The fall of a sparrow: Regathering Biblical fauna in the deserts of the Holy Land

Presented to the Club by Erik Bruun

"There's a special providence to the fall of a sparrow"

—Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2

1. The Six-Day War





On June 5th, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egyptian armies massed along their border on the Sinai Peninsula. Although they were greatly outnumbered, the Israeli air force had destroyed virtually all of the Egyptian jets in a daring dawn attack, clearing the way for a ground assault.



Three armored divisions invaded northern and central Sinai. While the southernmost division led by Ariel Sharon engaged the Egyptians in battle, the central division raced across the seemingly impassable mountainous desert to two valleys behind the Egyptian army. When the Egyptian soldiers broke into a retreat, they were caught in a trap and soundly defeated. In four days, the Israeli army held the entire Sinai Peninsula and the eastern side of the Suez Canal. Israel lost 338 soldiers in the Sinai, while 12,000 Egyptians were killed, 5,000 captured and 20,000 wounded.



Meanwhile to the north, Israeli soldiers captured Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In less than a week Israel had transformed itself. On June 4th it was a precarious nation surrounded by bellicose and heavily armed governments boasting they would wipe Israel into the sea. By June 10th, all of the Arab armies had suffered humiliating defeats and Israel held key geographic regions to defend itself from attack and important cultural and religious sites, including Jerusalem and Mount Sinai.



2. Don't shoot! It's a Dorcas Gazelle!



In this heroic time, Avraham Yoffe stood out as slightly different kind of hero. A military man all his life, he had fought with the British Army in World War II and three years later led Israeli soldiers in the war for independence against England and later Arab soldiers. In 1956 he led an armored brigade down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba to capture Sharm el-Sheik, the southernmost tip of the Sinai. And in 1967 he led the central division that cut off the Egyptian retreat and trapped nearly half of the enemy army.



Charming, abrupt and charismatic, Yoffe also had a soft spot for wildlife. He had famously once ordered a cease-fire in a minor battle when he saw an injured Dorcas gazelle trapped between combatants. In 1964, Yoffe became director of the Israeli Nature Reserve Authority. On the seventh day of the Six-Day War, Yoffe's credibility gave his agency newfound power. He used his prestige to expand the agency's reach.



Yoffe established a network of rangers to monitor wildlife throughout Israel and greatly expanded the number of nature reserves in the Jewish nation. Two of these reserves were called "hai bar," which literally means "wild life". The mission of these parks was to gather and breed animals mentioned in the Bible that were either endangered or extinct in Israel with the goal of reintroducing them into the wild.



Hai Bar Carmel in the north was very small. Situated in the forested hills outside of Haifa, it was closed to the public. But Hai Bar Yotvata in the Jordanian Valley in the south was much larger and open to visitors. The Yotvata Kibbutz gave the land to Yoffe for the reserve. The Authority built a chain-link fence around the 8,000-acre reserve. Yoffe collected animals for the parks from around the world. He hired Bedouin hunters to capture 15 ibex from the nearby Judean hills, paid a Catskills game reserve for three addaxes, had antelope brought in from the Sahara Desert, ostriches from Sudan, and the very rare Arabian oryx from the San Diego Zoo.



Ever the wheeler-dealer, Yoffe traded some of his ibex to the Iranian government for two Mesopetamian deer that were on one of the last flights out of Tehran hours before the government collapsed to the Ayatollah Khomeni. A few days later a Revolutionary Guard firing squad executed the Iranian official responsible for the exchange.



Hai Bar Yotvata got a lot of press as a modern Noah's Ark, but it was an expensive endeavor and so Yoffe turned to Jewish and conservation communities in the United States for financial support. The Holy Land Conservation Fund was started to support the two hai bars, and later other conservation efforts in the Middle East.



3. Clueless in the Holy Land



In 1983, just at the time I was graduating from college, clueless as to what I would do with my life, my father was president of the Holy Land Conservation Fund. I had been rejected by the Peace Corps because of bad lungs, but itched for adventure. "Why don't you work for the Nature Reserve Authority in Israel?" my father suggested. And so I did.



I arrived on the floor of the Jordanian Rift Valley at the end of August, just in time for the peak mid-day temperature to drop to 115 degrees. Stepping out of the bus was like walking into an open oven. My new boss, Roni, brought me to a small apartment in Eilat that was my home for the next 6 months and told me to meet him outside the next morning at 5. He, two other workers and I drove in his pickup truck (with me almost always in the back) 30 miles north to Hai Bar Yotvatah to work.



My job was to feed six small herds of animals every morning and then undertake different tasks in the early afternoon--drive along the fence to check for holes, help at the entrance gate, or some small job that needed to be accomplished. The reserve was definitely a desert. There was an elevated water table underneath our feet that nourished acacia trees and enough plants to sustain a small collection of gazelles trapped inside the reserve when the fence was built, but it was hardly an oasis. To the west lay the Judean hills and to the east a gigantic wall of mountains that was Jordan, which was still officially in a state of war with Israel. You could see military convoys driving north along the foot of the mountains from Aqaba carrying ammunition and weapons from the United States to supply Saddam Hussein's army in his war against Iran.



Although I was alone most of the time, I felt taken in by my co-workers and the wildlife rangers. Within a week of my arrival they included me on a two-hour, four-jeep convoy to one of the most beautiful valleys I've ever been. One of the rangers was getting married. He had just returned from serving in his military unit in Lebanon for the event, to which he carried an M-16 semi-automatic rifle. Six months earlier, he and one of my co-workers, Natan, had been captured near this very spot by an Egyptian border patrol, held hostage for a day, beaten up, and then released. Natan lost a tooth in the deal. Despite the good-natured protests of his colleagues and future wife, the groom insisted on keeping his rifle strapped on for the wedding ceremony. It was the first Jewish wedding I had attended, and the most memorable.



4. Noah's Ark



I tended to seven different types of animals at the Hai Bar. The most familiar to you and the most difficult to take care of were the ostriches. Cartoonists at Looney Tunes couldn't come up with a more preposterously dumb animal. Equipped with the brains of a bird, they have zero sensibility and endless curiosity, mainly in a quest to eat anything they can get down their throats. One time I hammered nails along a pen that held some of the adolescent ostriches. They gathered around me and kept trying to eat the nails and grab the hammer with their beaks, which have tiny teeth. In addition to hurting like heck when they bit my hand, if one had gotten a hold of a nail, it would have punctured the ostrich's intestine, resulting in death.



This did happen once while I was there when tourists on a bus threw food, including tomatoes, at the ostriches that would literally go up to the windows of cars and buses and peck at the glass. I still remember the row of tomatoes lodged in the neck of an ostrich like a stack of billiard balls. Someone threw a piece of metal also, though, and it killed the ostrich that ate it. I did the autopsy with Roni. This consisted of cutting into the underbelly of the gigantic dead bird and putting our hands into the intestines until we found the object. Ick!



Ostriches were one of the two most dangerous animals in the park. They have gigantic and powerful legs with huge claws at the end of their feet. In mating season male ostriches become wildly aggressive and will attack other male ostriches and people who enter their territory. The way they fight is to lift their feet and thrust their claws downward, like a knife plunging from a piston. A couple of years before I got there Natan had been attacked by an ostrich. His abdomen had been ripped open and he was hospitalized for several weeks.



The other particularly dangerous animal to humans was the Arabian oryx, which inspired the mythical unicorns. They are antelopes with horns that stick straight out. When seen from profile, it appears as if they only have one horn, similar to a unicorn. Like all of the antelopes in the park, the male Arabian oryx used their horns when they fought over the female oryxes. But because the horns are straight like a dagger, they can kill whoever is at the other end of their attacks. At that time, Arabian oryx were extremely rare, having been hunted out of existence in the Arabian Peninsula by hunters, so the bachelor herd was kept separate from the females and the one lucky male who ruled the herd in an enlarged pen.



The two other antelopes were the scimitar oryx and addax. The scimitar oryx is very similar to the Arabian oryx except that the horns curve backwards, making them much less dangerous in conflict. Addax have corkscrew-like horns and were very docile, with the exception of one very old addax who was named Moses. He lived on his own, away from the herd, in a seemingly perpetual grumpy mood.



The Persian wild ass, or onager, was the most promising animal for re-introduction. Related to domestic donkeys and zebras, they are very durable animals, capable of running hundreds of miles without stopping. We also had Somalian wild asses, which had more distinctive coloring and were notable because the males would castrate or kill each other during mating season. These males, too, were kept in separate areas.



Finally, there were the ibexes, which are wild mountain goats similar to our big horn sheep. The males have gigantic nautilus-like horns. In mating seasons they fought in what appeared to be a dainty dance, standing on their small rear legs and then bouncing toward each other to slam their horns with a thunderous clang. It was a stunning sight.



The Hai Bar also held other wild animals, including the gazelles I mentioned earlier, rodents, small foxes and poisonous snakes, which lived among the hay bales that I gathered every day to feed the herds.



5. Kafka's grand nephew



Little did I know when I arrived at the Hai Bar that I would become a bit player in the internal politics of the agency. Shortly after I arrived, a fifth employee joined the Hai Bar. She was from Jerusalem and having grown up in British-speaking Ghana spoke fluent English. "Hi my name is Tal," she said with a beaming smile on her 25-year-old face. "It means precipitation!" My stumped look prompted further explanation. "You know like the bits of water on the grass in the morning."



Tal's job was to cover the entrance gate. She was delightfully fun and to my annoyance took up with an Argentine boyfriend named Andres who was doing a doctoral study on the group behavior of a desert breed of starlings.



When I went north to visit Jerusalem Tal had offered her parents to host my stay. Her mother was away and so I only met her father. He was a quiet man and as we sat at dinner the television was on, broadcasting a documentary about the Holocaust. He broke our awkward silence by telling me that he had been in the Holocaust working on a road gang for six years. "I never got sick for a single day," he said and told me about some of the conditions he survived. He ended the discussion by saying the Six-Day War was the worst thing that had ever happened to Israel and would eventually destroy the nation.



When I returned to the Hai Bar, Tal apologized with a roll of her eyes that I had been "stuck" with her father. "No, it was interesting," I said. "He told me about his experiences in the Holocaust." Tal's jaw dropped to her bellybutton. "He's never said a word to me about it," she answered, holding tears back.



Roni was my boss. His great uncle had been Franz Kafka. "A real nut," Roni observed. His mother was from Prague and had spent World War II at Auschwitz. When I met her, I saw a number tatooed on her wrist. His father was a Palestinian Jew and had fought in the 1948 war. Roni had fought in the Golan Heights in 1973. Roni took very good care of me, as did his wife Mali. They had a small daughter Yara, who I occasionally baby-sat. I admired Roni very much.



Iran was another co-worker and a very kind, if timid man. He had the weakest handshake I have ever encountered and seemed in total contrast to the image of a rugged Israeli. It looked like a stiff wind could knock him over. He had a German non-Jewish girlfriend who had about 25 pounds on him, mostly muscle.



Finally, there was Natan, the scariest person I've ever known. Like all Israelis, he was a soldier, but Natan had also been a mercenary in the Rhodesian civil war. You got the feeling that not only had Natan killed people, but that he might have enjoyed it. I remember him talking about "khafers" with a sparkle in his eye that seemed more like a menacing glee than a twinkled nostalgia for the black people of southern Africa.



Natan had worked at the Hai Bar for many years and did not like Roni. He talked a lot about the good old days when an American named Bill Clark ran the Hai Bar before it had been open to the public. Among other things, he said that they used to hunt the wild gazelle that ran inside the park. It turned out that Roni wanted to fire Natan, but he did not have the manpower to replace him until Tal and I arrived.



When Roni did fire Natan there was a bitter divide within the southern section of the Nature Reserve Authority, revealing an agency-wide rift between the soldiers and hunters that Yoffe had brought into the authority and the more traditional conservationists who staff these types of agencies around the world. Despite the role I played in Natan's departure, he treated me extremely well and seemed to like me. Nevertheless, he was very bitter about losing his job, mainly I think because he loved the animals. It was as if he had lost his chance for redemption.



6. The fall of a sparrow



Twenty-five years later, many of the Hai Bar animals have been released into the wild. Persian wild asses live in the Ramon Crater deep inside the Negev, as do ostriches and even Arabian oryxes. Scimitar oryxes were sent to Senegal to re-populate the Sahara Desert with the wild antelopes. When Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, the Nature Reserve Authority sent ostriches as a gesture of good will.



The Hai Bar has added a predator center and a nocturnal exhibit that are open to the public for visitors, making the place seem more like a zoo than the wild game park I experienced. It has become a fixture as a tourist attraction for visitors to Eilat, a seaside resort that is very popular among northern Europeans.



I stayed in the job for six months and when it was over I flew to Kenya by myself for a month. I returned to Israel for a couple of weeks, briefly contemplated staying in the country to become a citizen, but then decided to return to the United States. I went back to visit Israel in 1987 and saw Roni at the Hai Bar. I have hardly given any thought to this experience until writing this paper. What strikes me the most in looking back is the stunning contrast between the people and events that made the Hai Bar possible and the mission of the wildlife park.



This was the toughest collection of people I've ever encountered (with the possible exception of the Monday Evening Club, of course). Roni's immediate boss from Haifa had fought in every Israeli war since 1948. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, age 50-something he was a sniper who covered an infantry platoon that included his oldest son. His boss, in turn, was a man named Dan Perry who lost a leg to a land mine in the Golan Heights. Then there was Shalom, a bird enthusiast whose heart raced at the prospect of a warbler's song. Shalom had lost his hearing in one ear from a bombardment in the 1948 war. Whenever we parted he held my hand with both hands and said "shalom, shalom" in the gentlest way you can imagine. If a teddy bear had a human face, it would look like Shalom. And to go back to Avraham Yoffe, despite his well-known charming charisma, in researching this paper I learned that soldiers under his command in the Sinai had killed Egyptian prisoners of war and that he, like other Israeli generals, turned a blind eye to it.



So here were these hardened soldiers working with the children of concentration camp survivors dedicated to preserving the lives of the most obscure collection of animals you could imagine so that they could live in the wild in places that practically no person ever visits.



It was an expensive, labor-intensive enterprise undertaken by a nation at war with its neighbors and later torn apart by the Entifada rebellions by Palestinians inside of Israel. I am hard-pressed to give a rational reason why with all of the troubles that Israel confronts the government would support year after year a project with so little quantifiable benefit.



But there it is and in a way that I cannot explain with words I completely understand it. The image that comes to mind is of when I was driving across the desert on a red 1968 Ford tractor with a cloud of dust trailing behind me and the jagged Jordanian mountains looming over the scene. I felt so small and yet complete.



It turns out that one of the prized Arabian oryx that was released into the wild died shortly afterwards, apparently bitten by a poisonous snake. I can just picture Roni's response after all the work he and so many people had put into giving the antelope the opportunity to live free in the wild.



"Well, it's the chance you take."

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Naulakha: Kipling in America

Presented to the Club in 1990 by David T. Noyes

My parents have been in the process of cleaning out their home of the last 36 years — the home in which I grew up. They were preparing to sell it and retire to Cape Cod, with some winter traveling in warmer climates, but the downward spiral in the real estate market has postponed their plans for the time being.

As part of the clean up process, several large cartons of old dusty items were dropped off at our house. Return delivery was not an option! Because I was now a homeowner, surely I had room to store all these “treasures:” costumes from a first grade play, comic books, Red Sox programs featuring Pete Runnels, Pumpsie Green, and Frank Malzone. There were also report cards, Boy Scout badges, family trip souvenirs. Bazooka Bubblegum wrappers (you know — the ones advertising trinkets such as rabbit feet for 25 cents plus 250 wrappers).

But there was also a faded yellow and frayed edged children’s anthology that I recognized immediately. Here was the real treasure: Childhood memories of many evening’s bedtime stories.

I sometimes wonder if I actually recall certain childhood events or if I’ve just been told some incidents so often that I have incorporated them as memories. However, I clearly remember asking over and over again for my parents to read my favorite: “The Elephant’s Child”. The cynic in me says that I chose it because it was the longest tale in this book or that the choice was influenced by my mother’s being an English teacher. But, in reality, it is still today my favorite children’s story. I have to confess that it was not until I started to read to my own children that I realized that Rudyard Kipling was the author. Somehow, his work had been totally lacking during my formal education. The teachers of my generation apparently did not value memorization of poems or passages of literature, whereas I suspect many of you can remember, even now, some passage you were required to recite. It is for this reason that I didn’t realize Kipling is perhaps more famous for his verse than his prose. At the [Berkshire] Athenaeum [in Pittsfield, Mass.], I was delighted to find not only Kipling in print, but several wonderful readings on tape.

To refresh your memories, “The Elephant’s Child” is the story in which, O Best Beloved, the elephant gains a trunk. Elephants had noses that were “blackish, bulgy and as big as a boot, that could wriggle from side to side” but were not useful extremities. Because a young elephant is filled with “ ’satiable curiosity” and makes a nuisance of himself by asking too many questions, his African family members take turns spanking him. When he can no find a satisfactory answer locally, he sets off to discover what the crocodile has for dinner, and comes to the banks of the “great grey-green greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.” Here he meets the Bicolored Python Rock Snake who proceeds to spank the elephant with his “scalesome, flailsome tail.” Soon the elephant has his encounter with the crocodile who bites down on the trunk. In the tug of war that follows the trunk stretches. Of course the Bicolored Python Rock Snake helps him to realize that the trunk will be very useful for picking up food, showering, and perhaps, most importantly, to exact a spanking revenge on all his family members.

Isn’t this the dream of all children: to turn disadvantage to advantage; to get even with the schoolyard bully? No wonder it’s such a favorite.

As you may know Kipling does have a New England connection. If we can stretch the boundaries of the Berkshires to Brattleboro, Vermont, perhaps we can claim him for our own!

He was born in 1865 in Bombay, India. His father was an artist and sculptor, working as head of an art department. At the age of six he was sent to London to live with a couple who were chosen from a newspaper ad. It was five years before his mother returned and rescued him for the continual beatings he was given (remember “The Elephant’s Child”).

Upon completion of his formal schooling, he returned to India to work for a newspaper. At the age of 21, he began to produce the writing that made him famous. Apparently, he was able to interview soldiers and subsequently write detailed accounts of battle without ever having experienced war himself, thereby breaking what I was taught was one of the cardinal rules of writing.

By the age of 25, he was back in London, and had published numerous poems including “Gunga Din” and “The Ballad of East and West.” When Tennyson died in 1892, the office of Poet Laureate became vacant. Kipling was passed over for this post in favor of Alfred Austin, a little known journalist.

Kipling had a general mistrust of publishers. Several of his stories were pirated and sold as editions. Apparently it was not clear what copyright laws protected magazine articles and he received no compensation for these anthologies. However, Wolcott Balestier, a literary agent for John Lovell Publishing Co., gained Rudyard’s trust and they became close friends. Wolcott was the eldest child of the Ballestier family of Brattleboro, Vermont. Shortly after Wolcott died a tragic early death from typhoid fever, Rudyard married Wolcott’s younger sister , Carrie. They were married in London, and Henry James gave the bride away.

The newlyweds arrived in New York and took the train for Vermont. They were greeted by Carrie’s brother, Betty. The countryside was snow-covered and the temperature was minus 30 degrees! Kipling describes his first encounter with New England:

A walrus sitting on a woolpack was our host in his sleigh, and he wrapped us in hairy goatskin coats, caps that came down over the ears, buffalo-robes and blankets, and yet more buffalo-robes till we, too, looked like walruses and moved almost as gracefully. But for the jingle of the sleigh-bells the ride might have taken place in a dream, for there was no sound of hoofs upon the snow. The runners sighed a little now and again as they glided over an inequality, and all the sheeted hills round about were as dumb as death.

When Kipling awoke the next day and took in the view of Mount Monadnock, which he knew to be Ralph Waldo Emerson’s favorite mountain, he wanted to make Vermont his permanent home. Beatty sold Rudyard eleven acres of rolling fields which included frontage on the Connecticut River and wonderful views of Monadnock. Kipling quickly started planning their dream house, Naulakha. This is the name of a fabulous Indian Jewel worn by a Hindu Maharajah and literally translates as 900,000 rubies. Kipling described his new home as “riding on a hillside like a little boat on the flank of a far wave.” His 1894 earnings of $25,000 allowed him to complete the house of his dreams.

He wrote in his library from 9 to 1, and did not allow visitors during that time. He said, “I have time, light, and quiet, three things hard to come by in London.” Captains Courageous, the only one of his stories in which all the characters are typical Americans in an American setting, The Seven Seas, and both Jungle Books were written there. Kipling wrote to E. L. White in 1894: “I wonder if people get a tithe of the fun out of the tales that I get in doing them.”

Rudyard continued to travel and meet people. On a visit to Washington D. C., he met President Cleveland and became disillusioned by the dishonesty in government. He subsequently described Theodore Roosevelt as a champion of manliness and enemy of pretentious shams. Kipling also returned to England to visit his parents, but, while there, he kept Vermont close to his heart. He wrote to a friend:

Real warmth at last, and it waked in me a lively desire to be back in Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont, U. S. A. and hear the sodywater fissing in the drug-store and discuss the outlook for the Episcopalian Church with the clerk; and hear the doctor tell fish-yarns, and have the iron-headed old farmers loaf up and jerk out: “Bin in Yurope haint yer?” and then go home, an easy gait, and the fireflies playing up and down the Swamp Road and Katy-dids giving oratorios, free, gratis and for nothing to the wippoorwill, and everybody sitting out on the verandah after dinner, smoking Durham tobacco in a cob pipe, with our feet on the verandah railings and the moon coming up.

However, the Kiplings did not associate with many of the locals. Rudyard did play golf with the minister of the Congregational Church, but did not attend services. He felt he was being stared at. One rumor suggested that he spent Sundays writing hymns, which gave him a mystical status and relieved him of being thought irreligious.

Vermont did not prove to be Utopia. As Kipling’s fame grew, so did the numbers of autograph seekers. The Kiplings ventured out less and less and came to be viewed as snooty by the locals. Visitors to Naulakha were almost exclusively out-of-towners, and included Arthur Conan Doyle among others.

Moreover, Beatty began to be a problem. He was drinking heavily and in debt. He had been hired by the Kiplings as caretaker of Naulakha, but was discovered taking money from this account for personal use. In 1896 Beatty filed for bankruptcy. Rudyard inflamed the situation by disparaging Beatty in the local tavern. Beatty then threatened to kill Rudyard if he didn’t apologize. Trying to turn the tables Rudyard pressed charges of “indecent and opprobrious epithets, and threatening to kill.” Beatty made bail and immediately wired the news to the leading newspapers, all of which were eager for the story. Kipling’s precious privacy was lost. The American press sided with Beatty, seeing this as the story of a famous, wealthy Englishman trying to throw his unsuccessful brother-in-law into jail to avoid the embarrassment of having to live next door to him. The outcome of the case became irrelevant; Kipling had made a fool of himself. He decided he had to leave Vermont, and wrote to a friend in England, “there are only two places in the world I want to live, Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live at either.”

He lived the remainder of his life in England and South Africa, where he became good friends with Cecil Rhodes. When Rhodes died, Kipling became a trustee of the Rhodes Scholarships. He continued to refuse public honors, as he thought this might compromise his complete independence to say what he felt needed to be said. Thus he refused knighthood twice and was passed over in favor of Bridges for Poet Laureate in 1913. He refused to be president of the Authors Society, but in 1926 the Royal Society of Literature awarded Kipling their gold medal which had been given previously only to Walter Scott, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Kipling accepted the Nobel prize for literature — the first Englishman to be so honored.

He also enjoyed the all male companionship of a number of exclusive London clubs. However, he found that he could not partake in the luxuries of the table without severe abdominal pains and thus spent the last 25 years of his life on strict, bland diet. Of course, his two pack per day smoking habit persisted and in 1936, at the age of 70, his ulcer perforated caused his death.

Throughout his life he adored children, reminding visitors to bring their own whenever they came. He was especially close to his own three children and was devastated when his first born daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of eight in 1900. In 1915 his son John, became a casualty of the War and his body was never recovered. Despite these tragedies, or perhaps because of them, Kipling pursued youthful writing. However, he wrote, “I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience. The tales had to be read by children before people realized that they were meant for grown-ups.”

While I would not categorize our Monday evening’s topics as bedtime stories, where else can I experience the pure pleasure of being read to!

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Missing in Action: Charles W. Whittlesey's farewell

Presented to the Club on May 14, 2001 by Martin C. Langeveld



Late at night on Saturday, November 26, 1921, the SS Toloa, a United Fruit Company liner, steamed south on the Atlantic, a half-day out of New York and bound for Havana. Charles White Whittlesey, a Wall Street lawyer, had spent the evening in the ship’s smoking saloon, conversing with fellow passengers about his wartime experiences. A half-hour before midnight, he abruptly excused himself. In his cabin, he placed on the bedspread nine letters in envelopes, along with a note for the captain. Then he stepped on deck, leaned precariously over the rail, shot himself in the head with an army-issue pistol, and fell into the dark sea.



Whittlesey, 37 years old, was considered one of the greatest American heroes of the First World War. In fact, the press had proclaimed his principal military exploit to be as memorable as Custer’s Last Stand or the defense of the Alamo.



During the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October 1918, he had led a unit of American troops that became known as the “Lost Battalion” when they were marooned for five days without food or water behind German lines, constantly under attack. On the final day of the ordeal, the German commander demanded that Whittlesey and his troops surrender, “as it would be quite useless to resist any more.” The story went out that in response he told them, “Go to hell,” which made him an instant celebrity, but afterward he steadfastly maintained that he had sent no answer. For refusing to retreat or surrender, Whittlesey received decorations ranging from the Congressional Medal of Honor to a citation from the king of Montenegro.



When the news of his disappearance reached New York, it immediately became the top story in every newspaper in the city.



All the recipients of Whittlesey’s final letters maintained he had offered no explanation for his suicide, and none of the letters were released to the press. As a footnote, months later, his estate was appraised at a net value of only $680, including $200 in clothing and a $40 watch. America’s fascination with Whittlesey’s suicide faded quickly, and his motives remain a mystery.

The Whittleseys, a family with colonial Connecticut origins, were keenly aware of their role in history and pursued a mission of leadership that encouraged service to God, country and society. Between 1776 and 1900, the Whittleseys, typically educated at Yale, supplied the nation with one Senator, four Congressmen, dozens of state legislators, and many ministers, lawyers, merchants and military officers.

Charles Whittlesey grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and chose to attend Williams College. [Incidentally, his family came to Pittsfield because Charles’ uncle William Augustus Whittlesey had moved here. William Augustus was a member of this Club, the first of several connections the story has to us. Also of interest, William Augustus had married Caroline Benton Tilden, the niece of Samuel Tilden, whose story Club member Roger Linscott presented at an earlier meeting this season.] At 6 feet, 2 inches, he towered over his college classmates, but his eyes were poor and he was never seen with a ball in his hands. Quiet, studious, and inclined toward literature and poetry, he preferred, instead of sports, long solitary walks through the Berkshire Hills, studying nature and watching birds. He flirted with socialism and youthful idealism, writing in 1904 that the purpose of a college education is “learning to judge correctly, to think clearly, to see and to know the truth, and to attain the faculty of pure delight in the beautiful.” He earned a law degree from Harvard in 1908, and embarked on a Wall Street law career, soon forming a partnership with a Williams classmate, John Bayard Pruyn.

A month after America entered the war in 1917, Whittlesey took a leave from the partnership and enlisted in the Army. He shipped for France as a captain in the Army’s 77th Division, also known as the “metropolitan division,” because it was made up largely of New York City men, principally from the polyglot lower east side of Manhattan. Its members spoke 42 different languages or dialects.

By September, Whittlesey was commissioned a major. General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, the commander-in-chief of the American forces, was gambling that he could smash the German lines sufficiently to induce a retreat by committing relatively green troops to battle. The alternative was to have his army suffer attrition by disease during the French winter in order to await a spring offensive. He planned to have the Americans launch a massive attack in the Meuse-Argonne region.

On the morning of October 2, the 77th was ordered to move forward against the heavily fortified German line. Whittlesey’s troops, a mixed battalion of 554 men, advanced through a ravine in the heart of the Argonne forest, an “almost impenetrable jungle of undergrowth.” Because the units on their flanks failed to make headway, Whittlesey’s troops were cut off from their supply lines the next day, pinned down by German fire from the surrounding 200-foot high bluffs. They began to suffer heavy losses.

Some of the men had never thrown a live grenade, but for four days, they resisted waves of Germans attacks. The Americans quickly ran out of rations, and had only the water they could scoop out of puddles.

Based on messages Whittlesey sent by carrier pigeon, his sole means of communications, Allied aircraft tried to drop supplies, but because of the narrowness of the strip held by the battalion, none of the parcels hit their mark. American artillery fire directed at the German positions fell instead on Whittlesey’s troops, and he had to send out his last pigeon with a message demanding, “for heaven’s sake stop it.”

On the afternoon of Oct. 7, the Germans pushed a blindfolded American prisoner, Lowell Hollingshead, back across the lines blindfolded to deliver a typewritten message to Whittlesey. In perfect English, it suggested:

The suffering of your wounded men can be heard over here in the German lines, and we are appealing to your humane sentiments to stop. A white flag shown by one of your men will tell us that you agree with these conditions. Please treat Private Lowell R. Hollingshead as an honorable man. He is quite a soldier. We envy you. The German Commanding Officer.

(The writer, it turned out after the war, had lived before the war in Spokane, Washington for four years.)

After the troops were rescued, a war correspondent asked Gen. Robert Alexander of the 77th Division how Whittlesey had answered the German demand. Alexander replied, “What answer could he send them? He told them to go to hell.” That response turned the the “Lost Battalion” into one of the biggest stories of the war, and made Whittlesey one of its most sought-after heroes.

In reality, Whittlesey had simply read the note aloud to his subordinates, smiled, and put it in his pocket. He told Hollingshead, “Go back to your post.” He sent no reply to the Germans, but decided to pull in the white sheets that served as targets for the airplanes, for fear that they would be seen as signals of surrender.

Relief came at last that night, when a fellow regiment of the 77th fought their way to Whittlesey’s position. Of the original 554 troops involved, 107 had been killed, 63 were missing and 190 were wounded. Only 194 were able to walk out of the ravine. Along the entire Meuse-Argonne front, 1,200,000 American troops had taken part, sustaining 117,000 casualties. But the offensive had more than met Pershing’s expectations, inducing the Germans to agree to the Armistice on November 11.

Whittlesey received a battlefield promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, and a few weeks later he was relieved from further combat duty and sent back to America. In New York, reporters besieged him, and he obligingly answered their questions, embellishing his tale with quotable lines like, “hundreds of Germans attacking with hand grenades and howling like 10,000 wild devils all day.” On December 6th, President Wilson announced that of the first three Congressional Medals of Honor to be awarded for valor in the war, one would go Whittlesey and another to his second-in-command George McMurtry.

After telling his war story a few times, Whittlesey accepted speaking invitations, but steadfastly refused to discuss his war experiences, both in public and in private. But he hadn’t lost the idealism that had turned him to socialism before the war. He spoke of pacifism, and in favor of the proposed League of Nations and its promise of a lasting peace. He consistently spotlighted the valor of the American enlisted men, saying “remember that those who have been picked out for special praise are the symbols of the men behind them. No man ever does anything alone. It’s the chaps you don’t hear about that make possible the deed you do hear about.”

He tried to return to his quiet law partnership with Bayard Pruyn, but the nation would not leave him alone. The hero’s role, which Whittlesey played willingly at first, demanded much of his time. He took to visiting the wounded recuperating in hospitals in the New York area, and delivered eulogies at funerals of servicemen he had known. In June 1919, he accepted honorary degrees at both Harvard and Williams. He marched with other servicemen in a July 4 “Welcome Home” parade in his home town, Pittsfield. He attended the first New York State convention of the American Legion in Rochester, and became active in the Roll Call, the annual membership drive supporting the New York City Red Cross.

Behind the public’s admiration for Whittlesey, however, there were disquieting whispers – suggestions that he had led his troops into an avoidable trap; that he had not properly followed orders; that he could have avoided casualties by surrendering or ordering a retreat; that he had given the wrong coordinates in his pigeon message calling for artillery support.

Military historians have exonerated Whittlesey, but whether he blamed himself or not, the level of casualties his unit sustained weighed heavily on his mind. And rather than diminish over time, Whittlesey’s role as a hero seemed to demand more and more. To a friend he complained, “Not a day goes by but I hear from some of my old outfit, usually about some sorrow or misfortune. I cannot bear much more.”

In pursuit of his special interest in banking law, in 1920 Whittlesey joined White & Case, a large firm with many banking clients – but the pace of his public appearances continued unabated. He made whistle-stop speeches favoring America’s entry into the League of Nations on behalf of the losing presidential candidate that year, Ohio governor James M. Cox. He stayed in the army reserves, where he was promoted to Colonel in 1921. He appeared, briefly, in a movie, “The Lost Battalion,” released in 1921, the principal action of which was romantic rather than military. In the fall of 1921, he served as chairman of the Red Cross Roll Call. Finally, on November 11, 1921, Armistice Day, when the nation buried the Unknown Soldier of the World War at Arlington National Cemetery, Whittlesey and McMurtry both participated as pallbearers.

Friends and relatives noticed that in the weeks after that culminating event, he seemed moody and depressed. He was also physically ill with a racking cough that kept him up at night, and was heard by others in his rooming house. To a fellow boarder, but not to anyone else, he casually mentioned the possibility of taking a sea trip to get away from things. After speaking at a Red Cross dinner, he confided to his dinner partner: “Raking over the ashes like this revives all the horrible memories. I’ll hear the wounded screaming again. I have nightmares about them. I can’t remember when I had a good night’s sleep.”

Unknown to all, but with all the thoroughness natural to him as a corporate lawyer, during those same weeks Whittlesey was meticulously preparing for his end, leaving no detail to chance.

At the end of October, he visited his family in Pittsfield for the last time.

On Friday, November 18th, he walked to the American Express office around the corner from his office to book a passage to Havana. From a chart, he selected a starboard cabin from which it was possible to slip easily, and unseen, to the upper promenade deck. To avoid easy recognition he used the name “C. W. Whittlesey.”

His father came to New York to see him that weekend, and later said that his son was in high spirits. On Sunday evening, seated on stage among crippled and wounded war veterans, Whittlesey appeared at a New York gathering honoring Marshall Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Commander-in-Chief.

On Wednesday, the 23rd, he dictated a new will, had it witnessed, and placed it in a bank safe-deposit box. To the stenographer and witnesses, this was normal – lawyers at the firm were always making new wills.

The next day was Thanksgiving. He visited his closest friends, the Pruyns. By all accounts, he was unusually cheerful, and played with their year-old baby during most of the visit.

On Friday, the 25th, before leaving his office for the last time, he wrote out detailed instructions for handling the cases he was working on. He told associates he would be away for the weekend – some thought he would be visiting his parents in Pittsfield, but he told others he planned to attend the Army-Navy football game on Saturday.

Instead, he went to a theater performance Friday evening with a woman friend, and asked Mrs. Gertrude Sullivan, his landlady, to have his breakfast ready at 8 a.m., telling her, “I’m going to be alone for a few days. I am tired.” In the morning he gave her a check for the December rent, urging her to cash it. The Toloa left the dock about noon on Saturday.

Whittlesey made sure the captain and fellow passengers knew who he was, asking whether any wireless messages had been received about the outcome of the Army-Navy game. During dinner at the captain’s table and in the lounge afterward, he spoke freely about the war, something he had avoided for three years. No one saw him leave his cabin or go overboard that night.

At Whittlesey’s home church, First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, the next morning, the congregation dedicated a bronze plaque memorializing the church’s war dead. The pastor [Rev. Hugh Gordon Ross] used as his text a quotation from Acts: “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.”

That day, the Toloa encountered rough seas. Many passengers stayed in their cabins and Whittlesey’s absence at meals prompted no inquiry until Monday, the 28th, when it was found that his cabin had not been used. In the note left for the captain, Whittlesey specified telegrams be sent to his parents, to Pruyn, to his brother Elisha, and to Robert F. Little of White & Case – the latter with the instruction: “Look in upper left hand drawer of my desk for memorandum of law matters I’ve been attending to. I shall not return.”

The New York papers carried lengthy stories for days, with many quotes from friends and relatives. Little was quoted:

He was a victim engulfed in a sea of woe. His last work as chairman of the Red Cross Roll Call this month was all based on the suffering of the wounded. He would go to two or three funerals every week, visit the wounded in hospitals, and try to comfort the relatives of the dead.

Marguerite Babcock, Pruyn’s sister-in-law, said: “The last week his cheerfulness was in great contrast to his usual solemnity. That is what we cannot understand, unless he had made up his mind to take his life, and felt better that he had decided it.”

The four friends who had received letters refused to make them public, but said in a statement: “In the light of our intimate relations with him we are convinced that the theory voiced by the press as to the cause of his death is correct. His was a battle casualty.”

Most eloquent was the eulogy given on December 11 at the memorial service in Pittsfield by Judge Charles L. Hibbard, a friend of the family and Pittsfield’s orator of choice [and also a member of this Club]. After recounting Whittlesey’s career and time of trial in battle, he continued:

Then comes the truce of that November day, the return to the home land, the public recognition, the undying fame and the world’s acclaim. But how hard it is for this self-effacing young man to endure this public praise and recognition. . . . Wherever he turns, he is Col. Whittlesey, not the Charley Whittlesey of old days. Invitations to be honored and to honor pour in upon him. . . . There are funerals and hospital visits and the impact of all such experiences upon his sensitive nature is terrific.

Hibbard continued with a remembrance of a recent encounter with Whittlesey:

He is sitting on the piazza of a cottage by the sea on a glorious late September day but a few weeks ago. . . He is looking straight out to sea, with naught but sea between him and that land where lie so many of his boys. The beating surf is but an echo, the warm, bright sunshine, the blue sky, the dancing waves, all combine to charm. But a single look at his face and one knows he is unconscious of this glory of Nature. Somewhere far down in the depths of his being or in imagination far off across the waters he lives again the days that are past. That unconscious look has all the marks of deep sorrow, brooding tragedy, unbearable memories. Weeks pass. The mainspring of life is wound tighter and tighter and then comes the burial of the Unknown Soldier. This draws the last measure of reserve and with it the realization that life had little now to offer. This quiet, reserved personality drew away as it were from its habitation of flesh, thought out the future, measured the coming years and came to a mature decision. You say, ‘He had so much to live for – family, friends, and all that makes life sweet.’ No, my friends, life’s span for him was measured those days in that distant forest. He had plumbed the depth of tragic suffering; he had heard the world’s applause; he had seen and touched the great realities of life; and what remained was of little consequence. He craved rest, peace and sweet forgetfulness. He thought it out quietly, serenely, confidently, minutely. He came to a decision not lightly or unadvisedly, and in the end did what he thought was best, and in the comfort of that thought we too must rest. ‘Wounded in action,’ aye, sorely wounded in heart and soul and now most truly ‘missing in action.’

Seventeen years later, Whittlesey’s youngest brother, Melzar, said that he never opened the envelope delivered to him from the ship. “If my brother couldn’t tell me why he did it, I don’t want to know,” he told an interviewer. “No, now that you have reminded me of it, I think I’ll destroy it tonight.”

But one letter, at least, survives, though it has never before been published or reported. Reposing in the archive of Williams College, it is the letter he wrote to John Bayard Pruyn:

Dear Bayard:



Just a note to say good by[e]. I’m a misfit by nature and by training, and there’s an end of it.



I’m sorry to wish on you the job of executor, but there is very little to do . . .



I won’t try to say anything personal Bayard, because you and I understand each other. Give my love to Edith.



As ever, Charles Whittlesey.

Retellings of the story have focused on the battlefield, treating the suicide as a footnote, and the sound bite of his friends, “His was a battle casualty,” has been allowed to stand. His nearest relatives today hand down the family’s feeling, that “he wanted to be with his men.”

But these theories explanations don’t fit with the farewell note to Pruyn, and don’t answer the many questions Whittlesey left behind. Why, at age 37, apparently successful as a lawyer, did he live in a rooming house and die virtually penniless?*  Why did he never marry? Was he a homosexual? Was he affected by other family tragedies — the deaths of two siblings during his early childhood, the death of another brother, Russell, in 1911, and the serious illness of his brother Elisha? Did his own physical condition, evidenced by the reported chronic “racking cough,” play a role?

Did he bury himself too deeply in volunteer efforts, speaking engagements and ceremonial appearances that would remind him of the deaths and injuries that had surrounded him on the battlefield? Did his refusal to discuss his war experiences suppress a serious depression related to traumatic stress suffered under fire? Was he bothered by the nagging possibility that different decisions made during the advance might have avoided the trap and the ensuing extraordinary level of casualties? Was he fatally disillusioned in his idealistic hopes, and by the realization that for all its human cost, the Allied victory in the war had accomplished no lasting peace?

And what’s behind his words to Bayard Pruyn, “I’m a misfit by nature and by training”? That he felt out of place in a society that valued masculine heroics and considered him odd for being uncomfortable with the hero’s mantle and for visiting the sick and crippled survivors and the widows and mothers of the dead?

With today’s hindsight, it seems likely that Whittlesey was a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During and immediately after World War I, this condition was only vaguely understood and referred to as “shell-shock.” Not until after the Vietnam War was PTSD, initially called post-Vietnam syndrome, officially classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

Ari Solomon, a professor of psychology at Williams, who recently reviewed the case, supports this view. Solomon would only speculate, since true psychological diagnosis of someone long dead is not possible, but he said, “There’s nothing intrinsically mysterious about this suicide to a clinical psychologist. The circumstances that are known – sketchy as they are – seem consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Among PTSD’s psychological features are: persistently re-experiencing a horrifying event emotionally (such as in nightmares or flashbacks); avoiding things that are associated with the event (or else tolerating them with great distress, as Whittlesey may have done); feeling detached from humanity or from one’s ‘normal’ life; sleep disturbance; and feeling generally overanxious.”

Whittlesey’s story, Solomon said, appears to match the prototype fairly well. Also typical of PTSD, according to Solomon, is “survivor guilt – the feeling that ‘the wrong person died,’ or an irrational belief that you did something to cause the tragic event. It would be common for a man in Whittlesey’s position to feel that he did not deserve to live while so many others had died.”

The improved, “carefree” mood in his final days, noted by most who encountered him, is not unusual in a suicidal person, often signaling that a final decision has been made, Solomon said.

If I could interview Whittlesey as a psychologist today, I’d especially have in mind … the sharp discrepancy between the public role he was playing and his hidden agony, his constant re-exposure to reminders of the battle, his possible lack of intimate relations, and his felt need to hide his pain even from family and dearest friends.

When an organization of Lost Battalion survivors was formed in 1938, many of the veterans reported still having nightmares and “nervous reverberations.” One, unable to attend in person, wrote, “We just do not have the control we should have. I went through without a visible wound, but have spent many months in hospitals and dollars for medical treatment as a result of those terrible experiences.”

Such repercussions are common to trauma survivors, as are beliefs, according to Solomon, such as “ ‘nobody, not even my family, could accept me if I admitted what terror and shame I’m still experiencing.’ ” A psychotherapist today would seek to modify those beliefs, he said, because “getting to the point of feeling emotionally safe and emotionally supported is a critical aspect of recovering from PTSD.”

The initial, very popular, assessment that the Lost Battalion’s resistance would rank with Custer’s Last Stand and the siege of the Alamo has not held up, although the episode has found its way as a case study into military textbooks. With only a few letters and contemporary recollections surviving, the mysteries will remain. Indeed, “his was a battle casualty.” However, his own tantalizing hint, “I’m a misfit by nature and by training,” also points to unresolvable conflicts between his public persona as a war hero, political speaker, leader and symbol, and the inner Whittlesey, an idealist, man of letters, and lover of nature and quietude.

As a final epilogue, there is the brief life of Whittlesey’s only nephew, Frank Russell Whittlesey, the son of Melzar. He was born just five months before Charles’ death. Just two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, at age 20, while enrolled at Yale, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was sent into action in the Pacific, taking part in the capture of Tulagi Island and Guadalcanal, where he was killed while assisting a wounded companion. His body was buried during the battle and not recovered until 1989, when a farmer turned up the remains. On Memorial Day, 1992, [in a service conducted by our fellow Club member, Richard L. Floyd] the Whittlesey family gathered, along with St. Paul’s School and Yale classmates, to lay him to rest in the family plot in the Pittsfield Cemetery. Nearby, a few years later, veterans dedicated a stone in memory of the uncle he never knew, whose heroism had been an inspiration to him.

*Addendum, August 23, 2013 regarding the question of why Whittlesey "died virtually penniless": This is according to the probate report on Whittlesey's estate as published in the New York Times. Thanks to James, in the comments below, for the suggestion that perhaps Whittlesey gave away most of his assets in anticipation of his planned suicide.

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How I lost my marbles on the Mohawk Trail: Memoir of a long ride

Presented to the Club in 2003 by Richard L. Floyd



1. It’s like riding a bicycle

You can see Mt. Greylock from one of the upstairs rooms of my home in Pittsfield. On winter days the mountain and its surrounding peaks and ridges are often covered with a mantle of snow, even when there is not a flurry to be found in the surrounding towns. It was such a sight that inspired Melville, looking out from his home at Arrowhead a couple miles from here, to imagine a great white while breaching the waters of the South Pacific.



Greylock is technically not even really a mountain, just the largest of the Berkshire Hills. Nonetheless, it is the highest point in Massachusetts. At a mere 3,491 feet it is hardly Everest, but for a cyclist in Berkshire County it beckons, not only because “its there” but because it has a paved road to the top. Riding up, and preferably over, Mt. Greylock establishes certain low level bragging rights. Not, however, if you do it on one of those ubiquitous mountain bikes with 27 speeds and a granny gear. Any reasonably fit person with the time can do that. No, you must go over Mt. Greylock on a road bike.



To acquire some serious bragging rights you must do the Greylock Century Ride, a loosely organized annual pain-fest that attracts a certain sketchy clientele from around Western Mass and neighboring states, and is a regularly scheduled event for a few dozen of the hardest of the hardcore Berkshire cyclists.



I wanted to do it. I had seen the coveted T-shirts at my spinning class at the Y, and the people who wore them were not chopped liver in the local cycling community. The t-shirt changes some from year to year, but typically includes a side view chart of the one hundred mile course with elevations. The line resembles nothing so much as the EKG of a very distressed heart patient.



I had begun to cycle again in the autumn of 1998. I say “again” because I cycled as a child and then as a grad student before family life pre-empted most of my hobbies. But now my children were poised to leave the nest, and I was about to turn fifty. That summer I had started to try to get back in shape. I began with walking and some running at the Taconic High School track, but found that my joints were not as forgiving as when I had been a serious runner during the running craze of the late seventies and early eighties. The current craze for aging boomers was “spinning,” an aerobics class on stationary bicycles, much easier on the joints than running. I signed up for a Cycle Reebok class in August and began to spin three times a week. Soon some atavistic cycling impulse was stirred deep within me. I felt the need to get on a real bike and hit the roads.



So I went down to the local “serious” cycle shop, which is owned, operated and presided over by an amiable but eccentric character named Tom, who is philosopher, local historian, and grease monkey in equal parts. I am the pastor of a Congregational church in Pittsfield and Tom is a life-long Methodist with a theological cast of mind, so not infrequently when I want to talk about bicycles he wants to talk about religion.

Nevertheless, Tom knows his bicycles and is the purveyor and mechanic for many of the serious road cyclists in central Berkshire. Tom is not known for pitching a hard sell, but he allowed as how he might order me a bicycle and gave me a couple of catalogues and a disinterested evaluation of the pros and cons of each one. After picking the brains of my cycling friends I finally decided on a racing (rather than a touring) bike. After all, if what you are doing is getting in touch with your inner 13 year old and trying to forget that you are about to turn 50, a touring bike “with a longer wheel base and more stability” is not nearly as enticing as a racing bike that is “lighter, quicker and more responsive.”

So I ordered an Italian road rocket, a Bianchi Veloce. What’s not to like about a bike named “Speed” in Italian? For economy’s sake I was ordering from the remains of last year’s models so I couldn’t get my frame size in the classic mint green (and actually rather ugly) “Celeste” which is the hallmark of the Bianchi line. So I chose the only choice I had, bright blue. Then I waited around impatiently for my new bike to arrive, like a child who has ordered some trinket from the back of a cereal box and watches the mailbox each day. When my new bike finally arrived I visited it regularly in Tom’s shop while it waited its turn to be assembled.

As kids know there is nothing as exciting as a new bike. This bike was a beauty. First of all it was really big. I am 6’4” and required the biggest standard frame that Bianchi makes, 63 cm. And it was really blue, bright shiny blue, adorned with beautiful Bianchi logos and a “Made in Italy” sticker in red, green and white on the seat tube. It had shiny Campagnola components, brakes, gears, and cranks. These were exquisite little works of art, like fine handcrafted jewelry. At that time, in 1998, every winner of the fabled Tour de France had won while riding a bike with a Campagnola gruppo. Since then a crazy Texan named Lance Armstrong has won (how many is it now?) four! consecutive Tours on a bike with Shimano components made in Japan. But the Campagnola brand still evokes visions of the great European riders, of Fausto Coppi, Eddie Merkx, and Miguel Indurain crushing opponents in the Alps and Pyrenees. Shimano is to Campagnola what Toyota is to Alfa Romeo. The Japanese components are every bit as good as their Italian counterparts, and considerably cheaper, but tradition is still very much on the side of Campagnola. Think Yankee pin stripes, wooden bats, and natural turf. Think Fenway Park. My bike was not only beautiful it was a classic.

I soon acquired the proper accessories to ride this beauty in style: brightly colored shirts with pockets in the back, spandex cycling shorts, cycling shoes to fit into my clipless pedals, fingerless gloves, and last, but not least, a helmet. I was ready, not just to ride a bike, but to be a cyclist.

2. I am a cyclist
Nearly two years later I was a cyclist. By then I had logged thousands of miles. I had joined the Berkshire Cycling Association and proudly wore their distinctive mango and blue club jersey and the club shorts with “Tosk Chiropractic,” our chief sponsor, in bold letters on the sides. I had become a regular on the Thursday Night Ride, a weekly recreational ride through the Berkshire countryside. On Tuesday nights in the summer I often drove half an hour to the East to Cummington to compete against the clock in a 40 k time-trial as a way to increase my speed. On Saturday mornings, if I didn’t have to officiate at a wedding, I would ride a fifty miler with my new cycling friends. I had caught the cycling bug.

At first, my family thought it was amusing. They know that I am an enthusiast, and get caught up in these passions for hobbies from time to time. My wife Martha had been none too keen on me spending four figures for a bicycle. Her fear was that I would soon tire of it and it would molder in the garage along with the golf clubs and the fly fishing rods. Thousands of miles later her fear had moved in a different direction.

That summer I was always going out to, or coming in from, a ride. Even Abby, our dog was on to me. She had been accustomed to lobbying energetically for a walk whenever I came downstairs. She would smile that dopey Golden Retriever smile and vigorously wag her tail and look as if my attentions were the most important thing in the world. Now she had learned that if I was in spandex to forget about it. She wouldn’t even lift up her head as I prepared for a ride.

The truth is I was no longer riding, but training. I considered the leisurely 20-25 miles of the Thursday Night Ride an easy day. Sometimes I would ride my bike to the start of the ride. Once, when I rode to Jiminy Peak to a ride I failed to calculate the hour of darkness and found myself riding home through downtown Pittsfield in the dark with no lights.

Recreational riders just ride, while serious roadies keep logs. I diligently kept a log in which I entered each day’s ride, the miles, the duration, and the avg. speed. My bike computer has an odometer, so I knew how many miles I had done that year. Big mileage carries some bragging rights, and riders compare cumulative miles and talk about their weeks, as in “I only had 80 miles this week.” Or “Whoa, I just knocked off my 200th mile this week.”

The previous year, 1999, I had gradually become fit enough to stay long periods on a bike. I rode my first fifty miler alone in June, then a seventy miler in July with a friend and finally, on Labor Day weekend, a hundred miles in a day with a group of 14. On that first century ride I blew out a tire in Williamstown, and lost about 45 minutes going to the local bike shop to get a new one. A friendly young man from our group name Shaun was deputized to wait with me, and once the new tire was installed he drafted for me all the way to Pittsfield so we could rejoin the group at the fifty-mile mark, before starting the second half. A few week’s later I rode the bike for a team in the Great Josh Billings Run Aground, a bike, canoe and running triathlon that is a Berkshire County tradition. The “Josh,” as it is called locally, begins in Great Barrington, roams through the Alford Hills before wending its way through Stockbridge to the Stockbridge Bowl, where the canoers do several laps before handing the baton to the runner who runs a 10k, finishing at the cool green lawns of Tanglewood. I had the time of my life at the Josh. I had finished off my first full season of riding with a bang, and I couldn’t wait for spring.

On Memorial Day weekend of 2000 I successfully rode my second century ride, and aimed my sights at the Greylock Century in early August. In the weeks before the big ride I rode up Mt. Greylock twice, the first time on a last minute whim with my friend Rik, and the second time in the pouring rain and down the steep North Adams side, which is harder and more dangerous than riding up. The week before the big ride I was on vacation in Maine and rode to the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. I was feeling good. I had turned fifty without incident in February and I was proud of myself. I was ready for the Greylock Century.

3. From New Ashford to Florida
The Greylock Century started that year at the Brodie Mountain ski area on Route 7 in New Ashford at the foot of Mount Greylock. I arrived early for the eight o’clock start, took my bike off the car rack, paid my registration fee and received a t-shirt and a commemorative water bottle. I took a last minute trip to the men’s room and set off with a group of a couple dozen riders. Before we had even gone a mile we saw a rider changing a tire, but he soon rejoined us as we headed south for a few miles on Route 7 before turning left on North Maine Street in Lanesboro to enter the Mount Greylock State Reservation. Mount Greylock itself is but the high point of a vast outcropping of rock that is nearly eighteen miles long from North to South, or about one third the length of Berkshire County. We were coming at it from the South. There is a visitors’ center near the entrance to the park. From there it is about eight miles to the summit along Rockwell Road. The early climbing, just before and just after the visitors’ center, is actually the steepest grade and the hardest part of riding to the top of Greylock. Once you make it up to the ridge the road undulates beneath you until you come to Greylock itself, where there are some switchbacks before the road suddenly climbs, and meets up with Notch Road, which will take you to North Adams. From this junction a short road to the summit climbs, winds gently around the mountain with open views and takes you to the summit. At the top there is a great stone tower, the Veterans Memorial, and Bascom Lodge, a rustic building until recently run by the Appalachian Mountain Club, where you can fill your water bottles, buy food and drink, and use the facilities.

It was a clear bright day, a perfect day to spend on a bicycle. From the top of Greylock you get good views of Pittsfield to the south with its two big lakes, Pontoosic and Onota. To the West you can see the treeless ski runs at Brodie Mountain, and behind it the Taconic Range and New York State. To the East you can see the town of Adams and the Hoosac Range, which is where we were headed. It is hard to see to the North from the summit, but from a nearby overlook you can see Williamstown, with its college buildings and church spires and Vermont’s Green Mountains set behind it, a picture postcard of a New England town.

Part of the appeal of cycling is the scenery. You enter a place under your own power, unobtrusively, without the clang and clatter of an internal combustion engine. On a bike one sees birds and beasts that you would never see from a car. I have come noiselessly upon deer feeding in a field and once, a great blue heron standing by the side of Route 7. I have seen numerous foxes and wild turkeys. It is hard to explain to someone why you want to spend the better part of a day on a bicycle riding a hundred miles through the Berkshire Hills. The scenery is part of it, as are the bragging rights I mentioned earlier. There is too, the pure physicality of the act. The body reacts to such strenuous exercise with a flood of endorphins and enkephalins, the body’s own natural feel-good drugs, which make you feel, well, good.

It is true that the full benefits of cycling come only to the patient. There is a break-in period for your bottom which scares away many novices, and the new cushy comfortable seats that are so popular with recreational riders are too big and create too much chafing for long rides. There is no getting around it; the enjoyment of cycling is directly proportional to the shape you are in for it. The more you do it, the more fun it becomes. A century ride sounds hard, but in fact it isn’t. It is challenging and strenuous, to be sure, but if you have trained properly for it and are careful with your nutrition and hydration during the ride it can be very enjoyable. There is, too, a special camaraderie you experience with the other riders. At the end of the day there are war stories to tell. One of our riders writes a lengthy account of each day’s ride, with humorous anecdotes and observations about the roads and the views and the company. Each chapter is e-mailed to the list of riders at the end of the day, and the ride isn’t complete until you have read our Homer’s daily narrative.

That day I found myself on the top of Greylock with three other riders: my friend Shaun, who had rescued me on my first century ride, another young man I didn’t know, tall and wiry, from Bennington, Vermont, and a hefty man about my age from Rhode Island who had driven up for the day. My usual riding buddies were a little bit behind us (wisely pacing themselves) and they arrived as we were finishing our break at Bascom Lodge and about ready to descend.

I mentioned that I had gone down the north side of Greylock previously during a rainstorm. I thought today would be a piece of cake by comparison. What I didn’t envision was the peculiar problems a sunny day brings to a leafy wooded road. The uneven road surface was dappled with sunlight coming through the leaves, making it hard to see. In the best of times the road over Greylock is a minefield of holes and bumps and buckles. The north side of Greylock is so steep it is where the hardcore Berkshire cyclists train for the Mount Washington Bike Race. Notch Road is much steeper than Rockwell Road. It is a series of sharp and steep switchbacks, and when you are descending you are playing with your brakes the whole time. Gravity, normally a rider’s ally on a descent, goes over to the enemy and tries to kill you. This was the one part of the day I was dreading because I really do not feel entirely safe doing this. But this day the four of us managed it without incident and found ourselves spilled out onto the streets of downtown North Adams.


North Adams was once the industrial center of North Berkshire, but, like many New England mill towns, has been in decline for many years. It lies just East of Williamstown, which calls itself “the village beautiful” and is the home of Williams College. The contrast between the two towns is dramatic. But North Adams is making a comeback, centered around its new Museum of Contemporary Arts, MASS MOCA, attracting artists and craftspeople to its inexpensive housing and spacious lofts in the old commercial center.

It was through North Adams that we now road, along Route 2 for a brief urban interlude between more idyllic rural settings. Route 2 comes over from the New York border East of Troy and makes a bee line across the northern part of Massachusetts as it heads to Boston. This Western portion of the road is called “the Mohawk Trail,” and as one heads east on it toward Greenfield there are a couple Mohawk Trading Posts that seem like they are out of another era, roadside shops where you can buy moccasins, beaded belts and other assorted knick-knacks. But to get to Charlemont you must first climb up and over the Hoosac Range and then drop down its other side. So just East of North Adams Route 2 suddenly climbs quite abruptly, and snakes up to an overlook where you have spectacular views of North Adams and Mt Greylock. This section of road is known, for obvious reasons, as the Hairpin Turn, and nearly every year some poor trucker fails to negotiate it and loses his load or his life or both. Our band of four managed to get to the top of the turn, and had our first official fuel stop provided by the high school cross-country team. There was Gatorade and cookies and fruit.

After our short stop we climbed gradually higher to the hill town of Florida, Massachusetts, first to one summit, then to a second, and then began a long descent that would take us to Charlemont and the dreaded Hawley Hill, a climb shorter than Greylock but with a steeper grade. But I wasn’t worried about Hawley Hill. I was ready for it. I had just conquered Greylock and the Hairpin Turn and I was feeling good.

4. Gravity isn’t just a theory, it’s the law!
There came a moment when I quite suddenly realized that I was about to hurt myself, but it hadn't happened yet. There were seconds, or parts of seconds, (who knows?) when I knew I was no longer in control of my bicycle, and that one way or another I was going to go down, and at a pretty good speed on a pretty steep hill. Somehow I had inadvertently managed to drift off the road into what I later learned is called “a paved waterway,” a grooved drainage ditch alongside the shoulder designed to keep the snowmelt off the road. If you drift off the paved shoulder you drop down the steep pitch of the waterway, as I had just done.

How I got off the road I don’t know to this day, but off the road I was. I recall a weird sense of every thing slowing down, as if I was watching this happen to somebody else in slow motion. My adrenaline was pumping but I was strangely detached even as I fought in vain to steer out of the paved ditch and ride back up to the safety of the road. Finally the moment had come to fall, and I fell, something I recall only as pure sensation, without any visuals. Perhaps I closed my eyes. I hit hard on my right side and bounced, and then almost immediately my head thumped hard to the ground, and I thought, “I've hurt myself.”

Soon, or so it seemed, I was curled up in a fetal ball on the nearby grass, and a stranger's voice was asking me if I was “All right?” to which I could only moan. An ambulance arrived. By then, I was bathed in the soothing juices of shock, and gabbed with the EMT's as they put me on a backboard, and to the circle of worried cyclists that had gathered around me. My riding buddies were there, having come upon the scene and seen the ambulance. My friend Shaun was there. He had been in front of me, but was heading down the long hill when a trucker started to blow his air horn at him. Shaun thought he was harassing him, but when he turned around to look he saw the brake lights of a line of cars back near the top. And he didn’t see me. So he turned around and started to climb the hill he had just descended.

He reassured me that he would call Martha on his cell phone. Tell her “I'm OK!” I implored, meaning it, though it was as absurd a thing as I had ever said. I said some silly things. I wanted to get up and finish the ride. I wanted to take my bike with me in the ambulance. I was feeling no pain.

I mentioned that I am tall, and I weigh two hundred and fifteen pounds on a good day. My bike is 63 cm high. I had just crested the second summit and was heading downhill at about twenty miles an hour (in another half mile I would have been going near forty), and the sheer physics of mass and velocity meant bad things were going to happen to me.

The early inventory of those bad things included something obviously wrong with my right shoulder, for as I tried to raise myself the mechanics were weird and I had no strength. On the way to the hospital, I swapped old EMT stories from my days on the ambulance in Maine, and did my best to assure my rescuers that I was really fine, and that this whole episode was an embarrassing mistake of some kind.

Now my ride began a strange reversal. The ambulance took me back down the Hairpin Turn to the North Adams Regional Hospital. I was wheeled into the emergency room and my BCA jersey cut off me. A kind redheaded nurse offered me pain medication, but I refused it, since I wasn't in any real pain, although I could see now that I was pretty bloody and had nasty looking road rash on my knees and elbows and hands. It was only later, when I had to stand up for a CAT scan that the pain announced its arrival, and I felt a wave of nausea roll over me. Not long after that I accepted the offered morphine.

After awhile, Shaun’s mother-in-law Nancy came in to see me. I had never met her, but Shaun had been unable to reach Martha so he called her, and she drove the twenty miles up from Pittsfield to check on me, just one of many kindnesses I was to receive at that time.


Before too long Martha and my daughter Rebecca showed up and looked more concerned than I felt they ought to have been. I found myself involuntarily crying. I learned later that Shaun had called Martha, but she was at our church Blueberry Festival. When Shaun went to leave a message the tape on our answering machine ran out and the message she heard was “Martha, this is Shaun, Rick has had a crash.” BEEP, END OF TAPE. She had frantically started calling emergency rooms. On the second try she found me.

The scan came back. I had a broken rib, a contused lung, and a triple separation of the AC joint in my right shoulder. What I didn't know then, and didn’t discover for some time, was that I had lost my marbles on the Mohawk Trail, or to put in more clinically, I had a traumatic brain injury on the left side of my head from the big thump I felt. I had indeed hurt myself. Nothing has been quite the same since.

5. If one emergency room is good, two must be better
If you ride enough sooner or later you will fall. The number of miles a serious road cyclist logs makes falling statistically probable. Most falls are minor events, you wipe out on some gravel going around a turn or you are careless crossing the railroad tracks and your front wheel is swallowed and turned abruptly to one side. One mark of a really serious cyclist is shaved legs, which facilitates the placement and removal of adhesive bandages. The nasty abrasions resulting from a slide across a hard surface are called “road rash.” Every cyclist acquires some and in time it heals. Cyclists break collarbones and wrists, crack ribs and separate shoulders. My injuries were not unusual. There are also 1300 deaths a year from head injuries on bikes.


I had never fallen before, at least as an adult. I had never broken a bone in my life and never had surgery. I was entering terra incognita in my life’s journey, and the mode of conveyance that day was no longer a bike, but an ambulance. I had been five hours at North Adams and they seemed to be done with me, so I was shipped by ambulance to Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. Was it the same crew who had brought me down the mountain from Florida? I think so, but that could be a trick of memory. I was no longer chatting. It all seemed unreal, as I lay strapped on to a gurney watching the road behind me through the back window. I certainly was not prepared for the sight I was to see next. On Route 8 as we were coming into Pittsfield I saw six or eight cyclists with our familiar mango and blue jerseys laboring North toward the Berkshire Mall. It was my riding buddies, hours later and still on the bike making their way to Brodie and the finish. I was now on a different ride.

The EMTs and the emergency personal at both hospitals had asked me if I had lost consciousness. I said I didn’t think so, but as my neurologist later said, “Why should they have believed you? You had a head injury.” I was kept overnight at BMC, and discharged the next afternoon with a big bag of Percocet and Ibuprofen, and an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon in a few weeks to look at my ruined shoulder.

6. The Prisoner of Lazy Boy
I had been due to begin vacation that week, so the segue from active ministry to convalescence took minimal arrangements. Martha had called Luther, a retired minister from our congregation, to fill in for me on Sunday. I was soon comfortably ensconced in my old tattered Lazy Boy, and provided with meals, painkillers, company and an endless stream of videos, which I enjoyed indiscriminately, probably because of the painkillers. Because the controls to the chair were on the right side, and I couldn’t use my right arm, I had to call for help when I needed to be escorted to the bathroom. I had an unsettling glimpse of future geezerhood as I hobbled on the arm of my 18-year-old son, Andrew. When Martha was out on errands she left a bell on the table next to my Lazy Boy. One day she asked Rebecca to keep an ear out for Dad. I rang the bell and no one answered. I rang and rang and rang. Finally I turned over onto my bad side and found the controls with my left hand. I released myself from the chair and hobbled upstairs to Rebecca’s room where the door was closed. I knocked. No answer. Finally I pushed the door open and began to laugh at what I saw. There was my minder on her bed reading, with the headphones to her Discman on. She was singing along to the silent music in her head and bobbing her head along with the beat. I bellowed at her and she took the headphones off, “Did you need something, Dad?” You are only sixteen once!

Andrew was due to leave for Pomona College in Claremont, California, in a few days, and since I couldn’t be left behind alone, I was brought along, my ride continuing now in a wheelchair. In some very real sense I viewed everything that had happened to me as one event. I had left Jiminy Peak on August 4th for a long ride and somehow I was still on it. Sleeplessness, pain, and painkillers put me into a state of consciousness far removed from the ordinary, and I had never really gone back to the life I had before the day of my fall.

Now my ride took me to California, where I spent my days in a chaise lounge by the pool at our motel, while Martha and Rebecca helped settle Andrew into the dorm. I had brought some books I needed to read for a pastor-theologian program, but although I could read the words, I didn’t seem to be taking any of it in. It was like when you read before bed and find yourself reading the same paragraph repeatedly, realizing you have been reading the words but not taking in the meaning.

Back in Pittsfield my vacation ended and I prepared to return to my ministry. I had a full schedule for the fall. I had just had a book published and I had a number of public events scheduled. I drifted through a book signing at Barnes and Noble. When asked what the book was about, I realized I wasn’t quite sure. Later I discovered I couldn’t even read my own book (although I suspect others found it unreadable as well, for altogether different reasons.)


All the same, I looked all right, and I seemed all right. I showed up to work and attended to my business, though everything seemed more complicated and took longer. It took me twice as long to prepare a sermon, and where before I had often left my printed text to extemporize, now I clung to my manuscript for dear life.

My friends told me I was repeating myself. I have always had an exceptional memory, but now every day was a foray into forgetfulness. I missed appointments. I bumped into my friend the rabbi and congratulated him on his anniversary, which had happened while I was in California. He looked puzzled and said, “But I saw you last week, Rick, at your 25th ordination anniversary.” “Of course you did,” I said, for now I remembered. After church I would greet parishioners that I had known for nearly twenty years and be unable to remember their names. I would be headed in the car for someplace and drive to someplace else. I dropped things. Objects felt peculiar. My glasses didn’t seem like mine anymore and I was constantly taking them off to see if they were the right ones.

At home I was increasingly a hazard. One of my longstanding hobbies has been cooking, and I discovered I couldn’t cook. I tried to stir-fry chicken with no oil in the wok. Cooking, once my joy, was now a nightmare. I would search wildly for an ingredient while the dish was burning on the range. At breakfast one morning I put the cereal in the refrigerator and the orange juice in the pantry. These things are amusing now but they were disturbing at the time. I had always relied on my wits, and now they seemed strangely unreliable. It was unnerving.

I tried to talk to people about my problems, but most just reassured me I was OK. I told Martha that I was getting “the halo effect.” If I put on a tie and didn’t drool, people just assumed I was Rick Floyd and that I would behave like Rick Floyd. Part of the loneliness of a head injury is trying to explain to people what you are going through. You look OK, and you can talk OK, so what’s the problem? If I talked about my sudden memory problems people would often tell me how their memory wasn’t as good as it used to be either. If I complained of my hearing loss they would recount how their hearing had diminished with age. But not in one day, I wanted to say.

7. Dealing with deficits
It was clear to Martha that something was just not right with me. We had chalked up my erratic behavior to the painkillers and chronic sleeplessness, but there was more going on. Martha is an RN specially trained in the care of Alzheimer’s patients. She didn’t like what she was seeing in me. So we began another leg of my long ride, the chasing of a diagnosis.

If you have interfaced with the health care system recently you know it is a frustrating process trying to see the people you need to see when you need to see them. I love my doctors, every one of them, and believe I got the best of care. But I hate the process. I am convinced that the delay in diagnosis and treatment caused my family and me a great deal of extra and unnecessary suffering.

We began with my primary physician. We described my memory problems, my frustration over simple tasks, my headaches, blurry vision, tinnitus, and constant fatigue. “You could have a concussion,” he said, and ordered an MRI. After a very frightening attack of claustrophobia in the MRI tube, I was sent to a neurologist. She said, “You have brisk reflexes and a tremor. You have sustained a traumatic brain injury. It should clear up in time, but you should get tested for cognitive deficits by a neuro-psychologist.” So that is where we went next. Each succeeding appointment took several weeks, so that by the time I got tested it was Thanksgiving, and by the time I met with the neuro-psychologist to hear the results it was December, five months after the trauma.

I expected the neuro-psychologist to say I had tested fine, and everything was OK, but she didn’t. She told me I had a series of significant measurable deficits, and they were consistent with the limitations and frustrations I was experiencing. My biggest deficit was in the area of multi-tasking, doing more than one thing at once. She explained it like this: “In the past, you could cook dinner, talk to Martha, and listen to NPR all at the same time. Now you can’t. You will be taxed by doing one of those things and it will demand your full attention.”

“What should I do?” I asked her. “Try to reduce stressful situations. The big danger with a brain injury is depression as a result of bumping up against your deficits daily. I recommend you consider medication. Depression itself has some memory loss, and if untreated could add on to your deficits.”

Martha and I left this appointment reeling. It is easy to say avoid stress, but the ministry is a stressful job, and being a parish minister is “multi-tasking.” Both the neurologist and the neuro-psychologist couldn’t believe I was working. Nobody told me I shouldn’t be.

In January I finally received medication, almost six months from my injury. At the same time I had surgery to repair my separated shoulder, which required me to be in a sling and a swath for 10 weeks. Once again I was “the Prisoner of Lazy Boy.”

8. Back on the bike on the wrong side of the road
I managed to work through Easter, after which I was scheduled to go to Cambridge University In England for a sabbatical through the summer. In January I wrote the principal of the college explaining my limitations and he had written a gracious letter back telling me to come along and do what I was able.

My arm came out of the sling and I had months of physical therapy. After the accident my bike had ended up in the Florida Fire Station. My friend Arthur went up and retrieved it, and my son had taken it to Tom’s shop. There it had been an object of curiosity, as the handlebars were turned under from the weight I had put on them going over the bars. Before we went to England I had Tom repair the bike. I purchased a new helmet. The old one had been completely crushed on one side.

I was intent on getting on the bike again. I asked Tom to box it up for airplane travel, and I bungeed it to the roof of my Jeep before we headed to Logan. Martha was strongly against me taking the bike to England, and we had a tense negotiation in the driveway. In the end we got the bike and ourselves to Heathrow, then by bus to Cambridge, and by cab to our flat. I took it by bus and foot to a downtown bike shop to be unboxed and assembled and I asked around for a group ride. So the ride I had begun in New Ashford was continued on the wrong side of the road, through the green and pleasant countryside of Cambridgeshire and East Anglia.

I was blessed to have that sabbatical for a period of convalescence. These were anxious times for us. We wondered if I would be able to return to work in September. Martha accelerated her work on her master’s degree in case she might have to become the breadwinner. In Cambridge I took walks and photos and soon began to be able to read again. I returned to work in September and preached my first sermon on September 9. It felt good to be back. I thought I might be able to manage. Three days later terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

One of my doctors told me about the concept of ”new normal.” She said, “Don’t compare where you are to where you were before your injury. Compare where you are to where you were after the injury.” In that light I have done well. I didn’t lose all my marbles, and some of the ones I did lose I have since got back. My shoulder works fine and I am pain free. I am able to work, though many things are harder that they used to be.

In truth every day is “a new normal” for us all. There is no secure, untroubled place or time where we can avoid the changes that life brings. We are always adjusting to changes, some in our own bodies, and some in the events of our lives. Some of these changes bring us joy; others bring us sadness and sorrow. Sometimes these changes are sudden, a bike goes off a road, a test comes back with hard news, terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center. Sometimes the changes are a matter of course, woven into the very fabric of things. Our kids grow up and leave home and go to college. Our parents become infirm and die. You cannot avoid these changes anymore than you can deny turning fifty by taking up cycling. They are all part of the daily journey through life. They are all part of the ride, and I am thankful for each day of it I am given.

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