Cycling Inspires

Ahh, alone on your bike, at peace, as one with nature. Wouldn't it be grand if you could put those thoughts down on paper? David Nord can and did ...

Another day, another ride. Blustery, I should say! The first 26 miles of 45 were into the fist of the wind, cheeks slanted to the task and shoulders bowed. Someone through the centuries should have planted more trees or plowed much less I believe. I thought county roads were void of monolithic vehicles. A gigantic, four rear-wheeled tractor craned upon the burdened back of a semi truck's flatbed, furrowed highway sand in its wake, unimpeded in its lateral avoidance of a stick man on a stick bike. Its massive secondary treads somehow levitated over tar, past the groaning steel platform sides, the tractor stretching wide its one and a half lane domination. I celebrated the truck driver's navigation courtesy after the fact of his passing.

Wind. Wind. Wind. I am a son of the most high! Stand up! Reach out! "Be still!" I shouted. Gust. Gust. Gust. The white highway shoulder stripe had whitecaps, as do lakes. The highway's yellow center stripes were caught on barbed wire fences and tattered on occasional tree branches past the ditches to my right. Their presence or absence would not have mattered to the obesity of the tractor transport anyway. Even fair and undulating farmland in its graceful serpentine motion seemed blown in obedience across the plains.

Finally arriving at the Blackbird Marsh Airport, I taxied onto the homebound runway to flow like silver mercury into the ground level jet stream, just as cliff jumpers freely leap into the allure of gravity. I had barely to cooperate as flattened black carpet ushered my crowning and my allegiance to twenty five and thirty five miles per hour, mile after mile after mile. Fatigue still lingered in my legs, my quads "hulkified", suggesting some grotesque apportionment to my already non-biker frame, which somehow would become permanent. But oh to glide with air between tire and tar, when velocity matches velocity, and nature's sounds again are heard in the slippery silence of unopposed speed."

David W. Nord