[Monday: 3.4 miles; thursday: 3.4 miles]
I don’t remember how it happened. Somehow I got to thinking about those visits to the Fort Collins Library where I would sit and read the latest edition of Cycle World magazine. Usually the best two things in there were the tech column by Kevin Cameron and the bloggish column by Peter Egan.
Like I say, I don’t remember how it happened but I looked up Peter Egan on Amazon.com and ordered two anthology books of his columns: Leanings and Leanings 2 , used, for a grand total of about $11.
They came in the mail and I’ve been reading them all week. He has me wishing I could jump on the motorcycle and do some twisty roads. But I don’t have a motorcycle and there aren’t any twisty roads around here that I know of, paved ones anyway.
I could probably find a way to get a motorcycle. There’s a basket case BMW K100 on Craigslist over in Alabama and a ’86 BMW R80 in the newspaper today. Both of those would be cool but tall for me. That has been my problem with cool “standard” motorcycles: my 29″ inseam. Lots of Harleys around, of course. But those are outrageously expensive. And there are sports bikes which go really fast and make you either hang on for dear life (accelerating) or do push-ups to keep your helmet out of the speedo (braking)… no thanks.
So I am probably just going to finish the books and call that done.
Egan writes a lot like John Giersch, the fly fishing writer. Gierach makes me want to go find a mountain stream and pull in a trout. No mountain streams around here either.
I think that is the real lesson from this: a good writer fires up my imagination. I can imagine myself fishing a river in Montana or touring the country on a motorcycle. Actually doing it is highly doubtful, but I enjoy the idea that maybe I could.