Why I Love Half Moon Bay, Pt 3

Today I went for my morning bike ride a little earlier than usual, because I've figured out that as the temperature differential between the coast and the valley grows over the course of the day, the rising hot air in the valley creates a convection current that manifests itself as the HMB wind.

Basically, earlier in the day = less wind. Less wind is nice because the way the wind blows happens to be in my face for the entire ride back to the house, the last half of which has a slight uphill orientation. A couple of weeks ago, Socci was out west visiting some of his friends, and came down for an afternoon in HMB, which Keiko later dubbed "a middle school playdate" since we rode bikes and played catch. But it was late in the afternoon, by which point the wind had really picked up, and we had to bike all the way back headfirst into it, which was NOT fun.

As a side note, I had gotten the bike that Socci rode so that there would be an extra bike for Keiko to ride when she came out for visits, and although I'd put it together I hadn't actually field-tested it yet. Turns out I had neglected to completely tighten the screw that holds the handlebars in place, so as we were going back across the wooden bridge, the handlebars came loose and Socci crashed into the rusty metal railing. Showing a manly stoicism I wouldn't have thought possible after seeing him wuss out of skydiving ("No way am I jumping out of a plane!"), he remarked only: "So, how long are tetanus shots good for again?" I told him I didn't know, but that whether he lived or died, Keiko would really appreciate his having test drove the bike.

So, today I experimented with an earlier ride. Apparently, this earlier time is primetime for seeing bunnies. I saw 7 of them throughout my ride. Like Hawk the other day, the bunnies were willing to allow me to get surprisingly close before reacting. Then they reacted.

Here's the thing about bunnies. The summer after I graduated from business school, I went on a 7,000 mile, monthlong road trip through the west with Nacole. At one point, we were driving at dusk through Craters of the Moon national park in Idaho. A little piece of trivia about CotM: when you're watching your local news, and they talk about the air quality, and it's determined to be good, or bad, or Los Angeles, or whatever, it's being compared to a benchmark for what great air should be like. That benchmark is CotM, which is a giant exposed lava plain in the middle of nowhere, and because of air currents and the lack of population centers even remotely close by, it has virtually zero pollution.

By virtue of being a giant exposed lava plain, it also has not so much as a visible blade of grass, or a tree, or anything on it. Basically nothing lives there. Except giant jackrabbits. I don't know what they're eating, but whatever it is makes them get big.

Nacole and I discovered them as we were driving through the park at dusk. I was clipping along at around 70mph or so, came around a bend, and my lights illuminated a giant jackrabbit on the side of the road ahead. His eyes were lit up by the reflection of my headlights. I had just enough time to register that he was a very large jackrabbit, and he had just enough time to register in his little herbivore brain that I was both moving very fast and 500 times his size. In that moment, the rabbit, by instinct going into a flight reaction, had a choice between the following two options:

Option 1: turn around and flee into the 300,000 acres of empty lava plain interlaced with 400 trillion miles of tiny passages in which he could hide, and in which God Himself could not find him, or

Option 2: try dashing across the empty, exposed road in front of my car in the hopes that he could make it to the other side without getting annihilated.

The bunny chose Option 2. And was annihilated. For the record, it made an incredible impact on my car. And he had the misfortune of impacting the bumper on the passenger's side of my Hyundai Elantra, which was unfortunate for the following reason:

About 8 months previous, I was leading a group of business school students in a project to provide volunteer consulting services to a local nonprofit, the Shoreline Alliance for the Arts. They provided a number of services that exposed economically underserved kids in coastal southern Connecticut to the arts. Kids like that typically attend public schools that lack money for basic things like books, let alone fancy stuff like art, so for many of the kids the organization worked with, this was the only exposure to the arts that they got.

Historically, the organization had been run by the artists who volunteered for it. At the risk of unfairly stereotyping, in my experience artists are always interesting, often a pleasure to know, and rarely possessed of anything approximating "good business sense". So although the organization was doing a lot of good, from an organizational design and effectiveness perspective it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a train wreck.

Our group had put together some initial findings on simple, quick steps that the organization could take to improve its effectiveness, and since there was no room in the administrative office that could accommodate everyone who wanted/needed to be present for the presentation of our findings, the Executive Director volunteered to host the meeting at her home, a beautiful home in the forest in suburban CT, near a bubbling brook, and at the bottom of a long paved driveway.

I mention that because the morning the 4 of us left for the ED's house, all packed into my little Elantra, it had snowed a bit, and once I got all 4 wheels onto the driveway, we lost all traction and began slowly sliding down.

At the bottom of the driveway, the pavement curved somewhat sharply off to the right, and at the bottom was a long retaining wall, which helped keep the side of the hill from encroaching on the house, and which we were currently accelerating toward head-on. In that moment, I had 2 choices:

Option 1: Attempt to swing the wheel right and hope we slid by the wall without hitting it. If it worked, we would miss the wall, slide along the front of the house, and eventually come to rest in the yard somewhere. If it didn't work, the retaining wall potentially could scrape all along the driver's side of the car, damaging it all the way from front to back, and it we still had enough momentum, put the hood of my car into her front porch.

Option 2: Do nothing but continue to try and regain any traction, and let the front bumper do what it's designed to do and absorb the frontal impact.

Given that we had started at the top from almost a complete stop, I actually did have time to weigh the options in that level of detail in my mind, and I decided (unlike the bunny) not to take the gamble.

So I went with Option 2, and we slowly, majestically, crashed head-on into the wall.

Fortunately, we all had plenty of time to brace for impact, so no one was the slightest bit injured. Except, of course, for Julio (my car). He took it right on the chin, and in inspecting the damage I discovered that the bumper was not solid, but rather was a hollow piece of plastic not unlike tupperware, the major difference being that tupperware does not shatter like glass when you hit it with something.

The other piece of damage was to the retaining wall, in which I put a large, thick crack from the base to the top. So I kicked off our first meeting with our client by explaining that I had just crashed into her house but was happy to pay for all the damage.

Thing was, I had no money to pay for the damage, and thankfully she refused the offer. I also had no money to get the bumper fixed, so from then on I drove around with a shattered front passenger bumper. It was barely hanging on on that side at all, and a few months later when Nacole borrowed Julio to drive to Philadelphia for an audition, and stayed with a college friend, that friend's dad freaked out that the bumper might imminently fall off and so he duct-taped the bumper onto the car.

But by the time of CotM, the jagged shards of bumper had sawed through the duct tape, and so the front of the car on that side was saw-toothed plastic with short strips of duct tape dangling down. And that's where the bunny, his leaping, stretched-out form totally silhouetted in the headlights for a split second, impacted. When I got the car pulled over and got out to take a look, the bumper and the duct tape were covered with bloody bunny bits.

Eeesh.

We got back into the car and started off.

And then it happened AGAIN.

Not 15 minutes later, same drill. Come around a bend, bunny by the side of the road, bunny chooses the wrong option, bunny gets annihilated. This time, I was annoyed. I mean, with instincts like this, how are bunnies not extinct??

I bring all this up because I encountered 7 bunnies on my bike ride today. 4 of them were about 2 feet off the bike path. 3 of them were right on the edge of the bike path. All 7 of them waited until I was passing very close to them (keep in mind that I was not chasing them, I was simply continuing on the path), and then all of them chose between Options 1 and 2.

The results were this: the 4 bunnies 2 feet off the path chose option 1 and turned away from the path and dove into the underbrush. The 3 bunnies right on the edge of the path chose option 2 and dashed across the open, exposed path right in front of me, 1 of them forcing me to hit the brakes, rather than turn around and dive into the much closer underbrush behind them.

This leads me to wonder: if you're a bunny, and a large, fast moving something appears to be headed right for you, presumably causing you to assume the large, fast moving something is a predator bent on eating you, is your dominant strategy to run _toward_ the predator? Presumably then if it misses you on the first pass, by the time it gets itself turned around for another pass at you, you've had time to pretty carefully hide yourself.

Either way, this is why bunnies do not rule the world.

Nevertheless, it was fun to see so many bunnies. And at the end of my ride a pretty big (~ 1.5 ft) snake slithered across the path. I hit the brakes, jumped off the bike, and ran to it hoping to catch it, but it was fast moving, and as a Missourian, my instinct is to hesitate a second before grabbing at it to first verify that it's not a copperhead. That last second of hesitation was all he needed to get far enough under the brush that it wasn't worth trying to go after him.

Upon returning home, I gchatted with Keiko and related the events of the ride. And she asked:

Keiko: "omg, WHY would you try to catch a SNAKE?"

which puzzled me a little, because the answer to the question seems almost painfully obvious:

Me: "Uh... 'cause."

But I guess it's not so obvious, since I had the same gchat with Shara later in the afternoon.

But, it was another small adventure on the bike path today, and that's another reason to love HMB- every day is a little different, and most every day has some little adventure in it...