That’s a billboard at the western end of the Indiana Tollroad. In Gary, to be a little more precise. We saw it as we drove east from Chicago to Geneva on the Lake, Ohio. It’s a hard-looking little town east of Cleveland that bills itself as Ohio’s first Lake Erie resort. The shore is lined with summer cottages, old travel courts, and some newer, swankier buildings that look like they could be time-share condos. There’s a strip where bars, cheap eats, arcades, and souvenir shops dominate. So do bikers, on the weekends. The weekdays and nights are pretty quiet. Walking down the main street last night at 1a.m., there were a few drinkers traipsing from bar to bar looking for a last round. A woman called to us as we passed a winery, “Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! Is that winery open?” I heard the same woman call across the street to a couple of guys a few minutes, “Hey, I’ve got drinks over here!”). It’s friendly enough here, anyway. (Below: Eddie’s walk-up Dairy Queen and hamburger stand.)
Road to Vacationville
That’s a billboard at the western end of the Indiana Tollroad. In Gary, to be a little more precise. We saw it as we drove east from Chicago to Geneva on the Lake, Ohio. It’s a hard-looking little town east of Cleveland that bills itself as Ohio’s first Lake Erie resort. The shore is lined with summer cottages, old travel courts, and some newer, swankier buildings that look like they could be time-share condos. There’s a strip where bars, cheap eats, arcades, and souvenir shops dominate. So do bikers, on the weekends. The weekdays and nights are pretty quiet. Walking down the main street last night at 1a.m., there were a few drinkers traipsing from bar to bar looking for a last round. A woman called to us as we passed a winery, “Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! Is that winery open?” I heard the same woman call across the street to a couple of guys a few minutes, “Hey, I’ve got drinks over here!”). It’s friendly enough here, anyway. (Below: Eddie’s walk-up Dairy Queen and hamburger stand.)
Lake Night
In the Bay Area this summer, everyone has bemoaned the prolonged presence of the thick marine overcast that keeps the coastal locales cool. And it does seem to have been a little cooler than normal if you’re anywhere along the bayside (inland’s another story). Chicago, too, has had a relatively cool summer; it’s been six weeks or so since the last official 90-degree reading. That will change today — it’s before noon and the temperature is already pushing 90. The weather service has issued heat advisories from Chicago south and severe thunderstorm warnings from Chicago north.
Though it didn’t officially hit 90 yesterday, the day did feature the high humidity that makes Chicago great. It creates a heat that seems to envelop you, then go through you. I spent most of the day in the North Side Brekke place, comfortably air-conditioned. I did take a short midday walk up Western Avenue, though, and then after dinner walked the mile and a half over to the lake. I got there about 10 o’clock, and there were lots of people hanging out on the beach, the one cool spot in the city. Fireworks were going off to the south somewhere; to the northeast, lighting flashed through the clouds. (The shot above was on the shore where Columbia Avenue ends. )
Lake Night
In the Bay Area this summer, everyone has bemoaned the prolonged presence of the thick marine overcast that keeps the coastal locales cool. And it does seem to have been a little cooler than normal if you’re anywhere along the bayside (inland’s another story). Chicago, too, has had a relatively cool summer; it’s been six weeks or so since the last official 90-degree reading. That will change today — it’s before noon and the temperature is already pushing 90. The weather service has issued heat advisories from Chicago south and severe thunderstorm warnings from Chicago north.
Though it didn’t officially hit 90 yesterday, the day did feature the high humidity that makes Chicago great. It creates a heat that seems to envelop you, then go through you. I spent most of the day in the North Side Brekke place, comfortably air-conditioned. I did take a short midday walk up Western Avenue, though, and then after dinner walked the mile and a half over to the lake. I got there about 10 o’clock, and there were lots of people hanging out on the beach, the one cool spot in the city. Fireworks were going off to the south somewhere; to the northeast, lighting flashed through the clouds. (The shot above was on the shore where Columbia Avenue ends. )
Leaving Denver
After the flight from Oakland and the layover (above), we flew on to Chicago. The plane left about 7, which meant an evening light had fallen across the planes and silhouetted the Rockies in the distance.
Landing in Denver
I once did a bike ride that started northwest of Denver and headed east into the high Plains. We started at 3 a.m. An hour or so into the ride, we crossed under the flight path into Denver's airport, in the middle of the farms and ranches that stretch from the city pretty much clear across to Kansas City. I rode along in the dark, watching the progression of the planes approaching from the north, each with landing lights on, each seeming to move so slowly they appeared suspended in the predawn sky, each silent until they were almost overhead, but even then the roar of the jet engines seemed muffled by the dark and the prairie.
You get another version of the same experience landing here: a long approach with the farms and ranches interrupted by just a few new developments flung out from the city. We approached from the north, the afternoon sun shadowing us on the fields below, right up to the edge of the runway.
Guest Observation: ‘On the Road Again’
A Tom Rush song for which I can’t find the lyrics online. If memory serves, it starts like this:
“Well, I locked my door as the sun went down
And I said goodbye to Boston town,
Took the Mass Turnpike down to Route 15,
That’ll take me on down to the New York scene.
Humming of the tires sure is pretty,
Think about the women in New York City,
On the road again.
Take the Harlem turn to the Jersey pike
And you roll through Philly in the middle of the night,
On the road again. …”
Me? I’m flying to the Midwest and then making stops along Lake Erie and points east. See you out there.
Berkeley Barn Owl Update
I’ve started to anticipate the evening not too long in the future when the barn owls that have nested a couple blocks away will have emancipated their young and flown on to find fresh rodent pickings. But for now, they’re still here: a nesting pair, by the best guess of close observers, and four young that appear to have started to go out and join the rat quest that starts just after sundown every evening.
Besides those half-dozen birds, dozens of humans have been showing up, sometimes all at once, to listen to the owls screeching or watch the birds wing out of their palm tree into the neighborhood. Tonight when I was out on the street, a woman pulled up in a diesel Mercedes (from the smell of it, an environmentally correct one, burning biofuel). She got out, walked over, and said, “Do you know what it is?” Before I could say anything, she said, “Two owls and their four puppies.” She then got back in the car and drove away.
I’ve heard there’s a biologist from UC-Berkeley who lives in the neighborhood and has been visiting the site to collect owl pellets. (You know–the regurgitated carcasses of their most recent meals.) Some parents are bringing their young kids. Some adults have brought flashlights or even heavier-duty lighting equipment to illuminate the owls and their tree. The owl’s human foster parents–the family in whose yard the owl palm stands–has taken to posting signs asking people not to disturb the birds during their early evening hunting time. So far, no one has tried to sing to the owls, play the bagpipes for them, lectured them on the virtues of the vegan diet, or used their presence as an excuse for on-street slam poetry.
There’s a story there, for sure. What I can’t satisfactorily put into words yet, though, even as I listen to and watch the birds, is why their appearance is so fascinating to me and the others who come.
Long Berkeley Dog Walk
The Dog’s main person is away this week. He is very aware of that fact and can be sort of moody and preoccupied about it. Yes, there’s some anthropomorphizing going on here. But there’s also this: The other day, at the schoolyard where we occasionally take The Dog to run around, he sat staring back out to the street and didn’t budge for a good 15 or 20 minutes. I was talking to another guy who had brought his dog out there–his dog was chasing a tennis ball around–when it suddenly dawned on me why the dog was so focused on the schoolyard gate. If his main person were around, that’s where she’d appear.
My strategy to get his mind on other things, at least for a little while, is long walks. He gets plenty of walks in the normal course of the day. Four, usually. But the longest we’ll have him out is an hour or so, and most of our strolls are shorter. But the past few days, we’ve been going far up into the hills from our place in the flatlands. A couple hours or a little more, five or six miles, with long uphill stretches, maybe including a couple of the old paths between blocks that I haven’t seen or walked before. I chart a route that will take us past water at least once, because The Dog works up a thirst. Then long downhill stretches back home, with more unknown paths (two tonight) and maybe a couple of deer loping along the street in front of us (happened tonight, and The Dog wanted to chase; it occurred to me that I might not see him again for awhile if I let him run after them).
I think this URL will work to show tonight’s stroll, which started about an hour before sunset and end about an hour after: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3068855 .
Aftermath: dog is tuckered out. So am I.
Tour de France Aftermath: Shut Up and Ride
Before the Tour has vanishes entirely from memory, I just want to set down an impression or two. But not before a detour to take notice of the “war of words” between the winner, Alberto Contador, and his teammate, Lance Armstrong. To boil the thing down, Contador said he respects Armstrong the champion and the racer, but doesn’t like or admire Armstrong as a person and never has. Armstrong responded Tweet-wise, unloading pearls like “there’s no ‘I’ in team.” Pretty mild stuff, really, but it must delight the organizers of the Tour, who now have a grudge match to promote as next year’s premier attraction.
But back to this year’s race. Yeah, there was a little drama on the road, what with Contador unable to rein in his urge to show he’s the best and Armstrong and Team Astana clinging to the flimsy public fiction that leadership of the team was unsettled. That was always bull, and here’s why: Johan Bruyneel, like his riders, lives to win. For him, that meant an Astana rider in yellow on the Champs-Elysees as the Tour rolled across the finish line. He had one horse, and only one horse, who would get him there: Contador. Bruyneel was never coy about who he thought his strongest rider was, and Armstrong, after Contador’s decisive attack on the Verbier in Stage 15, conceded the point.
Yeah, you can talk about Contador’s ill-timed attack on Stage 17 that dropped teammate Andreas Klöden, a move that later prompted Phil “Pot Calls Kettle Black” Liggett to question whether Contador was intelligent enough to win on another team. But look again at what happened. Contador sat up as soon as he realized he and Andy and Frank Schleck had gapped Klöden. By then, though, the Schlecks had seen Klöden fall off and taken the initiative, and Contador had no choice but to follow them. There was a lot of talk that Contador’s move had cost Astana a one-two-three overall placing. Maybe. But that argument assumes the Schlecks would never have attacked themselves or would have done it too late to create the time gaps that relegated Klöden to a lower placing. They certainly showed they had the ability to attack in that moment: their pace finished Klöden, and their descent to the finish, with Contador as passenger, gained them even more time on all the chasers. The favor Contador did the Schlecks was to remove the need to decide for themselves when to jump. How much damage they would have done to Astana without Contador’s move–and, presuming they weren’t content to let Astana dictate pace all the way to the finish, they would have done some–we’ll never know.
But back to that impression.
It comes from Stage 16, a mountain stage on which Armstrong had become separated from the leaders’ group. He made a long solo attack from a trailing group to rejoin the leaders. And for several minutes, there he was, the Lance we remembered from all those years of dominating the race. Standing, accelerating, holding a high pace forever. It was thrilling, it was beautiful, as he passed one rider after another and gained on the official cars convoying the leaders to the top of the climb. On the team radio, Bruyneel sounded almost as surprised and excited as the people in the cafe where I was watching the race: “Lance is coming! Lance is coming alone!”
Not a race-winning move, to be sure, but a flash of strength that reminded you of how stirring this race and this racer have been.