A homebound holiday

Mark Knutson on his last day.

We've been hermetically sealed in the house right through this Christmas except for Ms. V's dog walks, which so far I have resisted taking part in. I like the dog, of course (the required caveat), but I take the position that he likes and respects me even more because I don't stoop to his trivial needs. 

We had a plan to visit the daughter in Washington DC, but the Omicron variant was raging there and flights nationwide were being cancelled by the thousands, making our own return flight chancy, We didn't like the look of it, so we switched our flight to zoom calls with both kids, and that was a good temporary fix. 

And then we watched the Packers. We should have been reading The Satyricon, or Paradise Lost, or at least the Old Testament, but we didn't want to overdo on self-improvement on what is, after all, just a holy holiday. All of our prevaricating, hemming-and-hawing, and undoing of plans has delayed the annual mailing of the Christmas cards and we are working on that now.  But just in case we fall short, or Louis DeJoy gets mischievous, I'll paste one below. 

Last month (pre-Omicron, post-booster) we spent a few days in Olympia, Washington for my uncle Mark's funeral and related events. He was 80, a retired Lutheran pastor, and had nearly died at least once with a heart ailment, and the gathering was as much an extended family reunion as a way to celebrate Mark, which is certainly what he would have preferred.

So, happy new year to all!

*

Here's our card.

 

Friends:                                                                                                                                                                             

What with all the shooting, voter suppression, covid variants, and the impending end of the planet, it’s best, I think, that we just wander back to bed and lie quivering under a coverlet.

 

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty good year.

 

Ms. V and I diverted ourselves in recent weeks by watching way too much of the Beatles’ 10,000-hour “Get Back” documentary. Ms. V happy-cried through the whole thing, and, speaking for myself, I think some of their music may catch on.

 

Julia is happily retired and spending a lot of her time on yoga, and meeting with friends (outdoors, she wants me to add), and even more time, and way too much of the family treasury, on young Jamison, who is so darn cute. He likes to run – and run and run. Recently at Currie Park he explored a little foliage by the fence and came out with his fur matted with burrs. Turns out, he’d even swallowed one, clever fellow, and he started hacking and crying. This took place on Thanksgiving Day night, when most of your more reputable veterinarians are dining and watching football. Ms. V finally found somebody to take a look at him, and he said, for an astronomical fee, “It’ll pass.”

 

Nothing’s too much for a dog you love.

 

Ahna is a nanny in DC for a couple who work from home. She and the young boy play in the living room, have little lessons, go to the park, explore, and speak French all the while. The parents want their son to be raised bilingually, and Ahna fills the bill. 

 

Ezra is still a grad student at Stanford. He just finished a 116-page thesis, and I read the whole thing! His topic is the contemporary literary anthology from 1912 to 2017 and its place in history and the literary world. It is filled with footnotes, and it’s an impressive testament to his reading, writing and analytical skills. 

 

Myself, I’m just reading and writing and watching “Succession” when I’m not watching the Beatles. I’ve taken to walking, instead of biking, in this gloomy season.

 

We travelled to Olympia, Washington last month for the funeral of my uncle Mark Knutson. It became an extended family reunion, and this was the gift Mark gave us. He was my mother’s brother, the last of that generation. Mark was 80 years old and was fortunate to live that long, given a history of heart trouble, including a heart attack in his 40s that would have been fatal had he not been saved by a person nearby with some medical know-how. He was a Lutheran pastor with an easy laugh and the common touch – a man you could talk to – and he will be missed. In his last minutes he had a glass of wine on his back patio, with a view of Mount Rainier in the distance, and he was gone.

 

So now we crawl warily out of our coverlet to wish you a happy – and safe – new year!

 

           

 

 PAGE 2:

Jamison: His head abuzz. 

 

  

In the woods

The big tires at the big rock.

The last time I biked with any real gusto I was in Michigan and collapsed on a searing hot day on the Pere Marquette trail down by the town of Clare, if you know where that is. After three days there in the hospital I suffered the ignominy of getting a ride home from my wife for the second time in two years. See previous posts for all the gory details.

At home in Milwaukee, I moped for a couple of months. I rode my bike listlessly a half dozen times and slowly deteriorated to such a pathetic state that the prospect of a flat 20-mile ride seemed formidable. 

To get out of the house, Ms.V and I took a couple of little car trips -- overnight to Madison, where we found a lot of old professors sitting outside cafes thinking their big thoughts; and to our friends' cabin near Wautoma, where we shared the secret sign of the vaccinated by bumping elbows. 

And now, on our third sojourn -- and thank goodness for generous friends and relatives -- we're up at the Vosper island place, where the stone beach is white and the water is blue blue blue. 

And I brought a new bike. Just before we left I bought a used Mongoose fat bike on Facebook Marketplace for $300 -- pretty cheap in the world of bikes.

And I've actually had fun!

So here are some of my adventures on a fat bike in a land where mud and gravel rule.

The ferry landing.

Neighbors.

                                                                                  Still operating.

Everywhere.

 Hostile hermits.

 

                                                                  Sasquatch lives!

   

More neighbors.

Public restroom decor.

History Part 1.

History Part 2.

My trip and its unexpected end

 

 Hospitals are my business

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

I promised to post updates on my bike trip as it happened, like I did in 2019, but wi-fi is scarce to non-existent in the wilds of western Michigan, so I'm finally getting to it now -- now that the trip is over. Careful readers will notice that this was not the planned end date, and we'll get to that.

Here's a little summary: 

In my ongoing quest to cross the country, I left Ludington early Wednesday, June 16, and followed the meandering roads of US Bike Route 20 into the Manistee National Forest. There was little wind, only modest hills and very little traffic, and this was easily the best of my three -- yes, just three -- riding days.

I took a break in the village of Freesoil, maybe 20 miles in, and was eyed by a lingering pickup driver who didn't seem inclined to share any of his soil, so I pushed on a couple miles to where there was a wooded site off the road with a big sign that said, "Camp Sauble Cages of Carnage." Now, I'm not going to pontificate on everything I saw, but Camp Sauble was pretty interesting. 

Camp Sauble

There were large chainlink cages set out across acres of land. Were they wild animal cages? Dog cages? I did a little studying. Turns out, no, they were boy cages. 

In the late 1980s this was a "boot camp" offered to young offenders as an alternative to prison in return for reduced time. One source called its methods "shock incarceration." As the Camp Sauble website says:

   From the moment the squad car doors opened the guards took total control. Inmates were slammed

   against the bumper of the squad car, called "Maggot" and "Scum" in true old school military style.

Good old military style.

Lately the camp has become a source of funding for local fire departments as a haunted house. Not so different from what it was.

 

*

I didn't know it then, but I was passing through a region pocked by small, amoeba-shaped lakes. Here's the rest of the day: 

Clear enough

Maybe "Sha Na Na" would've had more cachet.

Just in case you need to call 1995.  

Lucky 7 on a day off.

Development!

Lake country.

I was tempted.

Not hardly.

Calling me out by name.

My route. Nicely marked!

* 

My second day is best forgotten. I got lost at one point and went miles out of my way and had to go back, and, in another case, was misdirected by a sign, which sent me in a circle, costing me more miles. Though I spent a lot of time riding through trails in the Manistee National Forest looking for campsites, what I found were mostly privately owned lands within the forest. There are campsites somewhere there -- plenty of them -- but I really hadn't studied it, and in the end I rode to the little town of Ashton, charged my phone at an outlet outside the fire station, bought some food in the one store in town, and camped in a church's backyard. I tried to call the pastor, but his number was disconnected, so I thought it was safe, the lack of a pastor in this case being preferable. I didn't even set up my tent, just laid out in my bag -- and of course got wet. Yet still slept well. I left one of my "business cards" about my trip on my spokes, in case I was investigated. And in the morning it was gone. 

My card, front and back:

*

Well, of course, I didn't finish what I started. In the morning, my third day, I rode about 12 miles south, to the Reed City area, where, from a house at the edge of the Pere Marquette Trail, a man called out to offer me coffee. We introduced ourselves -- he was Mark -- and we sat on his porch and conversed for maybe an hour. He talked about his dogs, his life as a trucker and a cabbie, his wife, his grown kids who live next door. I told him about my trip. I lingered, thinking I had my day's allotment in the bag -- 30-something more miles on a flat paved trail? Easy. And meeting people -- that's part of it, right?

Mark with his "Norwegian Ridgeback" mixes, Turbo (left) and Axel. I think they are, really, Rhodesian Ridgeback mixes. He warned me not to make sudden movements around 

the young one, Turbo, and he had Axel scramble up the side of the tree 

next to his house as a demonstration of his prowess. 

I was impressed -- and too slow with the camera, alas.

At last I set out on the trail. For about 100 yards I thought, "This is great!" But it didn't take long to see how dull it would be -- wide, highway-like pavement, no shade, few turns, no up and down. I tried to keep a steady pace, but every few miles I kept thinking of reasons to stop -- I should eat one of my bananas; or how about a swig of orange juice? More than once I stopped altogether, set the bike down, and laid in the grass next to the trail, catnapping. I couldn't quite account for this, my dread of going on. I'm not a fast rider, but you wouldn't call me a shirker, and in retrospect it had to be the heat that lay like a blanket. I made a lengthy stop for soda and ice, and a few miles later stopped in a small town called Evart and got a giant milkshake, which I thought would jazz me up, but it seemed to slow me down, all my energy suddenly going to my stomach. 

I finally collapsed in a swerving, slow-motion way maybe 7 miles short of the town of Clare, my goal, where I expected to meet my friend Bruce. I had a clear sense that I was in trouble, but thought I could push through it -- what's 7 miles? -- and I was on the ground when a pedestrian discovered me. He said he was a former police officer, and he talked to me about my condition, asked me how I felt. I might have made little sense. He said he'd like to call an EMT crew. I objected, said I didn't need it, but he called anyway -- and it was the right choice.

I spent three days in the Clare hospital on a drip line taking fluids. My wife and the dog came and got me, and now I'm home, feeling vaguely like I'm still traveling and have happened upon a pretty nice rental that I'm disinclined to leave.

I wonder if I'll ride again, at least in the way I have. Getting hit by a car with my friend Mark in 2019, and now this -- it makes you think. Maybe a supported ride would work? I have yet even to take a local ride since my return, which I usually do almost daily. I'll be mulling it all over till spring.

 

Let's get this party started

 

Amish men on the boat

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

I took my umpty-umpth ferry ride on the Badger in the last couple years and still found it, well, long. But it does force you to find a way to pass the time. For half an hour I listened to a couple of truck drivers -- long haul truck drivers -- trade secrets of the craft, involving braking and shifting techniques and the brand names they had driven -- Peterbilt, Freightliner, Volvo, International. They had such an easy rapport I wished I had something to say.

And a large extended Amish family had also embarked. The men wandered in ones and twos quietly observing. I saw one old man at a table playing, I'm pretty sure, sudoko. The girls wore bonnets and cloud-blue dresses and the boys wore suspenders and every last one of them was strikingly good-looking.    

I śaw a grandmother or two, and felt bad for an 18-20 year old girl who was assigned to child care and led the younger children through the boat like ducklings. 

*

Ms. V took me to the ferry this morning, Jamison riding shotgun, sorta.

Tomorrow I actually pedal!

Biding time

 It works.

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

We've been at the Michigan homestead this week, working, mostly, all in the realm of Upkeep. Still it's a nice place to be, and we are fortunate. 

Waiting for my bike ride to commence, I feel a little lost, living ahead of myself, and, when I come back to where I actually am, and doing what I should be doing, I feel tired. So I'm up to about a nap a day. 

I leave June 15 or 16, thereabouts, and have tentatively recruited a compadre, the famous Bruce, who will join me a day or so in, and stay on the trail for, well, who knows how long. Where company is concerned, I'll take it. 

I did a dry run, in a car, of my first day's ride. It'll be about 55 miles through woods and past farms. As I have not ridden in almost two weeks, 55 sounds like a long way. But I'll leave early and I'll just keep cranking. And eating.  

Behold, above, my new tent. I put the fly on after the picture was taken -- inside out. It was a choice. No, really.  

Well well well

Oh boy.

Sorry I've been out of touch. Still a month till I go, but I've been packing assiduously for days. It's like doing a puzzle, and then doing it again, and again. My office is a mess, the bike's leaning on the dining table where we hope the dog won't knock it over, and we eat hunched over the TV trays holding conversations that are, well, merely polite. 

Sorry about the tired picture. It's from last fall's ride -- closest I could come to what I'll look like this year.  And here's my half-finished packing list: 

It's a fluid document. I don't want to carry things I won't use. On the other hand, I want to keep myself from turning savage, stealing food from picnic tables and snatching sleeping bags out of strangers' tents.  

So.

We've had a couple of outdoor dinners with friends at local restaurants, and it was like surfacing after a long period under water. We could actually talk in the old way, interpret a hesitant smile, gauge a shrug of doubt, listen to an anecdote uninterrupted by a spinning connection. We are, again, HUMAN!

June 15 is still my tentative departure date, give or take. We're going to Michigan for a few days at the end of the month, and while I'm there I will drive my first day's ride, just to see what it looks like. If it's nothing but hills and wind and cars, heavens, maybe I'll just cancel the whole thing. 

Such a good boy.

Summer ride

 Making plans

I said I would finish my crash-interrupted cross country ride of 2019, and I'm finally getting around to figuring it out.

Just to recap, I'd done about 2600 miles from Astoria, Oregon to southern Michigan when, in August, my riding buddy Mark and I were hit by a car. We were both hospitalized for many days; the driver, a young woman, was cited with two counts of causing bodily injury with a motor vehicle; and still, at this late date, my claim for medical costs is ongoing.

My old bike was destroyed, and I bought a new one, a Surly "Disc Trucker," in February and have been riding pretty regularly when this crappy Wisconsin weather allows. 

The red line on the map shows what I've done so far, the "x" the site of the crash, and the brown is my tentatively planned route. I hope to leave in mid-June. 

The route takes me from the ferry landing in Ludington, Michigan, around a crescent-shaped loop (an Adventure Cycling route) to Bay City and down to the Detroit area. I might get help from my intrepid wife in a car to get me through Detroit -- although there are trails -- and on down to Toledo, or maybe Huron, Ohio. 

The best way to go would be through Canada along the northern shore of Lake Erie, but Canada is closed to visitors, so I'll follow the southern shore of the lake on marked routes. This involves a few big cities, like Cleveland, so I'll just take my time. 

At Buffalo, I meet the Erie Canal trail. It's about 400 miles, flat, wide, pretty much straight and closed to motor vehicles. I think it might even be a little dull, but there are small towns and lock stations to explore, and it has an interesting history. 

When I reach Albany, I'll follow trails through the Hudson River valley to NYC, where I'm hoping my sisters will take me in, and Ms. V will pick me up. 

It's about 1200 miles, roughly a third of the total distance coast-to-coast. It should take 30-ish days, so let's say 40 at my lollygagging pace, which would bring us to, say, the end of July or beginning of August. 

Stay tuned!

  

On the downbeat

 

The Hoan Bridge drowning in fog.  

It would be disrespectful to say the weather is like the pandemic. But it's depressing in its way. I've been biking semi-regularly, but for two days now I haven't had the spunk, and, outside the window, it's a sunless 50 degrees and threatening to rain, so maybe I'll take another day off and just futz in the house.  

The dining room is littered with dog toys like car parts in a vacant lot. You have to walk very carefully just to cross the room, and we're looking forward to getting out of town in May when we'll be all vaxxed up. 

I can't wait.

The lakefront. Same day as above, no kidding!

I'll do my best.

Hostage to a 4-pound dog

Jamison with his keeper

It's been two and a half weeks and young Jamison is settling in well. He has us trained in his service and we are meeting his every need. We think he was in shock for the first couple of days -- he was wary and did a lot of staring, and of course who could blame him. It would be like me, for example, waking up one morning to find myself on the Serengeti tended to by kindly elephants. 

Ms. V has been a warrior on his behalf, enrolling him in a class, taking him to the vet, procuring special foods, and taking him out to do his business six or eight times a day, including at least twice in the middle of every night. She has slid into a kind of baby talk with him that is barely comprehensible, but he is, like, in love with her, and even tolerates me in short polite intervals, which is about what I deserve. He travels with V everywhere, including to see her mother -- two hours each way -- and is pretty content to ride it out in a little crate, where he also sleeps at night, propped on a couple of chairs so he can see his momma all night long. 

He understands the world mostly through his mouth -- that is, seeing something is not quite enough; he has to taste it, chew it, see what it's made of. He has accumulated quite a few toys and he likes nothing better than to have to retrieve a thrown squeaky toy or a plastic bone. He runs fast, paws flying, skitters to a stop, picks up the toy and races back to drop it on his red T-shirt or his pad, whichever he has designated as his nightly Base of Operations. In the hours before bed he gets so wound up, scrambling here and there, we call it the Nighttime Crazies, and it's better than TV. 

POSTSCRIPT: We have appointments for vaccines this week, and we are excited! We used this link: https://mke-vaccines.egov.com/  It may require you to be a City of Milwaukee resident. 

 

 

  

Dam-burst of dog dreams

Our long-running push-me pull-you dog discussion ended last week with Ms. V the winner, just as she wins most of our discussions. Hey, she's a lawyer. 

It's not that I don't like dogs. I just didn't want to have to care for a dog, what with my full schedule of eating, biking and fretting. Until recently, Ms.V was working full time, exercising or yoga-ing straight thereafter, and then rushing off to book club or investment club or theater club or church club or one of her various dining-out clubs -- much of which is not my cup of tea, and which would've left me the de facto dog-walker-in-chief.     

But along came the miracle of retirement. I had to relent. 

We took a little day trip to a pup breeder last week and spent about an hour with a variety of little dogs one or two at a time. We finally decided on a thoughtful, playful but scholarly little fellow, a 12-week-old "Poochon" (poodle/bichon). Julia was nearly giddy in the presence of pup after pup after pup, and has spent recent days buying toys and foods and reading up on her training manuals. We will actually bring the dog home Friday. 

 

We're calling him Jamison -- pronounced like "peanut butter and jam-ison." See Take a Letter for a good use of it. 

• 

Jamison on prom day

Jamison (right) valiantly battles a mighty foe. 

 

Leave me alone for a minute, lady!

Ahh.

Well, I didn't want to drop him.

Earlobe fatigue

 

It's not really the lobe, google says, but rather the pinna or auricle that all that crap is hanging on. The lobe is the drippy thing on the bottom, as if you didn't know.  (Bet you didn't think I actually did research, did you.) In any case, it's gotten to be kind of a lot, as the crimpled, folded state of the top of my ear shows. 

If I put it all on wrong and then, say, try to put a stocking cap on, it all comes tumbling down and I have to start over. If I try to take off my glasses, or, for example, pull my mask -- or both masks -- down, you can see the problem. And don't even ask about changing the volume on my sound system. None of this, of course, has yet risen to the attention of the Biden administration, but for those of us not skilled in health care, or not flying to Cancun, it is what we're left to. 

While we're on the subject of ears, let me take you back about 40 years to one of the best days my ears ever had :

Ah, shucks. That's Ms. V, in her best flannel pajamas, fingering my smooth elfin auricle. Such hair!  

 

 

38 years

A big party in a park would've been better, but you do what you can.

The energetic Ms. V graduated -- er, retired -- last week after lawyering for almost 38 years. A great career. Her first job was as a lackey at a small law firm in Milwaukee -- collecting overdue bills and taking out the trash (at least, that's what it sounded like to me) -- before signing on with the Legal Aid Society, closer to her heart, where she stayed for 16 years, rising to chief staff attorney for the guardian ad litem division, which represents the interest of children in cases of abuse or neglect. A tough job. 

For the last 20 years she worked for the county as a judicial court commissioner. Starting in June 2000 she presided in many different courts, including small claims, children's, and criminal intake. She made decisions regarding bail in intake court, placement and safety decisions regarding children in juvenile court, and did soup to nuts in small claims court -- performing marriages, ruling on neighbor disputes, debt collection and eviction actions.  

I heard a lot of stories -- storytelling is a Vosper family trait -- such as one about a child kept in an attic by her neglectful family who found the strength to reach safety; kids on the brink of redemption who, in a moment, became involved in a car theft or worse, affecting the rest of their lives; weddings in small claims court with sometimes happy, sometimes contentious participants.

She would tell you that among her most satisfying experiences was the day same-sex marriage was legalized in Wisconsin, when the courthouse doors remained open late into the night and she got to  perform some of the state's first gay marriage ceremonies; and the day when a mother who had battled addiction for years at long last was reunited with her children after success in a drug treatment program.  

She's been assigned to small claims court in recent months. With the pandemic raging, all of it is done online, and the most difficult cases have appeared in evictions court -- tenants frantic to be given time to pay and landlords frantically facing months of lost income. There are never enough solutions, there is never enough time. Every day she would come home feeling like there had to be a better way of getting through this covid crisis. 

This retirement has been long-planned. She says that the scary days she spent in the ICU trying to will me back to health in August 2019 gave her time to see that life is short and retirement shouldn't be -- and this was well before the pandemic upended the world. Now we start our new (mostly) calendar-free life together! Clearly, the first priority is to get her a good road bike.