Wherever You Go

Yesterday, birding. Today, biking.

What's up with these mid-week jaunts?! [No, I'm not playing hooky.] I'd decided something of a “summer vacation” was in order this year. [Remember those? Or maybe you're a schoolteacher, enjoying them still.] I'd plotted and planned, banked up my vacation days and marked my work calendar “OOO.”

Weekday riders tend to be retired (or have flexible schedules). It's fun getting to know folks I would rarely meet, otherwise. These outings are about camaraderie, not so much the scenery. They're about conversation and coffee, and (of course) riding our bicycles.

It's convenient for me to bike to the starting point. Driving there, followed by unloading and setting up my bike, would not be faster. [Plus, I get more exercise.]

Today's route would mean two round-trips home—our leader had settled on a coffee stop in my home town. Should I cut it short, leaving them to return back to the start? [Nah.]

The second round-trip would feed not only my hunger for more exercise, but also my curiosity. Our leader seems to carry a veritable atlas of local roads in her head (no GPS needed), and I wondered what neighborhoods she'd choose on the way back.

Wherever you go, there you are ... 33 miles and about 500 feet of climbing later.

Birds of Belgatos

And now for something completely different.

I decided to take advantage of a bird-watching session offered through a local library, and to treat myself to a suitable pair of binoculars.

I was a bit skeptical about our destination—a little neighborhood park. [Oh ye of little faith!] As the bird-watching expert jabbered away, her back to the sky, I spotted some drama overhead: a hawk being chased by a (somewhat) smaller bird. Feeling it would be rude to interrupt her outright, I simply raised my arm and pointed. “A Cooper's hawk, chasing a Red-tailed hawk; she must have a nest nearby.” [Okay, things are looking up. Literally.]

And indeed, she did have a nest nearby.

Although we spent most of the session planted in one corner of the park, a few steps away from the parking lot, we spotted two of the juveniles perched in a tree after we took a short stroll uphill. They were waiting for mom to fly in with their next meal, and tolerated our gaping and gawking for quite a while before they took wing.

To return to their nest, as it turned out; where we discovered a third juvenile.

We watched an American Robin pluck a big juicy grub out of the park's lush field of grass, and several Western Bluebirds and a Black Phoebe foraging as well. We saw familiar Dark-eyed Juncos, Anna's hummingbirds, a Lesser Goldfinch, and an American Crow; circling overhead, a pair of Red-tailed hawks a-courting and a Turkey Vulture.

An eye-popping yellow bird darted through some branches: a Hooded Oriole. A Chestnut-backed Chickadee teased us—now you see me, now you don't. [An oriole and a chickadee, in California? What do I know ...] We also glimpsed a White-breasted Nuthatch scooting up and down a tree trunk.

Without our expert guide, I would have been able to identify only the birds that were already familiar to me. The rest would have registered as ... Tiny bird. Brown bird. Another tiny bird. Yellow bird.

I walked away impressed. I would never have imagined I could see so many different birds while standing in one spot at the edge of a neighborhood park!

Viva Calle, San Jose!

“Have you seen the house with the creatures?” one of our riders asked. While the rest of the group assembled at our rendezvous point, she led us down a side street to behold an amazing sight.

Perched on the rooftop (and, well, all over the house) were fantastical ceramic figures.

Whimsical, one-of-a-kind little masterpieces of a creative mind.

The popularity of Viva Calle has led the city of San Jose to schedule the event more frequently. Not volunteering for this one, I was ready to go exploring. Better yet, with a small group of folks from the club.

To get there, we started off on the Los Gatos Creek Trail. Maybe it wouldn't be too busy on a Sunday morning? [Wrong.] But the first near-catastrophe came early, when a less-experienced rider wobbled in front of me and almost toppled off the edge of the trail as I descended behind him.

I gave him more space after that, but finding that he flagged going up each little rise on the trail, I decided to slip past him.

Then he repeatedly took to cruising on the left side of the trail, over the line. Even after I gently reminded him to stay to the right. [And I thought the biggest challenges today would present themselves in the free-flowing crowds on the event route.]

Arriving before things got busy, we piled into a photo booth for a group shot. The green screen technology took some liberties with our attire(!) to promote the event. There was music, there were artists painting live, there were booths promoting health and the outdoors, there were food trucks.

It was fun to see so many people wheeling around—mostly on bikes, but there were some colorful and talented folks twirling around on inline skates, too. You did need to keep your wits about you (as you were mixing it up with lots of unpredictable people in motion), but I didn't witness any crashes. [Which seemed somewhat miraculous.]

Our group splintered and came together again before riders branched off to head more directly home. With only three of us returning to our starting point, our leader agreed to forego retracing our route on the trail. [Whew.] In all, 28 flat miles (500-ish feet of climbing).

A Slice of San Jose

Those pesky Canada geese ... everywhere. The white specks in the treetops on Almaden Lake's island are nesting egrets (and their noisy chicks).

When I decided to take a bit of a summer vacation, I imagined many restorative days of biking and hiking ahead. But after somehow tweaking my back three weeks ago, I reluctantly admitted it would be best to give it a rest.

Enough of that.

Time for a test ride. Today's leader eschews route sheets and rarely shares a plan in advance, so we all trail her like obedient little goslings (lest we get lost). I imagine her favored routes would become familiar after a while, but to me they're fresh adventures.

With today's flat slice of San Jose, I covered 31 miles with less than 700 feet of climbing.

And my back? No better, no worse. Might as well keep moving.

Interloper

I was in the neighborhood, so why not meander through the campus. A stroll down memory lane, as they say.

When I took a tumble at the broken-up base of the sharp descent from the Stevens Creek Trail to the end of Crittenden Lane, I could not have imagined that one day—25 years later—it would be luxuriously transformed, graded gently and paved smooth.

Corporate campuses in the Valley rise and get recycled as technologies wax and wane. In this neighborhood, territory that was occupied by Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics in their heyday has since been absorbed by Google. Many buildings remain, and new ones have been erected.

If this were your workplace, you just might find the place attractive enough to return to the office.

What will become of this place, 25 years hence? The revolutionary design of the building where I did my graduate work (nearly brand new, at the time), did not age well; I learned recently that it has been torn down.

I was amused to see that the local population of cliff swallows quickly embraced their new habitat. Somehow I doubt this was architecturally intended.

A thin, muddy stream of Stevens Creek was flowing toward the Bay, enough (for now) to sustain some of the marsh plants. Enough to draw your attention away from the high-voltage transmission towers.

A well-intentioned (but deteriorating) fitness trail was torn out and redone with native plants a few years ago. A loop on this trail was great for walking one-on-one meetings, and this morning I fell into line behind a few turkeys. [Literally.] The birds were completely indifferent having me on their tail. [Okay, I know where this is going ...]

I was tempted to uproot an invasive thistle plant along the trail, but couldn't tackle that without gloves. The native flora have flourished (and thus, the return of native fauna).

I continued my trek to the nearby rookery. The egret chicks were a-chattering, and some adults sat tall on their nests.

The black-crowned night herons were present and accounted for, too.

Twenty-five years hence, I likely won't be here. But if the trees and the plants are, the birds will be.

Remembering Steve

The last time someone asked me about Steve was the day he drew his final breath. At the time, I had no idea.

Ride leaders have their own styles, and I liked Steve's. It wasn't long before he recruited me to co-lead with him. At first he wanted to pre-ride (!) every route we mapped out. That was too much for me, and I managed to persuade him that we might not need quite that level of preparation.

He also shunned offering route sheets, insisting that without them the group would need to stay together. True enough, but that locks everyone into the pace of the slowest rider; I suggested that we would attract more riders if the jackrabbits could dart ahead and wait for others to catch up. He was also insistent that we plan our lunch stop for noon—later than that and he would assuredly be grumpy.

Steve had a silly sense of humor. I don't think we ever passed a horse without Steve asking “Why the long face?”

We rode thousands of miles together, and led nearly 60 rides over the course of nine years. One of my favorite memories was the day we took Caltrain to San Francisco, where we would join a group to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and onward to Tiburon. It was Steve's birthday, and he had “permission” to ride so long as he got home in time for dinner.

I boarded the train a couple of stops before he would; I festooned the bike car with crêpe paper streamers and brought mini-cupcakes to share with all. As we arrived in San Francisco the conductor announced the last stop over the intercom, adding a spirited “And Happy Birthday, Steve!”

After Steve retired, we rarely rode together—he shifted to weekday rides and focused more on achieving milestones than riding socially. Then he disappeared.

I'd reach out to him periodically, letting him know that club members were asking about him. It would be some time before he was ready to tell me that he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's and that he'd probably had it for years before being diagnosed. I thought back to a ride we'd co-led in 2014. He'd introduced me to that route, yet when we stopped at an intersection on the return, he didn't know which way to go. After that, we led only one more ride together.

Steve was a model ride leader: Thoughtful, patient, kind, encouraging. At his memorial service today, friends and family members filled in more pieces of his life story. I recalled words that had resonated with me at another memorial service a few years ago, exhorting us to stay present in the lives of our friends, to ensure that they can see how much we treasure our friendship. I am sad that Steve had isolated himself from our community, but he did not want his diagnosis shared. I know that his cycling buddies would have enjoyed spending time with him much more than memorializing him.

I will always cherish the memories of the adventures I enjoyed with Steve, and in that sense carry forward a thread of his life in mine.

Bike to Work Day, 2022-Style

We had a reputation, in years gone by, for rolling up to this “energizer station” with a group of two dozen or more cyclists.

Today? Me and six guys. But hey, it could've been just me.

At least one was joining us for the first time, so ... that's something. And we welcomed one colleague on a vintage special-edition folding bike. I was impressed that the thing was still functional, having been disappointed in its build quality on a test ride, back in the day.

We were sorely disappointed to find no Hobee's coffeecake this year. I know the volunteers meant well, but a cookie thickly coated with sugary icing is not appetizing at 8 a.m. [Not to me, anyway.]

A day or two ago, one of my steady co-leaders had sadly tested positive for Covid-19 and thus had to stay home; one of the other riders gamely stepped up to steer folks to our rendezvous point.

I knew what to expect at the office: The ventilation in our building's shower room has not been improved, but (like last week) I would be the only one to use it.

At the end of the day, I pedaled (solo) back home; the usual round trip of 40 miles and about 1,000 feet of climbing, the usual (gradual) uphill return.

Unfortunately, I somehow irritated something in my back on an after-work ride yesterday. Today's riding didn't feel great, but luckily didn't exacerbate it. Methinks I'll be off the bike for a while, until it's sorted out.