The date bothers me. It’s early August. Sitting on a log in an arena of sound, the falling of an occasional leaf the only movement, I try to still my mind, but it’s as active as the voices of ten thousand anthropods beneath this canopy of green and blue, each seeking to be heard. Those [...]
Posts Tagged ‘bicycle’
Come August
Posted in Mountain Bike, tagged bicycle, Cycling, Indiana, Mountain Bike, Westwood Park on August 2, 2010 |
At first there is this. A sense of autumn. The breeze heady with the smell of short lawns and tall weeds. The air abuzz with the songs of late-summer life. August opens the door to my favorite time of the year. Ditches thrive. The country roads I ride serve as amphitheaters for the orchestration of the [...]
They bump fists and whoop like boys at the bottom of a sledding hill. Except it’s 90 degrees, and the five guys are on road bikes, not Flexible Flyers. Only a few yards in front of me, they’ve just passed the 100-mile mark of RAIN, the annual Ride Across INdiana. There’s no roadside marker here. [...]
Delicate yellow. Long, flat caterpillars mark summer’s first harvest. – The smell reaches me first. Dry and dusty, like a fragile memory. It turns my head to a field that stretches endlessly, running to a woods to the west, skipping past distant houses to the south. Neatly cut and kicked into windrows evenly spaced, wheat [...]
Running on Empty
Posted in road bike, Running, tagged bicycle, Cycling, road bike, running, Trail running, Westwood Park on June 18, 2010 |
Carrie is sitting on a rock along the trail. She’s not used to this. The heat. The terrain. The roots and nubbins. It seemed easy at the start. The pace. The downhill stretches where legs strode effortlessly. But uphills and trickier footing followed. By the time we arrived at Grand View, a clearing I helped [...]
Scary Restroom Man
Posted in road bike, tagged bicycle, Cycling, Indiana on April 29, 2010 |
I see him outside the restroom at Metamora. On a hill where the wind now tosses full-sized leaves on maple trees, he stands by the building and watches. He’s there when Dave and I stop early in the day, the miles few and our legs fresh. Again when the sun slides down its arc, limbs [...]
Degrees of depravity
Posted in road bike, tagged bicycle, Cycling, Indiana on March 24, 2010 |
Dead raccoons spill from a garbage bag at the side of the road. I’ve circled back, so my brain might try to understand what my eyes have described. But there is no real comprehension here. Only confusion. Sadness. Anger. I count seven, maybe eight raccoons, plus one opossum. They litter the ditch, next to a bag [...]
March Madness
Posted in Mountain Bike, tagged bicycle, Cycling, Indiana, Mountain Bike, Westwood Park on March 20, 2010 |
I shouldn’t be here. Not that I don’t enjoy it. I’m on the trails of Westwood, a ravine to my left, surrounded by the earth tones of late winter, last autumn’s leaves laid flat by a season of snow and melt. There are patches of green, the first signs of spring, most noticeably in clumps [...]
Unreachable
Posted in road bike, tagged bicycle, Cycling, Indiana on March 17, 2010 |
Two-thirds of the way up a highly eroded bank, I’m clinging to the exposed roots of a small tree and the stubby limb of a massive oak, both taken down when the hillside gave way last year. I’m trying to climb to a plateau of rocks, roughly five feet above me, but my boots can [...]
Not far from Montgomery Creek, where a brick Federal house rises above a landscape of flat, brown fields, there are the birds. Killdeer lift in alarmed flight, first on my right, then on my left, some scattering away, others fleeing overhead, all with a piercing cry. They are the sight and sound of early spring, [...]
