Steve’s Newsletter 2 (1)

Steve’s Newsletter 2 (1)

Hello all, I’m now in the second calendar year of my newsletter. I ended up with 9 issues last year which isn’t quite as many as I wanted, but given the death of my father and the lead-up to that, I am okay with how much I created. Work-life balance and what-not.

It’s hard to watch what’s happening in the US from afar. We left for a reason, but I take no pleasure in being proven right headline after headline, day after day.

In everything, I am continually reminded of 1984.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

This is what we have been asked to do in the shooting of Alex Pretti. The MAGA movement claims that he blocked traffic, pulled a gun, and any number of things that justify his killing. These claims are contradicted by the high-definition footage before their eyes, but they keep claiming them.

Far-right propaganda organizations are sharing AI renderings of what might have happened, but we have video of what actually happened at regular speed and slow speed. We don’t need theory when the result is a man with two hands on the ground, half-a-dozen agents on top of him, his gun being pulled from his holster by one agent, only to be shot by another agent.

It’s going to get worse before it gets worse. I have no idea how to stop it, to change it, or to reverse it. All I can do is call out the bullshit for bullshit, vote, and write the whimsy you find below in an attempt to give you a moment of levity. Stay safe out there.

Cycling in a Winter Wonderland

I have my fair share of experience with ice and snow, but ultimately I have spent the bulk of my time in Florida. If you were to ask me, “Steve, do you want to go ride our bikes on an ice-covered bike path that’s elevated up to 10 feet from the surrounding terrain?” I would likely decline. Yet, as a Florida Man, I admit to not thinking things through and unwittingly arriving at undesirable situations that I take on, regardless of the risk.

So it was this morning when I found myself on the aforementioned ice-covered bike path.

I actually gave myself a pat on the back when I left the house, having remembered to top off my air. The last time I rode, it was around 40 Fahrenheit and this morning it was about 25. The tires would be a little deflated in the colder weather. I filled them to 80 PSI.

Afterwards, I zipped along through our little village of Faverges, France before making a right turn onto the bike path. I maintained my pace, mindful of occasional patches of ice but otherwise unworried as the sun had melted most of it.

At least for the first mile.

Once the path entered a forest and went behind a mountain, the sunlight could no longer melt the ice. Suddenly I found myself confronted with between 1 and 3 inches of solid ice. Turning around wasn’t really an option because I signed up as a parent volunteer for my children’s school today. The second graders have eight weeks of swim lessons and given my lack of gainful employment, I signed up. They asked me to come for all but one session, so I decided to get a workout in on the roughly 8-mile route to Ugine, France.

I made a go of the ice for all of about 40 feet before my rear wheel came out from underneath me and I went down hard. I could see an ice-free patch up ahead and started jogging on the ice with my bicycle beside me. This went only slightly better and I was forced to take a knee in lieu of reenacting a scene of Harry slipping on the ice in Home Alone.

I thought, “Well this is unfortunate.”

As I arrived to the ice-free section, I mounted my bike a third time and considered my options. The main highway has no shoulder and a speed limit of 60 mph. It’s also half a mile away across a frozen cornfield. I could potentially take a farm road that crosses every few hundred yards but they were also frozen and once arriving I would still be faced with the issue of high-speed vehicles and no shoulder. Eventually I would find a bus stop on the highway but there is no guarantee that the bus can handle my bike. Or I just suck it up and stay on the ice hoping to prevail by doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Another cyclist went by me at a slow, but stable speed, seemingly immune to the ice. He gave me a sideways glance while saying “Ça va?” This is French for, how’s it going but as in English, people rarely want an answer to the question. I also said “Ça va” and shrugged my shoulders while envying his mountain bike tires which gave him more stability than my commuter bike.

I continued on for a few hundred feet at a time, never going down hard enough to hurt myself but also not particularly enjoying the experience. I don’t know how far I had gone when I had the Eureka moment of realizing that mountain bike tires aren’t just wider they also have a much lower PSI! As mentioned, my commuter tires were dutifully filled to their capacity of 80 PSI to maximize efficiency but to also reduce surface area. Meanwhile mountain bikes are inflated to between 25 and 40 PSI depending on use. So I let some air out. Then I let some more out. I squeezed the tire firmly and stopped just before I could feel the rim through the rubber. This is not good for tires, but tires are cheaper than another concussion.

It worked! I made it the rest of the ride without falling once. However, the increased exertion of cycling on flat tires left me drenched in sweat beneath my fleece.

Oh well.

If you liked this section on cycling misadventures, then check out Silly Rider in which I have similar foolishness cycling from San Diego, CA to Saint Augustine Florida in February-April 2013.

https://www.amazon.com/Silly-Rider-Steven-Specht/dp/B08Y4LKDJQ 

French children have three mandatory water-safety classes—one in kindergarten, second grade, and sixth grade. The kindergarten class is just to get the kids accustomed to being safe around a pool by learning not to run, using hands to “walk” along the edge to get to safety, and things of that nature. The second-grade class is more intense, teaching some basic strokes and learning how to navigate obstacles. Though it takes place in a swimming pool, it is intended to simulate the outdoors. The third class is supposedly a boat-safety class, though I have not yet seen it in person.

Today’s session was with the second graders. (I don’t actually have a child in the second grade, but after I took the volunteer training to support my kindergartner, I helped fill a shortage of volunteers for the older class.) Given my gameness and fitness level compared to the other volunteers, I’m tasked to be in the water as the kids launch off a small slide and swim underneath two cables that run across the pool. Ideally, they should swim all the way under the cables before surfacing, but the swimming skill of kids varies wildly. One little boy I’ll call “Marcel” was so terrified of the water that he refused to even don a swimsuit during the first session. Today, he is at least willing to go under the cables if I pull on them so that he can keep his nose out of the water. The strong swimmers go down the slide backwards, turn underwater, and swim all the way under the cables before surfacing and making a left turn for a freestyle to the next station. The weaker ones stay between the cables, kicking with their feet and using the cables for support as necessary. I tend to stay with the weaker swimmers, demonstrating how to kick with straightened legs and to keep the head down to make things more efficient. Whether through simple exposure or my efforts, they get progressively better each turn.

The second station is a cage-like structure. I’m uncertain of its primary purpose, and my French is not sophisticated enough to ask. However, while in the cage, the children take turns submerging to recover weighted plastic rings (the same types of pool toys one might see in the United States). The cage could be an obstacle course to navigate underwater safely or it might simply be a structure to help counter buoyancy as kids learn how to dive below the surface. Either way, it seems to be the favorite station.

The third station involves leaping off a floating mat, floating for five seconds, and swimming across to the end of the pool. Again, skill level is recognized, so some of the kids are doing back flips off the end and others slide in as gingerly as possible. One thing I notice is that chaos seems to be part of the process. If they jumped off the rigid poolside, it would be a more stable fall into the water. With the wiggling mat, kids are forced to take on more water. (Or, maybe the flexible mat is just safer than the concrete poolside.)

In between kids rotating from station to station, I pepper the teacher with questions. She was my middle child’s teacher last year so we already have some rapport. The swimming is universal with no religious exception, something that jives with France’s fiercely secular society but seems odd for me, who grew up in the Bible Belt of the Deep South. I can’t imagine the shy Mennonite girls I knew doffing their ankle-length jean skirts for a plunge in a swimming pool. Yet here I know the parents of some of these kids and little Muslim girls are zipping along without issue. The cultural homogenization is not the primary purpose but it is a nice secondary effect.

Meanwhile, the result of this national standard means a lower drowning rate overall but also a lower rate of child drowning. The United States has roughly 4,500 drowning deaths annually. Adjusted for population, France has roughly 4,100. However, the stark difference is in the percentage of deaths that are children. In the United States, 24 percent of deaths are under the age of 19, while in France, that number is well below 10 percent.  In short, you are less likely to drown in France and if you do, you are less likely to be a child. (France’s healthcare system might also contribute to this, but I don’t want to get too far afield.)

In all of this I am amazed at the professionalism of French society generally. Because their high school system is tailored around getting people into jobs they will be good at and their economic system ensures a living wage, people are not only good at their jobs but also fairly happy. (One of these days I’ll get around to writing about the lady at the landfill living her best life.) Maître nageurs is a career choice in France. (Maître nageurs translates as master swimmer but it’s the word for lifeguard.) Lifeguard was my first job as far as the IRS knows and I was always amazed at the willingness to pawn off such an important role onto the backs of hormonal teenagers making minimum wage. Suffice it to say, my coworkers put in as much effort into getting laid as they did watching the water, at least in most of the places I worked. Nationwide, the salary of the maître nageurs is slightly more than what the French government considers a living wage. Here at this pool, the youngest guard is a woman I suspect is in her late 20s and the oldest is a man nearing retirement. I presume the wage goes up with age.

I wasn’t supposed to come back next week but Carol has asked if I will reconsider. Marcel has asked for me in particular because I make him feel good. I guess I can make it work in my schedule. It’s not like I have a day job.