Only the pavement. A gray road. A white line.
She holds her gaze three feet in front of her wheel, all the time counting in her head, a string of numbers that climb, climax and start anew. It’s how she keeps going on a cold, gray day.
It’s unfathomable to me.
“Why ride at all?” I ask.
Her answer is pure, even if I can’t make sense of it.
“I love to ride,” she says, as if her motive shouldn’t need to be explained.
We’re on the return leg of an out-and-back on U.S. 40, fog like a curtain hiding all things distant. But I can see far enough to breathe.
This morning I sat in a straight chair in front of a picture window, gazing across the field to a woods half a mile away, as far as my vision would take me. But the air pulled into my lungs was dry and warm, predictable. Almost mechanical.
In the chill, in the open, I draw breath again. Afresh. Anew. My diaphragm moves. My chest rises. Lungs fill. Eyes open.
Farmland unfolds before me. The landscape holds silos, cattle and a red barn with double cupolas. Water fills ditches, and near a creek a plowed field bulges, as if punched twice from below.
Boarded windows on a burned-out house stare blankly down the street at a man walking a dog.
Open stretches hold mourning doves on a telephone line while a flock of starlings scatters across the sky like balls of mercury on a marble counter. A straight line of trees all but hides an abandoned rail line, from which a stone bridge arches, a path leading nowhere.
We pass an electric substation, a harsh rhythmic clanging of metal arising from within the chain-link fence. And we move through the silence of open countryside where I once saw a coyote bounding carefree on a spring day.
It’s in these places I breathe again. See again.
I think of telling her about the coyote, but the concentration on her face keeps me quiet. Her eyes locked on the highway.
We ride together in separate worlds.
Road bike: 26.11 miles — Henry County
