Missy Giove freed

•November 28, 2011 • 5 Comments
Tim Woolard snapped this in 1990, at Shuss Mtn, Michigan. Missy, me, and Cindy W.

Missy’s mom called Nicole Hahn to tell her Missy’s out on 5 yr probation.  Her time served for that marijuana trafficking offense  was proabably about two years at some Montana facility. By the way, Hahn’s the videographer who took up downhill racing to better understand the subject of her documentary, Hardihood.  It’s a good one, starring  Missy, Marla, Lisa Sher, and a handful of others, including me. The movie might get a second life, watch this space.

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You Are All My Daughters

•November 23, 2011 • 7 Comments

JP "logging", captured by Carson Blume

Another World Championship in San Francisco Last Sunday. I’d marked my calendar, but didn’t think about heavy rain (my plan had been to ride into S.F.  as a warm up for a 47 minute gutbusting race).

Mandy Isbell and John Butera of  Colorado were in town for the race (and his 50th  b.d.)– I’d met ’em  in Ireland a couple months ago at the other singlespeed world’s.  Mandy thought nothing of coming in a downpour at 7 am to get me, and bring me back into town.

Which she did.

Then we rode a few miles to the races in Golden Gate Park, with negligible traffic and barely any rain–John helped carry my ‘merch’ (cashmere armwarmers, embroidered badges, all of which were ignored the entire day, as usual).

Single speed cyclocross is a splinter group off the single speed splinter group  I’ve been racing with the last seven years.

The promoter, Murphy Mack, and the title sponsor, Sheila Moon, are both friends, and I’d crawl over broken glass to take part in anything they are producing.

I knew costumes were ‘strongly encouraged’ but didn’t realize the visceral effect of seeing 60 women in  full regalia–showgirls, ‘more cowbell’, a St. Pauli girl with armbands of overflowing bier steins, a Spielbergian  shark, chickens galore, ballerinas, airplanes, in fact, out of the pack, a mere four women declined to wear a costume.

They were not evident at the front, either. At the front was Julie Krasniak, a Frenchwoman of impressive grace and power–she finished her race of three laps in the time it took me to have a couple of laps (including beer stops). More importantly, she was minutes ahead of second, and in a cute  Rapha outfit with a  “I love Wieners” message on the shirt.

Having arrived three hours before my one o’clock start, I busied myself meeting every woman I crossed paths with, including Gnat, who took pains to get the feathers, nylon, and sequins exactly right, and Mary McConneloug, our cherished Olympian from Fairfax.

Hypothermia almost claimed me, but I got some fortification: cocoa from the sneaker company, wieners from Paul components in Chico, and warm oatmeal from a very stylish gray bread truck piloted by Rapha people.

So I did a lap. My feet and hands  thawed.  I actually felt warm. The bike, my ‘ham crosser with bald “Expotition” tyres rolled through the mud like they were on a rail. No slips, no slides.
Dollar bills were tied to low-hanging branches.  I even saw one muddy bill on the track, next to a peacock feather. I got them both–nobody was near, no one impeded by the inveterate pack rodent.

“Another lap would’t hurt” I told myself.  “Maybe the nice guy will hand up a full beer this time”.  At the second most popular spectator spot, I swam the water hazard, instead of prancing it like a real racer.

Backstroke.

After the first lap, it became clear that three decades of riding gave me a certain  Nerve that allowed me to fly at the three-foot diameter trees lying across the path, or the four-foot height fence we had to scootch under without banging our head….I knew my (Mafac canti’s) brakes were perfect. I even passed some riders, only to lose time when I sat down for a beer.

Please look at the Flickr, Bookface, etc. of all these people. Incredible fun. A tribe I can relate to…

When I look at the great pictures by Carson, Wil, and John, I notice how almost every rider is grinning–visible proof of the excellence of this event.

La citadina

My winnings:

Winnings, SSXCWC2011

Posted in "knobby nobility", Alice B. Toeclips, art, cycle racing, fashion
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Cranksgiving

•November 13, 2011 • Leave a Comment

Yesterday a bunch of Bicycle Works people (Jelani and Shannon plus a dozen others) fanned out over the county to eight supermarkets to shop for ‘non perishable food’ (a thought that strikes fear into my heart, since food should perish), then donate to the Food Bank. See story.

Over a decade ago I devised a  Cranksgiving of my own–namely the Appetite Seminar followed by a free meal at a local hostel. Only the hostelliers failed to tell me that their annual tradition of free food had been discontinued, so I had five people to feed–five surprised, starving people whom I’d told would be well fed.

This may  have marked the beginning of the decline of my so-called organizational powers. The old Youth Hostel host had moved on, and the new one saw little point in feeding the guests on Thanksgiving evening–since more and more homeless folk showed up each year.  I never checked.

WE went to San Francisco and ate  at a restaurant.
Still makes me feel rotten!
So this year, I did something for those who have not the luxury of a four hour social ride…but I didn’t haul in the most food. The cargo bikes did that.
Still, under sunny cool skies, the twelfth of November was a great day to zoom around buying food for the poor.

It was more or less the first time I’d purchased food (other than on foreign trips) in years….Big fun to see how prices have changed since 2003.

Glad I don’t HAVE to buy food.  I only buy when there’s no butter in the trash bin.

Posted in food, Jacquie Phelan, Ride

Occupy The Tarmac In Sonoma

•November 4, 2011 • 3 Comments

Last night I gave a brief presentation ( Why Women Love Bikes) at the Sonoma Museum in Santa Rosa.
It’s one of my favorite topics, and it is so huge it allows me to vent about the patriarchal, sexist bike  industry .  I show that, despite the trivialization,  sexual objectification (sadly by the women athletes themselves as well as the neanderthals in the marketing department), and despite universal silence concerning the many body types, riding goals, and ages of women cyclers, we still keep riding and sharing what truths we know.

Namely that offroad riding is safe, easy and fun. And that, despite the frightening realities of auto-rider mayhem, it’s still statistically healthier to ride than not to. Oh, and that we women really look out for one another. We  are not catty, at least I never see that.

What I do see is: every bicycle event is a boys/mens event, unless it is specifically geared for women (like tonight’s clothes party at 3 Ring Cycles, or the amazing Wild Goose Chase produced by the inimitable Georgena Terry, patron saint of women cyclers worldwide). Yes, it appears to be a men’s world. But this is because of the media silence, the marketing lameness, and the myriad tiny factors (like: thou shalt not make waves) the keep our Ilk out of the manstream.

Um.
Well, it looked like my victims audince was having as much fun as I was, roaming all over the Victorian, Golden Age, Suffragist-Biker terrain I could cover in 46 minutes.

My friends Paula Smith (outsitting in her field, above.  Namely:  landscape oil painting), her hub Keith, and ‘bicycle world heritage human” Art Read cruised south from their place in Santa Rosa at noon today, covering 40 miles in about 3 hours (they are still dealing with a scary headwind, while I happy type this up)…

The air was crisp, the light was low-angle, the colors were saturated, the experience very moving.

Posted in "knobby nobility", Alice B. Toeclips, art, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan, Trees
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wh

•October 18, 2011 • 1 Comment

A half year ago Georgena Terry invited me to speak at her annual fundraiser, Wild Goose Chase. There is a wildfowl refuge called Blackwater out in eastern Maryland where there are some fine country roads and lots of waterways and of course habitat destruction.  Terry put bikers and birds together, and I would get to entertain the couple hundred riders who attend…

Which would give me a chance to visit…..

A  kiwi gal living in Maryland (Carol Bell)  whose idea of a nice ride is the Paris-Brest-Paris, or any great 1200 km brevet. A decade ago she flew out to Taj Mahovel to unlock the mysteries of mud and offroad decorum. Her husband Eric had prodded her into it even though she’s an accomplished roadie.

Reader, we made the wombat bond.   You know women have who wish they had a soul sister? Yah, that kind of loving bond, regardless of distance, time, and other trivial impediments.  We kept in touch, I’d remember her wedding anniversary (which she’d missed, to come to my one-woman class) and she’d ship fancy tea from the remote corners of the planet.  This would be a perfect time to finally meet Eric, and visit the 160 year old house they rescued from melting into the swamp, and see their family (a pair of impressively mellow dogs and five cats who think they are dogs).

Then Tom from The Bicycle Escape in Frederick offered significant assistance by letting me have a platform to wig out on, er, a chance to give a presentation at his store the weekend before….so I sewed all week, lace on cashmere, weaving sample  on canvas, and of course extremely hole-y, cut-up, deconstructed sweaters of all sorts…to offer for sale.

Hopped on a plane at ten am, the first of two.

Alas, waiting three hours in Denver, I slept through the announcement that the Baltimore flight was boarding. This happens. Luckily there was a second one (two and a half hours later still). I should pin a note to my sweater…like automobiles, airport lounges put me straight into a sort of daze…

I had my magic day (doing absolutely nothing but take a walk, eat and talk) in Balmer.

Then we drove the extremely long hour to Frederick, and almost didn’t find The Bicycle Escape (at least one person got as far as the shopping mall at 1700 Kingfisher Drive, but turned around at the Starbucks, and damn, I guess we should have clarified how to find this nice little modern bike shop).
The talk was fun, furious, and all over the map. There might have been 20 people there, all expecting something different from the queen of Talking Dirty & Tedium Escape as a lifestyle/art form .

Maybe I should devote time to what I said?

Nah…you know it all, already…

Geopolitics, America’s wars around the world, the OBCD epidemic..the importance of free education and health care and a shrunken militia) as they relate to bicycles…

The next day it was Mary Costello’s turn to babysit me, and we rode a pleasant loop (Paul’s trail, plus a couple of ponds) up in the watershed around Frederick.

A few months earlier some stone mason artists had done some wonderful stuff….

Posted in "knobby nobility", Alice B. Toeclips, Cycling, heinous name dropping, Jacquie Phelan, lame wordplay
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Minding Gina’s Garden

•October 7, 2011 • Leave a Comment

After getting mine in winter shape. At our place, the wood’s been split and stacked in the shed, the retaining walls put in, and the Lumber Orphanage finished.

Over in West Marin,  Gina Smith perfects the garden on her sunny,  south-facing, ‘convex’ (as in: no hollows) acreage. She has the help of a couple of curiously industrious unpaid helpers (see below) who quite literally will work for food.

Down below us in the house, a passel of boys have Happy Childhoods (=make lots of noise) while us ol’ mudhens toil away, loving every grubby-fingered minute.
Yesterday, we uprooted a dozen or more giant chard to lay in a new bed of rutabagas (yes, those bulbous things that Eastern europeans subsist on in winter), rocket and kale.

Margit shoved the overfilled wheelbarrow up the hill as I picked up the fallen umbrella-sized leaves, then we’d fling  everything over the fence, where three goats stood expectantly.

I wasn’t successful putting the gold-stemmed chard under my sweater to make off with unnoticed, but Gina said it was OK to keep one as a souvenir.

 

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Humble Daze

•October 1, 2011 • 4 Comments

This week has been all about the Coming Of The Rain.

Charlie’s “lumber orphanage”  had to be completed before the anticipated shower…and he just made it in time last week. Our yard began resembling its gardenesque self.

This week, another promise of rain, so the wood splitter was improved by a bolted-on ‘cruciform’ blade that made four little pieces out of each chunk of madrone, oak or extremely worm-eaten bay.  The hydraulic splitter is a vast (but not fast) improvement over the frightening sixteen pound maul that I can only barely get over my head…and which I was convinced was ruining my back. All that torque, the ballistic action of the swing, oh my.

Why haven’t I had back problems yet, I wonder?

This week should tell. I spent about three hours scurrying back and 4th from the back end of the splitting machine and the Jim Frick woodshed (each of our buildings has a name, didn’t you know? There are about ten of them. You know the name of the tree house, and the main house.  No need to know all the others.)

Inside the extremely ratty (hope there’s no hantavirus haunting the place) dry shed, I’m bent double, taking each wood-hunk and flinging it frisbee-style underhand to the far corner of the shed.

Such routine unskilled labor is made fun by noticing that (unlike sports that have balls being hurled or  swatted) my aim is perfect. Each chunk sails–and sticks!–to its appointed corner.
Mark Twain, sorry, Sam Clemens had something to say about writing and wood:

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

Today’s post is dedicated to Charlie Kelly, who has persistently nudged me about my relative silence. Since his fave author is one of mine, I thought I’d drag in a Twainism or two.

Here’s a doozy he  crafted called Advice to young girls. It just happens that an artist I’ve admired for years has illustrated the text.

Please do not think I’m not writing my book. I am just playing with the raw materials first, to feel the grain, the heft, and breathe the sawdust of the future work…

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Irish Dervish

•October 1, 2011 • 1 Comment

I’ve read her books, well, four of the thirty or so she’s written.

Written postcards and lobbed them overseas with nothing more than “Dervla, Lismore Ireland” for an  address.

She tells me that she’s gotten letters addressed “Dervla Murphy, Ireland”, so I shouldn’t be surprised they got to her.

When Jac Marquis, the singlespeed champion of Scotland, agreed to drive down the twisty 50 miles or so from the race in Kilfinane and the home of my highly esteemed writing goddess, I was over the moon.

Jac got herself a stack of Dervla’s books to learn more of my hero, while I just relished the chance to do Two Things At Once when over on the Emerald Isle.

We arrived a half hour early, and in the pretty heart of the town, her gate stood between the pharmacy and some other shop. Keys in the lock, and an empty wheelbarrow (they’ve been called Irish something…walking stick? To help a drunken man make it home, must look that up).
We let ourselves in, Jac toting some very fine organic Scottish whisky and me my coutnerfeit Book of Kells canvas, and a silent team of bouncing dogs
(later I  learned that one was called Worzel Gummidge) welcomed us in.

Dervla greeted us most warmly, beckoned us in, and regretted that the beer was slow in arriving.

We sat in a room surrounded with books on all walls, and a table decorated with an Irish motto along its perimeter…and my hero, slightly stooped and claiming to be deaf as a post, yet missing nothing, she inquired about the Two Jacquies. We told her our mission(s) and a bit about ourselves, and it wasn’t very long before she was inquiring about my take on the situation in America….I gave her the short version…and the talk turned to social justice   (anyone reading her books discerns the importance of this lifelong narrative thread).

“Do you still ride?” Jac asked.

“No, not now….arthritis…but I still swim daily” Dervla replied. “In the Blackwater river”.

Oh, my….without even a wetsuit, according to Nick, who also swims daily, but uses a wetsuit.

We had a not-long-enough visit, and a couple of fellows came, Colm and Nico, a bit of beer was poured, and as we left she put lovely cheese sandwiches in our hands to hold us until we got back to the bicycle revels in Kilfinane……I took pix, but must wait til I’m home to put them up here….The web has great stuff on this brilliant, mulish, and utterly compassionate human that I have hoped to meet…oh, she says she got two of my postcards (I’ve sent three over 30 year’s time)…..”But …you never wrote back!” I said childishly.

Colm muttered that she only gets a few hundred fan letters a week….I was slightly mollified….

This week I’m in Edinburgh I hope to munch my way through a couple more of her books–Down From The Limpopo…and maybe one more. I just finished Wheels Within Wheels, her 1979 autolessbikography….brilliant reading. I’m so humbled (this is of course good for me) to grasp as well as I can, the depth and breadth of her amazing mind, her formation, her milieu, her parents.  It makes modern life feel superficial, if not downright stupid.
IF you are a reader, try Full Tilt, please, first. Then hit the rest. You won’t be sorry.

Posted in heinous name dropping, Ireland, Jacquie Phelan

Irish Singlespeeder Nails Win

•August 28, 2011 • 1 Comment

Niall takes title!!! He was hotly pursued by last year’s winner Garth Weinberg…from NZ. I think Niall surprised himself. How casual he was about picking up a singlespeed conversion kit the day  we left town, hours before the “race”, and installing it MORNING OF (race was at three in afternoon)…wow. The course was pretty easy, not technical, except maybe those built bits …9 miles per lap, roughly. I was happy to do a single lap and have beer and root for people (and got to see  26 yr old Niall come across line  jubiliantly mud-flecked… He’s a scholar (mechanical engineering) as well as an athlete.

Ireland got her own champ without a big fat coprolite, er, corporate logo on his chest.

Second place was about half a second back….the kiwi racer (wearing pro kit)who won last year almost stole the win since the finish line was a few chicanes and I actually stopped the wrong place myself.

I know there are riders like Marla Streb with a pair of tatts, but it’s nice the local kid took it.  Third guy across the line was from Germany I think, and he was very bummed that his chain failed several times, but his wild front wheel (nose wheelie) skid, rear wheel in the air, was most satisfying. Maybe someone caught it.

The start, let me tell ya, was a grand parade….Badgers, six of them, Dorothy and her friend the tin man, the Improved Captain America, a rainbow unicorn, several bottles of beer, tutu’d men and women, lots of feather boas, masks and beer helmets. Only one Book of Kells….The pace among my cohort was dignified, efficient, and I almost felt naughty squeaking past the occasional hesitant guy bobbling over the rocky section. There were a half dozen custom designed wooden xylophone sections with swoops and turns, all over what looked like mossy bog, but was in fact lots and lots of fallen trees covered lightly with moss….not something to fall into and impale one’s self on.  I was able to (slowly) navigate them all–never touching the brake–but very happy to be done with them since falling 2 feet off a narrow ‘North Shore’ style track can really do a number on your tibia, fibula, femur, shoulder, gee, anything.

There were people who fell and were only barely bruised. My friend C. was not one of them. She tipped, and wounded her shoulder enough to look pretty pale at race finish.
Meanwhile all around, serious party mode: beer poured (the paper chits we were issued proved to be worthless for most of the night) and stories regaled.
Rain didn’t come until around 5 pm, and the only way it was obvious to me (inside big tent) was how suddenly crowded it became….

Posted in Ireland
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Free time in Killmallock

•August 26, 2011 • 3 Comments

Barely in Ireland 3 days, and a dozen rain showers a day make it obvious why the island’s so green.  My rain jacket comes off, goes on, comes off…and miraculously dries in between.

Comfy Deebert House  is my base of operations. Hosts Margaret, Jamal, and their little girls make Tarja, Niall and I full welcome with a flurry of really cute jokes told rapid fire (I can only remember one: ‘how can you tell if a clown has farted?”

“It smells funny”.

OK.

First people I met: John Butera and his wife Mandy Isbeth. I recruited her to be The Other Jacquie this evening, when I’m expected to lead a ride in the Ballyhoura woods… my own confused schedule has me simultaneously getting an audience with Dervla Murphy, the Literary Lioness of Lismore…not a difficult choice, since I think Mandy will do a superb job of posing as me, whilst fobbing those patches I created off on patrons of the embroidery arts.

Jac Strachan and I will be zipping down (avoiding head-on collisions, sort of a secret sport of the Irish) to County Waterford to meet her and we can’t wait. Can’t wait…Dervla…thank you in advance for the time…
Here in the Kilmallock Library, the staff whispered a request for a banjo tune (I obliged).
Each place I go (Lounges, bars, usually to put on my rain coat and steal a peek at the decor) people enquire for a micro-concert, and I always oblige.  Never happens in the states.
Yesterday at a roadside gas station/cafe called Insomnia Cafe, we even befriended the Guy In The Car Next To Us. (Hello, Rory). Then found an entire platoon of Dutch single speeders –Hubert, Jaap, etc, buying food. It feels like the world is a tiny little carnival of two wheel buffoons.

Posted in Ireland
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