Raw like sushi

Humans, like hire cars, need refuelling.

Although there the similarity ends. Our Chevy Tahoe with its huge gas tank can go days between refills. We can manage only a few hours between meals. And while eating fast food and filling a vehicle may take roughly the same time only the car can be driven straight away.  The body takes much longer to metabolise a meal into the energy it needs to keep going. And so it is that endurance athletes (I use that term only loosely to describe myself and Rose) have to eat little and often to stop running out of energy and hitting the wall or, as cyclists call it, getting the bonk.  Our bonk prevention strategy involves posting box after box of energy bars and gels (more than 40kg in total) from the UK to the hotels and motels we’re stopping at  along the route.

As you can see from the picture below some of the boxes contain packets of powder that look suspiciously like cocaine or heroin so I’m a little worried they (and quite possibly I) won’t reach their final destination.  Note to Hollywood movie moguls reading this: if I am thrown into prison for drug smuggling can Brad Pitt play me in the film version? Rose wants to be portrayed by the actress off Homeland.

It really is energy drink. Honest!
It really is energy drink. Honest!

For now we’re more worried about whether we’re properly physically prepared for the journey ahead. We’ve put in the distance but will we be fast enough to keep up with the more experienced riders and average the required 16 mph?  A chance meeting with ride staff Mike and Karen  who, like us, are getting a few last minute supplies at a local bike store doesn’t do much for our confidence. They are whippet to our mongrel.

Later we console ourselves with a carb-loading meal at the Japanese restaurant just over the road from our hotel. And that’s when it hits me. We’re raw. Like sushi. Not just undercooked but uncooked. Let’s hope it’s not that kind that kills you if not properly prepared.

LA is a great big freeway

Burt Bacharach and Hal David were right. LA is a great big freeway.

But as such it isn’t crash hot for cycling (more hot crash) so we hire a Chevy Tahoe for the 40 mile journey from LAX to the start line at Costa Mesa. The vehicle is a supersize SUV (think Sherman tank then order the go large option) and swallows our two Evoc bike cases and four kit bags with trunk to spare. With eight lanes of traffic in each direction the Interstate 405 seems almost as wide as British motorways are long. America is a big country. In more ways than one.

Too tired to assemble our bikes immediately after check in and too scared to venture out even on side roads that have four lanes each way we don’t need much persuasion to embark instead on some essential carb loading. Without being too unkind to our hosts carb loading is something the Americans do very well if the bodies on display at nearby Newport Beach are anything to go by. Which reminds me: did I pack the spare tyres (or tires as they say over here)? It’s the carb burning they don’t do so well. But with 3,000 miles of pedalling ahead of us Rose and I reckon a burger, fries and cola won’t hurt. And it doesn’t. We wash it all down with milkshakes. And for pudding pop a couple of the cookies thoughtfully provided by the hotel kitchen for guests with the early evening post-lunch/pre-dinner munchies. I weighed 71.4 kg before I left the UK. Watch this space for my weight in four weeks time. I could well be taking back some unexpected excess baggage.

(F)owl play

The owls were sated. Full of moles
and torn up scraps of suede-skinned voles.
Plucked from the ground in the dead of night
by the white-winged warrior with the gift of flight.

They didn’t hear the approach of death
for the owl can murder with barely a breath.
That they died in pain is dead cert sure
judging from the splash of crimson gore.

Evidence was plain for all too see:
a furry pellet at the foot of the tree.
If the police were called to solve this crime
they’d have it cracked in double quick time

‘cos all wrapped up in the ball of fluff
inedible bone and incriminating stuff.
The hooded crow would be judge and jury
and vent his spleen with his usual fury.

The surviving mole would give his version
with unassailable assertion.
The verdict was not when it came a surprise
because owl is a creature that others despise.

“I find you guilty and you must hang,”
said crow without an avian pang.
The case made the front of the woodland clarion.
Headline: owl makes tasty carrion.

So remove the pellet from the base of the tree
then the owlets will live to themselves fly free.

Entwined

The snow was mostly gone. But it lingered in the tramlines where tractors had trodden two months earlier. Then the ground was sticky and the tyres left what, from this distance, looked like the parallel prints of a finger painting.

We followed one of the grooves towards a drift of sheep. For the first half-mile they appeared as white woolen flakes sticking together for warmth and huddled against the hedge line for protection from the easterly wind.

But close up they resolved to a slushy grey. Winter coats tie-dyed with a combination of red clay streaks and blue woad farmers’ marks. Worsted darned with threads of bramble from close encounters with the field boundary. A woven landscape of which we were a part. Warp and weft.

Across the valley, behind a curl of woodsmoke, in a patch of the cloth with the sun still on it, the sheep were scattered. Pearls from a broken necklace rolled across a green carpet.

And in the field at our feet a stooped apple was festooned with mistletoe and garlanded with wool. Nature’s Christmas tree for anyone bothering to wait a while. There, under a priceless chandelier of white berries, we kissed.

Hands held. Eyes locked. And in that one moment physical and emotional landscapes entwined.

Glen Gordon

Molecule by molecule the mountain is dismantled by the soft but irresistible rain. The beech tree has snagged a scrap of night in its boughs and is holding it hostage to the day. Black wool on a wire fence stirred by the wind but unable to escape.

The rain cloud necklace will not pull him down. Nor the winds that whip and slap his granite face. But this is demolition on a geological span and the fan of broken rock at the mountain’s foot shows elemental forces cannot be resisted.

A lupin flames and flares among the scree, a terrestrial reminder of the fire below. White splash on silver. A heron patrols the loch. His lonely watch a blink in time. The keys to the glen passed from generation to generation.

The cloud is lifting. Now only cobwebs cling to the valley sides. Rejoice! The mountain top survives.

Eden sun

The tree tops are immersed in molten copper. Cast with the the horizontal rays of a dying sun. But the death of day breathes life into the night. And the blue black shadows, born short and shy in the seconds after midday, rush ever faster towards maturity. Across field and valley, through farmyard and village to a vanishing point where, after the pale hours of a summer night, tomorrow will send them into a reverse journey from the infinity of dawn to the oblivion of noon. And where just a second later the cycle will begin again.

But for now the sun has gone and the shadows have melted away like my fair weather cumulous friends and I am left alone in my Garden of Eden.

Lock up your hens

Scary creatures stalk wood, field and heath.
Fox and badger with fearsome teeth.
Death and destruction wherever they pry.
Henhouse, sheepfold, pond and sty.

All is happening while the farmer’s asleep.
Rounding up flocks of imaginary sheep.

And by the time he awakens when the cockerel crows
And the sheepdog is nibbling his corny old toes.
The entrails and bloodshed have been cleaned by the crows.

And a chorus of birdsong replaces the screams.
And the terror of night is consigned to our dreams.

But next time you ponder the moon or a star.
The darkness they lighten is not very far.

So when blackbird sings sweetly from his eventide perch.
And the eastern sky purples with a sun setting lurch.
The song is a warning of dangers to come.
The notes may be gentle but the message is RUN

Earthly pleasures

The lovers laid on the drier ground in the middle of the copse. Face to face. Hand in hand. Two thin lines drawn so close together that from any distance they’d have appeared as one brush stroke on the canvas of their special field. There was only leaf litter for a mattress. And the scree slope spoil of a badger sett for a pillow. But they really couldn’t have been more comfortable.

Mostly their eyes were locked together. Invisible bar magnets; his north to her south. But when they did look up it was to a Sistine Chapel ceiling held aloft on the fluted columns of tree trunks. Buttress roots. Rafter branches.

Her eyes mirrored the sky painting. Or perhaps, he fancied, it was the other way round, such was the power she exerted over him. An earth goddess with irises as blue as a cloudless day and pupils as dark as a moonless night.

Little was said. But there was no silence to break. For they both heard the music that others did not. The bark of a dog fox. The throat clearing crow. The monotone morse of the woodpigeon. The wind playing notes in the tops of the trees. Creaking baritone oaks at one end of the scale. Tinkling cymbals of copper beech leaves at the other.