The meet was held Friday night at the Reggie Lewis Center (a work of wonder) in Roxbury, Mass. Among the better performers was a kid from Hamilton-Wenham named Jackson McDonald. He was seventh in the 55-meter hurdles in 7.78 seconds and second in the long jump in 22′ 6.75″. He has also high-jumped 6′ 6″. The previous Friday, at the Mass State Meet, he broke the meet record by jumping 23′ 3″. He then demolished the state record in the pentathlon last Wednesday. He’s narrowed his choice of colleges to U. Conn. and Boston U. He had previously looked at both UNH and UVM.

Noteworthy about this kid is that his mother and my mother are longtime great friends, having met about 30 years ago after winding up on the same team in an amateur women’s softball league. Renee is about a dozen years younger than my mom (she was in college wen they met) and used to take me skiing. In, I think, 1984, my parents, Renee, Renee’s husband Jared, and a few others were spending a weekend at Renee’s parents’ place in New Jersey. Very late at night, Jared was water-skiing with one or two of his buddies and was killed when he was cut by a boat propeller after falling. Everyone was devastated; Jared was a great guy. Renee eventually remarried and moved to Massachusetts, and she and my mom, though still in touch, were not as close. They have been through a lot together.

Anyway, it’s hard for me to imagine Renee having a kid who’s 18 years old. That’s older than I was when she used to let me take nips of peppermint schnapps on the chairlift at King Ridge.

My old high school, Concord, had two kids fare well in the distance events (one was sixth in the two-mile, another seventh in the 1000 meters).

I’ll hop on the sea cucumbers bandwagon along with Sheril of The Intersection, Coturnix on Blog Around the Clock, and Benny of Zooillogix (be sure to check out the boffo cartoon in Benny’s article).

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If there’s one thing that characterizes any drive across northern New England, it’s not the pleasantly empty highways or the likelihood of hitting a deer or a moose; it’s the absolute dearth of decent radio stations. If you’re into country or the worst of classic rock (e.g., anything produced by the Kinks in their long, weary post-sellout days), you’re in luck. Otherwise you’re better served by belting out “One googol bottles of beer on the road, one googol bottles of beer…” all the way from Portsmouth to New York State, because fiddling with the tuner is a sure prescription for frustration.
Last night, however, somewhere near the Quechee Gorge, I stumbled upon a means of mitigating this joyless travel feature. Thanks to the personality whose signature phrase will always be “Kasey, could you please play… ,” I created a bastardized, highly limited version of the digit-span test for myself.

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Since today is Saturday, I’m doing what I always do on days ending in “Y” and taking a break from writing about science topics. I could argue, however, that the following garbage might be vaguely associated with linguistics and hence, at a broader level, childhood or developmental psychology. I know nothing about these.
When I was two or three, I would sometimes have ginger ale and potato chips for a snack. For whatever reason I took to calling these “see-soo” and “tip-tips” respectively. This was clearly a formative language sort of thing; I heard the right words and jumbled them somewhere between Broca and Wernicke, and it was some time before I started spitting out the right terms for this healthful repast. I think I was about 30.

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So anyway, after the guy asked me if engaging in the five-knuckle shuffle was among my habits and I pleaded road-weariness in response, he shut up for a few minutes. It didn’t matter; I was pretty sure what was coming (so to speak). I slouched against the door and feigned sleep, though, of course, I kept one eye opened just so. We were probably halfway to Roanoke before the guy started working at his zipper. Evidently he either hadn’t finished the job back at Smart View or had a very healthy sexual appetite. He had the courtesy to ask me, “Mind if I do?” in much the same way others might have inquired whether I cared if they lit up. In fact, despite my distaste for cigarette smoke, I would have preferred his smoking a whole carton of unfiltered Camels and blowing huge toxic clouds in my face to his whacking away at his crotch as we tooled along (so to speak), but I didn’t have options to select from. I decided that had I known this was coming (so to speak) while exiting the bathroom back at Smart View I would have stolen his ride (though I would have been careful to somehow drive it without any part of me touching the upholstery, the gearshift, or the steering wheel) and pushed it off a cliff, as many were available and I’d always wanted to see a car explode in person.
Keeping my eyes averted was not difficult.

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I watched the scenery pass, mindful of its beauty in a detached way — I’d seen so much of it in the past hundred hours that I was, sadly, almost inured to even the most spectacular views, and in spite of lingering trepidation surrounding the potentially befriggered intentions of my chauffeur I felt I could fall asleep in a trice should I be so stupid as to allow such a thing to happen.
After several minutes, the guy struck up a conversation, asking me from whence I had come to this part of the world. He told me his name, which I now cannot remember. Given the pressing issue of his lecherous actions, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the sight of someone hammering up the Blue Ridge Parkway on foot (he’d first observed me at least forty miles to the south that morning) and toting a minimum of possessions was, all predatory instincts on the part of observers aside, apt to arouse a modicum of curiosity.

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I watched the scenery pass, mindful of its beauty in a detached way — I’d seen so much of it in the past hundred hours that I was, sadly, almost inured to even the most spectacular views, and in spite of lingering trepidation surrounding the potentially befriggered intentions of my chauffeur I felt I could fall asleep in a trice should I be so stupid as to allow such a thing to happen.
After several minutes, the guy struck up a conversation, asking me from whence I had come to this part of the world. He told me his name, which I now cannot remember. Given the pressing issue of his lecherous actions, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the sight of someone hammering up the Blue Ridge Parkway on foot (he’d first observed me at least forty miles to the south that morning) and toting a minimum of possessions was, all predatory instincts on the part of observers aside, apt to arouse a modicum of curiosity.

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I was beginning to think t would have been wise to wash my feet in a stream rather than in a sink in the Smart View picnic area bathroom, the isolated nature of which suddenly seemed much more stark and apparent in the wake of my first lifetime encounter with a such brazen solicitor of the flesh. Besides the building it was in, there was really nothing else there, save for the view. The whole Parkway, in fact, was really just one long heat-baked ribbon of programmed isolation, free of domiciles and power lines and cross streets, and was rapidly losing its eco-romantic appeal.
Anyway, I put my shoes back on and began shuffling up the Parkway once more. I tried to determine if I would make it to Roanoke before nightfall and figured I’d need to average about 5 MPH in order to achieve this. This, on average, was faster than a walking pace and I really didn’t feel like running any more that day, so I began to contemplate hitchhiking, something I’d done only a couple of times during my journey and for very brief stretches at that.

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After posting a copy of an e-newsletter concerning the Blue Ridge Parkway I subscribe to, I was reminded of an experience I had almost five years ago – the time in my life (that I knowof) that someone secretly followed me for close to 100 miles in the hope of consummating a sexual liaison. I wrote about this experience for a now-defunct message board, and saved a copy for myself as part of writing about the greater journey to which this pursuit of sorts contributed.
I am including this here for several reasons. One, I wrote it and I have it on my hard drive, so that must mean I have to share it with the general public. Two, it’s kind of funny. And three, it demonstrates that it’s possible to be the quarry of a much-maligned demographic without forming negative stereotypes or opinions about said demographic.
I first arrived in Roanoke in August of 2002 and got there by running and walking up the Parkway from Asheville, N.C., 275 miles away. All I had with me was a backpack that held about 15 pounds’ worth of clothes and necessities. It took me four days to cover 240 miles (with about half of these done at a light run), leaving me 35 miles south of Roanoke on a day on which it was, according to the radio station I was tuned into at the time, 94 degrees.

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Earlier today, Chad Orzel, posting about his first bicycle ride with a new multipurpose speed/distance measuring device, wrote: “Why am I posting this? Well, why not?”
I entered a comment below his post, but I’ll reproduce it here. Why? Why not? It’s Saturday night, I’ve already seen the episode of House now airing on the USA Network, and the melatonin has yet to kick in.
When I started running in 1984 at age 14, there were two ways to measure my routes. One was to have my mom drive them. The other — the “sophisticated” way, and the one that was required when dealing with off-road courses — was to take a piece of soldering wire and one of my gradfather’s USGS maps (I was a hella map freak as a lad), bend it carefully along the scaled-down representaton of the path I had taken, straighten the wire out, and lay it against the scale of miles or kilometers to figure out how far I’d run.
A few years later, I got a mountain bike (actually a hybrid) and by then wireless spedometer-odomoeter units were available. The transmitter went on the rim of the front wheel and the receiver/display element on the handlebars. High tech, high tech.
Now, we’re in the personal GPS age, and it’s not just megageeks and heavily committed runners who have Garmin Forerunners and the like — it’s everyone with a pair of running shoes. I coach people over the Internets who send me .kml files which I open with Google Earth to see exactly where in Northern California they ran, how much ground they covered and over what type of terriain, the associated elevation change, and more.
It’s all pleasantly creepy for a guy who once used a 100′ tape measure to “certify” a mile-long stretch of road in his neighborhood (without the help of anyone or anything else with the exception of a heavy rock, thank you very much) and, a few years later, used a gagdetless bike and a similarly crude but cleverish scheme to mark off 1/4-mile intervals on about 15 miles worth of roads in Canterbury New Hampshire — just before the state decided to re-pave Route 132 and obliterate my work.

Perusing yesterday’s Concord Monitor yielded some unfortunate news: One of my few fellow physics majors at the University of Vermont in the early 1990s died in a motor vehicle accident in California a week and a half ago.
I didn’t know Matt all that well, though we hung out a little bit away from classes. Our loose bond was a natural consequence of our being among only a small handful of students in UVM’s class of 1992 who were pursuing physics degrees — as I recall, fewer than 10 out of a total of close to 2,000 in the College of Arts and Sciences — and discovering that we were from the same hometown, though we went to different high schools. (Matt would actually receive his bachelor’s in 1993.)
One whimsical detail about Matt that’s jumped into my mind unbidden from time to time over the past decade and a half is that he owned several large, brightly colored tropical fish (don’t ask me what kind; they all look like groupers to my ignorant eye). I’m glad that in recent years the Monitor has relaxed its formerly stringent policy about excluding what it deemed an excess of personal details in its obituaries, because whoever submitted Matt’s did an excellent job of painting him as the kind and colorful character I remember.
As the obituary notes, a friend of Matt’s has started a Web site for the purpose of exchanging messages and memories, although at the time of this writing it includes only a picture of Matt astride his motorcycle.