So finally, finally I’m wrapping back to the actual start of this whole psychosis episode: Just over a week ago, when I came home from a birding outing to the slough for another birding outing, one of the best days of the summer for me: I discovered Bread and Honey, I had the best birding day in half a year, and I felt strong and competent on the bike, strong enough to race ahead and make nearly all of the stoplights on Williams.  I had thoughts of making a shot at biking out to the Bull Run Reservoir as a next stretch goal soon.

That night though is when I believe the Episode started, because I woke up the next morning with bad leg cramps and the beginnings of swelling in my feet.  I had an agenda for the day, including sending a warning Kelly and Jacinto about the terrifying bikes they might get blown off the road and over a cliff by when they dropped into italy in a few days.  First though, I wanted to wrap back to the previous day, when two significant events occurred that I omitted from the narrative and forgot to share with Rachael until I was stepping out to coffee the next morning.  I did that and left with the idea in mind that I’d start the new post by backing up to include those two omissions and then send my warning to Kelly before moving on to my other plans for the day.

I never got there, and in fact never got closure on any single item I segued into.  I only got about five words into episode one before I got distracted by some tangent that felt so urgent and important that it had to be heeded immediately.  A sentence later I’m on to the next, and rhe next, and the next, and three hours later i have a wall of text as long as a roll of toilet paper and I’d still be at it if I wasn’t out of battery life and needed to save my precious, drug-inspired little book before it disappeared.  Something a little odd seemed to have happened over the night beyond the cramps and swelling, so this feels like the right place to start.

But first, let’s go back up and pick up the two omissions from the previous day because both are worth setting down - the first one could easily have terminated the male half of the team right then and there, which would be a real tragedy - for all the obvious reasons, but also for you too because as beautiful and exceptional a spirit Rocky is and as many unique gifts as she has, plannin’and bloggin’ and navigatin’ aren’t high on her list and it's likely that this would be the end of the blog and it might be a good while until folks out there realized there might be a problem with rhe team.

Thank god that didn’t happen, but there’s still that story to tell - and that’s the goal of this post.  We’re gonna describe that episode in the usual way, and then she and I are gonna proof read it, and then we’re gonna publish it, and then we’re gonna move on to omission number two as the next post in this series, and then we’ll finally be ready to start in on the Episode from the top.  Here we go, hold on to your seats.

But I'll keep it brief.  Everyone knows where the phrase Trust but Verify became famous, and regardless of how you feel about Reagan and his politics, I agree with him completely on this one.  It's a core tenet in my survivalist tool kit, a part of my credo for decades.  (Interestingly enough since Reagan made it famous in the Berlin Wall standoff, the phrase was originally Russian: doveryai, no proveryai.).  I learn as I go, steadily trying to work myself away from my innate spontaneity, rashness, over-optimism and blind faith.  You can't change your inherited attributes and your gene pool except through the magic of modern science, technology and medicine, but you can learn to manage them by learning from your life experiences.  I know now that you should always look both ways on a one way street before entering the intersection because every few thousandth time some distracted or confused soul will be in your face because they screwed up - you know from experience because you've witnessed it and done it yourself; and knowing he's in the wrong will be cold comfort when you're lying squashed like a bug on the pavement beneath the front end of his vehicle.  Live your life on the continuous improvement model, that's the ticket.

Likewise, it's been a few decades since I got carried away by youthful pride and self-righteousness and chased down some asshole who nearly sideswiped me or honked for me to get off his road that I didn't pay any taxes to maintain and startle him by racing to catch him at the next red light, give his front fender a righteous thump of my fist and then speed off.  Kids, it might feel really good in the moment but it's dumb as a truck to  make enemies of folks encased in a ton of steel behind your back.

Likewise, I no longer pull out my frame pump to brandish in front of the nose of some snarling cur that's on my shoulder, teeth bared and growling.  I stopped doing that neat trick after stunning my assailant by felling myself instead when I rammed my pump between the spokes of my front wheel and stopped the bike on the spot but not myself, who ended up going over the handlebars and landing on the road, fortunately wearing my helmet.  The confused cur had never done that before, but fortunately he just slunk back into the grass he had suddenly emerged from, and probably went back to his mate or harem or young pups to brag about the amazing trick daddy had just pulled off that day.

 I have a list yards long of experiences like that, each item another opportunity to get lucky, learn a lesson while still young enough to be relatively limber and not so breakable. - cross train tracks and cattle guards at the right angle; don't look straight up at some red tailed hawk when you're biking on the edge of an open drainage ditch you might veer into.  That one's still the instance of bicycle handling prowess I'm the most proud of, right up there with the time I got doored and floored in Tuscany by a guy who was mad at me because he felt it was my fault.  How was he to know I was coming up behind me when his mirror was broken?  I take pride in coming through virtually unscathed after steering my front wheel into the wedge between his door and the shotgun seat and then rolling off onto the pavement smoothly, suffering nothing worse than some minor road rash and a busted mirror of my own.

Like most guys at all like me, you've got your own lengthy list, filled with many of the same items and some you've run across that I haven't, rare freak events I could learn from if I witnessed or experienced or just heard about them.  Young men with fire are so dumb in some ways, with no sense or understanding yet that things oft go awry.  It's a wonder that as many folks like myself manage to survive to a late age unbroken as do.  Maybe especially folks like myself who are overly impulsive and unreasonably optimistic and easily disrptractable from birth as I apparently am, a born wingnut on an unusual spectrum, an upbeat hypomaniac.  I was like those alpha dudes of my youth, showing off for their gals or tormenting those beneath them in the pecking order just to prove to their bros that they deserved to be king of the pack. 

which is a typically long winded way of saying that I know this experience and model of continuous improvement is why I'm still upright today instead of some recycling bin after having been stripped for reusable parts.  The event occurs when I'm approaching the dangerous three way intersection where Noth Portland Road abuts River Road at the base of the Burlington Northen/Amtrak crossing of the Columbia River.  I'm always wary of this spot, with all three arms being two laners and heavily trafficked, much of it consisting of sixteen wheelers hauling containers shipped to and from points worldwide to the series of huge shipping ports arrayed around Kelly Point. All of them anxious to time the lights right so they can maintain their speed and not out wear on their brakes if it can be avoided.  It might be the most potentially dangerous I routinely cross here in town, but it's manageable since there's a stoplight and a safe crossing if you're patient enough for the long wait and alert when your turn finally arrives.

So I'm approaching this junction with the usual caution but today something's different - there's a guy standing in the center of the bike path maybe a hundred yards up when I first notice him, with a big lenses camera aimed at my face.  Uh, oh.  I've naturally cautious, and I immediately wonder what sort of wingnut is this oddball?  Is he N amateur photographer sort of like me, or nutty in a less benign way, possibly a hazard to himself and others.  I check back on my credo to see what it has to say about situations like this - oh, yeah, TBF - so I approach cautiously and am slightly anxious when I get to the intersection because it's a lengthy light and I'll likely be in this guy's blast zone for a while.

But he's just fine.  He's one or two notches off center but not off his rocker as far as I can see, and he has a unique story to tell.  He's here building a shrine.  We don't visit long enough for me to know what inspired him to this, but maybe someone dear to him made his last stand on his bike here.  The shrine he's planning is for more than one person though - he doesn't look like he's thinking of 'just' erecting a ghost bike, like the one a few hundred yards back at the junction with the trail to Smith Lake and Kelly Point, another chancy spot.

No, he's here to come back sometime, presumably in the dark, and clear out the little copse of trees at the intersection and build a real monument, sort of like the war memorials you see in every small village in France, but this one dedicated to all the however many bikers whose lives ended prematurely in this spot.  What a monumental vision!  

Finally the light changes, it's nearing 90F already and I'm standing here in the hot sun, so I wish him well and carefully step off the curb into the intersection.  And here we can all take my pulse (since I've still got one, PTL) and view this as a mental health checkpoint on our slowly recovering maniac.  I'm distracted by the encounter I've just had.  I'm distracted by my state of mind, which is still oh, so distractable.  But I haven't forgotten the credo.  I look over my left shoulder to make sure some impatient or himself distracted driver isn't about to make a right turn and flatten me in the crosswalk.  And I look both ways crossing the second eastbound lane to make sure it's either empty or at a standstill.  And when I come to the third lane, with a long line of cars stopped and impatiently for their green to finally come I catch the eye of the first in line to make sure he knows I'm inching past his bumper.  And because I'm blind on that side now I turn my face straight at him to make sure of what I'm actually seeing.  It's my new standard practice at spots like this.

And because bikers get exactly 20 seconds to cross I can see from the helpful countdown ahead that I've only got five of 'em left before it's their turn again.  But I'm still following the credo, I ease past the right bumper of this lead car to see what's coming in the final lane, the one I can't see at all because the closer lane is completely full with a queue of maybe ten vehicles, most of them high profile trucks.

Which means there's still time for both of us to save our lives when I peek around the corner and see a sixteen wheeler driving toward me at near full speed, timing the light at an intersection he clearly knows well.  He must do this all the time, knows when the light will change, knows that by then the crosswalk is undoubtedly empty, as is the case 99+% of the time - it's the way with pedestrian and bike crosswalks like this everywhere- once the one person everyone had to come to a halt for wheels or walks or hobbles across, cars start moving again.  There's no blame to be had there, just a need to be attentive.

I killed a dog once.  There was no chance to avoid him - I was driving at a responsible speed, it was nighttime on an unlit country road, and suddenly there he was dashing out of the trees and that was that.  Some poor family's pet maybe, the family backk home anxiously waiting and wondering where he'd wandered off to this time and when he'll return.  I've suppressed that image and the sounds - thump, yowl, and finally a plaintive whimper that dampens down pathetically toward the inevitable eternal silence.  I've suppressed that memory for a long time; but it was painful to me then and it pains me now to be reminded of it again.

There's instantly a lot of sound.  Panic brakes get applied, tires squeal as they burn up a thousand miles of tread on the pavement, dark clouds of smoke rise up, and undoubtedly some interesting orders are await if I had the sense to notice them.

I figure that my credo saved a lot of lives that day.  I'm not mincemeat, his career isn't suddenly ended with the loss of his job and CDL, maybe along with his marriage or his home.  These days, you can imagine his whole clan ended up out on the Springwater Corridor before long, just another family of desperate moles waiting for someone to give them a whack to put them out of sight and out of mind.  

And about his mind - he won't have to live out the rest of his days with the image of me disappearing under his truck, mortified and endlessly revisiting the day he needlessly destroyed his life the lives of others.  All lives matter, folks.

The front of his truck comes to a halt almost precisely at the first white stripe of the crosswalk.  Two shaken faces glance briefly at each other with a look of relief. I step onto the sidewalk, turn back, and give a thumbs up to my new friend across the street - you don't need to chisel my name onto your monument after all!  And then I turn east onto the bike path, the driver heads west, and life goes on all around.  Lessons learned, an opportunity for continuous improvement if you're paying attention.

Well!  (As Jack Benny and then Gramma Woodings was apt to say).  Now there's a wall of text that needs some color, but no images were shot here, or of those street people that frightened Rocky walking home from dinner a few nights back, or of the homeless folks along Johnson Creek and elsewhere that are starting to bleed into the obscene scene again.  Time to make another clean sweep of it.

How 'bout them mole whackers, ain't they a crew, whackin' them moles,  all along the slough.  Maybe just one, maybe quite a few, just whip out your billy club, haul off and whack it!