McKusick Road Blues

Today, as I was driving home from skiing (three pairs of gloves, two each of hat and sock!), I drove down McKusick road. It passes trees, a few houses with garages and snowmobiles and piles of chopped wood between trees, like little hammocks, a marsh of just ice and headless cattails, some thickets of brush. It climbs and dips a little, perhaps clambering over a glacial moraine or a tiny, immature volcano, waiting to burst.

I've been down McKusick road before. We usually take it to descend into the St. Croix River valley on summer afternoons.

I wished that instead of leading me back to White Bear Lake, and my house, and a State of the Union address, that it lead me into a small New England village, with a square, and a trout brook, taverns, maybe a small house in the woods, mine, where I could chop my own wood and rake the leaves and stones.

White Bear Lake, I'm leaving you soon, to drive again all over the west, to ride my bike the preposterous distance of 2,000 miles in five weeks, to camp the whole time and probably be wet and cold, potentially miserable. I'm not going to find a little village, no squares or little brooks. Just big rivers and big mountains and a whole lot else.

I baked whole wheat bread when I got home. It took hours. The rising was slow. It's cooling in the kitchen, and will go great with almond peach jam that I made this fall out in Utah. I'm eating bread tomorrow in the morning and will wishing the windchill wasn't so below zero. Little New England brook, you'd be frozen through and through.

Be good to yourselves.

Golf Courses

I can't think of a better use for a golf course in the winter than as a groomed ski trail ( and if they advocate using golf courses as common pasturage for locavores to raise cattle and other beasts that low and chew cud in the summer, I'd fully support that too). I've been going to Phalen golf course a couple of times a week, usually skate skiing 10-20k each time. Since I won't be able to get out on my bike for at least a month, skiing has proven to be a great way to get my legs and lungs up to par for my bike ride. (Ask Paul Peterson about my Red Rocks training regimen!) I've got about six weeks to train for an estimated six week long bike ride. I won't be breaking any records, but I want to keep my rear end happy, and the pedals moving up and over those coastal mountains.

*Side note: I can't decide whether to call it a bike ride or bike tour. Ride doesn't capture the bigness, and tour sounds like something involving tuscan wine samplings and fifty seven year old money market executives with $15,000 road bikes. Thoughts?

Skiing today was an exercise in frustration. The trail consisted of a pretty nice, thick base (the remnants of a big ol' December storm...the very one my friend Grant and I flew before on a marathon twenty six hour drive from Moab, UT back to the North Star State a few days before Christmas), topped by an icky brown, icy crust (courtesy of a misty, rainy weekend), and decorated with windblown powder drifted deep, like uneven frosting spread by unsure hands (today's storm). I shuffled across the icy sections and post holed in the powder for an hour before giving up. My middle fingers went numb, so I couldn't give the weather gods the bird.

Before I go further, I'd like to thank my friend Ellie Rogers for providing the inspiration to write this blog. When asking her if I should, she said yes, and that she thought we could arrange some sort of underground railroad-esque network of computers at various places along the coast, so that I could update as I rode. We're still trying to concoct a quilt code and lantern signals. Ellie has been blogging and writing eloquently, check out wherethelionliesdown.blogspot.com and you'll see what I mean.

I don't know what the proper length for a blog is. No one is telling me to write blah-blah number of double spaced MLA pages. Am I trampling on blog world toes here?

Ok, now a list to conclude:

1) Read these books: My Story as Told by Water (my new favorite James Duncan book about fly fishing and religion and the way in which industrial America/Amerika is threatening both of these, and about how fly fishing and religion are threatening industrial America), Take the Cannoli, Into the Wild (better than the movie! (the soundtrack is quite good, though), When you are Engulfed in Flames (David Sedaris tells you to quit smoking).

2) Don't read these books: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (sorry, Ellie), the Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell, you really let me down on this one.)

3) I'm trying to grow bonsai trees.

4) Blog writing is way harder than I thought.

Stay safe, and be peaceful to one another.

The birth of a blog

I've never blogged before. In fact, I just recently got a cell phone. I don't know if I'm 3G or 4G. I don't even know what a G is. Here goes!

Premise: I am going to be riding my bicycle from Vancouver, British Columbia south to the Mexico border (like Jimi Hendrix says, "I'm headin' down Mexico way").

Distance: One thousand, nine hundred and eighty seven point three miles. (I'm outfitted with a guidebook, known as "the bible" among Pacific coast tourers, and the suggested route is 1987.3 miles.) I'm both expecting and hoping that, in the end, I travel a greater distance.

Significance: 1987 happens to be a famous year in human history. The year of my birth. I turn 23 in a week. I'm unemployed, bachelor-ed (academically and personally), and a recent member of Barack Obama's Socialist Army.

minnesotaindependent.com/31237/bachmann-reedcuation-camps

1/30/1987...1987.3...Coincidence? No. It's an omen. A sign from the gods. Time to ride.

Preliminary Logisticating: I won't be leaving until mid March. Until then, I'll be training and updating this blog. Expect nothing. But do check back often. Until then, stay safe, and be peaceful to one another.**

**(thanks, Mark Wheat!).