This Journey (With Apologies to James Wright)

Whenever I ride a long road or path along an ocean--or just about any other body of water, for that matter--I can't help but to think about some of the earliest long rides I took, as a teenager in New Jersey.

Some said I was a lonely kid. Truth was, I simply wasn't thinking about the things most other kids my age were.  Truth was, I couldn't.  Oh, I worried about which college, if any, would accept me and ran different career paths through my mind.  Truth was, I was doing those things because other people said I should.

Truth is, I was on a journey on which no one could accompany, let alone guide, me.  I wanted to ride my bike across counties and countries when my peers wanted to get their licenses and pick up dates who would be impressed by such things--or being picked up by one of those new drivers.

And that was just one way in which I wasn't on the same road or path as my peers.  If you've been reading my other blog--or even some posts on this one--you know another one of the ways in which my life--or, more precisely, the way in which I saw my identity, my self--differed from almost anybody else I knew.  And I would not learn a language to express it for a long time.

But cycling was, and remains, a means of communication between my body, my spirit and all that is essential to them.  That is the reason why, even when I have ridden by myself, I have never felt lonely while on two wheels.  Some might have said I rode because of alienation.  When I didn't know any better--in other words, when I didn't know how to express otherwise--I believed something like that in the same way people believe the most plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything because they don't know anything else.

Perhaps that is the reason why I am drawn to the ocean, or to any other large body of water, when I'm on my bike.  It was while pedaling along the Atlantic Ocean between Sandy Hook and Island Beach--and along the bodies of water that led to the ocean--that I first realized that I would often ride alone, but I would not lack for companionship.  I had my self, I had my bike and at times I would have a riding partners who understood, or who at least simply wanted to ride with me. Or, perhaps, I would simply want to ride with them. 

P.S.  On a somewhat related topic, please check out my latest on Huffington Post!

Flora And Fauna And Time

When you live in a big city, you can tell what part of the day it is by the light in which you're seeing whatever's in front of you.  In other words, buildings or streets or other structures reflect morning, noon or night by dawn, daylight, dusk, shadows or artificial light.

Here in small-town and rural Florida, flora and fauna show varying sides of themselves through the different facets of the day.  So, bush that might bud at one time of the day could bloom a couple of hours later and denude itself by nightfall.

And so it was this morning, when I rode from my parents' house.  The street on which they live ends in a wider street that edges a wooded area.  That street, in turn, leads to a four-line parkway that cuts through a swamp. 

Alongside the parkway I saw these tiny flowers colored like pale lilacs waving in the breeze as I pedaled away.  When I returned in the afternoon, they were gone.  They were repeating the "hello" and "goodbye" they bade me yesterday and the day before as I began and ended those days' rides.

Tomorrow I will bid them farewell until another day, another season--and more important, another hour, another time of day.

Portrait Of A Chance Encounter On My Way To Painters Hill

Yesterday I did a shorter ride (about 50 km) than I did the other day (Daytona Beach) or Saturday (St. Augustine).  But I planned it that way so I could linger along one of my favorite stretches of Route A1A, in the very aptly named Painters Hill:

Well, all right, the Painters part is apt.  The hill, not so much.  But it's a feast for the senses.  And, oh yeah, I went swimming.  You could tell I--and the other swimmers--aren't from around here.  Natives wondered how we could "stand" water that's "so cold".  I'd guess that the temperature was somewhere around 13 to 15 C (55 to 60F).  At Rockaway Beach or Coney Island, it's probably not much higher than 5C (40F) right now.

Perhaps the best part of the ride is that I might have made a new friend and riding partner for future trips down here (or perhaps even for later this week!)  I met her at a convenience store-gas station just west of the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A-1A.  The bichon frise in the front basket of her Diamond Back cruiser gave that ever-so-friendly look bichon frises give and, of course, I stroked his head.  If dogs are a reflection of their owners, that bichon frise perfectly mirrored her personality.  

Before I crossed the bridge into A1A, we rode trails that crossed ponds, cut through swamps and rimmed the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.  She apologized--though she had no reason to--for her riding:  It was her first time out this year, she said.  I didn't feel that she was slowing me down, as she feared.  I must say, though, that I astounded her when I said that I rode the borrowed clunker to and from St. Augustine and Daytona Beach.  "Just thinking about it gets me tired," she exclaimed.

After about two hours, she had to go back to her house to meet a client.  I thanked her:  Even if I hadn't continued down to Painters Hill and Flagler Beach, I would have felt I'd had a good ride.  After all, encounters like that remind me of some of the reasons I ride.