Passageways, Part 1
Reflections on the passage of time and a recent cycling vacation with my son.
We are driving south, miles vanishing away behind us like so many years, lifetimes, my eldest son, Nick, 27 now somehow already with a new full beard going red from some ancestral recessive hocus-pocus sitting next to me as he has so many times in that other lifetime of a decade or so ago when he’d be there, the eldest of three, the other two in the back, each clad in soccer clothes, cleats, shin guards tucked into long socks or with their cloth sacks of music on the way to piano, flute, guitar lessons, or my daughter in dancing clothes—pink leotard, white tights, ballet slippers, and hair bun making necessities in her backpack….
But those days are far behind me, far back past the Tappan Zee (it, too, fundamentally changed now with its tall, white towers and arcing cable stays, the old bridge gone, renamed, its pylons and supports lifted from the muddy depths of the Hudson, hauled away).
The past is not unlike this, I think, as I cross the now Mario Cuomo bridge, what once was vanished away, existing only as vague memory, the new thing bright and shiny and real carrying us onward into the future.
We are headed to Brevard, North Carolina, the back of my Subaru stuffed full of bicycles, guitars, biking kits, clothes, power bars, spare tubes…. The idea is to travel far enough south that we will also be traveling forward in seasonal time—to a cycling Mecca of gravel and smooth-paved roads and single tracks galore complete with waterfalls and mountains, barbecue, micro breweries, coffee shops. We have brought our fancy carbon fiber Cannondale gravel bikes and will seek out un-paved, forest roads. My son is a design engineer for Cannondale Bicycles, and he has his unmarked, all-black, preproduction bike, and I have a beautifully appointed slate green version of the same thing (which I can only afford because he works for Cannondale).
After years of piano lessons, Phish’s Trey Anastasio stirred his desire to play guitar, and one day, home for a college break, he borrowed a guitar to bring back to campus with him and started a journey that has taken him to Kalamazoo and the Heritage guitar company to purchase a guitar built where he was born, building his own tube amplifiers on the bottoms of broiler pans, stringing together effects pedals and loopers and flangers and wah-wahs…to ultimately selling everything electric and buying a new, pre-war Martin D-18, listening to endless hours of Doc Watson, Billy Strings, Tony Rice, Molly Tuttle and dozens of bluegrass artists I’ve never heard of in an effort to master the art of bluegrass flat picking.
All of this takes me far back to my college years, hearing a bluegrass flat picker at a local bar in Canton, NY, taking lessons with him, until I heard a classical guitarist from The Crane School of Music perform on campus, and soon I had sold my Guild dreadnaught and purchased a Yamaha classical and started growing out my nails and practicing Segovia scales.
Perhaps following the urgings of another far less recessive gene, Nick has already mirrored my own sometimes dizzyingly shifting passions, though now it has started to go both ways. After he sold all his electric guitars and amps and pedals and acoustic guitars to purchase one guitar of guitars, I found myself visiting the luthier shop of Bruce Thompson in Saranac Lake, NY, not far from my Adirondack cabin, playing his hand-built masterpieces, amazed at the resonance and responsiveness and—there’s not really a word for it—the just plain magical sound that emanates from woods selected and carved and shaved and bent and sanded and glued together by a master builder (some 200 hours of work go into the process of hand building a guitar)…. So now, in the back of the Subaru, alongside my trusty Martin and Nick’s own lovely instrument, sits a fresh-off-the-press classical guitar crafted by Bruce from redwood and cypress, mahogany and bloodwood—a good number of my lesser guitars listed on Facebook or Reverb, with others to follow, to offset the purchase.
As we finally roll into Brevard and unload, the light is fading fast, I quickly pull up a nearby route on my laptop, and we head out, our legs after 2 days of driving ready to do some real work. And work they do as it soon becomes apparent that all gravel roads here go up (and up and up) or down down down. After a few miles, I settle into a climbing rhythm that will become all too familiar in the coming days, Nick cautioning me to not push too hard given that other, longer rides lie ahead. Meanwhile, he seems to be barely working at all, standing up out of the saddle, light on his pedals, talking in a normal tone of voice.… And on the descents, while I hold off as long as I can on squeezing brake levers, cautiously keeping my speed in check, he vanishes beyond the switchback ahead of us, and as I round that corner, he is already rounding the next one, and when I round that one, he is gone. Eventually, I’ll find him calmly straddling his bike off to the side of road when it has flattened out some, patiently waiting
On a ride later that week, I will pass a father urging his young son to continue up a big hill. He will eventually ride away, straddle his own bike at the top of the climb and patiently wait (next to where Nick is waiting for me), and I will be sent spiraling into memories of first teaching Nick to ride on the long, gentle-sloping neighbor’s lawn where all my children learned to ride, or convincing him to wear cycling pants and to use his mom’s road bike for a spin around town. (In a few short years there he will be shaving his legs, racing in category 3 events, putting 10,000-something miles into his legs every year)…time playing strange games with me, as it likes to do these days—all at once father, mentor, teacher… apprentice.
At our AirBnB we play together some, sitting out on the small deck in the other-worldly warmth of the high-mountain southern Appalachian spring, Nick calling out chords, giving me advice on how to keep the beat, on the expectations of rhythm guitar playing in bluegrass. We work out some vocal harmonies. I try to take a lead or two but fumble where he is fluent, quickly, gratefully re-assuming the role of providing the supporting rhythm. He will also spend a lot of time holed up in the office of the small house we have rented, and I will bring my new classical guitar outside to practice Bach violin sonatas and other assorted music, we both wanting, needing to spend alone time with our instruments. I am also preparing for a recording session with my old band, Hand. But mostly, I find myself just playing a note or two and marveling at how long it rings out, at how many different sub-tonalities I can hear, and how it all sounds set against the backdrop of already-leafing trees and chortling cardinals.
On a particularly grueling day, we find ourselves climbing (and climbing and climbing) up a freshly-graveled road of baby-fist-sized, extra chunky, loose gravel. Large dump trucks filled with the stuff pass us on the way up, grinding gears, spewing diesel clouds, and coming far too close to our left shoulders, then coming back past us empty, air-brakes roaring as they work to slow enough so as not to fly off into the forest. I am for some reason sent back to a fishing trip with Nick where I stupidly locked my keys in the car, and we had to wait for hours along a dirt road for a AAA truck to find us and snake a tool down in through the window to undo the latch, both of us miserable, our fishing rods also locked away just beyond our reach, so all we could do was invent our own version of bocce by gathering up rocks, one for the pill, others of vaguely similar colors for each of us, pitching rocks out onto that gravel road, passing the time, waiting it out. Here we were suffering together again, grinding up and around each switchback, my lowest gear—already ridiculously “granny-geared” for this trip—not quite enough, my rear wheel sometimes spinning out and forcing me to walk the rest of the way up particularly steep inclines.
But not too many minutes into the future, we are gliding along a mildly descending section of single track, coming out at a clearing at the base of a lovely waterfall, the mist drifting over us, the sound hard to talk over, the past hardship an already distant memory, the raw power of such natural beauty stepping in, pushing the past aside.
(To be continued….)
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