Days 89-91 Weedsport, N.Y. to Pittsfield, Mass.

 

Days 89-91

Weedsport, N.Y. to Pittsfield, Mass.

      I left Weedsport intending to visit my cousin, Andy Beach, for the first time in many years. As I was cycling towards Delta Lake State Park where he keeps a camper for much of the summer, received a text that his wife, Michelle, has just tested positive for Covid. Though I was very disappointed, this unexpected turn of events allowed to get caught up on my schedule. My sister and mother are scheduled to meet me in Worcester, Mass. on Friday, August 18th and I needed to speed up to make it there on time.

      As mentioned in a previous post, I called Denise who agreed to meet me in Amsterdam, N.Y. and to spend a day exploring that section of the trail. This thrilled me and encouraged me to pedal faster so as to be there when she arrived. The bike trail is particularly attractive in approaching Amsterdam. The surface is improved and the rider can view the rolling hills as the trail hugs the banks of the Mohawk River.

      After exploring the area for a day, Denise offered me and my bike a ride to Lee, Mass on her way back to Saugus. It just so happened that this saved me a 1,500 foot climb up the Berkshire Mountains. She dropped me off in town and I headed north to Pittsfield, Mass. I was planning to bike through the outskirts of Lenox, where I spent a good bit of my childhood and still holds a special place in my heart.

     If you inform the GPS that you are cycling between points you are directed away from all paved roads. This is not always desirable. In this instance, it took me along the gravel road which passes through the October Mountain State Forest which would do significant damage to automobiles. The hills were steep and the terrain more treacherous than anything I had experienced in South Dakota. There had been heavy rain the previous night which made it necessary to push my bike through a mile of heavy mud. The mosquitoes were ferocious and delighted in attacking someone whose hands are occupied with a rebellious bicycle. Though the scenery was beautiful, I was not in a state to appreciate it.

      After eight miles, the road became paved and the forest gave way to small farms. I had reached New Lenox Road which was the street where I had lived as a young child. The point where the pavement ended was very familiar to me. As a child I was given a bicycle and free rein to explore wherever my curiosity led me. Although my curiosity was great, it was not enough to push me into the forest. The forest appeared to be a hostile place. I now know my hesitation was well founded

     When I reached the familiar pavement, I was transported back in time. The farms and houses of my childhood were still there. The unique smell of the vegetation triggered powerful memories. The road continued over a bridge crossing the Housatonic River. I remembered nearly 60 years ago when that bridge had been completed and was named after a local boy who had been killed in Viet Nam. The naming ceremony contained a real 21 gun salute which made a profound impact on me.

     I peddled half a mile further and reached St. Helena’s Chapel, the small, rural Episcopal Church where my father had served in the 60’s. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was surprised that the door was unlocked. Upon entering I was able to locate the pew I had once sat as a child. The smell of dust, books, bricks, wood stain, flooded my brain. On that quiet Saturday afternoon, I could hear the birds outside sounding just as they had in the distant past.

     Sitting in the pew, I drank in my surroundings and memories of forgotten events returned to me. When I had last sat in that spot, everyone I had ever known was still alive. I remembered some of the people who had once occupied that place. I remember this as a place where even adults became quiet. In my universe, adults were always speaking and I felt that every one of them had something of great importance to say, though I generally found their sentiments incomprehensible. I remembered the woman sitting in front of me who throughout the winter would wear a coat with a collar made of fox. The fox’s head was still attached as she sat he looked at me look with his glass eyes. This both fascinated and repulsed me. I found myself wanting to pet it, but suspected that would be considered inappropriate.

     When I last sat in that place, I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that adults could sometimes be cruel. It was clear to me that children could be cruel (generally demonstrated the millisecond an adult left the room), but the gentle conspiracy of kindness agreed to by adults protected me and my peers from seeing the destruction wrought by fearful and powerful men. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were names I had not learned. MLK was still alive, students had not been killed at Kent State, and the Pentagon Papers had not been released. It was not considered important that elementary school children know the word “impeach”.

     A large part of this conspiracy of kindness was carried out by those who worshipped every Sunday at St. Helena’s Chapel. These adults who were so strangely quiet in church were delightfully noisy at other times. They created a space which welcomed me and other children. I remember some who clearly found it awkward to talk with children. This created a more level playing field, because I found it difficult to talk with adults.

     When the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, was hospitalized with a serious illness, he fell in love with his nurse. He wrote this poem to express the awkwardness and power of this love:

Love is not itself

Until it knows it is frail

And can go wrong

It does not run

Like a well-oiled machine…

Love runs best

When it seems to break down…

     None of the people gathered in that church ever stated that they loved me. I certainly never stated that I loved them. It was the gentle (and sometimes very peculiar) souls that gathered in that place touched me as I sat alone in that chapel.

     I was reminded of the wonderful passage written by Frederick Buechner in his book “The Sacred Journey” about the great figures of his childhood:

“…How they do live, the giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they still live in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us-through them we come to understand ourselves-in new ways too. Who knows what the “communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just that ware all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of lift itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I assume-“increasing in knowledge and love of Thee” says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength” which sounds like business enough for anybody-and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever ne shore may await them; but is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.”

     I know now that horrible things were happening in the world as I lived in that place in blissful ignorance. I am, however, grateful their conspiracy delayed the day when I would eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

     I climbed back on my bicycle to continue to ride to Pittsfield, where Matt Albert was preparing dinner for me. The silence of the ride allowed me to digest the thoughts and feelings welling up inside of me.