Well, the weather today (Sunday) was amazing so I suppose I should have hit the road again before the rains return again. But they'll return anyway, and Eugene always seems to hold me longer than I intended. There were a couple good reasons though: one was my poor aching thigh muscles which really needed another day of relative rest. But the main thing was that Kathy and Sue were having a big gardening work-party that I took part in. They belong to this really cool informal neighborhood permaculture/gardening mutual help group. Every Sunday thru gardening season members will go to another member's house/yard and do a bunch of work. In return you get to have work parties show up at your place and slave away happily at whatever big garden projects you may have, and share knowledge and wisdom, etc. It felt like a fun conversational social gathering at which we happened to also do a bunch of useful grunt work like busting sod and hauling loads of soil for the big new raised beds they are building. It was the funnest day of work I’ve done in awhile.
See, that's the thing about work. We've always done it in some form or fashion ever since we were (smaller) monkeys. "Work" in its literal sense is a neutral term of physics. It is only the socio-economic-cultural setting that makes it good or bad. Or put it this way: in a natural "tribal" or familial human setting work is transparent, it gets done but no one calls it "work" or judges it oppressive. There are just tasks of living, performed in a social and conversational setting. Some of the tasks are physically difficult but who cares? In all likelihood no one is compelling you to do the same boring thing all day every day for 50 weeks a year. And if someone suggested such a thing they'd be laughed out of the village or camp.
Ah, its me the idealist again, waxing nostalgic for the Paleolithic. But mutual aid co-ops like the River Road Permaculture Platoon are a great step in the right direction.
Dan
Well, i'm off and riding! I finally left Portland Thursday 3/27 @ 10 am. Headed south on Barbur Blvd thru 20 miles of suburbia, strip malls eventually giving way to farms and such. Took highway 99W most of the day, things really start to get rural and scenic once you're south of Dayton on the cutoff to Amity. Had no clear idea where I’d spend the night but found a perfect stand of oak trees just south of Monmouth, yes a full 60 miles south of Portland! Pretty good mileage for day 1 I think. Intermittent showers, no deluges thankfully. A big thumbs up from a grizzled old Harley biker. I think maybe those guys consider bike tourers to be hardcore enough 2-wheelers to be on their side.
Nicest surprise of the day was an unexpected 6 miles of smooth separated bike path between Rickreal and Monmouth, way out in farm country.
Rose and left camp by 7:15, made it into pleasantly sedate Corvallis by 9:00. From there southward took Peoria Road and River Road. Except for several crappy miles of bad shoulder on 99E from Harrisburg to Junction City, the ride today was an idyll of glistening green pastures, orchards, lowing cows, sheep, horses, tulip fields, flowering trees, and sometimes even daffodils planted with care right along the road. Plus a view to the distant icy spires of Mount Jefferson and the Sisters.
The kind of day that makes you religious. However my butt hurts worse than it ever has. Oh well, the good and the bad together makes it all good in the end. Especially if I go to Prince Pucklers ice cream parlor tonight in Eugene. Staying with my sister Kathy and her partner Sue. Without them this and many other trips I’ve taken would've been a lot harder. I could write a small book on all the help they've given me.
I'll be in Eugene till probably Sunday, then to the coast.
hey all, just a quick note to say that i'm finally hitting the road! Last minute stuff of course ended up taking way more time than expected, but tomorrow (thursday) morning i ride south for eugene. Will probably take 2 days, then over to the coast and on and on southward. I'll keep you all regularly posted.
4 days (or so) and counting till i embark! I got a new front wheel today, and i've almost cleared all the junk out of my room. It hard to imagine what this adventure will be like. Its never real until its real. Kind of like war. Speaking of which... I didn't intend this weblog to be a political rant (after all i don't want to offend my corporate sponsors!) but i have to offer a few observations on the war-day protests here in Portland yesterday and the accompanying media coverage:
According to the consensus opinion/propaganda as mouthed by the tee-vee reporters, the riot police in their storm-trooper armor and guns and billy-clubs and mace and tear gas canisters (employed, ultimately, against unarmed people) are the peace-makers, and the peaceful protesters are committing
some kind of illegitimate assault on decency and the American way. When really all the 2,000 or so protesters (except for an annoying minority of about 10 angry young men) were doing was having an almost festive march and sit-in and blocking the passage of oil-burning machines. What threat is it for unarmed humans to occupy a given peice of landscape for a few hours? It is SO not a threat that the police don't even have to be there, in my opinion. It would have ended sooner too.
As defined by Channel 6, the whole essence of the protests is the half-dozen people who rushed at a group of police on the Steel Bridge. The reporters seem to have no ability to objectively see the fact of massive police armor and weaponry arrayed against unarmed people, in the name of protection. Protection from what exactly?
The police depicted as the victims. Protesters responsible for wasting taxpayers money.
OH, guess what??? At the rally i ran into 3 people i know on the Appalachian Trail, who i havn't seen since the trail. Pam and Jamie, who I knew lived here but i didn't have their contact info and Sojourner (trail name) who just moved here from Atlanta. You don't know how exciting it is to run into old trail friends like that.
The other most fun i had all day was actually before i headed downtown, i joined my friend Bruce Orr and his neighbor Mike and we manned a giant puppet that Bruce made. Instead of a head it had a faux-bloody neck stump and a sign that says "America Has Lost its Head." I was inside (as the body), Bruce and Mike held up the giant arms/hands. We walked up and down along NE MLK near Fremont St. Got a lot of good and a couple bad responses. Nice to live in a city where we wouldn't be beat up by shit-kickers for such a display.
In talking to Bruce the other day, this realization: In corrupt late imperial Rome, they had their wars and they had their gladiatorial spectacles of death and gore to entertain the illiterate public, but the two were of course physically separate events. But in the case of this current corrupt empire, the war and the public bloodletting spectacle are one and the same! So very brilliant! And make no mistake: when we watch the live images of explosions in Iraq, we are watching people die horrible violent deaths, right in front of our eyes. We are absolutely no different than the screaming mass in the coliseum watching bloody death unfold. It is the same spectacle, updated by technology.
Empires fall. Thank God. Going back to that theme of liberal vs radical vs anarchist: in the world of ideals i really am a full throttle anarchist, actually more of paleolithicist, the ultimate conservative. We were far better off before civilization and we'll be better off again after it.
As i prepare to embark on a multi-thousand mile human-powered journey, something that in a world ruled by the iron grip of addiction to oil and internal combustion could be considered a radical act, it is worth pondering for a moment the ubiquitous terms "radical" and "liberal." Am I a radical? Maybe in some aspects of my material and personal life I am. And certainly I believe that the world at large (and our nation in particular) needs some "radical" transformations. But I think that MANY of us very often confuse the different meanings, political versus apolitical, of these two words.
It is quite possible to be radical in one's personal and "lifestyle" choices and yet
anywhere from far left to grey middle to extreme conservative in political views.
And it is possible to be either "liberal" or "radical" in politics but solidly
conservative, even puritanical, in lifestyle. In fact the possible combinations and permutations of viewpoint and philosophy in politics and lifestyle are so multitudinous as to render the terms "liberal", "conservative", and "radical" quaint at best, disruptive of true communication at worst. In other words they are gross generalizations that have no ability to signify the true landscapes of a person's life and opinions. Pat Buchanan is an ardent foe of the Bush doctrine and war in Iraq. That doesn't make him a "radical". Neither is he a liberal. What he is, it seems, is something like a xenophobic but anti-imperial arch-conservative. What about you? What about me?
Ah, what ABOUT me? That's what this weblog's about right?
Well, as for politics I believe in the rule of law and elective representation. That doesn't seem like an amazing thing to say, but it means I'm not a capital-A anarchist. What many self-styled anarchists don't seem to understand is that just because a government is a system of control does not make it a tyranny. Only a tyranny is a tyranny. A system of control in itself is neutral. Even "anarchy" would have a system of control. And it would be something like the government-less system of warlords that has controlled Somalia for most of the last decade. Not a pretty picture, though I've read they have great cell-phone service.
Now yes, I do believe the U.S. is becoming an imperial thug state with rumblings of actual tyranny right here at home. But that has nothing to do with the bedrock ideas of representive democracy, small-r republicanism, and the rule of principle and constitution. Quite the opposite. Military-industrial-imperialism is the overthrowing of the basic philosophy of public discourse and community that, as AMERICANS and civilized people, we subscribe to. And as a believer in this basic idea of the rule-of-principle-as-embodied-in-the-constitution (and enacted by government,) I am not a radical. The political meaning of the word "radical" is someone who wants to violently overthrow the established constitutional order. I don't want to do that. I want to defend it and reclaim it from the radical corporate/miltitary interests that seek to usurp it for their personal profit.
So I am a liberal in the old old (two levels of old) sense of the word. I'm an 18th century liberal. A 20th century one too, I'm not ashamed to admit it. Most of the best and most enduring legislation of the last century was the work of liberals.
Now being the sort can see 10 sides to every issue, I'm prepared to admit that the constitutional order had ALREADY been usurped, so the question is not how best to defend it but how to win it back. And maybe for that we need a good old fashioned revolution. But revolution meaning what? Voting? Shooting? I don't own any guns. And what use would be a revolution that, in its enactment, betrayed the ideals it seeks to defend? And yet clearly, yes, this whole Bush luna-cracy cries out for overthrow.
Been under the weather these last couple days. I very rarely get sick, i usually attribute that to my "active" lifestyle, i.e. riding my bike everywhere all the time.
And even in this case i think i can beat it quickly and not let it turn into a full blown thing that knocks me out. Last time that happened was 1997 when i had the flu, you know, the actual viral kind. Bad bad thing, pain, suffering, etc.
This thing now is just a low grade event but enough slight fever and chills and wooziness to suck.
I was thinking, maybe there won't be a war after all, for the simple reason that the Iraqi forces surrender en masse before anything really happens. If this
happened, would not the President seem to be a genius? But if this sort of non-war scenario did happen, would it be a good thing? How could i deny that it would be wonderful, the lives saved on both sides? And yet by the means of imperial bullying. Thru a real willingness to launch a pre-emptive and thus (in my opinion) immoral war? My America does not start wars. We didn't start World War 1 or 2, even Vietnam was a pre-existing conflict we just sort of unwisely insinuated ourselves into and expanded. The closest comparison would be the immoral and illegal bombing of Cambodia instigated by Henry Kissinger. Talk about blowback. Khmer Rouge anyone? Anyhow, what am i driving at here. Just that i wish my country were not a pariah thug state. It's shameful and fundamentally un-American. Makes me ill.
Required Reading: Feb issue of Washington Monthly, article entitled "Deep in the Heart of Darkess". About the Texan cultural roots of GWB's politics.
the other day I was riding up the Springwater Cooridor trail from Sellwood to OMSI and out of the blue I was vividly remembering the day I learned to ride a bike. I had a bright red child-size raleigh cruiser with training wheels, but today the training wheels were finally coming off. The bike was a birthday present, my 7th birthday (late starter i guess.) We lived at the time on a small US Army base in southern Germany. I remember how I was in no way eager to take the training wheels off, but my brother Eric (age 12) insisted on taking them off, I couldn't just ride around with them forever. After taking them off he held the bike steady as I got on, and continued to hold onto the seat bracket as I began pedaling. In my imagination, his grip on the bike (walking along beside me) was the only thing keeping me upright as I tentatively pedaled out the drive in front of the apartment building and onto the main road of the housing area.
But I kept on riding until suddenly I noticed that Eric was not holding onto the bike. I immediately fell clanging to the pavement. I literally did not believe that I could be riding this thing on my own, and this belief bore itself out once I was aware of the lack of another person's steadying hand.
But Eric ran up to me yelling "you were doing it, you were riding on your own!"
Faced with this incontrovertible fact, I changed my belief and was immediately able to ride on my own.
Anyway, thanks Eric for teaching me to ride a bike.
"Free your Mind, and your Ass will follow."
When i said "my world is ruled by humane technology" etc., I did not mean to imply that i'm some kind of saint who shits gleaming bricks of garden-ready compost. I get cravings for a bacon-swiss-guacalmole burger just like anyone. I just meant that it is possible to have as an ordering principle in one's life the notion of living "as if" the ideal world were already present. You can never attain that absolute perfection, the world will always fall short if only because we are constantly updating our standards and ideals. This is what the theologians mean by saying we live in a fallen world. But that doesn't mean the ideal is not real. It may in fact, as per Plato, be the most truly real. For without the ideal, how could this moment have any actuality? You have to measure things against something. That something is the ideal. To give one example
from today's events: Our President is a ninny. He's a blithering nincompoop who seems satisfied to start World War III because of the possibility that sometime in the future the Bad Man with the Big Moustache might do something Bad to us, never minding that North Korea has the ability right now, today, this minute, to nuke my hometown, Seattle. And this opinion I have of our leader? It is only possible in relation to an ideal of national leadership which though we may never see it, has, I believe, a reality that transcends this all too benighted moment.
Okay, okay, i know the previous entry gives a rather pessimistic view of the world. World War III? Really now, Dan. The fact is i'm in love with the world and people and think that in the long run there will be a reign of peace and something like ecotopia. I just take a pretty long view. This next century is probably going to be rough. But i still plan to live as if the world were my ideal and not my nightmare vision. That's why i'm riding a bike 3,000 miles or whatever this summer. My universe is ruled by appropriate and humane technology like bikes. Cars have their uses but in my world (any many of yours') they are relegated to the role of true utility vehicle, not 4-wheeled slave-master.
Anyway, this discussion could go on and on but right now i gotta run.
Warning: i may express something like political opinions in today's entry. I don't plan to make a regular thing of it, after all this weblog is about a simple bike and hike trip.
It used to be that people who thought the end was nigh were crazies standing on the street corner shouting at everyone and noone. Now it seems almost conservative to say that things are changing irretrievably from what we've all been used to. I'm afraid my observations lead me to go well beyond that.
It is clear to me that the current course of events is leading to something that i think can only be labeled doom for what we think we know of as "civilization."
Lots of blame to go around, to be sure. But i don't think i'm out of line in my
opinion that the Bush administration may very well start what will soon be recognized as World War 3. I'm talking about a war the likes of which America and the world has never seen or imagined. An immense and fearsomely devastating conflagration encompassing most of Eurasia, Africa, and ultimately North America as well. There are very many scenarios for what may come to pass in the coming months and years. But the list of hatreds is long, that of fears even longer. I don't want this crap to happen. I love people and actually do believe we can make a better and saner world.
But come on folks: there is a terible momentum to mass human events sometimes. It's like the socio-political/geographical version of a whirlpool or a chemical reaction. Once it starts there's nothing that will stop it short of an exhaustion of fuel or energy.
The energy coulda gone into planting trees and rebuilding infrastructures (like our own) and establishing schools and writing symphonies. Instead it got chanelled into a dark labyrinth of hatred and reactionism.
Lest you think i'm a simplistic radical who's rooting for Saddam instead of Bush, nothing's further from the truth. But to get back on that subject for a sec: Saddam did not do 9/11. That was mostly planned, financed and carried out by fundamentalist Saudi Arabians. Like, um, Bin Ladin. And those guys are not and should never be considered heroes to the American left or counterculture. They are no more environmentalists or working class utopians than GWB is. Bin Ladin
comes from a family of powerful industrial capitalists. He just happens to be imbued with the ideology of Jihad. Beware of idealogues of any stripe.
Today i took what i think is my longest ride yet, all the way down Barbur and 99W to Tualatin-Sherwood Road, back via Lake Oswego and Terwilliger Blvd. plus a 1 hour hike in Tryon Creek State Park. Pulled my trailer with about 40 pounds in it the whole way, total mileage including errands before and after, about 43 miles. The main thing that struck me as i rode thru suburbia:
THERE ARE TOO MANY CARS!!! All day, everywhere, cars cars cars, trucks trucks trucks, SUVs SUVs SUVs. Thousands upon thousands of them with their drivers trapped in them like robots, going wherever it is they have to be going all the time. Multiply by all the cities and towns across the country and the
world. Every car with its own engine, burning its own tank full of dead dinosaurs, on a network of pavement that never stops growing, to strip malls and Big-Boxes and endless subdivisions.
IS IT NOT CLEAR THAT A CIVILIZATION LIKE THIS IS DOOMED? And probably sooner rather than later? Get ready folks. The end really has to be nigh. Let's hope what's on the other side is civilization in the humanistic sense of the word.
Those of you who've either moved or gone on long-self-propelled trips know the routine i'm in right now: getting rid of JUNK. This trip will be long enough to not want to maintain and pay rent on the half of the apartment i live in, so i'm whittling down my possesions again to something easily storable. It's a healthy thing to do, forces you to really assess what is necessary and sufficient in life. All those great books i've been meaning to read but still havn't? Someone else should have 'em. All those groovy town clothes i wear like every other week? Gone. The piles of knick-nacks and doo-dads and old pay stubs? Hello dumpster. Why is it so hard to get rid of material things even when objectively they no longer have use-value to me? Nothing wrong with being sentimental but attachment to surplus things is a primary disease of civilized life.
The best way to cure yourself of it is to take a long hike. Not that that's the main reason i'm doing this trip, but it is a good side effect of this sort of self-propelled adventure, something i learned vividly hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2001.