Moonstone Beach
Transportation
The Three-Speed
When I penetrated back to the day-room I encountered two gentlemen called Sergeant Pluck and Mr Gilhaney and they were holding a meeting about the question of bicycles.
"I do not believe in the three-speed gear at all," the Sergeant was saying, "it is a new-fangled instrument, it crucifies the legs, the half of the accidents are due to it."
"It is a power for the hills," said Gilhaney, "as good as a second pair of pins or a diminutive petrol motor."
"It is a hard thing to tune," said the Sergeant, "you can screw the iron lace that hangs out of it till you get no catch at all on the pedals. It never stops the way you want it, it would remind you of bad jaw-plates."
"That is all lies," said Gilhaney.
"Or like the pegs of a fairy-day fiddle," said the Sergeant, "or a skinny wife in the craw of a cold bed in springtime."
"Not that," said Gilhaney.
"Or porter in a sick stomach," said the Sergeant.
"So help me not," said Gilhaney.
-- Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (New York: Plume, 1976), 76.
NASCAR Season Canceled
LOUDON, NH -- Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. . . .
"I'm flooded with feelings of -- for lack of a better concept -- incongruity," said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace's novels to his fans. "David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony."
"And now he's gone," Johnson added. "He's taken himself away. We can't possibly race now."
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The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race
The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.
Contemporary engravings reproduce this scene from photographs. But it appears that the sport of cycling, as a result of the well known accident which put a grievous end to the Passion race and which was brought up to date almost on its anniversary by the similar accident of Count Zborowski on the Turbie slope -- the sport of cycling was for a time prohibited by state ordinance. That explains why the illustrated magazines, in reproducing this celebrated scene, show bicycles of a rather imaginary design. They confuse the machine's cross frame with that other cross, the straight handlebar. They represent Jesus with his hands spread on the handlebars, and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce his air resistance.
Note also that the frame or cross was made of wood, just as wheels are to this day.
A few people have insinuated falsely that Jesus's machine was a draisienne , an unlikely mount for a hill-climbing contest. According to the old cyclophile hagiographers, St. Briget, St. Gregory of Tours, and St. Irene, the cross was equipped with adevice which they name suppedaneum. There is no need to be a great scholar to translate this as "pedal."
Lipsius, Justinian, Bosius, and Erycius Puteanus describe an other accessory which one still finds, according to Cornelius Curtius in 1643, on Japanese crosses: a protuberance of leather or wood on the shaft which the rider sits astride -- manifestly the seat or saddle.
This general description, furthermore, suits the definition of a bicycle current among the Chinese: "A little mule which is led by the ears and urged along by showering it with kicks."
-- Alfred Jarry
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The Fur Trade
The fur trade, as it lengthened, manifested its own destiny and Canada's, too. The fur trade established canoe routes to the far northwest, and conjoined the segments of a continental wilderness. It is possible to cross Canada by canoe, to crisscross Canada, to go almost anywhere. Canada is twenty-five per cent water. The quantity of it outreaches belief. A sixth of all the fresh water that exists on earth is in Canadian lakes, Canadian ponds, Canadian streams, Canadian rivers. A friend of mine who grew up in Timmins, a remote community in Ontario, once told me about an Indian friend of his in boyhood who developed an irresistible urge to see New York City. He put his canoe in the water and started out. From stream to lake to pond to portage, he made his way a hundred miles to Lake Timiskaming, and its outlet, the Ottawa River. He went down the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence, down the St. Lawrence to the Richelieu, up the Richelieu to Lake Champlain, nad from Lake Champlain to the Hudson. At the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, he left the canoe in the custody of attendants and walked on into town. Reversing that trip, and then some, one could go by canoe from Seventy-ninth Street to Alaska, and down the Yukon to the Bering Sea. By the Rat-Porcupine route (up the Rat, down the Porcupine), the length of the portage over the Rocky Mountains is half a mile. Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, anywhere on the routes that were used by the fur trade, the longest portage is thirteen miles (and even that is an exaggeration, because the trail is interrupted by a mile-long lake). In 1778, a white trader for the first time crossed that portage. It is Methye Portage, in what is now northern Saskatchewan. His name was Peter Pond. Beyond the portage, in the region of Lake Athabasca, he encountered a crowded population of beaver whose fur (as a result of the mean temperature there) was as long and rich as any yet found in North America. The discovery extended to its practical limit the distance that fur could travel in the unfrozen season by canoe from the source to Montreal. Trans-atlantic ships could navigate the St. Lawrence to the Lachine Rapids, near Montreal. At the head of the rapids, the fur-trade canoe routes began. The distance from Lachine to Lake Athabasca was three thousand miles. Unsurprisingly, the men who did the paddling were known as the voyageurs.
-- John McPhee, The Survival of the Bark Canoe (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 56-58.
