Sunday on the Road with Ruth: Our Training Ride Adventure

The day, Aug. 5, started auspiciously enough. We took the 9:05 Metro North train out of Grand Station to New Haven, and had a wonderful pro-bike conductor who opened up a car just for the six of us! (His brother is a cyclist.) But as we reached Bridgeport, it turned out there had been some kind of electrical malfunction in New Haven and we would have to detrain and take the approaching Amtrak into New Haven. Fortunately the Amtrak passengers commiserated with us, and made room for the bikes. Rail passengers of the world unite!

Our little group was Johanna Smith and her girlfriend, Sandra; Ronn Seely, a triathlete; Maiko Minami, an AIDS Rider along for the distance; myself and Ruth Messinger, former council member, Manhattan borough president and Democratic opponent of Rudy Giuliani in the 1997 New York City mayoral election. Ruth was quiet, unassuming, personable; I'd read that she has a lesbian daughter, and she said she and one of her two sons was planning to do the AIDS Ride, so she wanted to come along to get a taste of the terrain. Apparently her daugher-in-law (her daughter's partner) had challenged her to do the ride and then dropped out herself. I'd listed the ride in the training ride newsletter.

On arrival nearly two hours late in New Haven, Shawn Hill and Magda Teter greeted us with open arms and a Ford Escort station wagon to take our gear. They'd been neighbors of mine in Inwood, at the tip of Manhattan, but moved this summer to Middletown so Magda could take a job there. Shawn Hill is a bike and computer geek; his wife, Magda Teter, is a newly-christened assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University.

We followed them about two miles on the cue sheet they had already mapped out into a Hispanic part of town, where we got takeout rice and beans and camped out in front of a community health center to enjoy the day. The 30-mi. ride up to Middletown on Shawn's cue sheet was short and uneventful, and went past both a shooting range (though I saw no NRA bumper stickers, remarkably enough) and an amazing number of working farms replete with cows and their smells.

Ronn, Maiko and I got to Shawn and Magda's about 3 p.m., before they had gotten back from buying groceries, and the rest of the crowd was not far behind. The two-story house is on a side street five minutes from campus. It's 8 Brainard, for you expeditionists, but the street signs are spelled Brainerd (they've since changed signs). The university owns much of the housing in the neighborhood, including the house Shawn and Magda occupied. They had the whole first floor and basement, which used to be a separate apartment under the previous owners, but the university had abandoned it for zoning reasons. The basement was a far sight more comfortable than we had expected, with smooth tile floors and working bathroom, though no hot water.

The university sent a maintenance person to mow the lawn, and Shawn and Magda had revived the garden planted by previous Italian occupants. Magda discovered several bushes of mystery herbs growing at the back of the garden, and when the former owner dropped by to say hello asked him what they were. He could only recall Italian names, but it turned out one of them was borage. Whatever that is. Shawn and Magda had planted squash, which turned out to have only male flowers and so no fruit; tomatoes, which were green even in August; and lots of beans and herbs.

After showers and some considerable relaxation, we walked to town with dreams of Italian food, specifically pizza, dancing in our heads. Alas, the pizza place was closed, as so much in Middletown seemed to be this August weekend, and we went to a very good Thai restaurant instead.

Ronn, Shawn and Magda and I recognized Ruth, but the rest of the crowd were clueless until dinner, when the talk got to cycling and politics. The inevitable subject of traffic in Central Park came up, and Ruth allowed as how she had helped roll back the bike-unfriendly winter traffic hours (read: Christmas hours) to a two-month, rather than five-month, period. Johanna Smith asked, "Are you Ruth Messinger?" Ruth's reply: "Yes, and that's better than most of the questions I get asked!" (Maiko, when I asked her, said she knew Ruth was some kind of government official, but didn't know at what level.)

There was talk of the upcoming presidential election, and I echoed the question that my friend Peg Byron had been dying to ask Ruth: "How do we vote? What about Nader?" Ruth was succinct: "Vote for the Bore!" Candidate's records on lesbian and gay rights were less important than the fact that Gore likely would appoint liberals to the Supreme Court and Bush (or Shrub, as Molly Ivins likes to call him) would appoint conservatives. "I'm thinking of having a button made up that says, 'It's the court, stupid!'" said Ruth. And in light of the recent Supreme Court decision holding that the Boy Scouts in New Jersey had had a right to exclude James Dale, the exemplary if homosexual Eagle Scout, it seemed to all of us that Ruth had a point. Nikki's rejoinder: "The Republican ticket this year is a lot like the Bush-Quayle ticket in 1992, except this time the idiot is at the top of the ticket."

For dessert, Ruth had made incredible toffee fudge brownies, which occupied our mouths back at Shawn and Magda's house. Ruth says she makes them for every AIDS Ride training ride she goes on, so scope her out! We were in bed shortly afterwards, since the next day was our big ride.

The plan was to ride east to Hebron and pick up the AIDS Ride route, for which I'd brought the ride's cue sheets. Ruth left shortly after 7 a.m., a good two hours before the rest of us, who enjoyed Magda's homemade yogurt, Shawn's intense coffee and a wonderful fruit salad. Shawn had mapped out a route that took us out about 15 mi. east of Middletown to Route 66, and we were on our own to find the AIDS Ride route. This had to have been the hilliest ride of my life: the ridges in Connecticut run north and south, and any attempt to ride east and west is met with considerable resistance.

After finding Burroughs Hill Road, which marked the start of the AIDS Ride course, things flattened out somewhat. Ronn and I had gotten ahead of Maiko, and she caught up with us, while Johanna Smith and Sandra had decided to have a leisurely, gay-male-like breakfast and then ride a much more direct route back to New Haven. Then the flats gave way to steep downhills, and Ronn and I were flying from Moodus to East Haddam, a beautiful little town that is the site of the Goodspeed Opera House. After we crossed the Connecticut River in East Haddam and headed up a long hill, we looked back to see the town spread before us, the gables of the opera house tiny dots in a field of green and clapboard.

As we approached Killingworth, I started to feel bonkish, so we stopped at a gas-station-cum-deli and had fruit juices and muffins, which restored me remarkably. A mile or so out of the stop, Ruth called Ronn on his cell phone. She had lost the entire last page of the cue sheet and Ronn had to dictate it to her over the phone. We had lost Maiko by then, and headed down the fated Chestnut Hill Road, which was very poorly marked on the cue sheet. Ronn and I made a wrong turn, adding 10 mi. to what was already planned to be an 80-mi. ride, and as we emerged onto Route 1 found Maiko, who had made a similar wrong turn - but one that shortened her route instead of lengthening it.

We rode together along the swampy Connecticut shoreline, through Guilford and Branford, and arrived in New Haven at well past 4 p.m., again an hour later than anticipated, with a few raindrops falling. About a mile from the train station, who should we pass but Ruth Messinger, slowly making her way past the industrial neighborhoods west of New Haven into town. Shawn and Magda were waiting faithfully at Union Station and snapped photos of Ronn, Maiko and me - "sweat sisters" as Maiko put it. Within minutes, Ruth arrived, followed by Johanna Smith and Sandra, and the ride was complete. I showed 90.5 mi. on the cyclocomputer, and I think Ruth and Maiko were both happy to have seen some of what the Ride had in store for them.

Oh joy! Except, of course, that we had troubles on the train going back to the city. But nothing could mar the exaltation we all felt after the warm and wonderful welcome extended by my former neighbors, Shawn Hill and Magda Teter. You'll be neighbors of my heart forever.