Dead of Winter

In dusty apartments reeking of cigarettes --

In vacant lots on ten-degree evenings
when even thought freezes and falls to the ground
to shatter among the broken bottles and feces --

In a parking lot outside a bar like a souvenir
of a heedless bacchanal left behind
for the staff to collect and deposit appropriately --

In nurse-white hospitals that purge their atmospheres
of the life they aspire to prolong --

In a car unaccountably parked on an abandoned pier
in a blighted waterfront district full of big plans
and bigger failures --

In a body buckling under the impossible weight of a snowflake
of the thought that there is nothing more
than this cold, this grey, this frozen bustling
to and fro in an effort to present a moving target.

Touring for Dummies

We don't think about these things. Or I don't. The cold. The water issues. The sores. The frost. The reaching out of my sleeping back to find glasses frosted, cigarette lighter encrusted, the wet elbow from the wet sleeping bag from the cold morning. But then if we did, if I did, we'd never end up in these situations, and what's the fun of that.

So instead there I was, awake just prior to done, poking the fire as though to awaken it, lying back in the darkness to envy the moon her diffuse beauty through the pre-dawn mist, wondering whether sleep would return, whether dawn approached, which direction that was, east suggesting a great deal of night left, west suggesting morning's approach, wondering.

It all began innocuously enough: a Myspace bulletin from a friend suggesting a little ride: a jaunt out of the city, through Mckeesport, and twenty miles or so down the Yough Trail, 45 miles each way, Saturday into Sunday, not enough miles to really hurt, especially given the flat terrain, just a way out of town, sleeping in the open, a celebration of fall.

When we met Saturday morning at Tom's Diner, we were a ragtag quartet. B1 (of Urban Velo) and E (of BikePgh) and B2 (whom I finished an alleycat with, once), gathering for a heavy breakfast and a slow prep for the ride. After breakfast, we scattered, variously, to Giant Eagle, Thick Bikes, and REI for random gear and provisions, before finally reuniting at, and leaving from, REI on Southside a little after 1 for our ride.

The ride itself was much as B1 had suggested, short, low key, pleasant. Temps were between 50 and 60, and I changed out of my fleece tights even before leaving breakfast. From REI, we rode out to the end of the Southside trail, then walked a quarter-mile down the railroad right of way to Sandcastle. There, we rode over to the Greenwood Bridge, and climbed the stairs to its southern end, picking up on a strip of dirt alongside the roadbed down toward Homestead, finally entering traffic where it became practical.

From there, it was 837 through Homestead, out past Kennywood, and then toward McKeesport. After passing through McKeesport's blight, we found ourselves at the trailhead, where we passed up a short climb into the woods, B2 and I discovering the surprisingly well-maintained trail for the first time.

Whatever it is that opposes a sense of urgency is what we had, and we took our jolly good time. We were all on road bikes, so we didn't travel slowly, but we were perhaps too confident of the simplicity of the ride, and so we tarried, enjoyed our various and frequent breaks, were slow back to the bikes. B1 rode a track bike equipped with jury-rigged panniers over his front wheel; E rode a touring bike equipped with panniers over the rear wheel; I rode my Ti-bike, the roadie I don't use nearly enough, and my gear and provisions rode in an unfortunate backpack that my shoulders are still talking angrily about; B2 rode a roadbike and carried his gear in a messenger bag.

The mileage was easy, though, and aside from a few close buzzes in McKeesport, everything was very low key.

Finally, after a stop for ice cream at a trail-side convenience store in Newton, we reached our desination, a campground 40-plus miles from my house, fifteen miles or so down the trail. All along, B1 had been defining this trip by the fact that we'd reach a brilliant shelter, a three-sided structure with the fourth occupied by a working fireplace, stone, with a chimney -- the Lexus of lean-tos, in a sense. And the shelter was just where he said we'd find it . . . and occupied.

Ensued from there a faltering discussion of whether we'd ride onward, to the next campground some 12 miles (and the last hour of daylight) away, or set up without cover at one of the firepits in the same space. The campgrounds near the shelter featured firepits and cinder platforms for tent erection, which would have been delightful had we a tent. But of course we hadn't brought tents, confident that we were the only people in the planet who knew about the ubercool shelter B1 had identified.

After some negotiation, we opted to stay, confident in our gear and the rain-free forecast, and, at least for my part, vaguely excited at the prospect of sleeping under the stars on a cold night. We selected an isolated spot, for privacy, and settled in -- picnic tables, firepit, firewood, etc. It wasn't until after dark at 8 or so that we realized that the pumps at the campsite actually were fed by a conventional waterline, and had been shut down for the winter. Reluctantly, we were forced to consider whether four of us could get through the night on the 20 or so ounces of water (not including my bottle of frappucino) we had amongst us. Deciding that we could not, the two B's decided to head back down the trail four miles to the nearest convenience store, which (conveniently) was open. Eight miles on a star-lit trail, with only street-oriented headlights to guide them. Easily, the trip MVP's on that front alone.

All of this is building up to that moment, near midnight, when we bedded down. I can't speak for anyone other than me, but there's something special about lying down in the darkness, next to a fire, and sealing up a mummy bag to leave little more than an eyeslit, and staring up at the stars above. Within moments, the heal I was resting on the ground, the other foot resting across it, began to take on the cold (my pad is 3/4 length), and I pondered for the umpteenth time the prospect of hypothermia.

Of course, a night with a low of 30 isn't the most dangerous condition one might imagine, but I'm no veteran of this sort of camping, and my 20-degree sleeping bag is nearing 20 years old. I've taken care of it, but I had no illusions about it living up to its rating after so many years, and so I spent the first part of the evening suspicious, wondeing whether it was really up to the task, and taking dead seriously the danger implicit in falling asleep in an inferior bag on a night at or below freezing.

But my heel was hardly numbing, the bag seemed adequate in the heat of the first, and then there were the stars overhead. The stars were beautiful, the woods peaceful except for the periodic trains passing on the other side of the river and the snores of my friends.

For a spell, I slept deeply, my sleep growing irregular only near dawn, when I noticed the fire faltering and the fact that most of our woodpile had disappeared, the word of Brad2, who we later learned had slept poorly and thus tended to the fire intermittently all night, making all of us more comfortable.

And then my eyes opened on full-blown morning, B1 tending the fire, my bag and our bikes encrusted with frost, sleeping bag moistened outside with dew. We lingered for a while, hours in fact, toasting cheap bagels, drinking coffee from a nalgene french press, continuing the endless bullshitting session of the night before, warming to the morning.

B2 and I complained of sores; neither of us had done a long ride in a while. But for me at least the bike welcomed me when we finally got moving. Lots of bitching and moaning, for sure, but that's how these things go. We lazily returned, stopping for breakfast in Newton, for no good reason at a cemetery near the start of the trail, and finally saying good bye at the Hot Metal Bridge, where we split for our various destinations.

But what a way to welcome the cold, and to reject its tendency to drive us inward. Instead, we four consider the cripness of its air, its bugless clarity, its way of pruning crowds down to a hard core, and welcome the transition, the invitation, the challenge. I should do this more often.

Shelter Island

28 August, 2006 (as scrawled on a legal pad by the muted light coming through the windows behind me as I sat on the porch in the rain)

The night is saturated and raw, a rude awakening from summer, but the peach hue reflected against the undersides of the clouds across the bay warms the sky. Runoff drums in the downspouts while baysurf sips at what's left of the beach afoot the seawall, insatiable, its mouth full of salt.

Drifting through the night come the sounds of two boats playing tag in the fog like children of sound cavorting behind parents of light, father first, his searchlight caving the mist in sweeping whorls, fixing the opposite shore for a moment before turning to pin me to the porch moist and still, mother steady in his wake, an emerald perched in her tiara?

As mother and father are eclipsed behind the point, their children still play over the sibilant white caps, which climb over their own backs to surf their bellies, and as their game dissipates higher surf visits the beach like a rumor of their passage.

Beset on all sides by water,
we leap from womb to womb
like sunfish breaking the surfact
to thrill in the gasping
before slicing back into the darkness.

** The photo was taken in 1989 from the top of a dune only slightly down the shore from where I sat when I scribbled the above musing. I remember sliding down it on my belly all the way to the beach as a child. FLICKR has many photos of Shelter Island.

A City Besieged

Grousing about the weather is a Pittsburgh pastime of unquestionable pedigree and endurance. Among outdoor athletes, the grousing reaches crescendi in spring and fall, when the sky grows dark and ominous with the prospect of rain, and the sun finds summer at or below the equator leaving us all pining for its grace with the faith of the devout; and on the tenth or eleventh consecutive day without sun, like a lapsed Catholic, our faith falters, and we shake our fists at the sky, bereft, betrayed.

Notwithstanding our uncommonly dry Spring, the delayed arrival of weather more typical of this time of year has provoked the usual hue and cry, our yearly ritual. Brian's in on it. So is David, just days after noting how odd it was that the rains belayed their arrival. And I'm hardly innocent.

This morning, nether regions impossibly sore from 50-ish unpadded miles in the past two days on Susan's miserable saddle, I skipped riding in, especially in light of what should be a long-distance sort of weekend. I figured that if it was vaguely painful just to walk to the shower, naked under my robe, getting back on the bike once again would be intolerable.

Instead I drove, having an after-work commitment making bus commuting impractical. Still half-asleep from the somnolent creep down Butler, I had my breath stolen from me when I turned onto Ligonier and paused at the red light where it met Liberty. Before me lay the narrow strip of Liberty arrowing into the heart of downtown, and at its end stood the monolithic USX and Mellon towers, dwarfing at their feet the cornice of the granite facade of the Pennsylvanian, its lower stories eclipsed by a train trestle in the foreground.

All paled beneath the sky, which was bruised and inflamed with the insistent vibrancy of spring, and lurching toward the city from below, the vividly green flora of Polish Hill, within which hides the narrow, begrudging easement of Bigelow Boulevard. The sky and the hillside formed discordant jaws threatening to devous all the iron and concrete of this city, the water of the rivers perhaps rising up to facilitate in- and digestion. The city, in a word, looked small.

The wind hurtled about my car, the clouds about to reach down and pluck me from the roadway, and all I could think was: I wish I were on my bike.

I can take or leave the rain, in itself, but I love this weather, its profundity, its urgency, its life-giving ablutions, and I love living in a city so green, with hillsides to look upon, waterways to stand beside, backroads down which to disappear.

Missing the sun when it goes is a biological thing, and like anyone when it goes for long spaces of time my spirits plunge and I find myself aching for something I cannot name. But I wouldn't trade those struggles at the expense of this, the heavy gray sky I see out my window, offset with the blues and greens and reds of the city and the suburb, the bright yellow of the right field foul pole at PNC park, the gleaming dome of a distant church, a sliver of brilliant green marking the trees between the Gateway towers, and the gray, always the gray, the gray that is white and blue and purple and even a little green, the gray ever-changing, bringing with it all the joy and petulance of resurrection.

Truly, I do not mind the weather in this city.

Kissed By Spring

Over two weeks since last I arrived at work on two wheels, last night I went to bed in a drizzle and doubted my triangle-shaped Tuesday commute would allow for a bike. Even as late as the shower this morning, I remained uncertain. Emerging from the shower, however, I found sun streaming through the open bathroom door and spilling down the tile wall.

I wandered into the living room, wrapped in a towel, hair wild about my head, and leaned over a chair into a high livingroom window, spattered opaque with last night's rain, a thousand jewels obscuring my street view with their brilliant twinkling in the morning sun. But unlocking and then sliding open the tall window, I had the immediate sensation of childhood springtime, a day to bring only a light jacket to school that would never leave my bag once out of Mom's sight.

From an elevated dais somewhere down the block birds sang reveille, the neighborhood's morning news, the facing houses chin-tucked and enshadowed while the sun tried in vain to read the newspaper over their shoulders. The road shone still. The brief pause following the opening of the window -- outside air startled into stillness, momentarily, to find such a warm and generous portal to explore -- ended, and the damp morning chill warily poked its nose through the screen, before entering like a familiar houseguest into an unfamiliar party, head high, hand outstretched in greeting, presumptuous without importuning.

An invitation to ride I couldn't decline.

Forty-five minutes later, fed, vitamin'd, dressed in shin-length cut-off cargo pants instead of the fleece-lined tights to which I've grown all too accustomed, I hit the street. (Actually, first I wrestled with my messenger bag, which for whatever reason continues to baffle me utterly. The cats were laughing, I swear. If they're not careful, one of these days I'm going to bathe them. Then we'll see what's so goddamned funny.)

On the street, for the first time in two months of learning, I was comfortable on my still new-to-me fixed-gear cycle from the second my foot left the ground. I started on the sidewalk and was snapped into both pedals before I reached the first driveway ramp into the street. On the street, my cadence was immediately smooth and easy as I held back just a bit heading down my hill to the light, acclimating my legs to the locomotive circles that would define their next 20 minutes or so. Passing to the right of cars waiting at the light, my head swiveled unthinkingly scanning at once the traffic and the road surface for hazards, errant cars making unexpected moves, pedestrians, pocks and gravel. And this was so easy, all of a sudden; my pedaling required no thought: as I looked for an appealing opening to join the flow of traffic, my feet found just the right degree of hesitation, accelerating momentarily when something appeared to open up, and then resisting again at precisely the moment I decided the opening wasn't as good as it first had seemed -- no intermediation whatsoever, hard wiring.

Finally merging into the thoroughfare's morning rush, I discovered that my wrists and my tailbone ached from Sunday's long ride, that my thighs felt a bit hollow and stiff, but my legs warmed easily enough to the movement, and my right shin to the knee was stimulated rather than chilled by the breeze to which it was exposed. For a change, my eyes didn't water as their humor adjusted to the outside air.

Everywhere I rode, every hill taken slowly, every time I allowed myself to quicken to catch a light, every intersection, every abrupt ninety-degree change of direction to angle around a car and thus avoid stopping, all were as natural as picking up a pen and paper, or down-shifting to pass someone on the interstate, like breathing almost, no anxiety for the ever-present risk of someone (quite possibly me) doing something stupid, just being -- on the bike -- on the road -- in traffic -- in the morning breeze.

Kissed by spring, which -- like the jail-trail ride into Oakland I have to look forward to this afternoon -- can't come soon enough. Every day should begin with such promise.

Sonata

I.

In the brittle chill the brilliant sun
sings in radiation's tongue
of morning and winter.

Unshoveled snow ossified into
undulating perfidious ripples;
feet skitter perilously seeking purchase.

Friendship Park, through salt-stained Plexiglas:
a moonscape of foot-shaped craters
rimed in metamorphic crags,

five thousand crunching footfalls --
five thousand strophes unrequited --
etched on unlined parchment,

score an inchoate symphony,
the crescendi and diminuendi of which
reach skyward then drift.

A child in quilted down,
hatted and scarved and mittened,
chinned down against the wind's lechery,

leans into his passage
like a conductor his orchestra,
studied in his mute adamance,

attuned to his vain endeavor:
to nurse from each note its frigid beauty
to find in a stagger its dance.

II.

Pressed into stoops' sun-lee corners
upset pyramids of ice-rimmed snow
lay neatly in the shape of their shade.

House after house thus adorned
with winter's diamond jewelry,
their recessed pointing limn their beauty

like symmetrical grooves a grande dame's visage
against the glow of her glistening eyes,
her gown's shimmering lyric,

the caternary elegance
of pearls to flatter
its plunging decolletage:

curves implicit in curves
complicit in curves dancing circles
around Euclidian formality.

III.

In chaos a suggestion of order,
in winter a whisper of spring.

[1/28/05, 11:08 AM (as Wave Equations) - 1/29/05, 7:11 PM]

Today is a day of . . .

. . . half-smoked cigarettes; the raspy peal of rubber seeking purchase on a glassine veneer of ice; pretty women red-cheeked in pea coats and scarfs, their bodies fisted like infants on the verge of tears, their eyes gleaming an eyelash short of freezing over; wind as recrimination; the search for unexpected and ephemeral oases of warmth and flight from the equally unexpected pockets of cold carted in with each quarter of a revolving door; contemplation: Why would anyone in his right mind leave the house on a day like today?

Night, Snow

Northside is buried and hushed; turning onto Northern Avenue too fast, the rear end kicks out like a movie radio car in the rain, and your hands instinctually steer the proper aspect into the slide, foot unwavering on the throttle, as the car easily negotiates itself into conformity with the manichean insistence of right angles. Along Northern Avenue only the streetlights are wakeful. The park, the library, the aviary, the children's museum, the brownstones and row houses of irregular statures, girths, and setbacks, the Garden Theatre restful and darkened after the night's raft of pornography, all bathed in shades of indigo left and right, through which bores a tunnel of sodium light. The car crabs and revs on the snow, wide tires catching and releasing the slick pack like tooth-broken cogs.

Past the Garden Theatre, the Light of Lite Ministries, denoted by a flapping vinyl sign as impermanent as its residents' tenure. How can you reconcile the odd melange of restored historical brownstones, park, porn, and halfway-houses, not to mention the YMCA? The hospital, however, imposes order with its tumble of orthogonal rectangles reigning over the neighborhood -- or perhaps just dominating it in the way that a man head and shoulders taller than a crowd does a room.

Turning right to continue skirting the park's perimeter, the skyline is nearly eclipsed by aggregate precipitation, whether falling down or blown up by the small-hour bluster, leaving only the various signs in Mellon green and blue to suggest the buildings they crown and the metronomic pattern of the tallest building's red-blinking constellation, an encrypted message from a ship foundering in the night.

At the 16th Street Bridge, waiting for the signal to change is no more rational than carrying an umbrella in sunshine, though the sun is no more than a faint recollection of childhood and baseball fields and windsprints and the reverberant clank of taut hide-bound spheres on aluminum. Route 28, however, is hardly empty; you spy with your slitted eye the hulks of old commercial buildings mouldering under the burden of winter, devoid of human congress for years, perhaps decades, squatting as close to the highway as cats to a window, squinting myopic through jagged pupils in shattered irises.

It's not so late, though: in bars, people are still drinking; in houses, people watch television through heavy-lidded eyes, heads nodding in mute imprecation, invitations to slumber; in houses, people make love, spoon against each other in REM, fingers and toes twitching in time with their eyes's dancing like marbles under sheets. And then there's you: in limbo between 2d and 3d gear, wakefulness and sleep, sunset and sunrise, Chicago and New York, here and there, driving patiently forward, searching the road ahead for the least dangerous path, but yearning to reason the snowpile between the lanes, to press the pedal to the floor and hold white-knuckled and grinning on for all you're worth.

Morning, Snow

Isolation's ache incipient,
a million shades of white murmur and shift
outside where gingerbread cars shush by
and a simple machine grumbles and coughs.
Warm and alone inside this is a day
to drift in and out of sleep, to daydream discretely,
to find succor in solitude (or suffer in silence).

Alone with my imaginings
like friends forgotten but forgiving
the day ticks forth as the quiet accumulates,
drifting in the corners
tickling my cheekbones and nose.
A head shake sends a cloud of soundlessness
cascading to my shoulders, to the floor,
where a draft whisks it around my feet
this desk in furling eddies.

A gust of wind loosens and lifts the hush
in whiskers and whorls of white
until inside and outside merge
and I stand naked and snowblind in an endless field
dressed in alabaster.

If you run, I will follow.

Been Grey So Long It Looks Like Sunny to Me

So today, finally, we are granted sunlight, coupled to a sunrise that occurs earlier with each passing day. It has been so long that I couldn't tell you where my sunglasses are.

This morning, the sunshine also was attended by the insult of an arctic cold as scrupulously lethal as German cutlery.

Forced to choose between 50 degrees and drizzly and 0 degrees and sunny, all things being equal, I'd choose Seattle.