DC Reflections

Elderly Bicyclists Leave Me Tired And Inspired On The W&OD Trail

Taking a break from churning the bicycle pedals on a lengthy Saturday ride last weekend, I pulled over at a rest stop next to an old man. Very old. Moses would have called him, “Sir.”

His wrinkled skin looked like a white raisin left on a hot beach for a week.

It took my brain a second to absorb that he was doing at least a part of what I was doing — riding the Washington and Old Dominion Trail (W&OD) that runs 45 miles from just beyond Washington D.C., to Purcellville, Virginia. He was clad in flashy cycling attire like a Tour de France rider, and he rode an even more colorful high-end bike.

The old man caught me in mid-astonishment and asked me how many miles I was doing.

“About seventy-two,” I said, thinking that was a good day’s work.

I politely asked him how many miles he was putting in, expecting him to say that he was on course to do perhaps 10 or 20 miles.

“Seventy-five,” he chirped!

The number punched me in the face.

What?

The old man said he was recovering from cancer and that his life-long love of biking was helping him do it.

My jaw dropped further as he continued: He said he was training for a century ride (100 miles) in October — Maryland’s famous Sea Gull Century. I know that ride well. On that very jaunt years ago, I realized I never again wanted to be away from the woman I was dating: She’s my wife now.

The old man said he used to do century rides all the time. Two of his buddies rolled up a minute later. They were just as old. They said they plan to do the century with him.

I stood there, stunned. My brain couldn’t process the information fast enough.

I couldn’t believe that the first raisin was not only kicking cancer’s ass, but that he was loving life. Living it with gusto.

I’ve been struggling to work through far more minor health issues — trivial, compared to his — and I’ve had a hard time getting motivated to do all the things I love.

But look at this guy.

Life throws him lemons; he not only turns them into lemonade but puts the mixture in his hydration pack — and slurps it down as he rides! Maybe I should up my cycling game and try to get back to century rides, I thought.

Every time I see men and women a few decades older than I am (I’m in my 50s) who are still out there pounding the pedals, I am absolutely inspired. Happens to me every time I ride. Minus the cancer part, I want to be that old man 30 years from now.

If you’re a cyclist and you happen to be in that age category, I hope you realize what a huge, life-affirming impact you’re making on other riders just by still being out there doing what we all love.

I had to bid the old man adieu before my not-as-strong-as-his legs locked up. I heaved myself back onto the trail and began fighting my way through the last 20 miles. I got passed twice, going uphill, by women in the same age group. (None of the folks I saw today were using electric bikes, by the way — just muscle.)

I wanted to thank the ladies for their inspiration, too — but I couldn’t catch them!

Christopher Lancette is a Maryland-based freelance writer with an enormous love for outdoor sports, nature and all wild things. A former journalist and environmental organization communications director, he spends much of his time exploring and writing about his favorite creek at EyeOnSligoCreek.com. He has written for some 50 national and local publications ranging from the Atlanta Business Chronicle and Biography magazine to Salon and the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Finding more than a bargain at the Colonial Market Fair 2017 in Ellicott City

I drove north to Ellicott City on June 11, 2017 feeling a little bit sheepish -- and maybe a tad embarrassed, too. I've been a student of the American Revolution most of my life. I fell in love with the subject in fifth grade and the passion is still with me as I push 50. Yet there I was, a resident of Maryland for 10 years but making only my first visit to the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum that sits in Catonsville. That's just a stone throw or two from Old Ellicott City, Maryland.

I knew that Banneker played a key role in mapping the newly formed District of Columbia but that was about all I knew -- at least as the day began. I pulled into the complex to attend the Colonial Market Fair 2017 and became spellbound the moment the mouth-watering scent of bread cooking in an 18th century earthen oven wafted over me. It smelled like heaven.

My stomach already grumbling, my brain developed hunger pains just as quickly. I entered the museum building and fought against a sudden onset of Attention Deficit Disorder, though I often refer to my own affliction as Attention Surplus Disorder. I like to concentrate on ten things at once. I heard fife and drums echoing from outside. Inside, I saw all kinds of displays I had to check out. I grimaced in pain as I examined a table full of antique surgical "instruments." I moved from exhibit to exhibit before entering the main room dedicated to Banneker. I had no idea that he was the first African-American giant of science, that he was an exceptional astronomer or that he published superb almanacs. I didn't know that he was a powerful advocate for the abolition of slavery.  

I headed outside to throw myself into all the action taking place there, transporting myself back in time more than two centuries in the process. The fife and drum corps continued playing with military precision, giving way to a man playing a stringed instrument resembling a mandolin. Skilled tradesmen and women wove baskets, made soap, crafted fine leather bags and gunpowder horns, stitched cane chairs, and lovingly made dolls for children. Yet other people toiled away making corn brooms, cleaning laundry, and using wood to craft tools and other necessities. I perused displays of jewelry, fine lace and candles.

Bang! A soldier in the distance fired a musket and nearly sent me flying out of my shoes.

A town crier rang a bell and directed people to a wide array of entertainment. I turned to my girlfriend Won-ok and asked her to film a video clip of me introducing the fair in case we ended up shooting a segment or two for a YouTube channel I've long dreamed of launching -- a place to tell the stories of the fascinating faces and places we encounter all the time. (Watch the Colonial Market Fair opening video.) We shot the intro and continued our stroll through the 142-acre grounds. A man walked by who quite resembled the namesake of the historic site.

"Are you Benjamin Banneker?" I asked.

Indeed he was. I asked him if I could interview him, recognizing that we HAD to launch Faces and Places TV that very day. Banneker kindly granted this one-time scribe's request. Won-ok and I would go on to film a total of eight segments by day's end -- essentially a whole episode of a TV show. Watch all eight Colonial Market Fair 2017 videos here. Banneker told me about his early life, the arduous task of using astronomy to help map the new federal territory in the dead of winter and the importance of education.

"I didn't attend school for very long but I was able to read," said Banneker, whose 21st century name is Bob Smith, a professional actor and storyteller out of Baltimore. He remained in perfect character throughout our chat. "I had access to books. As long as you can read, you can learn to do anything." (Watch the Banneker video.)

I thanked Banneker for his time and walked away elated from the unexpected encounter, the chance not just to learn about history from the pages of a book but to literally shake hands with it. I was pumped and ready for more!

A song caught my attention, spilling out over the field -- from a voice deep in pain, one crying out to God above for the strength to survive. The voice belonged to songstress Brenda Tucker, who shared her gift of Negro Spirituals with all who would listen. She sat down with us afterward and conveyed why it's so important to her to sing those songs.

"You put yourself in the place of the person who created the music, those who sang it," she said, the brim of her hat occasionally giving way to her beautiful deep, dark eyes that conveyed as much pain and hope as her words. "They were out in the fields picking cotton and picking tobacco, working in the rice fields and working as domestics. They were out in the fields in the hot, burning sun and they had to keep going. So you put yourself back where your ancestors were." Tucker's words did exactly that, causing her to break out into a spontaneous song -- "Lord, How Come Me Here."  Goosebumps sprouted on my arms and I had to fight back tears. You have to watch the video. You have to hear her sing. (Watch the Tucker interview.)

Emotionally spent, I turned to something a little easier on my soul. I chatted with book artist Martha Edgerton about book binding in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm a rare book collector myself and collect the American Revolution. I always love seeing the old tools of the trade. Turned out that Edgerton also currently has an exhibition of her work on the subject of slavery on display at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum on Pratt Street in Baltimore. That will be next on my list of places to visit. (Watch the Martha Edgerton interview.)

Mysterious forces then pulled me to the display of "Edmund Howarth," a natural philosopher whose trade is "the collecting and trade of natural curiosities." I saw taxidermy squirrels, little alligator heads, animal bones and a seemingly infinite number of oddities tucked inside specimen jars. He quoted his hero, American scientist Charles Willson Peale, in telling me that "Nature is simply a book and we are meant to read it by turning its pages." Howarth (a science educator and living history instructor whose modern name is Dean Howarth) pays further homage by assembling his own library of natural wonders. (Watch the Dean Howarth video interview.)

I spotted a man in plain white garb approaching a tent to perform. Branch Morgan III is a retired school teacher with a passion for sharing his love of historic African and African-American rituals and the origin of dance. He brought the whole crowd up to join him in "The Ring Shout," a ritual practiced by slaves who moved around in circles shuffling their feet and clapping their hands. They did not cross their feet, Morgan stressed. That would be dancing, and that was the devil's work. Morgan told me that slaves often had to wander deep into the woods to perform "The Ring Shout," lest slave masters see them and think they weren't working the slaves hard enough. The thought left me speechless. (Watch the Branch Morgan III interview.)

The day drawing to a close, I made my way back inside the museum for a pit stop between the 18th and 21st centuries. I met Justine Schaeffer, the director of the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum. The fair marked her last day at the post with the Baltimore County site. I didn't know until that moment that the place was run by the county. I tipped my tricorn hat to her and the county for a job exceptionally well done. I asked her what she'll take away most from her tenure at the historical park.

"I think it's an appreciation of the accomplishments of a free African-American man and what that means to us today," she told me, with a life-sized Banneker figure listening in. "He was a man who overcame obstacles throughout his life at a time when most people with his skin color were enslaved. There are messages in his life for each of us. There are things for older people, that we can accomplish things in later decades ... for younger people, who can overcome those obstacles to achieve [their] goals ... his message as a human being, those universals that drive us all. It has been an honor for me to be here, to learn about him and to teach others about him." (Watch the Justine Schaeffer interview.)

Her words hung in the air as I exited the museum and made my way out of the Colonial Market Fair 2017. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say on-camera, how I was going to sum up the profoundly moving day that I had just spent with Benjamin Banneker and colonial America. The impact of it was moving through me like the slow, undulating spiritual I heard Tucker sing. I asked Won-ok to just hit record on her phone and that I would say whatever came from my heart. (Watch the closing thoughts video.)

Lyrics from another Negro Spiritual I heard earlier came to me -- "Lord I've Been Changed." I used that thought in my closing and called it a wrap. Even after Won-ok and I returned home and spent all night producing the videos, though, I knew two things for certain: I'll absolutely return to the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum on a more regular basis -- and that doing so will continue to change me in ways I can't yet fully imagine.

Christopher Lancette is a former journalist and avid history buff with a particular passion for all things American Revolution. He would be honored if you helped spread this post far and wide so that more people may learn about the life and times of Benjamin Banneker and appreciate all those who give their time and talent to educating people about history.

 

 

 

 

Making feathered friends with Friends of Sligo Creek

I normally experience my beloved Sligo Creek Trail from Silver Spring, Maryland to Lake Artemesia in College Park on my bike: I cruise along at 12 to 15 miles per hour, my eyes focused on the pavement ahead and my ears filled with the constant whoosh of wind breaking across my face. The Friends of Sligo Creek introduced me to a whole new way of encountering the tail on May 6, 2017, when it organized a walk through the tree canopy.

That's what it felt like anyway.

The trip along Sligo Creek was actually a guided tour -- the first time that either myself or my girlfriend Won-ok Kim had ever formally gone "birding". We've admired a lot of birds in our day but never really taken the time to get to know much about them. We certainly didn't know much about the feathered friends in our own back yard trail, nor had we spent that much time looking up -- or listening. The sounds were what I found the most fascinating. It was like they had all been hidden from my ears until ornithologist David Blockstein and local birder Mary Singer pulled back some kind of magic curtain. The 25 of us who went traipsing through the woods spent as much time straining our ears as we did craning our necks. Had all of these sounds been up there the whole time, Won-ok and I wondered? We were dumbstruck. 

Blockstein, an FOSC member who works as a senior scientist and director of education at the National Council for Science and the Environment, must see that kind of looks on newbies' faces all the time. He asked us why birds sing the way they do. I had never considered that, either. He told us that birds sing to mark their territory and that the males do so to attract the ladies. He said that female birds judge potential mates by the quality of their song. I whispered to Won-ok that I'd be a 48-year-old virgin if women judged me by my singing ability.

Blockstein and fellow volunteer Mary Singer would call out what bird had just landed overhead long before any of us could see it because they knew their songs so well. "Scarlet Tanager," Singer would say -- tilting her binoculars up to the tree tops and helping us all find it. "Yellow-rumped Warbler," Blockstein would usher, pulling out his dog-eared copy of "Finding Birds in the National Capital Area" by Claudia Wilds and teaching us more about the bird in question. 

Won-ok captured brilliant bird photos as we walked, enabling our fellow birders to see birds they missed by looking at the screen on her trusty Canon camera. I shot photos of the people watching the birds and jotted a few notes in my trusty reporter's notebook, a habit from a career long ago. (View more FOSC birding photos.) I focused most of my time, though, just getting lost in the joy of the ambient sound. I couldn't believe how many different sounds there were. It had all been one big blur to me before that day. Much like the process of learning a foreign language, though, I eventually began to be able to distinguish one song from another. Perhaps with more time I'll be able to learn which songs come from which birds.

Blockstein and Singer pulled back the curtains ever-wider, sharing their passion with the group and teaching us more at every step. Blockstein pointed to one bird dart across the air in a peculiar manner. It seemed as if the bird was a plane whose engine kept stalling, causing the bird to drop down before the engine re-started and boosted it back up. He said that the flight pattern was no accident, that some birds fly that way to conserve energy -- flapping their wings, stopping and starting again. I had no idea.

The tour guides taught us about more birds than I can remember, including some that we were not lucky enough to see that day such as the Black-crowned Night Heron. Out on a morning bike ride today, I found myself looking up into the trees as I did down at the ground. I recognized that this was not a good idea for a guy who just spent a year recovering from a violent bike crash caused by mud I didn't spot in time but the Friends of Sligo Creek had inspired me to spend more time with my head in the trees above. I caught a black and white blur going across the top of my line of sight and pulled off the trail. I saw some polar-bear-white-bellied bird perched on a branch it looked too heavy to call home but I couldn't get a good look at it. A white-bearded man with a half dozen cameras dangling from his neck approached. I knew he would know what I was looking at. "It's a Black-crowned Night Heron," he said. 

Beautiful.

I didn't get a good look at him but luck improved dramatically on the way back. There he was again, sitting right in the middle of an Anacostia River tributary. It was lunch time and he was hungry. I crawled down the bank to get the best shot I could using just my phone and wished that Won-ok and her professional camera had been with me. I was able to shoot some neat videos of the big bird as he stared intently into the water but good still photos weren't happening. I gave up on the quest and simply sat on the rocks enjoying the view for as long as he let me. I probably sat there a good 10 minutes watching him hunt. I loved every second of it but had to pedal away to eat my own lunch. I gave thanks to the Friends of Sligo Creek the whole way home for the new gift it has given me to treasure.

Writer Christopher Lancette and photographer Won-ok Kim look forward to getting more involved with Friends of Sligo Creek. Contact them here. 

 

Get your literary motor runnin': National Book Festival is here

It's time for one of my favorite events of the year in Washington D.C. -- the National Book Festival. It's sponsored by my favorite place in the whole world -- the Library of Congress. Read my blog post about it on the Fine Books & Collections magazine site and make plans now to be on the National Mall on Sept. 25. 

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter @chrislancette for literary nuggets and tips from the festival -- and good stuff about life in Washington D.C.

Looking to make friends, have fun? Join meetup.com

I've used the Internet for all kinds of things -- from improving my health to making small loans to worthy entrepreneurs in developing nations. And there's certainly no way I could have won my fantasy football league championship without the Web.

One of my all-time favorite sites, though, is Meetup.com. If you're looking to make new friends and have more fun in Washington D.C. -- or about any other place in the country -- this is a fantastic way to do it. The beauty of Meetup.com is that it's a site aimed at doing what more sites should do: increasing human interaction and deepening our involvement in the non-cyber world. The concept is simple: go to the home page, plug in a geographical area or interest and, presto, it gives you links to a bazillion different clubs in your area that focus on a specif subject. In a big city like ours, there's likely a group for about everything you can imagine -- from afghan-making to zoology. You sign up for notices from any group you find interesting and then attend events organized by volunteers. If by some freak of nature there is no group in the District organized around your interest, you can start one.

What kinds of people attend Meetup.com events? Everybody.

Young, middle-aged and old. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian and people of every other race and origin. White collar. Blue collar. Rocket scientists. Writers. Weekend-warrior athletes. People trying to get in shape. 

What do people do? Everything. There are 2,526 groups in the D.C. area as I write. Sit and drink beer or hike and watch birds. Learn a foreign language or how to salsa dance. Play scrabble, rescue dogs, and root for the Nationals. Grow your business. Save the Chesapeake Bay.

A few of my favorites will give you an additional sense of the range of possibilities. If you join 'em, tell them I sent you.

• DC Volunteers -- sign up to do good in a day. It's volunteer work for busy people who may not have time to commit to ongoing efforts but want to make a difference. If you were going to sign up for just one Meetup.com group, start with this one.
• VeloDCity -- a biking group that goes on frequent rides of different lengths. I'm a pretty fit biker but thanks to the selfless efforts of the organizer, Gregg, I've increased my skill level, learned new routes without having to worry about getting lost (we leave no one behind), and met people interested in exploring other great rides.
• DC PR Flacks -- a group of public relations professionals. I'm a communications director for a nonprofit by day so I try not to keep thinking about work when I leave the office, which explains why I haven't attended an event yet, but networking with people in my profession is always helpful.
• Washington DC Blogger Meetup -- I love writing and very much enjoy learning new things about the blogosphere. I attended its last event, met people with far more experience blogging than myself and walked away with great tips and new friends. The insight gleaned there has prompted me to start a blog about watching TV. Actually, I'm missing Lopez Tonight on TBS right now. Time to head to the living room -- and maybe start a George Lopez show MeetUp group.