New England

Apparently sufficient time has passed since the plane taxied out onto the floodlight Heathrow apron that nearly all the albums I’ve mentioned in introductions, afterwords and blog bodies now have successors. The artists have moved on and found further creative spark. Even The Bleachers’ A Stranger Desired, despite being a rehashing of their debut Strange Desire is convincingly explained by Jack Antonoff as a reimagining, an important difference that conveys forward momentum and not a slide into writer’s block. It’s good. Very good. Zach Bryan released The Great American Bar Scene — the opening track as poem is now motif — Lucius are drip-feeding singles, Manu Chao has thrown us another trilingual treat. And a myriad other artists that I have glossed over as sources of my nourishment have likewise produced afresh: Empire of the Sun, Glass Animals and Sports Team to name a further few.

Some, you could say, have cheated. Yes, we are talking The Live Album.

I love a live album.

I love seeing music live.

Live music permits spectacle, audience unpredictability, and a slow-building crescendo of nasal assault colloquially known as B.O.

Sight, touch, smell.

There are also the obscenely priced beers decanted into disposable cups, at once doubling landfill volume.

Taste.

A live album provides none of these.

What makes a live album good? It must capture as much of the reality of the performance as possible. Essentially it requires the artist perform not flawlessly but without any cringeworthy fuck-up.

You read that write. Not flawlessly. If you want a flawless performance go see a DJ press a triangle then bop around for 45 minutes, headphones banging around their neck. New paces, timbres, an audience singing, shouting, humming. And we want the chit chat: the almost exclusively one-way, occasionally self-conscious mush that explains or disorientates and always conveys a state of mind. Oh, and it should be long. I don’t want it to end. Same as at Wembley or Ally Pally or the pub down the road. (Ally Pally has terrible acoustics, so maybe don’t record there.)

Noah Kahan’s Fenway Park recording hits the ground like a dinosaur-murdering meteor. I just went and listened to the original Dial Drunk. Pfff. Grammy-award winning? Garbage now. This new version kills. The sound engineer has done a blinder. (The producer too.) The instrumental intro with its heavy bass drum beat, building to an abrupt stop, audience going wild into the brief respite, first words, “New England!” This is It.

“I dial drunk, I’ll die a drunk, I’ll die for you.”

“I’d fucking die for you, Fenway Park!”

Live music demands a fourth wall demolition job. And this human is shouting his desire.

“My mom went to Boston College, my dad went to MIT.”

Stop it.

I message Will. Something like, “Make babies, you have a mega star, we go Fenway Park backstage.” (I did provide something of an explainer for this logic.) Will of Will & Hartley. Or Hartley & Will. Which rings better? Both sound like a noughties sitcom.

Will and Hartley had just celebrated their marriage in Hartley’s home state of Vermont. Whilst at MIT for a year Will had met Hartley, AKA Grace Kelly, who was studying at Boston College. The same alma maters as Noah Kahan’s parents. (Noah Kahan is also originally from Vermont.) The story of Will and Hartley’s first acquaintance is amusingly old-fashioned: a set-up by parents, by email.

“This new song is an anthem for wishing people the worst.”

Ok.

“And I thought it’d be perfect to play here in New England.”

Explain.

I was given the heads up on Bostonian character by my Warm Showers hosts the night before I rode into its heart. The lesson was given via the medium of Dunkin’ Donuts ads and their SNL skit equivalents. And some personal anecdotes. Soon enough I had my own. The first road rage episode in 1000s of kilometres shook me whilst a resident approaching down the hill sympathetically shrugged, “Welcome to Boston.” They’re a cranky bunch.

The city has redeeming features. Fenway Park is one of them. The oldest ballpark in the country features towards the end of one of my favourite films, Moneyball. A Michael Lewis book concerning the story of player-turned-coach Billy Beane and his adoption of an analytic approach to the transfer market and team selection at the relatively poor Oakland Athletics MLB franchise was adapted into a Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt. (This is the same author as The Big Short, also turned into a major motion picture, this time featuring a cameo by Margot Robbie in a bathtub. Whilst The Big Short’s subject matter is more serious, risking a belittling of baseball’s place in society at large, it clearly found time to have some fun just as the book will have you creasing.)

I have never looked up Moneyball reviews or checked out the “Moneyball (film)” Wikipedia page where I assume there’s a “themes” section, so what I’m about to say is perhaps a mistake of memory, a reading into things that are barely there. Perhaps aptly so.

Moneyball has its place in my crowded nebula of favourite films because of its subtlety and realism in portraying “second chances”. Billy Beane the player crashed and burned from promising rookie signing: a slow-burning car crash of unrealised potential and the adult world relayed in flashback parental home sitting room scenes with talent scouts and agents. His second career on the non-playing side of the club finds success. But it is hard fought and intertwined with fortune. In his private life the second chance is withheld and this is the source of the pain, the emotional clout of the screenplay. There is no happy family ending. But neither is there a sad ending. It just is what it is.

On the pitch it’s an almighty success. His method is vindicated and will be copied the world over as its fundamentals are applied to a vast array of sports. Which leads him to Fenway Park. There he is, sitting on one of the signature green benches with Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry and he concurs, “This is a ballpark.” It’s a line I’ve adopted for anything that widens my eyes, rounds my lips and pricks my ears: it’s in the intonation, “This… is a Pub.” “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” move aside.

At this point I decided I should probably rewatch the scene. It’s different. It’s far better. The director, Bennet Miller, has made startling few films but they’ve all punched high. Foxcatcher was his most recent, I believe, and that was released years ago. He explains his low output as the understandable consequence of the all-consuming nature of making a film and the spent wreck that it leaves you.

The actual scene has the line delivered by John W. Henry as they walk purposefully between rows. “No offence to The Coliseum, but this is a ballpark.” Pitt’s Billy grunts agreement.

The Coliseum referred to is clearly not the Roman roundhouse. It’s the Oakland A’s stadium. A concrete monstrosity set within a huge, tailgate-party-facilitating carpark. In 2016 Rufus and I caught a daytime game there. A pilgrimage of sorts for me. I actually like the brutish ugliness of its decaying greyness. It’s sad to read that The Coliseum has seen its last game. With scant reason the owner has decided to move the franchise to Las Vegas via a few seasons of exile at a minor league stadium in Lady Bird’s Sacramento. For those that have watched and remember Greta Gerwig's 2017 film starring Saoirse Ronan you could surmise that the Oakland A’s now reside firmly on “the wrong side of the tracks”.

In Boston Alice and Ed were my hosts. Alice lived with my sisters and me for a while in London. She’s the daughter of our mother’s old friend, Amanda. To save being accused of flattery or criticism I shan’t attempt to describe physical appearance aside from 1. Blonde; 2. Dresses well. Ed is her fiancé and is basically the male version of Alice. Peas. Pod.

We went to Fenway Park.

It’s one of a dying breed of ballpark. Nestled into the surrounding streets it’s more like Ireland’s Lansdowne Road minus the modernising revamp. It has the quirks of being somewhat undersized and pinched in funny places. And the colours are magical. The turf and dirt are matched in their richness by the crimson and Dartmouth green of the stands.

Dartmouth green. So named for the green painted onto the shutters of Dartmouth College, the Ivy League university on the New Hampshire side of its border with Vermont. The buildings are whitewashed three-storey blocks of Georgian mansion. Unlike the vast majority of shutters so far seen adorning clapboard houses in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire these buildings’ appear to be functional. It’s the first day on the road after the wedding weekend and I’ve detoured from my straight line “sprint” to Boston to visit Gossip Girl’s Nathaniel “Nate” Archibald’s slated college destination until he goes rogue and ends up at… Columbia, with the rest of the cast. How convenient.

Dartmouth is also the home of BASIC, one of the first user-friendly computer programming languages. Birthed by maths professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz it’s a language that runs critical banking software that my ex-employer would like to see replaced.*  It is also still used in corners of academia such as by some of the researchers at The British Antarctic Institute based in West Cambridge where I carried out a small research project in 2016. The canteen’s fish and chips with mushy peas is truly exceptional. Blessedly I did not suffer Basic All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

That was about the sum of my speed tour from Vermont. The way there was thankfully more pedestrian.

Crash aside.

A little over eight months of riding through Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru had resulted in zero incidents.

The recipe for disaster required Canadians and bears in the ratio 2:1.

Shaken over carbon, poured over tarmac.

Rubbing the tip of my tongue over the inside of a stiffened lower lip I can feel a  ridge of scar tissue a mirror tells me is white. My left hip now has a blanched section to match that received on my right from last year's speedbump slide-out.

It could have been far, far worse.

Disembarking the Essex, NY to Charlotte, Vermont ferry that morning I'd crossed a couple low ridgelines to Hinesburg. Lying at the edge of the mountains proper this small town is home to Frost Beer Works, my first stop on my first indulgence into the world of bikepacking.com and its Green Mountain Gravel Growler route. But it was not yet midday. So in the shade of a tree and by a clear stream I pulled out my flamethrowing stove and coffee making gear and drew me a caffeine fix.

At Frost I was not the first customer of the day but I was the first to sit in sitting out. I greedily parked me bum on the red picnic table with parasol, anticipating a number more hours under the Sun. Soon, however, a large group of New Yorker carbon boys whirred in on obnoxiously loud freehubs. Their white jerseys were adorned with a blue chainring infilled with a frothing pint, “Bike for Beer”. I shuffled aside to welcome their invasion.

I took as cue the arrival of the next such cohort, this time in retro-themed “Bike and Beer” jerseys, the hour for my southwards advance.

Fate stalled me at my first maple creemee sighting, served out of a beaten-up campervan at a farm shop from Vermont central casting. (Creemee is Vermontish for soft-serve.) That and hauling 40-odd kilos up and down over rolling Gucci/champagne gravel roads – dirt and stone that is so compacted and smooth and water-resistant it may as well be considered paved – permitted those beery bike folk to catch up to me by the edge of Bristol.

There was a plan. Enjoy another (small) beer at The Bobcat then grind up the mountain to camp in a Warm Showers host’s garden. A relatively easy day would be round out with a wash in the river. Bish, bash, bosh. To that end I swung off to the supermarket to stock up.

Walking into the sumptuously wood-pannelled, dimly-lit Bobcat I nodded a mute greeting to my brief riding partners sat at the window table and grabbed the nearest stool at the bar. I was caught between being overfamiliar and being cool as in cold. They broke the ice, motioning for me to join. Denis (de-niece) and Glen who I'd met on the road, Peter and Jacques. And then in walked the rest of the gang: Mike and Russ, and Jeffrey who was the non-cycling pick-up driver.

More beers were ordered. Turns out their Bike and Beer is The Bike and Beer, the first custom jersey on Zwift. They've capitalised well raising club funds selling their stylish merch online.

The inevitable. Where are you headed tonight?

I'm camping in someone’s garden but actually they haven't messaged.

Why don’t you crash at our Airbnb? There’s a bed, shower, laundry, BBQ, lots of beers we need to drink. (Beer drinking clearly a necessity. It actually was: they’d all already filled their customs’ quotas.)

Where?

Waitsfield.

I want to ride there.

Give us your bags. Anyone want to join?

Two takers. Peter and Glen.

Two parts Canadian.

One part bear. Standing upright in a grassy field on the flat lead-in to the forested App Gap climb.

We’re in a close-packed line. Peter at the head, Glen the sandwich, me drafting most at the rear.

I see the bear. I admire the bear. I wish I could stop and take a photo of the bear. But I recall my camera is safely stored aboard the pickup. So is my phone. In any case we're going so faaaast...

Glen’s bike is sliding along, turned through ninety degrees, saddle away from me, chainring staring up at me. No time, no space. Front tyre hits and mounts the toothy metallic smiles. I'm on the deck. Spring up. Grab my sunglasses off the surface. A water bottle too. Lift the bike onto the verge. My lip is hot and slimey wet, blood bubbling, dribbling and spattering. This white Decathlon tee has survived long enough.

Shaken over carbon, poured over tarmac.

Survey the damage.

Glen’s helmet is a goner. He says he’s okay but with a helmet like that?

That’s the biggest concern.

My front tyre was torn open, its sealant guts pour out. As far as equipment damage goes that and the helmet appear to be the sum.

A motorbike?

The biker is explaining why he was where he was, in the skinny shoulder. His bike is facing us. I’m ready to let fly my thoughts on his careless “bear protection” missive.

And then he says, “But you hit me. I was stationary.”

Peter. Oh, Peter.

100% Peter.

The unscathed Peter. Peter blindly led the flock. Peter led the flock to slaughter.

Peter was also watching the bear. He only noticed the bike with time to save himself and swerve. Glen had clipped it and gone down, flipping and landing (we think) on the back of his helmet. With his bike splayed out afront of me I had no chance though perhaps the foray into all-terrain had arrested my impact velocity and provided that split-second to orientate for a softer landing. The split lip scuppers that theory. No one in their right mind opts for a macadam face plant.

No broken teeth. Result.

So what do we do?

Ride on, of course!

It’s only the following morning having fit a new tyre that I more closely inspect my helmet. It’s fully cracked. And my saddle is beatifully bent. If one leg wasn’t already longer...

The USA once again served me a treat of hospitality. Whereas in Chile and Argentina I camped like mad and in Bolivia and Peru I made use of cheaper accommodation, the return to the West and its steep prices resulted in my leaning hard on the kindness of friends and strangers. To all of you, thank you. In particular my stay in the Bingham basement went beyond anything I’d have wished. Dodge and Beth, Hartley’s parents, were magically welcoming during what I imagine could be a stressful albeit beautiful period. Likewise Cole and Cassie, the brother and girlfriend. Soon I’ll hang up the wheels and catch up on life and write a more suitably personal note (and sift through the mountain of photos).

Warm Showers which is mentioned a couple of times above is a super online community for cycle tourers. Essentially it is coach surfing for cyclists. During the three weeks in New York and New England I manically messaged and found hosts to crash with, largely to save acidentally wild camping on a gun-wielding Trumpite’s land. All were wonderful. Especially David and Ann in Albany, NY.

That day I’d given myself an ambitious distance to cover, and failed. My estimates of pace were wildly off, repeatedly. With the Sun shuffling off to bed David offered to pick me up from other side of the bridge over the Hudson. He’d already delayed his own dinner by a couple of hours. I struggled to accept this generosity but thankfully did. The next morning he perhaps suspected a root cause of my arrival delays when I hung around for a threateningly inordinate amount of time. But I had a less ambitious daily goal. And he is an interesting man. A retired G.P. Over coffee out back in the morning we chatted away, Dudley his dog resting peacefully in his arms. His face is a rich, polished brown, inlaid with a great roman nose. His hair is healthily full and almost, but not quite, fully greyed, and he sports an enviably trimmed beard and moustache. His appearance is Gandalf-like, plain glasses completing the look of a lifetime of acquired wisdom. He’s wearing a blue hoodie with the hood gently hanging off the rear third of his head its edge pushing his ears forward. The sleeves are pushed up to his elbows. He’s telling me about growing up in California with his brother. How the hippie movement came along at the right time for them as unsporty, gangly guys. The non-jocks. They could be cool. At some point he goes to find a photo from 1975 of his brother, their friend Guillermo/Willy and he in Tafalla, Spain with a gaggle of anti-Franco Spanish students. Beautiful chicas, of course. Francoist Spain will fall with the dictator’s death at the end of the year but then, he recalls, tensions were fraught on the street. They’re all smiling, mutually enjoying each others’ attentions. When David lifted the photo from the basement wall it clattered to the floor and the frame’s glass shattered and scarred the momento of happy, carefree days, the days before his brother slowly ate himself away through the fast life of LA in the 80s.

What I wasn’t expecting in the US was the random hospitality that transpired not once but twice.

I met Ava in Fort Ann, NY. She’d whizzed past me on the Champlain Canal trail and I just so happened to pull in at the same gas station in the village for a calorie top-up. Fate. We got to chatting and she dropped in that she was on the way to her parents’ shoreline retreat on Lake George and that if I made it that far I was welcome to stay. Painful. I really had no intention of pushing myself that far. It was going to be one of my rare nights in the tent. Not that I knew where I could pitch up and not be bothered by God, Guns and Trump.

Well, I made it. And I’m mighty glad I did. Ava’s wife, Angie, was there. And later Rob and Melissa, her parents, joined. It was one of those special, totally unexpected, crazily appreciated evenings. And in the morning we went for a swim in the clear water, drying off under the deliciously warming Sun. Ava is a lawyer in Albany and rode the distance that took me two days in an afternoon, and she still arrived hours before me. Some athlete. It was also her birthday. Wild. Love it. Just invite some stranger off the road. She’s also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. She’s clearly someone that makes time.

I was sad to leave but the day had other exciting plans in store. Again I’d planned to wild camp but I really wasn’t sure where and the place I’d identified turned out to be filthily mosquito-infested. I dragged my bike around a muddy riverside path searching for an open, flat space to pitch the tent and returned to the road with chickenpox. Nae bother. Try again. At a store I asked for any advice, secretly praying to be admitted to its accompanying grassy patch. Not quite. Essex Farm was the hot tip.

Having ground up the final climb of the day, out in the sticks on this bend in the road there's a school. A fun, outdoorsy, wooden cabin type primary school. Not a public (state) school. You spend some dough for your kids to play with dough. Anyways, it's the summer holidays. There’s a light on inside so I go see if anyone’s home. Nope. Hmmmm what if I cook my dinner and see if someone turns up? Yeah. And that’s what happens. The school legally requires someone to live on the propery and Liz is the happy sole tenant. She's cool with the idea but wants to check with the owner, and the owner consults the book. Insurance says No. I’m back out on the street.

In the process Liz had unloaded a crate of roma tomatoes from her car, piling half a dozen on to me to add to my simple pasta dinner. Guess what? They’re from Essex Farm. She works there. A phone call later and I’m on my way to camp by rows of swollen cherry tomatoes of all flavours. Sun Gold, Super Sweet, Midnight Snack. I had a midnight snack. And in the morning, the rest. My time in New York is rounded out with the best breakfast that Liz cooks in the staff trailer and we devour at a picnic table with cups of moka pot coffee.

By evening my ground floor furniture has been rearranged. I pray a week is sufficient for a twice cut lip to heal. A week until the only prior commitment I’d made this year. Hartley & Will. Will & Hartley.

Rebecca near Concord, NH (Warm Showers) gave me a delight of a read. For the first time I was carrying a physical book rather than the Kindle, breaking a slightly senseless weight rule; senseless because of all the other weighty paraphernalia I deem necessary luxuries.

The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening is an entertaining memoir by the NPR journalist Ari Shapiro.

* Actually that language is COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), but why ruin a good story with fact?