an end to thirteen years of beautiful Jags and their insatiable thirst for fossil fuels, I hit the brake, pressed Start, and went into Drive. The car moved soundlessly off the lot to the tune of Louis Berry’s Restless, then down 101 in the Spring rain and into my brave new electric life.

Riding Fool Snacks on Bugs

Like any life-threatening activity, when you road bike fast downhill you pay really really close attention to what you are doing. Wednesday I was riding home from the Alpine Dam, a ride that I know like the back of my hand. The last stretch from the top of Azalea Hill to my door is a non-stop fast-paced downhill stretch that takes half an hour to ascend and nine minutes to come down. If you don’t attend to every millisecond of the descent, you could be toast. I love toast, but I don’t much want to resemble it.

A downhill when you are familiar with the road involves knowing exactly how much you need to brake at the start of each curve in order to safely make it through the bend without losing control and without crossing the median on a blind corner. On most bends, if I brake for one to two seconds, I have curbed my speed enough to ride freely into the curve and feel I can come out of it alive. Sometimes I let it go a little, see if I can take the curve with no braking. Yeah. No. Braking is generally a good thing. Coming out of it alive is never a given.

Wednesday was a warm Spring night, the first of the merry month of May and when I set out, I was trying to ride away from a tough week. This generally works, which is why we fools put on the spandex and clip in with the silly shoes and pedal up vertical slopes. But as I rode up the mountain I felt slower than usual. The mountain was also a lot longer and steeper than usual. This is typically a sign that I am going to have to ride harder to leave my day behind. Either that or CalTrans has actually employed some guys to make our local hill higher and more steeply graded. This happens. I have seen them out there, with their traffic cones.

Just past the Deer Valley golf course, I saw a mama deer with her little bambi snacking on the lush grass and forget-me-nots in the ditch. Baby bambi looked to be just a few days old, he was still tottering a bit. Maybe I was the first bicyclist he had ever seen. I called out to him not to be afraid of us, we mean him no harm. It’s those morons in the King Cabs you need to worry about, bambino. He gave me a quick nod. I hoped my lesson had sunk in.

On the downhill past where the road has caved in because nobody’s paying attention to national infrastructure, I started to feel seriously good. The ride high was kicking in. I knew this because I started swallowing bugs. When I am on a ride, I generally have a silly grin on my face and this freely allows small insects to fly into my mouth. Believe me, this is worse for them than for me. They were probably planning on dinner with the family, with the intention of having dinner, not being dinner. Me, I get a tiny nugget of protein. With wings! And legs!

When I got to the dam, I was feeling that old I did it feeling that really floats my boat. The sun was about to set over the mountain and a duck was doing a spectacularly low fly-by over the lake, so streamlined and graceful I couldn’t understand how he wasn’t skidding into the water. Then he sort of sank into it with choreographed grace and I wondered if the maneuver released endorphins in his brain like my ride did for me or if it was all just ho-hum for him, another day skimming over a lake in paradise.

I parked my bike by the metal sluice gates and I noticed once again how they inexplicably have large KEEP OUT signs carved into them. I mean, who really wants to enter a dam’s sluice gate area? Or is it a general statement about the lake and its gloriously pristine environment? About America? Am I reading too much news?? I took a selfie beside the sign, and a picture of Mathilda casually leaning up against the gates. No, I don’t think we will keep out, I hoped my selfie expression said. I think we will keep riding right across your dam with its unfriendly signs and I think we will keep soaking up the free natural beauty of this mountain lake.

But the sign also got me thinking about the southern US border, because despite having ridden all the way there after work I wasn’t quite unplugged enough. I thought about being an immigrant myself, a blow-in from Ireland with a lottery visa in 1991. It was relatively easy for me. I was white, educated, and Bush Sr. was president. I literally won my green card in the lottery instigated by Senator Brian J. Donnelly in an attempt to legalize the tens of thousands of highly educated yet illegal Irish workers who flooded in from the “sick man of Europe” in the 1980s and boosted the California economy in Silicon Valley.

I did not have to walk across a desert with little food or water. I paid money, a lot for me at the time, but coyotes were not involved. My point of entry was Boston’s Logan airport. An immigration official looked at my paperwork, and although my heart hammered as hard as any immigrant hopeful, he waved me through. 

Twenty-eight years later, I am reminded every day how lucky I am. I work with caregivers from Haiti who yearn to return to their home country; with nurses who were physicians back in the Philippines; with refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Chiapas. I left terrible economic insecurity in Ireland, with an undergraduate degree not worth the paper it was printed on in terms of available jobs, but it was nothing to what these people fled.

So I got back on my bike on the dam and I headed up the mountain to that nine-minute downhill . There is a bend in the road right near the summit where you can look back down over the snaking uphill road you have toiled along, all the way to the distant puzzle piece of lake far below. It never ceases to amaze me that I have ridden that far uphill. I’d like to capture that feeling in a little bottle and take it with me to work every day so I could open it now and then and get a burst of it.

Failing that, I put the bike in its highest gear for the descent and I let loose with my carefully timed braking schedule. One second, curve, two seconds, curve, long free downhill, one second, curve...Dramatic descents usually provoke some quietly manic laughter in this riding fool, so I definitely got a little bug protein action. Hors d’oeuvres! And on my way down, I passed a CalTrans guy putting the cones back in his truck after a long day making hills steeper.

A Love Song to the Jaguars

Last Wednesday I got to ride in one of those cool yellow AAA tow-trucks. Again. I’m kind of used to swinging my nursing bag up into them now. And you get to see Marin from a whole different perspective up there. Plus there is the comforting sight of your car along for a jaunt on the back of the truck as you ride up front, sort of like a little car vacation. 

My Jag had the good grace to fail on a quiet side-street. I came out from seeing a patient, and it wouldn’t start. It sounded to me like a battery issue, so I chose the Battery option on the AAA automated phone menu. Fifteen minutes later, Nicholas drove up in a dark blue Prius with pink breast cancer awareness logos all over it. He was a dude and he was not happy about having to save damsels in distress in a Prius. I compounded his insecurities by saying hey, I was expecting one of those big yellow trucks! But then he laughed and we fist bumped when I pointed out that at least his car started.

It was not a battery issue. Nicholas tested my charging system and it measured 10. Sounded quite good to me. I mean, it was 10, right? Nicholas shook his head. 14 is good. 10 is not good. The word alternator was mentioned. I don’t much like that word. He told me a story of how he jump-started a guy with a charging system number of 10 and the guy said it’s fine, I can drive it home, I just live a few blocks away! And then his car clapped out on the freeway. So Nicholas would not let me drive my car with its deficient charging system the one mile to my mechanics.

He called me a tow from one of his buddies. While I was waiting for the tow, I sat in my car in the sun and reflected on how much better it is to break down on a sunny day than a rainy one. I just hate standing around watching my car get strapped to a tow truck in the rain. 

I swung myself up into the tow truck cab and I enjoyed the ride like I always somehow manage to do, even though the word alternator had been mentioned in my presence by a AAA employee and I was on my way to my mechanics who, although I seriously love and trust them, I only ever see when my car’s on the back of a truck.

My office has loaner cars. This is one of the many truly wonderful things about my job. All I had to do was arrange for my teen to pick me up at my mechanic’s and drive me to my workplace for me to pick up the loaner and go on to my next patient. I picked up the loaner car. The previous borrower had spilled disgusting substances innumerable on seats and console, and our loaner car person was terribly apologetic, but I was so pathetically grateful just to have a car that started - with working a/c -  that I waved away her apologies.

The loaner was a Chevy. It took me a bit to figure this out because most compact cars look the same to me and I don’t own a TV so their logos fail the brand recognition test with me. I resolved not to park my Chevy in any big parking lot because I knew I would instantly lose it. One of the advantages of driving a Jaguar from the last millennium is that you can always find it in parking lots. Another advantage is that every time I come out of a patient’s house and see my car in the road, I get happy. Every time I sit into it, I get happy, except for the times I put the key in the ignition and turn it and nothing happens. You win some, you lose some.

It was the alternator. Plus I got my a/c fixed. The bill was $1100, but two days later I drove the unmemorable Chevy to my mechanic’s to swap it out for my Jag with its shiny new alternator. I was between patients and thought I was being marvelously efficient. My plan was to come back later in the day with my teen and together we would effect the loaner return. I sat into my Jag and felt the familiar happy. Home.

I performed a complicated parking maneuver so I could leave the loaner in the spot where my Jag had been. In so doing, I parked the Jag really poorly near a corner, because I was only leaving it there for a minute, right? Then I got back into it and it wouldn’t start. Plus it was sticking out in the road. But at least it wasn’t raining!

This time it was the fuel pump. Another $1100, what are the odds of that?! Tim, my mechanic, gave me a little talk about the state of my car. I could tell he felt really bad. The chassis was so badly rusted, he said, it really wasn’t worth fixing the fuel pump. Very bad luck to have them both go on the same day. It would have been so hugely wonderful to find out about this very bad luck before dropping $1100 on the alternator, but I guess that is the nature of bad luck. 

There may be some folks out there who would quibble with the word luck. There may be some who might judge me for my great loyalty to old Jaguars. In fact I know there are, because they have told me repeatedly and in various ways over the years how stupid I am to drive these cars. And I hear what they are saying. But as with all love affairs, there are some very good reasons to ignore the good and well-meant advice of others. If you have ever been the driver of an old Jag, you will know exactly what I mean. 

I am now on the road to purchasing an electric vehicle. I’m doing my second Climate Ride in July to raise awareness and money for climate action. Driving a gas guzzler becomes at some point too out of balance with my values and beliefs. An electric car will feel clean and right and I won’t have to spend any more time standing at fuel pumps watching my daughter’s college education disappear with the flickering numbers.

But this is a love song, a paean to the six old Jags I have been lucky enough to own. I have identified with these sleek and gorgeous vehicles for more than a decade, and been unendingly grateful for how protected I have always felt by their tanklike frames. When I skidded into a freeway onramp wall in March, I would probably have been injured had I been driving a hybrid. I’ve always loved the stretch of the Jag’s hood with the signature silver cat poised in its eternal leap. The slow pickup and the purring cruise, the walnut dash and leather seats and that distinctive Jaguar smell, they have felt safe and comforting to me. It is a deeply satisfying car to drive, and mine have all taken me on journeys innumerable and wondrous.

I’ll save money on gas and maintenance now, and I’ll be doing a better job of living my beliefs. I probably won’t be along for the ride in a tow truck again for a while. In a kitchen drawer, I have a silver cat that got knocked off one of my Jags. Maybe I’ll fix it to the puny hood of my Nissan Leaf or my Fiat 500e. That way I won’t spend too much time wandering hopelessly around large parking lots looking for my car.

Hospice Nurse Spring Cleans Her Contacts

I was home sick from work yesterday. It was the kind of sick where I was too fatigued to wash dishes or sweep the heinous dust bunnies up from the many corners of my house, but not so sick that I had to lie in a darkened room and take chemicals. After some early morning work texts and then some serious sleeping, I woke up and I was antsy and I had to do something. I made some work calls, so that my more compromised patients and their families wouldn’t need to know I was home sick. This is because I am a rescuer and have very poor boundaries. Then I found myself lolling on my wicker couch in the sun on my patio with my work phone in my hand and I hit on the excellent plan of cleaning up my contacts list. Productive, but only with movement of two fingers: perfect!

Normal people don’t often have to clean up their phone contact lists. I mean, how many of your friends are so much no longer your friends that you have to delete them from your phone? Hopefully the answer to that is not very many. If not, you might want to seek some help.

But hospice nurses: we accumulate hundreds of contacts over time, most of whom as the great wheel rolls become deletable, either because they have - let’s just say it - died, or because they are the family member of someone who has died. I know this is weird, but when I looked at my work phone contacts list, most of the people on it were dead. I have not had the bandwidth or inclination for this particular task for a very long time. 

So I sat there on my comfy wicker couch with many pillows and a steady supply of La Croix, and I started to scroll through my contacts list. The first thing I noticed was how often I had referred to patients only by their initials. This was in my early days at hospice when I was hyperalert to the HIPPAA privacy laws and felt that even on my password-protected phone it would not be okay to refer to patients by their full names. LW? Who was LW? And RD, son of MP? Who was MP? Who was his son RP? How could I have forgotten all these people?? But how could I be expected to remember them when there are 676 permutations for two alphabet letters?

That was the easiest round of deletions. If I couldn’t even recognize the patients or their beloved family members, deletion was just a matter of Edit>Delete Contact. I was making good progress and I had not even felt a pang. It felt kind of clean. Like I was getting the dust bunnies only without having to wield a broom. 

Then I began to pay attention to the names. They were interspersed with the living, those names of dead folks. Interspersed with the names of doctors and coworkers and pharmacies and xray labs. Some of them I still struggled with, and it distressed me that I might have taken care of a patient in their last days and weeks and now not even recognize their name. But some of our patients are only on hospice for a very brief time, so I reluctantly cut myself a little slack for not remembering someone I had taken care of for a few days four years ago. 

Then there were the names that stood out to me. Some I remembered so well, because I had thought of them many times since they died. Driving around the county seeing patients, I frequently drive past the turnings or the very houses of people I have cared for. I get visceral memories of what it felt like to turn onto their road, to make those visits, what their situations were, how their deaths went, how the families took it, what they needed, what the challenges were.

Sometimes I have memories that are so specific that I hold them to me like secrets, like the secret heart of my job that makes it both so special and so unbearable. Like the patient I had near my own home, whom I would always visit on a Friday afternoon. Her house was down a very long, very windy, very leafy road. Her decline happened over a whole Spring, so over the course of my visits her road burst from its Winter bareness into it Spring splendor. Just when the wild roses and wisteria and roadside forget-me-nots and wild onion were in their greatest profusion, and the rains were in their heaviest April unpredictability, I was visiting her as she succumbed to her terminal disease. I used to listen to the one song as I turned onto her road: Nathaniel Rateliff’s Tearing at the Seams. It had a sense of desperation to it that perfectly mirrored my sense of helplessness as my patient approached her death. I looked at her name on my contacts list. I was not ready to delete it. 

Others I had a hard time with also, but I figured it was time to let go. That patient up in the hills of Marin whom I came to love and admire so deeply, and whose death was such a struggle that I remembered physically holding him down in the bed one night way after my shift ended as he battled terminal agitation and the meds that would help him were inexplicably delayed. There was his name, and his wife’s, and his wonderful daughters, with whom I had so many long heartfelt conversations in their sunny kitchen with all the windows overlooking the pool and gardens. I’m sorry, dude, it’s time I let you go from my phone. You are still in my heart. And you always will be.

And the patient whose family had placed her bed in the very center of the family home, right next to the pool table and directly beneath the billiard lights. She struggled to die, wore a crucifix, and there were often ten to fifteen family members present, all trying to do right by grandma, all in their own individual ways. There was enough food in that house at all times to feed the five thousand, but if two family members were on the same page about what was right for the hospice nurse to do for grandma, it was a good day. I wished them all peace of mind and familial harmony as I deleted her.

OMG and the guy I was afraid might go for me with a kitchen knife? His name hit me like a brick between the eyes. This was a guy who had made a career out of helping people, and by all accounts he was very good at it. But Alzheimer’s disease had been unconscionably cruel to him, and in his dementia he had become a danger to himself, his wife, and his hospice nurse. I had to notify the pharmacy delivery service to drop the meds on the doorstep and on no account to engage with anyone they met because the situation was not really well controlled, and my job is primarily to keep everyone safe.

I had a vivid memory of one of my last visits with this patient. I was alone with him in his wife’s bedroom, which I had perhaps ill-advisedly let him wander into. He was calm and docile on this day, and I could catch brief glimpses of the kind and intelligent man he had been. We moved around the room together. He was clearly looking for a place to rest, but the bed I kept trying to direct him to was not it. He wanted to lie on the floor. I found him a blanket and tried to make the floor more comfortable for him. Comfort was not his priority, more some kind of primal state of being that I had little understanding of. We had fleeting moments of some kind of communication in that room that I will never forget. He died a few days later. Rest in peace, my friend, and peace and comfort to your loving all-forgiving wife as I delete you both from my phone contacts list.

After a while, and as I got closer to the A-list of patients, I realized that I was crying fairly consistently. I had reached the point where the dead patients on my phone lists were the patients who had worked their way into the very innermost chamber of my heart. The young mom with small kids who battled cancer for years and who died early on her own birthday. I had attended her death, because I told her mom she could call me any time of the night or day if her daughter died. Strictly against hospice policy and a serious breach of healthy boundaries, which I recognized at the time but felt powerless to resist. I will never regret it, but I will also probably never do it again. There is only so much a hospice nurse can bear. Each death is only one of 13 or 14 patients I have at a time and I can’t get up at 5am for everyone. But she was so special. She is still in my contacts.

I got to R before it occurred to me that crying in the sunshine on my patio during a sick day was probably not the healthiest way to recuperate. I put my phone down. I drank a whole peach-pear La Croix. I blew my nose. The pale creamy-pink fuchsia I had bought myself was cascading languidly from its pot for my delight, and the gardenia bush I’d purchased on the same nursery run was just dying to burst into bloom. There were bearded iris, madly huge daises, rose geraniums and a random sprinkling of wildflowers in bloom in my garden. The jasmine was more blossom than leaf. The pale pink wild roses at their height. Look at us! Yes, there’s lots of death, but we are life, and we keep on coming, every Spring! Don’t be sad! Look at us!

So I looked at them all. And I decided that as well as being sad for all the great people I have taken care of and lost, I would celebrate their lives by exulting in my own beautiful garden, with all its weeds and unexpected blossoms out of nowhere, its volunteers and forgotten beauties. If I can bring every patient I will ever take care of in the future moments of relief and joy like I get from looking at my garden, then I will feel like I have done more than a great job.