Pain Up; Rain Down: Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway

 

The climb to Thunder Ridge on Virginia's Blue Ridge Parkway is a smooth, steady, winding climb of 3,300 feet at five percent for just over twelve miles. I drove to the base of the climb on the James River and began the climb in bright sun; the temperature just over 90 degrees.

The forecast was for more of the same.  

That was true until the tenth mile. The sky to the east was bright and sunny. The sky to the west was suddenly gray.  Sprinkles began, but it was so bright to the east, I thought I could get to the top before it got bad.  

The sprinkles became light rain. The mountain to the east almost disappeared in haze.  Then with one kilometer to go, I heard thunder.  

Shit. I was too late.

I turned around and rode in increasing rain at down the hill for about a mile, then sheets of rain and crosswinds hit me.  I watched water swirl and eddy on the road in front of me.  I took off my sunglasses and tipped my helmet low so I could see.  I let myself roll for a while at 35mph then started squeezing the brakes. After riding slower for a while, I let the brakes go and went back to coasting in the torrents.  

Raindrops stung my face and arms when the wind turned and whipped toward me.  At one point after miles of descending I thought, 'At least there are no bugs!' Bugs buzzed around me all the way up.

I passed the turnoff for the ranger office and knew I was close to the bottom of the hill.  The grade lessened.  Then I was pedaling slightly uphill across the James River to the parking area.  I pulled up to the car, opened the door and emptied my pockets onto the passenger seat. Then I took the wheels off the bike, put it in the car (I have a 2001 Prius; the bike rides in the back seat; it won't fit in the trunk.) and stripped off my soaked clothes. 

I dried off with an old sheet I had in the trunk and sat on an old camouflage shirt.  It was so humid I turned on the AC and the rear window defroster. 

Tomorrow I am going back to Thunder Ridge.  The forecast is good and I want to get all the way to the top!

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When I arrived in Richmond for a few days, I  searched on line for the toughest climbs in the area. A group called PJAMM listed their top ten climbs in Virginia.  Thunder Ridge was the longest. Here is their site.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011.  Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries.  The book was much more vivid in this reading. 

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts.  Later in the year the essays were published as a book.

Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust.  She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.  

The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the  cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.  

In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war.  In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better.  More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.  

Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year.  Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.  

The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil.  The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann.  Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).

The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Twenty Guns: A Sign of Mental Illness?

 

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A very smart friend just posted that the father of the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Trump owns 20 guns. He thought that indicated Dad was mentally ill.  

If Dad is mentally ill, he is part of a mass psychosis.  There are nearly 400 million guns in America yet the majority of Americans don't own guns, so a large, vocal minority owns a lot of guns.  

Twenty is not far from average for an avid gun owner.  When I was deployed to Iraq, I asked soldiers I served with how many guns they owned.  I should have made a careful but the number that came up most often was sixteen.  They included soldiers of every rank, enlisted and officers.  

According to Pew Research, 32% of Americans own guns, just over 100 million people.  

The majority, 62%, own one hand gun. That's more than 60 million people.

More than 25 million people own three to seven guns. 

The top 14% own 8 to 140 guns.  The average of 17 guns was in line my informal survey in Iraq. That's about 15 million people who own an average of 17 guns, or a total of 250 million guns.  

If you combine all the multiple gun owners that group is more than 40 million people. Can 12% of the population be mentally ill?  Not in any sane definition of mental illness.  

The 40 million people who own multiple guns are part of a community in which owning many guns is normal.  Nearly all of them have jobs and are part of communities.  They made a choice the majority would not make, but they are not mentally ill.

Today, I talked to an 80-year-old guy who is a life-long resident of Lancaster County. He volunteers with community groups and has been part of emergency communications teams that help in disasters. He has five guns: two pistols, two shotguns and a hunting rifle. They are locked in a gun safe.  He is part of a community in which five guns is not even remarkable. 

 

 

Mundolingua: A Word Museum Paris

Near Luxembourg Gardens in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris is Mundolingua a museum of words: "Stacks of books and dictionaries share space with dozens of digital screens, the intimate exhibit spaces at once cozy and quirky. Words in many languages and alphabets adorn the walls, and, as you wander from the first floor down to the building’s 17th-century cellar, you are surrounded by languages at every turn."

   

Please follow the link above if you are interested. Better yet, if you get to Paris add ths odd museum to your list of sites to vist.

So Many Mennonites on Bicycles!

 

Last Saturday, I was riding between Leola and New Holland in Lancaster County. On that five miles of PA Route 23 I saw more groups of Mennonite men than I have ever seen in more than 40years of living in Lancaster County.  Every few hundred yards I saw another group of three to five guys in straw hats, suspenders and farm boots riding and talking.  

On  the way back I caught up to one group and asked why there were so many bikes on the New Holland Pike.  They told me I was seeing people leaving Horse Progress Days at the end of the two-day trade show/event/festival.

In a huge field on South Groffdale Road, south of Leola, were tents and displays of manure spreaders, tillage equipment, sprayers, and then the haying equipment--all designed for horse-drawn (and mule-drawn) farming. 

Over the two days ofthe event, 30,000 people came from all over the U.S.and Canada to see the latest in horse-powered farm equipment.  

Along with the bicycles were several pairs of Amish men riding high-wheeled scooters along Route 23.

The next day I rode the same road and saw a few buggies, but no bicycles or scooters.  I will have to wait until next year.  

 

Moving to Panama--For a Year

 

The Panama Canal

For the third time in my life, I will live in another country beginning on August 15.  My wife got a Fulbright grant to study abroad for a year, so I will join her in Panama City on the Pacific Coast of a very narrow country. She is going to study math and to teach in a community outreach math program (She is fluent in Spanish). 

While she works, I will make dinner and ride coast to coast! I have never ridden coast to coast before on the six continents I have visited, but Panama will be the place I make my first transcontinental ride from Pacific.  The distance is 75km or 45 miles ocean to ocean. A lot less distance than New York to San Francisco.

The last two times I lived overseas, I was a soldier. I carried a gun.  This time, no gun.  

In Iraq I had the gun all the time. 

In West Germany during the Cold War, I rode inside my gun. I also carried a sidearm. 

I have never been to anyplace between Tijuana, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, so there are many places to explore.  Panama is a beautiful place from all I have read and heard, and the canal is a marvel of engineering.  So it should be an amazing year. 

In Terror of Ducatis on Sestriere: My First Climb in the Italian Alps

In 2000, I made the first several climbs up to the Sestriere ski resort.  It was a beautiful September day as I toiled the seven-mile climb. At several point on the way up, I was riding through avalanche tunnels--they are a roof over the road, open on the cliff side. 

 It's dark inside the tunnels, not totally but dark compared to ride in bright sun.  As I rode through first tunnel I could hear the roar of Ducati race-replica motorcycles climbing between the turns, then the odd silence as they coast through the hairpins and roar to life again out of the turns. 

I have this experience before on Mount Palomar in San Diego county.  But there are no tunnels on Mount Palomar.  As the bikes got closer I pedaled faster, not that it would make any difference, but I wanted to get out of the tunnel. I had a sudden vision of the bike at the back of the group moving right to pass one of his mates then slamming into me.  

The roar went from deep rumble to deafening howl as the pack swung out of a hairpin and accelerated into the tunnel. The tunnel had about a six percent grade so the roar swelled as they approached, throttles wide open.  I put my head down and kept pedaling.   I could see the end of the tunnel. I hoped the roaring bikes could see me.  

Then it was over. The bikes flew past me in a line. Clearly they had passed many bicyclists on this mountain.  They shot from the tunnel into the light and disappeared. I continued to pedal, a little more slowly.  

Mount Palomar has many more motorcycles than any alpine climb I have ridden, but they are almost always single or in pairs.  They also are mostly four-cylinder high-revving Hondas, Kawasakis and Suzikis.  When they were near me in a turn, I could hear the best riders dragging the hockey-puck pad on their knee as they leaned into the turn at 45 degrees or more.  

Only on Sestriere did I have packs of motorcycles fly past. In 2005, three different packs flew past me on my way up. 

Usually, the excitement on these rides is descending and feeling the rush of speeding around the hairpin turns. On this ride, the biggest rush was the pack of Ducati race-replica motorcycles that shot past me on the way to the summit.

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On Tuesday, July 2, 2004, the Tour de France will climb to Sestriere then to Col de Montgenevre, through Briancon, up to Col du Lauteret on the way to Col du Galibier then downhill to the finish in Valloire.