The Natural Poetry of the Biking Trail

A Sunday afternoon in late May: I’m biking Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis, roughly 17 miles of an asphalt trail that at one time was a railroad track. Add the mile-and-a-half from my house to the trailhead, and I have a relatively flat 20-miles roundtrip.

I’ve been biking this trail since 2005, when it was three miles shorter, and a rather bumpy ride over old railroad bed gravel. My first ride over the pre-asphalt section led me to the discovery of the unexpected hole. Fortunately for my dignity, no one was nearby to witness the aging cyclist hit the hole, fly up from his bicycle seat, and spend the next few seconds (eternity in the moment) struggling to stay upright. I managed it. Barely.

But the unpaved became the paved, the whole was filled in and covered over, and the ride became less eventful.

Until the day of the snake. The black snake. The big black snake. The big Missouri black rat snake. Did I mention it was BIG?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The eastern end of Grant's Trail in suburban St. Louis.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s time for another edition of random musings, idle thoughts, unrelated occurrences – in other words, it’s Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

I’m currently reading Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World by Boris Johnson, and it’s delightful. Johnson, the mayor of London, provides (relatively) short vignettes on 17 people (and one hotel) who had a major impact directly on London and more broadly on the world. You’ve heard of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, but what about John Wilkes, Robert Hooke and W.T. Stead? The book is history and biography and it’s full of insights on the city and its people. And yes, the title is a take-off of Boswell’s Life of (Samuel) Johnson – and Johnson is one of the 17 profiled. Review is coming Monday.

Yesterday, I had a telephone conversation with a good friend about the publishing business. We talked about publishers, genres, marketing of books, lack of marketing of books, expectations publishers have of authors and expectations authors have of publishers. We both agreed it was one crazy industry. But if you’re a writer and are published or want to publish, it’s what you have to work with.

Magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read: two issues of Poetry (I’m behind); American Poet; Englewood Review; Oxford American; Writer’s Digest; Ravi Zacharias’s Just Thinking; and the 2012 fall planting guide from Dutch Gardens (summer hasn’t officially started and I’m already having to consider bulbs for the fall).

I biked Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis Wednesday after work. It was a beautiful evening. I’ve been gradually building up distance and speed (making sure my ruptured disk stays healed), and I’ve ridden the same 20-mile roundtrip a dozen times or more so far. The trail crosses two or three major streets, a couple of parks, Grant’s Farm (the Clydesdales!), several wooded areas and suburban subdivisions. It can make for an interesting ride – locally sponsored group rides where everyone is afraid of being left behind and so they run the rest of us off the trail; the professionals practicing for races who ignore red lights and trail etiquette; what look like small sticks or branches suddenly wiggling across the paved trail; beavers; suicidal rabbits; families of wild turkeys; and swarms of gnats at certain times of the day.

I forgot to mention that I love biking Grant’s Trail.

On Tuesday I was in downtown St. Louis at the London Tea Room (actually, outside the Team Room on the sidewalk) for our local observance of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. There was a raffle to raise funds for a children's disease research association, and one of the raffle items was that fine novel Dancing Priest.

Last week was a significant birthday for my wife; she turned at least 21 (that’s all I’m allowed to say on the subject). Good friends from New Orleans flew in and stayed with us for a few days, and we did a restaurant atop an old, former warehouse with a good view of the Arch and downtown St. Louis, the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens (and it was COLD), the St. Louis Art Museum, an art fair, an art gallery or two (including Brother Mel’s); and a stroll around downtown Kirkwood, our little St. Louis suburb, during which two of us had an ice cream cone from Jeremiah’s Custard Stand (names withheld to protect the guilty) (but the vanilla was delicious) (from what I understand, of course). We had a great time.

The Community of the Early Morning Trail

Almost six years ago, I took up biking. I’d always wanted to do it and had reached an age where it was time to either bike or shut up. So I bought a hybrid bike (what is now called a “leisure bike” to appeal to aging Baby Boomers) and off I went. Two years later, I bought a road bike and discovered speed.

One of my regular rides is Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis, which has its northern trailhead about 1.5 miles south of my house. Door to door, it’s a 20-mile ride for me. It’s a relatively easy ride – no hills (although there’s one major “false flat” that looks flat but is actually a mile-long incline), fairly long stretches without having to cross at streets, and some interesting side scenery like the Clydesdale horses at Grant’s Farm, which used to belong to Anheuser Busch but is now owned by InBev AB.

I’ve biked the trail at all times of the day, weekends and holidays. And I’ve noticed there are at least two distinct communities who “inhabit” Grant’s Trail – one I would call “The Community of the Early Morning Trail” and the other “The Community of the Early Evening-Weekend-Holiday Trail.”

In the early morning, from 5:30 to about 7:30 a.m., the trail has a small but regular group, and they they’re either bikers, runners of walkers (the rollerbladers wait until the late afternoon or early evening during the week). I’ve noticed that they tend to fall into categories:

Second Childhooders. They always ride the trail by themselves, invariably are men in their 60s, and they will bike as long as they can without using hands, just like they did when they were children. (“Look ma, no hands!”). I can’t explain why they do this other than they’re reliving when they were 9 or 10 years old.

Professionals in training. These are lone riders who are training for a race, criterium or century. You only know them by the breeze they leave behind them as they pass you at twice the speed you're riding. They never smile. Never. They do, however, scowl. Some scowl so well that they must practice for hours in front of the mirror.

Teams in training. At least four people, and usually six or more, who are training for a race. You can tell because they are drafting – lined up in single formation and riding very, very close to each other’s back wheel. They’re usually moving at something approaching the speed of sound. Unlike individuals in training, team members will smile. Sometimes. One might even say good morning as they leave you in their vapor trail.

Triathletes. They’re always on a bike (they can run anywhere and the trail isn’t conducive to swimming). You can tell triathletes by their clothing (black biking shorts and a black armless t-shirt) with a monitor attached to their arm to check pulse, heart rate, etc. They also never smile or speak. If you tell them good morning when your stopped at one of the street crossing lights, they might grunt in reply.

Doctor’s Orders Walkers. These are usually men who’ve been ordered by their doctor (or their wife) to get exercise each morning. They’re on the trail against their will, and their countenance will prove it. They walk face down and not very fast. They are enduring a daily trial, and they are not happy. This is the group that if you say good morning, they will respond with “What’s so good about it?”

Jubilantly Athletic Walkers. This is the group, usually women in their 40s and 50s, who enjoy walking, usually in pairs or trios. They talk and walk fast. Some carry five-pound weights and are vigorously moving their arms up and down as they walk. They are so engrossed in their conversation s that they are generally oblivious to other walkers and all bikers, so this is the group you usually have to be the most careful as you ride near them on an early morning ride.

The Walking Tea Party Ladies.”Tea Party” here does not mean a political group; it takes the original meaning. These are generally ladies in their 70s who walk the trail each morning. Sometimes it’s only two; other times, as many as six. They chat with each other; smile at and greet other walkers and bikers; and don’t seem to mind the stone-faced, scowling, mad-at-the-world crowd. They will strike up a conversation at the crossing lights. They have a set time and routine, driving to the parking lot of the Trailnet office, walking from there to end of the trail and back (about 1.5 miles), and then they go home. I like this group the best; it’s always nice to see their smiles.

The group I fit in – Professional Amateurs – isn’t usually riding the trail in the early mornings. Next week I’ll cover them and others in “The Community of the Early Evening-Weekend-Holiday Trail.” This is where things can get nasty.

Biking with an Eagle

There is a section of Grant’s Trail in St. Louis (mile marker 1 on the map) where a biker or walker (and sometimes a blader) is almost guaranteed to see wildlife, and not just rabbits or squirrels. One summer a nice seven-foot long king snake slowly meandered its way across the trail, pausing long enough to stop foot and bike traffic in both directions. Then there was a family of wild turkeys – two grown birds and several chicks. I slowed and then stopped, just watching the two grown birds herd the kids across the trail. And there’s the herd of deer that inhabit the stretch. I’ve seen them from some distance down the trail as they quickly crossed; fairly close as three of them, as close as five feet away, stood and watched me bike by, and once when several suddenly darted across the trail, right in front of me.

I braked hard. It’s bad enough to hit a deer if you’re driving a car. Hit one when you’re biking, and you, not the bike, will sustain most of the damage.

There was also the time on the Katy Trail, a stretch in St. Charles County near St. Louis that’s heavily wooded but adjacent to the Missouri River. I was biking by myself, when I heard a huge rustling in the tree limbs overhead. The next thing I knew, what caused the rustling was flying alongside me, and we continued together (once I resumed breathing after the shock) until it rose and soared off toward the river. “It” was an American bald eagle; I could have reached and almost touched the tip of its wing next to me.

Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’ve now finished week 8 of our discussion of Gerald May’s The Wisdom of Wilderness. And a family of wild turkeys and a bald eagle are characters in this chapter. The turkeys seem to serve as a digression for May, and how Benjamin Franklin wanted to have the turkey as America’s national bird. But his eagle story – when an eagle flew straight at him as he was in a boat -- resonated. He dodged that eagle, but along came a second one. And both did exactly the same thing – attempted to defecate on him.

Despite the funny story about the eagles, of the eight chapters we've read so far, this one has the least to recommend it. It begins with a veer toward a rant about rejecting the “dominion” over nature God gives man, as recorded in Genesis. (And this is one of the reasons May rejects the inerrancy of Scripture.) This is a point at which the book is beginning to show its age – there’s been a huge development in Christian thought about nature and the environment in recent years, and what “dominion” actually means. And it’s not “plunder and pillage,” but more like “use and be good stewards.” And the chapter finishes with the eagle story. I’m not sure where May was going.

But the eagle story is funny.

The Real E-Me

My friend Mike Dellosso had a neat post today -- taking us on an e-tour of his life and suggesting his readers do the same. So here goes.

This is the church I attend.

This is the company I work for as a public affairs director. One of the things my team does, by the way, is the corporate web site you're looking at. And right here is an article I wrote for the web site last fall.

This is the suburb of St. Louis I live in -- incorporated in 1853 and still with its own train station.

We have two newspapers -- the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Webster-Kirkwood Times (a weekly).

This is one of the trails I regularly bike. (I live a little over a mile north of the "8" designated on the map.) It's named after Ulysses S. Grant -- it goes right by White Haven, where Grant farmed before the Civil War and now a national historic site. The trail is also adjacent to Grant's Farm, owned for years by Anheuser-Busch (petting zoo plus free beer) and now owned by InBev AB. This farm is one of the locations where they keep the Clydesdale horses, and you can see the horses in the pasture next to the trail.

I don't listen to any particular local radio station, and I don't watch much television, so no helpful links there.

So that's a short e-tour of where I live and work.