The Long Haul for Haiti

Welcome to the Rolling Home Tour, 2010 edition.

After many years in the dreaming, we are finally ready to move into the reality of Summer, 2010 and the long-awaited opportunity to complete a coast-to-coast bicycle tour. In May of 2009, when we managed to pedal up and over the snow-capped Cascade Mountains from Whidbey Island in the Pacific to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in a 'trial run.' This year, the trip resumes with what we think are stronger legs and what we are sure is a worthwhile cause. We are resolved to go the distance AND help raise funds for a very special community of children in Jacmel, Haiti.

Art Creation Foundation for Children, a non-profit arts organization created to serve children in need, is truly a community. Having survived in the immediate aftermath of the January earthquake, these young artists and scholars are filled with resilience and hope. There were 60 children and youth at ACFFC pre-earthquake and now approximately 20 more have become a part of the art creation and learning community in Jacmel. They are the future, the hope for Haiti.

But they need our help, both now and for a long time to come.
Please consider making a donation directly at:

http://www.artforhaitianchildren.org/

Please watch for new posts of our 'carnet de voyage' beginning in May, 2010

2010 Starting Point

Beginning in May, 2010 we resume the Rolling Home Tour as a fund raiser for the Art Creation Foundation For Children, starting from the bike path in Coeur d'Alene along the Northern Tier and Great Lakes route, all the way to the Atlantic coast (around 3500 mi/5600 km), we hope by September 1. Along the way, we will be talking to people we meet about the learning community in Jacmel, showing some of the children's art and making some of our own. We hope many others will join us in spirit, on bikes or both for all or part of the Long Haul for Haiti.

Montana

The first five hundred miles from the shores Pacific across the Cascades to Coeur d'Alene and then on to Heron, Montana were a tantalizing taste of more to come next summer. After you are on the road for a while, the destination matters less than what you experience along the way. Time slows down and days melt into nights and then more days. Returned reluctantly to the East Coast by air to fulfill work obligations but with a solemn oath to return to Spokane by train and then Coeur d'Alene to pick up the trail in 2010.

Rainy Pass

High above the snow line

Where the people do not go

Breathless, arched to heaven

Straining, banking, breathing
Sun drenched air

conditioned the cascading waters

pierce every cell

Lowland strangers here

We grasp for meaning even as
We climb

Raven spreads her wings

Wren nods

New life cries out

A warning

These are sacred heights
Do not ask

Do not stare

Pass through lightly,

With no sound

On Sunset Highway (Rte 2), Heading East

Suspended in time and space

The taut road ahead

Shimmers, a twisted steel cable

Stretched across the pale yellow hilltops

I scan the sunrise
Back mercifully to the wind
and sodden shore

I am an inchworm inching my way

Above the crowd

I am a Great Wallenda, 
Gripping the balance beam

Holding the pose

Sliding one slipper
Ahead of the of the other, steadily

In perfect tune

Two wheels firmly planted
on the high line

Whidbey Island Book Club

Safe in the rain shadow, bonds secured

Words launched into the high canopy

Rest adrift

Disperse

In the worn cafe, animated currents

Born of shared memories

Seek a shore

Still in the deep past, tangled here,

In nettle, elderberry, ocean spray

Whisperings with softened edges

Swinomish

Suquamish

Snohomish

We are here

In the mist, stories rising

in words,

in bondage,

in crossings.

Leaving Seattle

By ferry north toward Port Townsend and Whidbey Island..and so begins the Rolling Home Tour 2009.