Steve Tried to Kill Me!

I have written several times in previous posts about my buddy Steve Blunt.

Today he invited me to his house for a "nice little bike ride".
Those were his words.

Exactly.

I arrived at about 11 this morning and by 1 was eagerly awaiting death's sting. His "nice little bike ride" was a 25+ mile endurance test of pain, suffering, and more pain. Followed by a bit more suffering and punctuated by a little more pain. I do a lot of biking and typically 25 miles would be a long, but very manageable ride. What kills me about riding with Steve is the grueling pace he sets. He seems to operate under the misapprehension that I am some sort of biking hot-shot whose only desire is to leave other bikers in his dust. This is not true. I only do that when I'm biking with little kids, because it makes me feel like a tough guy.

Steve paces his rides to match how he imagines I ride, and I suffer for it. I spend the first 15 minutes chugging along and chatting and having a delightful time dodging the traffic through Nashua. As most of the rides I take are through the rolling, verdant pasture lined roads of rural New Boston, I find the multiple lanes of speeding traffic coursing through Nashua an energizing thrill.

There was a time, many years ago, when I was attending art school in Boston, that a favorite pastime of mine was to venture out on my bike into 5:00 rush hour traffic on Boston's main thoroughfares. That was years ago, and though I find that I don't bounce back as quickly as I used to from catastrophic collisions, there is still a tingle of a thrill when a driver roars past me, leaving a half a centimeter between me and his right front bumper.

By the time we had gone about 10 miles, I noticed that it was hard to talk to Steve, both because I was using all my available oxygen for other purposes (namely, remaining alive) and because Steve was several hundred yards ahead of me.

We slowed up a bit when we entered Beaver Brook (a delightful conservation area suspiciously devoid of beavers or brooks) and I was able to prepare for the ride back to Steve's house, which was brutal. I would not admit this at the time, but Steve threw his chain twice and I was delighted at the opportunity to stop and take a quick break while I watched him work.
I am proud to say that I made it all the way back to Steve's house without throwing up a single vital organ.

I don't consider my spleen vital.

Steve made all amends with a delicious Sangria and some tasty lunch comestibles. After lunch, Steve showed me his new didgeridoo (which he can actually play - he is amazing) and a tiny clay djembe drum that he was given as a gift. Naturally, we broke into song and his suburban Nashua neighborhood was ringing with the tribal beats of our drumming.

His daughter came home from school and said she could hear the drums from several streets away. My secret hope is that the neighbors were in fear of a takeover by some hostile native tribe. I figure that would distract them from the comical sight of me panting and heaving like an overheated buffalo in Steve's driveway.

White Water Madness - sort of...

If you are not from NH, you must know that this summer we have been under some evil voodoo hex. It has caused so much rain that my socks mildewed. Actually, that may be a function of poor hygiene, but the fact remains that this has not been the sunny, bright summer that one likes to reminisce about in one's dotage. More like the gloomy, gray, moist funk wafting out of a high school locker room.

Noisome, intimate bodily functions aside, we did have at least one bright sunny beautiful day just a few short days ago. I jumped on my bike and zipped around town, delighting in the breeze through my hair, the sun on my face, and the swarms of insects peppering me like birdshot. On my approach home, I have a delightful 4 mile stretch along the Piscataqua River where I can ride in relative peace, soaking in the natural beauty and having only to remain vigilant about the hundreds of cars zipping by–every driver desperate to either get to Goffstown or leave Goffstown.
As I reveled in the beauty of the river and enjoyed the tickly sensation of the thousands of bugs wriggling along my lips and mouth, I saw a kayaker stopped at the bank of the river listening to the music from an annual blues festival that comes to town, um... annually.
Of course, this made me think, "I should bring my fragile children on a life-threatening ride down the churning, rain-swollen rapids of this river in a large, hard to control, inflatable raft!" Perhaps it was simply the giddiness of all the Vitamin D surging through my sun deprived system, but this was indisputably the best idea I had ever had. Of course, the kids agreed whole-heartedly. They're good like that.
We unearthed the raft from beneath the porch, scoured it, inflated it and strapped it to the roof of the car. We dropped my truck off at the proposed end-point for the ride and Kerri drove us all to a spot several miles upstream so we could 'put in', as the pros say. For us, it might be more accurate to say that we dropped the raft into the water and flailed and dived for it as it was whisked away in the current. After scrambling aboard we settled in for what proved to be a delightful sojourn down the river. There were a few bumpy parts that were a lot of fun (save for the crippling pain of bouncing off a rock with my knee) but the rest of the ride was smooth and fun. In the interest of absolute honesty, I feel that I need to post an uncropped copy of the exciting looking picture at the beginning of this post.

The glamor and high excitement is somewhat lessened, I know. The river loses some of its potential as a raging force of nature when you see how calm most of it is. In the background you can see the bridge leading into the fairgrounds where the blues show was being held. You can also see the man who warned us, "There's whitewater up ahead there." then sat back and ghoulishly watched to see if the guy with the two kids careening down the river might wind up on the news that night. "Hey," he could tell his wife, over dinner, "I warned them..."