There was a series of unseasonably warm, sunny days in November. You may or may not remember this. I know this because I check the weather app hourly from November through April to see if one of those increasingly prevalent unseasonably warm, sunny days might be in the offing and I can sneak out for a bike ride. (I use the word sneak here because a bicycle ride on a balmy winter day definitely feels like I'm cheating someone or something. God, if they exist? The unforgiving natural world, which has relented for a moment? Death? It's probably death—the closer I get to it, the more mental paperwork I find myself filing in the folder labeled "Cheating Death" even though a bike ride under clear skies is far from daredevilry.)
Take today for instance, December 15. The app says that at 2pm it will be 53 degrees and sunny. Definitely warm enough for a spin—my delicate constitution can't take temps below 45 degrees for riding—but alas, I cannot slip out as I must finish making this magazine. While I'll drop nearly anything to get in the saddle, there are limits to what a full-grown person with concomitant adult responsibilities can get away with. You can't cheat death every day. I mean, staying alive is, by definition, cheating death, but it's not special. Does anyone lie down on their pillow at night and exclaim, "Take that death! I really poked you in the eye with the shitty stick of my existence today." (If you are such a person, please reach out. I have death-cheating scorekeeping questions.)
Thanksgiving was one of those aforementioned days. As were celebrating the holiday with friends in Stone Ridge, I decided to ride the 20 miles from our home in Kingston. Lee Anne and Clancy would drive over and I would throw the bike in the car and drive home with them after the feasting as I'd be in no shape to shoehorn myself back into my spandex shorts and navigate blurrily home in the dark.
In the warmer months, I ride a lot. I have a sumptuous Spanish gravel bike (a mango-colored Orbea, if you must know) that I take on a 25-mile loop almost daily. The route consists mostly of two rail trails—the O&W and the Wallkill Valley. This allows me to ride to Rosendale and back with just a couple of miles spent risking my life on the road while I connect the two. (Thanks and praise to all the folks who've spent the last few decades constructing the region's extensive network of rail trails—and continue to do so. Personally speaking, it has measurably improved my quality of life and likely saved it by keeping me out from under the two-ton death machines zipping down rural roadways.)
Normally, I listen to music while I ride. I've made innumerable mixes for this purpose over the decades, trying to find the right balance of propulsion and languor. I don't want to listen to a 150 beat-per-minute techno banger but Erik Satie doesn't cut it either. Mixes are quicksilver, like romance, and some linger in memory in a similar fashion.
I only remember one song of the best mix I ever made: "Locomotive Breath" by Jethro Tull. I remember cresting the pedestrian pathway of the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn when the song kicked in on my Discman. A minute-and-a-half-long stride piano intro to build the tension and then the skronking electric guitar to kick the door in. The deserted walkway. The sunrise over Brooklyn. There are moments in life you chase again and again—even if you don't always know that you're chasing them.
As it was Thasnkgiving, however, I thought I'd switch up my routine a little, do something festive. I remembered reading a review of Werner Herzog's new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All and thought that it might be a fun listen if the author read it himself. I was in luck!
This would normally be the spot where I would spend some sentences contextualizing the 81-year-old German filmmaker and writer and creative madman. But Herzog resists easy definitions. He is both profound and ridiculous, one moment making pronouncements like: "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder." Then he's likely to say something like: "I always wanted to direct a 'Hamlet' and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under 14 minutes." (Actual quotes from WH.) Where you land on the Herzog profound-to-ridiculous spectrum says a lot about what you think of the utility of obsession, the absurdity of existence, and whether Germans can ever really be funny.
At 2pm on Thanksgiving I set out for my friends' house on my beautiful Orbea. While I don't mind the conviviality of group rides, I prefer to ride alone. And you are never more alone then when you are listening to Werner Herzog. His voice is what foreboding would sound like if it took aural form.
By the time I ride crosstown and reach the start of the O&W Rail Trail, Herzog is recalling his childhood in the mountains of Bavaria, where he grew up very poor. And grim. I'm whizzing along on my fancy bike, passing families out for an afternoon stroll on a national holiday while Herzog recalls stabbing his older brother when he was a boy.
"There was something grim in me.... In one violent quarrel, I laid into my brother with a knife. I struck him once in the wrist as he tried to fend me off and once in the upper thigh. In no time, the room was awash in blood.... In a brief family meeting, we decided, since the wounds were not grave, not to deliver my brother to the hospital to get him looked at, which would certainly have led to questions from the law."
Passing pedestrians from behind, I ring my bell to alert folks of my imminent arrival and instantaneous whooshing past. People don't always hear me. Sometimes they're yelling at their dogs; sometimes they're talking in groups; sometimes they have their own ear buds in, listening to podcasts or music, maybe even Werner Herzog. Imagine it: Hundreds of us all along the linear park with the voice and visions of this Bavarian madman pouring into our ears.
Herzog would hate the rail trail. The pavement, the straightness, the normies, the lack of death. I flash back to this fall when the trail was covered in caterpillars and I tried to slalom between them and succeeded for 100 yards or so before running over a dozen in quick succession. That's more of a Herzog scene.
Tragedy becomes him. A witch tried to kidnap him as a child. He fell off a barn and broke both arms. He declined anesthesia during dental surgery because pain was "the way I expected the world to be." He smashed his collarbone ski jumping. He was struck by a stray bullet on the street in Los Angeles while filming an interview with the BBC. He rescued Joaquin Phoenix after the actor crashed his car on the highway.
I make it to my friends' house without incident, though I'm famished. At dinner, I try and try to enlighten folks about the works and ways of this strange, compelling man I've spent the last couple hours with. Did they know that Herzog wants to make a movie with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings? (Turns out the champ is a bit of a history buff.) Or that he met a pair of identical twins in England who could finish each other's sentences and mirror each other's actions perfectly? Or that he watches trash TV because he doesn't think the poet should avert his eyes?
Unsurprisingly, no one is all that interested. It's Thanksgiving after all. There's more food on the table than Herzog probably ate in the first six years of his life. We're here to celebrate, not wrestle with the grand existential questions. But I wonder, as I pour gravy over the dead bird on my plate, what's Thanksgiving like at Werner Herzog's house?
