Monday, April 26, 2010

A Bicycle Built for Two


I did a lot of bike riding with my friends when I was growing up.  Our neighborhood was quiet, and we usually rode on the sidewalk when we pedaled to the library or the drugstore.  One year I even biked to school although I must have done it wearing a dress because girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school then. Talk about  the Dark Ages!

After Paul and I were married, my grandparents gave me a bike for my birthday with tassels on the handlebars and an ooga-ooga horn – further evidence that grandparents really know what kids want, even grown up kids.  Columbus, Ohio offered lots of flat biking routes, but I still had trouble keeping up with Paul.  One day we were riding out around the Darby Dan horse farms, and I kept falling further and further behind. Paul was getting annoyed, until he realized I had been riding on a flat back tire for several miles.  Well, anyone could have told him that he wasn’t getting a bike mechanic when he married me.

As the boys got older, we gave up biking for other activities.  Anyway, being on separate bikes was a strain because we never rode at the same pace.  Paul couldn’t understand why I couldn’t keep up and I couldn’t understand why he had to ride so fast.  Finally, our friends introduced us to the perfect solution –a tandem bike! 


With a tandem, nobody has to worry about keeping up and you always have somebody nearby to talk to.  You can also divide up the work.  Paul’s jobs are shifting gears and steering to avoid cars, other bikes and road kill.  He is also in charge of the brakes. Don't tell my mother but a bike like ours can do 50 miles an hour on the downhill.  However, if it does that while I’m on the back, Paul knows he’ll have to find another biking partner.  My main job is to read the map and watch for road signs, something I am okay but not great at, especially without my reading glasses.  Jobs that I do well include waving to passing cars, handing Paul the lip sunscreen and scratching his back.  I also have to straighten out the guys who yell from their front porches, “She’s not pedaling.”

My favorite job on the bike is riding shotgun in case dogs chase us. (If you’ve read my post “Going to the Dogs,” you’ll understand this.)  Today most dogs are inside electric fences; and the ones barking, snarling and yelping are in pens or chained up.  Every so often, however, a loose one decides to come after our bike, so I have to be ready with my squirt gun.  Most of the chasing is done by those little yappers who don’t realize that something with two-inch-long legs is not a match for a tandem bike. They’re no problem.  Bigger, more savvy dogs, who leap unexpectedly out of high grass and can run as fast as the bike, are more of a challenge.  Fortunately, a spritz of squirt gun water on the end of a dog’s nose has the same effect it would have had on the Wicked Witch of the West. The dog stops, gives me a look of moral outrage, and, by the time it realizes it’s not melting, we're out of range.

We have had many wonderful rides on our tandem.  A good bike ride begins with a plan about lunch.  The ideal bike route has a lunch stop about two-thirds of the way through with an easy, downhill coast back to the car afterward.  A bad day on the bike is one where you’ve ridden 30 miles to a special lunch stop in lovely, secluded countryside only to find out that the restaurant is closed, there is nothing else anywhere nearby and all you have with you is disgusting stuff like Gatorade and Energy goop.

With our friends we have developed favorite day rides on quiet country roads in Indiana and Ohio, all with a lunch stop, of course.  The Vatican Ride is spectacular, despite a few tough hills. It includes the towns of St. Peter and St. Leon,  the grotto at St. Mary’s of the Rock, and a picnic lunch in the Franciscan sisters’ garden at Michaela Farm in Oldenberg.  At other times, we cruise past cornfields, farms and old one-room schoolhouses in the area bordered by Harrison, Oxford and Brookville,  with lunch at Brookville Lake or the Oxford bakery.  The ride that meets all our criteria for an ideal bike route is a loop from Sunman to Batesville, with lunch overlooking the vineyards at Ertel Winery (32 miles to the winery, 5 easy ones back to the car) and landmarks like an old country store/restaurant, a backyard airstrip called JFK Flyway and a Shetland pony farm.

Organized rides for large crowds of bikers can be fun, and we’ve tried several of those.  One of the first organized rides we took was The Chili Ride meandering around country roads north of Cincinnati and ending with guess what for lunch.  The Horsy Hundred around Georgetown and Lexington, Kentucky’s horse country got a 10 for scenery but a 1 for food – peanut butter sandwiches, which Paul hates, bananas, which I hate and uninspired snacks like Nutri-Grain bars.  Hello? Where's the CHOCOLATE??  I mean, what’s the point of that kind of a ride?  Since then, we’ve organized our own Horsy Hundred with friends (photo above) – we’ve kept the scenery but you can bet we aren’t eating peanut butter and bananas. 

The best organized ride we've found is Bloomington’s Hilly Hundred, two fifty-mile days through farms and forest land when the leaves are changing color – it was a highlight of our fall for many years.  The Hilly Hundred lives up to its name, which is why we’ve been retired from it for a few years, but here’s what made even a sluggard biker like me willing to tackle fifty miles of hills – the rest stops.  Each day’s route had three rest stops featuring live music from blue grass to solo guitar to accordion to Woodstock-style rock. Those stops also offered outstanding food – cider and donuts, fried chicken, pasta salad, ice cream, apples and absolute cookie nirvana –the biggest selection I’ve seen since I burglarized my college sorority house cookie closet. It doesn’t get any better than that, even if you are a little saddle sore.

We’ve also taken longer biking vacations, each of which had its highs and lows.  Our week biking on the
C & O Canal towpath in Maryland and Virginia featured leafy trails along  the Potomac, bed and breakfasts in Civil War era towns and a leisurely ride around the Antietam battlefield.  That trip also featured riding around a bend to find the towpath had disappeared under three feet of water and having the trailer that held our clothes and gear nearly fall into the canal.  During our week biking the Finger Lakes, the highs included eating fresh peaches from a roadside stand, staying in quaint, 1950's  towns and passing picturesque Amish farms. The low, which was due either to faulty directions (my opinion) or a navigator error (Paul’s opinion), occurred when we missed the turn into a lunch stop and had to ride down a long hill in heavy traffic just as a thunderstorm hit.  It wasn’t pretty.

The bike vacation we return to again and again is in Door County, Wisconsin.  We never get tired of riding past cherry and apple orchards, staying in a Victorian house and on a sheep farm, and enjoying views of Green Bay, Lake Michigan and beautiful Wisconsin barns.  On top of that, the Door County routes have more lunch stops than we can fit into a week, there are ice cream parlors everywhere and you can even get your water bottle filled up with homemade root beer.  We have, occasionally, contended with strong, gusty wind on our Door County rides (and I don’t mean what happens when you have a big bowl of pea soup for lunch.)  Pedaling against a 30 mile an hour wind makes you feel like you’re 90 years old and ready to hang up your bicycle pump.   However, when that kind of wind is at your back, you're another Lance Armstrong.

The warm April weather has allowed us to get back on the bike and start getting our legs and our seats back in shape.  Even though, sometimes Paul has to say to me, “Jill, I need a little help here” and sometimes I find it hard to be helpful, I really love our times on the tandem.  I hope we have many more biking adventures in us.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?




Cowboys were a big part of my life growing up, even though I never met one, at least not in person. Like many kids of the 50’s, everything I knew about cowboys came from television shows, and there were a ton of them to choose from.  According to Wikipedia, Hopalong Cassidy led the way in 1949; and, by the peak year of 1959, there were 26 prime time cowboy shows. During one week in March of 1959, 8 of the top 10 T.V. shows were Westerns.   Here are a few that I remember: “The Lone Ranger,” “Roy Rogers,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Gunsmoke,” “Maverick,” “Rawhide,” “Broken Arrow,” “Wild Bill Hickok,” “Annie Oakley,” “Wagon Train,” “Zorro,” “The Cisco Kid,”  “Bonanza,” “Bat Masterson” and “Have Gun Will Travel.”  How much T.V. did we watch???

Those cowboy shows featured memorable theme music and lots of exciting action – gunfights, runaway stage coaches, cattle stampedes and Indian raids.  The violence was mild by today’s standards, and there was never any gore (although all we had was black and white television so what did we know?) Usually the hero would shoot the gun out of a dirty, lowdown outlaw’s hand before anyone got seriously hurt.  Occasionally somebody got “winged,” which meant he showed up in the final scene with his arm in a sling.  A barroom fight often ended with a brawler being tossed out through the saloon’s swinging doors.  When a gang of bad guys wanted to humiliate some city slicker, they shot around his feet and jeered, “Dance!”  My brother Mark got in trouble the time he tried that on my sister. 


T.V. cowboys had the lifestyle we all wished for. Liver and Brussels sprouts were never dished up out of a chuck wagon and eaten off of tin plates around the campfire.  You never saw Gene Autry take a toothbrush out of his saddle bag, even though he and all the other good guys had beautiful teeth.  Cowboys never took a bath unless, during a dust-up, some sidewinder got thrown into the town horse trough.  They even had a language all their own with cool expressions like “Reach for the sky, pardner,” “You’ll never get away with this,” and “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” 


It’s no wonder the Wild West dominated our play time.  On nice days, my
brother Mark and I were out in the backyard and the woods with our friends, re-enacting what we saw on our favorite shows.  We all had toy six shooters and holsters.  We practiced a quick draw and were good at getting off shots from behind trees and bushes.  At some point, we transitioned to cap guns – if you took the time to thread a roll of red paper caps through those babies, every pull of the trigger was rewarded with a bang and an acrid puff of smoke.  I’d know that cap gun smell anywhere.

 
In bad weather, we stayed inside and drove the stage coach.  Mark and I sat on the high back of the couch and bounced along just like John Wayne and Andy Devine.  Mark snapped the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue and the side of his teeth and yelled “Yaw” a lot.  I rode shotgun and picked off Indians, rustlers, bushwhackers and varmints like my sister.   Often Mark’s three imaginary cowboy friends, Boss, Tom and Luke Bosom, joined us.  Mark would announce at breakfast that the guys were coming for dinner.  Mom was always up for company; and they were light eaters so she never had to make an extra trip to the grocery.


 After a hot, dusty day on the trail, we bellied up to the bar like real cowboys.  Mark was the bartender.  (Somehow, even though he was younger, he always landed the best roles.)  He couldn’t get my Dad to replace his bedroom door with swinging doors so he had to settle for putting a table across the door to his room in order to serve water or milk in shot glasses.  Of course, any game was always more fun at our grandparents’ house; when Mark played saloonkeeper there, he got to pour our favorite Barq’s root beer out of those tall, nubbly glass bottles into Grandpa A.’s  special souvenir shot glasses.

We were always ready to add to our stock of cowboy gear.  An early Christmas photo (unfortunately lost) showed me in a new Dale Evans cowgirl outfit cooking on the toy stove my dad had made for me – a variation of the “Home on the Range” theme, I guess. Because she was younger, my sister Kay was on the fringes of the cowboy action.  She did have a red cowboy hat even though everybody knew real cowboy hats were supposed to be black or white or tan. She also insisted on pinning a pink scarf to the back of her hat brim so she could swish it around and pretend she had long hair. She was just a little kid so I didn’t say anything, but I was glad Dale Evans, “Queen of the West,” wasn’t around to see that hat.  For Christmas a few years later, when kids with less imaginative parents were getting dollhouses and playhouses, Santa Claus surprised us with a cardboard cowboy jailhouse.  It was tall enough to stand up in, and it had a cell with cardboard bars on the door and windows.  It also came with play handcuffs and a big ring of jangly keys.  You can probably guess who got to be the sheriff.

I was able to “return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear” when John and David went through their cowboy phase.  They were entertained and inspired by cowboy movies, rather than television. The tension of “High Noon, the machismo of “The Magnificent Seven,” the nonchalant camaraderie of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and the absolute cowboy rightness of anything starring John Wayne affected them and their friends just as T.V. Westerns affected us. 


On our Wyoming vacations with the boys, I finally got to meet real cowboys. They worked as wranglers, taking care of the horses and leading trail rides by day and cooking and making the campfire at night.  They were polite and helpful like the Lone Ranger, rugged-looking like John Wayne and tuneful like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.  They ate like real cowboys too, starting lunch with candy bars, sometimes skipping the main course and always skipping the fruit or vegetable courses. (They fed all the apples and carrot sticks to the horses, unless we ate them first.)  We learned that Paul could never be a cowboy because he chose walking over riding on horseback or in a covered wagon. The cowboy’s motto: Never stand when you can sit and never walk when you can ride.  Many of the cowboys we met competed in the rodeo during their free time, and most of them could have used a good physical therapist and lots of Advil. Overall they were nice, friendly people who worked hard and knew a lot about horses and about Western wildlife.  I wonder how many of them are still around.  Are there any cowboy avatars?


P.S.  If you’re the right age, you can probably identify most of these cowboys.  The dude in black is my brother, Mark.   David and John are pictured at right with Bill Cody, grandson of Buffalo Bill and above with Joe, their favorite wrangler on the Cody ranch.

Click below for the only possible ending to this post
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcYsO890YJY&feature=fvst

Monday, April 5, 2010

Is There a Doctor in the House?

There has been a lot of discussion and controversy about the differences between boys and girls.  Experts debate at length over the left brain/right brain thing, verbal ability vs. math ability, expressing vs. holding back emotions, and social maturity.  In the end, there are just four universal differences.   Girls give out those piercing shrieks that penetrate right to your core.   Boys drink right out of open juice or milk containers in the refrigerator.  Girls frequently change their clothes.  Boys frequently make trips to the emergency room.  These differences require different parenting skills.  My friends who have raised girls have a vast store of knowledge about nail polish colors, ear piercing, tying scarves and hair ornaments. After raising two boys, I know all there is to know about sprains, breaks, gashes and blood.

Not counting the usual toddler borks and dings, which always happened right before it was time to take the family Christmas picture, we had our first introduction to the big leagues of injury when David was three.  He and Paul were playing what David proudly called “rough soccer” when he tripped and split open his chin on the sandbox railroad ties.  Although David insisted we should just fix it with Vaseline, his chin launched our maiden voyage to Children’s Hospital.

When John was three, his broken collarbone became the Injury for All Seasons.  Late one Saturday night in the spring, he fell out of bed while we were hosting one of our big pizza bashes. David went home with our guests while we went to Children’s Hospital, where our tomato, onion, garlic and red wine breath made us pariahs in the waiting room.  John healed up in time for a summer visit with my parents at the beach, fell out of bed on our last morning there and was back in the collarbone harness by afternoon.  After six weeks, we thought that was the end of the story – and it was, for awhile.

Three years later, in a fall backyard football game, John came out from under a pile of bodies holding his shoulder.  After six weeks of healing, we had our final visit with Dr. Crawford, the head of orthopedics at Children’s.  Dr. Crawford was a soft spoken, tall black man –when he sat down and held John between his knees, his kneecaps came up to John’s ears.  After I had voiced my concerns about re-injury and asked about restrictions on activities, Dr. Crawford looked John in the eye and said, “John, boy, don’t let them keep you down.”  Then he turned to me and added, “We’re open 24 hours a day.”  You can bet I watched John like a hawk all winter.

To his credit, John also won the prize for the Worst Injury That Almost Happened. He was new to biking with training wheels but naturally joined the other kids riding their bikes down the neighbor’s driveway, a hill which banked sharply to the right.  We watched from the back porch as John clattered and teetered his way down the hill, missed the curve, ran off the driveway and disappeared over a stone retaining wall.  Somehow he pulled off this 9.5 rated stunt with nothing more than a bloody nose.


During the grade school years, here is what I found out first hand.  If a kid is playing hide and seek and runs into the corner of a brick house, he gets stitches.  If a kid tries riding with no hands, falls off his bike and hits a tree trunk, he gets stitches.  If a kid is at summer camp on a farm and tangles his arm in barbed wire, he gets stitches and a scar that looks like the souvenir of a fight with Captain Hook.

At times, I wondered if my boys were just accident prone, but they fit right in with our neighborhood.  Two of the more noteworthy injuries were a golf club to the knee and an arrow to the lower lip. (No, the arrow was not shot
out of a bow; it was being pulled out of a target.)  From the true confessions I’ve heard recently, it’s amazing we weren't picking BB's out of the kids as well.  Luckily, my next door neighbor, a nurse, was even calmer about these mishaps than I was.  Her philosophy was if it isn’t bleeding too badly and if you can walk on it, even with a limp, just go back outside and play.

Once boys are in high school, you might think the medical emergencies would be over, but you would be mistaken.  While John was allegedly studying for an AP exam, he tried a Pete Townshend windmill guitar maneuver (see Wikipedia), broke the ceiling fan light and nearly severed his finger.  We were at the Lake with
several families and came back from an adult bike ride to an eerie quiet.  The kids were all huddled in the docked boat wondering how to tell us that David, who had been using the water balloon launcher to launch rocks, had nailed himself in the foot at close range. One Sunday we were hosting a neighborhood open house. Just as the pianist arrived and we were setting out food and drinks, John showed up missing most of the skin on his left side – a mountain biking smash up.  During a family bike ride the weekend before David’s wedding, someone zigged when they should have zagged; and David wound up with a dislocated shoulder.

The last major injury occurred a few years ago – another biking accident (is there a pattern here?) and a
two-fer as well.  David was in town for Mothers’ Day weekend, and he and Paul started off with a bike ride in Indiana.  I was at home wondering where they were when I heard the car in the garage.  David skulked in limping (sent by Paul, like the canary in the coal mine) to tell me what had happened.  Here are some prompts – you fill in the blanks: dogs, rear end collision, blood, mangled bikes, four mile walk, two 1000 capsule bottles of Advil, frozen peas and ice bags.   I can only hope that will prove to be the final emergency of its kind, but who knows? As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

A lot of people (mostly parents of girls) insist raising boys is easier than raising girls.  I say it depends on whether you do better with trauma or drama.  I wonder what medical adventures await  David and Megan.  I am contributing a collarbone sling and crutches to their family first aid kit, and Paul is a pro at removing stitches.