City cycling for the “modern gal”

For over a decade, Katie Dailey has bicycled around London, “one of the most congested and overpopulated cities in the world.” Despite countless hours dealing with the hazards of cycling in an urban area, she still doesn’t know “why anyone uses any other mode of transport to get anywhere.”

What surprises her is that in rush hour when she looks around she’s “almost always the only girl.” On weekends, “there are plenty of ladies riding around,” but “hardly any on the busy roads when there’s traffic about.”

Heels on Wheels is a breezy little book addressed to “the modern gal who would like to get back in the saddle after a short (or very long) hiatus.” It is guaranteed, the publisher’s blurb declares, “to make you fall in love with cycling all over again.”

The six chapter headings indicate the range of topics that Daily cycles through: Getting Started, How To Incorporate Cycling Into Your Lifestyle, Cycling Safely, Parking (Or How To Ensure Your Bike Isn’t Stolen), ‘Just One last Question…’, and Bike Maintenance.

More important than the range of issues is the way that Dailey treats the subjects:

• She writes in a trimmed down, casual, almost flippant style, with much of her phrasing drawn from what I presume is the slang style of the modern English gal. She is determined to avoid sounding like someone who represents the bicycling culture.
• She deals with basic issues such as choosing a bike that is suitable for women who want to ride comfortably, safely, and efficiently while traveling around doing ordinary things like going to work and shopping.
• Dailey explains some aspects about cycling that might be hard to understand, such as why “big, squashy seats aren’t necessarily more comfortable – the saddle that has given me the least grief in a decade of city cycling is shaped like a stork’s beak and is as hard as nails.”
• She cuts through some of the issues that arise by flat out stating her opinion as being right, thereby dismissing other ideas on the subject. Dailey is not the only writer on cycling subjects who adopts this same strategy (most of them men). Strongly opinionated myself, I agree with some of the assertions by all of these writers and disagree with others. My disagreements with Dailey may be caused, in part, because I’m a traditional American guy who rides hard rather than a modern English gal, who rides around town all of the time.

Dailey’s chapter on riding safely states a point of view that is clear, firm, and right for all cyclists who are old enough to cycle on city streets and other public roads. “The key way to be safe on the road as a cyclist is to be as visible and assertive as you can possibly be.

“Recent studies have suggested women are more likely to get hit on the roads because we cycle prudently and unassertively – tucking ourselves into the pavement where we can’t be seen and hanging back at traffic lights.”

She counsels her readers: “Position yourself at the front of the traffic at lights and never, EVER pavement hug when it comes to a turn as you simply won’t be seen by big vehicles turning left [which American readers should translate as “right”].

As the above quotation and note illustrate, the chapter on cycling safely, which I find to be forthright and correct in its major content, is written for English readers who drive on the left side of the streets. Dailey explains that the book “is written from a leftie point of view, i.e. right hand drivers on the left-hand side of the road. Simply reverse the instructions if you drive on the right.”

If publishers want American gals to make full use of the book, they should publish an edition that does the reversing so that the readers don’t have to. An American edition would benefit from translation of some of the slang into language more likely to be understood and appreciated by modern gals whose English is common, everyday American.

Because Dailey writes for women, she discusses several topics that do not pertain to men—cycling when pregnant and cycling in skirts and high heels, for example.

Even so the book has much to offer to the modern guy who has been thinking that he ought to get back to biking. The book reads quickly, and guys as well as gals will be helped as they try to choose a “trusty steed, stay safe on the road, fix a puncture and select the best lock” for their bicycles.”

40 years with bike nashbar

 

40 years ago, I was in the early stages of becoming a strong adult cyclist. My son Mike and I had entry-level ten-speed Raleighs and were reading about bikes, doing vigorous training rides, and beginning to think about tours like Ohio’s Tour of the Scioto River Valley.

We had already subscribed to Gene Portuesi’s mail order catalog, Cyclo-Pedia which had started publication in 1937, and were learning about exotic components that were no where to be seen in bike shops in Indianapolis where we lived. Portuesi’s catalog included strong advice about touring and many aspects of serious club cycling.

At this point, Arni Nashbar in Youngstown, Ohio, started his own mail order business by publishing a catalog entitled bike warehouse. Early in its run, we put our names on the mailing list, and it’s been coming to my mailbox ever since. About ten years later, the name changed to bike nashbar, the mailing address has changed to Crab Orchard, West Virginia.

Another young entrepreneur, Chuck Sink of Marion, Indiana, started another mail order business from his home north of Indianapolis. We received his catalog during the short period of time that Chuck stayed in the business.

Mike and I visited the small show room in his home, and that’s where I first saw a Mercian frameset, a bright red work of art. A year or two later, I bought a blue Mercian with beautiful lugwork at Action Sports, a bike shop in Beaverton, an upscale suburb of Portland, my home town.

Catalogs in the early days differed greatly from the garish, glossy publications that come through the mail now. As the 40th anniversary issue of bike nashbar explains, “the original issues had pages full of line-drawings, product listings, and the occasional photograph of models in shorty-shorts and jersey graphics best lost in time.”

My list has three items that depict the changes in catalog design and character.

• In contrast to the full color productions now published, the early catalogs were printed in black and white on off-white paper. Illustrations were largely line drawings or sketches.
• The early catalogs tried to tell readers all that they would need to know about the items described. Since the internet was not yet a part of ordinary life, additional information could be obtained only through long-distance phone calls.
• Most of the catalog was devoted to accessories and equipment, with only a few pages describing the short list of jerseys and chamois-lined wool shorts.

I don’t know why bike nashbar still comes to my house since I rarely buy anything from the catalog. Bike shops abound in Portland, and I can usually find exactly what I want, with the benefit of advice from knowledgeable personnel. Buying from bike shops costs more most of the time, but I get personal treatment, some of it gratis because I’m a regular. Bike shops have sales, too, so careful shopping keeps costs reasonable.

I’m glad to get bike nashbar every now and then. It gives me a sense of what’s happening in the bike market. Even though much has changed in these 40 years, the anniversary issue of the catalog says, “Arni’s desire to provide value cycling goods never wavered.”

My congratulations to a long-lived publication in the American bike world. As long as bike nashbar keep coming, I’ll keeping reading it. And maybe even buy something now and then.

Cycling, science diplomacy, and the fresh water crisis

Shared Borders Shared Waters: Israeli-Palestinian and Colorado River Basin Water Challenges by Sharon B. Megdal, Robert G. Varady, and Susanna Eden (CRC Press, 2013)

Of course, I gave my permission when Susanna Eden, PhD, asked if she could use my photo of the San Pedro River as cover art on a new book entitled Shared Borders Shared Waters. I had taken the picture from the bridge on Arizona Highway 82 near Tombstone, while bicycling through the region on PAC Tour’s desert camp. Later, I had used it on blogs about roads and rivers in Southern Arizona.

Eden and two colleagues at the University of Arizona were editing a forthcoming book on Israeli-Palestinian and Colorado River Basin Water Challenges. My photo would be paired with one of the Jordan River. My photo, by the way, is the one on the lower right corner of the book.

Since I have always thought of myself as a writer rather than a photographer, I was surprised by the request and therefore all the readier to give my consent.

Furthermore, the topic of their book interests me greatly. While living in Arizona for several post-retirement years, and as I continue cycling there during the winters, I have become increasingly aware of the history of crises because of water in the arid Southwest. My one tour of Israel and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) alerted me to the impending ecological, political, and human crisis that is forming in that region because of the limited supply of fresh water.

Eden and her colleagues show the similarity of the Arizona-Mexico and Israel-Palestine ecosystems and the resultant issues over fresh water. Cycling through places like Arizona and West Texas, where the pressures are mounting quickly gives me a heightened awareness of the challenges facing human society everywhere. In a land with little precipitation, limited aquifers, and rapidly growing population, something has to give.

The book is based on the Arizona, Israeli, and Palestinian Water Management and Policy Workshop that too place at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2009. Sponsors included UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme and three centers at the University: the Water Resources Research Center, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Financial support came from several sources.

Since my copy of Shared Borders Shared Waters has just arrived, I have had time to read only a few pages. Clearly, it is a substantial book, with chapters by thirty contributors from around the world. At some point in the future, I will write more about the ideas, issues, and conclusions in the book.

It is a substantial volume, replete with charts, graphs, and photos, many in color. The “normal price” is $99.95, but if you order it before May 15, 2013, you can buy it for $79.00, with free shipping. Ordering information appears on the advertising card below.

One aspect of the book, which the editors call “science diplomacy,” is especially interesting to me. Here’ how they describe it:

“Across the world, the history of contentious water issues confirms that the resolution of such issues can engender collaboration rather than divisiveness. Experience has shown that researchers who are sensitive to sociopolitical conditions often can help avoid or resolve conflict by serving as neutral experts, offering assistance through reasoned, independent analysis” (p. xii).

This kind of science we need. And more diplomacy like this, too!

Still looking for the right tires

Jan Heine Measuring Speed

My first serious adult bike (an entry level Raleigh, circa 1971) had 27 in wheels with gum wall tires that carried 75 psi pressure. I was happy with this “high performance” arrangement until I visited Bud’s Bike Shop while teaching in a summer session in Claremont, California. There I saw (and bought) skin wall tires that became my standard from that time forward.

I soon upgraded my bike and started using 700 cc wheels with presta valves. For many years 23 mm tires, with folding bead, pumped to 120 psi were my normal equipment. This arrangement, I believed, was a nice compromise between high performance and high dependability. Except for the steady rise in price, I was content.

Then I started reading Bicycle Quarterly, edited and published by Jan Heine in Seattle. With an earlier career in racing and continuing active involvement in top-level randonneuring, Jan knew bicycle technology and performance very well, both in the United States and in Europe. He and his cycling friends in Seattle were especially interested in the design and performance of classic European road bikes.

I was surprised by the conclusions they were drawing concerning the effect of tire width and pressure upon performance and comfort. Contrary to conventional wisdom, skinny tires (20 and 23 mm), pumped to pressures well above 120 psi did not contribute to fast times except in highly specialized conditions.

On the open roads where most of us ride, even when racing, wider and softer tires are actually faster. They support their conclusions with carefully documented procedures for timing the performance of tires of various sizes and types by well-known manufacturers.

As a result of their studies, I changed how I equip my bikes. On my classic Mercian, which I unwisely modified fifteen years ago, the largest I can carry are 25 mm. On my Waterford winter bike, I use 32 mm tires, and on my Davidson I am currently riding 28 mm but have been thinking of changing to 30 or 32.

The new issue of Bicycle Quarterly (Spring 2013) updates the studies that the Seattle group has been doing. It contains ten articles on the general topic of tire performance. Some of them revise and republish earlier reports. The writers compare clinchers and tubulars, the effect of tread on speed, the comparative performance of specific tires on smooth vs. rough roads, and the effect of “drop” on performance.

Although I do not fully understand the technical material that is included in some of the entries, I come away with four conclusions.

First, there are measurable differences in performance of tires related to materials out of which they are made, their design, their weight, and the pressure they carry. The combination of these factors interacts with road surfaces so that some tires are measurably faster under some circumstances than under others.

Second, for most cyclists the variations are hard to discern under normal cycling conditions. Several of the essays in this issue carry statements similar to this paragraph from “Choosing the Correct Tire Pressure.”

“Fortunately, tire pressure makes only a small difference in tire performance. It is far more important to choose your tires well. Once you have mounted supple high-performance tires on your bike, then you don’t need to worry much about pressure” (p. 44).

Third, several factors affect how fast cyclists can ride and how long they can stay in the saddle. At this stage in my cycling career, the benefits of wider and softer tires, light weight and supple in design, are increasingly persuasive.

Fourth, tires with these characteristics are also reliable on the road. Of course, flats are always possible given the character of streets and highways, but tires that combine comfort and performance are probably more resistant to punctures than the skinny, high-pressure tires I used to ride.

I want to bicycle in carefree fashion, which means, in part, that I don’t want to worry about my tires. Even checking pressure is a bother. That’s why I like the way Jan concludes one of his essays. There are no “hard and fast rules,” he writes.

“On my own bike, the tire pressure changes over time, because I only inflate my tires when the pressure obviously has become too low. As it turns out, that seems to put me right into the sweet spot of tire pressure” (p. 44).

And that’s the very spot in which I want to ride! 

One more trip to Bisbee

Bicycling is a way of traveling that encourages people to spend time in places they ride through: to look around at the distinctive buildings, meander down quiet streets, savor the character of coffee shops, talk with people who live there. This kind of cycling, as John R. Stilgoe explains in his book Outside Lies Magic, is a liberal art because it liberates and often reveals secrets about the built environment in which we live.

Some cyclists, and I’m one of them, wonder about the history of places we pass through. We look for bookstores and local museums where we can learn the story of how these places came to be the way they are.

When traveling with tour groups, however, we are pushed by the schedule and tied to the designated route. There is little time to explore these interesting places. Even when I’m traveling on my own, the thicker story of these places often comes only after I’ve ridden through them and have done the research that I should have done before the trip.

The importance of learning about places before the trip has come clear to me as I read about Bisbee, Arizona. Even though I’ve bicycled to Bisbee, this unique mountain community, five times during the past fifteen years, I have failed until now to discover how this old little place came to be the way it is.

The door into Bisbee’s past was opened for me by Richard Shelton’s award-winning book Going Back to Bisbee, which he published in 1992. I already knew that Bisbee was largely the creation of the copper industry, which flourished in southern Arizona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Shelton, however, explains the industry’s history. He characterizes the social and economic layers of Bisbee’s people over the years, coming as they did from several parts of Europe and continuing many of their old-world patterns. Shelton also describes the economic vulnerability of the town and its people because of the volatility of the one industry upon which everyone depended. It is a hard story.

He helps us understand the challenges that come from building a community along the sides of steep canyons. Obviously, it takes strong legs, lungs, and heart to clamber up and down from one level to another. What should have been obvious, but had failed to register in my mind, was how vulnerable the town is to flooding because of these steep canyons that flow together into the main canyon where Bisbee’s central district is located.

Until reading Shelton, I knew nothing about the history of fires in Bisbee and the successive rebuilding of the town until finally a more fire resistant set of central buildings came into being.

Despite Shelton’s deep personal attachment to Bisbee and the romantic glow that he has infused into this text, Bisbee’s past remained largely a collection of facts until I read Conrad Richter’s novel Tacey Cromwell, published in 1942. Even knowing about this book I owe to Shelton who cites it a few times in his volume.

The story revolves four people whose lives unfold over a twenty-year period in Bisbee that is climaxed by a great fire, probably modeled after a conflagration that occurred in 1908. Tacey Cromwell, a prostitute from New Mexico who wants to start a new life, and her companion Gaye Oldaker, bring “Nugget” his eight-year-old runaway half brother with them and establish residence on O.K. Street on Youngblood Hill.

Soon after they arrive, a mine disaster kills their neighbor, a widower with infant son and eight-year-old daughter “Seely” who now are destitute. Tacey takes them in. The novel describes the systematic way in which Tacey molds all four of them into lives that are consistent with the patterns of the upper class people in town.

The crises around which the story unfolds are caused by the rigidity of the “better” people and their unwillingness to accept Tacey because of her former way of life. It is a somber book that in some ways ends the way it begins, with Tacey and Seely, Gaye and Nugget together again.

As we follow Seely and Nugget in their fast trips up and down stairways, over fences and walls, through yards, and across dangerous spaces, we begin to sense the precariousness of Bisbee’s geography. As we listen to the conversations with neighbors and townspeople, we hear various half-Englished dialects and recognize the sure signs of prejudicial attitudes among the more established layers of the social order. The Bisbee that I have experienced as a built environment becomes a multi-layered human community.

Now that I’m beginning to understand this strange place, I want to go back one more time, when I’m on my own schedule. The trip should include a night at the Copper Queen Hotel, with plenty of time for meandering.

One more trip to Bisbee! Maybe next year.

Bicycling Back to Bisbee

Going Back to Bisbee, by Richard Shelton (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). This book won the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Again this year my bike ride in Southern Arizona was an intellectual journey disguised as vigorous physical activity. It provided the incentive for reading about the historical, religious, and geographical territory through which I was cycling on week two of PAC Tour’s Winter Training Camp.

In an earlier blog (“A melancholy cyclist riding along the Santa Cruz River,” posted February 22, 2013) I reviewed a book, which I read before the trip, that interprets the history of the portion of the Sonoran Desert through which I would be cycling: The Lessening Stream, by environmental historian Michael F. Logan. This modest stream, scarcely 200 miles long, is one of the defining features of this year’s journey.

It is difficult to imagine how a book could differ from Logan’s more completely than the volume that I read during the ride itself: Going Back to Bisbee by poet and university professor Richard Shelton.

Whereas Logan’s self-avowed materialist point of view generated a strong sense of frustration and futility as I thought about the way that human activity has affected this desert river and its basin, Shelton’s personal narrative conveys a lilting sense of love for this arid river valley and its flora and fauna (including the people who have lived here over the centuries). Instead of melancholy, Shelton inspires joyful wonder.

Unlike Logan who grew up in Southern Arizona and moved away, Shelton first came to this country in 1956 as a draftee in the U.S. Army and has made this “baked land of chaotic hills and valleys” his home ever since.

Going Back to Bisbee begins on a monsoon summer day as Shelton drives his old van from Tucson to Bisbee—up the grade on AZ 83 to Sonoita, east on AZ 82 over the San Pedro River, south on AZ 80 through Tombstone, and onward over Mule Pass to Bisbee. It takes 319 pages of beautifully crafted prose for this poet-English professor to fill in details about the drive itself and the many associations that it brings to mind.

He describes the character of the Arizona monsoon season, portrays the strange beauty of yucca and other “stand-up-straight” desert plants that thrive in this dry land that has two rainy seasons. Shelton gives a detailed account of the ferocity of the marauding Apaches who terrorized this land for three hundred years.

His accounts of ghost towns in Southern Arizona are based on his own scrambles through the desolate places where crude piles of rain-destroyed adobe, now overpowered by mesquite thickets, are all that remain.

Whereas Logan stands back from his subject, trying to describe it with analytical objectivity, Shelton draws close, embracing this strange place with love. What Wordsworth said of poetry can be ascribed to Going Back to Bisbee. It “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

As Shelton drives through fields overrun with cholla cacti, he explains in full detail the particularly painful characteristics of this desert plant. When he stops to watch a handsome coyote lazing along a pool of water in a canyon, he provides an extended discussion of the remarkable family life of coyotes and, as an extended aside, the ill-fated romance between one of his own dogs and a coyote from the Tucson hills.

Bisbee

The deep humanity of Shelton’s narrative is most fully expressed in the last third of the book in which he describes the geographical, architectural, and human history of Bisbee itself where he taught school for two years immediately after his two-year stint at Fort Huachuca.

The sensitive portraits of his junior high students during the late 1950s inspire confidence in the teaching profession. Shelton describes the complex ethnic mix of Bisbee’s neighborhoods and explains how the culture of copper mining has created this town that “never grew up, just got older and older.”

As religious historian, I was especially interested in Shelton’s characterization of Bisbee as caught between the hardships of life and the terrors of a Calvinist God, both of which were brought to Bisbee by the Phelps Dodge mining company.

The hardships of life, manifested in Brewery Gulch and the many brothels of earlier times, are self evident because of the rigors and dangers of mining and its destructive impact upon geography and the ecosystem, and also the fluctuations between prosperity and privation that are characteristic of a mining economy.

Less obvious is the religious side of the contrast, represented by Bisbee’s Presbyterian Church. The Phelps-Dodge-James family consisted of New England Calvinists, who brought their theology and their desire for order and propriety to this town that their company controlled.

Neither side of the social conflict won, and the Bisbee that Shelton remembers in the late 1980s, when he writes this book, contains ample evidence of both elements still living in tension.

Most of what Shelton tells us in this book was new to me, even though I have bicycled through this land several times. And now, having read this travel narrative, I am inspired to follow Shelton’s example by going back to Bisbee one more time.

A melancholy cyclist riding along the Santa Cruz River

The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River, by Michael F. Logan (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2002)

Turkey Creek in the Canelo Hills

As American rivers go, Arizona’s Santa Cruz isn’t very much, 205 miles from its headwaters in the Canelo Hills to its confluence with the Gila River near Phoenix where both streams exist as dry washes most of the time.

My interest in this little desert stream is based, in part, on the fact that on four days of PAC Tour’s Border Towns bicycling event we’ll be riding up and down in two valleys that are part of the Santa Cruz’s drainage basin. A second reason is that this river is a useful paradigm for the environmental history of rivers great and small across America’s West and in many other places in the world.

To understand the river’s history, it is necessary to have a comprehensive account of its life as far back as we can get it, with special attention given to the forces, natural and human-caused, that have affected it. Environmental historian Michael F. Logan, whose family settled on the Santa Cruz a few miles north of Nogales in 1880, has provided this narrative. Its usefulness is increased by the fact that he intends to avoid a moralistic overlay to the narrative. Evaluations of good and bad and right and wrong are largely absent, leaving it to the readers to develop their own interpretation of the story’s meaning.

As we bicycle along the historic course of the river and its tributary streams, we can ignore its history. We can focus full attention upon the ride itself and give little thought to the way this river has entered into the human history of the societies that have endured through this desert landscape. All that we have to do is keep to the designated route and revel in the delights of Arizona’s winter sunshine and broad vistas.

As a history-oriented cyclist, however, I keep thinking about the human stories that have unfolded along the roads over which I bicycle mile after mile. As I travel along the Santa Cruz waterways, Logan’s book will provide a multi-faceted narrative that interweaves the interaction of natural and human factors in three eras which he describes as archaic, modern, and postmodern.

My mindset will differ from Logan’s, however. He considers himself to be a materialist, and therefore resists seeing this history as a story of decline. As a religious historian, I pay attention to meaning as well as to fact, and it is more difficult for me than it is for Logan to resist the tendency to develop the morality of the actions that have taken place in the Santa Cruz basin. Topics that interest me include this short list:

1)    The capacity of this little stream to support extensive human development, including the Tucson metropolitan area, vast acreages of irrigated farming, and an extensive mining industry. Even though the Santa Cruz is a diminishing stream, the reservoirs provided by its ancient aquifer continue to support a complex industrial society.

2)     The ability of humankind to alter the forces of nature. Logan shows how even the Hohokam—the “Ancient One”—were able to change the river’s flow by their simple but highly efficient irrigation systems. In later years, and especially in the most recent postmodern era, this human capacity beggars the imagination.

3)    The strange, disquieting character of what Logan describes as the postmodern era. Even Logan’s determination to avoid moralizing escapes him as he describes the “postmodern vision of the river” as “chaotic and surrealistic.” People with this point of view completely dissociate the river, and all of the politics revolving around its use, from anything that is important to them in their daily lives—and this despite the fact that the Santa Cruz and its aquifer continue to “be central to the survival of human society in the valley.”

4)    Logan’s calm confidence that our culture, like that of the Hohokam more than six hundred years ago, will disappear because the natural world will no longer be able to sustain our way of life. “Just as a river existed before human cultures arrived in the valley, . . .a river will no doubt continue to exist in one manifestation or another long after the last human culture, and I, have passed from the scene” (p. 11).

Despite the somber character of Logan’s eschatology, I tend to share it. As a religious historian I am drawn to the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, but as I bicycle through life the plot of world history seems to be fundamentally tragic.

This bicycle ride through the Santa Cruz basin, enjoyable as it is bound to be, is likely to send me home even more uneasy about our human prospects than when I began the ride.

Padre on Horseback

The Padre on Horseback: A sketch of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J., Apostle to the Pimas, by Herbert Eugene Bolton (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1963, 1986; originally published 1932)

The person I nominate to be the inspirational example for multi-day bicyclists in the desert southwest is Eusebio Francisco Kino, “the padre on horseback,” historian Herbert Eugene Bolton calls him, who devoted most of his adult years to constant travel across the Sonoran Desert in northern Mexico and southern Arizona.

In 1932 Bolton published a slender book which he described as a “sketch” of the “apostle to the Pimas” whose “well authenticated feats in the saddle” leave southwestern cowboys “aghast and almost skeptical.”

A chapter entitled “Hard Riding” summarizes this endurance on horseback. In 1695, already past fifty years of age, Kino made a 1,500-mile journey in thirty days, averaging thirty miles a day. In 1697, he made another seven or eight hundred mile journey in thirty days and the next year a trip of similar length in twenty-five days, thus averaging twenty-five or more miles per day. In later years, his averages sometimes reached thirty to nearly forty miles per day.

Since Bolton began his scholarly career in 1902, at a time when travel on horseback was still part of the ordinary experience of most people, we can trust his evaluation of the impressive character of Kino’s horsemanship.

It must be remembered that this Jesuit missionary was riding through rough country, without roads, and that he had to find food and water for himself and his horse. Many of the nights, he and his travel companions would stretch out someplace on the desert floor to find sleep and rest.

Furthermore, these were business trips for Kino, to adopt a modern term. He stopped along the way to preach to the people he met, counsel village leaders, baptize, and sometimes marry.

Kino died in 1711 when he was nearly seventy years old, “having spent twenty-four years in glorious labor in this Pimería, which he entirely covered in forty expeditions, made as best they could be made by two or three zealous workers” (Bolton, p. 78).

During my forthcoming week bicycling with PAC Tour, a dozen companions and I will ride from sixty to eighty miles a day for six days. Because bicycles are far more efficient than horses, we’ll go twice the distance in a day as compared with what Kino could cover, but perhaps expend less energy than he did. Like Kino, we will be exposed to the weather and experience the world around us with an immediacy that never comes when traveling in motorized vehicles.

On days when my energy wanes, I will think about the padre on horseback in the hope that his example of physical prowess, spiritual zeal, and humane values will help me continue my ride with renewed energy.

Kino’s life and work will be most evident on the first and last days of the tour as we travel through the middle basin of the Santa Cruz River valley between Tucson and Nogales. We’ll see churches at the two northernmost sites where Kino established missions: San Xavier del Bac, which still functions as an active church for the Tohono O’odham people, and Tumacacori, which for more than a century has been a National Historical Park. We will also travel close to two other locations where the Jesuit mission system operated.

As I bicycle along on well paved Arizona roads, enjoying the luxuries of modern life and PAC Tour’s provisions, including hot showers and real beds at night, I will think of Eusebio Kino, S.J., who died as he had lived, so Bolton tells us, “with extreme humility and poverty. . .His deathbed, as his bed had always been, consisted of two calfskins for a mattress, two blankets such as the Indians use for covers, and a pack-saddle for a pillow” (p. 78).

The Cactus Classic

One of the most interesting bicycling routes I’ve ever traveled!

Standing alone and in full dignity, a mature saguaro cactus conveys a sense of unflappable dignity. Since it is covered with spines that discourage intimacy and may be fifty feet tall and weight six tons, it is not exactly friendly.

Yet any one saguaro by itself seems benign, which may be one reason why my ninety-year-old, stroke-impaired mother, on her first visit to our new home in Arizona, snuggled beside a solitary saguaro, as close as the spines allowed, to have her picture taken. Two veterans: one fragile and just shy of a century, and the other already well past that age and strong enough to continue its vigil another hundred years.

A broad mountainside of these gigantic creatures, however, is an unnerving sight. Each one stands its ground seemingly unaware of its fellow creatures, unmoved by the wind and absolutely still, yet poised as though it would spring into action at the slightest provocation.

In the Saguaro National Park in the Tucson Mountains west of the city bearing that name, they are spread out in a seemingly random, unordered pattern. Nothing moves in this phalanx of fifty-foot, branched zombie clubs that warn travelers to stay away.

The only softness in these large displays, as seen from a safe distance, is provided by modestly sized cholla cacti spread out between the saguaros. Like most cacti, chollas have sharp spines, which actually are modified leaves, but on the chollas, they are unique. They cluster on the wart-like projections from the plant’s stem and are covered with papery sheaths that disguise their danger.

From a distance, they appear soft and inviting, but up close their true nature is revealed. The spines become detached so easily that they seem to jump on their own to attack anything that wanders by.

As we bicycled through the National Park, on the first day of PAC Tour’s Cactus Classic (February 2012), our company of cyclists was riding at a safe distance from the saguaros and chollas. After traveling through the southwest suburbs of Tucson, we climbed our way to a higher elevation on Kinney Road and the McCain Loop where some of us found ourselves interspersed within a group of Tucson cyclists using the grades for hard training. The bright sun and mild temperature were a welcome change from the cool, Pacific Northwest raininess from which I had come.

The above paragraphs come from my travelogue based on a weeklong bicycle ride a year ago. To read the full account of the tour: The Cactus Classic. 

Borderlands Bicycle Tour

High fog, 33 degrees! Just the morning to think about my annual week of bicycling in the warm winter sun of southern Arizona!

This year’s tour will travel through border towns: Nogales, Patagonia, Sonoita, Bisbee, Douglas, Tombstone, Sierra Vista, and Tucson. As I drink my Peet’s coffee, looking out at Portland’s bleak sky, one thing is clear: I have to spend the rest of the month in serious training—of my legs and lungs, and also my heart and mind.

Long ago I decided that one way to build coherence into my travels is to focus attention on two or three themes that are illuminated by the places through which I ride. For a retired academic like me, that means reading up on places where I’ll be cycling. Guidebooks help a little. Even better are materials that discuss the history and culture of the region. This kind of study helps me understand and more fully appreciate what I see while riding along through unfamiliar countryside.

For this year’s trip, “Border to Border” (week two of PAC Tour’s Desert Camp for 2013) my reading will explore three themes.

Eusebio Kino, S.J., and the chain of missions he established in the Sonoran Desert between 1685 and 1704. The three northernmost sites are strung along the road between Tucson and Nogales: San Xavier del Bac (still functioning as a parish church for the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation, Tucumcacori (for more than a century a National Historical Site), and Guevavi. Although I have owned books about this system of missions for well over a decade, the time has come actually to read them, and I’m making a little progress.

An ever greater need, however, is to learn more about Kino himself, and with the help of Powells Books in Portland, two volumes are on their way. Because this reading connects my two blogging interests, American Religion and Aggressive Cycling, my background reading will likely influence columns on both sides of keithwatkinshistorian during the next few weeks.

Pre-industrial Patterns of agriculture in the Sonoran Desert. When Spanish conquistadores and priests traveled northward through the desert in the 1500s and 1600s, they discovered thriving indigenous civilizations that were well adapted to the arid climate. The interweaving of mission agriculture and Native American development of a food supply is an important part of the history and culture of this part of the world.

My guide to this topic is Gary Paul Nabhan, whose academic career at the University of Arizona has focused upon the ethnobotany of the region. Some of his books, most of them at least half read, are on my shelf, and I hope to pick them up again.

Although Nabhan grew up in Gary, Indiana, his family is Arab/American, with continuing family connections in the Middle Eastern deserta. His interest is scientific and cultural, and he has spent most of his adult life in close communion with desert people, especially the Tohono O’odham (referred to in some of the literature as the desert Papago).

Nabham also was instrumental in establishing one of the most interesting organizations dealing with food and nutrition. Based in Tucson, it goes by the name Native Seeds/SEARCH. This organization specializes in preserving indigenous fruits and vegetables and also food-producing plants and trees brought by early Spanish colonizers that have since become indigenized.

In cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, Native Seeds/SEARCH maintains its own farm near Patagonia where it cultivates many of the seed crops that it conserves and keeps alive. I hope to visit the farm on this year’s tour as I bicycle along the Nogales-Sonoita Road.

The Lessening Streams. The critical issue in sustaining life in arid lands is the availability and effective use of water. One source of supply is the river system, which in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert consists of tributaries of the Gila River (itself, a tributary of the Colorado). In preparation for last year’s tour, I bought The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River by Michael F. Logan, professor of history at Oklahoma State University, whose family homesteaded near this river in the 1880s.

I read the first 50 pages last year and now must try to read the 200 remaining pages. One reviewer of the book describes it as  “one of the finest studies of the history of a particular watershed that I have read.”

There’s much to read in the next two weeks as I train my mind for “Border to Border.” And, of course, the bodily side of training, already much neglected in this wet Northwestern winter, has to be intensified soon.

These next three weeks will be filled to overflowing.