Oxcar Wears a Mask to Protect You.
16 May 2020
What day is it? What month is it? How long has it been? Does it even matter?
I was in grad school the last time I worked from home on a regular basis. I've been a multi-tasking turbo-technician ever since, always on my feet, rarely focused for long on one thing. Now I'm hardly ever going into the lab, focusing instead on a massive literature search that requires reading, digitizing graphs from the 1980s, and standardizing data so that the post-doc in charge of the review paper can make sense of fifty years of research on dendritic spines.
I can't sit for more than fifteen minutes without jumping up to do something else. Sometimes I stand with my computer on a bureau so that I don't have to sit. I'm accustomed to interruption from other people. Now I have to provide my own.
Exercise is a very important part of my workday. Without the bike commute, and without the gym, I take time to lift weights at home and take short rides in the afternoon. As each new week begins, I tell myself I'll ride in the morning and dedicate the rest of the day to my job, with a weightlifting session after my work is finished. It hasn't happened that way yet.
Two Tuesdays ago I decided I needed to beat myself up by climbing the same hill every way possible. That hill would be what old USGS maps call Pennington Mountain. The rest of us call it Poor Farm. It's the closest real hill to my house, a mere 9-ish miles away.
The top is accessible from Poor Farm Road and New Road, and crossed by Harbourton-Woodsville Road. Woosamonsa clips part of the hill as well. My goal was to go up and down each of these roads and then go home. I did Poor Farm first because it's the most difficult. I went down the east side of Harbourton-Woodsville, went over to New to climb that, went back over Poor Farm to Woosamonsa, headed up the west side of Harbourton-Woodsville, went down New, up the east side of Harbourton-Woodsville, straight across to the other side, swung around to climb Woosamonsa from the west, then dragged my tired ass home. I was hoping the GPS track would look like a flower. It didn't. It looked like a bowtie on a string.
I did stop a couple of times for pictures. This barn is near the top of Woosamonsa.
There's a cell tower at the intersection of New and Harbourton-Woodsville. I passed the thing four times. I figured I might as well get a picture of it.
From the top of Harbourton-Woodsville one can see the smaller ridge crossed by Poor Farm:
It was late afternoon. The light hit Harbourton-Woodsville just right. This is looking west:
It was a stressful and stupid ride that broke all of my rules: I crossed the same roads multiple times; I climbed the same hill multiple times for no reason; there was no coffee stop; and there were no Slugs. Someday, when I look back on this route, I'll have to remind myself that it was during the lockdown, when life itself was stressful and stupid.
With group rides canceled, Tom's Insane Bike Posse does the next best thing. Friday evening is our Insane Bike Posse Therapy Session on Zoom, where one of us, usually Tom, proposes a route and the rest of us figure out how to meet him somewhere. Tom wanted to get some hills in last Sunday, and proposed a version of his Raritan Ramble, starting from Rocky Hill. From my house to the canal parking lot is twelve miles. Riding to the start would give me 70 miles. Normally that wouldn't be much of a challenge by this time of year. This year isn't normal.
Tom sets a starting time and we figure out where we'll meet him and when. So far, a different one of us has managed to botch the logistics every time. More than once, Pete has hammered with a tailwind only to miss us by minutes or arrive half an hour early and go home. Bob has whiffed on the start time once as well. Last week it was Jim's turn. Aided by a flat, he arrived at Rocky Hill at 10:01, which would have been one minute late had we started from Rocky Hill at 10:00. The 10:00 time was for the park on Hollow Road, where we didn't meet Pete because he had arrived half an hour early.
Rocky Hill was 9:30. I came hammering by at 9:32 to see only Tom's car in the parking lot. He was waiting with Jack H and Bob around the corner, on the bridge over the canal. I took some pictures while we waited a few minutes for Jim, who was probably just leaving his house at the time.
I stopped on Camp Meeting Road for some pictures of the train tracks.
At my suggestion, Tom had tweaked the route so that we could ride on Woodfern and Three Bridges Road. I hadn't been thinking about the wind, which was whipping out of the west across the empty fields. This was the only flat section of the route, and we had to fight our way through it.
At the end of Woodfern, on the bridge over the Neshanic River, we took a short break.
Things got easier once we turned east again, but by now my legs were tired and each little roller was more annoying than the last. Tom stopped again on the Studdiford Road causeway over the Raritan.
The parking lot at Rocky Hill was full now, which is to say parked up all the way to the half-capacity barriers. Jack H and I left at the same time, but he got in front of me and disappeared over the hill at Rockingham. How he still had so much energy after riding this route plus something like 20 miles to get here is a testament to his skill and retirement free time. He probably went home the same way I did, yet I never caught another glimpse of him.
When Tuesday rolled around, I just wasn't feeling it. The wind was up, again. When I had done a sufficient amount of work, I took Miss Piggy as straight into the wind as I could go, through Pennington to Bear Tavern Road.
I turned around there, letting the tailwind do the work. At least it was pretty and gave my eyes a rest.
At the end of Main Street in Pennington, up near where it curves to meet Route 31, there's an ox from the 2014 Stampede. Oxcar's eyes are weirdly hollow, but he's wearing a mask, which is more important. A friend told me later that all the Stampede oxen in Hopewell are wearing masks. Good for them!
Last night, Tom posted his route. This time he was going to drive to a park in Bordentown, and this time we all decided we'd drive there too. Except Jack H, of course. With our collective inability to get the timing right, Tom emphasized the 9:00 a.m. start and even sent a reminder.
No problem. I could leave home as late as 8:30 and get there in 20 minutes.
I got up at 7:00. I'd set everything by the door the night before. All I had to do was grab my water bottles and Camelbak from the refrigerator and go.
Jack and I had a leisurely breakfast. I sipped on the cold brew I'd made last night. I watched the clock. I had plenty of time. I could leave at 8:45 and get to the park early for the 9:30 start.
At 8:34 I remembered that we were starting at 9:00.
I texted Tom, begging him to wait for me. Jim texted that the parking lot was open (we weren't sure it would be) and I texted back "Wait for me!"
At 8:59 I arrived at the park. They were waiting.
"I have a new term," I told everyone. "Rona Time."
I explained, even though I didn't have to: "It's the inability to hold a time in one's head for more than twelve hours."
There were seven of us, too many to ride together without looking like the knuckleheads our Governor calls anyone dumb enough to violate the lockdown by gathering in a large group. "You're leading the B group," Tom told me. By that he meant we'd leave five minutes after he, Ricky, Bob, and Pete did.
The plan was to meet again in a park outside of Vincentown. We had a strong tailwind pushing us south. There were few traffic lights and fewer reasons to stop. The A group was far enough ahead that we never saw them.
I did double back a few yards to get pictures of a boat at the edge of Mirror Lake in Pemberton.
We got spread out on Buddtown Road. Jack was a speck in the distance. Jim must have stopped for pictures. It gave me time to get one of my own, at Bed Bug Hill Road. I'm sure I've taken a picture of this sign before. It's something I'd do.
I'd have blown straight past the meetup spot had Tom not had the good sense to stay near the edge of the road. I plopped myself down on the grass to fix the tube fastener on my Camelbak, chow down on a melting energy bar, and snap a few pictures.
Tom's group left only a few minutes after we got there. I didn't have much chance to talk to anyone. We left soon after they did, and, because we were all into the wind and spread out, we all wound up together at a traffic light somewhere south of Smithville.
"Let's just ride together," I said to Tom. By now we've done this together-apart thing enough times that we know how to space ourselves.
What sucks about this arrangement, though, is that we can't draft off each other. We each have to fight the wind by ourselves. I suppose it'll make us all strong. And tired. But not sick.
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