But I've simplified things greatly. Now it's just me and my steed, currently a 25-year-old French Motobecane racing bike, a backpack full of sandwiches, my epi pen in case I'm swarmed by hornets, a few simple tools, and, on the days I tend the estate, a gnarly 17 mile commute.
And by gnarly I mean glorious, for a folklorist and a lover of richly inscribed human landscapes. I follow old Route 30, which follows an old Indian trail, which became the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad's main route. Devastating, beautiful: rowhouses crumble back to the soil. Abandoned factories and iron works. Crass commercial architecture. Pockets of proud, hopeful neighborhoods. Corner bars and storefront churches fight it out at prime intersections.
It is too much to take in, I have to pack the camera and the notebook firmly away. Every block, a story. So I just take it in with my eyes. I watch certain stone churches slowly crumble in on themselves, until one day, they are just gone. I watch the School District of Philadelphia knock away at an old brick schoolhouse for weeks on end, in the name of progress. She wasn't ready to go.
I look at the proud old shops and factories, where trades were practiced and goods manufactured.
Scrapyards and lumberyards. Boxing clubs and social clubs. Flea markets and rescue missions. Discount rugs and live crabs from the back of a truck. Grave blankets and hubcaps. Popeye's chicken and Furniture Sir Plus. Lancaster Pike: Avenue of Dreams.
But for every tumbledown ruin with a Tree of Heaven growing up through its roof, for every vacant lot of abandoned dreams, there is a well-scrubbed block where neighbors sweep front stoops and tend their gardens, as little girls jump rope and boys lob well-worn basketballs through makeshift hoops.
Traversing this landscape is an essential part of my work, in ways I do not fully understand. Its richness feeds me. I need to see this every week. It is both changeless and ephemeral. I need to feel the pavement underneath me, I need this tangible connection to the city I call home. I need to see the moon rise, and see the sun's slanting rays cast long shadows after a fulfilling, long day, as I make the trek east, toward home.
If I hadn't junked the Ranger, at one of the scrapyards that besmirch this place, it would be all too easy to hop in the truck for an easier ride. But then I wouldn't have this: this time each week to be in my environment, this place where I live. I see the buds swell each week with the sun's warming rays. I see the same kids on the same corners change and grow.
I have time for my thoughts, my legs pumping oxygen to my synapses across each rutted mile. Too much of our life is spent trying to find "easier" ways to do things. But this simple truth I know: labor is good. Our bodies were made for this. These movements, these exertions of effort, are the times we are doing exactly what we should.
About the time I realize these things, I leave the city's grid and that old pike that transects it. I cross the city line and enter a sheltered place. If I time it right, the seminary's carillon chimes my arrival with just the right hymn.
Suddenly there are lush lawns, and rolling acres. A canopy of trees, the bustle of landscapers, in a place otherwise silent. SUV's whiz past me, windows up and AC on, to the driveway, to the house.
And then I arrive, at the garden I made this journey to tend. I love this place all the more for the route I traversed to get here. I could not love each of these places to the extent that I do, if I did not have one to cast the other into sharper relief. That's my gnarly, glorious commute.
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