A Summer Soaker

Dear Blog Reader.     

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Here during the last weekend of June, I continue to watch the calendar. Two weeks left before the Ride Across Indiana; I have no idea if I can ride 160 miles in one day. Last weekend, I road the 15 miles south to US 40, National Road; the road that I will ride from Terre Haute to Richmond. I wanted to let my bike tire meet the road; to make sure that there were no unsettling allergic reactions in two weeks. That’s right. I am relying on luck and superstition rather than training and weight loss. It is a bit sad, but it is where I am at. It is not too early to start making small animal sacrifices for a stout SSW wind.

That intersection will be my biggest temptation. A simple left hand turn plus 15 miles and I am home. The pain can stop. I know that I will be more than half way there. I suppose close to 100 miles into the ride. Indiana at its widest point is about 140 miles but it is a 160 mile bike ride long the National Road. It appears that the builders, our civil engineering ancestors, got thirsty heading out of Columbus OH. By the time they reached the Circle City they had developed a powerful hankering for adult beverages and veered off in a South Westerly direction towards St Louis with the pace of plodding Clydsedales. Sadly, they were dispirited in Vandalia, Illinois and stopped. They read the town’s name too quickly and thought that they were in the onion counties of Georgia. Haste makes waste.

On Saturday, I rode in a steady soaking rain. We have been blessed with numerous such rains recently. Things are very green. Which is a paradox, because as soon as the life force leaves, all organic matter turns brown and decays rapidly and the process starts immediately. In short, it has been the perfect year for fungus and bacteria; a compost maker’s Nirvana.

While riding in that steady soaking rain, I was swept along to one of my favorite memories of my father. He loved a real daytime soaker in the middle of summer. We are rarely blessed with steady soakers in the middle of summer. We tend to rely on those pop up thunderstorms; those gully washers that leave our streets and creeks flooded. I remember getting one or two steady soakers a year.

The ever present gully washer would drive my father and the crew to the barn where the heavy drops pounding on a steel roof would roar in our ears. We would stand in the western barn doors watching the wall of water coming across the valley; actually, hearing the rain advance on our position as it used the corn leaves for a very thin sounding board. We would watch the lightning advance counting the seconds between sight and the cannonade of thunder; steeling ourselves for the close one; the one where there was no space between light and thunderous crack and then listen as the betweens became longer and longer as the storm left town. Soon the sun would come out and we would peer around the side of the barn looking for a rainbow, hoping for a full rainbow and excitedly pointing out any hint of a double.

While a gully washer would drive us to the barn a slow soaker would drive us to the house. It was probably the only time that my father rested. Summers were tough. The extra sunlight providing the spur to the old saying “Make hay while the sun shines.” Days would start at six with milking. We would do some chores around the barn waiting for the dew to evaporate off of the hay. On dry days, the baler would start at 11:00 and a couple of hundred bales would collected by lunch. However, most days, the baling started at 1:00 and would run until 9:00; an eight hour day on top of the six hour warm up.

Depending on your job within the hay crew, it could mean 900 repetitions with a 50lb weight. On days when the task was cutting volunteer corn out of the bean field, it could mean 5 miles of walking, stopping, and cutting with a corn knife, corn that last year was a crop, but in this bean field it was a weed. That will teach you a lesson about context.

So the gentle soaker was a blessing. It released the bounds of work. It said there is nothing else that can be done; take this blessing and take a nap. We would go to the house, lay out on the floor, the couch, or the Lazy Boy. A box fan would push the warm, humid air over us. The sound of the rain lightly tapping the redbud tree outside the window would accompany us to a nap.

Finally, two hours later, we would slowly emerge from our slumbers, awoken by a change in the rhythm of the rain or the rumbling of lunch deprived stomachs, or the internal alarm of the evening milking time. We would emerge from a suspended animation; separated from work, and worry. We would sit up, wondering about our surroundings, looking at the clock, remembering the work that was set aside, slowly merging back into work’s flow.

The same sensations flooded over me on that ride in the rain. Life took me down a road so different from dad’s physical exertion. My workaday is all mental, doing repetitions of 50 lb problems instead of bales of hay. Riding in that slow summer soaker, I was returned to those naps; the whir of the chain and wheels on tarmac, the spray of water thrown by the front tire, replacing the whir of the fan and the rain on the red bud. Finishing, I embraced the blessing of setting work aside, resting, emerging slowly, and re-entering the flow of life.

Take care,

Roger