| Cross-Country Ramble 3:
Leaving All Sent: 04/01/96
The day we left was vintage Southern California--bright, breezy,
cool in the shade/warm in the sun, covered over by an intense blue
sky with no cloud anywhere. The surf was moderate and dozens of
surfers were catching waves near the foot of the Ventura pier. There
we were joined by eighteen family and good friends come to see us
off.
Our friend George had taken advantage of his clergy status to
borrow an aspergillum from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. He
used it to sprinkle us and our bikes with Pacific Ocean water,
praying:
O Gracious Mother and Loving Father, thank you for the gift
of this water we use in your name. Over the oceans the Holy Spirit
moved in the beginning of creation. Through a reed sea you led the
children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of
promise. So may your Spirit be over this journey and the new
creation it begins. So may you lead these, your children by
adoption and grace, away from all that binds them to anything but
you. So may you bring them safely into a land of promise, into
lives of deeper service and into the joy of communion with friends
both old and new.
The allusions to leaving all behind and wandering for a long
period were not lost on us.
The day before we left, we vacated our house and put the last of
our stuff into storage. Now we toast our friends and family with
Mimosas and exchange hugs all around. Finally, we set off eastward,
up the Santa Clara River valley.
Our first two days of biking take us through sights and smells
that have become familiar and precious to us during the five years
we've lived in Ventura. The hills all around us are green with
winter rain--as green as they'll be all year. The road is lined with
orchards of lemon, orange and avocado. The citrus trees are full of
yellow and orange fruit and are in full bloom as well. Their
pervasive sweet smell is broken occasionally by the bay-leaf-like
smell of eucalyptus and once by the intensely sweet smell of jasmine
that has overwhelmed a fence separating an orchard from the road.
Soon we'll be in the desert and will have left all this behind.
I lied about only doing 20 miles a day. The first day, we did 30;
the second, 25. We've loaded the recumbents with clothes for hot
weather and clothes for cold; with tent, sleeping bags, mattresses
and cooking gear; tools, patch kits and spare tubes and, of course,
our technology--laptop and cellphone. The bikes are heavy, but they
handle as well as before. We were happy to find that out; we'd meant
to test them beforehand, but hadn't gotten around to it. This is a
gentle valley with low hills and we're feeling really good about our
biking.
In small-town Fillmore, I happened on the kind of hardware store
you dream of but rarely find any more. I had imagined some brackets
of just the right shape to mount a couple of water bottles on my
bike. I described the shape of the strap I was looking for to the
clerk. She directed me to shelf brackets which were just about the
right shape; then let me use an anvil and hammer in the back room to
bend them to exactly the shape I needed. I told her I needed 4
screws, nuts, washers and lock washers and she found them in a
wall-long library of wooden drawers containing an infinite variety
of interesting fasteners. She would have lent me a drill, too,
except, as luck would have it, the ready-made holes in the brackets
exactly matched the ready-made holes in the water bottle holder and
in the boom. Total expenditure: Half an hour and $2.07! Places like
these are losing out to superstores and it's too bad.
Ken
PS: Our first night out-of-doors on this trip was spent at
a nice campground at Castaic Junction, CA.
next ramble... |