Goosed

Our biggest challenge along the
Erie Canal Bike Trail??

Hissing, beak wide open, wings spread, the goose came at my right flank. I swerved the bike and accelerated my peddling. It was a narrow miss.

The goose was protecting its brood, mate, young and fellow geese, of whom 15-20 were spread across the Erie Canal Bike Trail. Repeatedly. It's June, and the goslings are of different ages, many verging on adolescence, and the adults are in full molt: they lose their big wing feathers at this time of year, and cannot fly, leaving them extremely vulnerable.

And defensive.

On Day 1 of the ride we'd witnessed a rider knocked to the ground by a flock of geese in Tonawanda.

They appear to be the most dangerous part of our 400-mile journey. Clustered at many various points on the trail, protecting their young, charging us on our bicycles as we attempt to part their feathered flocks and urge them not-unkindly off the path into the canal.

But being goosed -- prompted, urged, herded -- is for many of us a rather necessary thing.

Doing a long ride such as this, dependent upon your own physical strength and mental determination, "gooses" one forward toward new revelations and perceptions. As any herd dog, or goose, might tell you: a bit of a sharp nip on one's haunches, a change of scenery, a physical challenge is often what one most needs to get to the destination(s) one desires.

Riding the trail last month, I was goosed to consider what it really means to be a 60-year-old queer, feminist, childless woman out in the world, a body visibly traversing in real, human time the state of NY.

In my welcoming Maine community, I live a fairly protected life in which such facts of my difference from the normative culture don't often present themselves. But out here, exposed to the hissing of geese and the fury of young white men, I am just an old white dyke in their way.

And since then, there is the Supreme Court with all its illegitimacy and unrepresentative decisions that threaten our individual human rights -- including overturning the "settled law" of Roe vs. Wade.

It's easier to forget in these days, when fluidity of gender and sexuality has been more normalized in many-but-not-all places, what internalized homophobia and misogyny feel like.

As I pushed my body and my mind along the path for those two weeks, I was reminded of the things I carry that for the most part I have successfully evaded. In response to the cat calls and questions and assumptive "sir's" comes the internalized reality that to be a masculine female is indeed not only to be triumphantly queer but to be wrong. To be a woman my age without kids or grandkids: wrong. How much easier it seems were I to take testosterone, grow a beard, lower my voice even further so I could just be one and not the Other: both. A queer butch woman, unapologetically without children, masculine and yet still a woman. Powerful in myself, cycling 400 miles: someone others in their fear of what is different would like to disempower.

My tactic for the past 50 plus years to prove my rightness to myself has been to assert the power of my sexuality. To seduce and to charm the world around me. 

But I am 60. I am tired. I don't want to charm anyone anymore. And it is in that final 10 miles, riding through the 40th mile to the 50th, that I feel very alone and sad: living proof that the choices I've made are naturally wrong. We all have these moments when confirmation bias is achieved and escape velocity not. This is the point of vulnerability at which the power of the loving community is paramount.

#newblogpost

#queer

#whatisnormal

#imokyoureok

#lovingcommunity