Some many years ago I had a brief passing thought about a photograph project. What would it be like to shoot all of the rust? It has a certain beauty. It says, well, a few different things, if you contemplate it long enough. It’s also everywhere.
And sometimes, I find myself staring at a bit of rust.
When I do, I think of that passing thought. How long would that take? And who are you kidding? How many things would rust away by the time you got back to the starting point? Saturday, when I was looking at that bridge, I wondered, wWhat does all of the rust in the world weigh?
I was staring at that bridge while my lovely bride was checking in for her triathlon. She did a half iron this weekend.
The half iron includes a 1.2 mile swim, in a river, this time. Here, she is exiting the water right on schedule.
Immediately after that, there’s a 56 mile bike ride.
She dropped her chain, and said someone swung out in front of her and ran her off the road. She was OK. At least two different people were less fortunate, and had accidents involving cars. Excellent job securing those semi-controlled roads by the race organizers and local authorities.
And after that 1.2 mile run, and well-paced 56 mile ride, she had a half marathon to wrap up the event. Here she is setting out for the run.
She had a great swim, and she was pleased with her bike ride. But she did not care for her run. Aches and pain and no shade and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, when she made it to the line, she finished with a smile.
And that’s her fifth 70.3, to go alongside her three Ironmen triathlons. And wraps up the best part of the season. I think she has one or two more runs scheduled, just for fun, but everything is for fun from here. (It should all be fun, I say. Finish with a smile, that’s what I say.)
On the way back home today, we stopped at this place. ‘
Because, look, when you tell a trusted friend you are driving through her native neck of the woods and she simply replies that you have to go eat at this place, you take the advice.
Our trusted friend was spot on with that recommendation.
Today was a long day in the car; there was a lot of reading Wikipedia to pass the time. Tomorrow, it’ll be back to work.
This is almost entirely about this video. Except for the part that isn’t.
And if you’re paying attention — and why wouldn’t you be? — to the background, you might notice that this one deserves the special banner.
When I set out, this was the angle of the sun in the sky. I’d wavered for a while. Should I? Shouldn’t I? And then finally decided to get in a quick 20 miles. By then, and after I’d re-greased my chain and left my water bottle in the garage, it looked like this out.
I took a right to cut through some nice pastureland. Somebody is ready to put up their hay. Some of the livestock owners have hay leftover from last year, mild winter that it was. Maybe that’ll be the case again.
I pedaled through the farm lands, through two residential neighborhoods and a little town ready to stretch out for the evening. Then I was back in the farm fields again.
One left, and then a hard sprint to the next right, and then a charge up this hill.
Soon after which, I turned on my headlight. I love this thing, because it makes night riding possible. The best part of which are the quite roads I can choose. In the last half pf the ride just four cars passed me, and two of those were just at the end.
Equally usefully, is that you can ride at speed. Do you remember how you were taught to not outrun your headlights?
What?
You know, headlights have a certain limited range, a limited thrown, beyond which the light is too diffuse to be effective.
What do you mean, do I remember?
It’s obvious isn’t it?
I’m a narrative construct. I don’t know how to drive.
Right. Well, trust me. It makes sense, even if it isn’t the best advice. See where you’re driving.
Sure, if you say so. But so what?
Similar principle here.
OK, then.
I can pedal happily along at 20 mph and see the road in front of me. Somewhere after that it feels a little curious, but I’m not bombing down hills or doing a lot of sprints in the darkness. Tonight, this light allowed me to do the last five miles with confidence.
Note to self: Spend more time out here.
The gazebo is a nice place. Lots of lovely furniture. Fun lights. A delightful insect choir. And the weather, well now the weather is just perfect for it.
We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 43rd installment, and the 75th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And this one is relatively new. It was installed just last year.
This was a thinly populated area. A couple thousand people lived in this broader rural area. It isn’t much more crowded today. The first school was in a house. Then came a building purpose-built as a school in 1845, and then the Lambert Street school. The modern school, after generations of consolidation and change, remembered the teacher at Lambert School for a long time. Mary Elizabeth Remster, who retired in 1943 after 48 years in the classroom, had a future school named after her. That building was consolidated in 1980, meaning it was likely that kids studied under Miss Remster and then saw their grandchildren go to a school named after the woman.
Continuity is important in a small town. When this building was no longer needed as a school in 1925, it became a home. A former student bought it. He married another former student. The Lambert Street school is still in their family, a century later.
Which means there probably aren’t any students still with us who remember the school, but the local historical society is keeping it alive. The man that bought the home was an artist, a craftsman, a businessman. He served in a medical unit in England and France during World War I. He and his wife both passed away in the 1980s. They had eight sons. Theirs remains a prominent family name in that area.
At the beginning of each month I do a lot of important and boring things. I create a few new subdirectories for the site. I delete a bunch of stuff from the desktop of my computer. I update a document that holds a lot of standard code shortcuts that I use.
And so on. It is all terribly exciting.
One other interesting thing that I do is update the images on the front page. The rotating photos now feature a small piece of something we saw in California this spring. Head on over to the front page to check those out. It’ll take you 54 seconds for the rotation to carry you through. We’ll be right here when you get back.
My joking complaint about triathlons is that they start too early. We need hobbies, I say, that cost less and don’t start at dawn; if they don’t require too much running, more the better.
So, last night, because the story of this day began last night, as so many of them do, my lovely bride told me that she’d signed up for a super sprint triathlon she found a half hour away. And would I like to go? Also, the race started at 6:30 in the p.m.
Since that was my complaint, it seemed only fair that I should go in support.
Super sprints are short, but I had a long swim the day before, and I haven’t run in a while, so it’s just support, and that’s probably for the better. I’ve done one super sprint, thinking, at the finish line, that I am not able to get everything going in the right direction in those short distances.
Which is a shame, since they are shorter, and I am slow.
But I am a great observer of races. I am well practiced in this area. And, of all of the races we’ve done, I don’t recall having seen one with a flyover.
She’s out there, somewhere. She’s the one swimmer among much of the thrashing. It was just a 500 meter swim, and even then, the water was shallow enough that some of the dudes just stood up in the last 50 or so and waded in.
They all looked gross. This little pond is fed by this, South Branch Rancocas Creek. And it isn’t as nice as you might imagine here. There was a fine black particulate. The Millpond mildew. Something thinner than rubber, and thicker than dust, clung to everything. Whatever was contracted from this event will be given a name in due time.
The bike leg, she said, was nice. Good pavement, fast roads.
The run was one big loop. Neither that, nor the bike ride, would wipe away that stuff that latched on to everyone in the water.
When we left, because it was an early evening tri, we timed the sunset just right. I liked it. Almost didn’t take it. But I did, and I’m glad for it.
We celebrated with Chick-fil-A. The triathlon, not that last photo.
Just when you thought the sinusitis was done with you, the head thickens once again. Otherwise? Feel great! Except for right around the middle of the head. It’s just a head pressure thing, a let me go and move on abut my day thing, an enough already thing. It’ll be fine soon.
So, it’s back to the OTC pills.
I treated myself to a nice long swim today. The water was warm, 92 degrees the thermometer said, and it is true what swimmers say, you swim faster in colder water.
That’s why I went slow, you see. Has nothing to do with taking forever to get my arms warmed up. Nothing to do with poor form. Nothing to do the continued head cold recovery. It was all about the warm water.
But I did have a nice 3,000 yards of it.
It gave me a lot of time to think of something legendary swim coach David Marsh told me. He has won 12 national team championships and 89 individual NCAA champions, and he’s coached 49 Olympians, so you come around to thinking he knows a thing or two about what happens in a pool.
On a show I hosted, he told me, “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”
I didn’t swim a lot then, but I thought I understood his point. But now, swimming lots of laps of my own, I appreciate the point a bit more.
See? I’m slow in the pool.
I’m never shaving anything off my time.
But I bet if Marsh stopped by, he could give me two pointers that would improve everything.
Too bad he’s busy just now, Olympic year and all.
We return to the Re-Listening project. I’ve been playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order of their acquisition. The real point is to just enjoy the music, but I’ve doubled my value by using it as a way to pad out the site with a few memories and some good music. These aren’t reviews, far from it; there are enough of those, and then some, out there. Besides, we’re going back to 2005, or 2006, to discuss a 2000 record.
I picked up “Smile” without knowing anything about it, because I’d been fully bitten by The Jayhawks bug. It was their sixth studio album, and it was a move in a somewhat new direction for the band from Minnesota. The alt-country, jangle-pop sound gave way to a more straightforward pop, sonically.
“Smile” reached number 129 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart, which no one knew existed.
If you picked up this album, the first sounds you heard were also the title track.
It isn’t entirely devoid of the jangle-pop sound we all loved so much. But you can chart the progression all throughout the record.
But you couldn’t overlook the new direction. Probably it didn’t sit well with the purists, but Gary Olson was gone (for the first time) and this was their second album without him. It was like they were looking for something. And it took a little getting used to.
They were clearly exploring new distortion pedals. If you sit with it, though, the lyrics are still strong in spirit. Most importantly, the harmonies were still shimmering.
This was always a car CD for me. A lot of back-and-forth to work, 20 or 25 minutes at a time, for quite a while. I was probably late a lot. Hurried parking lots and the like. I remember I bombarded The Yankee with it, because we were carpooling at the time, but she preferred other Jayhawks records, I think. I also think it’s hard to go wrong. What you get, across their catalog, is material for a lot of different moods.
The Jayhawks are going back on the road next month. And, in October, they’ll be playing a show about two-and-a-half hours from us. This was the first band my lovely bride and I saw together. They were about that same distance away that night. And the next day we decided we, in our late 20s, were too old for driving that far and back in one night for a show, with work the day after. (We were both working morning drive at the time and being in the newsroom at 6 a.m. the next day was not easy or pleasant.)
But this show is on a Saturday. Something to think about.
And with that we are, for the time being, caught up in the Re-Listening project. But there are still about 150 CDs to hear again, and share with you.
Come back tomorrow, we’ll talk about a neat little light.
It is so hot, it must be July. Later this week, I’m shopping for ice vests. Summer just feels different, the older I get, and it is, of course, getting hotter, too. Maybe I should invest in ice vests.
We sat in the water to read. Shade, body-temperature water and good books. There was little relief in the activity. But it was a lovely activity.
I finished reading a biography on Gino Bartoli, Road to Valor. It’s one of about 250 books you can get on Ginettacio, any number of which are quality reads. It’s one of the handful that focuses a bit more on the Gino the Pious aspect of the man. Champion cyclist, hero of Italy, Resistenza italiana, who had his best years on the bike taken away by the war, a man who nevertheless used his bike to save an uncounted number of people’s lives during that time.
Among his highlights, Bartali won the Giro d’Italia in 1936 and 1937 and the Tour de France in 1938. Then the war, and when it was time to race again, he was already viewed, in his early 30s, as an old man. And so the anziano won the Giro again in 1946, and the Tour in 1948. It was, and remains, the longest between Tour wins and the second longest such streak in the Giro, which brings us to his rival, the great Fausto Coppi.
Coppi was the vanguard of the next generation of great Italian bike racers, another top talent, and he didn’t want to sit in line behind the old man, hence the rivalry. The book oversells it a little. There are stories, not included here, of how the two got along and worked together, even at the peak of their rivalry. But that duality doesn’t lend itself to drama, one supposes.
(Coppi would later set the mark for the longest interval between wins in the Giro.)
Everything about Bartali’s life — short of his riding a bike at the absolute peak of his powers — strikes you as a hard life. But it isn’t a hard read. The authors, Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon, took great pains with their source material and interviewed many people who knew Bartali. He was the subject of some of the myth-making, lyrical style of mid-century Italian journalism, but none of that was used here. Instead, this easy breezy read comes off a tiny bit elementary. It’s a backhanded compliment: I enjoyed the story they were telling. I wanted more of it.
There are other stories about his time during the war that deserve more attention. He put some of his Jewish friends in an apartment he owned, hid people in his cellar. The biography discusses his ferrying messages and forged documents through the Italian underground, hiding them in the frame of his bike and risk his life, trading on his celebrity, to move this information from one place to another. There are varying accounts of how this played out with the fascists and the Nazis, but that gets glossed over somewhat. There was no mention of his leading refugees toward the Swiss Alps in 1943. Some of the gloss is understandable. It wasn’t something he talked about, and a lot of it are now vague and, contemporaneously dangerous diary entries others kept, or decades old recollections. Bartali himself told his son, “One does these things and then that’s that.”
It was an act of his faith, and then, like many people, he simply tried to return to his life, tried to build a new and better one. And chapters and chapters could have been written about that, for most of us are fortunate enough to not know the experience. Just after the war, for example, when Italians started racing bikes again, they did not race for money. No one had any. They raced for chickens. Or for supplies. Or, in one instance, there was a race for pipes, that the winner gave his community so they could continue rebuilding their infrastructure.
There are always a lot more to these stories, is all.
I had a 2,500 yard swim today. The water was about 92 degrees. It felt a bit warm for a swim.
Swimmers say they swim faster in colder water. I swim slow enough, under any conditions, for this to be a negligible, to say nothing of perceiving it. But I did notice how warm the water is. Can a pool feel sticky?
Just as I finished my laps, I saw a plane turning north overhead. I waited until this moment to take a picture, because I thought I might need to make up a navel-gazing essay about two planes occupying the same plane and what it means for time and conspiracy theories and the efficacy of windshield wipers at speed.
But then I rememebered, it is Tuesday, and I’m not pressed for content.
Still, airlines aside, do you think a pilot ever gets up in the air and aims for a contrail? Just to break it up?
And while you think about that, please enjoy one of our stands of brown-eyed susan flowers (Rudbeckia triloba).
If anyone needs some for an art project, a bouquet or flower pressing, let me know. We have plenty.
And, finally, we return once more to the Re-Listening project. Longtime readers now this is an intermittent feature. In my car, I am playing all of my CDs, in the order of their acquisition. Here, I am writing about some of what I hear. It is one part reminiscence, one part excuse to put some good music in this space and entirely an excuse to pad the site.
I’ve been behind on the Re-Listening project for … I dunno … roughly a year. (See? Very intermittent.) It looks, though, as I’ll be caught up next week. That’s a weird feeling. But I digress.
So we’ll return to 2005, when I was listening to the 2004 Harry Connick Jr. release, “Only You.” it was his 21st studio album. It earned a Grammy nomination debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and hit the top 10 in the UK and Australia. All of the tracks are Baby Boomer standards. I think I picked this up used.
I played this whenever The Yankee was around so I would appear cultured.
My favorite songs were full of understated little moments. The Temptations and Stevie Wonder and a big handful of other recording artists made it famous, but Connick had to do it too. He puts some nice coloratura to it. And that little vocal nod at 1:24 somehow makes the whole song.
I was, and remain, a fan of this one.
And since we’re listening to standards, the next CD up in the Re-Listening project is a Frank Sinatra greatest hits, another 2005 library find. I prefer Deano, but this is pretty good. “Nice ‘n’ Easy” spent nine weeks atop the Billboard chart in 1960, and was nominated for the Grammy in the Album of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance and Best Arrangement categories. It went gold. Old blue eyes could do no wrong, right? He was doing some things right here, to be sure.
It’s one of those records that is useful to have, but I never really played all of that much.
This is Sinatra’s take of a Hoagy Carmichael-Ned Washington classic. It’s beautiful.
There are 16 tracks, almost all of them are performed as ballads. The notable exception is the first song, the title track.
George and Ira Gershwin wrote this one for an operetta that was never realized. Ginger Rogers and Fred Aistaire brought it to life, Billie Holiday immortalized it. And then came Sinatra. There’s a story out there about how he had to really understand a song, really feel a song, to be able to sing it, and this song is on a slow enough roll that you can think about that for a bit, and then, sure enough, you hear it.
Most of the tracks here will be at least passingly familiar to casual listeners, but you have to have an affinity for 1947 music to know this song. Those times when I play this CD I marvel at how I’ve never heard this before. In 1947 Art Lund, Dick Haymes, Sinatra, Dennis Day, The Pied Pipers and Frankie Laine all had a hit with it. (Lund’s version topped the charts. Sinatra’s peaked at number six.) The Four Freshmen, Andy Williams and Dean Martin all made renditions later as well. But the first time I heard it, it sounded like this.
Those crying violins put you in that cafe, but the voice really puts you in the seat at the table.
And that’ll do it, for now. The next time we return to the Re-Listening project we’ll try some 2000 Americana pop from Minneapolis. And then I’ll be caught up. Unless I get behind again by then.
