Itchy Deer, Woosamonsa Road
26 April 2020
During our daily 9:00 a.m. lab Zoom session, I begged one of the postdocs to let me help him with a massive literature search he's conducting for a review paper he's writing. My office mate has been involved for a while. I've always been envious of her, but I've never had more than fifteen free minutes at a time. Now that I'm overflowing with free time, I can help.
He'd collected over 11000 research paper titles. Our job was to read each one and decide if it fit in with the project. We were to mark "yes," "no," or "maybe" on the shared spreadsheet, and when we were finished our first pass, we were to read the abstract for each "yes" and "maybe" to decide if the paper would be relevant to the project.
Cool. "So how many titles do you think I should get through in a day?"
"A couple thousand," he suggested.
I took him literally, and before I knew it, it was 5:00 p.m. My eyes were shot after six hours of learning how to work from home. I needed to take Miss Piggy out for a short, hilly ride.
From my house, the closest challenging climb is Poor Farm Road. If you look at an old USGS map, you'll see that the road leads to the top of Pennington Mountain, a small bump at the base of the Sourlands region. There are four ways to get to the top: Poor Farm, Harbourton-Woodsville Road (from two directions), and New Road. My route would take me up Poor Farm, down New, up Harbourton-Woodsville, and back over Poor Farm.
I approached from Burd Road. I had to pee, so I dismounted near the Woosamonsa side to duck behind a tree. I was picking up my bike again when a cop drove by. He stopped and rolled down his window. "You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah. I had to, um, find a tree. All the restrooms are closed."
"Okay," he said. "I was just making sure you hadn't crashed."
What a difference a minute makes, amirite?
Poor Farm has a reputation as being a tough climb. From the southern end, there's a small, steep hill, a two-part descent, a flat stretch, and then the so-called mountain. The climb is short and steep, the worst of it nearly at the top. It took me three passes to figure out that the bad part was about twelve pedal strokes long. I used to get very nervous every time. Now I just get annoyed.
My legs were fresh, my bloodstream caffeinated. I went up and over and down and up and over again, then turned onto Woosamonsa for a little more climbing. On the descent side, there were deer browsing in the field beyond the little pond.
The cloud cover was heavy and the evening light wasn't very good.
From there I went directly home. There was rain in the forecast again, and it was getting late. My legs felt as if they'd done something. I had a big work assignment that would take me weeks; this would keep my anxiety at bay and justify my existence in the lab.
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