Into the Impermanence Tour

Life behind bars, as they say.  Rolling on Big Blue

Comfort is impermanent.  A lack of injury is too.  Skin on your ass is impermanent.  Youth, in all its forms is impermanent.  Having felt nothing getting up, showering, walking the bike out (there was no coffee, no breakfast, the bar which had duf duf duf'ed well into the wee hours was definitely not open), I felt a violent stab of pain to the right knee as I started pedaling.  I laid off it, kept the pedals turning, and eased down into the icy fog enshrouding Lake Anna.  By the time I crossed the bridge and started up the slope on the other side I felt that I was in trouble.  The 150 party the day before was definitely making itself felt.  On the other side of the bridge was a filling station and cafe type place (run by an Indian dude from Amdebad - where I will be cycling to next month).  I stopped for a prolonged breakfast, took out the tools and made as many changes to the seat, bike and pedal setups as I could.  The thinking, in short, is to try and change the shape of everything so that I wasn't pushing in exactly the same shape as I had been all day before.  I'm not sure how well it worked, but relying largely on Lazy Leftie, it eventually got a bit warmed up and started feeling better. Big lesson on being dumb, looking at the whole rather than parts, and reacting to feeling anxious.  Feeling better, I started cruising, picking up the pace, and making use of puffs of tail-wind.  The scenery became eyewatering - lightly inhabited space - but also signs of economic retreat, run down small-holdings in the forest, homes once peopled now overgrown; the echoes of lives once lived in a toothless basketball backboard with falling rings and bearded whisps of rotten netting; impermanence.  The peri-urban middle class squeezed from the land to the more densely populated places, nearer to the 7-11 jobs.

Big Blue, on the bridge over the James River, on the way to the delightfully named Farmville.  The James River plays a
significant part in the history of the settling of the US, the early transport of tobacco and slaves, and the civil war itself.

I know I sent you this from the road, with a quip about real estate dilemmas for ex smokers -
but it was interesting how big tobacco was still on the backroads - and the tree was so autumn beautiful.

I seemed to have seen the movie "Witness" a million times.  At some point, it was part of a high school english curriculum that I was teaching.  And it's a movie I love, and a way of life that I wonder about - what happens to people when they step away from technology - slow down and intentionally be with each other.  At the same time I'm clear about the irony of writing a sentence like that, on a blog, written for my son the engineer.  After seeing the sign below, I read a bit about the Amish, and where they have settled in America.  It's really interesting, and a sizeable overall community of a quarter of a million people.

Amish country - and the spirit of community that has cars pass bicycles as if they are trucks taking up a whole lane.

The end of the day, knee operating but definitely not fine, and some serious saddle sores (from which I have been eternally saved by Prep - the shaving cream - in short the difference between being sore and not being able to sit down at all) found me in Farmville 124 kms from the lake.  Farmville is pretty cool, it has two small universities, and a population of 8000+ including an excellent laundromat which allowed me to catch up on two days of long garment riding.

Big Blue - unlucky room 111 - Day's Inn in Farmville.  It was FANTASTIC compared to Lake Anna's lowly Lodge

Day 2 - Lake Anna Lodge to Farmville - 125km

Impermanence is also the loss of value and skills - I can't tell you how rare it seems that someone cooks something to sell as food in the tiny towns.  (And it was in this respect that I was thinking about the Amish way of life - it's as if that's what it takes).  Everything available in the small towns to the public was hyperprocessed and pre-packaged.  Tinkie food, both sweet and savoury. 

Farmville (perhaps in the spirit of its name) had a couple of Italian restaurants however.  Once showered up, iced kneed and Prep-assed, I set forth with laundering intent and a hunger as large as a plains sunset.  The Day's Inn is unfortunately not in the town centre, which I had ridden through, but in the less salubrious outskirts - 4 km away.  I was not getting back on the bike, and there are zero Ubers and taxis in the back and beyond, so armed with the washing I marched across the road to a gas station and asked a couple in a car if they were going into town and whether I could have a lift.  They looked fractionally startled, but in the spirit of American hospitality - which is a massively real thing - they gave me a lift and worked hard at rewarding them for that with an endorphin fuelled effort of massive warmth and cheerful gratitude.  The laundromat itself was fantastic in this space - I just know zero about laundromats - and the locals were massively obliging and helpful.  Folding washing is one of the last great social acts: it requires just that bit too much attention and hand eye co-ordination to be on a phone, so you end up chatting to the other people there, and people in the Farmville Laundromat were very keen to chat.  By the time I left, dangerous hunger had set in, and I hit the restaurant and ordered a large pizza.  That's a word that still means something in America.  I went hard at it, but at best made my way through (close to) a half.  The rest came back to the Day's Inn - via a student bus (which the restaurant staff kindly informed me about - 25c was the fare - that's great value by any standard).  The students on the bus had declined the offer of pizza (!?!) - thankfully - when you wake up and it's freezing and cold, pizza in bed as a breakfast prelim is a quality decadence that a bike tour deserves.

Waking up in Farmville - breakfast of champions