Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Like Ships
It’s funny how it can feel like I’m in a relationship with another vehicle on the drive home from the lake when it travels the same speed and direction as I am going. When they finally went straight through a roundabout that I turned south from, I felt as if I should send them off with some acknowledgment of the road miles we shared.
I arrived home yesterday around 11:00 a.m. and watched Cyndie prepare for a trip of her own. She left for a seminar in California, so I am on my own this week. We are like ships passing in the night lately.
Or, like cars on a drive home from the lake.
When she returns home at the end of the week, the plan is for us to head back up to the lake for the weekend. That will make three weeks in a row that I have been up there. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
It’s a treat, for sure, but it does require that I do the lawn mowing after work in the middle of the week and interferes with ever getting back to the lumberjack projects that linger in our woods unfinished. Small concerns, both of them, compared to the glorious beauty we get to enjoy up in the Hayward area.
I have a sense that a day is going to come when I will be facing long hours of labor with a chainsaw this fall. Too bad the hours of daylight get shorter as summer wanes. But, it’s the summer sunshine that is giving us all the more reason to be up on the water while the going is good.
You could say, the lumberjack projects and my attention to them are a little like ships passing in the night.
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Fat Tires
The weather was nice when we set out on a bike ride yesterday around 12:30. That niceness didn’t last. On the plus side, Cyndie’s brother, Ben, offered me a chance to ride his fat bike, so mine didn’t get all muddy.
It was my first time riding on the gigantic tires. The first thing I noticed was that my legs made contact with the frame around the wide back tire while we were cruising down the asphalt on the way to the gravel road that cuts into the woods.
Before I expand on my experience riding the big beast on the “intermediate” level off-road trails, there is a story about the pedals. I ride clipless pedals (the complicated descriptor for pedals that click onto a cleat in my shoe and keep my feet fixed in place while riding). Ben’s bike had standard flat pedals.
Knowing this in advance, I decided I would take the pedals off my road bike before coming up, so I could swap out the ones on Ben’s bike. The problem with that last-minute plan came about when I couldn’t get the pedal on the right side of the bike to budge. It was frozen solidly in place.
Several times, I took a break from futile attempts to loosen the pedal and let some penetrating oil soak in while I made other preparations for departure. Finally, I went inside, showered, and then drove the packed car out of the garage, ready to head out after making one last try on that stubborn pedal. The wrench slipped and my left hand slammed into the teeth of the big chainring. It cut deepest in two specific places on my thumb, filling the nasty gashes with dirty chain grease.
I rushed back to the house to wash out the cuts as best I could tolerate and then had to go find Cyndie for assistance in bandaging it up. Frustrated and angry with myself, I packed up the pedal wrench and drove off, leaving the road bike behind with one pedal on and one pedal off.
I held my wounded left hand up in the air for most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive north.
Yesterday morning, Paul and I decided to simply try swapping the pedals from my off-road bike for the ones on Ben’s bike. Both sets came off with ease. Problem solved. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t wasted one second struggling to take the pedals off my road bike.
My thumb wishes that even more.
So, now I had my clipless pedals on Ben’s fat bike and I was ready to try it out. The frame is taller than I want, but I can straddle the cross tube because it slants down just enough. It took me two tries to get the seat lowered to the right height, and then I was ready to go.
After the opportunity of riding my bike on similar trails the day before, I had a good reference for comparison between the two. The fat bike felt like a truck compared to the nimbleness of my old-style bike.
The shifters are different enough that I needed to think much more consciously about gear changes, rarely with the precise timing preferred. That wasn’t as much a problem as the basic difference of frame geometry and tire size. It felt like the bike took longer to make it around corners. Sure, the big front tire rolled over hazards easier, but it never felt like the back tire did.
Final verdict: I’m not sold. I think it would make a nice bike for riding on packed snow, but for the rough trails through the woods in summer, I prefer the much skinnier tires on my mountain bike.
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Makwa Trail
I’m up at the lake again this weekend, but this time it is for the big golf weekend that Cyndie’s brothers host annually for a collection of close friends who happen to golf. I don’t golf. So, why am I here?
The annual weekend has morphed over the years and began to include some other activities, one of which was biking the Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association (CAMBA) trails through the woods. That suited me well and earned me an invite both this year and last.
Last year was so wet that we chose to stay on the gravel fire lane roads rather than risk the challenging single-track trails, but this year conditions were perfect for hitting the Makwa trail with my birthday and biking buddy, Paul.
Riding this trail involves a mostly non-stop series of split-second decisions about where to point the front tire to traverse or avoid the consistently changing hazards of roots, rocks, and turns. The deciding is only part of it. There is also an unending strain of frequent gear selection, balance control, and a clenched power grip on the handlebars.
It’s a LOT more work than my road bike. I was reminded why I have migrated back toward primarily riding my touring bike on pavement as I have aged. There are a lot more opportunities to relax and coast pleasantly along on smooth asphalt.
Yesterday’s exercise was a nod to my good ol’ days. It made me feel young again, …while simultaneously aging me.
I’m grateful to the universe for the blessing of not being slammed to the ground in the hazardous terrain of the backcountry woods of northwest Wisconsin. I must admit, that result is more a product of luck than ability at this point.
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No Answer
There are some questions for which there is no answer. I heard one in an NPR interview last night. It was a fair question, but the guest didn’t really know how to answer it. Justifiably so. There was no answer. Sometimes it’s not possible to pick either of two choices.
I can live with that.
Driving home in the dark last night, there was a moment when approaching headlights obscured my view enough that I realized I was driving blind for a distance. I didn’t slow down. I just kept going under the impression it would be okay so to do.
Luckily, it was.
I don’t have a plan for what is next. Something tells me I won’t suddenly decide to try being a stand-up comedian. I’m very confident I will continue to live a life of sobriety.
There are questions I don’t have an answer to, but more often than not, I don’t even have the questions.
It’s pretty easy to not have answers when I don’t know what the questions are. I breathe, put one foot in front of the other, and make my way through the days.
I don’t know what comes next. For now, it’s a question I am okay not answering.
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Round Bales
We have a new look to our property lately. After weeks of our mowed hay fields getting wet, the neighbors who rented our fields arranged to have a beef farmer make some round bales out of it. That’s a first for us. It gives the place a different appearance.
Square bales like the ones we used must be picked up right away and moved under cover to keep them dry, but the round bales can be left out in the field. Beef cows are much less picky about what they eat compared to horses, so these bales of old grass that laid in the field for an extended time will still find use as feed.
I snapped that photo from the seat of our lawn tractor while mowing. I installed new blades after work yesterday and tackled two-thirds of the grass before the day started to fade. It’s amazing how hyper-sensitive I can suddenly (temporarily) be about mowing over any potential hazards like sticks, stones, and pine cones in the yard with new blades.
I know from experience that such intense concern does not last. After several accidental incidents of mowing over something I regret, I start to lose my inhibitions and trend increasingly toward reckless abandon. I’m pretty hard on mower blades.
I used to be pretty concerned about hay bales, too.
Not so much anymore.
I kind of like the way the round bales look in our fields. Gives an appearance of at least some level of functional progress. I’m not sure it entirely offsets the derelict impression the paddocks evoke, with the tall grass going to seed like never before, but the bales are a welcome sign of activity in our fields.
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Unglamorous Reality
I think it’s only natural that our minds tend toward the fantastical when attempting to interpret an unexpected scene in our otherwise staid environment. Why would the first impression be the simplest option, when a more unlikely one is possible?
When I got home from work yesterday, I discovered a mysterious disruption around the front of my closet. There had obviously been some sort of disturbance. Several odd shoes had been pulled out, shoes I haven’t worn for some time.
I suspected someone had been looking through my shoes, but it was possible my footwear had been incidentally dislodged by a person looking for something else. What could someone have been after?
Well, I can narrow it down a little bit. The only “someone” around here all day would have been Cyndie. The most likely scenario would be that she was pulling out items to be laundered.
Not all that exciting, after all.
The truth was even less glamorous than that.
When Cyndie came in from trimming fence lines, she offered up a set of facts I had failed to consider. Pequenita had barfed in the vicinity and Delilah stormed in to take care of cleaning it up before Cyndie could react.
Lovely. Sometimes things aren’t quite what they initially seem.
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Zooming In
You know me, I like to make full-framed photo art on occasion by zooming in on certain features. Here are three I captured on Saturday up at the lake.
We enjoyed some fabulously accommodating weather over the weekend, which came to a dramatic end just as we arrived back home to a powerful downburst of wind and rain. A tornado warning was issued for that very storm cell in the moments after it moved past us to the northeast. Thank goodness it didn’t form any sooner. As of this writing, I haven’t heard any damage reports from neighboring properties further along the path.
If I were to zoom in a little bit on our immediate family, it might reveal some exciting news that was shared at dinnertime on Saturday night. Julian and Allison announced they are now husband and wife. It wasn’t entirely spur of the moment since the couple, who have been together for seven years, applied for a license in advance and prescheduled an appointment with a judicial officiant, but the result is equally surprising for those of us who love them.
The deed was done Tuesday and they went to work like usual the following day.
Ain’t love grand!?
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Consummately Summerish
Here is a postcard from the lake. We are having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.
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I probably should have gone to Vegas instead. My luck has been remarkably good with card games the last two days.
Maybe it is a result of being so relaxed from floating in the water and reading a book on the beach. Throw in the smell of wood smoke wafting in the air, grilled meals, corn-on-the-cob, Cyndie’s homemade peach pie, and we are enjoying a quintessential summer weekend at the lake.
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Race Drama
I need to be careful what I wish for. Yesterday, I tossed out the hope that it might be rainy here at the lake so I wouldn’t feel bad sitting inside to watch the second-to-last mountain stage of the Tour de France. Well, it was storming so bad for a while, there was no signal to the satellite dish for us to receive the telecast of the beginning kilometers.
Luckily, things settled down in time to see much of the excitement. In a dramatic surprise, yellow jersey contender, Thibaut Pinot had to abandon due to a knee injury, but that was greatly overshadowed when the stage was stopped prematurely, mid-descent, due to an epic hail-storm. Times were taken at the top of the previous big climb and resulted in a change in leadership.
Columbian Egan Bernal is now in yellow!
Now the weather here at the lake is gorgeous and I am going to sit inside regardless, to see what drama might top that of yesterday.
It doesn’t solve any problems in the world, but the distraction of a great athletic endeavor for entertainment certainly serves to energize.
Race on!
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High Points
After work yesterday, Cyndie and I hopped in her car and drove up to the lake for the weekend. Leaving on a Thursday night makes for easy driving, in the absence of the typical weekend traffic headed north. Our route took us through some of the damage from last week’s storms that produced near-hurricane force winds and some baseball-sized hail.
It was fruitless to try to capture a representative photo of the large scope of broken trees for miles, but I snapped a few shots on my cell phone through the car window at highway speed.
It was a little easier to capture a sample of some building damage that hadn’t been covered up yet.
The extensive damage to trees was a really sad sight. It gave me a whole new perspective on the comparatively minor issues we are facing at home with a few dead or dying trees leaning across our trails. We’ve got it easy.
High point of the day for me yesterday was finding a neighboring farmer working our fields to finally bale some of the cut hay that has been left on the ground for weeks, repeatedly being rained on instead of properly drying out. The past week offered the longest stretch of dry days that I can recall so far this summer.
The second high point was getting a chance to watch portions of Stage 18 of the Tour de France on the subscription TV channels when we got here. At home, we only pick up what is publicly available through the airwaves, and bike racing coverage is minimal.
Two big mountain stages remain, today and tomorrow, and I am thrilled to be able to view all the drama as it happens.
Maybe it will be rainy here as the morning progresses so I don’t waste sunny lake time sitting indoors in front of the glowing screen getting my bike racing fix.
Honorable mention high point yesterday goes to the Coop’s pizza dinner we devoured when we got to Hayward. Oh, so delicious.
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Relative Something 