Locomotion
Getting around with your feet off the ground
Check in
It’s winter regardless
The official start of winter is still a week away, December 21. The Celtic calendar is more in keeping with actual weather. Celtic winter began on Samhain, November 1.
Here’s a poem about the season:
Maple syrup days
Plaid blankets, wood fires, woolen hats. Pancakes for breakfast, a roast chicken. Feathers from geese: put one in your cap, Pull some from a pillow, or fletch your arrows. Winter’s gray stain of despair Obscures the bullseye of your target. But shoot true the arrow to pierce it, Fusing the center to you.
Elsewhere on Substack
Tonya Morton at Juke just posted another of my creativity prompts. This time the word to write about is “flexible.” It includes one of my favorite photos. (There are more than six likes now.)
Also, Sue Cauhape, who writes Ring Around the Basin, has riffed on one of my previous Juke prompts, “Stretching,” with an expansive and heartfelt essay. Thank you, Sue! And finally, I have published a new story in my companion Substack, Fables and Legends. It is a fable called “The Barking Dog.”
Fred and Ginger
Dean Kamen is an inventor famous for his ingenuity—and for inventing products that ultimately flopped.
You may remember “Ginger.” That was the working name of the product he was secretly developing in the early years of this century. Word was that it was revolutionary, that it would change the way we lived.
The code name was a reference to that smooth dancing duo, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Kamen had already produced a product he called “Fred”—a wheelchair that could climb stairs. It was a revolutionary idea, and a good one, but most health insurance wouldn’t pay for the chairs and only a few were sold. Production ceased in 2009.
Now Fred has been resuscitated as the iBOT, a chair with four large drive wheels that allows users to traverse varied terrain, including stairs, but also rough grass, gravel, mud and snow. I hope it fares better than Fred. I’d like to have one.
Ginger
The scuttlebutt around Ginger was intriguing. Before the device’s debut in 2001, Wired magazine noted in a 2009 retrospective, “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and legendary venture capitalist John Doerr were early and enthusiastic investors, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs even predicted that cities would be redesigned around the device and that it would be even more significant than the personal computer.”
Well, not quite.
Ginger turned out to be the Segway, which you may remember as an overpriced scooter (though with amazing gyroscopic features) that made those riding it look idiotic. At $5,000 apiece, the Segway proved to be a tough sell, and production ended in mid-2020.
Getting around
Nowadays, the natural descendants of the Segway are everywhere. They are everyday electric scooters, less overly designed than Segways, but fast, versatile, easy to use and way cheaper. In Portland and other cities, you can rent a scooter using GPS to find it and a ride share to get to it.
I have a friend who hates these scooters. She says she’s seen people using them while drunk. I’ve seen two people sharing a scooter; she says she’s seen more than two crowd onto one.
Some scooters end up in the Willamette River. News reports from 2019 note that divers rescued 57 scooters from the water. In a report on OregonLive (The Oregonian’s online presence) Sgt. Brandon White from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office deadpanned: “We advise those people not to park scooters in the river.”
For the balance-challenged
Those of us with balance issues, in my case due to the disability of multiple sclerosis, shouldn’t use two-wheeled scooters. But we have other options for outside locomotion: mobility scooters and wheelchairs.
For many years, I used mobility scooters for traveling outside. These are three- or four-wheeled devices that you steer with a tiller. I favored the three-wheeled variety. It was easier to turn but also less stable. Sometimes it tipped over.
But not until I turned in my scooter for a power wheelchair did I discover true mobility. My chair, made by Permobil, can turn on its own radius. This makes it easier to take on the bus than the old three-wheeled scooter.
A note about riding the bus
The incoming Trump administration will ratchet back on solutions to global warming, as conservative Republicans dismiss the possible extinction of the human race as fake news. So it’s up to us regular citizens to do what we can. One major concession would be driving less.
I don’t drive anymore myself. I don’t like hand controls and I don’t own a van. But my Permobil and I on the bus—we are a climate change-fighting team.
Drinking on the bus
The Portland area transit authority, Trimet, has rules about smoking in and around bus shelters. But there’s never an announcement about alcohol.
I recently encountered two men at a bus stop. One was older and ragged and had a hand-lettered sign that read “I’ll take verbal abuse for $1.” I gave him a dollar but said I didn’t have any abuse to hand out.
The other man cradled a nearly empty bottle of vodka. He offered me a drink, which I declined. I think he wanted help emptying the bottle before the bus arrived.
He chugged the remaining vodka himself and tossed the bottle in the ivy of the parking strip. I came across the bottle lying there a few days later when I was at that stop again.
We all got on the bus, and the man who had been drinking got loudly chummy with several passengers in the back. Then he got abusive with another man, and they both exited at a downtown stop about the time the driver was starting to worry about how to eject them.
Check out
Robert had to spend some time away from me this week. It made me consider how women have waited for their men over time.
Widow’s walk
A lonely perch, high on the house Looking to sea, scanning the waves. Will he come back to me, my bonny one, His hair smelling of foreign places? I’ve traveled, too, just not on oceans. My journeys are briefer but no less intense. Serpents and rivers, orange crystal sunsets, Scenes I can’t share, they are too deeply set. When you come back, you will chase all the shadows Hold me, embrace me, smooth out my hair. You think I’ve waited, but I nurtured this time, Being and growing, becoming myself. All of my journeys have made me a woman Rich in my powers, authentic in scope. Power of love has enriched my genius— I yearn for you, darling; don't stay away long.
Parting shot
It’s just a crow on a wire, but I really like the colors and the composition.
—30—
Until next week
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My hugs to you Fran Gardner. We see a similar life. Thanks for your Poems and photos about what life is as you live it. It means much to me. Small birds singing. On ne holladay. Where someone nearby has a rooster and my squirrel is named Hoppy.
We made great progress during the COVID lockdown when we all learned how to work remotely. Traffic diminished. Cities emptied of their frenetic pace and wildlife sauntered in from the woodlands. Children and parents got acquainted and found delight in creative learning. Then the management class realized they couldn't evaluate productivity for remote workers and demanded everyone to return to the office. Traffic soon clogged the roads. Animals retreated back to the hinterlands. and pollution was replenished upon the landscape. Alas, it's the management track that is destroying the planet.
Another good read today, Fran. I've seen people using those scooters in Boise. We almost got run over by a corporate exec who needed the entire sidewalk to maneuver. At least she was dressed like a corporate exec.