dr_lizardo

Well, I've done a little bit of my habitual wandering around on a bike. A couple of days ago I took a day off a little south of detroit, and I was debating with myself whether to head up north to detroit and see the city or head south to see lake erie. The latter was a lot closer and I was feeling like seeking out some mellowness so I headed south.

Sometimes it strikes me that there are a lot fewer city names in use than there are cities, and I suspect that a lot of times you can tell where the settlers of a western city came from by the names of the eastern cities they choose for where they moved out to. The area south of Detroit Michigan is strangely similar to New Jersey. Due east of the truck stop at exit 32 is the town of Trenton which has an Elizabeth Park. And like NJ that part of michigan is very marshy and heavily industrialized, and if you're at the shoreline you watch giant cargo ships passing by all day long.

I rode down the riverside towards lake erie and I found a mashlands park with a museum on it. There were boardwalks and trails through the marshes, and I when I went on one of tghe boardwalks I was kind of overwhelmed with the sounds of nature, the breeze through the trees and all the song of birds and insects. I've never seen so many wading birds and insect eating birds in my life. It was such a powerful impact in me that I just thought "the land is singing". I've been thinking about how one might think that before man arrived on the continent or on the planet that there was silence, but life is something which sings. My hometown of northampton mass has its own signature song of crickets, with the addition of various frogs depending on how near water you are. Long island has its own voice, a different sort of cricket sound. Down south they have cicadas loud as airplanes. Birds, amphibians, and insects sing a lot more than reptiles or mammals it seems, just from my impression, and man and his machines roar.

Today I had a little downtime at a rest stop on I-94 just inside Minnesota, leaving wisconsin. I noticed a fellow had a bike and he pointed out bike trail I could get to, so I went for a ride and came into Afton, Mn where the people are friendly, as in other random bicyclists just saying hello to me, people leaving expensive bicycles unlocked and unattended in front of stores. Some people here have that accent you hear in the movie Fargo. The roads in Michigan are terrible but the people are friendly, and so are the people in minnesota. I walked up into a country store type place and ended up talking for a while with some folks on rocking chairs on the porch. They said I don't look much like a truck driver, more like a college professor and I told then about my classics education, and we got to talking about history and word origins. I told them how on my bike ride there it had dawned on me that the word "coprolite" comes from the greek kopros "shit" and litos "stone". I was asked about how the word gay had come to mean homosexual. I guess one thing I dislike about a lot of average folks that I meet is their homophobia. My hometown of Northampton mass has a large gay community and one of my best friends is gay, and it vexes me to find so many otherwise perfectly nice people have this totally stupid mean-spirited dislike of homosexuals.

Whatever. I guess nobody's perfect.