Last summer, I rode a bicycle from Chicago, IL to Devil's Lake, ND. Since I've never written about the adventure, and since it was a long December as far as temperatures went, I thought January might be a good time to talk about summer 2008. January is Bike Month at the Drawing Board.
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The next day was a scheduled day of rest and a needed one at that; the storms and crashes of the previous day left us in need of serious maintenance. We fixed flat tires and cleaned and lubed chains. We slept in. Then we went to relieve the flood relief.
I'm not really sure how all of this works. There had been some kind of serious flood in the area months earlier which led to an outpouring of entirely unfocused and uncoordinated compassion. One church had designated itself to be some kind of relief station and so people did what people do. They showed up in droves to drop off clothes, pots and pans, books, movies, anything. Trouble was, they hadn't relieved suffering; they'd merely created a messy pile in a church's basement.
People who needed help might show up, then become frustrated because it would take literally hours to find a single item in the fray. Finally, they sought their help elsewhere; and so now the church had a basement full of second-hand items.
It was our job to sort all of this, box it up, and then to take it somewhere else. I can't be at all certain how any of this was beneficiary, but I do know that cogs don't ask questions, and so I didn't. We worked flood relief, and I can only hope someone was relieved.
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