Ten days out

January 3, 2025

We fly south in ten days! Suddenly it doesn’t seem too far away at all, and the calendar is starting to fill up with last minute medical appointments, social engagements, and travel preparations. In the meantime we’re in a lull for a few days while we wait for the Raven and the bikes to make their way north and we wait out three soggy, cold days of more or less nonstop rain. For myself I’ve got two appointments queued up before we fly south, with an optometrist to get a prescription that fits my new state, and rhe other with my ophthalmologist. None of this sounds like getting stabbed in both eyeballs, so I’m not worried.

Rachael’s making good use of her new gym membership, and has a really wonderful time this evening at her first class of the year. It’s over at the LA Fitness she just got a new membership in, and since her class starts tonight at 5:30 and it’s after dark I act as her bodyguard and escort her over and then I head over to Via Delizia for a dinner salad while I wait for her call to come pick her up again. She’s enthusiastic, calm, and at peace with herself as we walk back. She’s always feeling her best when she gets exercise, but tonight was really special for her. Her instructor is a long time favorite of hers she’s known for years, she feels good and can keep up with the class and enjoys listening to some of her favorite music from the seventies. Workouts in the gym have never been my thing, and I’d just as soon get fat and soft in the winter and catch up in the spring. For her though it’s really a special evening, one she’s still upbeat about when we rehash the day the next morning.

For my day, I’ve been sitting around coffee shops and our tiny apartment - catching up on blogs, making preliminary plans for springtime in Europe if we get that second green light in March, and starting to peek into our storage unit with a more critical eye. With it being directly across the street from us now and when we return in March, there will never be a better time to downsize further and dispense with much of what’s in there. If we haven’t needed most of it for seven years, it’s time to let it go.

A part of this storage unit scan has been to once again go through a box of old photos, looking for material to supplement never posted past tours and for other long forgotten memories we’d like to preserve. So on that note, let’s take a couple of days off for a weather break and leave you with a few photos from the past I haven’t seen for a long time.

This first one is a newspaper clipping from spring of 1974 that I’ve been looking for and was afraid had been lost for good. It’s a feature article in the Lafayette, Indiana newspaper about my upcoming ride back home to Seattle on my new Motobecane, about to head west on the longest tour of my life up to that time. I only made it to Hardin, Montana for various reasons, but it was a great adventure. No helmet, no panniers, I carried everything in a small rucksack on my back and got by on a total budget of $8/day by keeping the costs down by sleeping in jails twice, a college dorm, a church, and dirt cheap motels; and by having cheap, large breakfasts with coffee for a buck or two in small prairie towns most mornings. It was a wonderful experience. I should really write it down from memory some day, even with no photos or written journal to lean on. I still remember.

Going forward a few years, I’m living in Salem and getting around primarily by bicycle with our newly adopted son Shawn. Adult bicyclists in Salem were still a rarity in Salem fifty years ago, and maybe we were something of a spectacle as I taxied Shawn to day care and around town with him cradled between my arms and sitting in front of me on a towel draped across the top bar to cushion his butt.

Somewhere there’s another old newspaper article I’m still trying to find in storage. One spring morning Shawn and I were biking down State Street in front of Willamette university when a car suddenly stopped about a hundred yards in front of us. Gerry Lewin, arguably Oregon’s premier photojournalist of the era, got out and pointed his camera our way; and the next morning our grinning faces showed above the fold on the front page of the city newspaper.

Jumping forward a few more years and I’m still in Salem, during the period when my sister Elizabeth also lived in town. One morning she calls up because her husband Vance is off at work somewhere and she needs rescuing because her house has been invaded by a scary wild animal. I bike over and save her by painstakingly guiding the northern flicker (they were known as red-shafted flickers back then) out her front door after it had somehow gotten down her two story brick chimney and in through the fireplace..

And now let’s briefly step into the wayback machine for another set of photos I’m happy to see again. This first one is of a black hatted, black bearded me in early 1971, living on a farmhouse up in Ferndale Washington with my first wife, Carol Jo. At my feet my first dog Dona looks up lovingly, just a pup then. CJ and I just got out of the army a few months earlier, and we’re up there for me to go back to Huxley College of Environmental Studies. My plan is to become an environmental scientist of some sort and save the world, because it’s the seventies and all that.

And here’s another shot with me and Dona. This might be still on the farm in Ferndale, but I think it’s a year later and we’ve moved into Bellingham in Happy Valley, sharing a house with a couple of men in a more or less communal situation because we were wanna-be communalists back in the day also. It looks like I’m working away on a journal, because I was also a wanna-be writer or even a poet until it finally sunk in that there’s not much poetry in the genetic combo I inherited.

And I’m displaying my natural impeccable taste I’ve always had by wearing the stylish plaids I favored then. Can’t smell, can’t taste, can’t look the part, and now almost I couldn’t see any more either. I’vealways suffered from having less sense than most folks.

And speaking of CJ, here she comes now in a photo I think I made reference to in an earlier post but couldn’t find the to include at the time. She has a bright, childlike delighted grin on her face because she’s taking the first bike ride of her life - something she was unable to do as a child because she was a victim of polio a few years before the vaccine came out. I was luckier, and a polio pioneer. I still remember standing in line with every other kid in my elementary school class back east in West Virginia in probably 1955, waiting for the liberating shot that will let everyone go outside and play in the world again.

And then way, way back - to 1964, when I still had two good knees working for me and I was the top miler and cross country runner at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. I was the best in our class of 3,000 that year, but also one of the best in Seattle - good enough to earn a ticket to Pullman for the state championships where fifteen of us watched the already internationally famous young phenomenon Gerry Lindgren all but lap the field on his way to the Olympic Games.

My lifetime best best time for the mile was 4:28.6,Mon the run that took me to Stat. It’s not much ro boast about now, but was respectable for a high school runner in that era and good enough to hold the Roosevelt record for the next seven years. I lost it to my younger brother Stewart, who took up distance running just long enough to take the title away from me. He quit running shortly afterwards, his point made.

And just look at that the cheering throng urging me on to the tape I’m about to break! Track and cross country were very big in Seattle even sixty years ago, as you can see.

And I’m surprised at the flood of long dormant memories that come back just from seeing this photo again - memories of the races themselves, and of all those wonderful summer mornings when the runner with the car would pick a load of us up at our homes and drive us over to Green Lake for a three mile loop around the lake at dawn - daybreak runs with the sun just rising as we dodged past ducks on the path and watched the mist rising above the lake; and then a couple more miles running up through the Woodland Park zoo over the hills of what was one of city’s competition X-C courses back then, with everything so quiet and beautiful in the early morning. One of the best years of my life, one that I reflect on as I’m lying in bed waking up the next morning.

And I think that’s as far enough back as we need to go. There’s no need to go back another fifteen years and post that shot of my sister and me staring at each other naked in the bathtub and discreetly covered by bubble bath. Besides, I haven’t found that photo again yet either. Still looking though, so watch this space.

We’ll take a short break here, but we’ll be back when the weather clears enough to venture out again. When we do, my plan is to take the MAX out to the Columbia for another bird run. Maybe that’s where the scoters annd scaups are hanging out this winter.

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Michael GrimesInteresting to see your picture from 1974 in West Lafayette, Indiana. We lived most of our lives about an hour south of there in Covington, Indiana. Many great biking routes in that area. I also want to note about your very fine mile time. The same effort on today's track surfaces and wearing the new so called "super shoes" would yield a much faster time.
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