Epic Meats

Got a call from a friend on Saturday that something epic was afoot at the aforementioned Ice House. Boy, was it.


That, for the record, is a burger skewered on sausages and wrapped in a woven cloak of bacon, waiting patiently for space on the grill. One of many, many, many meat treats at the, get ready, Montrose Beer & Gun Club Annual Cookoff & Music Extravaganza, a benefit for, also get ready, kids who wish things were better. You pay five dollars at the door and then eat as much as you possibly can from the 20-30 little stands set up on the grounds at the ice house. Beer is for sale, like always, but mostly, there's just a crazy amount of food. Things get made in waves, the offerings change as the day wears on, but we saw lots of chili, six kinds of beans, tenderloin on the grill, a roasted pig head, tamales, tacos, chicken, quail, rabbit, everything. And each with some kind of sauce, tenderly drizzled over top. I got to eat some stuff here and there, but yeah, mostly I just watched.







That there? That's a candied jalapeno. Momentarily sweet but really just hugely spicy, for the record.

The Stand of Cleo & Ramsey

Houston, Texas you all.

The Hikes

As I mentioned, I'm really not much of a walker. Give me an alternative and I will likely take it. But in the spirit of the aforementioned cabin vacation, we took these really great walks while we were in Comptche. First into town, and then later, along one of the heirloom routes that Miriam's family has worked out over the last few decades. The latter cuts across several country lanes and through some great big woods. The photos speak pretty well for themselves.
















Despite these fantastic photos and my stellar company, I'm still not sure about walks. By the end, I felt like I was going to run.

A Boy and His Bike.

This Saturday began like any good one should, with a little coffee in the morning and a big plan: garage sales and errands and a good chunk of time to myself. Not that I mind company on the weekend, of course, but lately that hasn't been balanced much with time for absolute solitude. By this weekend, I was ready for it. There is something about browsing through junk and walking around the grocery store that focuses my usually wandering gaze momentarily onto a single dusty plate.

This weekend, I was restricted to going to garage sales in our neighborhood for one reason or another and Miriam had called with a tip on some mason jars on Clarke Street. With backpack and cash in tow, I headed there first. Three little old ladies greeted me warmly, with all manner of things laid out on card tables, pulling evenly from the latest five decades. They were contentedly sitting in the shade, discussing the neighborhood generally while I scoured the piles until I settled on a few silly things: 3 yards of red cotton fabric, a gold barrette, a new belt and an old-fashioned metal ice cube tray. As I traded 8 dollars for the treasures, I asked after the mason jars. The oldest and least mobile of the three indicated that she'd been the one who talked to Miriam and sure, she had some jars, but no one but her knew where to look for them. She'd have to go down to the basement herself, but she wasn't feeling up to it just then. Could I come back a little later on?



Of course, I said, I could certainly stop back later but not to trouble herself too greatly after just these jars. She got a curious look and asked why we wanted mason jars after all. Her friend answered for me, Why, these girls want to make jam! The older one looked again at me doubtfully. Jam? And then what are you going to do with it! Eat it? She chuckled at the thought and told me again to stop back later on. Then she handed me back a dollar, reconsidering after this little while her earlier price on the piece of red cotton fabric.



The younger lady then nodded toward the end of the driveway where a younger boy, of 13 or 14 had set up a stand selling lemonade and had displayed some things of his. I do hope he sells some things, she said to her friend. He's such a nice boy. And you know, his parents don't help him out at all either. But he is such a nice young man.

I said I'd take a look at what I might be able to use, but glanced doubtfully at the old computer printer, skateboard and BMX bike. As a junk collector, I reach more readily for old lady junk than for 13 year old kid junk, but looking more closely, I saw that he was selling an old bike lock too. We can always use another bike lock around our house, with all of our bicycle riding friends, and I asked him the price.

He asked how much I had to spend. I offered five, and he offered seven, and I caved at the higher price, because this was a little kid after all. And a bicycle lock with a working key is a commodity indeed. As I handed him the dollars, I asked why he didn't need a bike lock himself and looked up for the first time at his face.

For a boy, he was pretty quiet and he had nice manners without sounding maladjusted. Although his sneakers weren't name brand or new, they were clean, like he'd made an effort to stay out of the dirt. Well...he said, I'm selling my bike too, so I don't need a lock anymore. I felt a sting in the end of my nose. Oh, I said, a little lump caught in my throat. He handed me the key to the lock, wrapped carefully up in a little plastic sandwich baggie and I placed it into the pocket of my backpack. I turned and headed back to my own bike, feeling fairly rotten.

I had meant to be nice, to buy something he was selling, but that was before I realized he was just a little kid, selling off his bike just as the weather here is getting nice out. I imagined that he needed school supplies or some similarly responsible thing, the kind of kid the elderly ladies next door affectionately call a nice young man, and here I was letting him sell me his bike lock.

My own little brother, another quietly responsible kid who's always been helpful and responsible beyond his years, watched too closely as my grandfather got sick when he was only 12. And here was this kid Chris, who so reminded me of Jake, both without much mischief behind their eyes.

I ran the rest of my errands and came back a few hours later for the mason jars. The bike was still for sale. Another truth hit me after leaving the second time: that if he didn't sell his bike now, he wouldn't be able to ride it without the lock he'd sold me that morning. I was fairly crushed at this thought, but didn't want to meddle. On the other hand, I couldn't bring myself to use the lock, knowing he probably needed it.

At five o'clock I succumbed to the guilt of the thing. I called my mom and laid it out for her. She assured me that I wouldn't seem totally insane if I went back and tried to give it back. So before I really knew what I would say and before I could get nervous, I rode my bike back to Clarke Street for the third time that day. I found Chris next to his own house next door, wearing his bike helmet and getting ready to ride out on his bike.

Hey there, I said, So, no luck selling the bike then? No, he replied, Actually I'm glad you came back. He too, had realized the mistake in selling the lock in advance of the bike, but he seemed troubled over the issue of refunding the money he had already grown attached to. So I proposed a solution. I told him I wanted him to keep the lock as long as he still had the bike. If he did sell it, then he could email me and bring me the lock, but he could hang onto it until then. I wrote down my email address and told him that it didn't really matter how long it took him, I was in no hurry, and in the meantime, he could also hang onto the money I'd already paid him.

I handed him the lock and the key and my whole person felt instantly lighter. He seemed pretty relieved himself. Even if I never see that lock again, I'm not too concerned about the seven dollars, either way. For me, seven dollars is a tiny amount of money, but for a kid, I recall it being quite a lot.. And I'm happy to gamble on the possibility that it is.

Adventures, of late

I've been withholding a minor detail of my state of mind from you people. I have what you might call an elephant in every room right now. He's really terribly enormous and invasive and he seems to whisper, always, the things I should be working on. Drawings, research, letters of recommendation. It being August, it is the beginning of application season, for those of us who dare to apply for graduate school. And this year, of course, that means me.

But last week Miriam had the good idea to take a bike ride out to the furthest point west, in the East Bay, to the port of Oakland for some exploring. It was a great way to ease my mind against its tendency to become overwhelmed and subsequently useless, but also a good time to just pedal and think and formulate. It had been too long since I'd visited a place unknown and it made me want to hop in the car and just drive somewhere new. Maybe with my next visitor, I'll enforce this plan.

Here are some of the parts of our journey that were best suited for a quick picture:










I'm a kid in a candy store, when it comes to industrial landscapes, because they offer such intense contrasts in color and texture. I wish I had a nicer camera, for times like this more than ever, because some of the lines get a little muddy with further distance. The scale is harder to convey, but in case you were wondering, those white cranes behind the shipping containers are bigger than anything with moving parts you've probably ever seen.

Via Philadelphia

People out here ask me all the time, "Where are you from?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question, especially because here in San Francisco most of the residents have relocated from somewhere else. The concentration of the young, attractive, healthy and progressive is just too high for any natural urban evolution. We tend to flock here in droves, and so when people inevitably ask me the big question, I usually just say Wisconsin because it's shorter than the truth.

While Wisconsin is certainly where I was born, and where I was raised, and where I go when I'm going Home, the truth about where I am from is somewhat more hairy. I feel like I did a fair amount of growing up in New York State, where I went to school, in New York city, where I first learned to know a city, in St. Petersburg where I learned to go it alone and mostly, in Philadelphia, where I made my first permanent home.

These days there seems to be a great divide between the people I know who pick up and leave to travel the world and live out of some combination of a tote bag, a bicycle pannier and a backpack, and the people who go somewhere to stay, to sign a lease and build a life in a single place. While both have attractive qualities, I've always fallen quite softly into the latter group because of how happy I am to settle in. Knowing my neighbors, building a routine, hanging up curtains and learning the best parts of a city are things I count as blessings.

And yet, I have an eagerness to live in new places, which has now carried me into my fifth urban residence since high school. So when I'm asked where I'm from, I have such a compound sentence at the ready. "Well..." it always starts. "Wisconsin, via New York State via Philadephia."

My hybrid loyalties to both the nomads and the settlers has made this most recent move bittersweet. And this weekend we're headed to Philly and it will be my first visit since leaving that great city last August. A tiny part of me is nervous that I'll feel more at home while I'm there visiting that past-tense landscape than I do out here in California. It will be a good litmus test for me, to sort out my mix of feelings around our move to the west coast; the lingering regret over leaving a life we loved and the strength of conviction that we did the right thing, for the sake of the adventure. Change, I'm always reminding myself, is a good thing.



I'm excited beyond words for these next five days, whatever the result. I think I'll count happy visits back in the "Advantages to Moving" column of my pros and cons chart...or would if I had one of those.

How to Make It Home Alive

As with the trip, the third day was our longest and just as it took 10 hours to do the actual biking, it took me a little while to work up the strength to transcribe it here. We heated up real coffee with the last of our stove fuel and made some barely passable oatmeal before packing everything up and leaving town for good. Our route to the east out of town started with a big big hill but then we found ourselves smooth sailing through a valley with the sun shining and the wind at our backs. Some construction, by luck actually, sent us along a concurrent small country road that couldn't have been more idyllic if we had made it ourselves, a hundred years ago in anticipation of riding down it now.


We started out in Sonoma County and it took until after midday to cross over to Napa, right around the time we stumbled upon a taco truck in the middle of a field where we pulled in for lunch. And with burritos longer than my forearm, including fingers, we sat at a picnic table in the side yard of an abandoned storage facility and chowed down. The hunger satisfaction ratio was right around critical, so that just recalling this meal makes my stomach sigh with gratitude. Dreams, it seems, really do come true.



Even so, we dared not devour our entire burritos right there, with 50 miles (optimistically) looming ahead. Rationally, a burrito longer than your forearm, lying in your belly does not an eager cyclist make. So we saddled up, thanked our hosts for the hospitality, and headed down the road.

We hardly made it a hundred feet before a man in a camper pulled over to give us some advice about even more construction on the highway ahead, and conveniently, a bike detour we should look out for. Grateful for the foresight, we hung a right and traversed the countryside full of rolling hills, vineyards and pastures, along roads we had mostly to ourselves. With the exception of a particularly territorial peacock. He left his post at the entrance to his farm only to chase us, aggressively, at the sight of our camera. We hopped back on the bikes and ran away. John was crying a little bit, but we were physically unharmed.



And things continued in a positive direction for much of the afternoon. Karmically, we were due for a mishap, as we'd had pretty solid luck throughout the trip. And sure enough, our route got confusing almost immediately after the lovely detour rejoined the main highway. Ahead, at the very intersection where our directions insisted we merge onto 29, stood a sign that said no bicycles allowed.

Thinking sorts, we tried to recall the maps we'd studied prior to departure but with little success. So we decided to just head south and hope for the best, placing our faith naively in the logic of rural roadways. We turned and began to follow a bicycle trail which we hoped might take us down river to again join up with our cue sheet later on. To no avail, I might add, as this bicycle trail instead looped around through a marsh past a commercial wine-making facility, only to dead end in the middle of a field with private property signs all around.

After making nice with the private property holders and asking directions, we turned entirely around and headed north (and due opposite from where we were ultimately headed) to catch the road that we hoped could carry us home. By this point, we'd added almost fifteen extra miles to the day, which was beginning to close in on 4 o'clock.

Once we were back on track, we realized that our next many miles would be along the shoulder of a very busy four lane highway with a speed limit which would honestly prevent both of our mothers from sleeping soundly through the night. But we took it slowly, paid attention and chugged along. That is until John got himself one flat tire, along a stretch with no easy exits. Which caused us to amble over a landscaped berm in a brand new Marriott parking lot in order to have a safe spot to stand while he swapped out the innertube. Which only took a minute because John is a juggler at fixing bikes.



Meaning he's pretty good at it.

And before you knew it, we were headed through Vallejo and over the Carquinez Bridge. Here we are happily on the other side.


We stopped to gobble up the remaining halves of the burritos (remember those?) and we were awfully glad to have exerted such self control earlier in the day. By 6 we were headed through the towns of the northeast bay: Rodeo, San Pablo, Richmond and lickety split, finally back on the Ohlone Greenway trail. Things got familiar again, like our shadows.


Just as the sun was setting, we pulled up to our house. At last! We were so excited that we danced around for a bit. Gingerly though, as we were still sporting cycling shoes.


I was so tired, I almost couldn't toast my oversized novelty celebration beer in honor of completing 203 innaugural bike tour miles.


I said almost.