Trumpet flowers are in bloom - blood orange flutes jutting out up and down the many trees they've entwined. Silk trees are blooming, too, and crepe myrtles. Non-natives call attention to themselves: invasives and, in the case of the myrtles, ornamentals. Back when I first bike commuted, along the greenways of North Raleigh, I focused on the native species, and took notes: when the bluets bloomed (it's now too late for them), and when the tickseed sunflower (too soon). Here, in this urban setting, while the big trees are native, the understory and and herbaceous flora are dominated by alien species. I hope to plant a native garden behind my house, and I encourage my neighbors to do likewise.
Certain native fauna, on the other hand, have drawn our attention. We spied a second fox this weekend, smaller than the first fox we saw. This was in the adjacent neighborhood of Lakewood, but still less than half a mile from home. Jen, my fiancee, pointed out that the vacant Army Reserve base that sits along the Morehead Hill - Lakewood border provides potential den sites, as does the wooded border of the creek below Carroll Street. So, even if the abandoned house across the street is re-occupied (and Durham Water & Sewer was up to something there yesterday), our local vulpine population may stand a chance, as might our tomatoes, threatened as they are by rabbits.
Attention must be paid to see the Wheel of the Year enacted in an urban setting, to discover the geography and culture of place, to know one's home. I bike in the morning half asleep; I come home in the evening anxious to get out of the heat. I need to remember to look. I need to read the history of Durham. I need to remove the English ivy from a hackberry tree, and the elm branch that threatens my roof. I should have noticed the bag of water bottles I left on our kitchen floor from when we were still painting, which now, having leaked, created a mold spot on our hardwoods that we must clean, and sand, and refinish.
Biking does help one pay attention. Of course there's the whole being-out-in-the-elements aspect, but even more important, perhaps, is the rise in energy, the waking up that comes along the way. I may start out half asleep, but by the time I reach the gym that's down to about a quarter, and if I have the time to work out before going to work, then I arrive, as I did today, fully awake.
And that seems to last all day.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Day 4: A New Voyage to Carolina
Nineteen years ago, when I first became a bicycle commuter, I discovered the Piedmont bioregion and fell in love. The whole idea of "bioregion," the bioregional movement, the sere, the seric cycle - all these things were new to me. I read Godfrey's Field Guide to the Piedmont, and I read John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina.
Lawson hiked The Trading Path (roughly, the route of I-85 across the Carolinas) between late 1700 and early 1701, reporting on a climax hardwood forest with scarcely a pine to be seen. He also noted the signs of recent native disappearance: fields and villages fallen into abandonment. It's not clear if he knew about the small pox, though later in the 18th century the British would use it for germ warfare against the local population surrounding Fort Pitt, and still later George Washington would insist on the inoculation of his rebel army against it.
Lawson wasn't the first European to report on wild Carolina, however. The oldest report I found, back in my first flush of bioregional love, was by a Spaniard who sailed up the Cape Fear as far as Raven Rock in the mid-16th century, noting the sounds of cougars howling in the night, which didn't scare him near so much as the lights of humans, which were still a common sight then.
We live in a naturally lush land, and there's something to love in that. Ed Abbey birthed eco-radicalism in the desert and had no use for anything east of the 100th meridian, but others have brought his kind of commitment to the hardwood forests. Here it is more fragmented, but also more insurgent. Even here in the city, the view out my windows is dominated by green. Cicadas sing in the trees, and I know that owl will be starting up shortly. You can't keep an eastern hardwood forest down.
I hope.
Lawson hiked The Trading Path (roughly, the route of I-85 across the Carolinas) between late 1700 and early 1701, reporting on a climax hardwood forest with scarcely a pine to be seen. He also noted the signs of recent native disappearance: fields and villages fallen into abandonment. It's not clear if he knew about the small pox, though later in the 18th century the British would use it for germ warfare against the local population surrounding Fort Pitt, and still later George Washington would insist on the inoculation of his rebel army against it.
Lawson wasn't the first European to report on wild Carolina, however. The oldest report I found, back in my first flush of bioregional love, was by a Spaniard who sailed up the Cape Fear as far as Raven Rock in the mid-16th century, noting the sounds of cougars howling in the night, which didn't scare him near so much as the lights of humans, which were still a common sight then.
We live in a naturally lush land, and there's something to love in that. Ed Abbey birthed eco-radicalism in the desert and had no use for anything east of the 100th meridian, but others have brought his kind of commitment to the hardwood forests. Here it is more fragmented, but also more insurgent. Even here in the city, the view out my windows is dominated by green. Cicadas sing in the trees, and I know that owl will be starting up shortly. You can't keep an eastern hardwood forest down.
I hope.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Day 3: Owl City
I’ve been a bicycle commuter off and on all my adult life. Starting one bicycular period (round two) in the early nineties, I researched the topic on the nascent Internet, and read the account of a four-season bicycle commuter in Ottawa, who once nearly endoed off a bridge into a frozen river after slipping on ice. If he could manage, surely I could in this more temperate climate. I often thought of him when biking in the teens on winter mornings, as ice rimmed the mouth hole of my ski mask. And I thought of him on my ride home tonight, still in the mid-nineties after 6 p.m., heat and humidity unbroken by any afternoon storm. And that’s all I’ll say about this weather.
My first stint of bicycular commuting was in the days before the Internet, at least as a matter of common usage, and the only research I did involved my field guides: to trees, to wildflowers, to birds… My route was along the greenways of North Raleigh, from Crabtree Valley to near Strickland Road, over six miles each way. Mostly off road, I traveled a narrow wildlife corridor, a riparian route that followed Leadmine Creek for much of the way, including the part where it expands into Shelley Lake. I carried my field guides in my pack, and I often stopped to study leaves and seed pods. I made a big deal about the distinction of species among hickories. I took notes.
Now, here in Durham, I own a small lot of trees I’m not entirely sure of. Those white oaks in the backyard are easy enough to ID, but I’m not sure what sort of elm it is on the east side of the yard, and I just tonight concluded, using both field guides and Google, that the three tall, wart-barked trees with elm-like leaves that grow along our western frontier are hackberries. But that’s a whole genus; species remains elusive. I’ll have more chance to study them as I hack back the invasive English ivy that constantly threatens to kill them all, and the other trees, too. English ivy and bamboo run rampant in Morehead Hill.
Fauna, do as well. The abandoned house across the street has a wild yard, where a barred owl is hooting, even as I write: “Who cooks for you?” Recently we’ve even seen a red fox, trotting down the street, barking hoarsely, like a canine cough, then disappearing into the overgrown yard. While I’ve been happy, as a homeowner, to see signs of possible restoration of this property, the amateur naturalist in me worries what might happen to fox and owl if humans move in.
My first stint of bicycular commuting was in the days before the Internet, at least as a matter of common usage, and the only research I did involved my field guides: to trees, to wildflowers, to birds… My route was along the greenways of North Raleigh, from Crabtree Valley to near Strickland Road, over six miles each way. Mostly off road, I traveled a narrow wildlife corridor, a riparian route that followed Leadmine Creek for much of the way, including the part where it expands into Shelley Lake. I carried my field guides in my pack, and I often stopped to study leaves and seed pods. I made a big deal about the distinction of species among hickories. I took notes.
Now, here in Durham, I own a small lot of trees I’m not entirely sure of. Those white oaks in the backyard are easy enough to ID, but I’m not sure what sort of elm it is on the east side of the yard, and I just tonight concluded, using both field guides and Google, that the three tall, wart-barked trees with elm-like leaves that grow along our western frontier are hackberries. But that’s a whole genus; species remains elusive. I’ll have more chance to study them as I hack back the invasive English ivy that constantly threatens to kill them all, and the other trees, too. English ivy and bamboo run rampant in Morehead Hill.
Fauna, do as well. The abandoned house across the street has a wild yard, where a barred owl is hooting, even as I write: “Who cooks for you?” Recently we’ve even seen a red fox, trotting down the street, barking hoarsely, like a canine cough, then disappearing into the overgrown yard. While I’ve been happy, as a homeowner, to see signs of possible restoration of this property, the amateur naturalist in me worries what might happen to fox and owl if humans move in.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Day 2: Watershed
A neighbor told me that Morehead Hill is the crux of two drainages: to the north, the Neuse; to the south, the Cape Fear. At the time she told me this, I couldn't picture the critical point of inflection, but after just two days' biking, I know it well: Chapel Hill Street, on our northern frontier. We are all on its downside, altitudinally, at least. Atmospherically, it seems a distinct drop to that strip of tired storefronts, though I do like the mural on the long-closed Durham Food Co-op, and I'm amused by the accounting firm in a converted church. A commercial zone could be a highlight, as Ninth Street is to Watts-Hillendale, but the only nightlife I've seen on CHS is the coterie of ink aficionados that tends to gather by the tattoo parlor. If I wanted to walk (or bike) for dinner or drinks, I'd head to Bright Leaf Square or American Tobacco.
Watershed was very much in action today, I'm sure, since so much water was shed when the near-100 degree heat broke in a Florida-esque cloud burst. My office has no window, so I was very much taken by surprise, having last seen sunny skies in early afternoon, to find a deluge about an hour before I was due to get back on my bike. However, by then, again in Florida-esque manner, it had cleared, though not before taking down one of the stately East Campus oaks.
We are among hardwoods here. Two large white oaks dominate my backyard, while some sort of elm leans in from the east. The whole neighborhood appears a veritable forest from Google Satellite View. This is much different from the scrappy pines that pass for woods in most of Cary - loblollies. Inman called them "trash trees" in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, and he would have seen a lot of them. By the 1860s, the North Carolina Piedmont had been pretty much stripped of its original hardwood forest cover - oak, hickory, chestnut - and it's the loblollies that come first in abandoned fields. They're weedy trees. They grow fast, provide sparse cover, and die once shaded out by the hardwoods that slowly come up to replace them. It's the seric cycle, and somehow enough of it passed since the last time this land was cleared for tall oaks to rise up all around us.
There's hope in that, like the hope I feel when I see ailanthus trees sprouting up all along the edge of Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh. Aliens, I know - aggressive invasives - but given hardly half a chance they will advance upon that mall and destroy it, clearing the way, again, for oak and hickory, if not (alas) chestnut. And, speaking of watersheds, we've seen time and again how quickly Crabtree Creek would reclaim its river bed, from Sears to Belks by way of Lord & Taylor, if it were not held at bay in a ditch to the west.
This is the hope that motivates this Urban Biker lifestyle, though it seems absurd as the news continues regarding BP's hole in the bottom of the sea, and while 100 degrees in June starts to seem normal, which it really isn't, not even on the NC Piedmont. At times I feel like the old eco-radical in TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, in a near future where the Earth is clearly a lost cause. Though we're not quite there yet, and Boyle seems to suggest that even his hero isn't yet, either.
Here's to that, then.
Watershed was very much in action today, I'm sure, since so much water was shed when the near-100 degree heat broke in a Florida-esque cloud burst. My office has no window, so I was very much taken by surprise, having last seen sunny skies in early afternoon, to find a deluge about an hour before I was due to get back on my bike. However, by then, again in Florida-esque manner, it had cleared, though not before taking down one of the stately East Campus oaks.
We are among hardwoods here. Two large white oaks dominate my backyard, while some sort of elm leans in from the east. The whole neighborhood appears a veritable forest from Google Satellite View. This is much different from the scrappy pines that pass for woods in most of Cary - loblollies. Inman called them "trash trees" in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, and he would have seen a lot of them. By the 1860s, the North Carolina Piedmont had been pretty much stripped of its original hardwood forest cover - oak, hickory, chestnut - and it's the loblollies that come first in abandoned fields. They're weedy trees. They grow fast, provide sparse cover, and die once shaded out by the hardwoods that slowly come up to replace them. It's the seric cycle, and somehow enough of it passed since the last time this land was cleared for tall oaks to rise up all around us.
There's hope in that, like the hope I feel when I see ailanthus trees sprouting up all along the edge of Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh. Aliens, I know - aggressive invasives - but given hardly half a chance they will advance upon that mall and destroy it, clearing the way, again, for oak and hickory, if not (alas) chestnut. And, speaking of watersheds, we've seen time and again how quickly Crabtree Creek would reclaim its river bed, from Sears to Belks by way of Lord & Taylor, if it were not held at bay in a ditch to the west.
This is the hope that motivates this Urban Biker lifestyle, though it seems absurd as the news continues regarding BP's hole in the bottom of the sea, and while 100 degrees in June starts to seem normal, which it really isn't, not even on the NC Piedmont. At times I feel like the old eco-radical in TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, in a near future where the Earth is clearly a lost cause. Though we're not quite there yet, and Boyle seems to suggest that even his hero isn't yet, either.
Here's to that, then.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Day 1: Little House in the City
Moving to a new place means giving birth to a new self. Along the way you’ll go through mixed bouts of grieving and celebrating, trepidation and anticipation, and gradually the incipient becomes the actual, and you find yourself in a once-strange locale feeling just a bit at home, and everything’s different.
I lived six years in Cary. Don’t judge me, please. It had to do with my divorce and my custody arrangements. Moving there ended a brutal triangular commute from inside-the-beltline Raleigh, to my daughter’s school in far western Cary, then up to Duke, where I work. I’d been a bicycle commuter years before, when I worked at NC State, and before that. And now I am again. Today was day 1.
Until I bought my house in Morehead Hill, in central Durham, I’d never heard of the neighborhood, despite 13 years spent working so close. I’m put to mind of Oakwood, in Raleigh, where I lived when my daughter was a baby – old wood frames, ranging from gentrified to hip to dodgy, with downtown hard by. Tonight, the night after day 1, my fiancée and I walked from home to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the American Tobacco Historic District, the Durham Performing Arts Center… We were, to borrow a phrase from the erstwhile owner of our home, Bob Sherrill, urban hikers. Though I’ve often enough visited American Tobacco, emerging at an unfamiliar angle onto a vista of old downtown brick building backsides, I felt myself moving in a new life, in which such a thing is possible: to walk from my little house in Morehead Hill and stand before this view I’d never seen, in the heart of this still-strange city.
And today, I rolled out of my gravel drive and cycled the short distance to Duke. I’d just gotten my old hybrid mountain bike back from the shop. It’s a bike shop that happens to be right along my route, close to my office, but with the disadvantage of seeming, at least at first blush, rather purist in their approach to bicycles. Their first estimate for repairing my vehicle came to roughly what I’d paid for it originally, and while I talked them down to the bare bones, I sensed the work was done resentfully. In fact, I overheard as much: that my repair man had grumbled and fussed his way through the business of restoring my gear shifts. This morning, pedaling up the slight rise of Arnette Street toward Morehead – apparently, the eponymous Hill itself – I discovered only one of my two shifters actually worked, but it was the important one, giving me seven good options, with the chain sitting on the middle of the three front gears. Good enough.
In about ten minutes I was on campus, and after a short spell of being lost at my own place of work, I found the East Campus gym, which I’d reconnoitered the night before. Despite the new façade, it’s mostly old brick, with tight stairs leading to hallways emerging into small rooms in which a few cardio machines have been placed, with weights and showers on the main floor, and a pool somewhere I’ve yet to discover. It was mostly the shower I needed, in any case, though after such a short ride, I felt the need to lift some weights first, to justify it.
Not much of a workout, but this is a southern summer, so there were sweat-soaked clothes to deal with, and the old question of where to put them in ones office. I picked my most obscure corner, and decided I’d better start brewing coffee in my room, to mask any locker-room odor. Several changes of shirts and pants hung from the back of my office door, so I was covered in that respect, at least. I figure I drive past work often enough on weekends to keep my clothes restocked, though careful folding in my pack remains an option, allowing room for my laptop, toiletries, towel, and such. Past experience is a handy thing; the mechanics of this will not be such a challenge. I’m more curious now about how my life will continue to emerge, on these streets, on two wheels.
I lived six years in Cary. Don’t judge me, please. It had to do with my divorce and my custody arrangements. Moving there ended a brutal triangular commute from inside-the-beltline Raleigh, to my daughter’s school in far western Cary, then up to Duke, where I work. I’d been a bicycle commuter years before, when I worked at NC State, and before that. And now I am again. Today was day 1.
Until I bought my house in Morehead Hill, in central Durham, I’d never heard of the neighborhood, despite 13 years spent working so close. I’m put to mind of Oakwood, in Raleigh, where I lived when my daughter was a baby – old wood frames, ranging from gentrified to hip to dodgy, with downtown hard by. Tonight, the night after day 1, my fiancée and I walked from home to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the American Tobacco Historic District, the Durham Performing Arts Center… We were, to borrow a phrase from the erstwhile owner of our home, Bob Sherrill, urban hikers. Though I’ve often enough visited American Tobacco, emerging at an unfamiliar angle onto a vista of old downtown brick building backsides, I felt myself moving in a new life, in which such a thing is possible: to walk from my little house in Morehead Hill and stand before this view I’d never seen, in the heart of this still-strange city.
And today, I rolled out of my gravel drive and cycled the short distance to Duke. I’d just gotten my old hybrid mountain bike back from the shop. It’s a bike shop that happens to be right along my route, close to my office, but with the disadvantage of seeming, at least at first blush, rather purist in their approach to bicycles. Their first estimate for repairing my vehicle came to roughly what I’d paid for it originally, and while I talked them down to the bare bones, I sensed the work was done resentfully. In fact, I overheard as much: that my repair man had grumbled and fussed his way through the business of restoring my gear shifts. This morning, pedaling up the slight rise of Arnette Street toward Morehead – apparently, the eponymous Hill itself – I discovered only one of my two shifters actually worked, but it was the important one, giving me seven good options, with the chain sitting on the middle of the three front gears. Good enough.
In about ten minutes I was on campus, and after a short spell of being lost at my own place of work, I found the East Campus gym, which I’d reconnoitered the night before. Despite the new façade, it’s mostly old brick, with tight stairs leading to hallways emerging into small rooms in which a few cardio machines have been placed, with weights and showers on the main floor, and a pool somewhere I’ve yet to discover. It was mostly the shower I needed, in any case, though after such a short ride, I felt the need to lift some weights first, to justify it.
Not much of a workout, but this is a southern summer, so there were sweat-soaked clothes to deal with, and the old question of where to put them in ones office. I picked my most obscure corner, and decided I’d better start brewing coffee in my room, to mask any locker-room odor. Several changes of shirts and pants hung from the back of my office door, so I was covered in that respect, at least. I figure I drive past work often enough on weekends to keep my clothes restocked, though careful folding in my pack remains an option, allowing room for my laptop, toiletries, towel, and such. Past experience is a handy thing; the mechanics of this will not be such a challenge. I’m more curious now about how my life will continue to emerge, on these streets, on two wheels.
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