cycleology

I was immensely fortunate to have evolved on this Forested Lake. Nestled behind this dam sits my pristine lake, cocooned by nature in every direction. This virginal lake banded in a 3.7-mile ovalish dirt road enveloped a living ecological encyclopedia furnishing all the schooling I required. Uncovering more of life, gazing at leaves, and trekking the forest with my Father, then shackled to that chalkboard.

Running and cycling the planet’s circumference around this 3.7-mile lake required eighteen years and four-point two days.

For a child such as I found myself, this was comprehensive autonomy in the classroom of my dreaming. The parochial school I endured was regimented Brain Squashing juxtaposed with my real education on the lake.

Everything was obviously tied to Nature, and learning so far removed from it was not learning. I could sense the unease in my unduly senior parochial educators. As the Nuns explained, it life itself was a guaranteed route to hell.

I was skeptical of their plans for me. Whoever conjured denying a woman sex for life and locking her with other sexless women in a dorm for life, then adorning them as educators, was mistaken. I had empathy for them. They appeared as inmates to me. As I saw it they had little to no nature in their lives. They needed some enlightenment. They required my lake.

Innumerous congregations of flocks replenished my horizons with lakeside paths, swamps, streams, rivers, brooks, creeks, mountains, hills, valleys, meadows, deer, grouse, pheasant, quail, geese, beaver dams, snapping turtles, trout, freshwater everywhere to quench from all this miraculousness merely a doorknob away every day.

A stand-out adventure with my Father was falling a dying spruce over the flooded riverbanks accessing Dad’s hunting enigmas. I invariably wondered if we’d ever put that colossus of a saw hanging in his tool shop to use?

Some days we plucked Brook Trout from overflowing puddles and their babbling brook. I treasured traipsing the forest classrooms with my Dad. Hunting, fishing, Christmas tree scavenging for the neighbors, securing community fireworks, fresh clams, and unfailingly embellishing annual assemblages.

One Thanksgiving, a powerless blizzard dispatched us via Deere and snowmobile, harvesting the lake elders for dinner at our home. This proved an extraordinary happening for me. Feet of blinding snow. My Father retaining me in his adventure made me feel like a slight superhero. My Father regularly entrenched in me the significance of our elders. Elucidating how an elder’s lifetime of formidable work and paying taxes created and nurtures our society presently.

My Dad frequently reinforced respecting the other sex. I accomplished this, nonetheless. Love evolved as life’s most treacherous game. In today’s precarious state of chivalry, merely restraining a door for a woman might expose you to a statutory ravishment charge.

Never concerned with “Bringing Water,” it was always around. I drank from lakes, creeks, brooks, rivers, and gushing puddles, predating the scourge of bottled water and the additional conveniences of capitalism swallowing us heretofore.

Skating the full moon’s snow-free lake is a star-engaging three-dimensional glide with an oozing orchestra percolating through the icy world of my blade’s veneer. Face up, on ice, no telescope insight, unfolded the universe every night, every winter.

Hockey with our MG and Triumph driving elders. Tops down sticks protruding parked on the lake pumps in the trucks to flood the rink on our moonlight crystal. I cherished living these encapsulating icy escapades for seventeen years and every moment since.

Evolving from Tri-cycle to PX-10, I surveyed off the lake. My cycling exploits inflating forsaken railway tracks minus the tracks spawned premature gravel riding aboard that PX-10, the singular gravel bicycle to ride during my teen junctures. These railroad beds furnished a web of trails and linkages, augmenting my notions of getting lost.

Comprehending how astoundingly fortunate I was experiencing my life I wasted little time indoors. Our extraction from Nature will provide our undoing. With no respect for Nature comes zero respect for Life. You do the math. Life – Nature = Death.

I contemplate this stunning Public Service Announcement circa 1970 and have witnessed no action since. I believe Reagan ended the Public Service Announcement with his knee-capping of the FCC.

I stood ten when this PSA shocked at least me. As we can all see, no one seemed to give a shit for the last forty-two years. The birds are now vanquished from all horizons. Water is polluted further and commoditized, destroying the oceans with plasticized capitalism. Land rapped and burned for cash.

Human lives are completely disposable beneath today’s Orwellian capitalist delirium. George knew the distinctions. He told everyone, yet in 2016 we elected the dingleberry of humanity to shine a light on the madness we live under and seemingly abide by.

We should stop building new and fill up our empty homes with our homeless.

We must stop purchasing new stuff. I’ve lived quite stylishly via Goodwill, Thrift, and Consignment for twenty years riding. Having just achieved a mint Jack Spade sweater for $17. An excellent cycling sweater.

We need to stop driving everywhere. Electric Bicycles will save this planet and save you if you get off that fence and stop creating excuses to continue living a comprehensive form of selective ignorance. Claiming, “I can’t make a difference.”

Only those who comprehend and aspire to comprehend the difference will produce the adaptations necessary for ongoing life on this planet that sustains our very lives. A conundrum, it is not. Particularly with all the blatant cycling solutions afoot today.

We must terminate this madness.