The Wet Guy - Life is a Wheel - page 206

New Yorker. I saw Moneyball. (Some nice performances by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and
a sweet, thoughtful coda, but otherwise a bit of a drag: long-winded, conventional as a
drama—the renegade is told no by the powers-that-be—and not very instructive about
baseball.) The point is, I can think of many places on my journey where I'd have been far
less well of stranded for a couple of days, and I've spent some of my time here ruminat-
ing on luck.
Mine has been astonishingly good. Flat tires, accidents, heat stroke, a tornado, being
stranded, hospitalized, ill: The list of disastrous things that haven't happened to me
would be a long one. (Now there's an exercise—make a list of the calamities you've
avoided. So far.) And innumerable moments come to mind when, grinding along on one
difficult stretch of road or another, I worried about conditions taking a turn for the
worse, but instead they turned better. The rumble strips on the shoulder suddenly dis-
appeared, or the wind died down, or I crossed a county line and the potholed road I'd
been rattling over was suddenly smoothly paved. To complete a trip like this you need
things to go your way more often than they don't, and I can only hope I've got three or
four more weeks of the kind of fortune I've already had.
Speaking of good fortune, as I've been writing this there has been a break in the
weather. The forecast says I've got a ive- or six-hour window before the next downpour,
enough time, I think, to get that tune-up and bolt to Kalamazoo, about forty miles away.
There's a trail from here to there.
And look at that! Out the window, a rainbow!
Wednesday, September 28, Montpelier, Ohio
Feeling a little pruney here.
For several days now—from Kalamazoo through lower Michigan, the northeast corner
of Indiana, and into western Ohio, pretty much since I wrote about how lucky I've been
with the weather—the skies have been broodingly gray, the air has been heavy, the
wind has been contrary and chill, and for a few hours each day I've been rained on. A
couple of the days I could have stayed put, I guess, but at this point I'm relishing the mo-
mentum I've built with daily rides, and my legs pretty much start pedaling in the morn-
ing whether I'm on the bike or not. Anyway, rain is hardly catastrophic, and now that
the Yankees are in the playoffs, I want to be home for the World Series. (Am I confident
they'll make it? Not really. As everyone knows, they don't have the starting pitching. 1 )
You get used to being wet. You get used to peeling off your soggy clothes at the end
of the day and leaving them all in a pile on the bathroom floor like a melted wicked
witch. You get used to concentrating on protecting the important things: cell phone,
maps, cookies. Besides, I'm happy to report that my gear is performing, so inside my