Roll with it

THIS IS supposed to be an over-the-road motorcycling blog, but on account of random changes, life being what it is, cells mutating haphazardly and whatnot, I’m sitting around unsaddled through 2020. What to scribble about?

Duncan from Martha’s Vineyard wanted me to ride to the Pacific with him. The last I knew, he was somewhere in the Black Hills on his R1200GS. We met in northern Quebec in 2015 while camped near one of the big hydro dams on the Manicouagan. We crossed the border into Labrador, rode together off and on for a few days, ended up losing track somewhere on the coast north of Red Bay, the old Basque whaling port founded in the 16th century.

Duane’s somewhere in Virginia bombing around on his Road Glide. Sent me this pic to torment me. Many thanks, bud.

Meanwhile, I’m here taking pictures of bugs.

Here’s the Eastern Eyed Click Beetle, so named for the fake eyes on its back. The look is said to make birds think twice about taking on such a big-eyed breakfast.

Big it would be, too. The bug’s more than 2 inches long.

For the record, bugs are a part of my theory as to why we had such a silent spring this year. Thankfully, not the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson fame, but there were literally no peepers singing in the trees in March and April. Not a one.

Our weirdly mild, all-but-snowless winter had something to do with it. Or so I posit. Warm temperatures might have woken up the tree frogs out of hibernation too early. No bugs hatching, hence no frog food, all it takes then is a sudden return to subfreezing cold to wipe out the peepers.

Here’s the last thing I have to say about bugs this morning: Don’t go buggy yourself this year, given all the crazy shit going on. America has been gnawing at its own entrails since Plymouth Rock. Maybe it always will be, in one way or another.

As James Earl Jones put it, “America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, and rebuilt, and erased again.”

We roll with it, what else? Encourage others. Be on the side of the next America, if you can, not some make-believe state of bliss that never was.

And roll on gently. Give yourself permission to take a break from the news when you need to.

Got a chuckle out of yesterday’s Macanudo comic at King Features…

And this made me smile… a t-shirt D3 designed for Sharp Solutions, her boyfriend’s computer business in Cumberland, RI.

Remember Pierre from the Northwest Territories? He’s the young French engineer who was bicycling north through the Inuvik region when I was up there last summer. We camped on the beach in Tuktoyaktuk on the 2019 summer solstice.

Last week, a year later to the day, he hailed me from Colombia, and attached this photo of us on the Beaufort Sea.

After pumping pedals all the way from the Arctic Ocean to Central America, Pierre put his bicycle aside and rented a place in Colombia with a young woman he’d met on the road. Colombia because she’s from there, I believe. Anyway, he’s in South America indefinitely; there are no flights to Paris because of the pandemic.

I’m Midnight-Sun-toasted and… I don’t know if it’s road-wasted or cancer-wasted. I wouldn’t know how much to attribute to which. I left 25 pounds or more on the road over the course of that 14,500-mile run. Then came chemo, and you know the rest.

I put the piglet 650 back together recently. She had passed a scattered winter in a hundred parts. There’s no reason the little thumper shouldn’t start and ride once I get around to dumping in a gallon of gas and adjusting the new carburetor.

This new & improved piglet is highly adjustable. She’s equipped with Cogent suspension all around, stronger bars that sit higher and forward of where the old bars were, lowered pegs that pivot fore and aft, smarter fuel delivery, the works.

On loose wilderness roads you need to be able to ride standing up; get your weight off the seat and onto the pegs, let the rear wheel slide around and hunt for traction as it will.

I did quite a lot of stand-up riding in Labrador in 2015, and again in the Arctic in 2019. Trouble is, the DR650’s factory setup fits no one. The pegs are too high, the bars too cramped.

The bad fit invites fatigue, which can easily get you hurt out in the middle of nowhere.

My decommissioned factory carb, still encrusted in Arctic mud. It’s the stock Mikuni BST-40. There’s no accelerator pump. You twist the throttle, the vacuum drops, that’s the signal for the carb to flow fuel through the main jet.

There’s a time lag there. I never found it a problem on paved roads, but poor throttle response on technical terrain? It’s always working against you. You end up over-gassing the bike while slipping the clutch to compensate.

The new Mikuni TM-40 pumper. Hasn’t even rolled Mile 1 yet.

I have one of those conversations to report, you know the kind. A few evenings ago, the bride and I are sitting down to watch “The Stranger,” a thriller from 1946

As the titles go scrolling by, I say, “Wow, Loretta Young!”

“Loretta Young? What was that show she used to be on?”

“The Loretta Young Show.”

“Oh.”

D1 and her husband closed on a house Friday, which means, come moving day, our happy gang of 6 will decrease by 4. That’ll leave me and the bride here, alone, moldering, lost in a mausoleum-like quiet. (Note how deftly I touch on this key parental duty, the administration of guilt, now we move on.)

The kids (they’re not that anymore) lived in and around New York for eight years, first in Brooklyn, then across the Hudson in downtown Jersey City. They had good jobs and earned more money than I ever did, he in medical publishing, she in marketing on the corporate side, the view of Central Park from the 40th floor, all that.

Of course, once you get past the novelty, the thrill, the hustle, the bustle, that whole New York thing, unless you’re independently wealthy the cost of living is a killer. You can go in debt for a million bucks on a house that needs to be gutted.

I’m sure the kids would have been fine and made their way, but once they started a family in 2014 we said, you know what? we have 11 rooms here and don’t need eight of them. You’re welcome to live here as long as you like, start banking all that crazy dough going out the door, the rent, city taxes, the commute to Manhattan…

After a year and a half of thinking about it, and getting their companies’ approval to work remotely, they took us up on the offer. We were delighted! Our once-empty nest came alive again.

The humble manse is the only home D1D1 has ever known. She was 18 months old when her family moved here four years ago. Now she’s getting set to go to kindergarten. It all sped by in a blur.

Fifteen months ago, D1D2 came along. First thing in the morning we can hear her chirping at us from one floor above.

Here she is talking up a storm to the bride through one of the passive air grates in the floor. We can’t understand a word but it all seems to mean something to her.

In winter these grates carry the woodstove’s heat up through the house. In the summer they’re more like room-to-room walkie talkies.

The view from below. There’s the little pumpkin talking to us, in pumpkin talk.

We enjoyed the full house while it lasted. Now it’s time for things to change yet again.

The way of the world, right? Roll with it. Nothing ever stands still, nor should it.

We balance ourselves on two contradictory–no, complementary–ideas: We’re sad to see them go, happy to see them succeed.

They’re disciplined savers. On Friday it all paid off for them. They bought a lovely house built 20 years ago. Not a starter house, either. More the kind you step up to.

They’re right in town, 12 to 15 minutes away. D1D1 can come over and camp in the playhouse or the tent whenever she likes. We’ve done both this summer.

We’ll hang in the backyard as we do now, see who can spit cherry pits the farthest.

We had fun milling and painting the purple trim she wanted for the playhouse.

I read books to her there. She tells me stories she makes up on the fly.

When I say, uh, wait a minute, what? she gives me the look. I call it the Just roll with it, old man.

I’m sure she’s never heard the term “a willing suspension of disbelief,” but she intuited the concept without any prompting from anyone. She knows that anything can happen in make believe, and that interrupting a storyteller just because you’re more the nonfiction type and you don’t get it… don’t be rude.

On a recent yarn she leaned in close and happily delivered fair warning: “There’s a lot of death and nonsense in this one.”

Despite the 60-year head start I’ve enjoyed, I’m starting to think she’ll make it as a writer before I do.

Tony DePaul, June 28, 2020, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA