Friday, July 22, 2005
Biking Around Michiana
Most days of the week I walk to work. It’s a fifteen minute stroll down residential sidewalks, but my neighbor, who works where I do, rides his bike. It must take him almost as long to pull the bike out of the garage and strap on his sleek helmet as it takes him to cycle to the office. Yet there he is, most every day, gliding past as I walk. The whole process feels vaguely un-American. Shouldn’t we both be sitting on our rumps in our individual gas-guzzlers, stalled in traffic, knuckles white on the steering wheel, our life-spans shortening as stress grates on our nervous system? Maybe we should stop for a maxi-tall coffee and a glazed donut at the local Speedy-Gas-Mart? Maybe we should tune our car radios to those stations that broadcast ranting politicos who care more about power than truth? Maybe we should be living the way our big-city brothers and sisters do.
Or maybe we’ve got it pretty good here and should appreciate life in Michiana. True, iceberg lettuce still dominates many of our local restaurant salads; true, our small cities and towns have pint-sized versions of most big-city problems; true, our cultural resources are slender compared to what you find in Metropolis.
Yet we do have real advantages. Most of the people within the sound of my voice can live a simpler life than our big-city friends live. If we wanted to, we Michiana residents could roll together even further down that path. With more bike lanes painted on our streets, more people might be able to hop on their cycles in the morning and pedal in to work. I can tell you that life feels very different when you don’t drive a car to work.
Of course bicycle commuting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the small scale of things here in Michiana makes many other good things possible. A few days ago my wife and kids and I went to Potato Creek State Park after dinner. This is a drive of less than half an hour from our house. It was a weeknight, so the place was pretty quiet. Across the parking lot a family was sitting in their car with the doors open quibbling at each other about something. I pulled the four bikes off our shiny new bike rack and we headed off into the woods. The sun filtered pleasantly through the trees as we rode.
I kept my eyes open for wildlife, but the first thing we encountered was a cloud of gnats hovering over the path. We sliced through the gnats and continued on our way. Soon I could see that the children were getting into the experience I recalled so well from childhood – the pleasure of pedaling downhill, picking up momentum on a bike, speeding up and testing your skills by leaning into each curve in the path. We had left the quibbling family in the parking lot far behind – face it, some days we are that quibbling family, but not just now.
As we made our way up a gentle slope, deep in the woods, a small flock of turkeys crossed in front of us – three or four adults, eight or ten youngsters, all heading off into the brush. They were the oddest creatures – they looked completely impractical as birds and not particularly interesting as food, but both we and the turkeys seemed to have the whole Michiana family adventure in the woods thing down pat. We zoomed past them and headed around the end of the lake. Back in our driveway later that evening, as I took the bikes off the rack, the sunset was splashed across all the western clouds.
Family & Friends • Nature & Outdoors • Sports & Recreation • Permalink • Printer Friendly
A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Ken Smith -- Biking Around Michiana / More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
Chronicles Home | Email:
Leave a note for any of the authors at our WebNote page, or maybe you'd like a copy of our book?
About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
| July 2008 | ||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
Recent pieces
Making Up on the South Shore -- As we’re approaching the Beverly Shores station I glance over and see the woman looking into a pocket mirror. Yes, you’re pretty, sister. Don’t worry about that. Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a big pink tackle box, sets it on her lap and opens it up, revealing a whole assortment of little tubes and jars. She selects one tube, squirts some stuff onto her fingertips and starts rubbing it onto…her face. Whoa! What are you doing? By Jeff Nixa.
Time Travel in Paris -- I had studied maps of Paris and read French literature and the Parisian works of American expatriates like Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Miller. I had fallen in love, of course, with my French teachers in high school and college. My prior romance with the language, art, stories, and landmarks animated the city. I remember a morning when the sun emerged and lit up the domes and towers across from where my friend and I stood on a right bank quay, and the world itself seemed like a pure gift, a fresh beginning. By Joe Chaney.
Celebrating Magna Charta Day -- Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Charta, loomed right up there in my imagination with Stonehenge: a couple of historical sites that had captured my interest early on. I can still see surly, pimply-faced, bad King John in some old movie being strongly urged, that is coerced, into signing this document where he promised to behave: “The Lion in Winter,” I think. By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Life on the Default Setting -- That foam cup will still reside in the county landfill when our great grandchildren are driving their offspring in a nuclear-powered mini-van to gymnastics classes on the moon. "Will you look at those kids jump!" By then the landfill will be the tallest manmade feature in north-central Indiana, visible from earth orbit. Astronauts will steer their sleek ships by the neon glow of all our waste. By Ken Smith.
It’s a Long, Long, Road from May to December -- Over the years Kurt Weill’s music has inspired a legion of devotees who want to be a part of his creepy luster. Some fifty years after Weill’s death Lou Reed took a stab at getting in on this kind of cool. Now, Lou is just about as cool as there is too. In the 1960s he co-founded the rock band, The Velvet Underground, and as the story goes, only a couple of thousand copies of their first album were sold, but everyone who listened to it formed their own band. The man gives new meaning to having no vocal range, and yet conveys everything that needed to be said. By Jonathan Nashel.
Pomp and Happenstance -- Truly, the moments in our lives that really deserve a brass band and velvet robes and a basso profundo voice saying “Something BIG has happened here!” are most often happenstance, unexpected. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a novel or seeing a film that shifts you, profoundly, to another axis – that peoples your interior with ideas or characters that become guides – or cautionary figures – for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’ve had a conversation with someone that suddenly made your world slide sideways as you questioned your faith – or gained a new sense of it. Those are moments that warrant pomp and circumstance, but they often pass quietly, despite their transformative legacy. By April Lidinsky.
A Kid and a Rock -- But every night I come home, the kid is hammering on the rock. He’s like a little John Henry. Small stones dislodged and fell to the dirt but then larger ones emerged, and eventually the worst one of all: a granite field stone the size of a pumpkin embedded in there till the end of the world. “This is hard,” he said. “Yeah, it is,” I said, watching the woman glare at me from hell. I left town for vacation. Two weeks. I was carrying an armload of sleeping bags back around the house when I stopped. The concrete monster was gone. Just a circle of rock dust in its place, littered with stones and in the center, the big granite pumpkin. I smiled. He did it. Dang. I’m going to go hug that kid. Buy them both a pizza or something. By Jeff Nixa.
True to Type -- We talk about what we are reading, what we have read, what we’ve read about reading (God bless the Sunday New York Times Book Review section!) and what we are planning to read next. Standing in front of the bookcase, my daughter-in-law, Nancy, and I were having one of those discussions. I think that she was holding Bobbie Ann Mason’s Clear Springs; she flipped to the back and saw the page that tells which font was used in printing the book and a bit of history about that font. Nancy said, “I can’t believe that they waste a page putting that in there. Nobody cares about that!” Danger! A big, evil-mother-in-law-trap just waiting to ensnare me there! Recognizing it in time, I pulled the shreds of my seldom-worn garment of tact around myself and did not blurt out, “Are you nuts! That’s a great thing! I love it when they put that in! It’s like frosting on a cookie; it makes it ever so much better!” By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Jump Ball at the Hoosier Primary -- I can’t believe it! At long last, Indiana matters during the national campaign season. We’re in the news every day. We Hoosiers have been crafty, too, not tipping our hand as to whom we favor. We’ve made Indiana a real battleground state, forcing the candidates to pour ad dollars into our communities in a despairing sort of Vegas binge. Here in the second congressional district, we’re a battleground within a battleground. And permit me to announce loudly that I’m an “undecided voter.” You guessed it: a battleground within a battleground within a battleground, the center of a political universe in which not knowing what you want makes you royalty. By Joe Chaney.
Doing Algebra -- I’m doing quite a bit of algebra these days, helping our young mathematician solve homework problems. I last took algebra from Mr. Webb way back in the year 19-mumble-mumble, when President Nixon was still lovingly adding names to his enemies list. My strongest memory from Mr. Webb’s class was that he never learned his students’ names. He called everyone Babe. No matter who you were, he’d say, “Babe, put the next problem on the board. Thanks, Babe.” But he must have been a pretty good teacher, because after a quick refresher I can solve a basic problem. And so for the moment I still have a role to play in our teen’s life. By Ken Smith.
Skirting the Issue -- Now, Land’s End and other sensible clothiers exploit this swimsuit anxiety brilliantly to play on both the intelligence and self-loathing of grown-up women. For one thing, you practically have to have your Ph.D. in Swimsuit-ology to wade through the thick catalogues hitting mailboxes now, with bold headlines promising “Flattering Solutions” – implying every body is a problem. In fact, you can shop by “anxiety zones,” choosing which body part you think most needs to be slimmed, supported, disguised, and, somehow, covered, all while revealing more than most of us care to face in full-length mirrors, fully clothed. By April Lidinsky.
Baby, It’s Cold Inside -- After you see these photos you will probably wonder what we can do to prevent every single last iceberg from melting away and becoming history. Here, I confess, I have no idea. I’ve heard it all before: lower carbon footprints, drive hybrids, recycle with abandon, hate the oil companies, love to read in the dark, you name it. And you know what: none of this is going to bring back these icebergs or grow new ones or do anything to stop our relentless destruction of the earth, let alone quell the naysayers on global warming. I recently heard on NPR that an iceberg the size of Connecticut just broke apart and is melting away. Now, I’ve been in Connecticut many times and I still can’t wrap my head around this little fun fact. What can possibly be the size of a state? By Jonathan Nashel.
Categories
Archives and syndication
- By author
- By category
- By date
- RSS 2.0 syndication
- Technorati Profile