Faith and High Beams

The church event was a lovely one, a celebration of World Food Day organized by our music director.   Folks from my little church, their friends, and representatives of local environmental organizations sat down and shared a potluck meal made of locally grown harvest.  It was both fun and heartening and yummy.

And when everything was cleaned up and put away, it was time to roll home.  I'd been worried about rain, just a little bit, as my little Suzuki's decided to get a little finicky about ingesting water.  But though rains had come through, and the ground was wet, the skies weren't dropping moisture.

I suited up, threw a leg over the bike, fired it up, and began the ride home through the rising mist.

Those late evening rides back from church are lovely, and the cooling October night was no exception.  Sitting smack in the middle of 93,000 acres of agricultural reserve, the little town where my church resides can be accessed only over miles of little country two-lanes.   The lights of houses are speckled here and there, down long gravel drives.  You do not pass, as you ride, the endless rows of tickytackytownhomes and flat-straight four-lane strip malls of 'Murika sprawl, but the fields and forests that were our landscape up until a generation ago.

At night, those deliciously ridable American roads are deep and very dark and lightly traveled.

It's high beam country.

And my bike has great high beams, two huge twin reflectors, mounted way up on its tall, lanky frame.  I snick that little thumbswitch by the left handgrip, and the little blue light comes on in the instrument pod, and the road lights up far ahead.  I cast, ahead of me, two tightly nested cones of light, enough to make for comfortable riding at a gentleman's express pace.

I love riding alone through the darkness.  Being that solitary speck of bright in a cool dark night gives a powerful sense of place, of being yourself in the world.  It feels wild and free.

But though it's a place of freedom, there are rules for riding in high beam country.

There are others who ride the same roads, but who aren't traveling the same way.  They've got other places to go, other homes that call them homeward.   You encounter their light first, as the forest or roadside around a distant bend lights up to announce their arrival.

And just before their light rises over the hill, or flares around the bend, you dip your own.  Snick, goes the switch, and the lowbeams are on, like a nod of acknowledgment or...in another era...the tipping of a hat.  You pass one another, respecting the integrity of the other traveler, until that moment you pass.  Snick, and the darkness ahead is banished again.

As I rode through the cool of the night, that blue light illumined, I found myself wishing Americans could grasp this sort of respect in our exchanges with one another.  We're not all the same, in our faith, in our politics. We do not have to be.  It's what makes the United States a wonderful place to live.

But as we live and move through our increasingly loud and crowded lives, it feels like we're all high beams, all the time.  We see that stranger, traveling in another direction to a different home, and we leave our beams on full.

Why should we dim our light, just because they're coming?  That's their problem, not ours, if our full blare brightness bothers them.  What right do they have, to make us do something?  No way will we tone ourselves down.   No way will we compromise.  Heck, if we had brighter beams, we'd use 'em.

So we rush blindingly at one another, lost in the retina-dazzle of our own stubborn selfishness.  And blinded, we lose our ability to see the road ahead.

Living To Ride

Today was a bustling errand day, and it felt it.

Beyond the various and sundry folks we had come into our home to repair and maintain, there were checks to deposit at the bank.  There were socks to be purchased for a youngling who burns through them like Bogey going through a pack of unfiltered Camels.   There was swim gear to be purchased, and books to be returned to the library, all scattered across the sprawling suburban wasteland that is Northern Virginia.

It was also a lovely Fall day, and so rather than trundle about in our utilitarian but inefficient minivan, I ran the Dad-errands on the 'Strom.  It's got a nice big lockable top-box, perfect for fat bags of factory-extruded socks from K-Mart, and for stowing library books.

The swim flippers and for my increasingly immense 13 year-old were another thing altogether, too odd shaped for the onboard storage.  But being a nicely designed piece of kit, the top box pops off neatly, leaving a nice big flat space for bungeeing things. 

The day's errands concluded with the pick up of the big guy from his rehearsal.   He loped from the entrance of the middle school, past the lines of idling soccer mom minivans and SUVs to the bright yellow motorcycle, tossed his backpack into the top-box, and got on the helmet without assistance.

As he hopped up into the pillion, I flashed back to those first few rides I gave him on the old bike, oh so many summers ago, back when his little feet first hit the pegs.   He was so small, barely a presence on the bike at all, nestled in tight and clinging to Daddy's back.

A man after my own heart.

Now?   It feels more like those times I would ride two-up to Skyline Drive with a fraternity brother riding pillion.   There's a man sitting back there.  As he leans back easy against that ever useful topbox, he fills the back of the bike.  His mass and size are palpable, shifting the dynamics and the balance.  But he sits calm and relaxed, an old hand at this, and we shout out our father son chatter as we burble down Columbia Pike. 

And so, for most of my dayful of suburban parental-unit schlepping, I make do with two wheels, racking up three times as many miles per gallon of go-juice, and taking pleasure in the tasks and the day.

It's good to be the Dad.  But it's better to be the Dad on the bike.