yfritz's Journal, 05 December 2022

Crap bike journal

I stayed at my friend’s house in Petersburg VA last week. “There’s a voodoo woman next door and she nosy as hell,” she warned me. I never saw the said priestess but I did meet the nosy pit bull behind her rotted fence. “Voodoo Chile,” I thought. It was a rough neighborhood and I managed to get my bike pump stolen. I was also without my helmet and water bottle because I forgot to bring them. Didn’t bother with breakfast either. I decided that the deficiency suited me well. The modern luxuries always make me feel somewhat discomfited on the Civil War trails anyway.

The battlefield elicits my tendency to disarrange contexts. The swish-swish-swish of the pedal strokes betray the contemporary decadence, echoing incongruously between the haunting trees that witnessed the Siege. Pines drop their skinny branches that get caught in my bike wheels then go click-click-click to mock me and threaten to destroy a few spokes, forcing the wheels to slide to a hard stop, subjecting my overequipped, overprotected, overnourished existence to the critical eyes of the famished Confederates crawling out of the trenches to seek answers, risking life and limb to seek the honey from a flower named Blue.

Siege of Petersburg (June 1864 - March 1865)
“A careful study of the 44th Virginia Infantry Regiment revealed a shockingly high desertion rate of nearly 30 percent”