Reflections from the night cyclist

It’s 4:30 a.m. and I’m riding my bicycle by myself.

It’s dark. Not counting the few street and business lights.

It’s hushed.

The one main road I have to be on for about 5 miles has few cars to worry about at this time. Two or three cars going my direction are usual. Once I turn east only none, or one, or two will whoosh past, if it's a weird day. Beyond the next turn I’ll be on a one lane back road and rarely see any cars for a couple of hours.

I generally keep a flashing tail light going and a head lamp. However, I like to shut the lamps off once I’m off the two lane roads. It's like coloring without boundaries.

The air is thick, and rich, and flows around me like cool milk.

I hear startled animals duck off the road.

With limited eyesight my other senses are alert – the morning smells like the first sounds of a newborn – never repeated again in its waking life.

I can’t see the cyclometer or my gear rings. I don’t know if I’m going fast or slow.

There are no lines on the road so I have to look for the slight phosphorescence of the weeds marking the pavement edge. I don’t know how to describe “seeing” in the dark. You relax your eyes. You can’t “look” at things. It’s more like absorbing subtle shadings and textures and then imagining them into place.

This imagining works but it is inaccurate. I am abandoning accuracy for sensation. I hope I don’t “sense” myself running into barbed wire.

To the east the oaks silhouette – like giant puffballs against the waning night sky – The watchmen of my world. I never notice their perfection during the day.

A Mona Lisa smile rises looking like something Van Gogh’s poor eyesight contrived. She puts the grass – i.e. stiff tinder, dull and lifeless, beyond dead, as something that never should have been, thistles, and stickers, symbols of the curse, that everyone always wishes were green, “like in Oregon”... she makes it flow silver, shimmering.

I smell its sweat, its fever, its introspection, its exhibitionism.

It’s easy for random thoughts to emerge in this cloister and I wonder, “If someone sees something so monotonous during the day, as beauty in the night, is the beauty real, or is the monotony justified?” The monochrome pointillism follows me through the day like a little private joke between me and the weeds. I know what they’re “really” like.

It’s light enough to see now and I’m pushing hard to get to the top of this road where I’ll stay hidden from the sun... I don’t make it. It rises directly into my eyes.

It’s magic. It destroys the silver with a glance and, establishing a dominant alchemy, transforms my world to gold. It’s the gold of a climax: the effortless explosion of the taste of a crisp, ripe peach on a summer day, the gold of a chorale winging to its height, the gold of miracles. The chameleous weeds just giggle and glow.

I dodge into the shade for a time. Then, turning my back on the morning, ride into my day.