Ichabod Crane and Me
Tonight I left work late in the dark and rain. Not so strange and not so bad. However, this evening was slightly different. I left on my bike. Like a deformed bike messenger suffering from an enormous, but surprisingly unimpairing hunchback, I slid out of the parking garage and into the rain, my backpack stuffed and under my raincoat, which was under a long sleeve white shirt, with the green cuffs of the rain coat puffing out at the wrists. Top it off with a blue bike helmet over the green hood of the raincoat, and accent with flowing red Umbros. I was ready to take on the Capital Crescent.
I have since learned that my plan was actual illegal. And for good reason, which I believe because of experience. The Capital Crescent trail is closed at night, and probably especially at night when it is raining, and very especially when you're speeding on your bike, moving as fast as possible to avoid being waylaid by criminals, gang members, headless horseman, highwaymen, whatever.
I felt more than a little like Ichabod Crane, and feeling that way made the trip definitely worthwhile. It was an adventure, more than a little dangerous, though more because of speed and road conditions than the threat of criminal activity. It was exciting, nerve-wracking, definitely confronting some minor fears and the elements. But more than all this, it helped bring me closer to the authors of all those old fairy tales and the readers and listeners that have been so enthralled by them.
Panic, flight, fear, and petrified. I know the story of Ichabod Crane not from reading the story by Irving, but from Disney. Thus, in my mind Ichabod is a really silly character whose death is ambiguous and actually a little humorous. If I recall correctly, his flight from the headless horseman was more than a little comical, ducking the horseman's sword by sinking his head into his shirt so far that..whoa...for just a second we wonder if he really has lost his head, before he timidly pops it back out again. In the end we assume he's dead, because he disappears and the cartoon focuses on a few falling leaves on the ground, or something like that. And so, as a child, I watched the cartoon rapt and laughing, maybe a little gripped by the action, but certainly not grasping what makes the tale literature. But after last night, I think I know why the story has survived. It is about fear, driving fear. A kind of fear that very few of us ever experience any more. It is very rare, after all, for persons living in my socio-economic stratum to ever truly fear for danger, or at least to fear over an extended period of time.
But as I was sailing along in the dark, my mind was diverted by worries of random miscreants, the worry that I would interrupt some MS 13 gang meeting, that I would run off the path and down the bluff into a ravine, any number of horrid and ridiculous scenarios, and yes, about headless horsemen. My poor mother, or Amy, my friends, what a nightmare, to lose someone to violence...especially for making such a stupid decision: to head down a clearly haunted trail at night and be piked by a mythological creature.
Darkness is bad news for bikers. You can see the road in front of you, it's coming on to quickly, but the road ahead is a weird whitish, grayish blur, blending with what you can make of the trees. It's all wet, reflecting what little light there is, and what little light there is either blinds you or reflects off the blacktop and the leaves. The road moves ahead of you at your speed, but about 20 feet in front of you it rises up to form a whitish wall. In fact, once it was not the road but a large tree that had fallen across the trail. I'm not sure why, but my sense of dread increased for no obvious reason, enough to cause me to slow down before I ran pellmell into the tree doing myself serious injury.
When I did stop, there I was, surrounded by darkness, before a large tree that was completely invisible to me only seconds before.
So, speed was dangerous. In that situation, you are always overdriving your visibility, but you have to keep moving, as fast as you can. Regardless of the fact that you may be soon decapitated by a headless horseman, or low hanging limb. It is your only defense. Speed is what gets you home, out of this mess. Speed helps you surprise those who may have wanted to lay in wait, or break through those hoping to stop you and deliver some horrid punishment meted out by the gods, for some past sin or tragic flaw.
And the hypersensitivity to speed is where Ichabod and I became one (other similarities, like physical appearance, aside). Because Ichabod knew that moving quickly on his horse in the dark was incredibly dangerous, but moving too slow was terrifying, because moving quickly is your one advantage over the night.
Your imagination is the source of most of the terror, but I was tearing along, blinking through the rain, feeling quite proud of myself for finding such a challenge in urban Northwest D.C. I was, after all, mediating my mind's confrontation with wet unknown darkness potentially inhabited by dangerous ill-wishing criminal types lurking everywhere, all the while speeding along on a bicycle, hurtling towards a mistake in hand-eye coordination and sudden crash and death. I would only have been prouder of myself if I'd been spinning plates on a pole in my helmet at the same time.
As I was hurtling towards Bethesda and a firmly rooted conclusion that this was probably a mistake, I was also realizing the value of ghost stories. I noticed that I was relishing my fear, sort of playfully wallowing in it. It's not that I rationalized it away, and was simply enjoying observing myself being human, afraid and fearful (though I admit that this schizophrenia was part of my sense of purpose filled euphoria). It was mostly that I began to understand ghost stories as a source of inspiration. They filled my mind with problems to solve, contingencies to plan for, and serious incentive to keep pedalling, and to do so quickly. And man, did I pedal.
Today's rule: if I ever have a child who pulls an stupid Ichabod Crane stunt like I did tonight, I will act very angry with her.
I have since learned that my plan was actual illegal. And for good reason, which I believe because of experience. The Capital Crescent trail is closed at night, and probably especially at night when it is raining, and very especially when you're speeding on your bike, moving as fast as possible to avoid being waylaid by criminals, gang members, headless horseman, highwaymen, whatever.
I felt more than a little like Ichabod Crane, and feeling that way made the trip definitely worthwhile. It was an adventure, more than a little dangerous, though more because of speed and road conditions than the threat of criminal activity. It was exciting, nerve-wracking, definitely confronting some minor fears and the elements. But more than all this, it helped bring me closer to the authors of all those old fairy tales and the readers and listeners that have been so enthralled by them.
Panic, flight, fear, and petrified. I know the story of Ichabod Crane not from reading the story by Irving, but from Disney. Thus, in my mind Ichabod is a really silly character whose death is ambiguous and actually a little humorous. If I recall correctly, his flight from the headless horseman was more than a little comical, ducking the horseman's sword by sinking his head into his shirt so far that..whoa...for just a second we wonder if he really has lost his head, before he timidly pops it back out again. In the end we assume he's dead, because he disappears and the cartoon focuses on a few falling leaves on the ground, or something like that. And so, as a child, I watched the cartoon rapt and laughing, maybe a little gripped by the action, but certainly not grasping what makes the tale literature. But after last night, I think I know why the story has survived. It is about fear, driving fear. A kind of fear that very few of us ever experience any more. It is very rare, after all, for persons living in my socio-economic stratum to ever truly fear for danger, or at least to fear over an extended period of time.
But as I was sailing along in the dark, my mind was diverted by worries of random miscreants, the worry that I would interrupt some MS 13 gang meeting, that I would run off the path and down the bluff into a ravine, any number of horrid and ridiculous scenarios, and yes, about headless horsemen. My poor mother, or Amy, my friends, what a nightmare, to lose someone to violence...especially for making such a stupid decision: to head down a clearly haunted trail at night and be piked by a mythological creature.
Darkness is bad news for bikers. You can see the road in front of you, it's coming on to quickly, but the road ahead is a weird whitish, grayish blur, blending with what you can make of the trees. It's all wet, reflecting what little light there is, and what little light there is either blinds you or reflects off the blacktop and the leaves. The road moves ahead of you at your speed, but about 20 feet in front of you it rises up to form a whitish wall. In fact, once it was not the road but a large tree that had fallen across the trail. I'm not sure why, but my sense of dread increased for no obvious reason, enough to cause me to slow down before I ran pellmell into the tree doing myself serious injury.
When I did stop, there I was, surrounded by darkness, before a large tree that was completely invisible to me only seconds before.
So, speed was dangerous. In that situation, you are always overdriving your visibility, but you have to keep moving, as fast as you can. Regardless of the fact that you may be soon decapitated by a headless horseman, or low hanging limb. It is your only defense. Speed is what gets you home, out of this mess. Speed helps you surprise those who may have wanted to lay in wait, or break through those hoping to stop you and deliver some horrid punishment meted out by the gods, for some past sin or tragic flaw.
And the hypersensitivity to speed is where Ichabod and I became one (other similarities, like physical appearance, aside). Because Ichabod knew that moving quickly on his horse in the dark was incredibly dangerous, but moving too slow was terrifying, because moving quickly is your one advantage over the night.
Your imagination is the source of most of the terror, but I was tearing along, blinking through the rain, feeling quite proud of myself for finding such a challenge in urban Northwest D.C. I was, after all, mediating my mind's confrontation with wet unknown darkness potentially inhabited by dangerous ill-wishing criminal types lurking everywhere, all the while speeding along on a bicycle, hurtling towards a mistake in hand-eye coordination and sudden crash and death. I would only have been prouder of myself if I'd been spinning plates on a pole in my helmet at the same time.
As I was hurtling towards Bethesda and a firmly rooted conclusion that this was probably a mistake, I was also realizing the value of ghost stories. I noticed that I was relishing my fear, sort of playfully wallowing in it. It's not that I rationalized it away, and was simply enjoying observing myself being human, afraid and fearful (though I admit that this schizophrenia was part of my sense of purpose filled euphoria). It was mostly that I began to understand ghost stories as a source of inspiration. They filled my mind with problems to solve, contingencies to plan for, and serious incentive to keep pedalling, and to do so quickly. And man, did I pedal.
Today's rule: if I ever have a child who pulls an stupid Ichabod Crane stunt like I did tonight, I will act very angry with her.
posted by Michael at
7:20 PM
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