Halfway down the alley I knew I should have turned around to put on a light jacket, a heavier pair of tights and thicker gloves. It was forty-five degrees but felt much colder because of the breeze, humidity, and the sun already so low. It snowed two days earlier and had mostly melted, but the ground was still saturated, puddles were everywhere, and snow remained in some of the shady corners. I knew it would feel even colder later in the afternoon, but I was running late to meet up with friends for our ride, so I continued rather than be even later.
I checked my navigation app and saw they’d already left the rendezvous point, and instead of catching up, I discovered I was ahead of them half an hour later because they’d modified their route and it slowed them down. While I waited, I checked their moving dot periodically and took pictures of the art on the underpass walls and surrounding landscape. This place doesn’t feel as magical as it did when I rode through it decades ago and it was an open meadow covered with tall prairie grass. Maybe it will become an interesting place again, but right now it’s a stripped construction zone. My discomfort wasn’t just this place, or being under dressed, but the devastating news fragments I’d read and saw in my feed before I left the house. Riding in the heat and humidity always feels better. It’s more forgiving, my joints are looser, sweating purges stress, and the air feels thick enough for me to disappear into. On colder days like this one, everything feels harsh and brittle.
After a while, I stood over my bike eating a banana and looked through the chain link fence at the flat bed semis loaded with industrial materials, enormous piles of excavated dirt, heavy machinery, cement barriers, concrete foundations with protruding grids of rebar, and disconnected two story concrete walls. The view wasn’t comforting. Then I heard a faint bell and assumed it was one of the nearby workers phones. I heard it again, a little louder the second time and from behind, so I turned and saw my friends riding toward me and Joe was ringing his bell. It always feels surprising when I meet up with people on bikes, even when it’s been planned from the start. It’s like we’re kids on the loose in our neighborhood randomly running in to each other. We discussed our gear and the weather for a few minutes and not long after continuing, the starlings became unusually active, even frenetic. I don’t know if it was the weather, or the light, but it happened repeatedly enough that we talked about it during a brief rest in Hopkins. I added that I have a friend who didn’t like starlings because the resident flock that settled in his huge elm tree burst out every morning as he walked past it to his studio. He was annoyed by them daily. They were unsettling at times, but I wasn’t annoyed by the starlings on our ride. When I rode back into our alley hours later I felt warmer than when I’d left, more optimistic, and I think it was because of the birds.
Songs :: The Beginning of Memory by Laurie Anderson, Europe Endless by Kraftwerk, and As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays
© C. Davidson