Coop's Corner: Making adjustments

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Making adjustments

Yesterday (Saturday the 14th) was a day of adjustments that all seemed to work out well, as most adjustments, taken with a bit of thought, experience and foresight, do, at least most of the time ;)

I was up early, excited to take the new black Morphous up to Diamond's for our weekly coffee gathering. Suited up, ear plugs in, GPS turned on and reset, the long and low scooter was pushed outside. Only one of the cats had sneaked inside before I got the big door down, so she had to be coaxed out with sweet nothings; luckily she's the one cat that my success rate with such action is relatively high.

Key on, starter button pushed and the motor turned over once before the solenoid started clicking. I jumped up, pulled the battery panel off to access the terminals and stuck the 2 amp charger on for a few minutes. Seeing the digital output reading on my fancy new battery charger gave me hope as well as concern when the "Battery Condition" too quickly showed 100%. One more push of the starter button took the battery down to 8 volts and I knew the Morph ride was being postponed.

The other Yamaha, the TW200 (sarcastically, the reliable one) happened to be the one in front, so I pushed that outside and headed off in the faint light of dawn, rain drops and fog. Before I had gone 20 miles, I'd been through thick fog and rain and by the time I was half way to Minneapolis, there was sunshine and fog so full of sunlight that it was almost worse than the dark fog I'd ridden through earlier. Couple all of that with my forgetting that the gas tank had been very close to Reserve on my last ride and an indirect detour near the Twin Cities, made my normally early arrival something that wasn't to be this time.

The coffee was good, the Deluxe Burrito seemed especially so. The morning cleared up, the temperature warmed and life was good out along the sidewalk on Central Avenue.

After the ride home, I unloaded and made room in the small tankbag on the TW so that I could stop at Frontenac Honda to purchase a battery. They had more than one in stock, checked the condition of the Gel battery with their meter and after a few minutes of motorcycle talk, I left after cramming the battery in the tank bag, the can of chain lube in my jacket pocket.

It was too nice of day to be messing around with the battery, so I left it on the workbench, and since I was anxious to get some more miles on the GT250R, I parked the TW and got ready to head down to Alma for lunch on the small sportbike. Finished with the Lunch Special at Pier 4, I headed north and east on mostly paved roads, though I found some gravel for the day as well.

There are so many great roads to ride in the area and re-riding them is never a hardship, but I'm forever looking for any that I've not been on before and yesterday I found a couple of them. Often it seems simply riding them in the other direction makes it challenging to remember if they've been visited before though normally I'm quite good at recognizing something along the way that ties a former ride and machine together as a reminder. I purposely changed my direction on a few of them for the day.

At the crest along County H.......

An always very quiet and scenic Cole Road.......

I found great pleasure yesterday in having the chance to speak with two young riders, one young woman just starting her riding experience with proper training, attitude as well as good riding gear and a young man who's been riding off-road for many years but only recently taken up road riding. Both of them college students, it was very refreshing and encouraging to listen to them share their stories of riding, justification of riding and attitudes. C and J, ride safe and do well!

The valleys and distant hills along Julson Ridge......

With this coming week's rain, there will be an explosion of green here in the next few days.

Now, back to my theme of "Making Adjustments". On these small roads and even some of the larger, faster ones, my rides take me past many small, local cemeteries. I stop every so often if something happens to catch my eye, possibly location, surrounding topography, nearness to something else, etc. The stop that made me do a U turn yesterday was due to a couple of factors, one of which was the fact that I happened to notice a cemetery that hadn't caught my eye before ( I do remember where many of them are, though not all of course). Between that and the fact that there were very fresh tire tracks in the long grass made me go back to take a better look. The area is very isolated and private with no dwellings or farmsteads nearby, at least modern ones. Part of my joy of riding these roads is imagining what it must have been like back when so many families struggled on these now-quiet roads with their 40 or 80 acre farms. Little or no trace of them remains, at least obviously from the road, though I'm sure that the older locals either knew much of the former residents or are those former residents in places long turned to overgrown patches.

So, though I normally wouldn't have stopped, something made me pull over yesterday. I parked the bike in the tall grass out in front, grabbed the camera and walked back on the ridge among the headstones and markers. Of course there were many old ones, commemorating folks from a century or two ago but there were many new, updated stones honoring those previous generations as well, replacing markers that had crumbled or spoiled.

What struck me and gave me pause were the more-than-one series of headstones honoring infant or young children, all from the same family. Appreciating the fact that youthful passing was much more prevalent once than it is now, I still find it extremely hard to imagine going through it once, let alone multiple times. I spent more than a few minutes yesterday in that quiet place trying to get some perspective on their lives as well as my own.

A lovely, combined trips day of 365 miles that I both appreciated and was very thankful for.

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Others say....

"it was auspicious to approach any situation from a deferential, inquisitive place. Conceding that there is much to learn is the best blueprint for discovering something new." ----B. Fuller

The Man straightened stiffly above the block of salt fixed to the stake and looked at the young cattle ringed about him. The pasture was holding out well and the stock was looking good. This bunch would be ready to sell in another month, maybe sooner if the market was right.

A stir among the cattle down near the river brought him round to face the swinging bridge he'd built years before. Someone was coming toward him from the bridge. Someone in breeches, but it didn't look like a man, somehow. What was a woman doing in his pasture this time of night?

He bent over the salt again; maybe if he paid her no heed she'd go on past and let him mind his own business. He heard her footsteps come nearer and stop. "Good evening," she said.

Her voice was smooth with book learning but friendlier than most, and somehow almost shy. When he made no answer she went on, "I've been sitting on your swinging bridge....I thought I'd like to say thank-you...." Her voice stumbled a little, then she tried once more.

"You are Mr. ____". His name sounded strange in her voice, but she went on to tell her own.

"That's what they've called me the last sixty-eight years," he said, looking past her face to the hills fast darkening under a single star. "I reckon the woods are free for those that like to walk there."

The unfamiliar voice laughed a little. "That's what Emerson said: the grove belongs to the man who walks in it with an open heart....On that basis I guess I've owned part of your woods for a good many years.....". She made a final effort. "I've always wanted to thank you....."

Something deeply hidden stirred in him. "There's a stump up there, in the notch of the woods", he said slowly, "that before the timber grew so tall you could stand on it and see all over this country."

He kept still a minute, remembering, then, "I used to stand up there an' look at things, an' wonder how they come to be like they was, an' how the hills was created, an' all the things in Nature.... I told my wife I guessed all the religion I ever had I got standin' on that old stump, a-wonderin'..." He turned his face away from her.

She helped him out. "I know about that, a little. This afternoon I saw......." Her account of a thing she had really taken time to look at eased him, and he answered with telling of the badger den at the foot of the swinging bridge.

When she had gone, he turned to watch her. After a moment she stood clear and unmoving against the sky. You could hear the sounds of the river where she stood. She was one that could stand still long enough, he thought, really to hear what a body was saying, or a river.

Then she walked down the farther side of the slope and was gone. ------Margaret Snyder from A Chosen Valley

Fall was the end of harvest, end of the growing season, a burst of color and sun-warmth before killing frost turned the land gray and cold. Fall was a moody time, full of both life and death, a time when we were reminded of the power outside of us, reminded that the seasons happen to us. We do not invite the change to come.-------Ben Logan, from The Land Remembers

When you get those rare moments of clarity, those flashes when the universe makes sense, you try desperately to hold onto them. They are the lifeboats for the darker times, when the vastness of it all, the incomprehensible nature of life is completely elusive. So the question becomes or should have been all along, what would you do if you knew you only had one day, or one week, or one month to live. What lifeboat would you grab onto? What secret would you tell? What band would you see? What person would you declare your love to? What wish would you fulfill? What exotic locale would you fly to for coffee? What book would you write? ------- Ben Tyler

We were also cautioned about journeying far from home. As an example of the dangers, the town had a badly crippled lady named Lucy, who as a girl had traveled to New York City. As she traveled along a sidewalk, sightseeing, she was struck by the outstretched hand of a suicide who had leapt from high above. Her spine had been shattered and for the rest of her life, she was to walk bent forward at the waist, tapping the sidewalk with two black canes. Whenever the subject of travel to a big city was raised, someone would say, "Just remember what happened to Miss Tripp." ---- Ted Kooser, from Local Wonders

"Steamboats are like wedding cakes without the complications...." ----Mark Twain

"It's not about having lots of money, it's about having lots of options......." -----Chris Rock

As the very proud father of three former ponytail wearers, hopefully I can get away with this....."For the past few years it's been fashionable for young women to wear ball caps and to snap the strap on the back under their ponytails. I like the looks of that, their shiny ponytails jauntily swinging, but it's hard not to think of the rear ends of horses. There's a piece of harness called the crupper that goes just under a horse's tail to keep its nose down. If the horse lifts its head to look for a way out of whatever predicament it's in, the crupper tightens and hurts the horse. But it's foolish for parents to think that a ball cap might keep a young woman from running away. Anybody can see they're made for running." ------Ted Kooser, Local Wonders

"I tell the guy's girlfriend that the only difference between the book's main character Phaedrus and myself is that I am neither brilliant, tortured or insane, she looks at my bike and there is an uncomfortable silence." --------ahendepe (a.k.a. Vermin)