In Memory of Bobby

I've been a little off lately.  So what else is new when the weather stinks and a 'breezy' day has winds of 25 mph?  I can't ride off my frustrations easily in the 40 degree, sleety nasty conditions of the last couple of weeks.  It gives me too much time in front of my laptop when I'm home.  Not that that's all bad.  I get a lot of work done on the Tour and my team (which incidentally, I should be doing now...but am not).  So it goes...

In regards to the aforesaid frustrations...Sometimes, you get a kick in the teeth that just takes the wind out of your sails and makes everything look just a little bit less sunny.  Such was my return from a trip a week or so ago.  I'm really having kind of a hard time getting around the news of my old friend Bobby.

Bobby was my conductor last fall on a work-train that I held until they chopped it off for the winter and sent me back on the road.  We had an absolute ball on that train.  He was counting the days until he could retire after 40-plus years in this line of work and nothing seemed to make him stop laughing about the good times he had lined up at his new digs in Florida.

Every day for those few weeks with Bob started with his 'Country Breakfast' (coffee and a cigarette) as the sun came up over the ball park in the east.  Then he'd tell me the news on the sale of his house in Pennsylvania, then tales of moving truckloads of stuff down I95 and the ongoing work on the new place outside Daytona.  He was as giddy as a puppy and even though I knew I'd rarely see him after the move, I was glad to see someone getting out of the grind with all the ducks in a row.  He said the days were dragging but the end of the line was in his cross-hairs and I was happy for him.

We had an old NW bay-window caboose (or 'shoving platform' as they now call them) on that job  that we kind of adopted.  The 'boose was a concession to the fact that we had to go backwards for long distances with the rail train we were hooked to and riding the side of a flat car for miles in the rain was something Bobby flat-out refused to consider.  We used our down-time to sweep the old wreck out, bagging up years of accumulated trash, wiping the dust off the seats and plugging up the worst holes with duct tape.  I called it  Bobby's pimped-out caboose after we got is semi-presentable.

Nothing in it worked of course; the coal stove was long gone and the old box radio was gutted to it's electronic innards on the wall.  The bank of batteries was still in the floor but they hadn't had acid in them in years and the generator was probably seized anyway.  Regardless, it became something of a prize.  Bob said it was pretty cool that he began his career on a caboose and was now going to end it on one.  Even this long after cabooses were abolished from everyday service.

I even learned to handle a train with a cabin on it.  It's a little different running when you have to think about smacking someone around who's riding on the other end.  You can slap them about pretty hard if you're not paying attention.  The stories from the old-heads of getting tossed against the wall or having their lunch fly out the window were strong in my head.   That was one of the reasons cabooses disappeared...too many injuries from ham-handed engineers running the slack in and out.  The later versions had 5-point harnesses on the seats like a fighter plane.  Wiggling the tail on 100 cars must have been like getting hit by a truck.  But I figured it out and if I did hit him with the slack, Bobby never mentioned it.  He kept the rail-train crew chuckling all day long while holding court from his rolling office like he owned the whole railroad.  In some ways, it seemed like he did.

I met him soon after I hired out way back when and once he found out I had a Harley, we were friends.  He was our union rep. for all those years and managed to save my skin a time or two when I rubbed the carrier the wrong way as well.  Sometimes I wouldn't even see him for weeks but then he'd call and want to know everything.

Then he surprised me by jumping on a long-pool job with me.  We spent months after that riding up and down the track between New York and Pennsylvania with an assortment of trainees and miscreants who were qualifying on the run.  It was a blast.  The tales of the Bobby and Harold Show would keep me blogging for months but nobody would ever believe any of it could was true.  It was one hell of a run.

Eventually, he went off on other trains and I moved around as we all do in this trade and we only ran into each other at union meetings unless I grabbed a vacancy on his job for a week.  We stayed close though and whenever the madness would get to me, I'd call and shoot the breeze for an hour.  Then the work train came up and the stars aligned just right for the old road-team to have one more go at it.  I was tickled to be able to hold the job with Bobby, even though I knew it was only for a couple of months until he was old enough to take his pension.

He told me before he left that he was happy he had the chance to finish out his career with me as his engineer and he was glad we got the chance to work together one more time.  That meant more to me than he ever knew and I'll remember it well.  Sooner than I wanted to think about, he was shaking my hand for the last time as he headed south for his new place in the sunshine.  I never would have imagined it would be the last time I'd see him.

Bobby passed away suddenly last week at his home near Daytona.  He slept away in his bed which is a long stretch from how he ever expected to go.  Only a couple of months into his retirement that he worked so long to get, like turning out the lights, that was all she wrote.  He got to party with all his friends at Bike Week, sent them all on their way and then he was gone.  When I heard the news, another little bit of the good leaked out of the world.  I still haven't figured it out.

We all know that fairness doesn't enter into these things and sometimes fate is one cruel bastard but it leaves us who stay behind to wonder...why him, why now?  Nobody ever knows their time but how is it that the cards played out the way they did?

As my favorite author, Ernest Gann said, "...by what ends does a man ever partially control his fate?  It is obvious from the special history of our kind that favorites are played, but if this so, then how do you account for those who are ill-treated?  The worship of pagan gods, which once answered all this, is no longer fashionable.  Modern religions ignore the matter of fate.  So we are left confused and without direction.  Let us admit, then, that the complete answer may only be revealed when it can no longer serve those most interested."

I for one, wish I knew.  But until I do, he's a good man gone and I'm proud to have known him.  We'll get through the hard time somehow because he always did.  We might even end up laughing about it.  He would.  He was my friend and all I'm sure of is that I'll miss that man.  And it'll be a while before I get some of the wind back in my sails.

So here's to you Bobby...I'll whistle for you in the night like I do when I think of all the others gone before. It's a long, long line you've joined now Brother; hold me a place and we'll do Daytona when I catch up with you next time.

Hello Tim Joe

One thing I learned since I started The Home is that a (very) few people are actually bored enough to read it.  It was originally just kind of a vent/rant/therapy kind of thing for nobody but myself but over time, it picked up a follower or two.  Who'd a thought?

One of those is TJ...The Trailer Park Cyclist...a total stranger (stranger even than me) who happens to come by and post comments pretty regularly.  For this I'm very grateful because it at least gives me the illusion that my keyboard time isn't just a waste of somebody's ones and zeros that instantly gets lost in space on a server somewhere.  His descriptions of bike rides around the Florida countryside strike me as...well...something I'd be likely to do if I happened to be in that neck of the world.  Kindred spirits perhaps.

I was thinking the other day how it was funny that just this once at least, the connected universe worked as advertised.  I can talk bikes, beer and barbecue sauce with someone I've never really met and likely never will.  Barring a sudden vast increase in my pay scale, we'll never see one another face to face over post-ride beverages.  But as long as those ones and zeros keep zinging back and forth, we'll have something in common.  We might never drink beer at the Park or the Home; half-wheel along the beach or the Finger Lakes; but we can still tell tall tales and lies from the kitchen table realizing that somewhere out there...somebody knows what we're talking about.

So, Hello Tim Joe...here's a little journey from up north.  Tag along if you like.  Only some of it is lies...

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I watched the sky from the back window yesterday with an eye on going for a ride.  The weather service guys promised severe clear and cool which is great biking conditions for an old guy like me but they also noted that the wind would likely blow hard from the northwest all day with gusts up to 30 mph.  This is a little less than ideal unless you can do a whole jaunt on a southeasterly course and never come back.  Since I'm a round-trip sort of rider and have to be able to make it home,  the outbound leg took some thought.  I stalled around the Home waiting for the thermometer to creep above the no-go line and pawed through my dresser for cold weather gear.

The mountain bike was starting to look good because at least I could hide in the woods and stay out of the wind's line of fire but that would likely entail driving somewhere to get away from the same-old-same-old places I hack around in near home.  Have you bought any gas lately?  I hate burning the stuff unless I really have to and besides, there's something fundamentally wrong about driving someplace to ride a bike.  Finally, I came to the decision to go the pavement route, mainly because the dirt bike was hanging in a semi-inaccessible location in the back corner of the garage and the street bike was already prepped and ready to go.  There's probably something to be said as well about being too lazy to dig the mountain bike out when you're looking for exercise but we won't go there today.

I bundled into a couple layers of jerseys and jackets, leggings and full gloves anticipating that it's probably going to be cold on the downhills.  Out the driveway, two lefts and directly into the teeth of the wind.  Might as well do it while my legs are fresh.  As expected, it was about an 8 mph slog until I hit some descent, then it was a 15 mph slog pedaling downhill.  The front wheel was doing a little happy-dance back and forth in the crosswind and visions of prior fork-chatter adventures again kept the fingers poised over the brake levers.  It obviously wasn't going to be a fast trip.

Since I figured it would be slow going until I turned for home anyway, I opted for a loop I did with my brother-in-law as my nearly-final ride before the snow last fall.  It was a pretty good climb the way we did it in October but this time I wanted to go backwards and do the steepest part first.  I'm in training for the Tour de Cure you know...at least that's what I keep telling myself.  If you can't go far, go high...and slow.  At least the wind isn't as much of a factor when you're already in creeper low and grinding.

A long chug up out of the valley is usually followed by a view from the hilltop and this one was no exception:

Severe clear was the truth.  I think you could see all the way to Syracuse if you looked in the right direction.  That stiff breeze blew everything out of the air and the bright sunshine made everything look brand-new.  Somewhere down there is Cayuga Lake and Ithaca but that way-far horizon was the real reward.  About 10 miles, 1200 vertical feet and 8 million crank revolutions down the road on the right is the bottom of the hill.  It always looks a lot better when it's behind the seat bag.

Now on the ridge of Connecticut Hill, I figured I could coast a while and let my legs regroup.  Or not.  The crossroad I was hoping for never materialized so it was more miles straight into the wind before the turn for home.  Talk about false-flats.  I could see it was all downgrade but I had to stay in the middle ring most of the way just to keep moving against the gusts.  A couple of them almost pushed the Trek backwards.  I've never ridden in reverse but there's a first time for everything.  I wondered if I held up my jacket if I could get home without pedaling at all.  Somewhere along there, I came across another old barn for my camera.

I take a lot of shots of assorted barns and junk.  I love old buildings and old machines...must be because they're usually the only thing around older than me.  I can almost hear stories and see other days in them.  They were new and someone was proud of them once and if the old boards and bolts could talk...what a tale they could probably tell.  I'd like to hear them all.  I've been told I have issues.  I'd like to think so.

Tooling along the wind induced upgrade, I eventually turned tail and suddenly it became a sled ride for home.  I never did try sailing with my jacket but my average speed went to double-digits for the first time all day.  I could actually hear something besides wind noise even in the big ring.  A pair of guys on bikes and a low-rider on a 'bent went by in the other direction crawling upwind.  I feel your pain boys.

The cramps and leg-burn faded out after a while and the countryside cruised by.  Around another little lake and over a ridge brought me out on the last leg.  The daylight is a little short still so a pause to look around, capture a pic and it was settle in to head for the Home.

The fields are plowed and the grass is greening up.  No leaves on the trees yet but any day now...

The temperature started down pretty fast as the sun got low but with the wind at my back and all those layers, I didn't care.  I made one more stop for one more pic as the sun dropped behind the hills.

I work for a railroad after all so I noticed I was perched along an old right-of-way.  That streak of dirt is all that's left of the Lehigh Valley Railroad mainline to Buffalo.  Another long-ago place that could tell a world of stories if anyone was listening.  If the miles of old stones and abandoned bridges could only talk...

As it was getting dark, the last road for the day ended up behind me and I rolled into the driveway.  Only 57 miles this time but hey, the season is young and I'm not. I'll get back in shape once the weather figures out what month it is and the temperature gets higher than my age before noon.   The cramps in my thighs should be gone in plenty of time for the Tour...I hope.  I've got a lot of miles to go and a lot to see before then.  If I wasn't such a sucker for a climb it would help...

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So there you go TJ and everyone else out there who happens by.  Pictures and random chatter from the cold end of the east coast.  As I'm so fond of saying, it's always something...

Come to think of it...the Wayward Home is still a kind of therapy for me but pushing pedals around the New York hills is too.  You never know where it'll all lead but I kind of hope someone sticks around for the ride.

On and On

Where did my last few weeks go?  Suddenly, I can't even seem to catch a glance of the days zooming by right in front of my nose.  I looked at my dashboard this morning and realized that my blog friends had been merrily posting away and where have I been?  I wish I knew.  Working a lot yes, but also buried in all things Tour de Cure and Team NS PowerTrain with some firewood, sick kid and a library desk on the side.  Things have been a little hazy with so many projects on the burner and so with apologies to Tim Joe at the Trailer Park, CraftyMamaWitch over on the other side of the pond and anyone else I've slighted by my absence...I humbly present a post:

In short...I've been working.  I know...gainful employment interferes with the good stuff so very much sometimes but, it seems to be a necessary evil.  It just ain't right but there it is.  The demands of walls and a roof, care and feeding and oh, of course, bikes keeps me listening for the faithful landline at hours when I'd rather just dig down in the covers and not hear a thing except the slamming of my own eyelids.  Trust me, getting a cheery phone call from the VRU at 11:30 pm after a total of about 3 hours of restless sleep isn't my idea of a good time, especially knowing that it'll be followed by an hour of driving, an indeterminate interval of throttle time and eventually, the sight of dawn seen through eyes that feel like somebody's been polishing them all night with double-aught sanding pads.  I like my work...really.

It's often not that much fun which, as a wise man once said, "...is why they call it work" but I need the income if I want to continue eating and buying pedal toys so I keep answering the phone.  The job keeps me away from home far too much and always has (which is a post for another day) but except for those hours-from-hell between 3 and 6am when every single cell in my body is screaming "SLEEP NOW", it's far from the worst.  I guess in the grand scheme of things I've done to earn money over the years, it's a pretty good gig .  It pays well, does not involve shovels, sledgehammers or sewer lines as some of my past employment adventures often did and as a real bonus, I get to be on YouTube without having to maim myself or destroy anything.  I'll probably never go viral but that's the price you pay for not shooting your kid's computer for an audience of millions.  Hey, it's a living.

But aside from the usual work/sleep routine, I'm up to those same gritty eyeballs I mentioned in projects that seem to just keep coming back for more.  The Tour de Cure bike team being one of the most serious time hogs.  For those of you just joining us...I refer of course to my initially reluctant involvement in said bicycle team which has now progressed into a three-year old monster with a voracious appetite for my time and phone minutes.  It's a pretty rewarding endeavour at the end of the day but it's also a bottomless pit of things-to-do.  As I said in one of my other posts, I kind of fell into the whole thing by accident but now it has a life of it's own and I'm constantly amazed by what it's turned into.  If I'd had any idea where that first ride around the lake would lead...hell, I probably would have done it anyway but maybe a little differently.

Initially, what I knew about running a bike team would fit in a bugs navel but over the course of figuring it out, I continue to blunder along and in spite of everything, something seems to be working.  By hook or by crook, we went from  few to many and in so doing caught the attention of some pretty big wheels in the company and suddenly a simple Century became something more.  We brought in a bunch of donations for ADA over the last couple of years and seem to be well on our way again.  That's good and in the end that's what we set out to do but there's a little wrinkle these days that I hadn't thought much about until now.

Chris and I were talking the other day and she mentioned to me that I may have turned what started out as a simple, easy thing it into a near-crusade and in some ways, as usual...she's right.
I know I tend to take almost everything much too seriously for my own good and the Tour is no exception.  I want very much for it to be wildly successful and in working at it so hard, I'm finding that some of the fun has leaked out.  Too many meetings, too much organizing, not enough down-time, not enough biking.  Somewhere, I've got to find a happy medium, or at least a happier medium with this thing or I'm going to burn out.

I find this is always a hazard whenever I get inolved in something voluntarily.  I have to be careful or I'll wind up getting an overload and blowing a fuse.  I've been down this road before.  Believe me, the Tour means too much to me to give up just now but when I found myself printing raffle tickets, planning a ride route, switching between about eight windows on my computer...all Tour related with a phone stuck to my ear and the sun shining outside...well, let's just say a little voice whispered ever so quietly, "What the hell are you doing?"
The answer was not readily available.  We've come a long way in two years of this thing but I think I have to figure out how much is too much lest it become...too much.

Looking at this entry, I noticed that I actually started it on Feb. 23rd.  It's now March 4th and I'm still working on getting it posted.  Almost 2 weeks seems like kind of a long time, especially when I like writing these things so much.  Other than that last blast I shot out a while ago, I haven't kept up with the Home the way I like and that's not the only thing that's gotten back-burnered.  There's some other projects that have kinda fallen by the wayside of late.  The captain needs a breather.

Don't get me wrong...I still think the Tour is the best.  We've come so far and done so much that I have no intention of giving up now.  We've created something out of almost nothing and that's a pretty darn good feeling.  There's people who ride with us now who hadn't ridden in years, we've made biking and staying in better shape more visible in our corner of the world, found a whole slew of new friends and helped ADA in the process.  This is a good and wonderful thing.  It's been an incredible ride.

But I think I should get that 2.1 back from the shop soon.  Real soon.  Maybe just a shade less crusading...and a touch more Wayward Home.  Too much of anything is likely...too much.

A Thank You

I'll be back at the old 24/7 on-call drag soon so I took the chance to make a trip to my friendly cyclery to pick up my birthday bike. It's only the second new bicycle I've ever had so I was pretty itchy to get my hands on it before the weather closed in. Unfortunately, my medical adventures of late put a damper on things pretty hard so it was a somewhat longer delay getting it home than I expected. Nothing ever goes quite as planned around here, but what else is new? It was certainly well worth the wait though when I very gingerly tried it out for the first time on a short, easy loop. It sure rides like a trail killer, especially when compared to my old standby (the one I've beaten into near-destruction on the fire roads). I knew the new one would be great but I didn't expect HOW sweet it would handle. Even though I wasn't quite up to anything resembling a thrashing yet, I can already see myself getting in some serious trouble with it. Once all of my internal parts fall back into place so I can dig without hurting and I get this baby tuned up and settled in...I've got some hills in mind that have beat me into walking in the past. Steep or slick, they aren't going to win the next round. My riding partners are really in for it now too.

For all that though, the most amazing thing about the new Trek is how I wound up having it home by now at all. Playthings are kind of a low priority for me so I had no plans for any such item as a new mountain bike anytime soon. I was half looking on Craigslist for a used one but out-of-the-box was out-of-the-question. Then along comes my half-century. The local cast of characters ganged up to chip in on it for my over-the-hill event in lieu of the traditional old-guy gags. Very nice guys, I didn't need anything on my shelf gathering dust to remind me that I'm on the slippery slope to AARP. That in itself says a lot about my family and friends to think that way in the first place, and the effort put a sizable down-payment on the bike. The rub was; since I got forcibly put out of commission, there was a drastic cut in my income. Say down around zero. That meant I couldn't finish paying it off until I got back to work for a while and recovered some lost ground on the bills. The toys have to wait if you want to keep the lights lit and the kids fed right? Not the end of the world but it was looking like there'd be snow on the ground before I got the new wheels.

Now along comes a trio of friends. They dreamed up a plan to chip in yet again on the balance so I could get the bike out of the shop almost as soon as I got home from the hospital. I was presented with an owners manual and a paid-in-full receipt about the first day I could actually move from a chair. All I had to do was go pick it up.

There's only been a few times in my day when I was without words and that was one of them. I still don't really know what to say except "Thank You" and "Thank You" again. What happened to me wasn't life-threatening or even really life-changing except temporarily, yet they still found a way to turn it into something wonderful.

There's a circle of family, friends and even some folks we never expected who helped with the bike in the first place, who came out of the woodwork when I was in the hospital, who hung out and kept me company when I got home, who drove us around, who helped my wife whenever she needed it, who called just to check in and then to top it off, the Gang Of Three who finished off the bike. They were all there and did without asking and I'm more than grateful to every one of them. The only way I can think of to tell you guys how much it meant to me is to someday remember and somehow pay it forward or back. When you or someone else is in a fix and could use a hand, I'll remember.

You hear so little about the good still to be found in people amid the trials and troubles of the world yet it's there and in no small way, I'm in awe.
And to all of you...I will remember.