The Shining Sea Bike Trail

I usually try to post at least before five o'clock, but I also try to follow a rule: never let writing get in the way of life.

Today was given over to about a twenty-mile bike ride along the Shining Sea Bike Trail, (named in honor of Katherine Lee Bates [a local native of Falmouth, MA], who wrote "America The Beautiful" - which, if you ask me, should be our national anthem...) in Cape Cod. It is a beautiful stretch of trail through some of the most beautiful parts of Falmouth, MA and to Wood's Hole, home of the distinguished Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute. (For Jaws buffs: the institute that Matt Hooper worked for.)

We saw pretty stuff and I had a lot of time to think.

It was beautiful, but it was a physical challenge for me, a guy who doesn't keep in as good a shape as he should, but who is, by no means, too weak to take up the occasional physical challenge.

As I pedaled along, sometimes huffing with the uphill effort -- especially getting from our house to the trail itself --  I got thinking about the sort of wimpy culture we have created by having warnings from doctors and newscasters about effort and those over the age of, say, eighteen.

Every time is snows, for instance, some news caster tells people over forty not to shovel snow. Because of this, my own mom often says: "You shouldn't be out there shoveling! Let the boys do it."

Kayak Meditation

Not ten minutes ago, I was on the water, sometimes paddling, sometimes drifting in the grey of a rainy morning; sometimes with eyes open and sometimes with eyes closed. With eyes closed, it feels like you're floating. Because you are, I suppose. But floating feels like transcending.

I tried to shut off the noise in my head, but that's hard. I tried to shut off the music, but that's kind of impossible. Still, with one's eyes closed, drifting forward and being held up by the bosom of a wide pond and cooled by a rainy breeze, the sense of peace works its way in to lubricate the mechanics of thought. It's an oil change for a brain like mine. Yours, too?

Mare's Pond, sans me, as it was before
and will be, after I go. 

Last night, I walked a long road lined with scrub pines and looked out upon by the occasional quiet house. The silence was dotted with the click of my dog's paws on asphalt which turned into gravel and then faded into a dirt path. But it was dusk, and the dirt path ran into a wildlife conservation of some seventy acres. Neither my dog nor I had the guts to go into it with night falling and facing the chance of meeting up with disgruntled coyotes (coyotes that are active at night and who, according to local Cape Cod science, are getting to be wolf-sized).

We walked back in the falling darkness. Most houses we saw were quiet. Some buzzed happily with families celebrating each other near fire pits or on horseshoe pitches. Some waved. Some looked vaguely suspicious of this visitor and his big, white dog.

In the Infinite Palm of God: First Encounter Beach, Cape Cod

Whenever we can squirrel away the money, pack up the family and go to Cape Cod in the summer. We're on our third trip.

We love it here. The pace is (generally) slow and there are abundant houses to rent on lakes, in which one can swim and canoe, etc. There are plenty of ice cream places and plenty of seafood restaurants (with, of course, clam chowder to die for) and with a quickish ferry ride, one can explore Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard.

Our house, this year, is on a pond called Widow Harding's Pond, which is inhabited (the pond, not the house) by a shy, but massive green fellow I like to call Moby Turtle. He generally stays away from our toes on swims, but I caught him following my canoe a few times.

Our house, from the canoe on the opposite side of the pond.

It's quiet and the wind plays like a virtuoso through the scrub pines around us. At night, the cacophony of nature, broken by the occasional maniacal debates among coyote factions, is, strangely, soothing.

Today, it is raining (my older son's prayers answered -- he loves the coziness of rain) and the lake is pin-holed glass. Down by the pond, sitting in the beached canoe: