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 the app and saw they’d already left our rendezvous point and instead of catching up, I discovered I was a mile ahead because they’d modified their route and it slowed them down. While I waited I checked their location periodically and took pictures of the art on the underpass walls and the bluff covered with dogwood. This place doesn’t feel like it did when I rode through it decades ago because it was an open meadow of tall prairie grass then. 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 crushing news fragments I’d read and saw in my feed while doom scrolling before I left the house. Riding in the heat and humidity always feels better, but on colder days like this one, everything feels brittle.
Eventually I stood with my bike between my legs, ate a banana, and looked through the chain link fence to the other side. There were flat bed semi trailers loaded with construction materials, enormous piles of excavated dirt, heavy machinery, hundreds of 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 the opposite direction, so I turned and saw my friends riding toward me and one of them rang his bell. It’s always 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 and seemed unsettled. I don’t know if it was the weather, or the light, but it happened enough along our route that we talked about it during a 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 them to his studio. When I rode back into our alley hours later, I felt warmer, 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