Biking the GAP and C&O

I picked up biking 20 years ago after an accident that stopped my running (which I began in 1978 after drinking beer on the Arkansas River).  Washington, DC is a great place for it with lots of trails of varying distances.  Rock Creek is my favorite.  Several years ago I did the C&O Canal from Cumberland to DC, 180 miles in three days.  Sixty miles in one day is pretty much my limit.  I could go more I guess if my life depended upon it but otherwise not.

When I got back from East Timor and read that the bike trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland - the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) - was now complete, I decided I'd have to try the whole thing back to DC.  This week I did it.  The trail goes through beautiful countryside and towns still struggling to recover from the loss of industry.  The trails followed the routes used for transport between east and west for almost two hundred years of American expansion, industry, agriculture and commerce.  The grade is train, and biker, friendly and the trail uses former train trestles and tunnels.  The trains still run but the goods come from everywhere but there.  The communities along the way have taken to varying degrees to the bikers.  There are bed & breakfasts along the way (and down-home eating too).  It was rivers, woods and the heartland.  A real adventure.

Here follows my daily record and some photos:

May 20: Nice ride, sunny but not too hot. The first several miles were paved trail and streets. I got lost in McKeesport but used my GAP app map to reorient myself and get back to the right path. On the way, saw a beautiful shiny black snake sunning himself on the asphalt, a jumping chipmunk, trains whistling, lots of chungalolos, people canoeing and floating down the Youghiogheny River and Sunday bikers and hikers. The trail, once it reached the old rail bed, ran next to the river and was easy to bike. Didn't really feel like uphill. My double padded seat worked well but my butt still was sore that last ten miles.

After checking in, went to the corner tavern and had an ice cold Bud (on tap) and watched a bit of the Pirates vs Tigers game. Then next door for a slice of pizza. Just spent the last half hour chatting with the nice lady (from Mt Lebanon) who does most of the work for their B&B while her husband mans the reservation desk. She was ironing.

Connellsville on a Monday evening is not much of a place. Wendy's for dinner tonight.

May 21: This is train country. The rail lines follow the river. Last night in Connellsville, they whistled and trundled on through all night, though not a problem for me. I love trains and the sound of trains. They kept me company most of the way to Myersdale and when I entered town, one followed me right in and passed though the middle of town. Reminds me that America still runs on rails.

On the way today, got rained on a bit but Andy's big purple poncho got me through dry if a bit muddy. (I was able to wash my bike when I got to the B&B.)  The Yough is a beautiful river with lots of rapids as it ascends into the mountains.   Passed through Ohiopyle, where we used to go when we were students at Pitt for the natural water slide and running rapids. Never dreamed I'd bike there.

Today I passed scads of scampering chipmunks, a box turtle, billion year old rock formations, outbursts of flowers, and lots of mountain laurel (not blooming yet).

Today was 56 miles and my butt again hurt the last twenty. Tomorrow will be a shorter but spectacular ride.

May 22: Shorter but nice way to complete the GAP. Had a nice breakfast in Myersdale after a night of getting woken and lulled back to sleep by the passing trains. The whistle woke me, the clickity clack sent me back to slumber.

Today the trail followed the river as it became a stream, a creek and finally a group of trickles lost in the moutains. The rail followed until the mountain got just too big. Then the ancient line that became the trail just punched through Savage Mountain. The trail passed over the Easter Continental Divide and then 3300 feet in the tunnel.

On the way passed by the first deer I saw and through wild roses. All along the way the air was delicious. The wild flowers, the deep green smell of the forest and just good clean mountain air. Today it was also honeysuckle and wild roses.

No rain today and even some sun. Tomorrow may be different.

Right now, nursing my second IPA sitting outside in downtown Cumberland.

May 23: Set off from Cumberland in fog this morning but turned out a good ride. No rain and though the trail was a bit wet in places, it was quite bikeable.  

Leaving Cumberland I saw a beautiful beaver duck into the bush. The air was heavy with honey suckle, quite intoxicating. Saw turtles, rabbits and deer along the trail and at one point a pair of crazy kamikaze squirrels jumped me. (No injuries to anyone.) 

The canal took all shapes, with water and without, and sometimes just became something else.  The C&O stopped functioning in 1924. Was being built 100 years before. The most interesting part of the day was walking my bike through the 3118 foot long Paw Paw tunnel built by 1848 to take the canal through a mountain. It is unlit and completely dark in the middle. There is a guard rail but it was kinda spooky walking when you can't see your feet. 

For the last 10 miles, I took a paved rail trail (WMRT) that runs on the other side of the canal. That was a treat. But not as good as the coconut cream pie at Weavers. One reason bikers take long trips is so they can eat pie!

May 24: The ride today was a bit tough. Started with a flat tire just outside of Hancock.  Had a spare tube so it only took me 15 minutes to get underway again. Then I got a bit lost trying to get from the rail trail back to the canal. But the real thing was that it was longer and wetter today. Lots of puddles I just had to go through. 

But a good ride nevertheless. Spoke to another biker camping his way from DC to Pittsburgh and back. He warned me the trail south of Harpers Ferry was really muddy. Also a local guy walking his dog. We wound up trading stories of how we almost drowned in rivers, while watching the Potomac flow by.

Saw turtles, rabbits, deer and chubby little groundhogs. Also squirrels, one of whom looked liked he wanted to bushwhack me. Instead of running away from the big thing on wheels, he ran in front of me to cut me off. Didn't let him bully me though. I rang my bell and pushed on.

Not much honeysuckle today but something that smelled like musky vanilla. Weather forecast aside, no rain but evening thunder now.

After dinner this evening, spoke with a visiting Austrian family that came to Harpers Ferry because the husband saw a picture of the view of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah and liked it.  Also with a young Mennonite couple from Illinois who once lived in Belize. We talked produce, including why we can't get good tomatoes.

May 25: Back to DC, having gone 330 miles in six days. Left Harpers Ferry after a good night sleep – the trains provided their music again – and a hearty breakfast. Spoke with a couple from Seattle that was doing Cleveland to Washington and told them about the W&OD trail. If the C&O was as muddy today as yesterday, I'd switch over at mile 35 and take the ferry. The trail was even muddier – it rained during the night – and I did cross at Whites Ferry. The “Gen. Jubal Early” is the last of the ferries once used to cross the Potomac. Cost two bucks for bikes. I didn't even bid the C&O farewell.

I needed to go five miles on Rt 15 to Leesburg, Virginia to pick up the trail. Plus, it's paved. Negative, it is hilly. I seemed to be running out of gas by Hearndon (mile 20) but revived after a stop at my favorite bakery. By the time I left the W&OD for the way across the river and up the last hill, I was powering through.

On the way I saw a big fat groundhog, deer and a little toad sitting on the yellow line on the W&OD. One thing I did not mention yet but were with me all the time were the birds. Always singing in the woods. Their colors always striking against the green, especially the cardinals and bluebirds.

BTW, I finally figured out why the squirrels were attacking me. As they saw this big thing bearing down on them – I averaged 10 mph – they didn't think to run off the path into the bush but to escape by running down the path in front of the advancing danger. As I got closer, they turned to the next level of defense which is offense. But I'm smarter than a squirrel so eventually figured this out. I started ringing my bell as soon as I saw them up ahead and then they'd simply scatter into the trees. 

The 70's and the “Arab Spring”

Ok, I'm over 60 and listen to some music my loved ones call “moldy.” But I like to think that much of the music of the 70s holds up well. Anyway, in addition to the indie and alternative music my son and friends at ATG keep me current with, I still play that moldy stuff.

Much of 70's music – and for my purposes here that means the period from around 1968 to 78 – is just music, meant to entertain, get you “up” or help you get high. But two strains have had me thinking recently because they seem to pinpoint something that changed early on in the decade, something that maybe points to a broader dynamic we can see playing out in the recent “Arab Spring” and on the streets of American cities.

The first of the 70's music broke over the happy silliness of Beatlemania. It took rock and folk and added drugs to produce the psychedelic movement with Jefferson Airplane and then the Grateful Dead. The Beatles themselves started it with "Magical Mystical Tour." But while this and much else of the time was just escapism – not to denigrate such fun – the strain that I'm focused on here was the music of protest and revolution. In the aftermath of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and in the middle of the Vietnam war movement, songs like “What About Me” by Quicksilver Messenger Service (1970) addressed the issues of pollution, war, repression, the 99% but also looked forward to change through confronting the forces of authority challenging them – “what you going to do about me?” Other songs of the period looked forward to just jumping over the mess of this world in the post-apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (Jefferson Airplane & CS&N, 1969) or by hijacking a starship (Jefferson Starship's "Blows Against the Empire," 1970). Whether it was confronting the man or escaping him, this music looked toward a better future, a fundamental re-ordering of society.

But by 1972, disappointment, alienation and a sense of loss had already begun to set in, despite the fact that we would shortly be seeing the first seeming accomplishments of the “attack” against the old order. Richard Nixon would be forced to take us out of the Vietnam War (the Paris Peace Accords, 1973) and himself would be forced from office (1974). I was at a CSN&Y concert in Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on the night of August 8, 1974. One of the group came out to explain a slight delay by informing us all “it's over,” Nixon had resigned. Music and fireworks celebrated this “victory.”

But The Who, sensing that maybe it would not be so easy, announced in “Won't Get Fooled Again” (1971) that after the “fighting in the streets” our team on the left would now be our team on the right. Jackson Browne was asking in “Doctor My Eyes” (1972) if perhaps we had already seen too much without anything really getting any better? Pink Floyd was suggesting that maybe it was all really about money and that anyone who doubted it was living on the "Dark Side of the Moon" (1973).  Jethro Tull – Ian Anderson always seeming to be bitingly aware of how real life disappoints our dreams – noted how each day was like “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day” (1974) and, in “OneWhite Duck” (1975), that something must be wrong in our brains if we were “so patently unrewarding.”

By 1977, Jackson Browne was “Running on Empty” and the year later, Jefferson Starship began its transformation into pop. Most of the supergroups fell apart in a haze of booze and drugs. Everyone else went to work. And the Fall of Nixon led to the two hapless president – Ford and Carter – and then in 1980, the “return of the repressed” victory of Barry Goldwater in the form of Ronald Reagan.

The hopes and dreams of the 70s were real and so was the movement on the streets. We – and I am taking some liberties here including myself in this – did remove a president and end a war. But the hopes that any of this would really change anything fundamental or in some way make our daily lives “better” or “happier” were not realized.

We've seen in the past year new movements in the streets, toppling governments and challenging the economic order. The experience of the 70s reminds that the push for real change leads to reaction; the harder the push, the greater the reaction. Society is, by evolution, a essentially conservative adaptation. The force of inertia fights against any change of direction. But the movement of the Arab Spring is more powerful than anything we experienced in the 70s because it is more necessary, more mass based. The Occupy movement is more informed by history than we were in the 70s. And it is so much clearer now, and in so many ways, that the world we live in has serious problems that don't seem to be getting better on their own, by business as usual.

Leaving the last word to Neil Young, who remained sideways hopeful despite everything we've seen since the 70's, keep on rockin in the Free World.

Biking at the Speed of Light

Took a long bike ride yesterday from Northwest Washington to Needwood Lake in Rockville.  Fifty miles round-trip in just over four hours.  On the way back, it occurred to me that after a certain point, time had been suspended for me.  Each moment was part of the next and the whole ride was as one unified experience, one moment in time.  Each point I had passed was "just now" no matter how many miles had speed under my wheels since.

This doesn't happen on my shorter bike rides but seems to kick in after 15 miles or so.  Einstein explained that at the speed of light, time stops.  It had stopped for me at a considerably slower pace.

Maybe this is how to unify quantum physics and relativity?  For quantum physics, reality is subjective in the sense that its many possibilities don't become one thing until observed.  Einstein thought of his science as objective.  The speed of light is the same everywhere, independent of the observer.  But time is experienced subjectively.  It passes slow or fast depending on how we feel it.  And biking at our speed of light can suspend our experience of time entirely.  Time too doesn't become anything specific until we observe it.

Our Three-headed Beast - Divided US Leadership

The New Yorker of March 19 has an interesting piece - The Unpersuaded by Ezra Klein - that looks at whether Presidential speeches make any difference.  He finds that they do, in a negative way.  When President's talk about things they support or want to do, they engender partisan resistance to that very thing among the opposition.  What helps a President achieve his agenda is a strong enough economy to help him win re-election and his party to gain enough seats to gain/maintain control of Congress.  This may always have been true but seems more so over the last few decades.

Drawing from political scientist Juan Linz, Klein writes that our form of presidential democracy is not common.  And for good reason.  "A broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict is woven into the fabric of a political system in which a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another.  Both sides end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite directions."  Parties no longer moderate this tendency in our American system because they have been transformed from "big tents" to groups operating as "disciplined, consistent units."  With party rigidity, the President becomes a polarizing figure rather than a persuader.

In other words, we have a system in which the parliamentary leaders - Speaker and Senate majority leader - and the executive can form a three-headed beast instead of a coherent government.  Time for change?  Time for a constitutional convention?

Changing the US Constitution: Some Suggestions

Wrote late last year about the Articles of Confederation and the possibility of working through the states to call a constitutional convention according to Article 5. This would mean seeking and supporting candidates for state legislatures whose sole purpose would be to have their state call on Congress to call such a convention – an “Occupy the Constitution” movement to allow us to assemble, debate and decide on draft amendments while enjoying our Tea. It's only fair, therefore, for me to outline a few of the ways I think we might use the amendment process to change the way our government works and make it more responsive to the majority.

Simplicity in representative government may be best – a one-house Congress elected for four years choosing a Prime Minister with a ceremonial President. Whatever party wins the majority gets to implement the policies it was democratically chosen to enact. But the USA may be too big and complex to give so much power to any one institution. The Founding Fathers may have been on to something when they provided for checks-and-balances. For checks and balances, I would not touch the Supreme Court much. But it might also do to re-invigorate the role of the states both to decentralize power and to provide some degree of check-and-balance at the federal level. Here's my suggestions:

• Increase the size of the House of Representatives to allow for greater and more diverse membership and points of view. Article One, Section 2 says the number of representatives “shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand.” Congress changed this by law in the 1920s to fix the number at 435. One for every 30,000 would now mean some 10,000 representatives. That seems much. But why not 1000?
• Elect the House for four year terms so its members can do something other than campaign all the time.
• Allow the House to choose the Prime Minister. He/she would be head of government, commander-in-chief and choose the cabinet and senior government officials (including ambassadors), assuming the powers contained in Section 2 of Article 2 without the need to seek advice and consent.
• The House would originate all bills and approve all treaties, assuming all the functions and limitations contained in Sections 7, 8 and 9 of Article 1.
• No commitment of US troops abroad for any time and any purpose would be possible without a majority vote in the House specifying the duration and terms.
• Repeal the 17^th Amendment on popular election of the Senate. Make senators appointed by state legislatures to two year terms. Senators would represent the States at the federal level.
• The Senate would have the authority by majority vote to reject laws and treaties passed by the House. The House could overcome the veto by a 60% vote. (We want to have checks and balances without completely tying the hands of the majority.)
• Members of the Supreme Court would be nominated by the Prime Minister and approved by majority vote of the Senate to serve single terms of 15 or 20 years.
• The President would be chosen by the House and be confined to being the ceremonial head of state. (Or we could abolish the office altogether.)
• Congressional campaign funding would be limited to public sources – money collected by the national treasury and doled out equally to candidates gaining sufficient support through local petitions – and individual contributions limited to some modest amount, say $200.

It might be good as well to take a hard look at the proliferation of government departments. We might grandfather State, Treasury and War – the first created – as well as Justice. But some of the others may be doing things better left to the states or society?

November 22

Tomorrow is the date in 1963 that President Kennedy was shot.  Every American alive then can tell you where he or she was at the moment they heard.  We are getting old and it is history.  But the hatred that may be the real story of that day is not history. America has always had this deep vein of hatred running through it.  I saw this weekend a local production of a play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.  The hatred goes back even farther than this.  It is rooted in our Declaration of Independence and our central lie that all men were created equal.  We had slaves, all thirteen states had slavery.  Slavery defined us and it still does.  At bottom, the hatred aimed at Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama is about the feeling that while we are slaves - to all kinds of forces beyond us - we have none.  It's about powerlessness and the inch-deep popular culture that cannot really sustain us.  It's about not really controlling ourselves or much of anything and not knowing what to do about it.  It's about being owned and having nothing we can really own.

The Case for a Constitutional Convention

I wrote several days ago on the usefulness of rediscovering the Articles of Confederation. But it is clear that the crisis – economic, political and moral – facing the United States today cannot be resolved by simply returning to the past. For years now, things seem to have been getting worse. Income disparity has been increasing, wars proliferating, politicians squabbling. Government has become overbearing, inefficient and too beholding to money. The American people's growing sense that things need to be fixed has energized both the Tea Party and Occupy movement.

Change is necessary but we the people cannot trust others to do it for us. Our politicians seek nothing more than power. Once elected, they spend most of their time and energy raising money in order to get re-elected. Our leaders do not lead because taking necessary actions might lose this or that constituency. So we need to start the change ourselves.

We need to begin pushing for a Constitutional Convention to change the way our government works and to ensure it better serves the 99%. A government lean, more responsive to our needs in the 21st Century and more focused on achieving economic prosperity with justice and liberty.

The Occupy movement has been criticized for not having any overall objective. How about occupying the Constitution?

The Tea Party wants fiscal responsibility, free markets, and constitutionally limited government. Let's do that the right way.

The US Constitution in Article V allows for various ways to amend the constitution:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; 

Leaving constitutional changes to the Congress would be to leave it in the hands of the professional politicians. The most reliable way to ensure real change would be to use the mechanism of a Constitutional Convention. None has been called since the first in 1787. But if the Occupy movement – perhaps alongside the Tea Party – focused now on electing in 2012 state legislatures committed to calling a Convention, a new era of American democracy could begin.

A Constitutional Convention would surely be a hotbed of democracy. Whether Occupy or Tea Party, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, everyone would come into it with different ideas. Reaching agreement on amendments to the constitution would probably be difficult and require equal measures of consensus and compromise. But such a convention would offer a real opportunity for the people to once again assume control of their government. The process of reaching agreement and then ratification by 3/4s of the states would offer further opportunities for democratic participation.

Some are no doubt afraid – whether they say so or not – of such direct democratic participation. They are comfortable with the way things are done today and do not want anyone to mess with that. But we, the great law abiding majority, the 99%, have nothing to fear from coming together to discuss and enact change.