“One Less Corpse”
Worst Case Scenario--my rolex gets damaged
Now that I’m home I can reveal the forbidden thought I set out with (shared by my loved ones with overactive imaginations ): that I might not make it back to Fairfax.
In 4200 miles, I might be clipped by a car, mushed by a truck, or impale myself on a bit of rebar on a mountainous descent.
To keep this from happening, I clung to riders with really good judgement (plus an i-phone). To them I owe my life (not exaggerating here, truly!).
For sixty dreamlike days I rode, got lost, got found, got dragged, got peppy, got depressed, got happy and ate foods both real and pretend.
My poops were prodigious, my hiccups sonorous, my sleeps seldom and the rest you can just imagine. There were times I was commanded to write, the results are here.
When I wasn’t singing (either with Breakfast Crew or by myself) or daydreaming, I was actively un-imagining the freeways, phone poles, silos and roadways, trying to picture the terrain, right down to the flora and fauna (so much of it flattened alongside the road under me) as it was before “discovery”.
Our country and Europe’s culture and technology robbed the first dwellers of their homes, their lives and their culture.
Later, scholars and artists have attempted to give them their posthumous due….There are so many tribes, but the California coastal Esselen were the latest on my mind…
Will we ever wise up and copy the stewardship, reverence and light livin’ of those innocent earthlings? Will we ever learn? Will we take our head out of cyberspace and give it a nice ride around the block, around the town, around the county of those people?
Why oh why oh did God not give them bicycles to combat the Spanish?
ARghhhh.
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Jacquie Phelan's Weblog 
Welcome back!
Oh Bat we need to have a long conversation about all that someday.
-B
well done Jacquie, and now for the hard part, winding back down, retrofitting back to so called normal pace and place
i just learned that Susan (Fat Cyclist’s beloved wife) did not survive the summer and…I can only think of him, and their kids…my frivol was a delight, and all my near and dear ones who signed affadavits that promised not to a) purchase rural real estate or b) kick any metal containers with handles, or bite anything bigger than a filbert…well, they honored that contract, while others were unable to. And on my street, Maria’s newborn didn’t make it past day 3…so I am aware that as always, it is a cruel unpredictable world, it’s not ‘fair’…and the odds are sometimes not in one’s favor…
I am not going to draw a conclusion.
I’m full of Tecate and some sort of Belgian beer, thanks to Gestalt Broory and Brathaus…and I can’t really think perfectly straight.
Here is a little prayer to Eldon Nelson’s family, and Maria and her husband, and Kay Ryan, Marie Dern and those left with an empty bed…
[…] Phelan is back home in NorCal. Her pithy travel assessment of 60 days on two wheels: One Less Corpse. Ride on Jacquie! ▶ Comment /* 0) { jQuery('#comments').show('', change_location()); […]