Wonders and Wanderings Close To Home
I have written in previous summers about volunteering for the Pan-Mass Challenge, the 192-mile bike ride (not a race) which terminates at the very tip of Cape Cod, a place Thoreau referred to in his essays as “the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts.” The event has happened on the first full weekend of every August since 1980 and has during that time given over half a billion dollars to find some answers for this scourge of humanity. This scourge took my father from us when I was only five and has affected directly or indirectly nearly everyone I can think of.
A virtual river of souls streams south from Sturbridge to Provincetown and passes through parts of forty six cities and towns in our Commonwealth. Hundreds of volunteers support the thousands of riders who raise tens of millions of dollars for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. There is always inspirational “fight cancer” swag in evidence, whether on riders, volunteers or spectators, like “Do epic shit,” “Kick cancer’s ass,” and “Commit. You’ll figure it out.”
It is truly epic shit, unforgettable, once witnessed. The ride is an important enough regional event that its logo makes an appearance on the left field wall, the “Green Monster,” at Fenway Park and the Red Sox are big-time supporters.
In an ordinary year, my wife and I would be leaving tomorrow for our annual volunteer gig in Provincetown, but this is no ordinary year. The PMC has been “reimagined” and that river of souls will be truly a virtual one, with all manner of creative and online ways to participate and still raise, in total, at least forty one million dollars. While this microscopic virus has been hitchhiking around the world, cancer has not gone away either and I’m in awe of the commitment and vision required to pull this off.
I usually reread Thoreau’s Cape Cod essays during the weekend. I’ll be reading it here at home this time. In The Highland Light chapter, he wrote
“I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea turn or shallow fog while I was there the next summer, it being clear overhead, the edge of the bank twenty rods distant appeared like a mountain pasture in the horizon.”
A place of wonders! I can look out this second story window and say the same words with resonance, right here on this little street in an old mill town in Massachusetts hard by a river the author also wrote about, the Merrimack. I can say it and be looking right at the flattened plastic bottles (that could have been recycled) pasted on the pavement, the crumpled fast food wraps the crows and sparrows are tugging at and scattering whenever a car drives by, the old dog shit and the beat up patchy road surface, the green leggy weeds (which technically are any plants where you don’t want them) rioting their wild way through impossibly small cracks (nature finds a way). Even litter, the detritus of a modern industrial society, can be reframed and made to tell a different story.
One doesn’t have to travel far to find wonders, which is good news this summer. Paul Theroux, no slouch at travel writing himself, said of Thoreau’s essays, “He would probably not have left Concord had it not been necessary for him to find material for his articles and lectures. He did not go very far afield, but I think it has to be agreed that travel is generally an attitude and has little to do with miles covered.”
