More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Ken Lyon
Cross-Country Ramble 3: Leaving All
Sent: 04/01/96
The day we left was vintage Southern California--bright, breezy, cool in the shade/warm in the sun, covered over by an intense blue sky with no cloud anywhere. The surf was moderate and dozens of surfers were catching waves near the foot of the Ventura pier. There we were joined by eighteen family and good friends come to see us off.
Fr. George Lutheringer with apergillium, Ken & Carol at the Ventura Pier.
Our friend George had taken advantage of his clergy status to borrow an aspergillum from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. He used it to sprinkle us and our bikes with Pacific Ocean water, praying:
O Gracious Mother and Loving Father, thank you for the gift of this water we use in your name. Over the oceans the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through a reed sea you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. So may your Spirit be over this journey and the new creation it begins. So may you lead these, your children by adoption and grace, away from all that binds them to anything but you. So may you bring them safely into a land of promise, into lives of deeper service and into the joy of communion with friends both old and new.
The allusions to leaving all behind and wandering for a long period were not lost on us.
Our first two days of biking take us through sights and smells that have become familiar and precious to us during the five years we've lived in Ventura. The hills all around us are green with winter rain--as green as they'll be all year. The road is lined with orchards of lemon, orange and avocado. The citrus trees are full of yellow and orange fruit and are in full bloom as well. Their pervasive sweet smell is broken occasionally by the bay-leaf-like smell of eucalyptus and once by the intensely sweet smell of jasmine that has overwhelmed a fence separating an orchard from the road.
Carol bicycling through fragrant orange groves near Santa Paula, CA.
Soon we'll be in the desert and will have left all this behind.
I lied about only doing 20 miles a day. The first day, we did 30; the second, 25. We've loaded the recumbents with clothes for hot weather and clothes for cold; with tent, sleeping bags, mattresses and cooking gear; tools, patch kits and spare tubes and, of course, our technology--laptop and cellphone. The bikes are heavy, but they handle as well as before. We were happy to find that out; we'd meant to test them beforehand, but hadn't gotten around to it. This is a gentle valley with low hills and we're feeling really good about our biking.
In small-town Fillmore, I happened on the kind of hardware store you dream of but rarely find any more. I had imagined some brackets of just the right shape to mount a couple of water bottles on my bike. I described the shape of the strap I was looking for to the clerk. She directed me to shelf brackets which were just about the right shape; then let me use an anvil and hammer in the back room to bend them to exactly the shape I needed. I told her I needed 4 screws, nuts, washers and lock washers and she found them in a wall-long library of wooden drawers containing an infinite variety of interesting fasteners. She would have lent me a drill, too, except, as luck would have it, the ready-made holes in the brackets exactly matched the ready-made holes in the water bottle holder and in the boom. Total expenditure: Half an hour and $2.07! Places like these are losing out to superstores and it's too bad.
Ken
Carol at our campsite near Castaic Junction, CA.
PS: Our first night out-of-doors on this trip was spent at a nice campground at Castaic Junction, CA.
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