Cold Ride

April 1, 2011 at 1:40 am (Travel)

About 10 a.m. I leave the Grove Park Inn by car for west Asheville, planning to park at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a bike trip up to Craggy Gardens. The Asheville temperature is about 42 to 44 degrees at 2200 feet elevation, with a predicted high of 54. Concerning weather, I characteristically underestimated my needs, and thus had left Hattiesburg thinking that surely I would not even ride if I was going to need my neoprene biking booties or full gloves. But, as an afterthought, I thought I ought to bring my full length biking pants since, after all, this would be Asheville and it’s barely April. So at the last minute in Hattiesburg I said sure, why not, and threw them in the bag, along with helmet, shades, biking shorts, socks, regular fingerless gloves, a summer short sleeve biking shirt, a heavier long sleeve biking shirt, a sleeveless nylon windbreaker, and a sleeved nylon windbreaker. Four layers—definitely enough. But then the day before the ride doubts had crept in—after we were already here, of course—and Val and I trekked over to REI about eleven miles out of Asheville, where she clothes-shopped and I bought nylon toe covers, some full-fingered biking gloves, and some little battery-operated blinking lights, forward and back, which I discovered were required for tunnels. I even tried to bungy cord my Polartech jacket to the bike frame, but it was too bulky for leg movement. Afterwards it occurred to me that I should have worn it over the long sleeve shirt, with the other three thin layers stuffed in the shirt’s back pockets until the descent.

Around 10:30 I’m at the Folk Art Center, and notice that a quarter of a mile up the Parkway there is a roadblock all the way across, which had not been there the day before on the scouting mission. This was not good; this little jaunt had been on my mind since I did it last summer, and I even had fleeting dreams of going past my 15 mile turnaround mark and maybe even all the way up to the peak of Mt. Mitchell, which, at 6684 elevation, is the highest point east of the Mississippi River. Until yesterday I did not realize that the turnaround at the summit was not 20-25 miles, but a full 35 miles. About 30 or so miles up the Parkway road, another road breaks off the Parkway and goes five very steep miles to the summit. I have hiked the last three or so miles on an often rough trail to the summit, and with the hike back, it was a good several hours work.

So, confronted with the roadblock, I go inside the Folk Art Center, ignoring the handmade blankets, on a firm quest to ascertain the reason for this roadblock and whether I should ignore it and duck under and be on my way. Well, it had snowed in the night at higher elevations, and there were concerns about ice on the road. Another lady joins in, saying that she lives in Black Mountain and snow had covered the area at upper elevations. The official Parkway lady suggests some other biking possibilities, but adds that I could go under the roadblock, though for the record she didn’t tell me that.

It’s fairly chilly, so I put on everything I have except the sleeveless nylon windbreaker, which I stuff in the shirt pocket for use coming back down, when the wind chill could be brisk, maybe even unpleasant. I scoot under the roadblock, wondering if I’ll be paying for this ride with a heavy fine, and started the ascent. The REI guy had told me that the first three miles are pretty steep and are often used as training rides, up three, down three, repeated until done. They are steep—one of my memories from the first ride last summer was that as a flatlander and hill-hater, I was breathing heavily in the first 200 yards and wondering what in the world was I thinking and should I turn back right now and call it just a big misunderstanding. So this time I was prepared for that, and slowly inch upward in my lowest two gears at between 6 and 8 mph, when even a quarter of mile seems like real progress. The road is dry and I am warm. Clouds move in and out, and the sun feels and looks re-assuring. And of course the traffic is not bad—in fact, non-existent, thanks to the roadblock—and for about four miles I see only one runner and one biker coming down. The biker and I briefly chat, noting our confederation of illegality. He had started well before my starting point on the Parkway and had only turned around about two miles higher than where we are now. He mentions one little rockslide but no snow or ice.

So I keep climbing. There are several fairly flat spots and even some downhills, but ironically the occasional downhills are actually disconcerting, since they feel like ground lost that you have to make back up. I’m not noticing any change in temperature, but there is some wind, sometimes rather loud. But the general quiet and the very real sense of aloneness are a little eerie, and the spots of sun make for a good companion. To my left is either steep forest or a rock face, and to the right many scenic views interspersed through the steeply descending trees. At about ten and a half miles, and over an hour in, I see the first tiny flecks of blowing snow along with icicles on the rock face, with sparse and thin patches of snow by the roadside. But the road is still clear, though a little damp, and my goal is Craggy Gardens at 18 miles. I’m working fairly hard, occasionally out of the saddle for variety, and so it doesn’t seem particularly cooler. At about fourteen and a half miles, a human being speaks from behind and startles me. We ride along for under a mile, and he says he thought he was the only one doing this today. He is a serious triathlete, training for one of his three full Ironmen per year, doing about 400 miles per week (not counting, presumably, his running and swimming), and unintentionally putting fitness in a whole new context for me. He has come from eastern N.C. to do some climbing work, and just yesterday he started at the Folk Art Center and went to the peak of Mitchell, thirty-five miles up, and of course the same back down, and he was intending to do it again today.

As we rode for that short period together, the whole ecosystem changes, with snow clinging to every single one of the billions of small twigs of all the trees on both sides of the road. It’s like something out of Dr. Zhivago, all whiteness, except for the road and rare patches of blue sky. But it’s mostly cloudy—more whiteness—very little sun. There are some marginally easier places where 10 or 12 mph is fine, but I tell him that this is my comfortable pace, and I know he has 20 more climbing miles to go, so he moves on.

I pass the point where I turned around last summer, Craggy Gardens picnic area, which is about 15 miles. My destination is 18 miles, the Craggy Gardens Visitors Center. It’s windy and a little chilly, but nothing serious, probably mid-thirties at this elevation. The snow is barely a dusting, but on the ground it’s pretty much everywhere except for the road. The previous night’s icicles are everywhere on the rock, some a foot long, some breaking off. Then, at about 18 miles, there is the Visitors Center, closed of course since the road is, but there is my buddy, straddling his bike and having a bite to eat. I stop also, and now it really is cold. The elevation is around 4900 feet. The wind now seems really harsh, and there is no sun. I had eaten a Hammer Gel at the second tunnel, and now clumsily take out a Powerbar, but it is so hard I’m afraid I am going to break a tooth and so put it back. The triathlete had turned around a couple of hundred yards farther up, saying there was ice on the road. I am jealous of his heavy gloves and booties, and I’m shaking. Now the descent, which had earlier seemed like a fun, exhilarating payoff for the labor of climbing, has become a fearfully cold prospect. We start together, but even going down he is soon out of sight, given my old man caution and all the mountain curves. My hands and feet, which had not been cold at all until I stopped at the Center, are stinging with real pain, especially my hands. I am shaking so much that the bike is shaking, giving a scary feeling of instability, and I am braking much of the way to try to stay under 25. I would love to put one hand somewhere warmer, but there is absolutely no way to even think of riding one-handed. It is a little frightening, knowing that even going downhill it will be 45 minutes of pain and uncontrollable shaking. A couple of miles down, the triathlete had the same thought as I, namely pulling over at an overlook to try to warm up the hands. I pull up too, and though doing so stops 25 mph of wind chill, my hands are deep orange, and the body-shaking will not stop. He says he’ll never complain about 95 degrees again, and it is the coldest he has ever been, a sentiment I echo. A few spots of sunshine from gaps in the clouds help marginally.

Then we are off again, and soon he is out of sight again. He said that he had hit 44 descending the day before until total fear kicked in. In warm weather I had hoped for 40, but not this day, not this cold, not this unstable. Despite braking, I am descending three to four times as fast as coming up, and soon there is more sun and the snow is gone. I can even feel marginal improvement in my hands, but the shaking will not quit. The brief uphills are actually welcome—10 to 15 mph, and working, the warmth improving as the elevation lowers. I hit 32 at one point, but it feels too dangerous with the shaking and the sometime wet road. Finally, the roadblock is in view. Soon I’m putting the bike on the rack, getting in the car, and turning on the heat. Hannah calls, and my voice is unstable from the shivering and shaking, and I drop the phone at one point.

Back at the hotel around 2:30, I look up the temperature at Mt. Mitchell. All I can find is the temp for the state park, not the summit, though I was about 1800 feet below the summit at my turnaround point. Weather.com shows 42, “feels like” 34, with 18 mph winds. The wind chill of descending had to have put the temp in the teens at our higher elevations to have hurt our hands so much, and the triathlete had even changed to thick biking mittens. Holding the mouse to do the temperature check, my hand still shivers. The last 45 minutes of that approximately three hours were not pleasant. If I do this again, it will be in August.

John Rachal
April 1, 2011

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Miss Favor Diop, Seeking Friendship

February 21, 2011 at 1:39 am (Lagniappe)

One of the pleasantries of the internet and email is the opportunity for expanding one’s friendships. For example, I recently received the following:

Hello
I ‘m a young lady called Favor Diop. I found interesting in your profile in that inspired me I discovered that my true partner for life and wants a serious relationship of love with you. If you are interested and have the intention that we should move forward, contact me via email:- I will send my pictures to you. It will be nice to receive your response.
Have a beautiful day.
Miss Favor

I was touched; I was moved; I was gratified. After all, she found me inspiring, and thus showed good taste. I prepared the following reply, but in the end chose not to send it for fear of hurting her tender and generous feelings.

Hello Miss Favor,
I was favored with your recent inquiry with the subject line “Hello am seeking for friendship.” I too have been seeking for friendship for quite some time. My wife and I just the other day were lamenting the sad state of our friendships, and so your recent missive gave us considerable pleasure not only in the reading of it (you have a delightful and inimitable prose style, including those clever syntactical whimsicalities), but also in the prospect of our gaining a new friend. I note that you observed that you “found interesting in [my] profile” and that it inspired you. This is flattering indeed, but I must, in all candor, assure you that I am, being of superannuated years, as homely in profile as in full face. Thus for you to infer from that profile, especially given my receding chin and generous nose, that you have discovered your true partner for life seems to me to exceed the facts. Of course these defects are no bar to true friendship of a platonic sort. I could envision the three of us, along with some other friends of our acquaintance, discussing just the sort of issues that true friendship inevitably entails, such as theology, philosophy, art, and science. No doubt it is just such issues as these which prompted your thoughtful and charming letter in the first place, a letter from which I can see that you are a lady of depth and substance. But alas, I fear that the grim and soul-less state of our society, with its intrusive strictures and incapacity for seeing the ethereal beauty of such friendship, might weigh heavily upon me. I can see that others might unjustly infer that you are seeking something other than your stated goal; they might find your protestations of true friendship insincere; they might even think that your words are fraudulent. While I know these calumnies not to be true, I confess that I am a slave to convention and decorum, and fearful of public disdain, and must therefore most regretfully decline the courteous hand of friendship which you have so graciously extended.
Have a beautiful day.
Mr. John

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Ivanhoe Revisited

February 19, 2011 at 1:38 am (Literary Criticism)

From the archives:

I have been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the adventurous, charming, romantic, and utterly preposterous Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. It is most charming in its antique language, and nowhere more preposterous than in its putting such charming language in the mouths of untutored, illiterate rustics of the twelfth century. Still, it is delightful, and so I proffer a questionable attempt at imitation:

Being homeward bound, two leagues out, I was assailed by a six-legged varlet who, in the manner of a cowardly ambuscade, thrust afore I could parry; and his rapier, though diminutive, did pierce my light armor in that self-same spot as our Lord and Savior received His holy wound upon the Cross. Failing to give a mortal blow, however, the dastard chose not to prolong his visit to the neighborhood, and afore I could send his infidel soul to the nether world, he escaped, true to the cunning and false valor of his race, leaving me to apply to my wound an ancestral poultice of palliative herbs, and thus to re-mount my middling born, yet noble steed, who bravely made his way homeward.

Translation:

Six miles from home, a yellow jacket or wasp stung me. I put some chewing tobacco (which I carried just for that purpose) on the sting, got back on my bike, and rode home.

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Hypocrisy as Fine Art

February 17, 2011 at 1:36 am (Political Commentary)

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa strains to find his artistic métier, and has succeeded wondrously in the art of hypocrisy. In his Valentine’s Day editorial in USA Today, he rails against the health care law and in particular the individual mandate requiring all Americans to have health care insurance through their jobs or by purchasing it if necessary. What he conveniently omits is his support of the mandate in the 90s, when it was a Republican idea. But now that it is a Democratic idea, somehow it is a threat to the very foundation of American ideals, which back then he somehow did not notice. Then, when it earned his support, it was a way to prevent all taxpayers from having to bear the burden of the uninsured running to emergency rooms. Now, having earned his contempt, it is the first installment of the Stalinist State. He doesn’t really believe that, of course; it’s just one more Republican example of the Great Lie aimed at garnering public support for the insurance industry in the guise of Constitutional principles. If we can frighten enough Americans and take down the mandate, the whole of healthcare reform will fall, like a house of cards. Had he simply acknowledged that he previously had supported the mandate when it was a Republican idea, one might write him off as just your average beltway hypocrite, or possibly even a fellow who just changed his mind when the political breeze shifted. But no, that would have almost approached having real principles—and would have required actually attempting to explain why what was good as a Republican idea is now bad as a Democratic one. But where Grassley rises above the common masses of political hypocrisy—rises to Olympian heights of hypocrisy deserving of admiration and almost defying ridicule—is in his gnashing of teeth that “the new law rewards insurance companies with a massive new captive market.” His concern over rewarding insurance companies is marvelous. It is transcendent. It is Rembrandt-esque in its artistry.

John R. Rachal
February 17, 2011

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Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

January 25, 2011 at 1:34 am (Political Commentary)

House Republicans, deterred briefly by the Tucson massacre, can now check off pandering to our base as their second action as the majority party in the new congress. Obamacare is now safely repealed—only it isn’t, if repeal means the actual law has changed. It will go nowhere in the Senate, where Democrats are still barely in charge. Even if Senate Democrats were all sick on voting day and it did pass, the President would simply pull out his veto pen, and there are certainly not 67 Senate votes to override him. But House Republicans can now say, as Speaker John Boehner did, “we listened to the people,” though he should have added, sotto voce, “but really to the insurance companies.” Thus the new majority played a little fiddle tune as Rome warms up, the fire on the horizon being the national debt and an unsustainable budget, with no current officeholder of any stripe having a serious plan to rein it in.

So what is it exactly about healthcare reform that the Republicans so want to repeal? The prohibition against insurance companies cherry-picking their customers? The prohibition against insurance companies dropping customers if they inconveniently get a little too sick? The prohibition against companies’ refusal to cover people with pre-existing conditions? The right of children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance? The closing of the doughnut hole for seniors? The expansion of health coverage to 30 million more Americans? The greater scrutiny of fraudulent Medicare claims? No, they claim to want to keep these things; it’s just that darned freedom-killing requirement that everyone have insurance, by buying it if necessary, that’s standing in their way. This, they say, is an infringement of a citizen’s rights, ignoring altogether the fact that governments require people to pay taxes to support things they may not advocate, and they require drivers to buy insurance. But that’s different—you don’t have to drive. For most people between 20 and 80, driving is not a choice. Well it’s just wrong, so Boehner et al. say, unconstitutional even, to require folks to buy health insurance, even though they inevitably are in the healthcare system from the day they are inoculated until their last visit to the emergency room. To make the case against the mandate, they drop their usual concern about the uninsured having their health problems paid for or subsidized by other taxpayers through Medicaid and visits to emergency rooms—the socialism thing.

It is hard to put much credence in their protestations that all those good things about healthcare reform are things they want too—their backers in the insurance industry certainly don’t. If it just were not for that pesky mandate that everyone must buy insurance, they would be healthcare reform’s biggest champions. All those mysterious lost jobs is a problem too, but never mind the Congressional Budget Office’s estimated $230 billion addition to the debt that repeal would cost over the next several years. Not coincidentally, the mandate is the linchpin of the whole plan, the mechanism by which it is funded, and if they could kill that, healthcare reform would just go away. And if they can say “job killing” enough times, that might, they hope, just put them and their insurance company pals over the top, before Americans discover that they actually like Obamacare, and that the Republicans tried yet again to sell them a bill of goods.

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Jean Meslier’s Secret War

January 9, 2011 at 1:59 am (Ethics)

Voltaire, like Jefferson, was a man of mixed parts, hardly less interested in science than literature, history, and the social and political events of his day. Also like Jefferson, he was deist, one who could be disturbingly deferential to nobility and authority, but who courageously campaigned against the horrid injustice done by the Church-State coalition to the Calas family, and who led the philosophes’ war with the Church. Still, in the way of old men softening with age (perhaps fearing to rage against the darkness any longer), he sought Communion at the end of a long life and died in the Church. In the course of his conversion, he drew a cartoon of Jean Meslier which was mendacious and contemptible.

The cartoon was all the more reprehensible because it was not a mere critique of Meslier (1664-1729), but rather an abduction of his very identity. He took Meslier’s posthumously published Testament, and printed a twisted, corrupted, hideously redacted version of the atheist priest’s explosive manuscript, dressing him up, as a modern Meslier defender states, “in a cassock and a clown suit,” and turning him into a deist.

Meslier was a practicing priest, deeply compassionate toward his believing and oppressed flock, hardly able to contain in secrecy his vitriol and literally unspeakable apostasy in the practice of his vocation. It is his hidden life, his hidden thoughts that fascinate me as much as the virulence of his diatribes. His conflict between public role and private thought must have been excruciating. He acknowledges that to expose himself would destroy his parents, but also that the Church could not find “tortures cruel enough” to punish him for his radical non-belief and his amazing indictment of religion itself. Thus Meslier leaves his Testament as his posthumous, single-handed declaration of war on the suffocating oppression of religion, the exploitation of the credulous poor by the pampered priest-class, and the sheer absurdity of theism in all its guises.

In multi-layered but often tedious and repetitious prose, he builds a double-barreled argument that no God, whether in the form of an anthropomorphic being or an abstract creator, exists; and second that religion colludes with the state to exploit the credulity of the peasants in order to oppress them, extort them, and tyrannize them. As Meslier says, “all religions are nothing but errors, illusion, and imposture.” In particular, his outrage emanates from his compassion for the people who are exploited by religious authority in a devil’s pact with the state—a pact in which all of the articles conspire for the benefit and protection of the signatories’ power, wealth, ease, and aggrandizement. He rages against this cruel exploitation, all the more cruel because the Church makes its parishioners complicit in their own oppression by fostering and then using their belief for its own ends. It is in this sense that religion is an “imposture,” and its leadership charlatans, con men—and no less so simply because some of them are taken in by their own con. It is, for Meslier, a cruel, life-ebbing criminality cloaked in the fine garments of soaring rhetoric and Godly compassion. Believe and accept (so the priest-nobility alliance says) this unfair imbalance of wealth and poverty in this life—and equally important, propagate it—and you will be rewarded in a deferred life that we have painted as a paradise. But protest this odious imbalance, this exploitation, and condemn it, and further proclaim to others their exploitation, and not only will we damn you to an eternity of torture, we will not even wait for that eternity to begin. Rather we will torture and painfully execute you here, in this life, partly from our own sadism, but mostly to protect our own hegemony from the dangerous sparks of disillusionment and the right to think.

Thus speaks, if not in these words, a righteous man. After thousands of handwritten pages scribbled in secrecy, Meslier concludes his Testament with: “It is the force of truth that makes me say this, and it is the hatred of injustice, lies, deception, tyranny and all the other iniquities that make me speak in this way because I really hate and detest all injustice and iniquity. . . . I am hardly more than nothing and soon I will be nothing.” The outrage is palpable; and the human compassion which is its source is profound and incorruptible. And one should not ignore the existential bravery required: not only does he reject an inherited belief structure that suffuses his world and all his training and upbringing, he rejects the illusory comfort of an eternal life and accepts his coming extinction. Like Hume, when the void nears, he does not retreat into the illusion.

For his time, Meslier, I believe, is correct in his indictment of the extortionate Church he knew regarding its exploitation of the people. And yet we do not have a full picture unless we also acknowledge the undeniable comfort provided those whose lives are an almost endless trial. The belief is probably illusory, but the comfort is not. The European Church of Meslier’s day earned its repellent reputation. Today, except where fundamentalism rules, religion often has a more benign face, and its anodyne value may exceed its vices. Thus the dilemma for non-believers: Can one embrace what he perceives to be an illusion because he also sees the comfort and consolation the illusion provides? At least the best of religion despises the fear, the superstition, the doctrinal exclusivity, and the obscurantism of most religion and stresses above all else kindness, compassion, and love. When the Dalai Lama says “my religion is simple: my religion is kindness,” he removes God and all the resulting dogma that so encumber faith and places humanity and humaneness for all sentient things at its center. But even in religions where God remains the center, the illusion can provide genuine comfort. If the illusion can inculcate an active kindness—as communities of faith often do during crisis, and as I have seen—then it is not without value. Where the message eschews dogma, and instead promotes the universal value of active humaneness, that is where religion’s potential for goodness resides.

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American Exceptionalism

December 31, 2010 at 1:30 am (Political Commentary)

So now Newt Gingrich, desperately trying to raise his visibility for a possible presidential run, attacks Obama for his perfectly sensible views on “American Exceptionalism.” Even Sarah Palin, who likely had never heard of the term before this month, weighs in by suggesting that Obama is somehow not American enough, given his willingness to acknowledge that other countries may likely see themselves as exceptional as well.

The term American exceptionalism suggests that America has been divinely assigned a role of unique greatness, a superiority to all other nations and peoples, and a corresponding responsibility to be the moral exemplar of the world. It is certainly true that we are the most powerful country; many other countries do look to us for moral and political leadership; many people from around the world want to come here; we are a democracy; our standard of living is high; we regard autocracies with a jaundiced eye. Moreover, our first national war was to achieve the laudable aim of independence and representative government; we fought another just war to cleanse ourselves of the crime of slavery; and we fought a third just war to eliminate the threats of two other self-perceived “exceptional” nations, Germany and Japan. But German exceptionalism, in the form of a purified racial superiority and the thousand year Reich, and Japanese exceptionalism, in the form of a divine emperor at the head of his divinely endowed empire, should give American exceptionalists some pause. One can be proud of one’s country, as I am, without crossing into exceptionalism. The danger of the exceptionalist view, even when divested of bellicosity, is its hubris. Despite the longings of the Old Testament, God does not “choose” peoples and the nations they comprise, and if he did, he probably would not go with the rich and powerful. And those Greek tragedians did have it right: an excess of hubris precedes a fall, as Germany and Japan discovered in the recently concluded bloody century, and as the Southern Confederate aristocracy did in the previous one. Whether we are in the morning of America, or the mid-afternoon, I cannot tell. As Egyptians, Greeks, and Britons will remind us, however, no empire reigns forever. And on that point at least—despite our many virtues—we are not likely to be an exception.

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