Presenting and arting in DC

A week passes. I’ve gotten out of the habit of riding, out of the habit of writing.

Activity crescendos, and for all the abundant wifi connections in rural America, in Washington, DC, internet connection on 12th between G and H comes with a price tag I don’t want to pay. I also have a presentation to give, and when I arrive at the conference and peruse the schedule, I realize I won’t have much time to put one together. Deadlines work for me because I finally put aside all my other distractions and get to work. Sometimes the distractions are not necessarily distractions. I don’t consider my relationship with you a distraction. I find this correspondence incredibly nourishing.

Nonetheless, I checked into my conference room early and set to work on the presentation, starting first with the draft paper I wrote back in Eugene prior to leaving. At the time, that was another one of those necessary deadlines that I put off and then squeezed out like toothpaste onto my toothbrush. That effort was helpful now. I reread my synopsis of bicycle history connected to Oregon’s historic roadways and the connection of this history to economic development.

Something’s missing.

I diagramed my ideas. I had three kinds of historic resources I wanted to discuss. There were also three planning strategies.

How do I explain this? Makes sense in my mind, but I struggle to explain to others. It takes times. Visuals might help here. What do you think? Juggling. Venn Diagram?

Time to go to the reception. I had a lot of ideas but nothing concrete. All the same, I figured I could go to the reception and meet some people. I hadn’t left the hotel all day. The reception was in the National Building Museum. When I visited DC in May for the Women in Transportation conference, my fellow scholarship winner from the University of Oregon and I skipped a morning of presentations to join the hoards at Bike to Work Day and then ducked into the Museum to see their exhibition on parking garages. We had a great day geeking out outside the conference context, indulging our interests in cycling and art. Couldn’t miss the opening reception.

I was a bit spaced out heading down the elevator into the great unknown. I wasn’t exactly sure where I needed to go. I stepped onto the elevator, and there was Christopher.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“On your way to the reception?”
“Yep.”
He walked quickly, reminding me of what it was like riding the streets of DC with him back in May. As soon as we got to the reception, he got swallowed up in socializing immediately as a good conference chair ought to. I made my way to the beverage table and got a glass of water and a glass of wine surveying the scene. Seemed like most people knew someone.

I found an info piece on Modern architecture in DC and browsed that for a time.
“I feel like I’ve showed up single at a wedding.” I’d just been counseling my niece the day before on meeting people at school.
“Probably the reason no one says hi is because they want someone to say hi to them.”
That’s the tough action. I thought I’d take my own advice and found some other people who were free radicals floating around the reception.
“Hi. Have you been to this conference before?”

It worked. I had a good cycle of conversations, people joined the discussions. I learned of the local celebrity status I’d achieved.
“Oh, are you the one who rode across the country?”
“I am.”
“I read your blog. I’m looking forward to going to your presentation.”
“Awesome. That’s good motivation for me to get my presentation together.”

I met people working with scenic byways, cultural resources, bridge preservation, departments of transportation, fish and wildlife.

Suddenly I got a call.
“Where are you? How do we get your bike to you?”
“How long does it take, 30 minutes to get downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s meet at the hotel at 8:15.”
“Ok. See you then.”

I went back to the conversation for a time with discussion animated by the roving hors d’oeuvre trays.
“Do you have a card?”
I totally forgot about business cards until that moment. On the ride I’d been handing people a tag with my blog address, email, and name…a small handwritten item. I didn’t have any left and completely spaced the benefit of having a nice stack of cards for such events. Oops.

I took my leave abruptly. “Excuse me, I need to go. I need to pick up my bike.”
Uncle John came with Emily, and Emily helped me take the gear to my room. I had her drive my bike while I lugged the heavy bag with gear.

Settled back into the motel room and started scouring the web for historic images of roads and bicycles. Talk about a good way to eat up some time, but this is usual for me. Translating text to image can be difficult, and I didn’t have a folder of historic bicycle photos at hand. I managed to get the background history segments finished before going to sleep. I started looking forward to the nap that would get me to 4 a.m. wake up time so I could work more. Just like being in school. I wanted to attend the conference sessions. It seemed silly to have made it the whole way to this moment only to shut myself in the hotel room and work on my presentation without listening what other people had to say and meeting the premium quality road nuts.

The short of it, I don’t recommend waiting to the last minute to create a presentation. I attended most of the Friday conference but skipped one session in the afternoon. It’s sort of like eating potato chips. I started working on the images and soon the lunch break was over, and I couldn’t pull myself away from Photoshop. Just two more images that were open on my desktop. Then I got caught up tweaking color fields. Soon, 3:30 came, and I went back to the last info session of the day.

Dan Marriott gave the opening presentation, a wonderful story rich with imagery.
Holy smokes! Are all the presentations going to be like this? I found the bar he set quite a reach. I wasn’t even going to get close. The afternoon session I attended relaxed me somewhat. Whatever I had to say wasn’t anything I’d written. Many of the presenters simply read their presentations. Still, I learned about the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and had the opportunity to hear an engineer’s perspective, a landscape architect’s perspective, and a preservationist’s perspective.
They have nothing to say about bikes.
I wondered about that, but given the way they described traffic moving on the byway, it didn’t sound like the kind of place a bicycle would want to go. I heard certain death in it even though it was my own mental process that came to it. Curious though, I would think that a parkway and an All American Road Scenic Byway would attract cyclists. People even commented from the audience that as a tourist, the local traffic has no tolerance for people even driving slowly on the Parkway. How can a person appreciate the individuality of each bridge along the way?
We had a lively discussion on the difference between trees adjacent to the roadway versus clearing the roadside up to twelve feet to reduce the number of “collisions with objects.” Apparently trees like to jump in front of cars. Perhaps they should install signs: Tree crossing.

Signs hold their own categories of debate.

I got a quick take out dinner and breakfast next door to the hotel and went back to my room and pulled in the latch string.

In the morning, I had nearly gone through practicing my presentation out loud one time through before making my way to the presentation room. The other presenters were speaking on cultural aspects of roadways. Robin, from Bend, OR, discussed the Cascade Lakes Byway and the work she’d been doing to incorporate art and indigenous culture and history into the roadway’s interpretation. Two presenters from Virginia described the large heritage area of which a scenic byway forms the spine. In this area, battle sites of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars pepper the countryside.
Then I got up and told my history of the bicycle and roadbuilding in America followed by some discussion of bicycle tourism projects and programs in Oregon. I found a great picture of cyclists riding on BikeCentennial, which gave me a chance to talk about what happened to the bicycle in its long sleep while the automobile gained ascendancy in America. I concluded with lessons learned from the road, elements a community might want to consider when developing cycling programs.

Finally, I could relax.

I learned a bit about Indiana’s roadway preservation programs and financing strategies for restoration projects. The Dixie Road. …

Over lunch, I conversed with Nathan from the Department of Fish and Wildlife about opportunities to connect wildlife refuges and other natural areas to a variety of transportation modes.

After lunch, I attended a presentation on one of the unpaved roadways in the Australian outback. I recalled that Robyn Davidson had traveled much of this road on her trek with the camels. It’s no coincidence.

After presentations, I walked Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and Union Station and back around to the hotel.

Apologies to my readers, but at this point I didn’t bring the camera with me.

Sunday morning I decided to be on vacation. I hefted a NYT to a little café with wifi down the street and enlisted some help at home via iChat to work through a few blocks of the crossword. Outside, the gray drizzle reminded me of fine Oregon mornings, and over the iChat, I watched the day lighten from inky blue to white haze. I felt that close to normal.

Just as I was about to see some art, I got a message from Mary & Dermot. After an unexpected twist of transportation, they were in DC that afternoon. I turned away from the museum and headed to Chinatown to meet them. For as many times as our paths have crossed, it can’t be coincidence. They were trying to make it around DC without anything. They had only the cycling clothes change and shoes they pedaled across the country, their essential items toted in little bags. I may see them yet one more time before they fly back to Wales…if they make it to Eugene. Mary gave me her dog repellent spray. She didn’t want to lose it traveling on the plane and said she would pick it up on the west coast. We’ll see. Wonderful surprise.

I looked at art. That was my great treat of vacation. I saw an exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts made during internment, Calder’s kinetic sculptures, Running Fence, and a variety of other contemporary artworks…de Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell, others.

Dan hosted a party on Sunday evening. He had an incredible view on the eighth floor and he’s an amazing cook as well. I took a cab with several of the Australians to the apartment and had some amazing conversations of my trip and of subjects Australian. Later in the evening, I chatted with Alicia from Spain who did a pretty good job wresting a story of her experiences from Spanish into English. She told me that the hostel she was staying at was in a sort of shady part of town — not unlike what Mary & Dermot had reported earlier. She swore that one of the women she’d seen standing on the street corner one night she encountered at the restroom in a subway the next day.
“I can’t be sure…how she was dressed made me think…but who knows…it was incredible! She looked very much like the person I’d seen the night before.”

A good time was had by all. Timothy, one of the Australians with whom I’d arrived, attempted to make some conversation with Christopher and I at the end of the evening, “You know this woman did? Incredible! It’s very…tomorrow… Well, you know… Oh, nevermind.”
We knew his ability to speak in sentences would return to him by morning.