Riding the Brakes
Or catching myself getting in my own way
My debut novel, Heading North, is now available for preorder from Braddock Avenue Books! I’m putting together events for the fall right now, so if you’d like me to visit with students, chat with your book club, or do a reading at your local bookstore or library, be in touch!
Last week, I did a pair of long Bike Rally prep rides on the Pine Creek Rail Trail, a gravel rail trail that traverses the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon1. If you’ve never walked or cycled on a rail trail, they’re pretty great in many ways: no big hill-climbs, so they’re accessible to all kinds of fitness levels, and though they might be heavily used by walkers, runners, and cyclists, you usually don’t have to worry too much about other kind of vehicles, barring the occasional country road crossing. If you ride north on the PCRT, you will have to contend with a slight uphill grade—about 2%—for the entire northerly progression, but when you turn around and go south, you enjoy the answering benefit of that slight downhill slope. And the Pine Creek Rail Trail comes canopied by trees and bounded by the creek, which means relative shade and cool2.
The forecast for our ride days read hot, though, and the air was syrupy with humidity. The last thing I wanted to do was end up short of water under such circumstances, so on Thursday morning, I filled up my hydration backpack, put bottles in the two cages on my bike, and put three extra bottles in a rather generously sized bar bag I borrowed from my spouse.
Somewhere around mile 20 of our northerly trek, I started to slow down. By mile 24, I was feeling like I was going backwards. I didn’t have an odometer on me, but I can tell you I was going slow enough that a mosquito caught up with me and tagged the back of my arm. As though my dead legs weren’t insult enough.
I had to make mile 30 because that would mean hitting the mile 60 benchmark once we got back to the car and because I didn’t come all this way not to hit my benchmark. So on I trundled. Glacially. Slowly enough that the sweat stopped drying on my face and just dripped. The terrible part was the forward-casting fear: if I was struggling like this here, I’d never make it through the Bike Rally, where all except one of the days is a longer ride than 60 miles. I would be a sad little puddle that someone would just sweep into the St. Lawrence.
At mile 30, our turnaround point and lunch stop, I shuffled my bottles around because something about them was causing a squeak, and sometimes, when the gravel really jostled, the bottom of the bag dragged against my tire. My aggressive pre-ride tightening of the straps wasn’t quite enough against the bottles’ weight, so I problem-solved by pouring a full one into my hydration pack, putting the other full ones into the cages. Then, with that bar bag full of empties instead of several pounds of water, we carried on.
All at once, I had legs again.
The next day, on the exact same route, but with my spare bottles in backpack pockets instead and the bar bag left behind, I had no problems maintaining speed. Hope returned. All things were possible. I would not be left in a ditch in Ontario3 (maybe).
The best I can figure is that I managed to put just enough pressure on a brake cable to ride those first 30 miles under some (rude) extraneous resistance.
At least in this case, if that’s what I actually did, I had the luxury of not knowing I’d done it. But it prompts reflection on the number of different ways I’m riding the brakes while trying to move forward, too, metaphorically: picking up my phone and starting to doomscroll before #5amWritersClub begins; avoiding the most daunting e-mails for hours under the pretext of working on something more pressing, but not really doing that task, either, because I’m still thinking about the e-mail I really should just send; saying yes to things I really don’t want to do.
Important lessons, as the semester’s start looms.
An announcement:
Thanks to the lovely folks who preordered Heading North in its first week of availability, we’ve raised an extra $200 for the Bike Rally! Thanks, friends!
Preorders remain available, of course! And if you’re not buying books yourself at this moment, remember that you can always ask your local library to order a copy of the books you’re excited about.
Some treasures:
A recommendation for your #SealeyChallenge endeavors: A Mind Like This by Susan Blackwell Ramsey. It’s “Knitting Lace” that first brought me to this collection (and you can read here, about 2/3 of the way through the interview, about her process of making a lace artist’s book during her MFA), but I wanted to share a few lines with you from the title poem, which brings me immense delight:
When a mind like this
hears that Burleigh Grims was the last pitcher
to throw a legal spitball in ‘43,
you’d think it had spotted a sapphire in the gravel.
It’s saving pocket lint and bottle caps
while bread and diamonds thunder down the chute.
“The Normal Force,” new fiction by Molia Dumbledon in The Sun, which is emotionally devastating in the most precise and understated way. And it has the most perfect depiction of grading first-year essays I’ve encountered.
Periodically throughout the summer, a whitetail doe or two will decide our front porch is a good fawn-daycare spot: quiet, safe, shaded. A few years ago, in late May or early June, we had a spotty little buddy literally napping on the welcome mat for a day. Tuesday afternoon, one fawn opted for the grass beside the walkway.
Some finished yarn! I’m hitting the homestretch with Fossil Fibers’ 2022 Tour de Fleece special. Looking forward to hopefully getting to the 2023 loveliness before 2024.
If you’re expecting actual Grand Canyon grandness, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re expecting a lush river gorge in an old, low mountain populated with bald eagles, otters, whitetail deer, and the like, with a pretty solid ice cream stop at the southern end of the gorge, you’ll be pleased.
Relative. If it’s 96 degrees, as it was on Friday, it is what it is.
Check my Instagram next week to follow along on my Bike Rally progress and see if I manage to avoid dissolving into a puddle in Canada.