Trail marker two

Steel rail . . . rusted!

All right, what we have here is a good possibility of future progress on the trail.  During my research, I’ve seen people from several different places state that if you are wanting to convert a rail to a trail, the first thing you should do is to go and check out the condition of the track.  If it is shiny, the line is probably still in use.  If the rails are rusty, you may be in luck.  It takes awhile for rails to rust, so the flaky brown coating is your ally.  The rail in the picture is from the tracks that run through Shelbyville and west into Waldron, St. Paul, and Greensburg.  Happy day.  To coincide with my upticked dedication to biking, I adopted a 2000 Diamondback Response Sport in gently used condition from the great people at The Bicycle Shop on N. Miller in Shelbyville.  They’ll probably be seeing a lot of me as I push this project through.

 

Trail Marker One

I got an email from Richard Vonnegut (I wondered at the outset…any relation to Kurt?) telling me Indiana Trails had gotten my note and asking me to give him a call.  We talked at length about the possibility of getting a trail in Shelby County.  We’ll be touring parts of the route early next month.  I can almost feel the wind in my hair.

 

Starting down the trail

I left a voice message with the Greenways Foundation this morning, and after work, went to The Bicycle Shop to talk with Tim McKenney.  It was a hundred degrees out today and the bottle of refrigerant I’d sprayed into my Cruiser’s AC system was only motivated enough to give me about seventy-nine degrees.  I wanted to catch him before they closed, so I went straight there from work, without changing.  I’m sure he was amused at the sweaty Major trying to beat “the locking of the door” only to find he wasn’t buying anything.

“Just wondering if there had been any interest in the past in building a rail-trail,”  I said.  He stayed for a few more minutes.

Back in the nineties, there was a big push and it almost succeeded, until someone who was against the project bought part of the proposed trail.  Fair enough.  I wonder if he’s still around or if he still feels the same way.  We’ll be finding out, because I need a trail.

“Can we finish this conversation later?  I really have to get this bike delivered,”  he ended.

“Absolutely.  Don’t want to keep your from your rounds.

The Bicycle Shop is a good local place to start asking questions if you’re wanting to put in a trail.

 

Morning ride

July 9th bike route

I could ride all day if my posterior padding would let me.  As it is, I went just shy of 7.5 miles.  Not too bad considering I could have gone further if I had more time, and it was getting hot out because noon was approaching.  I like early morning rides best.

Riding on rail trails is much more satisfactory.  The former tracks could be cutting through miles of corn fields but you wouldn’t know it.  You’re traveling down a linear oasis, with trees and vegetation on either side, in some cases giving the appearance that it goes on forever.  That means, simply put, that you are riding in the shade.  That is a good place to be when the sun’s rays are beating down.

Fence row of vegetation I thought for some reason was picturesque

I did see some interesting sights, and snapped a few pictures with my smartphone.  A couple of them adorn my blog header now, and if I’d known that you could upload and edit a variety of header pics and have them change randomly, I would have done that before now.  Then again, I haven’t been blogging regularly so what does it matter.  This is typical Indiana summer scenery, which is why I love it so much.  I’ve started to go places the past few years and always found something to fall in love with at each place.  I loved the rugged, rocky beauty of the Texas hill country, the hectic marble curbed streets of D.C. and the hidden garden-by-the-Potomac south of the Beltway and east of Route 1.

For now, I’ll pedal the hot asphalt of Shelby County’s old country roads.

 

Shelby County rail-trail

I find myself in a quandry.  Please bear with me as my stream of consciousness runs amok.  If a quandry was similar to a laundry, and a laundromat at that, then my mind could rightly be called a quandromat.  There are ideas spinning around like blankets in a big gas dryer.  I miss (and when I say miss, I mean desperately so) my trails.  When I lived in Peru, which is the Circus Capitol of the World, I had the gorgeous Nickel Plate Trail

http://jimgarlits.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/just-one-of-those-things/

to hike, bike, jog and enjoy.  Fate moved me quite serendipitously to the D.C. metro area for almost a year and a half.  There, even on the outskirts of one of the most populous areas in the country, I had the privilege of renting a house nary a quarter mile down the street from the Mount Vernon Trail, four-and-a-half miles north of Mount Vernon, and a stone’s throw away from Geo. W’s River Farm Garden.  Dyke Marsh on the Potomac.  Stone arch bridges.  Heaven.

http://www.nps.gov/gwmp/mvt-history.htm

Did I mention that I miss these trails?

Okay.   Here is what I’m thinking.  It may go nowhere, but it may go several miles.  There is a seemingly abandoned stretch of railroad that bisects Shelbyville, and cuts southwest through Waldron (past my pal Hank Nuwer’s house, literally) and down through St. Paul, Indiana and beyond.   I don’t care about beyond.  I only care about the stretch from Sunset Park in Shelbyville to Hidden Paradise campground in St. Paul.

I’ve contacted an Indiana rail-to-trail organization and begun preliminary research into seeing if this is even possible.  It is an intriguing thought.  Will I tick off the powers that be in my new town?  Who would have thought that Miami County would have let something like this happen!  There is hope.  Until then, I guess I’ll just ride my bike in traffic.  Safely, of course.

 

Public domain book update

A couple of years ago in late July I posted about the library of public domain books Google was making available free of charge through their beta Google Books program.  Google Books is all grown up now, and if it were a brick and mortar establishment it would resemble a ten story Barney Nobles-slash-Carnegie Public Library-on-steroids.  I uploaded a short video.  Sorry about the softness of the sound.  It was after midnight and I didn’t want to wake anybody up in the house.

 

Why I read fiction

“It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture.”

–R.L.S. from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

 

Isis and Habibi

Isis Marie at the shelter

Tell me it wasn’t only a week ago that snuffling came back into my life.  First it was Isis, and then me, and then Habibi.  The animal shelter is a heartbreaking place, but the people who run ours are the best.  You can walk in with a leash and walk out with a dog on the end of it (or a cat if you’re that sort of person).  At that point the dog doesn’t belong to you.  There is a fostering period during which you keep in touch with the shelter to let them know how things are going, and if the pet is a good fit for you.  On our first try, I walked out with Isis on the end of my leash.

It was not to be, and my heart broke.  She is such a great dog.   The Ibizan hound in her required constant attention when she was up and about.  I wasn’t being a wuss.  These dogs dart about with the agile movements of deer.  It is beautiful, even when it is happening in your living room, into the kitchen, into the office, into the entry way, back through the kitchen and into the living room again.

She would play catch for hours on end if you let her, and when you were spent, she’d be getting her second wind.  It was this, along with the facts that she needs to be around other dogs, too, and that she’s a nipper, that prompted us to take her back to the shelter.  The nipping didn’t bother me, but the kids weren’t impressed at all that she knew how to apply pressure without ever being a real “bite.”  And I know on an intellectual level that taking her back was the right thing for us to do, but I’m left wondering how in the space of one week, this dog put such a hole in my heart.  I posted on Facebook a couple days ago:

We fostered Isis the Ibizan/Shep mix for a week and she took a piece of my heart with her. Such a great dog, but she had more energy than the rest of us put together, and needs to be around other dogs. I hope she finds a great forever home soon. I was moping around the house yesterday after she went back to the shelter. Going back in there today to see if we could find the right fit with another dog, we found this gal “Inga” whom the girls promplty renamed “Habibi.” She’s afraid of her own shadow and is so lazy. Isis was back in her pen and licked my hand when I stopped to pet her, but she acted like she owns the place and was happy to be back with the others. Can’t wait for Habibi to come out of her shell. Shelters are heartbreaking places.

Isis is so full of life and fun and antics, I know there has to be someone out there looking for the great dog that she is.  She was mine for a week, but during that week, she was truly mine, and I’ve been mourning her absence like a death.

This dawg has gotta come out of her shell!

Now, as you saw in the FB post, we did come away from a second visit to the shelter with another dog whom the daughters dubbed “Habibi” which is Swedish for “my beloved.”  It seems she might have some Swedish Vallhund in her.  She’s a mongrel or a mutt, but there are enough points about her to suggest Vallhund runs deep in her ancestry.  She’s got the coarse black top coat covering her spine from the haunches to the tail, and the undercoat is thick and soft like down.  We’re talking face-burying fur here.

The only problem is that she was obviously neglected and never socialized.  It took her an entire evening of family lovin’ to get her tail out from between her legs.  Her movements during dreaming suggest different fears.  I am assuming she was always outside because there haven’t been any issues with house training.  She isn’t close to being out of her shell yet, but when she goes out, she sticks close and doesn’t want to explore yet, but when it is time to go back in she acts like you’re trying to play a trick on her.

“No, Baby (my shortened nickname for her), its okay.  You’re an indoor dog!”

When I got up this morning and made coffee, she didn’t signal or whimper or anything.  I opened the gate to let her out and she yawned and stretched and came out to greet me.  We went out for her to piddle.  After a week with Isis’s rambunctions, I was ready to play.   I went to the broom closet where I’d put Isis’s toys out of sight and grabbed a knotted rope that still had her scent on it and threw it for Habibi.  To my amazement she walked in the direction I threw it.  After sniffing it and tasting it, she decided it was hers.  I took it from her and tossed it and she retrieved and brought it back to me.  We did this for about five minutes.  My heart is right there on the horizon, waiting to pour sunlight into my psyche.  This dog just might work out.

“Isis, I still miss you, you goofball!  I wish we could have been your forever family, and the person who adopts you better realize what a gem you are and give you a fulfilling life.  Hope you don’t mind that we’re giving Habibi a try.  She’s only half your size with a tenth of your energy, but she seems to remember your scent from the shelter and rests gently on your old bed.”

More updates to come … just had to get that off my chest.

 

The Gatekeeper

If in a quiet moment on a sun lit park bench someone was to ask me what I most desire in life the answer would be simple, which is fitting because it would come from a simpleton.  What I desire most is that the Catholic faith be planted deeply in my children.  And in this damning post modern and post Christian cesspool of a culture we are swimming in, my greatest fear is that such dreams will be thwarted.

The greatest hurdle my kids might face is their father.  Are the other families in the pews in similar straits?  I have abounding doubts to that question.  I empathize with the late “Magister Johannes” John Senior who wrote in “The Restoration of Christian Culture”

“It is with a certain reserve that, like a janitor holding the door, I have urged others into rooms I have never myself entered; or like someone who had studied maps and read directions and diaries by travelers to a far country reporting such marvels as to make the place seem a terra aliena, I have awakened to some deep ancestral memory of my native country and King.”

I was cursed with a sense of humor that sorts belly laughs out of the most inappropriate subject matter.  Something inside me casts aside most reservations in commenting on the absurdities of our lot in life.  Over the years, my family has grown used to such outbursts, but it has taken too much of a toll and it would appear that many times such comments on absurdity have been taken to imply acceptance of immorality.

Should I state for the record that this is not the case?  I do so forcefully, now.

It also puts my children in a quandary when I do attempt to address certain topics near and dear to those who would cast off any moral restraints beyond those which have already or are still in the process of, being shed.

What is the antidote to that which I have poisoned?  Does a cure remain?

Perhaps it is what it always has been: The great and unutterable secret behind the “thou shalt nots.”  It is the burning fire of love with which our God burns for the souls of the children of men.  Should they get a true taste of that, I believe that the worthless trinkets we hold up to our eyes to block out the sun would be cast aside and be seen for the junk they are.

That has always been my ultimate goal, but my inappropriate laughter and deadpan social commentaries  could drown out the nine choirs of angels.  Am I alone the simpleton?

 

For a friend who knows who he is

Backstory:  This chapel has a history of having been vandalized.  When the most recent restorative work was done to it, a plexi wall was added, as well as a door with a deadbolt.  The plexi wall is notorious for denying attempts to photograph the interior.

It is hard to pan around to get the shot you want, because everything but the back wall must be shot at an angle through the reflective barrier.  You try for a clear shot, but there is always some reflection and background ghosting.  In this shot, I simply gave in.  The sun was at a good angle for explicit inclusion.

I’d have liked to get lower on the wall, but wouldn’t have gotten the rays to spray out like they did as they flooded the patina in the plexi.  All in all, a solid shot that spoke the words I wanted it to.