Another Slowtwitch writer is covering today’s CarbBoom Palomar Challenge. (Actually, he's covering it for Triathlonlive.com.) This is somebody who could actually see the event, as opposed to me. I saw only brief glimpses of it pass me by as I struggled up that damned mountain.

Most of our regular Wednesday riders struggled as well, but not with the mountain. We struggled with whether or not to ride at all. We were all going to feel guilty if we rode or mopey if we didn’t. Since we couldn’t win for losing, most of us rode.

We started at our regular spot, which meant we’d be ridng 25 miles out and back to Palomar, giving us all a 75-mile day in total. That gave me a lot of time to think.

As we climbed and descended through one rural community and another on our way to the mountain’s base, most houses we passed had flags flying. In times past I associated rural flag flyers with old redneck war vets belonging to the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion. But today I took a special pride in every flag I saw, and I doubt I’ll ever view home-flown flags in a cynical way again.

As we rode some of us talked about patriotism, and heroism, and sacrifice, and a sense of community our country has seen only in its peripheral vision during my lifetime. A terrible price has been paid by others for us to return these virtues to front and center, but they’re again vivid to us––that is certain. And that is good.

One thing all my group’s riders have in common: We want to help. We all want to do our part. Other than giving blood, though, we could not think of what to do.

But I do have one suggestion. More than a hundred years ago France gave a gift to America, and the Statue of Liberty sits in a New York harbor. I’d like America to give a gift. I’d like America to rebuild the World Trade Center as our token and gift to the people of New York.

I understand that Congress is preparing an appropriations bill that wiill send $20 billion to the State of New York. But that’s just $20 billion of debt we’ll incur, and I just don’t feel a particular sense of participation in that. I want to specifically, individually, pay a fixed sum. What I have in mind is 20 percent of that tax rebate check I got (or 30 percent if that's what's needed). We all agree that that check made no measurable difference to us. If we didn’t feel the effects of getting $600, how can we feel the effects of giving $120 of it back?

I want America––no, I want individual Americans––to build what again will be the largest building in the world on that spot, and bequeath it to the Port Authority of New York. That is what I can do. It is what we all can do, and it’s as simple as having an extra $60, or $120 (or whatever the bill for a new building turns out to be) added onto our income taxes at the end of the year––a fixed percentage of whatever our refund was. The other thing New York needs, by the way, is benefits for the families of its fallen firefighters, police officers and emergency workers. We ought to fund that at the same time.

I hope our elected officials realize we’re not only ready to help, we need to help. I can imagine the joy our country would feel watching the building go up, story by story, knowing that we’d built it ourselves, one American's check at a time. I’d like to go to New York when it’s finished and see the plaque at its base, saying in more eloquent words than I can muster something like: “To New York, from a grateful country.”

While I’m no architect, I heard a commentator on a TV talk show tonight suggest that a skyscraper should be built on that site, and in the shape of a giant middle fiinger. It was a crass suggestion, I thought, when I first heard it. But the idea is growing on me.

I tarried on my way back from the mountain this afternoon, riding with a slower friend. The leisurely pace allowed me to enjoy all the flags along the way, including a monstrous one hanging from the outstretched ladder of a fire truck parked outside a Valley Center fire station.