FLCC> Skaneateles Sunday ride notes: the view from behind

Tue Aug 28 16:09:57 EDT 2007

The Skaneateles ride had a good turn-out despite inclement Nantucket-style
weather with visibility of about half a mile (pretraining for the next
P-Brest-P).  My surmisal (from a brief and breathless overlap at the top of
the lake) is that the lead group included Teri Barnic, Ruth Sherman, and
Stewart Wolsh.  Teri said Stewart was walking a dog in the park.  Looking
over at the park I saw in that rarified rainfed plutocratic atmosphere of
Skaneateles Town not Stewart but a bagpiper playing his pipes as a group of
heavily-garbed tourists clambered aboard a  motor yacht with varnished
mahagony and burnished brass trim that looked to be a set piece in an Agatha
Christie novel. White caps in the distance and a slow rain commencing, the
bagpiper was guilefully luring these wretched souls aboard ship to an
uncertain fate.  And Stewart was doing nothing about it.  Even if waterfront
home values along West Lake Road start in the $2M range, we humble
out-of-town visitors still expect a safe harbor!  

Those not in the lead group found safe harbor at La Patisserie, a truly fine
bakery located behind the Sherwood Inn.  Among those seated on the terrace
and scarfing down gourmet energy food such as cinnamon raison scones with
hot coffee were Henrik Spoon, Misty McPhee, Eli Robinson, Mary Bouchard,
Sara Strickland, Marilyn Dispensa, Scott Zimmerman, Bobby Nunnink, Vanessa
McCaffery, Mike O’Donnell, and Jim Millar (Southern Jim). As we were
saddling up to depart, Bob Nunnink discovered a classy Nordstrom HYPERLINK
"http://shop.nordstrom.com/C/2376184/0~2376778~2372808~2372904~2376184?mediu
mthumbnail=Y&P=6&origin=styleCollectionPager_numbers&pbo=2376184"silver
slipper near the..ah..trash can. This heirloom is the bejeweled “Me too
Nolano flat”  on the lower right. I tucked it into my aerobars and think it
will make a fitting award for this year’s winning C rider on Pink Slipper
night. 

Sunday’s ride was replete with riders riding at their own reggae tempo with
or without regalia. Evan Palmer-Young arrived out of the blue and direct
from Ithaca as per usual. Impetuously, I had ridden from Locke, parking and
joining three cyclists who I only then learned were doing Owasco, not
Skaneateles. I arrived at the start on 41A about 25 minutes late.
Proceeding north, I queried the owner of Brown Dog Antiques, noting the
large brown dog lying in the parking area. [It didn’t take Gary Larson to
imagine a prospective customer stepping down from a huge SUV and asking the
owner, “Excuse me, was that your chocolate lab out there?”]  No, the
unsmiling (mind-reading?) owner had just arrived and so hadn’t seen any
riders.  Later, a man picking cucumbers with two children said he had seen
10-15 riders “about 15 minutes ago” and then “two riders about two minutes
ago.”  Back out on the road, I heard a horn blaring behind me and pulled off
onto the shoulder just as a speeding vehicle blew by me at high speed with
perhaps 12” -18” to spare.  Adrenalin kicking in, I hoped to chase down this
would-be homicidal maniac, but to no avail. (“Well, Officer, perhaps it was
only reckless endangerment.”)  Later I caught up with Bob and Vanessa
(Vanessa had flatted) and learned that they had had a similar experience.
But in their instance, there was traffic blocking the road and they had
caught up with Mr. Close Shaver.  The driver listened to Bob’s angry
complaint with a phlegmatic, “Whatever you say, fellah” attitude.  I
understood Bob to have reported the incident replete with license plate to
the State Police.   

Marcie Robinson was another late arriver in Skaneateles.  She skipped the
Patisserie in order to get a leg up on the rump group.  Southern Jim also
struck out on his own, but we reeled him back in in time for another
coalescing in front of Borodino Hall, which had been the Spafford Town Hall
in 1870 and then the Borodino Grange No. 1272 from 1912 to 1997.  Once it
was fairly certain that Mike would recover from a flat—he has recently been
the “other half” of Swan Cycles after all--we did the right turn onto
Nunnery Road, again in light and nonetheless nunless misting rain. 

At this point in the trip, I confess I fell into the thrall of astronomer
Henrik Spoon, who was kind enough to indulge me with six or more miles of
narrated Astronomy 101.  Spoon works on the Spitzer Space Telescope project,
which had just celebrated the fourth anniversary of the launch of the SST
the day before. The Spitzer—a telescope viewing the infrared spectrum—has a
price tag about $800M and is one of the four so-called NASA Great
Observatories (i.e., last of the mega projects). The Hubble Space Telescope
is the best known of this group.  In its four years of operations, Spitzer
has provided unprecedented infrared views of objects as diverse as asteroids
in our own solar system to galaxies at the edge of the observable universe.
Recent discoveries include the first detection of water vapor on a planet
orbiting another star and a titanic galactic collision five billion
light-years away. Henrik expounded on the topic of the worrisome expansion
of the universe.   As it turns out, drafting behind mother earth is not cool
if you are the SST.  Heat radiating from the earth reduces the clarity of
the SST’s view of the universe, so astronomers have allowed it to gap back
about a quarter of a rotation as both the earth and SST orbit around the
sun. 

Will an unstoppable expansion lead us into a loathsome state of becoming a
non-galaxy I asked?  Henrik explained that objects in our own Milky Way do
not take part in the expansion of the Universe, because the internal gravity
within the Galaxy is high enough to keep its components (stars & gas clouds)
bound. The same holds for our solar system. It is on the scale of entire
galaxies that the expansion occurs: galaxies drift away from each other, the
so-called Hubble expansion. But (wonderful view of Skaneateles Lake off to
our right and far below) if galaxies exist in a so-called “cluster”, they
can actually approach each other. That is why the Andromeda galaxy and the
Milky Way will collide in 3 billion years, despite the expansion of the
Universe. 

Henrik: “Some would call this a matter of bad luck, but I would not regret
seeing the majestic Andromeda galaxy a little closer. You can now barely see
it with the naked eye in the constellation Andromeda, but in a billion years
or so it should be already as prominently visible as the Magellanic clouds
(satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way galaxy)....”

After leaving Onondaga County and entering Cortland County, Henrik and I
glided down into the village of  Scott and turned off 41 onto a rapid
decline to the bottom of the glacially-steepened valley. We stopped at the
very bottom where about four run-down houses are clustered at the
intersection of Grout Brook Road and West Scott Road (which is methinks
about 150 meters north of the divide between the south-flowing Susquehanna
Watershed and the north-flowing St. Lawrence Watershed, but here called
Grout Brook).  As my feckless camelback was again dry, I stopped to ask for
water from a couple standing in front of an especially beat-up house and
their respective rusted vehicles fully loaded with the clutter of daily
existence.  Henrik wandered off to unload excess fluid.  Can impoverished
rural people—who kindly offered me water from a tap above a sink filled with
unwashed dishes—be respectfully classified as “rural punk”?  We didn’t
exchange names, but “Mr. Grout Brook,” who like me is in his latter 50s, was
sporting a subdued, low-profile Mohawk haircut dyed red. His heavy-set arms
had little dermal real estate not already committed to florid red
Rococco-style tattoos.  “Mrs. Grout Brook” was relatively “au naturel” with
only a spread eagle tattoo enhancing her chest above the neckline of her
loose-fitting blouse.  Her ample breasts might have been less distracting if
she had chosen to wear a bra that day.  

As Henrik and I were saddling up, I happened to ask the “Brooks” about the
most direct way back to the Colonial Inn. Each of them had such a
dramatically different view of the correct route that I rather regretted
having asked at all.  It was clearly a stressful day for them.  As tenants,
their rented home had been sold from under them and they were that very day
engrossed in moving to another community some ten miles east of Cortland.
But, despite the stress, they were exceedingly kind and hospitable hosts.
After we took our leave and started our ascent of the opposite side of the
valley, I realized the visit with the “Brooks” for Henrik had been as if we
had crashed and woken up on some other planet. “In Holland, we just don’t
have poverty like that!” 

We soon caught up with Bob, Vanessa, and Mike.  Vanessa’s chain had gotten
royally wedged in her bike’s chain stay and it had taken some time for “the
men” to set things right.  As my new shift cable and derailleur needed
tuning, Mike performed an impromptu tune-up at the top of the next hill,
while Vanessa, Bob, and Henrik  forged ahead and managed to drift off course
despite having detailed flcc maps in hand. Henrik suggests each group have
GPS next year; but my guess is that pre-ride counseling that “Bear Swamp” is
NOT dangerous will prevent folks from swinging so far to the west of it. 

Back at the instant road-side tune-up, “There’s a dead click,” Mike observed
when a shifter click failed to elicit any chain shift from one cog to
another. Back en route, Mike  and I peeled off from the designated loop and
bushwhacked our way westward toward Moravia and Locke taking Laty Road down
into the Dresserville Creek valley to Dresserville and then finally west-NW
(obviously our cerebral GPSs were on the fritz) over the ridge on Fillmore
Road past the site of the cabin where Millard Fillmore, 13th president, had
been born.  No one lives out there any more. Indeed Summerhill and
Sempronius Townships appear to be the most heavily-forested portions of
Cayuga County with coyote densities far denser than in Fillmore’s youth
(sorry, I’m makin’ that up).  

At yoga later in the day, I learned from Amanda Shenstone that Mark
Shenstone and Emanuel Cisteros had led a group training for the AIDS ride
around Cayuga Lake. Alas, for me, that route has never had so much appeal
after Alice’s Junkyard Café closed down at the intersection of 20 and 89.
Alice, most of your clients smoked like chimneys, but you ran one hell of a
memorable diner!  The intersection’s never been the same since.

Ride safe, 

John

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